Cambodian Chapey Dorng Veng (Khmer guitar) Kong Nai plays music as his wife listens at his house in Phnom Penh, in this May 11, 2007, photo. Over the blast of an electric guitar shuddering out of a karaoke machine nearby, Kong Nai was trying to speak of a time when Cambodian music could reach back through the millennia. AFPbrunei-online.com
By Ros Sothea
PHNOM PENH (AFP) - Over the blast of an electric guitar blaring out of a karaoke machine nearby, Kong Nai is trying to make himself heard as he talks of a time when Cambodian music reached back through millennia.
It could channel those things that defined his country, both simple and ornate, he says - from the shimmer of a green rice field to the gilded royal courts of the great builder kings.
But he stops his story, perhaps unable to think over the howl of the karaoke's tortured speakers.
Or perhaps he is simply unwilling to contemplate the future of his older, gentler craft, under assault from modern tastes with little consideration for old men and their music.
For many younger people, fed with a steady diet of glossy Thai and Chinese-style pop, Kong Nai is an anachronism and his chapey - a boxy instrument with a long, graceful neck that is strummed like a banjo to create a repetitive, droning counterpoint to chanted poems or improvised songs - is uncool.
"I have no hope," he finally said, sitting on the porch of his tumbledown one-room house in one of the capital's slums.
"The chapey cannot compare to this hip-hop," Kong Nai adds, gesturing towards the nearby house from which the karaoke accompanying dancing at a young people's party is blaring.
"Only a few of the old masters are still alive to play the ancient music - what of it when we pass away?" he said. "I am sure the music could easily die."
Officials acknowledge that Cambodia is in danger of losing a piece of its rich artistic legacy.
"People don't understand the value" of the old master musicians, of Cambodia's brightly costumed morality tales and epic dramas, played out through complicated dances and heavily nuanced songs, said Hang Suth, director of the culture ministry's art department.
Kong Nai, like the other few survivors of Cambodia's cultural upheavals, are the last links to a quickly fading past, say officials who also warn that when they die Cambodia will lose part of its soul .
Blinded by smallpox at the age of four, Kong Nai had, by the time he was seven, allowed the darkness that defined his world to also poison his heart.
His disability kept him from school and for years made him the constant victim of small cruelties inflicted by the other children in his village in Kampot province, in southern Cambodia.
"I found life meaningless and wanted to kill myself sometimes. I worried for my future, how I would survive because I couldn't even walk without someone helping me," he said. "I felt useless."
But one evening, as he prepared to sleep, an unfamiliar sound pierced Kong Nai's gloom, carried across the fields from a nearby village where itinerant minstrels had been hired to perform at a ceremony. It was the sound of the chapey.
"I immediately called my mother to take me there," he said, recalling that inspirational flash that would change his life.
For the next several years he memorised poetry at a nearby Buddhist temple, and spent weeks during Cambodian holiday seasons traveling through villages chanting poems in return for small amounts of rice or money.
He first picked up the chapey when he was 13 years old, after struggling to make his voice sound like the instrument.
Surrounded by a musical family - Kong Nai's relatives were masters of traditional Cambodian instruments, as well as chanting Buddhist texts and composing poetry - he quickly excelled.
By 15, Kong Nai had taken up the chapey professionally. His reputation spread among the villages in his province and other parts of the country, where he was invited to sing. His popularity earned him the nickname "Handsome Kong Nai".
"I would never have expected that a blind man like me could earn so much money," he said, a broad, toothy smile spreading across his face beneath the dark glasses that, almost as much as his music, have become a trademark.
The 1960s passed for Kong Nai in a blur of celebrity, wealth and romantic intrigue.
He courted and then married a young woman, Tat Chen, whom he had last set eyes on 14 years earlier when they were both four years old.
She sang beautifully, he said, and her voice helped him visualise what she might look like as an 18-year-old.
"I thought I'd be alone forever - I never expected that she would marry me," he said.
But his relationship was not without drama - a rival for her affections threatened to kill Kong Nai, but by 1963 the couple had settled into an easy domestic routine as his fame grew.
As the war in neighbouring Vietnam escalated, Cambodia enjoyed unprecedented peace and underwent a cultural renaissance, with the chapey's popularity reaching its height in the late 1960s and early 1970s as newly-minted recordings of famous musicians spread across Cambodia.
Kong Nai was among the tradition's superstars and by far the richest in his home province, renowned for his free-style improvisational skills that helped the art form evolve beyond simple poetic recitals.
But Cambodia's drift into the inferno that was consuming the region was inevitable. In 1970 Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the country's leader and a patron of the arts, was ousted in a coup by his top military advisor, General Lon Nol.
"We weren't happy for long after that," Kong Nai said. The country was collapsing in on itself, its corrupt disorganised government battling an increasingly emboldened communist insurgency.
Kong Nai could still work, walking between villages that remained untouched by war, but the crowds were evaporating, and with them the money.
"The country had changed - people didn't care about good music. They cared only for their security," he said.
"What I earned from the chapey was just enough to feed myself from day-to-day."
Like tens of thousands of rural Cambodians, Kong Nai was quickly absorbed into the "liberated zones" controlled by the communist guerillas, known by then as the Khmer Rouge.
Under their rule, he was ordered to only perform songs that described the suffering of farmers under Lon Nol.
"I couldn't sing what I wanted or I would be killed," he said, but Cambodia's misery, and his own, were only to deepen.
Kong Nai was, miraculously, allowed to keep his chapey after the Khmer Rouge wrestled control of the country from Lon Nol and began implementing their draconian vision of an agrarian utopia in 1975.
The arts, music included, had no role in the revolution and like the educated classes performers were slaughtered by the hundreds. An entire cultural legacy was being extinguished.
Kong Nai's role in this new Cambodia was to inspire those toiling on a vast collective farm in southern Cambodia with a brief recital of revolutionary songs once a day to which, he says, "people were forced to listen".
Within a few months it was decided that "there will be no more chapey", the musician recalled, and he was assigned first to harvest corn and beans, and then to making palm rope.
"I worked as hard as the others, but was not given the same amount of food because the Khmer Rouge felt that a blind man could not do the same amount of labour," he said. "A scoop of porridge was my food."
His family was assigned to a remote area of the country, and Kong Nai, alone and without his music, was more isolated and vulnerable than most. "No song, no music and no chapey. We only heard the voice of Khmer Rouge soldiers," he said.
In its final years, the regime's paranoid leadership had begun to turn on itself and increasing numbers of people were disappearing in purges.
Kong Nai's family came under suspicion after being accused by another villager of being American spies and he was imprisoned for three months.
Later, he said, he was sure to be marked for death when a regime cadre ordered the disabled and elderly to prepare to leave for somewhere else.
"I knew my family and I would die," he said.
Instead, he was left overnight in the forest after one of his children was wounded in a landmine blast. The following day, invading Vietnamese troops overran the area.
It was early 1979 and Kong Nai, and his long-suffering country, were free of the Khmer Rouge.
By Ros Sothea
PHNOM PENH (AFP) - Over the blast of an electric guitar blaring out of a karaoke machine nearby, Kong Nai is trying to make himself heard as he talks of a time when Cambodian music reached back through millennia.
It could channel those things that defined his country, both simple and ornate, he says - from the shimmer of a green rice field to the gilded royal courts of the great builder kings.
But he stops his story, perhaps unable to think over the howl of the karaoke's tortured speakers.
Or perhaps he is simply unwilling to contemplate the future of his older, gentler craft, under assault from modern tastes with little consideration for old men and their music.
For many younger people, fed with a steady diet of glossy Thai and Chinese-style pop, Kong Nai is an anachronism and his chapey - a boxy instrument with a long, graceful neck that is strummed like a banjo to create a repetitive, droning counterpoint to chanted poems or improvised songs - is uncool.
"I have no hope," he finally said, sitting on the porch of his tumbledown one-room house in one of the capital's slums.
"The chapey cannot compare to this hip-hop," Kong Nai adds, gesturing towards the nearby house from which the karaoke accompanying dancing at a young people's party is blaring.
"Only a few of the old masters are still alive to play the ancient music - what of it when we pass away?" he said. "I am sure the music could easily die."
Officials acknowledge that Cambodia is in danger of losing a piece of its rich artistic legacy.
"People don't understand the value" of the old master musicians, of Cambodia's brightly costumed morality tales and epic dramas, played out through complicated dances and heavily nuanced songs, said Hang Suth, director of the culture ministry's art department.
Kong Nai, like the other few survivors of Cambodia's cultural upheavals, are the last links to a quickly fading past, say officials who also warn that when they die Cambodia will lose part of its soul .
Blinded by smallpox at the age of four, Kong Nai had, by the time he was seven, allowed the darkness that defined his world to also poison his heart.
His disability kept him from school and for years made him the constant victim of small cruelties inflicted by the other children in his village in Kampot province, in southern Cambodia.
"I found life meaningless and wanted to kill myself sometimes. I worried for my future, how I would survive because I couldn't even walk without someone helping me," he said. "I felt useless."
But one evening, as he prepared to sleep, an unfamiliar sound pierced Kong Nai's gloom, carried across the fields from a nearby village where itinerant minstrels had been hired to perform at a ceremony. It was the sound of the chapey.
"I immediately called my mother to take me there," he said, recalling that inspirational flash that would change his life.
For the next several years he memorised poetry at a nearby Buddhist temple, and spent weeks during Cambodian holiday seasons traveling through villages chanting poems in return for small amounts of rice or money.
He first picked up the chapey when he was 13 years old, after struggling to make his voice sound like the instrument.
Surrounded by a musical family - Kong Nai's relatives were masters of traditional Cambodian instruments, as well as chanting Buddhist texts and composing poetry - he quickly excelled.
By 15, Kong Nai had taken up the chapey professionally. His reputation spread among the villages in his province and other parts of the country, where he was invited to sing. His popularity earned him the nickname "Handsome Kong Nai".
"I would never have expected that a blind man like me could earn so much money," he said, a broad, toothy smile spreading across his face beneath the dark glasses that, almost as much as his music, have become a trademark.
The 1960s passed for Kong Nai in a blur of celebrity, wealth and romantic intrigue.
He courted and then married a young woman, Tat Chen, whom he had last set eyes on 14 years earlier when they were both four years old.
She sang beautifully, he said, and her voice helped him visualise what she might look like as an 18-year-old.
"I thought I'd be alone forever - I never expected that she would marry me," he said.
But his relationship was not without drama - a rival for her affections threatened to kill Kong Nai, but by 1963 the couple had settled into an easy domestic routine as his fame grew.
As the war in neighbouring Vietnam escalated, Cambodia enjoyed unprecedented peace and underwent a cultural renaissance, with the chapey's popularity reaching its height in the late 1960s and early 1970s as newly-minted recordings of famous musicians spread across Cambodia.
Kong Nai was among the tradition's superstars and by far the richest in his home province, renowned for his free-style improvisational skills that helped the art form evolve beyond simple poetic recitals.
But Cambodia's drift into the inferno that was consuming the region was inevitable. In 1970 Prince Norodom Sihanouk, the country's leader and a patron of the arts, was ousted in a coup by his top military advisor, General Lon Nol.
"We weren't happy for long after that," Kong Nai said. The country was collapsing in on itself, its corrupt disorganised government battling an increasingly emboldened communist insurgency.
Kong Nai could still work, walking between villages that remained untouched by war, but the crowds were evaporating, and with them the money.
"The country had changed - people didn't care about good music. They cared only for their security," he said.
"What I earned from the chapey was just enough to feed myself from day-to-day."
Like tens of thousands of rural Cambodians, Kong Nai was quickly absorbed into the "liberated zones" controlled by the communist guerillas, known by then as the Khmer Rouge.
Under their rule, he was ordered to only perform songs that described the suffering of farmers under Lon Nol.
"I couldn't sing what I wanted or I would be killed," he said, but Cambodia's misery, and his own, were only to deepen.
Kong Nai was, miraculously, allowed to keep his chapey after the Khmer Rouge wrestled control of the country from Lon Nol and began implementing their draconian vision of an agrarian utopia in 1975.
The arts, music included, had no role in the revolution and like the educated classes performers were slaughtered by the hundreds. An entire cultural legacy was being extinguished.
Kong Nai's role in this new Cambodia was to inspire those toiling on a vast collective farm in southern Cambodia with a brief recital of revolutionary songs once a day to which, he says, "people were forced to listen".
Within a few months it was decided that "there will be no more chapey", the musician recalled, and he was assigned first to harvest corn and beans, and then to making palm rope.
"I worked as hard as the others, but was not given the same amount of food because the Khmer Rouge felt that a blind man could not do the same amount of labour," he said. "A scoop of porridge was my food."
His family was assigned to a remote area of the country, and Kong Nai, alone and without his music, was more isolated and vulnerable than most. "No song, no music and no chapey. We only heard the voice of Khmer Rouge soldiers," he said.
In its final years, the regime's paranoid leadership had begun to turn on itself and increasing numbers of people were disappearing in purges.
Kong Nai's family came under suspicion after being accused by another villager of being American spies and he was imprisoned for three months.
Later, he said, he was sure to be marked for death when a regime cadre ordered the disabled and elderly to prepare to leave for somewhere else.
"I knew my family and I would die," he said.
Instead, he was left overnight in the forest after one of his children was wounded in a landmine blast. The following day, invading Vietnamese troops overran the area.
It was early 1979 and Kong Nai, and his long-suffering country, were free of the Khmer Rouge.
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