Menh Kossony
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It was in March 2015, shortly after my 68th birthday, that I finally met Her Excellency Menh Kossony in her office at the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts in Phnom Penh. She is now Secretary of State in this Ministry.
She was the other dancer I had photographed in the dressing room of the National Theatre in 1974. The famous teacher, Chea Samy, was also in one of those pictures. Menh Kossony was the lead dancer in the Buong Suong dance. She was dazzling, resplendent in her white silk costume adorned with silver decoration.
When the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh, Menh Kossony left the city with everyone else and went to Takhmao, where she spent three months farming and ploughing fields in which dead bodies lay. She lived on one cob of corn per day. Then she was moved to Pursat, where the daily ration was one tin of rice and prohok (fermented fish paste). She spent a month there doing nothing, waiting for orders. Then she was taken to the remote countryside, seventy or eighty kilometres from the main road. She remembers the total darkness and the sound of people crying in the night.
She asked the group leader for rice and was given two tins, with which she cooked bobor (rice soup) for the whole group, using something they used as mosquito repellent for fuel. This repellent was used to protect the cows rather than people, but it burned well. Ironically, one of the cattle knocked the rice pot over... but the group leader was considerate enough to give her two more tins of rice for a second attempt.
The 'New People', those from the cities, the 'impure', the vanquished, had to sleep under the houses with the animals and their dung. She didn't get much sleep.
Eventually she settled in a deserted village where the ration was one tin of rice per day. Those who survived the Khmer Rouge regime often remember in meticulous detail how much food they got in each place and at each time, because it was almost never enough. Kossony was elected chief cook (although she professed to have little experience of cooking) and was responsible for feeding 100 people. She was separated from her mother and her siblings, who were forced to join the "dynamic working youth" group, working on irrigation projects. They died one by one. There were 20,000 in the group, she said, and five survived.
Kossony was promoted to seamstress. She made rags into pouches for carrying torches or serum. Then they put her in charge of the cows. The cows were very difficult to control, and Kossony couldn't bring herself to beat them. The Khmer Rouge showed her how to do it. She built her own straw hut out by the cattle pastures. She gathered kapok and food for drying and salting. Life was not so hard at that time.
Then she was moved to Mong Krusei, near Battambang, for the harvest. After that, there was more dam construction to be done. She ate a fruit similar to tamarind. It was good for getting rid of parasites, but it made your hair fall out too. Her next job was making straw roofing; she had to produce a hundred bundles per day.
After the arrival of the Vietnamese and the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime, Menh Kossony returned to Phnom Penh and resumed her dancing activities for a few years as a performer. In 1981 she became a teacher, and in 1984 a professor at the School of Fine Arts. Then from 1991 she worked at the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts as advisor to Nouth Narang, the Secretary of State for Culture, a position she assumed herself in 2013.