Sinn Sisamouth

It's strange how certain music can take you back to a place or time. Sinn Sisamouth is a classic example of this phenomenon.

Sophee Oeur, the nice Cambodian lady who works at my school, gave me a CD of Sisamouth's music. Whenever his high-pitched voice blasts through the computer speaker, I'm immediately transported to the village of Prek Pdao, or I'm stepping off a bus into the street of Phnom Penh, the smell of incense wrapping itself around me.

It's fair to say that the act of traveling creates a space in the traveler's mind that is open to new culture (i.e., music, art, dance, theater, or whatever else makes a culture hardly exciting). I have discovered Ros Sereysothea. This amazing Cambodian singer--who unfortunately died during the Khmer Rouge regime--sounds heavenly as she accompanies Sinn Sisamouth in their duet of the song "New Year's Eve."

This song evokes images of what it must have been like to be a Cambodian living in Phnom Penh during the 1960s--the glitz, the glamour, the fashion--and yet, a sense of untainted culture. 

Music has this strange effect, of transporting a person through time. It's as if music itself were the time machine. A person can listen to J-Lo's "Waiting for Tonight" or the Backstreet Boys' "I Want it That Way" and be transported to a totally different time and place. It's strange--as an eighteen year old, I'm considered young. But I feel that my experiences are as vast as Marco Polo!

Waiting

I see Cambodia now: the palm trees, the tuk-tuks, the kramas, the iced-coffee. The smell permeates the New England atmosphere, taking over everything that is familiar. I want to go back to my other home, the home in which I felt free, the home in which everything was new.
But I sit here, in my dorm room. There are papers to be done, math problems to be figured out, friends to text and email, and windows to be shut from the cold. In Cambodia, there is no cold; only a perpetual heat that is hardly noticeable after the first couple weeks. One stops sweating as the skin pores become used to the humidity.
Adventure awaits! It little profits an idle student to be stuck in one place. There are mountains to be climbed, temples to be explored, people to meet, smells to be smelled, food to be tasted, roads to be run on, drinks to be drunken, jungles to be blazed through!
But these images fade away as the present moment appears full force.

In these moments, these lonely moments at night, Cambodia returns with full splendor, like a symphony that quickly reaches its crescendo.
It disappears just as quickly, awaiting the return.