Vietnamese-German Friendship Hospital in outskirt of Hanoi
(Bệnh viện Việt Đức), photo by: Phuong Phan
1 During an artist talk with Nguyen Thi Thanh Mai and Tuan Mami at D21 Project Space, Leipzig (2022).
2 Interview with one former Vietnamese contract worker in GDR.
3 Referring to So, Anthony Veasna. Afterparties: Stories. First edition. New York, Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, 2021.
4 Time curfew for migrants in GDR to enter their residency.
5 During the GDR, in order to avoid being surveilled by secret police, one could open the radio or television loudly in order to speak about sensitive information.
FM 3.8
Last time I visited you, we took a few photos of your old houses. But because we live in this strange proximity, I never took a single clear shot. All the shots are blurred because the bus moves way too fast. I wonder what diaspora life looks like? How we sit and look at the outside world—blurred and shaky—as our seats are moving constantly?
Since your ears are wearing out, I thought, I want to send something to you.
This package contains a few postcards, a few tape cassettes, and a few Dharma prayers – for you. All of this is my attempt to understand you a bit more. Then, to remember and remind you of something you’ve told me which you forgot you had.
After the civil wars ended by the 1990s, some NGOs (or even “international” artists) were sent to your villages to build some schools, houses or projects, but many of them failed to understand what was cherished by the villagers. While these men focused on architecture and buildings, the women from the village cared about better sanitation and food systems serving the entire community.1 You yourself even complained that it was less about migrating, adapting, and racism. Instead, it was more about your shitty husband—unfortunately Dad—and my future.2 While white or state-run institutions now celebrate “cultural events”, “multiculturalism” and a “more tolerant society”, chanting these amongst only privileged white audiences, I believe you and your friends couldn’t care less. None of these have been relevant to us; it’s European problems, not ours.
So many questions for you still remain open, which none of us can really answer. They all said: you suffered a lot, you were discriminated against, offended, hated, thrown out, misunderstood, left at the margin – but is this all that true?
How come nobody in Southeast Asia knows about your friends?
How were you able to feel safe when you were pinned under someone?3 Can there be a socialist “sisterhood” rather than a “brotherhood”?
How can these Western materials be transformed into “ours” – Southeast Asian?
Does the memory of sound, mother’s lullaby, come before memory or taste – like mother’s breast milk?
Can you hear sounds coming from this silent picture? What is the difference between oral and written? Loud and silent? Telling and showing?
But hey it’s 10 PM now,4 let's turn on some radios loud, very loudly.5
Postcards from Sarnt Utamachote to Samboleap Tol for this publication (2022)
FM 3.8
Recently I’ve made a few new friends at various occasions. One was at a demonstration against anti-Asian racism and the erasure of our histories, which is not a recent event, but a continuation of the long European colonial history. It turns out that many of us know you well. We were curious about how you lived through those times, having arrived from a far away place—what they called former Indochina, or socialist Southeast Asia—to come here. And there are so many of them: a few in Berlin, Leipzig, Dresden. From Rotterdam to Amsterdam, London and Prague. I didn’t know I’d end up writing so much and writing so much to them. With strong accents, we communicate in (a) broken language(s), half way understood, but from the context of the spoken, we have always understood: the minimum. Sometimes we twist our tongues to languages we are more familiar with.
“Writing letters is the only way the two of us can be honest to each other, and it’s my only chance to tell you how I feel”,8 said my friend, Diana, from another border side. She wishes to write to her long-gone father. Now I’m doing the same for my friends I’ve recently met. The difference perhaps was that, in your time, someone must have read these letters and approved them before it reached you, be it your own government or this country. What does it feel like, to be vulnerable in front of all these secret police and politics? Surely you have sung karaoke with people who worked for the secret police.
8 Diana Cam Van Nguyen, Love, Dad, Animation Short Film, Czech Republic 2021.
FM 1.5
Voice 1: Bọn đầu trọc xuất hiện lúc bức tường Berlin đổ vỡ. Trước đó mọi người cũng tốt lắm. À, tất nhiên chỗ nào chẳng có người nọ người kia.
Voice 2: The bald heads (neo-nazis) first appeared after the Fall of the Berlin Wall. Before then, people were actually quite kind. Of course, like everywhere, there are these and those people.
Voice 3: Die Glatzköpfe (Neonazis) tauchten erstmals nach dem Fall der Berliner Mauer auf. Davor waren die Menschen eigentlich ganz nett. Natürlich gibt es, wie überall, diese und jene Menschen.
FM 2.4
PRESENTER: Welcome back to LETTERS TO OUR MUM where we write letters to our beloved mothers.
We’re cutting straight into an entry by SAM. SAM is one of our loyal listeners and she says she reps the Cambodians from Holland. Sam, can you tell us what you’re about to share with us?
SAM: Hi Bong, well yes, of course. I was really inspired by your segment last week on lost Cambodian songs and I wanted to give the listeners a personal insight as to how Cambodian songs find ways into my life. You know, as someone who grew up here.
PRESENTER: Great! And when you’re talking about how these songs made their way into your life; those ways weren’t very conventional were they?
SAM: (Chuckles) Oh, no.
PRESENTER: Well then let’s get right into it. Take it away, Sam.
SAM: Hi mum, I am sure you don’t remember this but I’ve asked you once on Skype: “Hey mum, do you know this song? Sra mouy keo leuk soon song sa…” and you finished it: “...Som bong pee sa pluok merl tov.” We both laughed because we know we both can’t sing!
I asked you: “Do you know this song is the theme song of a movie, with the same name?”
You said: “Yes, I know, I saw it.”
No, mum, I thought. At this point I thought you were lying to me, because they told me in Phnom Penh that the Khmer Rouge destroyed it, and no copies were found.
I said: “What do you mean, see? They destroyed it, it doesn’t exist anymore.”
You said: “I did see it! I heard it. It was on the radio in the refugee camp Khao-I-Dang.”
Ahhh! A radioplay, I thought.
“Well,” I said, “Do you know your mother liked this song?”
You smiled at me.
9 See: Norindr, Panivong. "Phantasmatic Indochina." Phantasmatic Indochina. Duke University Press, 1997.
10 Ladwig, Patrice, and Nicole Reichert. "Ritual insecurity, liminality and identity. Differing migration trajectories and their impact on Buddhist rituals in a Lao migrant community in Berlin." Journal of Ritual Studies 34.1 (2020): 1-16.
11 https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/
202204/1260587.shtml
12 Interview with Sonny Thet
13 Films directed by Norodom Sihanouk/Khemarak Productions are currently archived at Bophana Audiovisual Center Phnom Penh
14 Famous folk song about the national flower of Laos, Champa (Magnolia champaca or Plumeria), re-composed by Outama Choulamany with official lyrics by Maha Phoumi Chittaphong. The song has interesting French/European musical influence, through which its scale is more European in its 12-tone system, than the folk system of Southeast Asia mainland, which has only 7-tones.
Love, Dad (2021), a short film by Diana Cam Van Nguyen
FM 3.8
When these migrants built temporary space, rituals and games in the new land, nothing could be completely “authentically” recreated – even architectures at colonial exhibitions have never been 100% original.9 The Laos stupa (or the royal “That Luang”, the phallic center established via belief of Laos buddhist king), usually made from pure gold extracted from the indigenous laborers, must be made with styrofoam.10 The famous Bayon temple (and the whole Angkor Wat complex), which France tried to “save” from its own people (be it Siamese or Khmer), ended up being objects of decoration, satisfying the desire for the Orient of the French people. Or, they serve as trophies for the French to celebrate their “high culture”. During the Cold War, Angkor Wat complex was claimed by so many forces, amongst them even Poland and Japan. In between, UNESCO played its part. No one has questioned the role of UNESCO in these geo-political matters. Who is behind UNESCO? Do they really share our values or just dictate them? What is the purpose of UNESCO in these countries anyway? Now, we heard from our Cambodian friends that Chinese experts were “key contributors to safeguarding Angkor’s archeological part.” 11 I wonder, will they ever stop trying to “save” Angkor Wat and leave it alone to do its own thing?
Another way they treat Angkor Wat is as their imaginary projections, found on vinyls and aquarium castles for the fish. Or, as Bong Sonny described how his first album cover was designed: “the East Germans, having never visited the Bayon temple, saw the Apsara faces as monkey faces, so they painted it like that.” 12 Norodom Sihanouk’s (as well as others) “easy-music” compositions also followed a similar pattern: something easy, compact, exotic-sounding yet played by classical instruments, easy to be reused for many occasions. One track of his “Ironie” was used repeatedly in the films he directed throughout the 1980s, such as Crépuscule (សន្ធិប្រកាស, Twilight, 1969).13 Recently my friend Vanasay did the same, she also sung a few pop or “easy-music” songs—including a rehearsal of her version of the famous Oh Dok Champa Lao (ຈຳປາເມືອງລາວ)14—naked in exchange for drinks, which explored the intimacy already created in the former language school for Third World students in the GDR, at the Herder Institut in Leipzig.
I know all of these because they always send me selfies of them next to all these wondrous knock-offs, which are pretty much like postcards. They happen in the moment, capture the moment, allowing it to become shared, circulated and also rewritten. I find Diana’s collage and patchwork are very much fitting to what I’m trying to say: in order to fill up the space left by these torn photographs and letters, she can imagine a better alternative, less toxic, more loving life with her father or at least a possible conversation with him before it would be too late. This describes your and my relationship to our lives: we see negative holes in the already existing histories and try to fill them, playfully, with dreams.
Selfie of Vanasay Khamphommala & Sarnt Utamachote in Leipzig; photo by Vanasay Khamphommala (2022)
FM 1.5
“American GIs, don't fight this unjust, immoral and illegal war of Johnson's. Get out of Vietnam now and alive! This is the voice of Vietnam Broadcasting from Hanoi, capital of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Our program for American GIs can be heard at 16:30 hours. Now here's Connie Francis singing I almost lost my mind" 15
Voice 1: ท่านกำลังเข้าสู่บริการรับฝากหัวใจ ลงทะเบียนฝากไว้ตัวเอากลับไปใจให้เก็บรักษา ยอมจำนนเธอแล้ววันนี้แค่แรกเห็นหน้า ฝากไว้กับฉันนะหัวใจของเธอแลกเบอร์โทร โอ๊ะโอโอย.
ບໍລິການຝາກຫົວໃຈ.
Voice 2: You are entering a service center for heart care. Please leave your heart here as your body walks away. This is what I’m ready to offer. Give your heart to me in exchange for my number.16
Heart-keeping service.
Samboleap Tol, Do dreams come true?, digital drawing (2022)
16 A popular “modern moolam” Thai song Kau Jai Tur Lak Bur Toh (Your heart in exchange of my number) by Yinglee Srijumpol, Grammy Gold (GMM Grammy) 2012. It is equally famous across Thai-Laos borders and amongst the diaspora.
Letters from Samboleap Tol to Phuong Phan for this publication (2022)
A German-Cambodian fusion music band Bayon’s debut album in 1977, courtesy Sonny Thet (left)
A compilation record of Norodom Sihanouk’s composition, made by Leipziger radio orchestra in 1968, courtesy Sonny Thet (right)
FM 1.5
Thus, the second aspect of this everyday is its preponderant non-legality. Operating at the level of technocultural services to the vast majority of the population in cities and towns, the actors in this space have simply ignored the state as the regulator of everyday life. The thousands of small cable television operators, pirate audio-cassette shop owners and gray market computer companies have, with significant success, evaded state controls on their operations. Part of the problem has been the state's slow response in imposing regulatory mechanisms due to an inability to understand the new technologies. But when regulation has come, success has been uneven, with only the larger firms falling in line.17
17 Sundaram, Ravi (1999). Recycling modernity: Pirate electronic cultures in India. Third Text, 13(47), 59–65.
FM 2.4
PRESENTER 1: This next segment is a story sent in by LEAP from the Netherlands. What struck us about LEAP’s entry is that she went beyond our creative writing prompt to describe SINN SISAMOUTH’s musical legacy on the Khmer diasporas, to really give us an intimate insight into her family life. It’s brutally honest, really.
PRESENTER 2: Yeah, it’s one of those complex and honest stories which tell us what really goes on in our community. And it’s really needed, because it’s those glimpses, those stories that can teach us about the ills and joys within our community.
PRESENTER 1: That’s right. Bong, will you do the honors?
PRESENTER 2: Of course!
FOREVER by LEAP from the Netherlands.
“I introduced my mother to Youtube last year. She’s about… 51ish years old, illiterate somewhat, but definitely media illiterate. But to be fair, up until my father’s passing, she was not properly introduced to it. She’d call TV’s teletext the internet and recently called the car’s navigation system Youtube. I take after my father, who was the first of the Khmers in the Netherlands to obtain his bachelors. He spent 10 years going to uni in the evenings, which was a 2 hour train journey each way from our home, and I remember being at his graduation, as a 10-year old. So proud.
He was a technical engineer, always fascinated at how technology could accelerate or decelerate society – and his focus was always, as is mine, on those at the bottom of society. He would go to the computer fairs and buy me a Russian laptop. And with my big brother bullying everyone in the neighborhood, I felt like the coolest kid in town.
His flaw was his misogynism. He’d praise me to the moon, but I was not on equal footing as boys. Neither was his wife, 9 years his junior, one of the most beautiful Cambodian women at the time in Khao-I-Dang, the refugee camp. She was a teenager then, 17, in an arranged marriage to him. Mum’s grown to be paranoid, always texting me that the cameras are following her, and that I can’t call her because they are listening. But she’s sweet too.
I always thought my father had precisely my insight: the ability to look at someone optimistically, imagine their growth and support them, even if they are not kin. He probably did, that’s why they called him the teacher in the community. But he also didn’t, because I don’t know why he never showed my mother the thing that turned all of our lives upside down: the internet. Now he’s dead and my mother has the internet.
FADE IN SAMBA SONG IN THE BACKGROUND
Me: “So how did you find this one hour samba mix, mum?”
Mum: “It just popped up.”
FADE OUT SAMBA SONG
True, Youtube algorithmic suggestions are up to par. Cambodian sixties and seventies songs mimic those of the Americas, including samba. It has something to do with the wars being waged at the time and US presence in former Indochina, so the suggestions make sense.
A few hours later, we’re still cuddling in bed and my partner is reading a book in her big chair. The Youtube mix has shifted to an hour of rock and roll classics, my mother’s most favorite genre. Her ears are pierced as a new song starts to play.
“What?!” she yells.
Before she could utter: “But this song is Cambodian”, she realizes this song is not Cambodian. We all start laughing.
She says: “Oh gee, grandfather Sinn Sisamouth took all the songs, didn’t he?! I bet he flew around with the King to all these countries and stole their songs. I mean, not steal, I mean, copy their songs.”
Our laughter continues because at this point, she is literally stumbling over her words, as she’s trying to understand how far Sinn Sisamouth might have gone, and how many of his hits are … well, not the Cambodian originals she was led to believe. “Note for note,” she mutters.
The internet has also introduced her to Youtube monks. I love Theravada Buddhism, it has literally led me through the death of my father, something I still cannot accept even one year and a half later, but I dislike this particular monk she listens to. This monk makes misogynistic jokes, and my mother speaks of him as if he’s a dear friend she’ll sometimes flirt with. I guess building up an online following requires stepping onto others in society, and make-believe flirting with lonely women in videos.
Mum: “Child, can you please download all of his videos.”
Me: “Erhm, okay, yes I can. But why, mum?”
Mum: “He mentioned in one of his videos that, you know, the government does not like some of the things he said, and he might have to delete his videos. He’s also looking to migrate to Australia or the States, basically disrobing, finding someone to marry.”
She calls me up a few days later and says:
“Oh no, you don’t have to download his videos anymore. I think he’s safe now.”
She then, said, suddenly:
“I think in the future, he will still be everywhere, they can’t simply delete him or make him disappear. Just like mister Sinn Sisamouth, he will always be here – he will be eternal.”
Medallion in commemoration of international socialist solidarity with Vietnam [“für beispielhafte solidarität im geist des sozialistischen internationalismus”] (lower left).
Collage and letter from Samboleap Tol to Sarnt Utamachote for this publication (top).
Flower from To Doan and Quang Nguyễn-Xuân to Sarnt Utamachote (lower right). 2022 Leipzig.
Music archive section with playlists curated by Phambinho and Samboleap Tol, photo by Michael Moser (left).
Performance by Sintscha at D21 Project Space Leipzig 2022, photo by Clarita Maria (mid).
Self-organized concert band by Lao students at Thai-Lao-Vietnamese festivity in the 1990s Berlin, photo by S.S. (right).
FM 1.5
Voice 1: ឱ!ស្វាយចន្ទី នារីអូនអើយ
បែកមែកសាខា...
ឱ!ស្វាយចន្ទី នារីអូនអើយ
បែកមែកសាខា...
បន់អស់ទេវតា ប្រាថ្នាឱ្យបានជួបស្រីថ្លៃ
បន់អស់ទេវតា ប្រាថ្នាឱ្យបានជួបស្រីថ្លៃ 24
Voice 2: O cashew woman
Branches ...
O cashew woman
Branches ...
I wish all the angels to meet this bride
I wish all the angels to meet this bride
24 Famous Khmer folk song “Oh Svay Chanti”, which was covered into German-Khmer song “O Mangobaum” by the band Bayon in 1977.
FM 3.8
Since they gave you a little plastic bag of rice every week, which of course wasn’t enough for me and my siblings, you asked your friend to cross the border to West Berlin, collect imported rice from your relatives in France or the UK and bring them over to the East. Of course you were racialized, walking on streets looking so different, and later on people then associated you with these cheap traffics. At the same time, I knew you earned money that fed me from that, because people wouldn’t allow you to work a “normal” profession. You took objects left by the rapist American GIs and French colonial armies, and “re-branded” and resold them in East Germany. Jeans for 300 DM, enough to sell to the thugs.22 Some of them are “real”, some not; some sold to colonial museums, luckily it was fake then.
Later on, you taught me how to stay strong, stay “independent”, because being so (Selbstsändig) was the only possible reason to stay after 1989. We became a Model Minority 23 without being asked; yet I know extracts from traces of war and trauma are the currency which puts rice (or even Abendbrot) on my plate.
22 Interview with S.S.
23 Term associated with American neoliberal assimilation policies that affected Asian-American communities.
Baci Su Khwan/Bai Sri, Thai-Laos ritual with blessed white ropes and collective prayers, continued in East Germany's student dormitory during the 1990s, photograph, photo by S. S.
Family Khieu’s Cambodian friend gathering in Berlin, photograph, part of mixed-media installation "Identität" from Postmigrant Radio 2022
FM 3.8
Unlike the goddess Isis, who hunted down slaughtered and fragmented bodily pieces of the god Osiris along the river Nile, Mekong holds no original bodies but the leftovers, rituals, and festivities of the dead. All those trying to “recover” something will mostly fail in this mission. Coins thrown inside are forever lost. The act of preservation is not to understand how Western technologies can “save” us, or to find the authentic point of origin, the source of sound, but to embrace the distance and spaces around that allow few “echoes” to spread out.25 Although many patterns we Southeast Asians carry could be toxic, some colonial and some decolonial, our future lies in breaking and reclaiming them, in order to re-sell, re-brand, and re-vision.
25 See: Chude-Sokei, Louis. "When Echoes Return." Transition: An International Review 104 (2011): 76-92.
Sculpture of Vietnamese soldiers protecting the land from the enemies, built in social realist style in 2004. The park was originally built during French colonization, photo by Phuong Phan, 2022
FM 2.4
SAM: The following part, I never said to you, mum:
Well, mum, I actually lied. I am not sure if your mother liked the song.
Your aunt in Sydney told me this: she and your mother went to the movies to see this film in the seventies. Apparently Sra Muoy Keo was about a woman who is left by her husband, and now has no way to feed their baby. She had no choice but to become a bar girl – it’s a remake of a Chinese film. So auntie said that your mother started bawling at the movies. Auntie told me: I said to her, look, we’re at the movies, why on earth are you crying? Your mother said that the movie reminded her of how she’s being cheated on by your dad.
Your mother went to the movies, mum. But she was crying because granddad did her wrong.
I’m so sad.
Your mother left the year the Khmer Rouge took over.
Vanished into thin air, nowhere to be found.
You were a small child then, 6 years old.
Crazy. Love you mum. Let’s sing together.
Trần Minh Đức, Here It Is My Own Arm, 2019, brass
Samboleap Tol, Daddy’s lullaby (2022), digital drawing
FM 3.8
What they often see as untouchable, we see it as fun. White German dudes mansplain to you how racism in East Germany didn’t exist, or maybe isn’t like it is in the West (a racial capitalist world), or how he even went to Vietnam in the 1990s and got to “love” the people there. By doing this, he pins you and your kin onto something like a history whiteboard, with magnets or souvenirs marking its presence, under his ability to “buy” and claim it. It’s not just ignorance, it’s violence – that forbids us to touch the history he and his colonial ancestors have written. “Me born in the 80s, living at a time is like a realist dream. It’s about taking war and military museum yards as a playground, taking cannons and helicopter kinds as merry-go-round, [...] It’s [all] realistically unreal”.26 I know we are the perverse ones here, and I love it. Like a children's playground – and unlike the battleground, the roles assigned to us, be it gender, national, culture, can be temporally questioned, deconstructed, or even broken.
For you, for me, praying and partying has always been two sides of the same coin. We get “serious” in the beginning, and “playful” towards the end. Temples as well, made everywhere your relatives move to, are built to contain first the loud noises, of fights, tears, celebrations, and dog barks, and second the spiritual tranquility, existing side by side. I remember after a few drinks, you started to open up about stories you never told me before; wars, poverty, government propaganda, and some old love affairs you had. I got to know you better in this social setting, rarely in our private domestic time. Your storytelling always took place “by side” – like Trinh T. Minh Ha’s “speaking nearby” – it doesn’t play the upfront dominant role, yet if we have enough sensitivity and ears to listen, it whispers, warns, and gossips.
Documenta 15 thematized “make friends, not art”, which resulted in a garden that your friends helped to build and in which they later brought some seeds from there back home.27 The best part for me was when they all sang karaoke—a sonic intervention—the whole night, until the good German neighbor complained and the police came to shut it down. For the privileged and bourgeois (bürgerlich) Europeans, who love order, discipline and moral social coherence, this sound is annoying, but for us this is the voice, if not of home, then at least of short-term belonging, nostalgic joy, and a space for creation.
I realize building something requires both resources and sensitivity, if not critical thinking, time and patience… as well as playfulness. So then, karaoke happens.
26 Interview with Trần Minh Đức at Leipzig Sphere Radio, “Where is my karaoke? Still, we sing” (September 2022).
27 Referring to Tuan Mami’s Immigrating Garden at Documenta 15 (2022).
FM 1.5
Voice 1: ໃຕ້ທຸງສີແດງແຫ່ງການປະຕິວັດ
ພາຍໃຕ້ການນຳອັນສະຫຼາດສ່ອງໃສ
ຊາດລາວກ້າວໄປ
ປີໃຫມ່ມີໄຊສະຫງ່າງາມ
Voice 2: Under the red flag of the revolution
Under the brilliant leadership
His nation is moving forward
Happy new year 28
28 Happy New Year (ສົ່ງພອນປີໃໝ່), Laos propaganda song written by Bouathong Phunslith (ບົວທອງ ພູນສະລິດ), famously recorded by Chansamai Phoyasith (ຈັນສະໄໝ ໄພຍະສິດ) in 1976. Both were recognized as Lao’s national artists.
Ho Rui An, Ultimate Coin Test China High Speed Rail (2018), 3D Video simulation, courtesy the artist
FM 3.8
I know that you are not my biological mother, but still I respect you so much as a mother.
You bought 600 kg of sugar and sent them to your kin somewhere else,29 as if next week there would be nothing left to eat. Your friend also sent you hundreds of postcards that piled up over ten years in our storage room. We still have no idea where to throw them away. This abundance of objects and memories, now looking back, resembles what we used to have and exchange before it all started; this complicated and violent era. In retrospect, the abundance of them is supposed to substitute the loss of what is to come. Colonial conquest, civil war, European assimilation, you name it. Therefore, what you gave to your neighbors most of the time returned to you in any other form, or in many cases, returned even after your lifetime. “Karma” perhaps. It’s a system equally as stable as the 2-Euro coin, standing still inside a Made-in-China train within a certain dystopia.
29 Mentioned in “Sorge 89”, Thanh Nguyen Phuong, Animation short film, Germany 2021.