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.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver