International Herald Tribune
Published: September 3, 2006
PHNOM PENH To seek a lover, to choose an auspicious date, to find success in business and in love, to know the good and the bad in life, to change bad-luck moles into good-luck moles.
These are the arts of Son Sam-Ath.
To wrestle with demons, exorcise black magic or do battle with monsters in the soul, these are the bruising encounters of her dual life, half in sunshine and half in the shadow of ghosts.
"I am nothing," said Son Sam-Ath, 48, her faux pearl necklace, costume jewelry rings and glittery bangles announcing a woman who is oblivious to the bare feet that dangle beneath her.
"I am like the gateway to a temple," she said. "I am empty. But when I open my heart, the spirits can pass through me."
Son Sam-Ath is a fortune teller, one of hundreds who line the bank of the Tonle Sap River and cluster in booths around the little holy mountain, Wat Phnom, that is the heart of Phnom Penh.
In this realm of feints and whispers, where things may not be as they seem, these sages of the other world are the keepers of Cambodia's mysteries, the ultimate advisers to rich and poor, weak and powerful.
In a land where truth can be dangerous to the touch, Son Sam-Ath's words are pure and unfiltered, their messages as sharp as a scythe if they were not insulated by unintelligibility.
The riverfront in Phnom Penh, in view of the Royal Palace, is the city's promenade, from dawn, when it is the venue for tai chi, aerobics and badminton, to dark, when the city's poor gather with their children to eat boiled eggs and fried beetles.
Wat Phnom is its spiritual core, where supplicants make offerings at its peak to Preah Chao, a Buddhist deity, and gather for soft drinks and beer at its foot as traffic swirls around them.
These scenes show the revival of this tortured city, whose population doubled to two million as refugees poured in during the Indochina war, then dropped within days to near zero when the Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh in 1975. It has now grown again to more than a million.
There may be just as many ghosts floating in their parallel cosmos above the city and Son Sam-Ath communes with them, she says, and shares their secrets with those who believe, and pay.
Hers is a ritual as old as superstition and as widespread as the world of ghosts that blankets Southeast Asia. Summoning the spirits, Son Sam-Ath lights sticks of incense and the sweet smoke curls in front of her face. She chants quietly in an unknown tongue. Her eyes roll upward. Her soul flies away and she is empty.
Then, as if through the hum of a long-distance cable, the voices come to her and she begins to speak. The timbre is not her own and the words are foreign to her - perhaps Thai or Arabic or Pali, she says, or perhaps words with no earthly meaning at all.
If a client needs urgent help or if, for example, he is visiting the United States or Australia, she can also work her magic over the telephone, passing on the words of the spirits as if forwarding a call.
"It's as if someone has opened a book in front of my eyes," she said, describing a sort of dizziness that seizes her, "and I just read them out, whatever language they are in."
That is all the more mysterious, she said, because she cannot read or write, even in her native language of Khmer.
Lounging like an odalisque on her divan, her hair crimped and reddened by the mysterious arts of her cosmetologist, she beckons with a smile as strings of colored Christmas lights flash and twinkle from an altar behind her. If her altar represents the other world it is a cluttered and eclectic place, all leaping Ramayana monkeys and Buddhas with hologrammic halos, pot-bellied laughing gods and bearded porcelain sages, plaster horses, multitiered gold parasols, bowls of bananas, fluttering candles, incense and, for prosperity - and just in case all else fails - a plaster Japanese Beckoning Cat with an endlessly waving arm.
Not all the fortune tellers, in their snug booths here at Wat Phnom, are as gaudy as Son Sam- Ath. And not all of them commune with spirits. More commonly, like her husband, they read palms and cards in the lamplight and chart the graph of good fortune based on what they call the Napoleonic code. Their raw material is date, day, hour and minute of birth, along with the intuition or balderdashery that are the most potent instruments of the fortune teller's trade.
That is a challenge for practitioners here in Cambodia since many people - including Son Sam-Ath and her husband - are not sure exactly when they were born.
"It depends on the client," said her husband, Chhay Leong Ieuv, 38. If they are looking for a short-term prediction, the medium is the cards, he said. The palm and the complex graphs he has written in a notebook are for longer projections.
He learned these arts from his grandfather, a Chinese fortune teller, he said, and practices them side by side with his wife. She can handle these tools as well, he said, but her specialty is sorcery and magic.
There was no sign when she was young that Son Sam-Ath was special. Indeed, she shared the horrifying childhood of her contemporaries, working in a Khmer Rouge labor brigade while as many as one fourth of the population was slaughtered or starved to death between 1975 and 1979. Her father, a farmer, was killed and two brothers disappeared, never to be seen again.
"I have just a little hope that they are still alive," she said of her brothers. "They might return to our old village, but they have never come."
Their fate is beyond the reach of her psychic powers. "I can read the lives of other people, but for myself I am deaf," she said. "My power is a knife that can also cut its holder."
The Khmer Rouge, driven from power by a Vietnamese invasion, left the country ruined and bleeding. Like other survivors, Son Sam-Ath did what she could to feed her family, selling noodles from a basket she carried on her head until, she said, she almost went bald.
But the spirits, it seems, had been watching her since she was 12 years old, waiting for their moment. This in any case is what they told her.
The moment came when she fell ill and a doctor, diagnosing a problem with the membranes of her nose, wanted to remove her salivary glands.
Instead, she went to a traditional healer who began to paint her body with magic herbs. Suddenly, she said, she cried out and slapped the healer. The spirits had seized her.
After that, sometimes to her discomfort, she began seeing beneath the surface of things. When a child was ill, she could tell the cure. When husband and wife were quarreling, she could tell them their fate, for better or for worse.
"This is my true life," she said, swinging her feet. "That was the beginning of my life as a fortune teller."
As she was speaking, her daughter, Son Sopharon, 22, arrived, bringing glasses of sweet iced coffee.
Son Sopharon is studying to be a hair dresser and as far as anybody can tell, she does not have the psychic powers of her mother.
"I don't know anything about that," she said, unimpressed by the visitations of the other world. "I don't know it and I don't like it."
Asked if her parents used their skills to guide her in her life she said, "No. They don't tell my fortune. But they still tell me to do this and do that."
Her mother was understanding, as a fortune teller can only be.
"My son is a painter and my daughter is a hairdresser," she said. "That is fine. We all have different talents, different gifts, from the day we are born. We can't force ourselves to be something that we are not.
"You must follow your gifts," she said. "Everyone can't be a fortune teller. If they were, there would be nobody left to do all the other things that have to be done."
These are the arts of Son Sam-Ath.
To wrestle with demons, exorcise black magic or do battle with monsters in the soul, these are the bruising encounters of her dual life, half in sunshine and half in the shadow of ghosts.
"I am nothing," said Son Sam-Ath, 48, her faux pearl necklace, costume jewelry rings and glittery bangles announcing a woman who is oblivious to the bare feet that dangle beneath her.
"I am like the gateway to a temple," she said. "I am empty. But when I open my heart, the spirits can pass through me."
Son Sam-Ath is a fortune teller, one of hundreds who line the bank of the Tonle Sap River and cluster in booths around the little holy mountain, Wat Phnom, that is the heart of Phnom Penh.
In this realm of feints and whispers, where things may not be as they seem, these sages of the other world are the keepers of Cambodia's mysteries, the ultimate advisers to rich and poor, weak and powerful.
In a land where truth can be dangerous to the touch, Son Sam-Ath's words are pure and unfiltered, their messages as sharp as a scythe if they were not insulated by unintelligibility.
The riverfront in Phnom Penh, in view of the Royal Palace, is the city's promenade, from dawn, when it is the venue for tai chi, aerobics and badminton, to dark, when the city's poor gather with their children to eat boiled eggs and fried beetles.
Wat Phnom is its spiritual core, where supplicants make offerings at its peak to Preah Chao, a Buddhist deity, and gather for soft drinks and beer at its foot as traffic swirls around them.
These scenes show the revival of this tortured city, whose population doubled to two million as refugees poured in during the Indochina war, then dropped within days to near zero when the Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh in 1975. It has now grown again to more than a million.
There may be just as many ghosts floating in their parallel cosmos above the city and Son Sam-Ath communes with them, she says, and shares their secrets with those who believe, and pay.
Hers is a ritual as old as superstition and as widespread as the world of ghosts that blankets Southeast Asia. Summoning the spirits, Son Sam-Ath lights sticks of incense and the sweet smoke curls in front of her face. She chants quietly in an unknown tongue. Her eyes roll upward. Her soul flies away and she is empty.
Then, as if through the hum of a long-distance cable, the voices come to her and she begins to speak. The timbre is not her own and the words are foreign to her - perhaps Thai or Arabic or Pali, she says, or perhaps words with no earthly meaning at all.
If a client needs urgent help or if, for example, he is visiting the United States or Australia, she can also work her magic over the telephone, passing on the words of the spirits as if forwarding a call.
"It's as if someone has opened a book in front of my eyes," she said, describing a sort of dizziness that seizes her, "and I just read them out, whatever language they are in."
That is all the more mysterious, she said, because she cannot read or write, even in her native language of Khmer.
Lounging like an odalisque on her divan, her hair crimped and reddened by the mysterious arts of her cosmetologist, she beckons with a smile as strings of colored Christmas lights flash and twinkle from an altar behind her. If her altar represents the other world it is a cluttered and eclectic place, all leaping Ramayana monkeys and Buddhas with hologrammic halos, pot-bellied laughing gods and bearded porcelain sages, plaster horses, multitiered gold parasols, bowls of bananas, fluttering candles, incense and, for prosperity - and just in case all else fails - a plaster Japanese Beckoning Cat with an endlessly waving arm.
Not all the fortune tellers, in their snug booths here at Wat Phnom, are as gaudy as Son Sam- Ath. And not all of them commune with spirits. More commonly, like her husband, they read palms and cards in the lamplight and chart the graph of good fortune based on what they call the Napoleonic code. Their raw material is date, day, hour and minute of birth, along with the intuition or balderdashery that are the most potent instruments of the fortune teller's trade.
That is a challenge for practitioners here in Cambodia since many people - including Son Sam-Ath and her husband - are not sure exactly when they were born.
"It depends on the client," said her husband, Chhay Leong Ieuv, 38. If they are looking for a short-term prediction, the medium is the cards, he said. The palm and the complex graphs he has written in a notebook are for longer projections.
He learned these arts from his grandfather, a Chinese fortune teller, he said, and practices them side by side with his wife. She can handle these tools as well, he said, but her specialty is sorcery and magic.
There was no sign when she was young that Son Sam-Ath was special. Indeed, she shared the horrifying childhood of her contemporaries, working in a Khmer Rouge labor brigade while as many as one fourth of the population was slaughtered or starved to death between 1975 and 1979. Her father, a farmer, was killed and two brothers disappeared, never to be seen again.
"I have just a little hope that they are still alive," she said of her brothers. "They might return to our old village, but they have never come."
Their fate is beyond the reach of her psychic powers. "I can read the lives of other people, but for myself I am deaf," she said. "My power is a knife that can also cut its holder."
The Khmer Rouge, driven from power by a Vietnamese invasion, left the country ruined and bleeding. Like other survivors, Son Sam-Ath did what she could to feed her family, selling noodles from a basket she carried on her head until, she said, she almost went bald.
But the spirits, it seems, had been watching her since she was 12 years old, waiting for their moment. This in any case is what they told her.
The moment came when she fell ill and a doctor, diagnosing a problem with the membranes of her nose, wanted to remove her salivary glands.
Instead, she went to a traditional healer who began to paint her body with magic herbs. Suddenly, she said, she cried out and slapped the healer. The spirits had seized her.
After that, sometimes to her discomfort, she began seeing beneath the surface of things. When a child was ill, she could tell the cure. When husband and wife were quarreling, she could tell them their fate, for better or for worse.
"This is my true life," she said, swinging her feet. "That was the beginning of my life as a fortune teller."
As she was speaking, her daughter, Son Sopharon, 22, arrived, bringing glasses of sweet iced coffee.
Son Sopharon is studying to be a hair dresser and as far as anybody can tell, she does not have the psychic powers of her mother.
"I don't know anything about that," she said, unimpressed by the visitations of the other world. "I don't know it and I don't like it."
Asked if her parents used their skills to guide her in her life she said, "No. They don't tell my fortune. But they still tell me to do this and do that."
Her mother was understanding, as a fortune teller can only be.
"My son is a painter and my daughter is a hairdresser," she said. "That is fine. We all have different talents, different gifts, from the day we are born. We can't force ourselves to be something that we are not.
"You must follow your gifts," she said. "Everyone can't be a fortune teller. If they were, there would be nobody left to do all the other things that have to be done."
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