by Jen Myers

In January 2018, Vichet Chum stood on the Merrimack Repertory Theater stage in Downtown Lowell debuting his one-man show, KNYUM. He looked out into the crowd and saw something he had never seen before in his years of acting – a sea of faces that looked like his – an audience of Cambodian-American patrons.

“Seeing Cambodian faces out there, seeing my mings (aunts), my pous (uncles), my bongs (brothers) out there receiving my show and I was so moved by it,” Chum said, explaining the American theater audience is usually mostly white people. “To be able to have the chance to be in a theater in Lowell, Massachusetts, which has the second biggest Khmer population, it just felt special and really affirmed my choice to be a storyteller and to do this for the rest of my life.”

Chum was at the Butler Middle School on Tuesday speaking to a group of 8th graders in Ms. Sayles class about “Kween,” a young adult novel he wrote which was released nationwide on Tuesday. The main character is a queer Cambodian-American 16-year-old Lowell High School student who uses spoken word poetry to work through her feelings after her father is deported to Cambodia, as well as to navigate the daily trials and tribulations of life.

Growing up in Carrollton, Texas with few other Cambodians around, Chum heard stories of this place called Lowell “where Cambodian people thrived and were community leaders and were business owners and where the culture was reinforced and celebrated in many ways and I was always like – what is that place? I want to go there.”

He studied acting, play writing, and directing at Brown University and moved to New York.

Chum found himself creatively frustrated because “the entertainment industry was not catching up fast enough to tell the stories I wanted to tell. I only ever saw the brown Asian kid as a side character or a token.”

Chum wanted to create spaces where brown and yellow people could thrive and be who they are – the main characters of their own stories.

That was when he delved into writing, using his family’s story of surviving the Khmer Rouge genocide as the basis of his one-man show.

“I spent a lot of my growing up trying to understand what that legacy, what that history means to me as a first-generation Cambodian-American kid,” he said. “The show was really about me negotiating that inheritance, that history.”

He performed KNYUM at MRT and forged a long-lasting relationship with the theater. He went on to perform in “Miss Bennet: Christmas at Pemberley” and Jack Kerouac’s “The Haunted Life” at MRT.

When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down theaters in 2020, MRT contacted Chum and told him they wanted to commission a new play from him. He began searching for a Lowell-centric story.

“The first thing I thought of is that I wanted to write about the kids in this community; I wanted to write particularly about the Cambodian kids in this community who are in community with one another,” he said. “I didn’t grow up in that kind of a space. I didn’t have a ton of Cambodian people around me. I would have dreamed about having a main character in a book be a Cambodian person.”

Once he began writing the play version of “Kween,” a Cambodian-American friend who is a senior editor at HarperCollins Publishers asked him to turn it into a novel. He was intimidated at first – he had never written anything as long as a book, but within a year it was completed.

When the book was released “I wanted to make sure it was public in Lowell first before anywhere else,” he said.

On Monday night there was a play reading and book event at MRT and on Tuesday he visited Lowell High School and the Butler. Chum’s visit to the Butler was sponsored by Writers and Artists Across the Country (WAAC), a non-profit that covered his honorarium, as well as provided a free copy of the book to every student in the class.

Chum said he made an effort to not only showcase Lowell’s Cambodian population in the book, but also to be reflective of its diversity. The main character’s love interest is an African-American girl and her high school English teacher is a Latine Mexican-American man.

“I hope that this book is somewhat representative of your experience,” he told the students, urging them to read any part of the book and even if they hate it – take the time to write their own story.

“At the end of the day, everyone is a main character. No one is supporting,” Chum said. “Everyone is a main character of their own lives and you deserve to have your story shared in whatever way you desire, so write down your story.”

“Kween” will be performed as a play at MRT in 2024. Chum said there is also talk about developing it into a television series.