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October 29, 2009
"Samnang"
It's fascinating what you learn from casual conversations. Today I learned that one of the elder teachers here at ELSU completely fabricated his name, birthdate, and age after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. He shed the Chinese name he'd had all his life and took on a new Cambodian one, and became five years younger, all with one stroke of a pen. He did it because otherwise he wouldn't be accepted by the teacher training program he wanted to get into. He also devised new names and birthdays for his parents, who speak mainly Chinese. He could do this easily because there were no records in 1980. The last real census had been done in the mid-1960s, and the government had a fundamental problem of not knowing exactly who was living or dead, or even who had been living before the KR period. (That's one of the reasons that estimates of deaths during the KR period vary). Just as land was up for grabs, so was identity. While Samnang is a somewhat extreme case, most people over thirty have no idea what their real birthday is, so they just pick a day.
It's funny: this is the kind of story you'd expect to hear in some academic work about identity in the early modern period, and yet here Samnang is, cracking jokes about when people ask his parents how old they are or what their names are, they say "Ask my son."
Posted by flynn at October 29, 2009 12:35 AM
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or hollywood.
Posted by: Barbara sweet at November 6, 2009 8:36 PM