My Family // Cambodia, 1975

Vivian Fung, composer

Royce Vavrek, librettist

My Family // Cambodia, 1975 is inspired by events around Vivian Fung's family’s history. Fung’s extended family—including her grandmother, uncles, aunts, and cousins—lived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in the 1970s as part of the overseas Chinese diaspora in Southeast Asia. They were there quite happily until the Khmer Rouge stormed the capital in April 1975 and drove everyone out. Her family miraculously survived an arduous journey—over a month on foot in the countryside of Cambodia, and then in Vietnam. Ultimately, they ended up in Paris and Canada, but those events changed the course of her family forever. Fung was also born in 1975, and although born and raised in Canada, her childhood was deeply affected by omnipresent anxiety over her family’s situation and safety.

Only recently has Fung been able to piece together a more complete family history. She went to visit Cambodia for the first time in 2019 with her family, and she returned with Royce Vavrek in winter 2023 to continue research.

Using their Cambodia trips and ongoing oral histories with her family as inspirations for the libretto, they will finish writing this opera in 2024-2025. Their opera will be an immigrant story, using the events around Cambodia in 1975 as a backdrop of how one family survived a horrendous genocide and how these events have impacted their subsequent lives in a foreign country. The opera will be roughly 60-75 minutes in length and will be in one act.

Grover and Friends, and Alarm - Two scenes workshopped with the Edmonton Opera