Cambodian Wedding, American Twist

Robert Hendricks and Marianne Koch (Photo: http://khmerabroad.blogspot.com). Marianne is a lawyer and Robert is a prosecutor. Congratulations to the newly wed couple!

By Taing Sarada, VOA Khmer
Original report from Washington
05 June 2008

Click here to listen to the program in Khmer

Even Cambodians living outside their country can maintain their cultures and traditions. That much was evident through a recent wedding between a Cambodian woman and an American man.

Robert Hendricks, bedecked in traditional Cambodian groom clothes, said his bride's Cambodian family had welcomed him warmly.

His bride-to-be, Marianne Koch, said after eight years of dating, she was happy to be married. Her father, Kouy Marong, said he was happy to be preserving Cambodian culture, and her mother, Chanthary, hoped she would continue to do so.

"I feel very happy for my relationship with my husband," Koch said. "I feel very satisfied and happy with my husband, that he can participate with the Khmer community. I also feel very happy to observe my husband’s culture.”

Hendricks' mother, Ronie Lake, called the Cambodian wedding a part of a "valuable tradition."

"It is a good ceremony," she said, "from beginning to end."

Preserving old among young

Mayranacri Moeung, 14, has her makeup done by Sothary Sou, 15, as they prepare to perform a traditional dance at a Cambodian New Year celebration at the Park Village Apartments community center Monday. (Photo: Victor J. Blue/The Record)
Sophanary Sok, 21, performs a traditional dance during a Cambodian New Year celebration at Park Village apartments in Stockton. (Photo: Victor J. Blue/The Record)
Min Ua, left, and Olthat That lead a group of musicians in a Cambodian New Year celebration at the Park Village complex Tuesday in Stockton. (Photo: Victor J. Blue/The Record)

Cambodian New Year celebrates tradition with food, music, prayer

April 16, 2008
By Jennifer Torres
Record Staff Writer (Stockton, California, USA)

STOCKTON - In the last frantic minutes before the Cambodian New Year dance program was set to begin at Park Village Apartments this week, women passed handfuls of gold-colored belts and bracelets across a table and coaxed stiff, straight ponytails into curls.

Kunthea Tuy tucked flowers behind Mayuranacri Moeung's ear. Later, Mayuranacri would perform a classical blessing dance in bare feet on stage in the Park Village community center. And even later, she would take down her hair, trade her traditional dress for jeans and dance to hip-hop and Cambodian pop under lanterns and balloons on the complex's basketball court.

"I like both kind of dancing, both the same," the 14-year-old said. "It's just, like, culture. It's important."

Local Cambodian residents have celebrated their new year over the past three days with traditional food, music, games, dance and prayer.

After decades in California, many within the refugee community say the ties of language and culture are strained as children pursue lives that are more decidedly American.

They don't speak Khmer and they don't wear Cambodian dresses to the temple, 19-year-old Sophany Yinn said. "You can see the way they dance at nighttime. It's different."

Events such as this week's new year celebration become, at least in part, a means of preserving what's old in the lives of the young.

According to Yale University's Cambodian Genocide Program, about 1.7 million people - 21 percent of Cambodia's population - were killed in the country from 1975 to 1979 when Pol Pot-led Khmer Rouge forces took over the country.

Yinn's parents were among the thousands who fled.

Now a student at California State University, Stanislaus, she has been studying Cambodian dance for about 10 years.

She was recruited to dance through her Girl Scout troop.

"I liked it because I was learning new things, especially about my culture," she said. "We're trying to live in a new society here. I wanted to keep at least something alive."

Before the dance on Monday, she lit incense outside the Park Village community center, pressed her palms together and bowed. "I just prayed to the ancestors to give me strength to do the dances correctly."

More than 10,000 Cambodian people live in San Joaquin County. According to U.S. Census Bureau figures, about 9,000 of them speak Khmer, or Cambodian. Nearly 60 percent also speak English.

Increasingly, though, language and culture gaps between parents and their children are becoming more pronounced, said Sophaline Buth, a liaison for the Stockton Unified School District.

"It's very difficult. Kids nowadays are so Americanized," Buth said. "In order to maintain that traditional culture, the only way the parents can is through the temple."

At the Wat Dhammararam Buddhist Temple on Carpenter Road on Tuesday - the last day of new year festivities - hundreds of families prayed, danced and left offerings at the temple's giant Buddha statues.

Children could play traditional games and practice speaking Cambodian - links to their parents' culture, Buth said.

According to research published Tuesday in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, minority adolescents who maintain cultural identify, especially through their clothing, have fewer mental health problems than children who adopted the style of the dominant culture.

"If you don't know who you are and where you came from, it's hard for you to be able to stand for something," said Sovang Lam, program manager for Stockton's United Cambodian Families.

Earlier this month, the nonprofit organization led a focus group of about 30 Cambodian families to discuss concerns and priorities.

Parents were concerned about their children's education and ability to find jobs, Lam said.

Many, she said, have trouble communicating with teens who learned English in school and don't speak Cambodian well.

"I see that all the time here," Lam said. "Most of it is, 'I don't know what they're saying, and they don't know how to tell me.' "

Yinn said her parents insisted she study Cambodian. "I read, write, speak, understand," she said. "Kids are losing that too. They're losing a lot of that right now."

Keeping it is a challenge, she said, waiting to make a new year offering to monks at a temple in Lodi.

"It's hard. You have to balance it out," she said. "For one thing, you don't want to change so much that you lose your Cambodian culture. You don't want to keep so much because you want to be updated on American society. ... You keep some things and change some things."

Contact reporter Jennifer Torres at (209) 546-8252 or jtorres@recordnet.com.

LET NOTHING BE FORGOTTEN: New breath for the Khmer muse

Wed, April 16, 2008
Carleton Cole
The Nation (Thailand)

An immigrant couple in the US helps preserve Cambodian values through poetry - and the way they raise their children

Sinan Ung became fascinated with the infinitely varied forms of Cambodian poetry at the age of nine. Over the next decade she wrote dozens of poems about life in her small village in Kandal province. Then came the Khmer Rouge - tomorrow is the 33rd anniversary of the fall of Phnom Penh - and they told her to stop writing.

Owning pens or paper was not allowed between 1975 and '79, so Ung waited for rain and wrote poems in mud with a stick or her finger - until the day she was caught.

"They kicked me," she says. "I knew if they caught me again, they'd kill me, so I wrote in my head. I didn't forget one word of my poems."

Only years later would she have the opportunity to write them down, and she's since taught many Sunday-afternoon poetry classes at Khmer Arts, a shop in the small American city of Lowell, Massachusetts, that she runs with her husband, Molyrath Sim.

Ung and Sim arrived in the United States from a Thai refugee camp in 1981, with their year-old son Poly. They lived with a couple in Lexington, Massachusetts, who had agreed to care for them under a Lutheran World Relief programme for Cambodian refugees.

Following the births of their second son Mony and daughter Molyna, Ung and Sim decided they'd better teach their children about Khmer culture. Even as the couple learned a new language and social system in America, their commitment to honour their native culture increased.

While raising their children in a foreign country, Ung and Sim passed on to them many of the core aspects of Cambodian society - fluency in the language, reverence for elders, Theravada Buddhism and observance of the Cambodian New Year every April.

Once they opened Khmer Arts, they set out to promote and preserve their native culture within Lowell's Cambodian community, the second largest in the US. Their store is filled with Cambodian art, handicrafts and books. Lowell has dozens of Khmer grocery stores and restaurants, but few shops offer traditional Khmer artistry.

Khmer-language books on Cambodian history, Buddhism and grammar line one wall of the shop. Ung says it's important to pass on the language to young Cambodians, who might otherwise only know English. She lends and occasionally gives books to local Cambodians who can't afford them.

In her poetry classes, Ung explains the complicated techniques and meters that allow for multiple meanings. There are more than 50 distinct forms of Cambodian poetry, she says, and all of them rhyme.

It's meant to be recited as much as it's read. Heard aloud, it sounds more like song than spoken verse. It's often recited in rubato form, in which a rhythmic flow is suddenly broken by briefly closing the larynx.

On breaks from her job at an electronics assembly plant in nearby Burlington, Ung gives regular, informal Khmer-language lessons to co-workers - immigrants who never learned to write their native language. They work the evening shift, which is popular with many Asian immigrants.

Ung and Sim are hoping that the various cultural artefacts and social norms they took for granted early in life can survive being transplanted in Cambodian communities in America, especially after they were almost wiped out by the Khmer Rouge.

Cambodian tradition, history take the stage

The Angkor Dance Troupe, performs at the Khmer Student's Society cultural show on Saturday night. (PHOTO: Pat Hickey)

Monday, April 9, 2007

By Leslie Finlay
For The Collegian (Penn State U, Pennsylvania, USA)

Twelve classical dancers donning traditional costumes opened a night of Cambodian culture Saturday with a contemporary twist.

Members of the Angkor Dance Troupe performed the Tep Monorom Dance, a dance believed to embody well-being and friendship, to welcome a crowded Alumni Hall. The dance troupe was part of "Khmer Transcendence" presented by the Khmer Students Society. "Khmer" is the official language of Cambodia.

"We are celebrating our 10th anniversary here at Penn State," said Sarun Chan, the society's president. "We've been planning this show since summer, excited to showcase Khmer culture and bring to light a sense of our history, particularly Khmer Rouge."

The Khmer Rouge was a communist group in Cambodia responsible for a genocide that took place there nearly 30 years ago.

"The Khmer Rouge killed over a third of Cambodia's population, wiping out our culture. Even today many people who live in Asia don't even know where Cambodia is," Chan said.

Society member Mony Hin (senior-economics) agreed, saying it is important to promote Cambodian culture, which "was almost destroyed by genocide."

The society showed a slideshow paying tribute to the victims of genocide, identifying dozens of Penn State students who are children or friends of refugees, or who were born in refugee camps themselves.

"It was so sad," Tulsi Pathak (junior-information science and technology) said. "I had no idea that [the genocide] had even happened, or that so many students here on campus were affected by it."

Penn State student members of the Khmer Student Society also performed a dance called the Coconut Dance -- a dance inspired by a popular game played most often at Khmer weddings. Adding a modern facet to the show, the society put together its own parody episode of "Cambodia's Next Top Model", a takeoff of America's Next Top Model.

A fake Tyra Banks prompted the girls to "grab their flip flops and sarongs" to compete for a prize of a year's supply of mangos and a 40-pound bag of rice.

Jessica Bennett (freshman-journalism) said, "The costumes, the dances, the whole show -- it was a great cultural experience."