OUDAM.COM

Dear Steve,

Thanks for your inspiring account. Through this website, I hope to build a bridge for young Cambodians from around the world to celebrate their Khmer heritage and reconnect with their roots. I am very encouraged to find bright young overseas Cambodians like you take an interest in the rebuilding of our beloved homeland.

You are absolutely right that Cambodia is not the hell hole as it is sometimes made out to be by the naysayers. You just have to visit the country and decide for yourself. Sometimes, the negativity alone can keep good, decent people from visiting our heavily tourism-dependent country.

As for the Cambodian people’s apparent apathy toward the “old white geezers who run around with young Khmer girls,” I think this is an area where you and I can make a major impact. Remember that Cambodia is still reeling from decades of war and destruction, so the most important thing on most people’s minds is day-to-day survival, not sexual exploitation of our women and children by foreigners. The “old white geezers” recognize the extreme poverty in our country and simply move in to prey on less fortunate people. Some of them may find a twisted sense of psychological victory in sexually dominating a race they view inferior to them.

You must understand that many Cambodians associate Westerners with wealth, power, and even righteousness. Consequently, the mischiefs of some Westerners in Cambodia tend to become, over time, normalized and even accepted by the Cambodian people. In fact, some people in Cambodia even consider a teen-aged Khmer girl to be “somnang” (fortunate) to be hitched to a middle-aged white man.

As Cambodians from overseas, we can help explain to our compatriots back home that these behaviors are neither normal nor acceptable in Western societies. In fact, here in America incarcerated child molesters are so hated that they are routinely beaten– even killed– by fellow inmates. While I don’t condone this type of vigilante justice, it’s indicative of the level of revulsion, even among thieves and murderers, that Americans have for sex predators. This is a major reason that the pedophiles are venturing overseas to take advantage of poor law enforcement in developing countries like Cambodia.

When I visit Cambodia, I don’t get angry when my relatives, friends and acquaintances condone the sexual exploits of the “old white geezers.” I just take the time to calmly explain and educate them about how Western societies view sexual predators, and how our apathy toward them is hurting our honor and national image. If my compatriots do not agree with my stance, or simply pretend to sympathize with me just to get on my good side, then all I could do is to distance myself from them and focus on the things that I could do. For instance, I would personally boycott any restaurants and hotels whose employees smile and bow at foreign customers but not at their own kind. I know my boycott may not run them out of business, but I do it anyway because it’s the right thing to do.

You don’t have to accept what you know to be wrong just because you feel powerless to make a difference. There are many skillful and respectful ways you can influence positive changes without being seen as overbearing or confrontational. Remember that most Cambodians are not privileged to travel back and forth between Cambodia and foreign countries, so they don’t have a personal understanding of outside cultures like we do. Many rely on information they hear from their friends and relatives, the media, and even from the foreign “sexpats” themselves.

Cambodian expatriates wield a lot of economic and social power when we return to our homeland; we just have to play our cards right and use our influences to encourage positive changes in calm, realistic and intelligent ways.

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Oudam’s response:

Hi M,

Thanks for joining Khmercity.net and for sharing your thoughts.

I’ve created Oudam.com and Khmercity.net to foster greater Khmer unity and appreciation for our rich culture and heritage. To the extent that Cambodians from all over the world are coming to my websites to chat, make friends, and listen to Khmer music, the sites are accomplishing their goals of bringing our people together and drawing interest to Cambodian concerns.

When my family settled in America some 27 years, we did not have a lot of Cambodians living around us. I wish there was a Khmer community website like khmercity.net back then. As our people are scattered all over the world, I think the web could play an important role in bridging the physical distances that divide us.

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Dear Seth,

Your concerns about corruption in Cambodia are very noble, and they echo the thoughts that most of us have about the injustice in our beloved homeland.

Although the wealthy ruling elite is a convenient target for blame, I think corruption is so pervasive in Cambodia that it transcends the government and infiltrates just about every aspect of daily life.

For instance, Cambodian school teachers make on average just $30 a month– about the price a good bottle of wine in Cambodia. To supplement their paltry income, they are forced to hold extra tutorial sessions to collect payments from their students. While these sessions aren’t mandatory, they are necessary for students to do well on tests and advance their education.

Are these teachers also corrupt for collecting money from their students, who themselves are poor, to feed their families? Suffice it to say that the question is not that easy to answer.

I think corruption is something that all Khmer people should work collectively to diminish. To this end it is helpful to think of our nation as one big family. A strong, unified, and prosperous family is one in which every member cares for each other, performs his or her responsibilities, and does not take more than his share of the family resources. As poor as Cambodia is, I think we’d all still have enough if only everyone knew how to share.

While greed is an innate quality of all human beings, we Cambodians must learn to balance individual wealth with collective well-being. What is the purpose of having a huge villa if it must be fenced with barbed wires, or an expensive luxury car if it takes 30 minutes to travel just a couple of kilometers on Cambodia’s congested roads?

Reversing the culture of corruption does not even require us to be less greedy or to accept less in life. It does, however, require us to re-assess our understanding of what constitutes “more”. While I don’t think it’s too late for our people to embark upon this path, we need to get our acts together soon; otherwise, these bad habits may become entrenched in our society to the point of being irreversible.

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Hi Rick,

Exactly!

If people really want to download music from this or any other website, there are various ways for them to do so. There are websites and software programs available to allow people to capture streaming audio and video from the internet and save them on their computers. I just don’t want to make it too easy for visitors to do it.

The aim of this site is to foster appreciation for Khmer music and encourage support for the Khmer artists and production companies that bring them to us.

The Khmer performers need to make a living, too. If everyone downloads and copies Khmer music from the internet and stop buying CDs and DVDs, the production companies will no longer have an incentive to create them. Consequently, Khmer music will cease to advance, and some Khmer female singers will be forced to earn their living selling their bodies instead of their talents.

As a strong advocate of Khmer pride, unity, and prosperity, I certainly don’t want this to happen. I want this site to become a place to showcase Khmer talents and to encourage our people to support one another by going out and buy the music they like.

I am an avid consumer of Khmer music and own hundreds of Khmer CDs and DVDs myself. When buying a CD or DVD I always inspect it thoroughly to make sure that it’s original and not a boot-leg copy.

While many people, including myself, download music from the internet, we always have to ask ourselves whether our actions will lead to positive or negative consequences. For instance, when I copy a few of my favorite Khmer songs onto a CD and give it to a friend, I probably do very little harm because if my friend likes the music, he will go out and buy the original CDs or DVDs. On the other hand, if I make a thousand copies of the CD to sell to others, my actions would be very hard to justify. I think moderation is the key.

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Dear Bud,

Thank you for your comments and optimism.

I have no doubt that our people will rise from the ashes to be once again among the world’s greatest civilizations. After all, we Khmers built Angkor– it’s in our blood to be great.

Recent findings suggest that Angkor was way ahead of its time. We Khmers developed a highly sophisticated water-harvesting technology that sustained a civilization unparalleled by any other in the world for six centuries– 600 years! By contrast, the U.S. and Japan have gained prominence on the world stage only in the last 50 to 100 years, so they still have some way to go to match the Khmer Empire.

The scale of Angkor’s greatness was simply mind-blowing. Siem Reap was once a city larger than present-day Los Angeles and had over a million residents. It is now known that West Baray, just one section of the city, was many times “larger than the entire 9-square-kilometer hillock on which sat Tikal, the largest city in Central America,” according to archeologist Vernon L. Scarborough of the University of Cincinnati.

Just as mind-blowing as the Angkor era was our recent descent into one of the world’s weakest and poorest nations. To be sure, our recent sad history was not all our fault. Without going into details, Cambodia was a pawn in a chess game played by much greater powers. The Cold War may have ended without a single shot being fired on either the U.S. or the Soviet Union, but the war proved to be extremely hot for many smaller countries like Cambodia.

I think the keys to our re-emergence are Khmer unity and Khmer pride. First, it’s time to stop pointing fingers at each other and work together in the spirit of tolerance and national reconciliation. It takes positive, concerted energy to recover from our present predicament, and wasting our precious and finite energy on fighting amongst ourselves is simply not conducive to our recovery. If some of us feel that we must blame someone for whatever reason, then blame the foreigners. They deserve most of the blame anyway.

Second, we as a people must realize that we are inferior to no one. This is not some mind trick to delude ourselves into thinking we’re better than we really are; it is simply to remind ourselves of our past achievements and our true capability. When we feel inferior to other peoples, we are effectively crippling ourselves by setting up an artificial barrier to realizing our true potential.

I know it may hard to imagine that our people could ever climb from our present abyss and once again reclaim the status that we once held. But having survived the Khmer Rouge and having grown up in America, I am confident that if anyone is capable of such a feat, it would be the Khmer people. I can say this because I am a Cambodian refugee who had taken advantage of America’s educational system– one of the finest in the world– and had competed with the best of the best. The one thing I’ve learned is that nothing is impossible for our people if we put our hearts and minds together and work toward a common destiny.

Of course, I am not suggesting that we try to somehow turn the clock back to the Angkor era. Such an idea would be foolish. Rather, we as a people must recognize our innate greatness and tap into our vast inner resources. We must learn from and adapt to what the best nations are doing but do it just slightly better than they– that’s how we become the best.

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