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A.k.a. Don Bonus is a 1995 autobiographical documentary that has garnered critical acclaim for its candid representation of the lives of Cambodian American youth in San Francisco, California. This essay situates the film at the intersection of post-1976 Southeast Asian migrations to the US, the rising influence of neoliberalism on domestic welfare policy, and the transformation of juvenile delinquency into a state technology of social abandonment. Produced through a community-based program for at-risk youth, a.k.a. Don Bonus, a collaboration between Sokly Ny, a Cambodian American refugee teen, and Spencer Nakasako, an Asian American filmmaker and community activist, participates in neoliberal techniques of youth empowerment. However, the film also critiques the humanitarian guise of liberal citizenship that, at once, purports to incorporate refugee subjects produced from US imperialism and subversively abandons these subjects through welfare reform and incarceration. This essay argues that the contradictions of liberal humanitarianism are underscored through the collateral narratives of Ny and his brothers who bear the brunt of liberal cultural values that privilege individuals who subscribe to the values of liberal individualism (in this case, Ny’s older brother, Chandara) but at the expense of those who require more familial support (suggested by the juvenile delinquency of Ny’s younger brother, Touch, and Ny’s loneliness). Ultimately, the film’s collateral narratives not only disrupt readings of Southeast Asian refugee subjectively as solely an effect of US humanitarianism but also raise questions about the coherency of reading Cambodian American refugee subjectivity through a framework of liberal individualism.

The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education