Laura Mam is one of Cambodia’s biggest pop stars, but she wasn’t born or raised in the country. She’s American, and even though both of her parents are originally from Cambodia, she hardly spoke a word of the country’s language, Khmer, when she first became famous there.
“I had been writing music and my mom was kind of interested in what I was doing. I think I went to her room and I was playing this song. I was like ‘Hey mom, could you write lyrics in Khmer on top of it?’ ” Laura says.
But Thida gave it a try, and it turned out she had a knack for it. They called the song “Pka proheam rik popreay” which means “morning flower is beautifully blossoming.” A few months later, Laura and some friends made a music video and uploaded the song to YouTube, not expecting much.
“The comments were all just like ‘Yes! Original Cambodian music, oh my god!’ ” Laura remembers. The comments came streaming in from all over the world. “Not just the Cambodians in Cambodia, it was also diaspora in France, Australia and Canada,” says Thida.
But why were people all over the world this excited about one song in Khmer from a mother and daughter in California? To understand that, we have to cross an ocean and go back in time, to the Cambodia of Thida’s childhood.
“I was from Phnom Penh. And when I was growing up the music scene was huge. During that time there were all these new artists writing all these new sounds, new music,” she says.
When the Vietnamese army swept through Cambodia in 1979, Thida’s family fled across the border to a camp in Thailand. And in 1980, when Thida was 19, she and her family came to California as refugees.
Thida wanted her children to grow up feeling fully American — Laura and her younger brother had American friends and spoke English at home — but at the same time, Thida found ways to weave bits of Cambodia into their lives. Much of that revolved around music.
Thida sang Laura to sleep with Khmer lullabies, enrolled Laura in Cambodian dance lessons and played traditional Khmer folk music at home, but neither Thida, nor Laura felt much of a connection with the music that was coming out of Cambodia at the time.
Writing songs with her daughter has given Thida a second chance at feeling like a teenager. “This is what I would have wanted to be, you know like, be silly, be brave,” she says.
(via propheticfire)
