“I feel like my ancestors have left me a thousand voice notes to decipher”

Part 1: My ancestors

I was born in Roosendaal, the Netherlands, in 1990, to T. Vuthy and S. Chandila. At that time, my parents had been in the Netherlands for less than two years. My father was in his early thirties, and my mother was in her early twenties. My brother, born in Khao-I-Dang—a refugee camp on the Thai-Cambodian border—in 1987, was just three months old when they boarded the plane to the Netherlands as part of the few hundred accepted Khmer refugees. Until my mid-teens, I was unaware of my parents’ tragic plight, though I always sensed something was wrong. When I was fourteen, I accused my mother of not loving me, saying, “If you loved me, you wouldn’t act this way,” not yet having the words to describe mental and physical abuse. It was then that she first tried to explain that surviving the war, fleeing to the Netherlands, and giving me a new life was her way of expressing her love. It was also the first time I heard her speak clearly about the war.

I grew up among other Cambodian families, whom we often regarded as extended family members. Among the elders, I would hear murmurs of phrases like chomnan Khao-I-Dang (ជំនាន់ខៅអ៊ីដាង, “the period of Khao-I-Dang”) or chomnan a Pot (ជំនាន់អាពត, “the time of Pol Pot”) woven into their conversations, though these words held little meaning to me until my early twenties. Among us youngsters, the Khmer Rouge was never a topic of conversation. We found it difficult to imagine our elders’ lives, as none of the Dutch or American media we consumed reflected anything resembling their reality. Many of us, including myself, felt disconnected from our elders’ stories.

It wasn’t until I left home for a semester exchange in Sydney, Australia, where I lived with my great aunt on my mother’s side—one of our few remaining family members—that I began to take an interest in our family history. During my stay, she confided in me, sharing her own stories of war, displacement, and fleeing. At the time, I nodded along as if I understood, but I had very little context for what she was describing. It was then that I learned my grandmother had disappeared during the first year of the Khmer Rouge era, never to return. Her remains were never found. Suddenly, I understood why, when I was a small child, my mother had once cried while holding me and said, “I can’t remember her face anymore.”

While my mother was vocally upset for years, my father remained silent. To this day, it remains a mystery what happened to his family during and after the Khmer Rouge. I know he searched for them for a long time, even years after the regime fell, but I also know that ties were severed when I was young. One day, our family home phone rang, and I was instructed to answer it. A Khmer voice on the other end asked for my father. “I’m not home,” my father signaled to me. The voice told me to inform him that his mother had died. I relayed the message: “Your mother has died.” My father quietly went into the computer room, sat behind his computer, and continued typing. Years later, when I was about fourteen and a friend had died, my father forbade me from attending the wake and ordered me to stop crying. “I didn’t even cry when my own mother died,” he said.

Since then, my father has passed away, and my mother now suffers from schizophrenia. She refuses to be diagnosed, attend therapy, or take medication, and I believe my father’s sudden passing worsened her mental condition. His death has also profoundly affected my own mental state, as he passed away in Cambodia during the COVID-19 pandemic, and we were unable to attend his funeral. Many questions remain about his life, our origins, and what happens after death. These questions have become my most significant inquiries of the past three years.

Part 2: Have left me

When I was living in Sydney in the early 2010s, I worked full-time in marketing, which allowed me to stay there for three years. Before pursuing a media degree, I had applied to art school at a local college in Rotterdam and was accepted, but my parents forbade me from attending. This didn’t come as a surprise, as I vividly remember my mother instructing my uncle to tell me I couldn’t go to art school when I was ten.

Emancipated from my childhood home and the cultural context of the Netherlands, I spent most of my early twenties in Australia feeling confused. My great aunt’s stories made a deep impression on me and encouraged me to start reading about Cambodian history and the histories of the Global South in general. Toward the end of my stay in Sydney, I visited Phnom Penh multiple times without my parents’ consent. They deemed it too dangerous, but I couldn’t be stopped anymore. I wanted to understand what had happened, and I knew my answers weren’t in the West.

The second-generation returnee community in Phnom Penh consisted mostly of Khmer-French and Khmer-Americans who, like me, were driven by curiosity to return to Cambodia. After meeting them and local artists in Cambodia, I realized that we all had the same questions, and none of us had answers: “What had happened to our parents?” “What trauma have we inherited from them?” “How do we navigate life without their guidance?” Seeing the first Khmer contemporary art pieces in my life, where these questions were raised, made me realize how much of the media, art, and books I consumed never dealt with my story. I was constantly visualizing and empathizing with other people’s stories, but not my own. It felt absurd.

Art began to dominate the next few years of my life, perhaps as an idealistic response to that feeling. I returned to Europe to enroll in art school and ended up in London at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, one of the world’s top art schools. There, I was mostly vocal about injustices pertaining to generations of people of color in the West. I wanted to express my Khmer story too, but I felt there was no room for it, or perhaps I lost the confidence to tell it. At the time, North American and European postmodern and contemporary artists, along with their theories, seemed to dominate the discourse. I latched on to the few stories of dissent, often from Black American, Black British, and Caribbean art discourses about people of color, to feel heard, while minimizing the specificities of my Khmer identity. With no art schools in Cambodia, I didn’t foresee a wave of Khmer artists bringing change to the current dominating discourse.

During the second lockdown, in 2021, I was enrolled in a master’s program at an art school in Rotterdam, having returned to the Netherlands after living abroad for ten years. My parents had been living in Cambodia since 2015, after spending twenty-seven years in the Netherlands. My father had sold our family home to pursue his dream of running an organic shiitake mushroom farm. My mother opposed this dream but went along out of fear of divorce. My dad, an engineer and the first Khmer of his generation to obtain a bachelor’s degree, was laid off during the 2010 economic crisis. I feared ageism and racism would obstruct him from finding a new job, although he would never admit it, and being idle drove him crazy.

In 2021, my father fell ill and was bedridden for weeks. When he refused to speak to me, I feared the worst. The lockdown made visits to better-equipped Thai hospitals nearly impossible. He passed away in his sleep in a hammock, at the age of sixty, from a brain hemorrhage. The next few days were a blur as the villagers arranged a funeral, attended by neighbors. “His children are in the Netherlands,” my mother explained to a neighbor when they asked where his family was.

Part 3: A thousand

I was in my first year of a two-year master’s program in art school as we waited patiently for flights to resume between Phnom Penh and Amsterdam in the wake of COVID-19. My mother was paranoid, claiming “gangsters were after her,” and her stepsisters kept warning me that she shouldn’t stay on the farm now that the villagers knew she was all alone. Three months passed before the first plane flew out; coincidentally, an artist friend of mine, Kanita Tith, was scheduled to board the same plane, and offered to help my illiterate mother navigate her way back here.

It was like the time was right—or that I had had enough. My father, whose intelligence and knowledge were beyond my comprehension, had suddenly left us, and I had very few tools to navigate his passing and the resettlement of my mother. I latched on to Theravada Buddhism—which I had only experientially come to understand through temple visits in Khmer communities—as tightly as I could, and for the first time in my life, Khmer Buddhist-inspired drawings and paintings kept pouring out of me. In one of my art school critiques, I showed a painting of kneeling figures surrounding a body that was lying down. One of the kneeling figures had green skin, and another held his palms together in a prayer position. I was expecting commentaries from classmates and tutors regarding skin color or Buddhism, as often the littlest details would be dissected in such a setting, but no questions were asked.

I suddenly had a deep realization: I could never confide in my tutors about my turn to Khmer Theravada Buddhism or ask questions about the relationship between religious syncretism and murals. I realized that I wouldn’t be able to follow my authentic artistic path, or express all my needs and interests, because they deviated so starkly from the secular, postmodern North American-Eurocentrism that dominated contemporary art. I had to deliberately break away from the contemporary art rules established by the art schools around me to become myself.

Walking down this path felt scary. Western museums that displayed Khmer sculptures never conveyed the sacredness of these works or their significance in daily practices of veneration. These sculptures had been forced into a secular context, stripped of their religiosity, which seemed consistent with the way Asian and African sculptures were presented during colonial exhibitions at the height of European colonization—when they were often copied or looted. It made me wonder if there was any path for me in contemporary art, given the complex and unresolved histories between East and West.

It might have been the zeitgeist in which I was taught, but postmodernist theories and artworks from after World War II were held in high regard and favored for reference, particularly those from North America. This timeline felt unfair to the rest of the postcolonial world, much of which was still recovering from civil wars and instability before contemporary art could even become a priority, or artists could develop the individual careers necessary in today’s contemporary art climate. There was also a clear break from religious art—a decision shaped by the world wars—but this was a distinctly European choice, not one shared by Southeast Asia. All I knew was that I needed both: art and religion.

In 2022, I was awarded my Master of Fine Arts summa cum laude, indicating that my critiques were well received by the institution. Soon after, I was accepted into my first international art residency, in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, where I traveled with my partner. That same year, I won the Dolf Henkes Prijs, Rotterdam’s most prestigious art award, which funded further work periods in Siem Reap and Yogyakarta. The following artworks reflect these last two years of collaboration with craftsmen, engineers, artists, and thinkers from Asia.—ST

Part 4: Voice notes

Dharma Songs v2 (2023) is an interactive sound installation featuring water held in an old Javanese gong placed atop a teakwood table, along with a mini-computer, a Balinese cloth, and both artificial and fresh flowers.

As you approach the artwork, you’ll notice six fresh flowers resting along the rim of the tabletop, each attached to an electric wire wrapped in banana leaves. The ends of these wires are discreetly tucked away behind the Balinese ikat wrapped around the table.

A host will invite you to dip one of the flowers into the water held by the gong. As soon as the petals touch the water, a voice emerges from a speaker hidden within the table—a calm, reflective voice that speaks for about a minute on the themes of ancestors and familial bonds. Each flower corresponds to a different voice, and if you choose to dip more than one flower into the water at once, a symphony of voices will resonate together.

I asked six of my close friends and family members to respond to one of two questions: “If you could ask or share something with your ancestor, what would it be?” and “Is there anything you feel grateful for that your family has given you?” These voices come from the postcolonial diaspora, representing a diverse range of ages, genders, ethnicities, and migrant generations.

For instance, my father-in-law, Goos Picauly, a second-generation Moluccan-Dutch person, can be heard. He said:“I would like to ask my Moluccan grandparents, who died many years ago, a question. The reason is that I have never met them, I only know my grandfather from a few photos, and I have never seen my grandmother; there were no photos. My father hardly spoke about them and his own past. So my question to my grandfather is: Will you please tell me your life story and that of my father when he still lived in Indonesia? I would like to ask my grandmother if she could show herself to me so I can see what she looks like and how she sounds.”

This work is inspired by veneration practices in Khmer culture, particularly the Pchum Ben festival (បុណ្យភ្ជុំបិណ្ឌ) and the custom of saen (សែន). Pchum Ben is an ancestral veneration celebration that lasts about two weeks, usually beginning in late September and continuing into early October. During this time, laypeople prepare homemade meals for their ancestors and offer them to monks at the temple, hoping the food will reach their loved ones in the afterlife. The act of offering, called saen in Khmer, is also performed at home, on days that Khmers believe are spiritually suitable.

But I wasn’t always so knowledgeable about these practices. In the diaspora community in the Netherlands, Pchum Ben typically lasts just a day. In the morning, people offer food and chant with the monks, and in the evening, there’s a dance party with a live Khmer-Dutch band. To the untrained eye, this day might look and sound much like Khmer New Year, the other major celebration in Khmer culture. However, after brushing up on my Khmer through online lessons, I could clearly distinguish the difference the last time I attended Pchum Ben in my hometown. It was about the dead.

“We offer this food to our ancestors—say it with me now!” said the monk, who had traveled from Roubaix, France, to last year’s Pchum Ben festival in Roosendaal. It was just me, my partner, my brother, his newborn daughter, his partner, and my mother—now a widow—attending a Khmer community event for the first time since everything had changed. My mother chose not to wear traditional clothing and avoided eye contact with most of the community members. One man approached me and said, “I know you don’t remember me, but I was a friend of your dad. I used to drive you to Breda when you were a little kid!” I had no guide for how to respond, so I simply let a tear roll down my cheek.

When I was younger, my mother would occasionally tell me to turn off the TV and join her in saen (សែន): lighting incense, offering food, and praying. I’d see the dining table covered with home-cooked meals, like chha mi suo (ឆាមីសួ) (stir-fried glass noodles with wood ear mushrooms), along with fresh fruits, cans of soda, candles, flowers, and an image of the Buddha. Together, we would chant in Pali “namo tassa bhagavato arahato sammasambuddhassa” (“Homage to Him, the Blessed One, the Exalted One, the Fully Enlightened One”), followed by my mother’s prayer, spoken out loud—an elaborate conversation with an ancestor, asking for blessings and protection. I would follow her lead, but silently, because I was embarrassed about my Khmer. We’d end with “sathu, sathu, sathu” (“well, well, well”).

“A direct phone line to my ancestors” is how I articulated it later. Over time, I discovered that Pchum Ben isn’t a traditional Theravada Buddhist festival, but a unique Khmer tradition that had been incorporated into Theravada Buddhism. During a brief exploration of my Southern Chinese roots—Teochew, to be precise—I noticed that the offering style of Khmer-Chinese people closely resembled my mother’s way of praying and talking to her ancestors. So how we got our direct phoneline, I still don’t know, but it has helped me speak to my dad and my long-lost grandparents, and I’ve extended this magical connection to my friends.

The act of dipping a flower in water was inspired by a Buddhist ritual where a flower is dipped in perfumed water and then used to shower a statue of the baby Buddha. I wasn’t exposed to this ritual until my early twenties, as there isn’t a Khmer temple in the Netherlands where this could take place. My aunt took me to the largest Khmer temple in Sydney, Wat Khemarangsaram in Bonnyrigg, and encouraged me to perform the ritual. I remember how it felt—magical. I experienced it again in 2023 during Waisak at Borobudur, the largest Buddhist site in the world, and once again, it was deeply spiritual.

Part 5: To Decipher

In 2022, just a few months after graduating, I received a call from a Dutch national funding body, the Mondriaan Fund. I had been accepted into my first international art residency at the Cemeti Institute for Art and Society, one of the most historic art institutions in Southeast Asia, located in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. Although I had never been to Indonesia before, growing up in the Netherlands as a Southeast Asian meant I was exposed to Indonesian diasporic stories by association. For instance, my partner is third-generation Moluccan, whose history has been deeply intertwined with the Dutch for hundreds of years—a very different experience from being Khmer. When I shared the news with my mother, she initially congratulated me, but the next day, she called back and forbade me to go. Her dreams had warned her that in Indonesia I would go into the jungle (prey ព្រៃ in Khmer) and that bad things would happen to me.

Indonesia, and Yogyakarta in particular, had a profound impact on me. Both my partner and I were initially reluctant about the trip. He hadn’t visited Southeast Asia since the passing of his aunt in Jakarta, and I hadn’t returned since the passing of my father. While in Yogyakarta, I kept telling him, “I keep thinking I’m in Cambodia, but when I talk to people, they don’t recognize me as one of their own. Their responses are so lukewarm when I tell them I’m Khmer!” Which makes sense, as they were Javanese and we were in Java, and Cambodia is geographically far away. I also kept noticing, “They are warm, artistic, and polite like Cambodians, but they don’t carry that deep sadness in their eyes.”

I was surprised to discover that Yogyakarta has a vibrant and thriving arts community. June is even considered the “holy month of art,” thanks to a privately-run art festival called ARTJOG that has been attracting curators and art enthusiasts from across the region for over a decade. Yogyakarta is also home to Borobudur, the largest Buddhist site in the world, along with several other Buddhist and Hindu sites from the time when Java, like Cambodia, was part of Buddhist or Hindu empires. Both of these aspects became significant to me: Cambodia lacks a serious contemporary art infrastructure, making it difficult to pursue my profession there, while Yogyakarta has temples that I, as a Khmer, could understand as being part of a larger Hindu-Buddhist cosmopolis.

During a visit to the Sonobudoyo Museum, one of the most prominent Javanese history museums, I came across a tenth-century stone slate inscribed in Old Javanese or Kawi. I remember stopping in disbelief and nudging my Javanese colleagues, exclaiming, “It looks so much like Khmer!” Since they weren’t very familiar with the Khmer script, they didn’t share my enthusiasm. I had already been struck by the cultural similarities between Khmers and Javanese that I had observed, but seeing the script convinced me there must have been some historical link or exchange between the two empires.

When I wasn’t sure where to start this inquiry, a curator of the program, Doni Ahmed, shared a fascinating story with me. He revealed that his paternal side of the family harbors a great secret: one of his great-grandfathers belonged to the Kalang, a non-indigenous ethnic group in Java. Rumor has it that the Kalang were of Khmer descent. They had been ostracized from Javanese society for centuries, and as a result, little is known about them, except for their proficiency in certain professions: wealthy merchants and silversmiths in the last century and, in ancient times, temple builders.

In response to this rumor, I created a new artwork called Tails of the Past. It is a recreation of the administrative slate I saw at Sonobudoyo, crafted by embossing letters into aluminum and spray-painting it with bronze-like colors to give it a patina. The script is in Khmer, translating a short story I wrote about my feelings during my time in Yogyakarta. You can read the translation here:

To anyone willing to listen to the Khmer story: I was born and raised in the Netherlands, to Khmer parents who lived under the Khmer Rouge. Because of this tragedy, I know hardly anything about my family line. I know my mother’s father, who abandoned her and married another woman, and to this day is still a terrible father to her. My aunt in Australia told me my mother’s mother disappeared in the night, and never came back. As for my father, it is all a mystery. Who were his parents? I heard he grew up with his grandparents. I heard he cut ties with his siblings. What happened?

When he passed away two years ago, during COVID, I found a document in his belongings. A girl was pictured; her name, Narim. Is this my long-lost sister? This is the girl he must have carried over the borders on his shoulders, which he mentioned in our last conversation together, when I confronted him about the past. He told me, I must understand, he grew up very poor . . .1

“Let go of the past,” he said. It was probably a must in his case. To be honest, I am dancing around certain facts. I do not have the courage to follow the lead to America, to understand where this half-sibling is, and how she is doing; how she grew up without our father. But I am willing to come to Indonesia for an arts residency and unravel stories about how Cambodians are linked to Java, how Jayavarman II—the one who started the Khmer empire—was a Javanese man. When I heard the rumor about the Kalang people being descendants of the Khmer—I jumped up and down with joy. This is only a rumor—there are too many theories—but I wonder if being Khmer means I will always be looking for stories. Stories to validate the hole in my heart. I am willing to become a woman with a monkey’s tail,2 if that means I get to tell a story that is finally different from our tragedy.

Part 6: I Feel Like My Ancestors Have Left Me a Thousand Voice Notes to Decipher

Prior to this residency, after meeting members of the PURANA project, I decided to learn more about the Indianization of Southeast Asia, as this influence was prominent in both the Javanese and Khmer civilizations, particularly in their culture and religions. This shared influence made their temples and overall cultural aesthetics so similar. I discovered that the Indian influence on Southeast Asia spanned at least a thousand years, in different waves, with intercultural marriages between elites being one of the most significant vehicles of influence. For instance, Cambodia’s origin story is said to involve the marriage of an Indian merchant named Kaudinya and a Naga princess named Soma (though their names vary in different accounts), making Cambodia a prominent example of Southeast Asian Indianization.

When another opportunity arose to return to Asia for a work period, I decided to visit Siem Reap after nineteen years. I was accompanied by history enthusiast and tour guide Yoga Efendi, who has been integral in my quest to understand the ancient Indian, Khmer, and Javanese connections more deeply. We visited countless temples, and more than ever before, I became attuned to how Indian religiosity, politics, and arts had shaped Khmer art and architecture—something I hadn’t fully appreciated before as a Khmer.

In Yogyakarta, during a self-organized residency at MenH Studio led by Muhamed Eva Nuril Huda, whom I had met at Cemeti the previous year, I planned to create a sculpture inspired by the narrative of the “Churning of the Ocean of Milk”: a tortoise carved from teakwood. Yoga had taken me to see the giant wooden turtles at one of Java’s last Hindu temples, Candi Sukuh, and I had also seen the tortoise depicted in the bas-reliefs at Angkor Wat, where Vishnu takes the form of a turtle in the “Churning of the Ocean of Milk” story. However, my primary reason for choosing a turtle was that I believed an animal sculpture would resonate with audiences across all ages, generations, and education levels.

This artwork became The Cosmic Tortoise, a teakwood sculpture crafted by Jeparanese carver Kak Ros, who added floral ornaments to the shell. Inside the shell is a folded manuscript, about six meters long, with a text handwritten in Khmer. When a button next to the sculpture is pressed, the tortoise’s shell rises from its resting position on the tortoise’s back to nearly two meters high, revealing the leporello-style manuscript inside. As the shell ascends and descends, a singing voice can also be heard.

I was primarily inspired by two leporello-style spiritual manuscripts, both of which I found on a Dutch auction website: a pustaha from the Batak tribes of North Sumatra and a Khmer chanted leporello. Pustahas contain text written by the datu, Batak spiritual gurus, and hold intergenerational medicinal knowledge and spells. The manuscript is usually covered with wood or bone, and often features an animal carving, such as a lizard. Members of Kawanpustaha, a Batak community in Yogyakarta, consulted with me in my endeavor to create a folded manuscript and ensured I was not breaking any spiritual rules. “Will a Khmer monk give you permission to write your manuscript?” someone asked. I replied, “I won’t be writing any spells.”

The Khmer chanted leporello serves as the textual vehicle for a Khmer chanting tradition called smot (ស្មូត្រ). Smot singing has a mournful and sorrowful quality, typically performed at deathbeds and during funerals to evoke sadness and contemplation among the dying and the mourners. The stories are inspired by Buddhism, and the singing style is uniquely Khmer. During a video call with my Khmer translators, I showed them the leporello while discussing my inspirations. One of them immediately responded, saying, “Those are very sacred and old texts, which we can’t read. We don’t know how to read them.”

The text inside the artwork is inspired by smot: mournful, contemplative, and focused on the dead. The entire translation of the Khmer text can be read in English next to the artwork, as shown below:

“Will your book contain mantras?” was a question posed by many Javanese when I presented this idea, this book. “No,” I said, “I would like to write a story of my own.” But where to begin?

Booklets like these, according to American academic Trent Walker, are related to the smot (ស្មូត្រ) or thor bat (ធម៌បទ) tradition, where singers recite the book’s content, which consists of Buddhist stories of life and loss. He has mentioned in a podcast that the musical scales might resemble those of the African American blues tradition. A new Khmer-Dutch friend, Sonida, told me that when she heard the singing, tears welled up in her eyes. She was reminded of her grandfather’s funeral, where smot was also sung.

I can’t remember if smot (ស្មូត្រ) was sung during my father’s funeral, to be honest. It was all a blur, literally and figuratively. I remember the monks chanting day and night as my father lay outside on his property in Otaki, Battambang province. Now that I think of it, he was already gone, but the chanting makes me think he could still hear it—the mantras.

For the first time, I heard my mother say, “Bong (បង), why have you left me so suddenly? Why did you not say goodbye?” As if she were accusing my father of knowing he was going to leave us all. I remember becoming aware of his potential departure after many nights of nightmares, and I sent him a final message. “Pa (ប៉ា), it’s okay if you don’t reply. I just want to say how proud I am of you, your farm, and that I am your daughter.” It took him a few days to reply, but he eventually did, after not speaking to me for weeks. He said, “Don’t worry, koon (កូន, “my child”), it will all be alright, koon. You know that you can trust your instincts.” It was the last message I ever received from him, and deep down inside, I knew it would be.

Up until those few days, I had never known death, and my father was my hero—he seemed immortal. His mind was so brilliant, strong, and fierce. I remember, after so many weeks of worrying while he was sick, I asked my mother the day before he died to show him to me. She sent me a video of him working on his shed, and he was still welding. My mother said, “See, he is still walking around.”

In the days after he died, I heard my mother tell the story to others—the story we still couldn’t believe: “He took a shower, laid down on his hammock, and went to sleep. Then he did not wake up.”

Oh my dearest ma (ម៉ាក់), I cannot imagine the shock of your husband of over thirty years suddenly passing. Oh my dear ma, I understand why you are hearing voices more intensely now. It was COVID-19, and none of us were able to fly to your house in Cambodia—it was impossible. The lady at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the Netherlands, who denied us our departure and entry to Cambodia, said, “You are not the only ones in a family crisis,” as if that would soften the blow. Ma, I understand why you’re so hardened inside. For three months, you had to stay by yourself in Cambodia after Dad died before you could reunite with us in the Netherlands.

But I was also upset with you this year, ma. Your heart has frozen so much that you forbade us to talk about him. You threw away his ashes without telling me and blamed me for bringing it up. Until I went to Indonesia last year, there was no room for my love and grief for my father, your husband, because your pain was greater than all of ours combined.

I have come to Asia this year with less pain in my heart, but the clarity in life has faded away. I feel like I am caught up in daily worries, much like you, anticipating stressful situations and clouding my thoughts. Missing him has lessened. I pray less. I wonder less.

Yet, a few days ago, I had a dream where I teamed up with a small, unknown child to find out what had happened to him. My mother’s story was vague, so my subconscious still has questions. In this dream, I had to keep playing with the child, and if I did so patiently, maybe the elders would speak up and give us a clue. I woke up feeling confused and reminded of the importance of ceremonial closure. To this day, due to the absence of his funeral, hardly any adult in my community has personally approached me to speak about my father. It feels as if he has disappeared.

The song that is sung right now is by Look Ta Ballut Un, also known as Mak Wen (លោកតាបាឡាត់ អ៑ុន ម៉ក់ វ៉ែន), one of the most well-known smot singers. His voice was captured on vinyl, and over the years, it has been transferred to cassette and CD. I found it on YouTube. The song is about a child who has just lost his mother: chaol koon huy (ចោលកូនហើយ, “I have been deserted”) is one of the lines he sings. It is not how I feel personally, as my father lives on in my heart, but I am in awe of hearing an adult mourn. Hearing an adult express deep sadness before they turn and become cold. I still long for this moment, for elders to show me how to feel.

In my waking life today, despite the cloudiness, I feel grateful, and I am surrounded by bright spirits who keep showing me the way. Last week, my friend Yoga took me to Candi Sukuh, a fifteenth-century Javanese-Hindu temple, to experience the giant stone tortoises. It was one of the kindest gestures I have experienced in a long time. There, on top of the mountain, we prayed, and I expressed my sorrows to my father, my ancestor.

On our way home, Yoga shared with me a Javanese belief: Urip iku urub, “life is light.” To believe life is light is to live with passion, generosity, and giving. These were values my kind and generous father always stood for and fought for. Thank you, Dad. Life is light.