Music, Letters, Home
A Cambodian American Family's Story through Letters, Music and Performance Art
Presented by the UCI Orange County & Southeast Asian Archive Center: Learn about us and our projects.
How do we imagine home after genocide? How can music and performing arts enable new ways to engage with the haunting of war, genocide, and displacement? For acclaimed composer Chinary Ung and his daughter, Kalean Ung, their connection to Cambodia and each other are explored through letters Chinary received from Cambodia and refugee camps in the 1980s. Carrying reverberations of a trauma-filled history, the letters were tucked away for years after Chinary and his wife, Susan, fought to save their family members. Through the discovery and exploration of these letters, Kalean pushes her father to remember and to help her tell their stories through music and performance.
Chinary Ung came to New York in 1964 on a music scholarship to study clarinet and went on to receive a fellowship that enabled him to remain in the United States as the Khmer Rouge came to power in his homeland. During the Cambodian Genocide (1975-1979) approximately two million Cambodians perished under the reign of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. This included a majority of Chinary Ung’s family. While living in America and working as a composer, he received hundreds of letters from family members, Cambodian refugees, government officials, and non-governmental aid workers. Taking a hiatus from his music career, he spent 10 years trying to get all of his surviving family members out of refugee camps and into America. Through an oral history of Chinary Ung, the letters he collected after the Cambodian Genocide, photographs, and supplemental records from the Southeast Asian Archive, this exhibit tells the story of a Cambodian American experience enriched with music, longing, and love.
Meet Chinary Ung & Kalean Ung
Chinary Ung is often associated with that group of Asian-born composers whose music incorporates aspects of easter musical characteristics into a western classical music setting. Over the past forty years, Chinary Ung has developed a musical language that indicates an open ear toward the sounds of the East—Southeast Asia and his native Cambodia in particular—as well as the textures and instrumental practices of contemporary Western concert music. From the solo cello piece Khse Buon, to the Grawemeyer Award-winning Inner Voices, to the epic Aura, Ung's music is characterized by a vivid sound world with an intense emotional trajectory. Ung's extensive orchestral catalog has been commissioned and performed by major orchestras throughout the United States and abroad. His work has been commissioned by the Meet the Composer/Reader's Digest Commissioning Program, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Four, Koussevitzky, Joyce, and Barlow Foundations. In 2014 he was given the John D. Rockefeller 3rd Award by the New York-based Asian Cultural Council. He holds appointments at University of California, San Diego, where he is the Distinguished Professor of Music, and at Chapman University, where he is a Presidential Fellow and Senior Composer in Residence. He and his wife Susan direct the Nirmita Composers Institute each summer, with the goal of providing compositional direction and opportunity to musicians from Southeast Asia.
Performer and playwright Kalean Ung is an award-winning Cambodian-American multi-disciplinary theater artist whose professional career ranges from Shakespeare to experimental theatre to contemporary opera and solo performance. She has performed at The Kirk Douglas Theatre, Disney Hall, REDCAT, The Getty Villa, The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, Boston Court Pasadena, The Hammer Museum, The Actors’ Gang, among others, collaborating with critically-acclaimed theatre and opera companies including Critical Mass Performance Group, The Industry, The LA Philharmonic, Rogue Artists Ensemble, Independent Shakespeare Company, Four Larks Theatre, and CalArts’s Center for New Performance.
Letters From Home (LFH) will be performed at Merrimack Repertory Theatre in 2023. LFH has had performances at Independent Shakespeare Company, UC San Diego, Cambodia Town Film Festival, Willamette University, LA Mission College, UC Irvine, as well as a four-camera live-stream adaptation that was workshopped at Boston Court Pasadena. LFH has received support from the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, CalArts, and MAP Fund. Kalean was just awarded the competitive California Arts Council Established Artist Fellowship for her artistic work spanning the last ten years.
Kalean teaches in the Theatre School at California Institute of the Arts. She received her Master of Fine Arts in Acting from California Institute of the Arts and her Bachelor of Music in Vocal Performance from the University of California at Santa Cruz.
Chinary Ung and daughter Kalean Ung examining the letters in his home office in June 2018.
