I'm very connected to the story, the history, and the trauma people experience.

I'm also developing my own narrative, because I'm the son of a widow. And so, while working with women and gathering their oral histories, I'm taking a step back to do my own art book and visual work.

I don't approach my writing or my work from an academic or analytical point of view. I do it for myself.

I think that there are certain feelings and things you can convey in a simple form that people can see and understand.

Sometimes it may be something I hear in the news that affects me.

The family I grew up in had three generations of widows.

I have some advantages of viewing from the two lenses, the two perspectives. I think that a lot of visual artists who come back here from the United States and are Cambodian also write from their American references - looking inside the old culture, and looking at themselves as an American looking into the country where they were born.