{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.02808756712102437, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0057827344072697235, 'mean_word_length': 5.162849872773537, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Refugee Compassion and the Politics of Embodied Storytelling: A Critical Conversation

Y-Dang Troeung: For many who experienced it directly, the Southeast Asian refugee crisis that unfolded throughout the second half of the twentieth century carries not only the legacy of loss, but also the painful memory of the West’s distrust of refugee testimony. When Cambodian refugees began arriving at the Thai border in the late 1970s recounting the atrocities of the Khmer Rouge regime, their testimonies were not believed. Still locked in the Cold War at the time, the world’s superpowers conveniently looked away from Cambodia, a country they had previously bombed or flooded with arms. Seduced by Khmer Rouge propaganda photographs of smiling Cambodian peasants, prominent Western leftist intellectuals sympathetic to Pol Pot’s revolutionary experiment dismissed the testimonies of survivors as “unreliable tales told by refugees” (Thompson 43). Western journalists Elizabeth Becker and Richard Dudman were given rare access in 1978 to investigate the refugee testimonies. While Becker asserted that the scenes inside Cambodia were staged by the Khmer Rouge to cover up genocide, Dudman reported in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch that “the information received in advance [from refugees] was mostly misleading.” Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea, he wrote, contained a “healthy demographic mix of men, women, and babies” (qtd. in Becker). Only thirty-seven years later, when called to testify at the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia in 2016, did Dudman admit that he was wrong. He expressed regret for “his judgement at the time... that [he] should write what [he] saw.” In his documentary film The Missing Picture, Cambodian filmmaker and survivor Rithy Panh uses hand-carved clay figures to encode the embodied autobiographies of Cambodian survivors. Throughout the film, Panh uses these clay figures to reenact scenes from the past as a means of addressing the overwhelming absence of other archives with which to tell the story of how Cambodians survived the genocide. Looking starved and reduced to a condition of bare life by the torments of Khmer Rouge labor camps, clay figures appear while the film’s voiceover asks, “Those who read our books, those who loved our slogans, have they seen these pictures?” Panh addresses those who romanticized communism directly, finding it unacceptable that so few in the