Folk Opera : Cambodians’ ‘Memory and Yearning’ Satisfied by Long Beach Performance

The sun, who is the King of the Universe, once visited Earth with his pregnant queen, and she gave birth here to a son, Preas Ko Bot.

The adventures of that son--rescuing a royal family from an ogre that intended to eat them, fighting a monkey king, battling the father of the princess he loved--form the plot of a popular Cambodian folk opera performed Saturday in Long Beach.

The event, part of Cambodian New Year celebrations for the roughly 20,000-strong Long Beach Cambodian community, represented the first time since the 1975 Communist takeover of their homeland that experienced performers in this country have come together to present a folk opera show, organizers said.

About a dozen of the dancers and musicians in Saturday’s performance now live in California, while another 20 or so flew in from other parts of the country, according to Leng Hang, president of the Long Beach-based Cambodian Art Preservation Group, which organized the show. All had experience as folk opera performers in Cambodia, she said.

Scores of Cambodians gathered in the Polytechnic High School auditorium to see the show.

For 16-year-old Houth Pich, an 11th-grader at Long Beach’s Jordan High School, the folk opera, a combination of dancing, singing, comedy and drama, depicting folk legends, tales and stories, was a chance to “memorize my culture.”

Like other Cambodian youths, Pich, who came to the United States when he was 10, had never had a chance to experience the rich art traditions of his homeland.

Samoeurn Keo, 31, who fled to Thailand to escape the Communists, came to the United States five years ago and now teaches folk dancing, said older Cambodians feel especially strong about keeping their culture alive.

“If everyone tried to forget,” he said, “the next generation would not know how beautiful the Cambodian culture is,”

Hang said that for a dozen years folk opera has existed “only in the memory and the yearning of the Cambodian refugees in the United States.”

Most of the visiting performers took vacations to come to Long Beach, visit with friends or relatives during the New Year season and take part in Saturday’s performance, she said. This year, the Cambodian New Year begins April 13. But because that is a working day, refugees in the United States celebrate the holiday over the weekend, she said.

“At New Year, they come together to see their families,” she said. “If they believe in Buddhism, they go to the temple. Here, a lot are Christians, and they go to church. After church they get together and have food.

“The young people now, they like disco more than going to see people acting like that,” she added. “But the old people like the old culture. It reminds them of Cambodia.”