Poet Pichchenda Bao, Neuroscientist Heather Berlin, Artist Daveth Cheth, Designer Davey Chhoeun, and Chef Chinchakriya Un join Dramaturg Soriya Chum to discuss the many sides of what you are now

From left, Pichchenda Bao, Heather Berlin, Daveth Cheth, Davey Chhoeun, Chinchakriya Un, Soriya Chum

On April 2, following the 2:00 PM matinee performance of what you are now, the powerful new drama by Sam Chanse, everyone is encouraged to stay for a talkback about the historical, cultural, and scientific context of the play, as well as the many issues it addresses, including how trauma gets passed from one generation to another, Cambodian American life in the U.S., and what happens in the brain when we form memories and create art. Dramaturg Soriya Chum will moderate the discussion with neuroscientist Heather Berlin, poet Pichchenda Bao, artist and activist Daveth Cheth, designer Davey Chhoeun, and chef Chinchakriya Un.

what you are now asks what if our memories aren’t fixed, but change each time we recall the past? This world premiere by Sam Chanse is a thrillingly insightful new play that asks the audience to move through the shifting dance between the past and present, and to consider how with new understanding we might change “who you were then” to “what you are now.”

what you are now is this year’s mainstage production of the EST/Sloan Project, EST’s partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop new plays “exploring the worlds of science and technology,” an initiative now in its twenty-third year, and is being co-presented with The Civilians, a theater group dedicated to investigative theater, projects created through field research, community collaborations, and other methods of in-depth inquiry.

About the Panelists

Pichchenda Bao

Pichchenda Bao is a poet born in Cambodia at the end of the Khmer Rouge regime. She came with her parents to the United States as refugees in the 1980s, and now she lives, writes and raises her children in New York City. Her work delves into the urgencies and uncertainties of post-war and post-genocide survival and resilience, generational tension, motherhood, and feminism. Her honors include a Pushcart Prize nomination, an Emerging Writer Fellowship from Aspen Words, a grant from Queens Council on the Arts, a residency from Bethany Arts Community, and an invitation to the Kundiman writers retreat as a poetry fellow.

Dr. Heather Berlin

Dr. Heather Berlin is a neuroscientist and Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in NY. She explores the neural basis of impulsive and compulsive psychiatric and neurological disorders with the aim of developing novel treatments. She is also interested in the brain basis of consciousness, dynamic unconscious processes, and creativity.  Berlin is a passionate science communicator and a committee member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She’s hosted series on PBS and the Discovery Channel and makes regular appearances on StarTalk with Neil DeGrasse Tyson, BBC, History Channel, Netflix, National Geographic, and TEDx, and was featured in the documentary film Bill Nye: Science Guy. Dr. Berlin also co-wrote and starred in the critically acclaimed off-Broadway show, Off the Top, about the neuroscience of improvisation, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival show, Impulse Control.  Berlin received her doctorate from the University of Oxford, and Master of Public Health from Harvard University, and trained in clinical neuropsychology at Weill Cornell Medicine’s Department of Neurological Surgery. She is a visiting scholar at the New York Psychoanalytic Society and Institute, and was a Visiting Professor at Vassar College, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology/University of Zurich, and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

Daveth Cheth

Daveth Cheth is the founder, writer, and visionary behind Khmer Identity, a platform honoring Khmer legacies and contemporary Khmer voices. Born in Cambodia, Daveth immigrated to Lynn, Massachusetts when he was nine. A queer, non-binary Cambodian artist and activist, Daveth explores the  mediums of art, dance, and spoken word by focusing his work around queer visibility and Cambodian heritage and culture. A native Khmer speaker, Daveth teaches online classes in Khmer through Khmer Identity.

Davey Chhoeun

Davey Chhoeun is co-founder of Khmer Identify. The youngest daughter of four, and the only one born in the U.S., Davey was born and raised in Lynn, Massachusetts, where her family immigrated from Cambodia in 1988. Davey aspires to share her creative lens with her community and the world through apparel design and many personal hobbies. She graduated from Massachusetts College of Art and Design with a BFA in Fashion Design. Currently, she is a designer at a manufacturing company based in Boston. In 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic, she collaborated with Daveth Cheth to create an exhibition to share their mutual heritage with the world. This became Khmer Identity.

Chinchakriya Un

Chinchakriya Un is the chef and owner of Kreung Cambodia.  Kreung is a project that highlights her family’s recipes and new inspired dishes that she creates. Kreung is a traveling pop up with roots in Brooklyn, NY. Chinchakriya’s goals are to raise money to buy a tractor for her family in Cambodia, create a residency for artists, connect with the Cambodian diaspora around the world, and to document her family’s stories from the past and present to include in a cookbook. She was born in a refugee camp, moved to Massachusetts and grew up in a neighborhood with other immigrant families, predominately Puerto Rican, Dominican, and Cape Verdeans, and attended a predominately white school. Chinchakriya has found  that connecting with her elders and Khmer folks in the diaspora is a way that she continues to grow her understanding about the Khmer culture. She hopes that Kreung can exist as a platform for other young aspiring chefs to showcase their creations.

About the Moderator

Soriya K. Chum

Soriya K. Chum is a Cambodian American writer, dramaturg, and project manager working in the fields of arts and culture and book publishing. He currently produces consumer engagement events and programs for the Random House division of Penguin Random House. Previously, he has held roles at the flagship branch of The New York Public Library, Theatre for a New Audience, and the Asian American Arts Alliance. As a dramaturg, he specializes in providing support to scripted projects that focus on the lives of contemporary immigrants and refugees, particularly intergenerational stories that center the perspectives and experiences of Cambodian Americans.

what you are now began previews on March 10 and runs through April 3 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

Community Organizers Sothea Chiemruom, Sanary Phen, and Thida Virak join Neuroscientist Daniela Schiller and Editor Laura Ly to discuss inherited trauma, Cambodian American life, and what you are now

From left, Sothea Chiemruom, Sanary Phen, Thida Virak, Daniela Schiller, and Laura Ly.

On March 26, following the 2:00 PM matinee performance of what you are now, the powerful new drama by Sam Chanse, everyone is encouraged to stay for a talkback about the historical, cultural, and scientific context of the play, as well as the many issues it addresses, including how the brain forms memories, Cambodian American life in the U.S., and the neuroscience of inherited trauma. Journalist-editor Laura Ly will moderate the discussion with neuroscientist Daniela Schiller, and community organizers Sothea Chiemruom, Sanary Phen, and Thida Virak.

what you are now asks what if our memories aren’t fixed, but change each time we recall the past? This world premiere by Sam Chanse is a thrillingly insightful new play that asks the audience to move through the shifting dance between the past and present, and to consider how with new understanding we might change “who you were then” to “what you are now.”

what you are now is this year’s mainstage production of the EST/Sloan Project, EST’s partnership with the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to develop new plays “exploring the worlds of science and technology,” an initiative now in its twenty-third year, and is being co-presented with The Civilians, a theater group dedicated to investigative theater, projects created through field research, community collaborations, and other methods of in-depth inquiry.

About the Panelists

Sothea Chiemruom

Sothea Chiemruom is the Executive Director at CMAA-the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association in Lowell, MA. He has over 25 years of experience in day-to-day program operations, administration, management, reporting, and ongoing work in advocacy, and public relations. CMAA provides services for not only Khmer but vulnerable individuals who need support with everyday challenges. Throughout his career, Sothea has engaged youth, the elderly, and the underrepresented and promoted programs that serve them. A strong proponent for the education of immigrants and refugees, he promotes leadership training, economic development, and civic participation. He actively supports the empowerment and self-sufficiency of community members. He serves as vice-chairperson of the Affordable Housing Trust in the Town of Tyngsborough, MA.  Sothea has participated at NeighborWorks Training Institute, a  leadership program. A refugee from Cambodia, he has lived and worked in Boston and Lowell. He currently lives in Tyngsbo, MA with his wife, Bora, and their children. He enjoys the outdoors and gardening.

Sanary Phen

Poet, writer and storyteller, Sanary Phen was born in a refugee camp in Thailand during the Khmer Rouge era in Cambodia. She and her family emigrated to the United States in 1981 and resettled in Lowell, MA, which has been her home for more than 35 years. Sanary has a deep love and appreciation for the community and takes pride in giving back to the city and its people. She has over 15 years of experience in social work in the nonprofit sector and is currently working for Coalition for a Better Acre as their Workforce Development Coordinator. Sanary is also a freelance writer for the Lowell Sun and a dedicated volunteer with the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association.

Dr. Daniela Schiller

Dr. Daniela Schiller is a Professor in the Department of Psychiatry, the Nash Family Department of Neuroscience, and the Friedman Brain Institute at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Her research is focused on how the brain represents and modifies emotional memories. Schiller got her PhD in Tel Aviv University where she developed a laboratory model for negative symptoms of schizophrenia. She then continued to do a postdoctoral fellowship at New York University where she examined methods for emotional memory modification in the human brain. Schiller joined Mount Sinai in 2010 and has been directing the affective neuroscience laboratory since. Her lab has delineated the neural computations of threat learning, how the brain modifies emotional memories using imagination, and the dynamic tracking of affective states and social relationships. Schiller’s work has been published in numerous scholarly journals, including Nature, Neuron, Nature Neuroscience, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. She is a Fulbright Fellow and a Kavli Frontiers of Science Fellow, and has been the recipient of many awards, including the New York Academy of Sciences’ Blavatnik Award, and the Klingenstein-Simons Fellowship Award in the Neurosciences. 

Thida Virak

Thida Virak is the Director of Social Services & Advocacy at Mekong NYC and was previously Lead Organizer for Mekong NYC for ten years. Born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, Thida immigrated to the Bronx, where she began her work in the community as a volunteer. Shortly after Mekong NYC was founded in 2011, she joined as a part-time organizer and quickly helped build Mekong NYC’s community base, and was promoted to Director of Social Services & Advocacy in October 2021. Mekong NYC is a social justice organization that brings dignity and value to the lives of Southeast Asians in the Bronx and throughout New York City. As an organizer, advocate, interpreter and translator, freedom fighter, and mother, she exemplifies the spirit of social justice and advocacy. Her work explores identities, culture, collective healing, mutual supports, and community building, and deepens Mekong NYC’s campaigns for health justice, mental health justice, and the end of deportation in the Southeast Asian community. She also serves as a delegate in various coalitions, like the Bronx-Wide People’s Platform. Thida attended John Jay College of Criminal Justice and Borough of Manhattan Community College, and completed ANHD’s Center for Community Leadership Organizing program.

About the Moderator

Laura Ly

Laura Ly is an Emmy-nominated journalist and editor based in New York City. In her time with CNN, she has also worked in Hong Kong and Atlanta. She currently covers breaking news across the northeast United States. She is the daughter of Khmer refugees from Battambang and Takeo provinces.  Ly is a longtime Board Member of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association and also serves on their literary magazine committee. Each year, the organization publishes the “Stilt House” zine, a showcase dedicated to celebrating the work of artists in the Cambodian diaspora. Ly is originally from Connecticut and is a graduate of Columbia University. In her free time, she enjoys travel writing, biking, playing badminton, and attempting to cook Khmer food.

what you are now began previews on March 10 and runs through April 3 at EST. You can purchase tickets here.

A Note on the Historical and Cultural Context of what you are now

The EST/Sloan Project is committed to “challenge and broaden the public’s understanding of science and technology and their impact on our lives.” In that spirit, we offer this essay on the historical and cultural context of what you are now by Sam Chanse, the 2022 EST/Sloan mainstage production. what you are now began previews on March 10 and runs through April 3. You can purchase tickets here.

Passing on the Uncanny

by Soriya K. Chum, Dramaturg

Pia is a neuroscientist whose academic research is intensely enmeshed with the personal. Her scientific investigations concern “fear memories;” her mother is a survivor of the Cambodian genocide. As Pia looks at the long road ahead of possibly breaking into her field with a proposal to rid the brain of traumatic memories, she wrestles with the omnipresence of her own family’s uncanny memories—their capacity to terrorize her mother at night, to induce in their home a stultifying silence, which Pia helps to maintain as a way of coping.

Memory is an intimate process. The experience of a specific memory is palpable not only to loved ones who remember, but also to those who share space intimately with them—so that family, too, can be immersed, by extension, in the pleasure, grief, or violence of a recollection we may not exactly call their own. The reach of memory is powerful, with a magnitude that in some cases is felt across generations, and for a community like Pia’s that once endured a massively traumatic event, their interdependent behaviors of remembrance can either inhibit or change the course of the group’s collective development.

From 1975 to 1979, a communist group known as the Khmer Rouge controlled Cambodia, enacting radical social, economic, and cultural reforms throughout the country. In the group’s pursuit of an agrarian utopia, they expelled entire urban populations and moved them to remote rural provinces where they worked in labor camps. The Khmer Rouge purported that the citizens of this new, classless system would work the land together and live off of it, equally. In the propagation of their doctrine, they sought to re-educate the public on the party’s values and to root out all dissent by punishing alleged loyalists of the former regime. As their paranoia intensified, the Khmer Rouge grew rampantly murderous, targeting intellectuals, capitalists, foreigners, ethnic minorities, and artists. As a result of their totalitarian reign, an estimated 2.5 million people died of execution, starvation, and disease. Those who survived, like Pia’s mother, fled to refugee camps in Thailand—few with families left intact, some alone, all shaped forever by a deeply formative past.

My mother is a survivor of the Cambodian genocide. She evades questions still today about the losses she suffered. When I was a child, she would prepare dishes for our ancestors during the Cambodian New Year as a ritual expression of holding their hunger in the family’s memory. We’d patiently wait for our ancestors to eat first before lifting our forks. I’d crouch on the floor before a festive table presented with ample platters of roasted duck, oily noodles, pickled greens, and sour soup, while clasping sticks of champak incense in silent prayer, sending blessings of peace and comfort to them. My eyes would study the empty chairs, and I imagined I could draw into the seats my ancestors’ silhouettes with the rising, sweet smoke that escaped my hot fingers. I wondered if they could see me too—see us, the living, and how we struggled. I’d blush from the guilt of divining their tired eyes on me.

In what you are now, there is a scene in which Pia’s brother Darany makes a similar ancestral offering. He asserts, “Someone should be feeding us knowhatI’msayin / give us food to ease our suffering.” Embedded within his sentiment is a powerful question of what nourishment is given to people who haven’t passed, but who live on to bear difficult legacies. Darany’s assertion is an interesting counter-proposal to the survivor narrative that tends to centralize the memorialization of atrocious pasts. It is a suggestion that gently shifts our preoccupation with what happened, who we lost, and how we barely survived, to the untidy business of those living today, of nurturing present and future generations after the fact. 

In the eighties, nearly 160,000 Cambodians migrated to the United States as refugees. Planning for their arrival, the federal government assessed cities that could equip the newly arrived with low-wage and low-skill jobs and affordable housing. The majority of Cambodians resettled in communities with pre-existing, high rates of poverty and crime. In the play, Pia’s family migrated to Lowell, Massachusetts, home to the second largest Cambodian community in America. Challenged by the stresses of resettlement—securing a job, learning a language, and adapting to new norms—while burdened with the anguish of having fled genocide, Cambodians found their hard start exacerbated by their placement in distressed areas. From their precarious point of inception in the States, a line can be drawn to many of the contemporary problems faced by Cambodian Americans decades later, including deportation, gang-related violence, underemployment, and mental health conditions. 

In the last twenty years, we’ve seen tremendous advancements in research dedicated to helping us better understand the biological dimensions of trauma. Scientists now know that the posttraumatic stress individuals experience may be owed to changes to gene regions in the brain responsible for processing fearful stimuli. A person living with PTSD then, who shows signs of hypervigilance, reactivity, or avoidance, may be exhibiting these tendencies because of a past traumatic event that distinctly altered their DNA. These genetic changes extend beyond the life of the individual, branching out to the lives of their children and their children’s children, so that patterns of trauma are heritable down the bloodline. 

To stop these effects, Pia is exploring through her research the viability of an intervention that could selectively target and blunt fear memories, so that typical triggers become more like reminders, unimbued of their painful associations. Though a pathway to implementing treatment models and therapies lags behind the research in her field, Pia’s belief in science and its potential to heal is persuasive, and there is, of course, her double-fold experience (as both a scientist and the daughter of a genocide survivor), which is a factor in our bet on her. The dramatic irony of Pia’s mission is how much skin she has in the game. We cheer her on when she perceives connections between her personal life and career with the clarity of an expert witness; and we cringe with compassion when she barrels full-steam ahead in her research with the unchecked zeal of a grief tourist, and forgets herself—her close orientation to the work at hand. 

On a family trip to Cambodia in 2016, I insisted we visit the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh. The building once was a secondary school the Khmer Rouge repurposed as S-21, a prison camp and execution center. Now a museum, it displays the photographs of inmates, their discarded clothes, instruments of torture, and dusty chalkboards that spell of the place’s bygone innocence. In the main artery of the museum, my mother and I came to a large map on a free-standing wall. I took her hand to it. I asked her to trace her journey from Phnom Penh to labor camp to refugee camp for me. Confusion riddled her finger—starting, then stopping, falling, and breaking away from the map. In my abstract way of seeing back with her and urgently correcting the record, hovering over this map, a shade of disappointment rose in me for her failure to remember. My mother then turned and pointed to the open museum door, which looked to a sunlit courtyard lined with swaying palm trees, and she uttered just over the sound of a motorcycle zizzing by that her sister whom she loved lived once two blocks from where we stood. 

 For a scopic regime that deliberately annihilated the social foundation of a society by splitting up sisters, seeding distrust among brothers, rearranging marriages, and orphaning children, the most defiant act for Cambodians today against the perpetrators is keeping our families together. Like Pia’s family, it is a path of trial and error, closing the distance, and putting voice into the gulf of silence.