Others Were Emeralds by Lang Leav
"'This is the part in the story where someone I love would only appear again in flashbacks.' That's real pretty, Ai."
"It's a loose translation from what Mum said once when she saw the Khmer Rouge dragging her best friend away while she hid in the bushes. It was then she was hit with the realisation that someone she loved would now only be a memory."
In the novel Others Were Emeralds (2023) by Lang Leav, persecution and violence were never a mystery to the narrator, Ai. Her parents were Cambodian refugees who had escaped the Khmer Rouge when her brother Yan was a child and her mother was pregnant with Ai. In the prologue, she reflects on how “stories of war were passed around so casually at our dinner table, along with the thousand-year-old eggs and fermented bean curd.”
This introduction to Ai’s family history is contrasted with her dominant concerns from the first chapters of the novel. Set in 1997, Ai is in her final years of high school in Whitlam, a fictional town in New South Wales that is reminiscent of immigrant-populated suburbs like Cabramatta in Sydney and Sunshine in Melbourne. Ai has a close bond with three other Asian-Australians. Her best friend, Brigitte, always wants what is best for Ai; Ai’s first boyfriend, Bowie, is warm and charming; and Tin, Bowie’s best friend, initially appears reserved, but there’s hints of how deeply he can care about others. Ai has a loving friendship with Brigitte, but as the story progresses, Ai’s own self-doubts and insecurities fuel misunderstandings between them.
Ai’s family experiences are woven throughout her school life, but there’s a simplicity to the way she refers to them. She hasn’t personally understood the full impacts of trauma at this point – at least, not yet. I found her perspective intriguing because it is so different from my own experiences – and other stories I’ve read – of younger generations trying so hard to understand migrant parents who are reluctant to share more of their history. Others Were Emeralds portrays the converse of this: Ai has access to her family’s stories, but something in the present needs to happen to motivate her to make greater sense of them.
Things begin to change as racism escalates in Australia, fuelling widespread fears of Asians ‘invading’ the country. Ai worries about a repeat of what her family went through in Cambodia. And then, the unthinkable occurs: a violent, racially motivated incident happens to Ai and her friends. In the aftermath, Ai feels intensely isolated, is grieving, and still must carry on with her life and final high school assessments.
“I approached each new emotion cautiously as though I were entering a dim and unfamiliar room, one tentative foot feeling in the dark, the ever-present sense of something lurking in the shadows, waiting to lunge at me. In my present state, it seemed unfathomable that I could function at all, yet somehow I managed.”
Traumatic events can lead to a survival response where the person feels like there is genuine danger everywhere. The memories, ingrained in the person, lead to impacts on behaviour that cannot be put into words. I’d acquired a distanced knowledge of these aspects of trauma through second-hand stories, factual narratives and training sessions in the past. However, an unexpected first-hand experience showed me how little I’d really known.
Like Ai, as she pours herself into essays and her art project in the aftermath, I tried to regain a sense of control by being productive and blocking things out. Like Ai, it seems unreal to look back at how much I maintained an exterior of normality, when nothing else but my flashbacks and triggers felt as if they existed. Like Ai, what was once an intellectual understanding became woven into my daily life, prompting a new journey to work towards recovery from the event.
Traumatic experiences can also lead to changed worldviews. Ai decides that the art project she worked so hard on all year is frivolous, and burns it to ashes. Where she does finds comfort, it encompasses a new understanding of the trauma underlying her parents’ and friends’ experiences. Brigitte had photographed Ai’s mother and interviewed her about escaping the Khmer Rouge for an exhibition on refugees, and Ai observes that her mother looks “as though she were considering the answer to a question she’d always longed for someone to ask.” After initial distance between Ai and Tin, she learns of how he lost his mother and sisters when they were fleeing by boat, and discovers the ongoing domestic violence he is enduring in the present – compelling them to connect more deeply.
However, much of Ai’s trauma remains unresolved as she finishes high school and moves to Sydney for arts college. Her ongoing internal struggles become progressively evident: she fails to take care of her finances and wellbeing, and becomes obsessed with a particular artistic project to the extent that she lets her studies completely slide. She eventually collapses in what seems to be a panic attack, and continues struggling in a depressive state for months. What she had compartmentalised and pushed away eventually caught up with her new life away from Whitlam.
As Ai aims to pull her life back together, Lang Leav shows her healing in a unique way: by appreciating the love that had always existed around her. Ai eventually looks back on, and deeply connects with others over the love from her friends that had shaped her teenage years. These memories create a power of their own, allowing her to resolve aspects of her grief. She looks at her parents, and at Tin and his sister, with renewed love that she would have thought impossible in the period she had been filled with fear and anguish. And in this way, she finds the strength to move forward.
“I caught sight of my parents in the lounge, talking quietly to the hum of the nightly news. […] In that moment, I loved them so much that it already felt like loss.”
Others Were Emeralds is perceptive in its storytelling, illuminating the impacts of war, racism, and interpersonal conflict. I was continuously struck by Lang Leav’s resonant portrayal of heartache in friendships and the societal context of Ai’s coming-of-age experiences, as well as the complexity with which she explored the impacts of trauma, and how it exists across and within generations. The result is the rare kind of book that is worth multiple rereads.
Wendy Chen is a writer and reviewer based in Sydney, Australia. Her short fiction has appeared in the anthology Meet Me at the Intersection (Fremantle Press, 2018), she is a contributor to the science fiction and fantasy website Reactor, and is a 2024 StoryCaster in the Photojournalism stream with Diversity Arts Australia. Find more on her Instagram and Substack.