A memoir by award-winning author and opera librettist Sokunthary Svay. Svay escaped the brutal Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in the early 1980s and was sponsored to come to the U.S. The family settled in the Bronx, New York. Svay went on to achieve numerous fellowships and awards. A founding member of the Cambodian American Literary Arts Association (CALAA), she has received fellowships from the American Opera Project, Poets House, Willow Books, and CUNY, as well as commissions from Washington National Opera, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, the Chautauqua Institution, and ISSUE Project Room. In addition to publishing a poetry collection, Apsara in New York (Willow Books, 2017), Svay has had her writing anthologized and performed by actors and singers. Svay's first opera, Woman of Letters, set by composer Liliya Ugay, received its world premiere at the Kennedy Center in January 2020 as part of the American Opera Initiative. Her second opera, Chhlong Tonle, received its premiere in March 2022. She is a Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center and an Adjunct Lecturer at the City College of New York in Harlem.