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: Ly Vanna and Bronwyn Sloan, Picture by : Nathan Dexter. |
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There's
excitement in the air at the small park near Naga
Casino on the Phnom Penh riverfront.
A drum is beating, and without any further announcement,
people flock from everywhere. The Pahee are here,
and Cambodians know that free entertainment is at
hand.
A square has been pegged out, and two monkeys have
been chained to the edge of the square.
Now a man starts to speak, and the crowd are only
too willing to gather in to hear him better, children
on the inside, older people on the outside, a crowd
of curious motodops nearby.
Hai Hok Leng begins working his magic. He draws
a line in the dirt, and with a flourish, stands
back. The line in the dirt has become a live snake.
He moves again, covering the snake, and when the
crowd next catches a glimpse, the snake has become
a duck. A piece of paper becomes money in his hands.
Nearby, one of the watching motodops called Saroeun
shakes his head and laughs.
"I know this isn't true what I am seeing, but
it cheats my eyes and so I must believe it,"
he says. |
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The Leng family car becomes
a mobile sound stage as the family swing into
action selling their potions near Naga Casino
in Phnom Penh.
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"I watch
out for the Pahee and stop to see their show, because
their play always makes me happy and I'm never bored when
I watch them."
A handful of grass is transformed into noodles as Mr Leng
and his 14-year-old son, Chantha, set up a non-stop banter
of jokes and one liners that has the crowd howling with
laughter.
The monkeys, a female with no name and a big male called
Alain Deleon, are brought from their corner seats and
proceed to dance on command and walk about on their hind
legs, towering over the youngest children who have squeezed
through to vantage points at the front of the scrum.
"Have you ever seen anyone fish on land?" Mr
Leng asks the mesmerized crowd, and from nowhere, a catfish
is flopping around in the dust. Pahee is an unofficial
tradition in Cambodia. Although this form of performance
is not one endorsed by the Ministry of Culture and Fine
Arts, it has survived as well as many of the more formal
arts in Cambodia and today is a flourishing business for
the Leng family. Mr Leng learned his trade from his father,
and his father from his father. His wife Saly, 37, married
into the Pahee family, and now she acts as drummer, summoning
the people and keeping the spirits the very superstitious
Pahee family believe reside in the drum happy. |
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Simeon star Alan Deleon gets
ready for another performance for his Pahee troupe
as motodops and neighborhood children wait in
anticipation.
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Before every
performance, she offers gifts of eggs, rice and
candles to the kru, or teacher, spirits of the drum.
The drum is integral. It calls the crowd, and it
is a voice for the spirits. It must never be hit
with both drumsticks at once, or treated with disrespect,
or the crowds may stop coming, too.
Despite their piety, in another country the Leng
family might be labeled snake oil sellers, for there
is a point to all this conjuring and Mr Leng is
just getting warmed up.
"Now ladies and gentlemen, here I have a unique
herbal remedy which is guaranteed to keep your skin
beautiful. Do you have pimples, perhaps a mole?
Any blemish, any skin problem, this powder can correct,"
he cries.
"It cures, it stops, it improves-it smells
very good. Just add lemon juice and apply and all
for 500 riel a packet. And a special offer for the
first person to buy. Just put your hand up and buy
one packet and I will give not one free packet but
two free packets away to you. Three packets for
500 riel."
Within seconds, someone has their hand in the air
and Chantha is collecting money and handing over
traditional cures. There are drops to cure toothache,
powders to prevent |
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stomach ailments,
and solutions to cure ulcers, to rejuvenate the liver,
to stop coughs, colds and high temperatures.
"Don't take alcohol or eat fat or chili when you
take this one," Mr Leng warns a buyer when handing
over a package of herbs for yet another ailment. "And
never administer this one to children under six months
old. It is powerful medicine."
Leng is just 35 years old. Although the group spends a
lot of time in Phnom Penh, they are originally from Kampong
Cham and travel, gypsy-like, wherever the wind blows them.
In a year, they might play in Siem Reap and Battambang,
Ratanakiri, Kratie and even Pailin, taking in every corner
of the Kingdom, family and props inside and monkeys on
the roof of their faithful old Toyota.
"There are a few things you must be able to do to
be a successful Pahee troupe," Mr Leng said.
"They are the components of put (making the audience
believe), por (making the audience happy) and kokhork
(to be able to draw interest from the crowd and maintain
it). The show is to get the audience around to buy the
medicine, so you have to be able to talk non-stop, always
throwing in jokes, proverbs, tricks anything to keep the
people around you."
Sometimes the Hai Hok Leng Pahee Group is hired for shop
openings or other events by proprietors wanting to increase
their sales through the skilled act of the Pahee masters
on the doorstep.
"Our fee is 200,000 riel (about $50) for this service,"
Saly said. "We attract people and get them customers
at the same time. We do this fairly often."
Pahee is classed as "popular entertainment"
by the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts-certainly not
a classical art. There are no bas-relief carvings on the
walls of the Bayon Temple of anything like Pahee, unlike
Khmer dance or even Khmer circus. These are the favored
sons and daughters of Khmer cultural experts. In fact,
because no one studies this strange combination of showmanship
and commerce, no one knows the origins of Pahee. A Ministry
of Culture spokesman said his department had never undertaken
any research on Pahee as it was "not professional".
There is a good chance, however, that it is a Chinese
tradition that has been adopted by Khmers over the centuries.
Many Khmers consider the word "Pahee" to be
a corruption of a Chinese word. Even Mr Leng cannot say
how this brand of street circus hawking evolved. It has
been his family's destiny for so many generations, why
they began and where their art came from has been forgotten.
But the lack of official endorsement doesn't worry Mr
Leng. He makes a good living, and he is proud of the skills
he has acquired to be successful in his job.
"I became a Pahee performer because I love it, and
because it is a business. I live from what I make from
my performances," he said. There are no schools that
teach the mixture of knowledge of traditional medicine,
acrobatics, clowning and conjuring that a Pahee master
must know to be a true exponent of the art. Only Pahee
can hand down their Pahee tradition, so most of them are
family groups.
"We have taken on students before. They pay us about
$200 a year and we teach them the basics but a good student
will be a natural," Saly said.
"There is no way to learn this if you don't have
a natural aptitude and you can tell quite early on who
will be good and who can never be Pahee," she said.
There are perhaps six Pahee groups working in Cambodia
at present. Each has a circuit of provinces and towns
they frequent. The Pahee are wanderers, and do not stay
in one place for long, so many more troupes than this
would begin to take business from the rest and eventually
even kill the trade. The medicine Mr Leng sells is not
Khmer, but made to Chinese recipes.
The Ministry of Health view Pahee performers with more
than a touch of skepticism, but the National Center of
Traditional Medicine, which is a part of the ministry,
is reluctant to condemn it outright.
"I can't tell which traditional medicines are good
or bad because we haven't controlled them yet," administrative
chief of the National Center of Traditional Medicine,
Mr Suon Sam Oeun, said.
"I mean, there is a law in place but we do not have
the resources to enforce it at present. Khmers have used
traditional medicines for a long time. In Angkorian times,
the Neak Poan temple was the seat of traditional medicine.
"I believe in the benefits of traditional medicines,
but some can be potentially dangerous and some people
who are not qualified mix modern medicines together that
should not be mixed, or in bad quantities, and call the
final product a traditional medicine," he said.
"I cannot say if one particular Pahee troupe is good
or bad.
Many Khmers use traditional medicines and believe in them.
They work for us. Occasionally, someone will have a problem
like stomachache or swelling up. That might be bad medicine,
but there are professionals and fakes in every vocation."
Mr Leng swears by his products. He has taken them himself,
he says.
"I believe in what I do. I do not like to say someone
else is good or bad. I can only say for me, but I suppose
there are good Pahee and bad Pahee," he said.
The show is wrapping up. The monkeys are once again chained
to the back of the pickup truck and balance on the roof
of the battered sedan atop the paraphernalia of the Pahee
the ropes, the signs, the medicines, the drum. The crowd
has already drifted away. Tomorrow the Leng family will
head northeast more than 100 kilometers to Kampong Cham
and perform all over again. And the next day?
"The next day depends on business and the way we
feel. We will see," said Mr Leng. |
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Suite
B8, Regency Square, InterContinental Hotel, 294 Mao Tse Toung
Boulevard,
Phnom Penh, Kingdom of Cambodia.
Tel: (855) 23 213 133 Fax: (855) 23 213 033
E-mail:
editor@leisurecambodia.com |
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