May Ngo
Lives on the Line
This critical essay on Joseph Ponthus’s On the Line (translated by Stephanie Smee) does far more than simply evaluate the text. May Ngo, KYD's 2021 New Critic, reads Ponthus’s prose poem on working in factories through the lens of her own experience as a factory labourer in Cambodia for ethnographic fieldwork.
Drawing a comparison between Ponthus's privileged position and her own as ethnographer – that is, being able to regard their time on the factory floor as a temporary one – Ngo asks us to consider the ethics of academic fieldwork, and also literary production and consumption: ‘[W]hat do we owe to those whom we are writing about? ...What are we seeking out when we read this?’
Liberation/Fall
When I listen to my father tell his stories, I hear in his voice the almost universal youthful need for purpose and meaning in life, which the Vietnam War and the society he lived in at the time shaped into a particular direction. I hear the unfailing human desire, despite the circumstances and perhaps despite our own weaknesses, to want to create a better life for ourselves and for others. In essence, it’s a desire for life that persists in the belief that something can – must – be done when we feel there is injustice, an undying faith that we can have a better world.