A Familial Stranger
Lok yeay tending to her plants in the front yard. She chose to paint her house and shutters the same as my mother’s house in Rhode Island.
A few months after turning twenty-four, I returned to my lok yeay’s (grandmother’s) home in Hilton, New York, for the first time since I was fourteen, carrying the weight of distance and curiosity. A survivor of the Cambodian Genocide, she resettled in Rochester in the 1980s and later married an American firefighter whose controlling and distant presence has long shadowed her life. Though my mother has urged her to move closer, she remains in Hilton; tethered by obligation, isolation, and a house that feels frozen in time.
Lok yeay in the spare bedroom for my parents when we visited.
The floral wallpaper in this bedroom reminds me of the 1970s.
Wall art: Civil War era drawings (maybe from my step-grandpa) and traditional Cambodian stone carvings and sak yant scriptures (sacred tattoos).
I have mostly known her from afar: occasional visits, mailed gifts, video calls during dinner prep when she and my mother switch between English and Khmer to share stories and secrets. During this visit, I noticed what I had never fully seen before: her grief expressed quietly in the care of her plants, the patience of her sewing, the deliberate arrangement of photographs and objects throughout the house. In these gestures, I began to see her not only as my grandmother, but as a woman shaped by loss, resilience, and displacement, someone whose endurance I can finally recognize now that I am a woman myself.
My mother is my lok yeay’s only surviving child from the Cambodian Genocide. She had three daughters.
In the spare bedroom for my sister and I, there is a bookshelf of memories that has remained untouched since I was a baby.
I have always avoided photographing my family because it hurts.
When I was in college, my teachers encouraged me to turn the camera inward, to place my family alongside the portraits I made of others. I would laugh uncomfortably and explain that my family was difficult to photograph. It isn’t just imperfection, it’s fear. Photographing my family exposes truths I have carried quietly. It is a way of accepting them, and of memorializing what has been avoided.
I have been distancing myself from my family for as long as I can remember. I always felt different, out of place. Eventually, I left home because I did not know how to say, out loud, that I was being hurt. Living away allowed me to feel more like myself, even as the tension of my family’s life followed me—quiet and persistent. With distance came clarity, and with clarity, the realization that a façade I had grown up with was beginning to fracture.
Lok yeay sewing me a sarong (traditional skirt).
Self-portrait of me trying on the sarong.
I write this with a heavy heart. I am in Hilton now, a small town twenty minutes outside of Rochester. If I had to describe it in one sentence, I would call it what my depression feels like as a place.
The roads stretch endlessly, houses scattered far apart. Vast parking lots, oversized yards, and a silence that doesn’t soothe but unsettles. After time spent elsewhere, the contrast feels brutal. There, I felt like a bird. Here, I am a deer—skittish, hidden, always watching. Deer cross my path constantly, slipping out from wooded edges, reminding me that this is their world, and I am the intruder.
Lok yeay’s house has a lot of land behind it.
Lok yeay’s dresser.
Dentures and grandpa’s book on the sink.
Before I arrived, my mother called to warn me that my grandmother is taking antidepressants now, and not to trigger her with any talk of the Khmer Rouge. I recently learned my mother is, too. It feels uncanny, three women bound together by depression, each shaped by the weight of men.
My grandmother mutters to herself while watering the garden, insisting she “doesn’t take care of anything anymore.” She is critical of her appearance while I take her picture, saying she “doesn’t look good anymore.” My mother echoes her in her own kitchen: “there’s no love in my food anymore.” How is a daughter supposed to feel hope, to believe in love, when this is the chorus she inherits?
Lok yeay uses a bamboo stick to walk around her sloped yard.
Lok yeay’s crab apple tree brings me back to my childhood, waiting to watch deer eat the apples on the ground.
Lok yeay trims off the top of her jade tree to give me half for good luck.
Mike sits on the couch with the television blaring while my grandmother cuts the lawn and whacks the weeds on her own. The imbalance is painful to witness. The house itself feels frozen; forty-year-old sheets, walls lined with photographs like shrines. Mostly images of my mother: her high school yearbook, her wedding, her “real” marriage. Nothing has changed since the last time I was here.
My step-grandpa sits in the living room all day because he is diabetic.
My step-grandpa sits at the head of the table.
Mom’s wedding portrait and photos of our family.
Today, I took my grandmother to the Highland Park Conservatory. We wandered among plants and flowers, watched quails, tortoises, turtles, and moths. She laughed and pointed out flowers that reminded her of Cambodia, the place I hoped the conservatory might feel like for her. She walked farther than I had ever seen her walk, fully present, curious, alive.
Lok yeay and the plants that remind her of home at the botanical garden.
She asked me to smell the Thai basil.
I asked her: “look up to the sky and feel the sun on your face.”
I found fruits she puts in her water and soil to give her plants more nutrients.
When we returned home, the weight settled back in. She shuffled, muttering about chores, while Mike sat watching television. Later, she said quietly, “one more day,” then clarified with a gesture to her head, “it’s just me thinking.” As she passed me, she whispered, “it’s one more day to live.”
I urged her not to speak like that. I understand intellectually, but I am still unsettled by how close death feels in the everyday.
When lok yeay said goodbye to us, she always watched from the front door.
I asked her: “When was the last time you sat in the grass?” She said: “I don’t know.”
Being here has been confusing and heavy. A friend once said that expectations versus reality is one of the hardest things to navigate as an artist and as a daughter. I arrived hoping to make something lighter. Instead, I am learning to photograph what is truly here, and to trust that this, too, is worth holding.
Another friend reminded me that what I am carrying is “incredibly heavy.” These photographs, whether part of a larger project or a quieter exploration of mental illness in Southeast Asian families, hold meaning. As my mother once said about coming to the U.S. as a refugee, “you win some and lose some.” You leave what you know for the arms of a stranger, but those arms are not always golden.
After days of confusion and doubt, I return to Gloria Steinem’s words:
“The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”
