Resurrecting the dying art of dignity

You’ve spoken quite strongly in the past about the issue of ethnicity, most notably during your interview on the Angry Asian Man blog when he asks you what makes you angry. How would you describe your identity?
To be honest, I feel like no one! One of the songs I wrote with my mum – we write all my songs together – is called Refugee. We wrote about this idea that when you’re in between identities, you’re kind of drifting. It’s like an abyss; this abysmal identity, but also like a chameleon: you’re in many different settings and you change to fit those settings. Sometimes I feel extremely American, there are certainly times when everything I do, I say, my mannerisms, my likes, my dislikes, my influences – many of them come from an American basis. Even my ideas on morality, human rights: all those things. But when I come here there’s something else that takes over. Even my mannerisms change naturally: suddenly I’ll cross my legs more; I’ll be a little more shy around men, a little softer. Identity wise, I’m definitely American but there are also so many factors to it. I’m Cambodian, but I’m Cambodian diaspora; I’m not just Khmer, but then I come here and get influenced by the Khmers here so I feel like I’m just this big drifting boat of culture and I pick up things as I drift along.

When you were growing up in the US, how visible was Cambodia in your daily life? Did your parents speak Khmer with you? Did you discuss the country’s history? Were you conscious of where you came from, albeit indirectly?
When I was little, I didn’t even know where Cambodia was on a map. One day my mum said to me: ‘You know you’re Cambodian.’ My mum did a really good job of reminding me who I am. ‘You know, Laura, you are American but don’t forget that, at the end of the day, you’re Cambodian: your blood is Khmer.’ We talked about it later in life, too: how I wasn’t really meant to be in America; none of us Khmers were. But she did a very good job of raising me with Khmer themes. We didn’t speak the language: she wanted me to be assimilated, didn’t want me to grow up with an accent, so we spoke English at home. But at night time, she would tell me Ramayana tales; she put me in Cambodian dance classes when I was in fourth grade. She wanted me to grow up loving it, but she wanted it to be this mysterious thing, too. She would tell me about the good times; my family would always talk about the ’60s. No one really talked about the Khmer Rouge period, really. They’d talk about the old days and the glamour. I was raised to be proud of being Khmer, but being at school, Cambodia was a paragraph in the history books: you’re raised with the idea that America is Number One and you don’t realise that’s propaganda until college, so thank God for college!

Your mum sounds awesome: a very powerful but grounding force.
[Laughs] You got it! She’s the big one in my life. She’s also this great philosopher: she grew up on Chinese kung fu, but loved the entire concept, not just the martial arts. She was explaining the balance between yin and yang to me when I was six years old. She’s got this great sense of accepting what happened and pushing forward: ‘OK, where can we go now?’ She raised me with that. What she likes to protect is this idea that in Cambodian is called phlai phno, which means ‘dignity’. It’s a concept that’s dying; not necessarily dying, but it’s an old concept. The upper class are supposed to act with dignity; they’re supposed to be so educated that they can show other people how to act. The reality is a little funky, but for everything that happened during the war – the devastation – you can’t blame the dog-eat-dog. We’ve been in dog-eat-dog for more than 30 years, this post-war devastation, but we’re finally at a place now where there’s some prosperity and people are, like, ‘So, what else?’

I’m dying to hear about these famous ‘kitchen parties’ your mum held when you were a kid…         
Yeah! The funny thing is my mum and dad would never have got married under normal circumstances. He was from a high-class family, but actually his father was ousted and so only she grew up high class. If they hadn’t have got married they’d have been killed, because singles were being targeted. She always talks about it: ‘We would never have got married, but then you kids came out…’ My brother and I are pretty unique and we’ve got some spirit to us, but they’re both very hippy and in some sense – of course, they’re divorced now – they did match in a lot of ways and they’re now best friends. It’s a unique situation most Cambodians don’t understand: ‘What? They’re best friends? Why don’t they just get married?’ Because they’re not good together; they’re better as best friends. They’re both hippies! My dad was Creedence Clearwater all day, every day. That’s what we grew up on. My mum was Carlos Santana, The Beatles: she was the girl in the ’60s who was going to concerts and wearing mini-skirts. She always says: ‘I was born in the wrong country. I’ve got a big mouth!’ She was always top of her class, but the teacher would put her in a corner for talking too much; she just wouldn’t stop talking! She’s a rebel. When they got to the States – they’re both very smart; they’re not just survivors – these kids handled things, no problem. Both of them made it to at least lower- and upper-middle class, you know? They grew up with a sense of freedom and they wanted us to be free because they didn’t have that. My mum thought her youth was stolen by the Khmer Rouge: ‘I don’t know love, I don’t know falling in love; I don’t know any of those types of things and that’s their fault.’ My mum was 15 and my dad was 17 when it all began. She talks about it a lot: the absence of being able to be a teenager; having to survive too soon, to take care of her mother because she lost her husband and broke down. Both of them had their youth stolen and I feel that when they got divorced, they got to reclaim that youth. We all grew up together, almost: me, my dad, my brother, my mum. Now we get to experience things: it feels like we’ve been able to live life and now we’re the closest we’ve ever been – in 25 years.

With parents that progressive,little wonder you found yourself studying anthropology at Berkeley. Anything to do with your own sense of ethnic identity?
Yeah! I never fit in at high school, but it was Filipinos, Vietnamese and Mexicans. In middle school we all mixed; in high school we all separated by ethnicity. I was, like, ‘I don’t fit in anywhere!’ The only other Cambodians at my school were gangsters. I’m not even a gangster – I can’t really hang out with you! There was a lot of drifting, but then I noticed there were a lot of different cultures: bits and pieces you’d have to get over and this interested me. Mum said: ‘Get a business degree.’ so I started out in maths and communication. One of the prerequisites was anthropology; I took the class and thought: ‘Absolutely!’ I fell in love. You can solve cultural issues and actually write a book and have people read it and influence a generation? This is crazy! This is amazing! It was all the stuff that made sense to me because I’ve always been good at language; I’ve always been good at being a chameleon, which is sometimes what is helpful in an anthropological sense. To go into a culture, that was my favourite thing to do. I was studying Japanese and got to go there for a home stay. I was able to assimilate; get close; learn the language quickly. I had a deep conversation about love with my Japanese sister – and I was in high school. When I realised there were people doing this as scholars, dude, I would totally do that! I wanted to go to Cambodia and learn about it; I had dreams about it.

And the launch pad for your first visit was your band The Like Me’s, whose YouTube channel garnered more than 1,000,000 hits – and suddenly the calls started coming.
I was actually doing preservation conservation, working for Global Heritage Fund, but then I started a band for fun. It was me and people I know from my community: we did an open mic and there was a good turn-out so some guys asked if we wanted to come play at their club. It was four girls and, you know, girls draw crowds. ‘Alright, let’s do it!’ I put my original music up on YouTube and started receiving messages from people. It was a counselling tip from a friend: I was heartbroken and she said: ‘Get yourself out there.’

Heartbroken?
[Laughs] I was totally heartbroken in college! I was out of it and couldn’t figure things out. She said: ‘You have music. Why don’t you put it out there? It’ll be part of your healing process.’ I said: ‘You’re crazy! I would never do that.’ She said: ‘Just do it! You need to heal!’ Alright, fine. I put my music out there and these Cambodians from Germany, from Australia, France, different parts of America, were saying: ‘Finally! Original music!’ I’d always wanted an idol and when I started getting these messages I realised everybody feels this way. It gave me an idea: ‘I think original music could make a comeback.’ Then I joined The Like Me’s and we started doing music videos and, because I was leading, I said: ‘Let’s do Cambodian stuff!’ We took a chance and did one song that I showed my mum and she said it was cool, so I asked if she wanted to try translating it with me. She found this beautiful thing: she found a poet inside her. She’s a great poet. We had no idea! ‘I’m good!’ Yes, you are! ‘I write better than you do!’ You do. [Laughs] ‘Your songs are stupid. Mine songs are brilliant!’ So then we put that song out, Pka Prohean Rik Popreay, which is ‘Morning Flowers Blossom’, and it went viral because no one had done an original Khmer song on YouTube yet. Everyone was doing covers of the old Khmer stuff. Dengue Fever had come out and people were excited, but it was still covers. It was my first bout with viral stuff: it was getting shared all night long. We put it out there and it was, like, boom, boom, boom! ‘What is happening?!’ Then we did Sva Rom Monkiss, because we wanted a theme talking about the violence between the two generations: between parents and the youth; trying to undo it. Nobody knows there was a huge party scene here. Nobody knows there was this massive scene – intellectuals, artists. Nobody knows and nobody talks about it. That’s the thing my mum and aunts always lament: ‘Nobody knows we were awesome. We had great parties; we were thoughtful; we wanted democracy. We had all these ideas for our country and then it abruptly stopped.

Photos from Cambodia in the 1960s are magnificent: beautiful Khmer women in tight-fitting mini-skirts with towering beehive hairdos.
They were sassy! All my aunts say: ‘You don’t know how glorious it was. The Thais used to watch our stuff, rather than us watching their stuff. Of course it gets nationalist, but I think it has to do with this idea that we had so much and then it was gone. After Sva Rom Monkiss, I did this thing where a professor from San Francisco State asked me to come give a talk to his class. Afterwards, he asked what my plan, my mission was. He said he’d found out recently that his father was actually Cambodian. His father had told him he was Vietnamese his whole life. The crazy part is he ended up showing his father Sva Rom Monkiss – a cover from the ’60s – and his father broke down in tears and then started admitting his Cambodian life and it turns out he was a musician from that period and he was so broken-hearted about what happened that he never wanted to look back. I think the song helped open up the dialogue among youth and parents, but it’s presented in a way that’s happy. ‘Sure: let’s talk about the past; let’s talk about what could have been. I just think people haven’t been willing to dream for a long time and now it’s a different feeling, because we’ve got time now: we’ve got youth, we’ve got energy, we’ve got movement.

Talk us through some of your favourite original songs: what you’re doing creatively, what inspired you…
There’s Pka Prohean Rik Popreay (‘Morning Flowers Blossom’): that’s the first song we did with my mum and it’s written as a love song. You know Cambodians: they do love love! So many Cambodian lyrics are: ‘I saw you – and now I can’t live without you.’ She just rode by on a bike, dude! Woah! You gotta slow your heart down. Try dating multiples. Jeez! It’s one of my favourite songs because it’s my mum’s ode to her own love lost – the things that she wished she could have experienced. She talks a lot about fear: the fear of admitting you love each other. It’s such a beautiful feeling: love can be like a morning flower if we just let it blossom.

So many Cambodian songs seem to be grounded in nature, perhaps because of the country’s history of animism.    
It’s all about equating life to nature. Nature rules here. In the States, even in the UK, we rule the land, but here the land rules the people and that’s why they submit to the land. That’s why it’s such a huge theme. All of Cambodia’s ancient themes use nature as an analogy because what were they doing? Hanging out in cities? No! They were farming. Another song we did was Dontrey Sni, which translates to Music Love, more an alternative rock thing. Most Cambodian songs have a narrative but we did it the Western way: let’s just talk about a feeling; the experience of what happens when you close your eyes, let the music come in and just let go. I love that song because it’s my vehicle. Music isn’t my life passion; I think Cambodia is my life passion – the movement here. Music is my vehicle: that’s how I’m going to drive through this world.

Make sure it’s armoured.
[Laughs] Yeah! ‘Don’t mess with me or I’ll write a song about you!’ It’s about letting go and letting the music take over; it’s what I hope young Cambodians will do as well. I think they love music out here.

Your first visit to Cambodia must have been a powerful experience.
It was 2011, so I was 23. We got invited to give thanks at a ceremony to the Angkoreans for giving us their art. I’d had a dream about going to Cambodia. We were a garage band: a true garage band, getting kicked out of people’s houses: ‘Get out of my house! You guys are loud!’ We ended up in almost everyone’s garage; it was intense.

What did you feel, that moment when the plane touched down on the tarmac?
I felt like it was destiny: the gods were, like, ‘Are you ready?’ Lead me, o gods! [Laughs] My grandmother believes I’m the reincarnation of my grandfather, who was a congressman here before he was killed by the Khmer Rouge. Even though it’s a crazy thing to think about – reincarnation and all that – I’m a believer. Whatever: DNA and all those things. I’m spiritual: I don’t think anyone has the answers but I do think there’s something going on. If everything is energy then will is energy and if will is energy then will can live on beyond. I’m the only one in my family obsessed with going back to Cambodia, so in a way I believe it. I want to do something else here and to help rebuild something. When I got to Cambodia and got off the plane, I thought: ‘Aha! See? It’s real. Everything that will happen from this point on will happen because it’s meant to happen. There’s some unbalanced energy from the Khmer Rouge that will bring good energy: for all the bad that has happened, there has to be something better that comes. After so much darkness, there has to be light – and which side do you want to be on? More darkness? Or are you going to jump on this huge tidal wave of life and just bring it? You can leave a good grain of sand after death, after you’ve moved on, and say: ‘At least I was part of that wave and contributed to how good that swell was.’

Was there anything that surprised you about Cambodia?
The resilience: how comfortable people were with how much bad shit goes on here. It’s on the street! The big step on the small, quite literally, but people just live on and they find happiness in the small things: ‘Oh, whatever. That’s just the way it is. I’m just going to focus on this…’ How do you guys just keep on with this, because I can barely handle it? Maybe it’s because I’m American and have this spoiled perspective, but I just couldn’t understand how they maintained happiness through those kinds of things. They surprised me, and also the youth surprised me with how hungry they are. It’s a movement. There’s this boldness: ‘Whatever. We’ve seen it all. Bring it!’

Folk were hanging flowers and laundry on the razor wire put up by the authorities after the elections.
They’re defiant and bold! You can say there were many problems, but if you really look at the benefit of the elections, it was enormous. Regardless of how things went down, I think it was perfect. What you have now are people who are interested in taking care of their country. If it’s going to be a democracy, it’s about the demos, right? People have got to be participating and that’s all you need. If people are participating then things will happen in a certain way, even if it’s not perfect. They don’t have to be perfect.

Any chance we could persuade you to move here and run for office?
[Laughs] Here’s the thing: people have asked me about my political position and at the end of the day I’m American, I’ll always be American, I live in America. My opinion should not affect what Cambodians choose for themselves. They need to choose their own leader, make an educated guess and not just listen to someone saying: ‘Our neighbours are bad,’ or ‘The Thais are doing something.’ They have to make a decision on their own about what Cambodia needs. What I’m doing, and what I hope to do in my life mission, is to rebuild a sense of voice and empowerment: ‘We’re fine. We’re cool. We’ve got our own stuff. We don’t need to be this or that; we just need to be us.’ In terms of my political opinion, that’s just an opinion. What I want is for the Cambodians themselves to control their own narrative. The economy is the most important thing for Cambodia at this point: if we want justice, if we want all the things we want, we’re going to have to have rule of law and have a middle class to make such things take place.                ‘We should have it right now!’ That’s impossible – and it’s what got us into the Khmer Rouge in the first place.

What do you have planned for this trip?
With my EP, Meet Me In The Rain, the whole idea is to be more independent this time. I get to do whatever I want and work with whoever I want. I’m shooting music videos, all in Cambodia, but the most exciting thing is that I’m shooting it all with Cambodian talent: Cambodian directors, actors. I met them a couple of times on the last trip and now I’m pursuing them. They’re just as good and ready for the world stage. OK, let’s do it and see how far we can take it! This time it’s to put my feet in Cambodia and say: ‘OK, guys. I’ve been doing my thing. Now you show me your thing. Let’s collaborate.’ We’re doing NGO stuff; we’re doing a concert at Wat Opot; we’re doing Friends International. I’m going to try to do a lot.

Tell us about Meet Me In The Rain.
It’s funny: it turns out I really am Cambodian and love love songs! [Laughs] It just happened. Here’s the scoop: I fell in love with someone… Actually, maybe I shouldn’t admit that. Let’s just say I was inspired and wrote an entire EP. It’s a long set of emotions about love; sort of easygoing listening, a little more acoustic because that was my original style.

Dare I mention Jack Johnson, barefoot-round-a-beach-campfire?
Hell yeah! He was a massive influence. That’s the vibe for the entire thing: sweet and soft. When I was with The Like Me’s, we were all girls but we were all tough so we brought out the toughest music we could. When I’m on my own I’m all sweet and ‘Ow! You trod on my heart!’, you know? Totally Cambodian: ‘I’m totally fricking in love with you!’ Damn, I really am Cambodian. [Laughs] That was a realisation: ‘Dude, I’m just giving it away!’ But it’s all about love and it’s meant to be happy. Next year I’ll be working on a full album, In Search Of Heroes, based on the theme that all Cambodians are searching for heroes and we’re just going to have to find them, probably, within ourselves.

You’ve written a very moving song about the Water Festival stampede in 2010, in which more than 300 people died.
I’d never seen anything like that; never seen images ever like that. It was very sensitive and it was actually recommended to us that we don’t make a big deal out of it. We played it though, on our tour, but we didn’t release it as a single. We wrote the song for the victims; it was called Pich, which means ‘Diamond’, and what we meant to say was that the victims would become like diamonds in the sky; every time we look up to the star, we’ll remember you. That’s what music is for: healing. I was a little sad that people didn’t want to think about it because it was too tragic, but we have to remember them. The whole point of the song is to remember them – a tribute to the people lost.

You mentioned gangsters earlier. Khmerican.com rates you Number One in its list of must-watch Khmericans for 2013. Another name is Kosal Khiev, former felon turned spoken-word artist whose experience of life in the US was very different than yours. Do you ever get a sense of ‘There but for the grace of God…’?
Me and my buddy in psychology had long talks about this idea. She talks a lot about trans-generational trauma: trauma that’s passed down even though you’re outside the zone. I think there’s such extremism because any Cambodian – almost all of them – have parents who endured trauma. All of us have witnessed post-traumatic stress syndrome: our parents having nightmares. My father went through a week of nightmares when someone in his workplace committed suicide – and he’s really in control, but the minute it’s triggered, it’s crazy. There are so many emotions; so much pain. When I was growing up there was a lot of emotion and I thought: ‘Am I crazy?’ I’m also a Scorpio, which makes it worse. [Laughs] There’s so much emotion that sometimes I would surprise myself: ‘Where’s this rage coming from? I’ve had a good life. Why, if I see something on the street I think is unfair, am I crazy, red in the face and shaking?’ Trans-generational trauma: that’s where that’s coming from and I think it needs to be studied. A lot of Cambodians are attracted to gang culture, or anything that has domination and submission in it. We’re attracted to violence. There’s a lot of trauma we’re not talking about and I think there are some people, like Kosal, who have come from such extremes and I think his artwork is so great because he’s able to translate that pain and channel. Once you open those channels, which is what my buddy was helping me to do in college by doing music – she said: ‘Learn how to channel it or you’re going to burn to the ground; you’re going to get into trouble if you keep doing what you’re doing’ – and that’s what we’re doing. We’re translating those feelings. Kosal found a way to translate them; he’s tapped into this multi-generational energy. It’s the energy of the people and you saw it when the king father died. It wasn’t just mourning because people loved the king father, it was because we haven’t expressed our feelings in more than 30 years. There is so much energy here that’s untapped. Whatever people like me and Kosal do in this generation, I feel like we’ll lay the foundation for the next generation to tap in and just absolutely go for it. That’s my hope and I think that’s what Cambodians everywhere have the chance to do. If we allow ourselves to tap into that energy, there are many great things that can happen. We don’t need to create an identity, we have one already.

WHO: Laura Mam
WHAT: A most iconic Khmerican chanteuse
WHERE: The Village, #1 Street 360 (Nov 22 & 23) and Wat Opot, December 22
WHEN: 7pm November 22 & 23 (The Village) and December 22 (Wat Opot)
WHY: She’s the future