Author/s: Komarine Romdenh-Romluc

Date of production: 2024

Language/s: English / Khmer

Transmission details: 

This work tells the story of a journey to Cambodia. It both represents Kom’s ongoing search to make sense of her Cambodian heritage, and is the record of a literal journey to the country with her father and brother to introduce her daughter and niece to the family in November 2022. It turned out to be her father’s last voyage back to his homeland.

Kom’s father came to the UK in 1978. Despite living and working in mainland Europe for many years before then, the political turmoil in Cambodia rendered him sans papiers, and he arrived in England as a refugee. Believing that his family had been murdered by Pol Pot’s regime, he cut all ties with Cambodia, refusing to speak Khmer for so long that he forgot his native tongue. In fact, nearly all his siblings survived. Kom traced them on the internet in 2007, and the family were reunited in person the same year.

This piece is composed of chewed and filtered auditory fragments representing the fragile threads that bind people across time and distance, radio connections to the country and the Cambodian diaspora: traditional Cambodian music, Khmer hip hop, dance music, psychedelic rock from Cambodia’s swinging sixties, the FSI (Foreign Services Institute) language pack created around 1969 for US government personnel working in Cambodia, which Kom’s brother used in his first attempts to learn Khmer, and Kom’s field recordings from the trip in November 2022, during Bon Om Teuk –the Water Festival –when people celebrate the end of the rainy season and the reversal of the Tonle Sap’s flow. The Buddhist ceremony of Sampeah Preah Khe occurs at the end of Bom Om Teuk. Many Cambodians visit temples throughout this time.