"Truly a Cambodian Dish"
Phon Sann: Everything she needs to say is in the cooking
When Phon Sann, 71, starved in a Thai refugee camp, pregnant, she would sometimes walk to the edges of the camp, where food, like tiny potatoes, would be cooking for those who had the means to buy them, stand near the cooking smells, and inhale.
It would help a little– offering a modest sense of satiety to supplement the watered down rice that otherwise counted as her daily food.
When her husband, Soreth Phann, tells the story secondhand, he cries, just as he did when he realized what his wife was doing each day when she would disappear for a while. “It made me love her more.”
“The women in my family don’t crack,” says Soktevy Phann, 44, Phon and Soreth’s oldest daughter. She repeats this often.
“They don’t ever talk. They don’t share a lot of stories– so you just have to pick things up.”
She occasionally picks them up, eavesdropping on her mom and her aunties in the kitchen. Many times, they’ll be chatting about something truly atrocious from their past, but they’ll mention them in the most nonchalant way.
And she knows: “My parents don’t want to remember a lot of these things.”
During Cambodia’s brutal and devastating civil war, which raged on for more than eight years between 1967 and 1975, followed by a genocide– where up to three million people were murdered by the communist party Khmer Rouge– Soreth’s father, a government official, was dragged from his home and killed when Soreth was barely 18.
In the forced labor camp where Phon and Soreth were ultimately imprisoned, the couple entered into an arranged marriage, part of the communist party’s plan to create a society in their image. They were kids themselves, hardly into their young adulthood.
“You married whoever was in front of you,” as Soktevy puts it. “They would call out the man, then call out the woman, and there would be a mass marriage. That day they were given rice to eat, instead of the thin porridge where you could hardly find a grain.”
How did Soktevy feel about the circumstances that led to her birth?
“I didn’t really know about it.”
Her parents don’t want to remember a lot of these things.
When Soktevy was born malnourished in that Thai refugee camp, an aunt, who had access to a little more food became her supplemental wet nurse. When that source of nourishment was unavailable, Phon would give the tiny Soktevy chips of block ice to suck as a pacifier. Eventually, Soktevy would just cry for the ice.
“And now, I've shattered molars, and I still chew ice. It's just something that’s in me.”
So now, Phon cooks. She cooks and she cooks. Ten, 12 hours a day oftentimes. She doesn’t talk. But she cooks.
“Cooking really helps us hearken back to our life before the war,” explains Soktevy, as she circles her mom in the kitchen, trying, and sometimes failing, to find a place beside the machine that is Phon’s precision-sharp culinary stylings.
“Cooking starts from so many core memories, and a lot of dishes she can't just make. I'm like, ‘Mom, can you make this dish?’ She’ll say, ’No– it involves this and this and this. It involves your aunties coming to help.’”
When the family had the opportunity to leave for the U.S., impossible decisions had to be made.
“You could only bring five people. It’s just something I couldn't even fathom,” Soktevy imagines. You know, who do you leave behind?”
As she makes a beloved family recipe, tuk kreang, fish dip, made with prahok, a fermented fish paste that is the basis of Cambodian cooking, Phon preps giant baskets of vegetables– bitter melon, hollow vegetable (water spinach), long beans, cabbages, cauliflower– the baskets unfold with color like a wide-brimmed church hat festooned with plastic flowers.
She reverently glides her hands into the chopped cabbages, the beans, letting them fall from her fingertips like confetti; maybe checking for consistency, imbuing them with know-how, history, and yes, love.
Is the kitchen a place of joy for Soktevy and her mother?
“No,” Soktevy answers simply.
“But the joy looks different. The kitchen is almost a place of catharsis. Being in the kitchen is a deep meditation for [my mom]. There is that other sense that goes into the food that makes it transformative and makes it a spiritual experience.”
Mostly barred from the kitchen, she’s reminded of a quote from Chinese influencer and writer Bo Ren:
“My parents were tasked with survival, and I with self-actualization. . . ”
The family wanted Soktevy and her siblings to focus on their studies and their jobs, and to leave the cooking to someone else. To Phon.
“You’ve got to wait for the perfect time to gather the vegetables, too– my mom knows– a week ago, she grabbed some ingredients. She's got to time it. On Saturday, she grabbed this. On Monday, she grabs this. Because, you know, the way things ripen, the way so-and-so isn't fresh– she's got to go to like, three different stores.”
And that’s just the produce she doesn’t grow at home.
“In Asian families they say if your mother is cutting fruit for you, that’s love.”
In Cambodia, before the war, Phon’s family was agrarian, and poor, so their food was mostly rice and vegetables that they could grow themselves. Still, food was abundant. They had enough.
What were some of the first indicators that things were about to change drastically as the first signs of the war began?
“There wasn’t enough,” says Soreth.
He’s a cushion to Phon’s pillar. He takes care of the grandbaby underfoot with the tenderness of a mother. Quick to smile, his eyes are pools of warmth.
Though he came from a different social class, and could have eventually left for the U.S. a lot sooner than Phon, leaving her behind as many in his station did the families they were forced into having, Soreth chose not to.
Their relationship was the ultimate slow burn.
“[During the war] even though I didn’t love her, we tried to understand each other from day to day because it gave us some reason to survive.”
Eventually, he did love her. He wanted to challenge the notion of social status. Why should he be allowed to live a life of abundance but not her? He nicknamed her “Richnie,” because it’s a royal name, and he wanted her to have a name fit for a queen.
As she deliberately shaves ribbons of purple off of an eggplant, ingeniously slashing the flesh with a sharp knife, then going back and shaving it off creating matchstick shapes– typically a job for a mandolin– Soktevy asks:
“Who taught you how to make these dishes?”
“My mother.”
“Why do you love this dish?”
“It is truly a Cambodian dish.”
“Do you remember some of the first times you ate them?”
“No.”
The Khmer food that Phon cooks relies on ingredients sourced from Cambodia, like whole fermented fish and fish paste, called prahok, that come out of the Mekong river– flavors that cannot be reproduced anywhere else. The family doesn’t shirk from the word “stinky,” where it comes to their cooking– it’s more of a term of endearment– and even refer to the dips they relish with many meals, tuk kreang, as “stinky dips.”
Still, they’re aware of how their food can be perceived by the uninitiated, and seem overly mindful about keeping the smells at bay. Like many immigrants to this country, there’s a delicate (often mind-bending) balance between maintaining culture and avoiding being “othered.” It’s one of many constant burdens to shoulder.
Phon asks Soktevy to come and cut some vegetables for her but then soon decides, no, she’s not going to do it right. So, there’s a lot of confusion.
“This happens a lot. It’s one of the most challenging things. When I say, ‘Hey, I want to learn how to make this dish, and it's like, ‘No.’ you know? There’s so much unspoken. And I start feeling at my age this anxiety. I need to know. I need to know now.”
And maddeningly, when she sometimes asks for a recipe, she’ll get “berated.”
They’re like: “Why don’t you know?!”
This reminds me of a quote in the book Knots, by psychiatrist R. D. Laing:
“There is something I don’t know that I am supposed to know. I don’t know what it is I don’t know, and yet am supposed to know. . . ”
If you are a person with a family of any kind, this feeling is a relatable one, but in particular for immigrant families, where the legacy of trauma can be so acute as to be rendered unspeakable.
But Soktevy is in the kitchen with her mother, as, sometimes, are her other siblings Sovanneary, Sominne, and Susandra, and her cousins, and her father (“in Cambodia the husbands help– so it’s not always just the wives”). And even if it’s not always a place of joy, the kitchen is a place of connection, of culture, and silent communication. If Soktevy is ever going to know her mother’s story, the story will unfold here, even if that knowledge is hard-won.
“You have to eat every grain of rice,” Soktevy recalls of her childhood task to wash the rice, getting into big trouble if even a single grain escaped down the drain.
“Everybody in Cambodia is starving. You know– how dare you waste food? And then that rice water is used to water the plants. Nothing goes to waste. Bones, cartilage, marrow– there’s even a dish where they're chopping all of this up with pork or chicken and everything getting incorporated, so when you eat it, there’s a lot of spitting going on. But that’s what truly gives flavor to our food.”
What gives flavor to the food: the utter reverence for every last thing, not taking shortcuts– “all of the women have shoulder problems” from grinding, mincing, and chopping everything by hand; the respect given to an individual dish for what, and who, knows it most intimately. For a single grain of rice.
“My mom wouldn’t touch a red curry,” says Soktevy. That expertise belongs to another auntie.
Still, they aren’t necessarily passing the expertise along.
“I have to hunt an auntie down for it, and she may not be available, or in the mood or the mindset to be cooking certain dishes.”
So now, with Soktevy in the role of telling her family story, in the complex position of stewarding this information to the next generation, how can she know what she is supposed to know, but doesn’t?
Grain, by tiny, magnificent grain of rice.
Video: Serena Hodges
I had to read this twice. Wow. Painful. Touching. Thank you for sharing.