Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Kaliani Mom is a Sundance-winning filmmaker.

Born in BatunbaumBang, Cambodia,

during the Khmer Rouge regime,

Kalyani immigrated to the United States in 1981 with her family.

Her films include A River Changes Course,

Lost World, and the fight for Arang Valley.

In this essay, Kalyani traces her father's struggle for agency and acceptance in America

after her family escaped from Cambodia, reflecting on the false promise of the American dream

and the deep belonging that can be found in landscapes of home.

Loss Rai.

Each year it becomes increasingly difficult to return home from the mountains and readjust to

the world we've left behind. This year proved even more challenging. This summer, my husband, David,

and I, made her annual pilgrimage to the Sierra Nevada and California, this time to the eastern

Sierra, the land of the Paiute. We met 14 years ago in Yosemite and have been returning every

year since then. Each year we look

forward to greeting the trees, shrubs, and flowers that pop up every summer along the slopes and trails,

like long-lost friends helping to guide us along our journey. We know that where the willows grow,

there will be water nearby. Where the flocks and

buckwheat bloom, it will be rocky and dry. Where the fox tail and wide bark pines bend their

...