Arn Chorn-Pond’s speaking, storytelling and music were a roller coaster of emotions that took me through both sadness and laughter, and showed me a truly compassionate and dedicated person’s life story as he spreads hope and awareness through education and music. One of the biggest things that stood out to me from hearing Arn speak was the degree of violence and terror he, and many others went through, during Khmer Rouge rule. It is one thing to sit in the Solarium and watch First They Killed My Father, or read information from slides and something completely different to hear someone tell their own memories. I think the things he said felt so real because of the way he told his stories. He was genuine, compassionate, and honest in a scary way, and his emotions and expressions added levels of depth to his words that I'm having trouble finding ways to try and put into writing. One thing I appreciated was how he didn’t cater his story to his audience, he told everything how it was because it is and was real life and people should know. Telling stories about guns and horror and not being able to cry or you would be killed in a room partially filled with middle schoolers shows just how honest he is willing to be. It is also sad to see just how desensitized he was to these things, because everything he said gave me this feeling of shock, but he spoke of killing and terror like it was the weather.

 

Another big realization I got after the masterclass with him was that Arn isn't simply a piece of Cambodian culture– he is Cambodian culture. Without his returning to Cambodia, and reuniting with other artists and musicians, so much tradition and art would have been lost. I find this situation and the role he is in so unique, because in my mind culture comes from groups of people uniting with their shared qualities, history, and art, but in this case it almost all originates from him. Many times throughout Arn’s story telling he brought up the comparison of guns versus instruments. I think this juxtaposition is a cool way to represent so many different concepts, and levels to what was going on during the Khmer Rouge, showing things like peace and war, oppressors and the oppressed, or freedom and control. I’ve heard of guns being compared to pens, and violence versus education, but this new comparison to music was new to me, and I found it very interesting.