Each Other’s Destiny presents accounts of Cambodian children, adults, and elders who remember past lives. Their stories show how memories of earlier lives reshape present families, obligations, identities, and moral expectations.
The book centers on six people whose experiences Davis researched extensively in Cambodia between 2003 and 2006. Their accounts include children who remember former families, women whose near-death experiences were understood through culturally particular visions of hell, and people who used claims about past lives to establish religious or political authority.
One child recalled a former life as her own uncle, who had died while fighting for the Khmer Rouge. Her family’s response—including an effort to make her forget that life—shows how memories of rebirth can create competing kinship claims and revive unsettled karmic debts.
Across these cases, Davis examines the Cambodian concept of nissăy: a karmically consequential relationship often translated as destiny or fate. The book proposes that rebirth is best understood through these relationships. What returns is not simply an autonomous person, but a network of attachments and obligations through which people become who they are.