Often when people tell their story, they talk about their strengths and resiliency. It's really about their determination and their aspiration to survive and live.

Everything around you can use. It's like your tools and your material. Whether it's in performing arts like dance, or visual arts, or poetry, a lot of those elements can come and help you, can trigger your creativity. But you have to be open, be aware, and you have to be ready to look.

Even though I'm not privileged in the money world, I'm privileged in other ways: I had greater access to education, I can travel, etc. It's the same with writing: the freedom to move in and out of different places, of different realms of existence, of different life forms.

I think that through the narratives of other people you get closer to your own.

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.

I am a community social psychologist and a lot of my work deals with social work and helping people overcoming addiction and trauma.

How am I placing myself in the world of other people around me? For me, I feel that I am not really alone, that others can feel it too. I see art in this way.