The elegant woman has dainty hands and long, narrow feet. Her limbs are incredibly limber — she easily bends back her fingers until they touch her forearm, her toes at a 90º angle — the results of decades of training and dedication.
Vong Metry, 56, has been a classical dancer since the age of five, an occupation that carried a death sentence after 1975, when Cambodia’s murderous Khmer Rouge regime overran the country, killing almost everyone who was not a farmer or worker.
Centuries of knowledge about Cambodia’s traditional dances, which are full of history and legend, were almost buried with the victims in the Khmer Rouge’s mass graves.
Vong Metry was one of the few survivors of the purge. Today, working with the Apsara Dance Association, she helps to continue the tradition of Cambodia’s dancers.
Back then, she was part of the country’s dance elite, studying and dancing in Cambodia’s royal palace in the 1960s.
“For the Khmer Rouge, our talent was an aesthetic waste,” she said about the horrifying rule of the communists who killed almost 2 million people by torture, executions, starvation and forced labor during their four-year rule.
“When they marched into Phnom Penh, they immediately chased us out of the palace and we ran for our lives,” she said.
At that time, Vong Metry was heavily pregnant and lost her baby after the forced march to the provinces. But there was no time to mourn.
“I had to work like a horse,” she said, wringing her slender hands over the memory.
The dancer pretended to be a farmer while she plowed fields, pulled weeds, planted crops and milked livestock.
Training, even secretly, was out of the question.
“There were Khmer Rouge spies everywhere,” she said, sitting up ramrod straight and rapping her chest. “I carried the music and the dance only here, in my heart.”
Cambodia’s classical dance is also called Apsara, after the nymph-like beauties who, legend says, danced in the palaces of the gods and are immortalized in thousands of carvings at the temples of Angkor Wat.
Srilang, seven, one of Vong Metry’s favorite pupils at the dancing school, wants to become just such a nymph.
Well-behaved, she knelt, only her toes supporting her feet and the soles of her feet upright and perfectly straight.
Vong Metry sat behind her and moved the girl’s arms into the typical graceful movements of the dance.
“More tension,” she murmured in her pupil’s ear again and again and touched her thighs.
DIALOGUE: US president-elect Donald Trump on his Truth Social platform confirmed that he had spoken with Xi, saying ‘the call was a very good one’ for the US and China US president-elect Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) discussed Taiwan, trade, fentanyl and TikTok in a phone call on Friday, just days before Trump heads back to the White House with vows to impose tariffs and other measures on the US’ biggest rival. Despite that, Xi congratulated Trump on his second term and pushed for improved ties, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs said. The call came the same day that the US Supreme Court backed a law banning TikTok unless it is sold by its China-based parent company. “We both attach great importance to interaction, hope for
‘GREAT OPPRTUNITY’: The Paraguayan president made the remarks following Donald Trump’s tapping of several figures with deep Latin America expertise for his Cabinet Paraguay President Santiago Pena called US president-elect Donald Trump’s incoming foreign policy team a “dream come true” as his nation stands to become more relevant in the next US administration. “It’s a great opportunity for us to advance very, very fast in the bilateral agenda on trade, security, rule of law and make Paraguay a much closer ally” to the US, Pena said in an interview in Washington ahead of Trump’s inauguration today. “One of the biggest challenges for Paraguay was that image of an island surrounded by land, a country that was isolated and not many people know about it,”
‘FIGHT TO THE END’: Attacking a court is ‘unprecedented’ in South Korea and those involved would likely face jail time, a South Korean political pundit said Supporters of impeached South Korean President Yoon Suk-yeol yesterday stormed a Seoul court after a judge extended the impeached leader’s detention over his ill-fated attempt to impose martial law. Tens of thousands of people had gathered outside the Seoul Western District Court on Saturday in a show of support for Yoon, who became South Korea’s first sitting head of state to be arrested in a dawn raid last week. After the court extended his detention on Saturday, the president’s supporters smashed windows and doors as they rushed inside the building. Hundreds of police officers charged into the court, arresting dozens and denouncing an
CYBERSCAM: Anne, an interior decorator with mental health problems, spent a year and a half believing she was communicating with Brad Pitt and lost US$855,259 A French woman who revealed on TV how she had lost her life savings to scammers posing as Brad Pitt has faced a wave of online harassment and mockery, leading the interview to be withdrawn on Tuesday. The woman, named as Anne, told the Seven to Eight program on the TF1 channel how she had believed she was in a romantic relationship with the Hollywood star, leading her to divorce her husband and transfer 830,000 euros (US$855,259). The scammers used fake social media and WhatsApp accounts, as well as artificial intelligence image-creating technology to send Anne selfies and other messages
RSS