This is my first collaboration [with Mary Hamill] so I'm going to learn how it's going to work.

You get closer to your own humanity by understanding the stories of other people and the struggles they have.

When I hear Khmer poets, when they recite their poems, I know what they're talking about, I get it right away.

I think every writer has their waves of inspiration and their ways of doing things. But writing is very difficult for me. It's something I haven't practiced as diligently as my visual art. I've been doing visual art because I think it's easier for me to construct, whereas words are very difficult.

I write and I write and a lot of times I go back to the American lens, though sometimes it's a struggle to come from that perspective.

I'm doing a collaborative project with another artist, Mary Hamill. My project is to gather the oral history of war widows, starting with the women of my village, Kop Nymit.

Some people have witnessed the killing of their husbands, or they survived other horrific things. My sister is a widow but her husband was killed after the Khmer Rouge. There are different periods in which violence has occurred, and differences in how these women became widowed and how they survived afterwards.