This study focuses on the life stories of four elite Cambodian immigrant women currently situated in the United States who survived the traumas and tragedies of modern Cambodia's social, cultural, and political upheavals during the period of the Cold War in Southeast Asia---from the turbulence of the anti-colonial movement and Sihanouk's reign (1941-1970) to Lon Nol's coup that ushered in the Khmer Republic aligned with the United States (1970-1975) to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge regime (1975-1979) to the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia (1979-1989). In sharing their life stories, these four women express their pain, horror, and unspeakable loss in the face of the ongoing traumas of class warfare, ethnic cleansing, famine, displacements, and resettlements. Although their life stories overlap in time and space during this tumultuous period of Cambodia's history, these women provide contending interpretations of their shared history from the perspectives of their distinctive sociopolitical locations as shaped by their embeddedness in complex networks of familial and sociocultural affiliations.

After presenting a brief survey of the cultural and political history of Cambodia in the first two chapters, in the following four chapters I provide case study narratives of the four Cambodian women who are the focus of this study: Mrs. V (chapter 3), Mrs. P (chapter 4), Mrs. X (chapter 5), and Mrs. Z (chapter 6). In presenting their life stories I seek to address what these women represent as semiotic overlays that signify the distinctive sociopolitical positions assumed by competing factions during this turbulent period of Cambodian history: the anti-colonial and anti-monarchy democratic republic movement (Mrs. V), the monarchy as a symbol of a Buddhist nation (Mrs. P), the leftist regime's vision of a classless utopian society (Mrs. X), and the Lon Nol proxy regime supported by the United States (Mrs. Z).

These four case studies not only provide glimpses of differing sociopolitical perspectives on Cambodia's social, cultural, and political upheavals during the last half of the twentieth century, but they also explore the religious/spiritual beliefs and practices of the four women and the roles that these beliefs and practices played in their processes of coping and healing from extraordinary traumas. This study includes a discussion of the Hindu epics that contributed to the Cambodian literary and cultural imagination and hence to Cambodian identities and ethos. Finally, in a personal Postscript inspired by this study I reflect on my hopes for a future in which both men and women extend empathy and care to others in their interpersonal relations and in the world at large as a basis for fostering more humane and sustainable social relations around the globe.