Incense, Angkor, and a kilo of trey ngeat: Reflections on the materiality of Khmer culture in Cambodia and the Khmerican diaspora

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‘Nyom khoun kaht’ (‘I’m a mixed child’), I explain to the tuktuk driver at Phnom Penh International Airport as he lifts my luggage into the rickshaw. ‘Ah, that explains a lot’, he replies in Khmer. Despite the immense geographical distance between my family and Cambodia, I never felt too far away. Being a K-visa holder, a designation which offers the children of Khmer refugees displaced in the war access to Cambodia, I moved to Siem Reap, Cambodia for a few months of work and research. This move solidified the inevitable clashing of two distinctive forms of Khmerness – to be Khmer in America versus being Khmer in Cambodia. After I arrived, my mother called me constantly wondering how it felt to truly experience Cambodian culture, ‘Now you can understand me better, right?!’, she joked. 

As I made my way through the countryside from village to village, as well as from the city capital of Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, I felt that everything I associated with being Khmer was screaming at me. Streets congested with tuktuks hosted hordes of food carts which sold roasted meat on skewers that my aunt would recreate for special occasions, fresh sugarcane juice that I was only able to drink on Khmer New Years in the US, and bags of various sour fruits sprinkled with salt and chilli that I would see my mother nibble on occasion. Motorbikes cruised by, street dogs searched for food scraps, and young children tried their best to sell small packages of dried nuts and fresh fruit. It was like I was living in an experiential overlay: the outlines of what I knew as Khmer and Cambodian culture were suspended over the typical activities of everyday life in Cambodia. It was like I was witnessing fragments of a life I could have lived; it felt familiar and astoundingly nostalgic.

I got into the habit of sending her visual updates so she could experience a more welcoming and modern Cambodia vicariously; these updates included photographs of everything I ate, ‘I’m so jealous you get to eat salaw kako and amok whenever you want’. Throughout the years, she has made (and I ate) an exceptional amount of salaw kako. I remember it fondly as a warm and nourishing soup full of ‘as many vegetables as you like’, fish, and an assortment of typical Khmer seasonings and spices such as lemongrass, turmeric, galangal root, and kaffir lime leaf. Salaw kako was a common staple when the weather was grey and stormy, often accompanied by a heaping serving of jasmine rice as well as a shallow dish of sliced chillis submerged in salty fish sauce. What differentiated salaw kako from other Khmer dishes for me was its colour: with pieces of pumpkin and leafy greens poking through and toasted rice grains as a thickener, salaw kako reflected one’s immediate landscape. Recipes for salaw kako vary among Khmer villages, but the feeling of substantiality and vibrance it brought was constant across each interpretation of the dish. 

After flipping through some Khmer recipes books, I soon realised that salaw kako was heavily reliant on certain local vegetables like sluk bah (ivy gourd leaves) and cheak kuchuy (green bananas) so I enquired how my mother dealt with this, ‘When I make salaw kako in America, I use vegetables that remind me of the ones we have in Cambodia. The kreung (seasoning paste) still makes it pretty close in taste so it’s not really a problem. It still tastes Khmer to me’. The cultural legacy of Cambodia is embodied within Khmer food to her, salaw kako was the way my mother tied herself to her Khmer identity and the seemingly distant landscape which once housed and nurtured her. Even after all these years, these manifestations of Khmerness through her cooking offer a sense of support and recognition of her transformative journey from refugee to citizen. While she couldn’t bring much to the United States, her memories of taste and a hunger for recreating them have sustained without issue. 

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