ReFused - by Kam Nuon (Paperback)

About the Book

A Cambodian genocide survivor reckons with fifty years of silence - and what his body passed on to the four sons who eventually stopped speaking to him.

A memoir of intergenerational trauma, fatherhood, and learning to stay.

Book Synopsis

Kam Nuon survived a genocide. What he didn't survive was fatherhood - not intact.

ReFused is a memoir about what a body carries across a lifetime, and what it passes on without meaning to. Born in Cambodia and forced into labor camps under the Khmer Rouge at four years old, Nuon spent the next fifty years running - from war, from silence, from the rooms his sons needed him to stay in. By the time he understood what his nervous system had been doing to the people he loved most, four adult sons had gone quiet.

This is not a redemption story. It is the record of a man learning - late, imperfectly, in a Berlin flat with no doors - to do something his body was never wired for: stay.

For readers of Bessel van der Kolk and The Latehomecomer. For anyone who has felt the silence inside a family and couldn't name it.