In this intimate exchange between mother and daughter, multidisciplinary designer Malika Leiper speaks with Cambodian politician, rights activist and former Minister for Women’s Affairs, Mu Sochua — who was arrested in Phnom Penh following her involvement in critically located urban protests — about operating between languages, between roles and between worlds.

This conversation is part of KoozArch's issue "Polyglot".

SHUMI BOSE / KOOZ Thank you so much for joining us, Sochua and Malika; thanks for making the time. Malika, may I start by asking you to describe your many-headed practice?

MALIKA LEIPER I would consider myself a generalist. I started my professional career in cooking; I was a chef for five years in New York, managing and cooking in a number of restaurants like Buvette and I Sodi in the West Village. I grew up in Cambodia until I was 18, with Khmer as my first language. One of the ways that I developed my capacity for English was by reading cookbooks on the kitchen floor, understanding ingredients and processes. In a way, I think that led to my love for design.

After cooking, I went back to school to do a masters in Urban Planning at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. I was looking for a profession or a way of being that would open me up to the world — and I actually found it through literature again. I read a number of books, including Maximum City by Suketu Mehta and Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of American Cities — and found myself fascinated with the idea of a city as an organism. In a way, the restaurant world was a microcosm of a city and I wanted to understand how that organism works — and how I might somehow have a role in shaping it.

Now, I’m one half of Stephen Burks Man Made, an industrial design studio working between art, craft and industry. We believe the closer the hand gets to the act of making, the more room there is for innovation. I've always embraced the idea of being a beginner at any stage in life; the early stage of learning a craft or engaging with a community is always really exciting. I like to have a lot of different fires burning at once, to make another cooking analogy.

KOOZ Can I invite you to explain a little bit about your project with your mother, Mu Sochua?

MLAbout three years ago I had the idea of writing a book to document my mother’s story, both for myself and my immediate family. My mother, Mu Sochua, has been arguably the most outspoken political female voice in Cambodia, as well as the Minister of Women's Affairs, an elected member of parliament, and ultimately one of the leading voices of the Cambodian opposition movement for democracy. But her career is much bigger than politics, it’s about Cambodian heritage and culture. So, the bigger project is about how to share this with future generations, whether it’s a book or a podcast or a film or a conversation. These are all different “languages” if you will and I’m searching for opportunities to translate her story into as many languages as possible.

KOOZ Sochua, what's it like doing this project with your daughter? Do you find that you have to switch languages often?

MU SOCHUA Oh yeah, but I've been living with that for 70 years. In a way, I wish I could just stick with one language. My mother was half Chinese, so from the day I was born, I heard Chinese. My father was half Khmer Cambodian, so I heard that too. Then, when I was five years old, they sent me to a preschool that was taught in French. So I had three languages in my head. English came in when I started middle school, in sixth grade. When I was older, I entered a school where we were not allowed to speak Cambodian or Chinese. The French kids would spy on you in the courtyard; if you were heard speaking your own language at school, they put your name on the blackboard.

MLKhmer has its origins in Sanskrit, or actually Pali, which is a more ancient language. Cambodia has strong Hindu and Buddhist influences that come into the language specifically. Do you consider Khmer your mother tongue?

MS Yeah, it's my mother tongue. However, I feel inept — although I can read it very well, I don't write it. I don't really have one language where I feel comfortable. I speak English, but it's really not me, it's not my language. I'm really too much of everything.

MLWhat’s difficult about my mom’s use of language is that it always needs to be interpreted. I can relate; growing up, I had Khmer as my first language until I was maybe five, but school was in English. I never formally studied Khmer, yet it's the language that feels closest to me.. It's frustrating, because you almost can't fully be in your body when you don't have the words, right?

MS Exactly.

KOOZ That said, with multiple languages, there are also different possibilities for understanding and empathy, aren’t there? It allows us to navigate, as we find ourselves in different positions…

MS Well, in Chinese culture, you don't express the inner self. People tend to think that it's your inner thoughts, so we don't want to hear about it! My mother would say, don't tell me all those things. I think that carried on between me and my daughters; Malika, many times you ask me, why are you not talking, Mak? But then if I switch into English or French — then it flows, just like that. My inner self says no, you are Chinese, what are you expressing? How do you allow yourself to just be you in a language where you feel uncomfortable? Of course, now I feel much more comfortable but with my children, I didn't express all these feelings.

MLWhat about other ways of communicating? We talk about body language, or the language of food. Can you describe some of those afternoons when we would cook together, when I was in high school?

MS You always baked bread. It was enough to come home and smell fresh bread in the oven, to know you were here. When you left home at eighteen, I cried for a whole week. Something was gone, and it was the smell of that bread. Of course, you were gone, but I felt it through that smell of bread. We always cooked and talked about cooking.

When I was a child, we grew up with nannies, cooks and domestic staff. At meal times, they would gather together — that was my best moment, because they’d be talking about food. Every season, my mother would pickle things; if it was time for mango, she would pickle the mangoes. If it was the fishing season, she would preserve fish, like anchovies. At times like this, the whole village would come together: you cut things up, another crew cleans; another crew would mix the spices, and another crew would fill up the jars. It is the most beautiful moment. With the love of food comes the love of being together, in space. Everything is done in the courtyard, that space is shared.

ML I had a very similar feeling towards cooking, of wanting to be involved in some activity that was bigger than me. I loved playing a small part in a bigger whole, with all of us working as a team. There’s a word that’s been on my mind, which is democracy. What's the word for democracy in Khmer?

MS Prachea which means people and thepetai, which means governance. So, pracheathepetai.

ML Much like the Greek “democracy”- demo which means the people and kratie which means rule or power. Are there other derivative words that use prachea ?

MS Prachea is always the people. Because of the class system in Cambodia, and then later, the Khmer Rouge regime of genocide, they called it prachea-chun, because chun means…. If prachea means people, chun means the people as a people; the people of a nation. The Khmer Rouge obviously wanted everything to be set on an equal basis, restarting Cambodian society from Year Zero, so they referred to the people as prachea chun — because we are all equal. When Cambodia was still a kingdom, the king would refer to us as prachea reas which means the subject or subordinate of the king. Now we say prochea pul roth.
There is a difference. We are very sensitive. When people say prachea chun, we say no: we don't want to go back to the Khmer Rouge. We are prochea roth which means the people of a nation.

ML Yes, and I’m proud of you, Mak, for making that distinction because language is so crucial to how we define ourselves as a country and to one another.

MS I belonged to the party in opposition; we want to say the nation belongs to us. We are the nation. So we say, prachea roth.The current ruling party wants to return to Khmer Rouge ideas, that’s where they have their origin; they refer to themselves and to the people as prachea chun, like the Khmer Rouge. We say no, we are prachea roth, and we don't separate, because we don't want the people to feel like we are still under the king.

ML For context, can you explain what you're doing now with this new democracy movement? Maybe take us back over the last five years, since you were forced into exile from Cambodia and had to start a new chapter of your career.

MS Oh yes. Every single day, it's about democracy. To start at the beginning, I went back to Cambodia to find my parents — I never found them. But I stayed and learned about Cambodia; I learned about who I am, because I fled when I was 18. Before that, I was living a very sheltered existence; I had a family and household that protected me all the time. We didn't really know what Cambodia was; we would visit our grandparents in the car, with a chauffeur and our parents — but we were never out of the car, walking around the paddy fields. We came from a different background; we were the upper middle class. I didn't realise that before.

When I first returned, I was 30 or 32; because I was looking for my parents, I went everywhere on foot. When I entered politics, I went to campaign; before that, I campaigned for women's rights, against gender-based violence. We took that campaign to every single household in Cambodia — literally, we walked and walked and walked. That's how I learned the beauty of Cambodia — my Cambodia, that I didn't know. And that's how I got so committed. That's who I am now, grounded in the principle of justice, of democracy, of a country that should be ruled by the people — but the upper class and the politicians divide us. You understand that coming from India, right?

KOOZ It's a somewhat parallel history, as you know, and language is very instrumental in the divisions that are pushed forward. There are similar Sanskrit, Hindi and Urdu terms that inform governance; there's also the language that we inherited from our colonisers.

MSIn English, we say “you eat,” right? In Cambodian, there's about ten ways to say you eat, depending on who you talk to! Because of this class system, you have to know where and how to use specific terms, and if you use it wrong, it can mean something quite different. I remember the first time I made a speech as a minister, after I had left Cambodia for quite some time, on Women's Day. There sat the Queen; in front of the queen were the monks; behind the queen, the prime minister, then the cabinet and then the people. In one speech, I had to greet every single one of them in a different way; you bow to the monks, and to the Queen, you touch your head to her feet. To the Prime Minister, you express your respects, while the monk is referred to like a God. My first speech was written in Khmer; I was terrified, but I got through it — and then it gets into your head. You are a different person; you move within a kind of straitjacket, through language. As the minister, I should be thinking about liberation, about women's rights — but not in that situation, not until I finish that speech, with the right forms of address. That's how language determines power.

MLThen after your time as Minister, you joined the Opposition.

MSI started to talk about women's rights, freedom and human rights. We would live with and learn from people in the villages. We would eat their food, drink tea together, spend the night, bathe in the river, fetch the water. All those things, I didn’t learn until I was 40, 45 years old; people would laugh at me when I got self-conscious. But this is really learning about your own culture. You see how people do everything together — bathing, eating, cooking, even going to the toilets. Very early in the morning, everybody went out to do their business, but they went together. There are so many things to learn by living with the people, and at one point you just value those things so much. That's why I fight for democracy. It's a long story about why I do what I do. It's about justice. Justice is about knowing how to bathe with people, with one bucket of water to share.

KOOZ These are incredible stories, but obviously the reason people do these things together is for safety and for mutual support. It's true that if we want to understand the power of people working together, it begins by looking out for each other and creating social, cultural and spatial rituals to work together, right?

MLThis idea of democracy as being one with the people being together makes me think about where we are in the US now, in this horrid, rampant individualism; the idea that no one wants to live together and share resources or look out for someone. Having committed most of your life to democracy, what do you think we can do to resist or to transition to a better situation?

MS I think this is when you need to resist more than ever. It's a continuation of our work, more than ever. We stay with people, we talk to people. We work with people, we inform people and get people to call their senators. Whatever party you support: is it right to spy on your neighbours? Is that right? It's not right. Maybe your neighbors are not the same colour, they’re immigrants. Now you feel more empowered, you can denounce the neighbour as an illegal migrant. That's not right. The law is the law, but our government is trying to get us to spy on one another.

ML I wanted to bring us back to the relationship of democracy to the city, having grown up watching you, out on the campaign trail or leading protests, meeting with constituents. I was very much watching as these extremely powerful moments in Phnom Penh’s urban history unfolded. The first one I really remember was Boeung Kak, the lake. Can you tell us about this story, and how you were involved in it?

MS This was a lake in the middle of the city, Boeung Kak. Boeung means lake; Kak is the name of the lake, and it houses over 2000 families. About 10,000 people live on that lake. It’s like a freshwater basin for the city — when the river overflows, it goes into the lake, and the biodiversity helps to keep the water clean. So it has always been Boeung Kak for years and years and years. Now, this government — that is so greedy, so inhumane — sold the lake to a private real estate company. The new owners filled in the lake and got rid of all these people — that's how we got involved.

At the time we, as members of parliament, went there every single day — to talk about the lake and be with the people there. I learned the ways that the women on the lake resisted police crackdown. They resisted with their songs, with their language, with their creativity. For example, one day they would be dressed in a certain colour. Another day they would come out with lotus flowers. This is when I went to Freedom Park and led the campaign. I learned from the people — using the lotus flowers, getting the children to be part of the campaign — to talk about the effect of losing the lake. What is the effect on the children, the families, the people — not only concentrating on anger against injustice or against the government, but focusing more on the humane part, on the dignity, respect, and pride of the community. If the fight is about hatred or anger, it becomes violent. But if you translate it into what the effect is on human life, on society as a whole, you are now teaching people about dignity. The people on the lake were very poor, but they were dignified people. If we concentrate on the contribution of that community to the city, the fight becomes real. That's what I learned from the people on the lake.

ML That was in 2010, right?

MSAround that time, yeah.

ML At the time, Cambodia still had a free press, so the situation on Boeung Kak Lake was making headlines every day. I'd already left Cambodia for college, and when I came back to visit, the lake was no longer there. The unfortunate reality for people living in rapidly urbanising contexts like Cambodia is this constant confrontation with erasure. Whether that is a building, or an entire neighborhood, or the natural landscape. It’s not to say that progress or development isn’t possible, but more about how we build upon the value and history of what is already there.

MS Of course. If you had good city planners with any sense of ethics and values, that lake could have been turned into something beautiful. You could keep the community, developing housing that fits with how they live on the lake. You could have schools — even floating schools, right? You could have restaurants or hotels, in structures that do not go above the houses of the people. You could train, invest in the people so they can run their own little hotel. You could celebrate the cooking of the women, the fish from the lake. The menu could come from the lake; from the lotus flowers, the lotus leaves, the seeds. The smell of the rice and lotus leaves… , And then with the stems, you can make fibres and weave with this. It's like Inlé lake in Myanmar — it's a whole life. It's a whole community. This lake could have been the pride of Phnom Penh. They destroyed the whole thing. That's why city planning is so important — I don't know if you learn that at Harvard, to do city planning with humanity!

ML Of course I was taught that at Harvard, but I think because of you and where I grew up, I had an intimate understanding of these ideas in practice. I want to bring up one more site, and that's Freedom Park. That started around 2014; can you tell us about that site at that time, and what you were doing in the opposition party?

MS There was an election in 2013 and for sure, we won that one — because we really prepared the people. I'm going to give you a lesson about free, fair and just elections. It's not just about a person who goes to vote — it’s about the process of how to get to vote. First of all, you have to have a birth certificate. If you are poor, you don't have a birth certificate. How do you get a birth certificate? You go to the village chief; if it's a good village chief, they will sign it off, and they will be your witness. Now, if in a corrupt country, you pay the village chief. If the village chief says you're not from my party, so I'm not going to certify you, then your chance of getting a birth certificate and later on an ID card is gone — you're not going to have it. So we had a whole campaign about how to get your ID and our members would take the villagers to get their documents. Later, we learned that after voting, the people did not leave the polling stations; they stayed for the count. They counted the votes at every polling station, and the voters stayed. So there’s the real count, done by the people — then you have the manipulated count, which is how they fixed the numbers. We knew that it had been fixed when they said that we only had 43% of the vote, which gave them the majority. We said, hell no. We won that election.

From June until December, we held this rally opposing the declared victory. They all thought it would be a good idea to give it to Sochua: they asked me to lead this rally. So there we were on this big square we call Freedom Park in the middle of the city, near the lake. We did not even have a stage. We had nothing; we had a little box. I stood at that box and said that we had to do a recount, and we sang our songs of revolution. One guy brought the party flag, which we flew with the flag of Cambodia. From there we kept adding things and more people would come; it got bigger and bigger. We would march until it eventually took over the whole city and people came from all over Cambodia. By then, we could afford to have a real platform. We had a band, we had microphones, and we had people lined up to go up on stage to talk about things.

I was in charge, like a nightclub bouncer. People lined up: there were women, there were children, there were disabled people, there were veterans. Even from the opposition, people who disagreed with us: those are the real people. I would say, okay, Uncle: what are you going to talk about? I want to talk about how to kill that guy. I’d say oh yeah? Well, you can't go up there, not until you have another story, then you can get on. He’d say, How about that little kid, how come he’s up there? Well, he has a poem. Do you have a poem? It was so, so, so much fun. It was really democracy on that stage, right? Every day we’d serve 20,000 lunch boxes. In the morning we had hot buns, we had baguettes. At five in the morning we had prayers. The monks were always supportive. We learned how to meditate; we even showed the film Gandhi; we had to learn non violence and control the crowd. We never had violence. Then came the workers: thousands of workers were on strike because they wanted a raise in the minimum wage. They joined us, and the crowd grew to about half a million in the middle of the city; each little province controlling itself.

To cut a very long story short, it went on and on until they cracked down, until they brought the police and the tanks. That was a massacre. So we stopped from January 2014 and Freedom Park became so quiet. Some people said, auntie, let's go back to the square. So I went back to the square with them; we brought flowers, we brought the lotus, we brought everything that I learned from trying to save Boeung Kak. The lake community and the monks came again. That was in June, when they arrested me and put me in jail. After that, they surrounded the park with anti-riot barbed wire and big, armoured trucks. Those things can crush you. All this equipment is from China.

The people told me, the only person who can stand up there for us is you. This is the way it is: in the village, I can be very vulnerable. I might feel unprepared, but I am with the people. But when there is trouble, they say, it's you. You are the leader. You go out there. Even now it is really split; I have to always be ready. When am I the mother, the little sister, the big sister, the auntie — and when am I ‘your Excellency’?

ML “Your Excellency” is the title you were given as Minister of Women’s Affairs, right? And people continue to call you that out of respect, even after you left the position to join the opposition movement.

KOOZ So were you able to reclaim the square?

MS We reclaimed the square, but we went to jail. Many people were injured or brutalised by the mob or by the police, but we fought back. Today, I am sentenced to 47 years on charges of insurrection for that day at Freedom Park — and I can't go back to Cambodia. I'm labeled as one of the terrorists.

KOOZ Again, a term that is applied rather indiscriminately, but which holds so much power. You've been talking about one site that was filled — or rather, erased — and another site that was occupied and seized. Now, due to actions on those particular sites, you are forcibly displaced and unable to return. Moving towards hope: could you share some words or phrases that have been especially useful, resonant or instructive for you both?

ML My immediate thoughts are about a particular campaign, back when my mom was Minister of Women's Affairs. There's a proverb in Cambodia which roughly translates as: if man is a piece of gold, a woman is a piece of white cloth. The message being that a man, in Cambodian society, can do no wrong; the woman’s job is to maintain her purity, but also to wipe clean any blemishes from this invaluable male member of society. But when you were Minister, Mak, you began a campaign called Neary Rattanak, where you changed that proverb to say: that men are a piece of gold and women are precious gems. That was a beautiful example of the power of language as a form of resistance, reclaiming a sense of positivity. Part of what I recognise in your career, and what I admire so much, is your ability to take violent, negative or dark times and transcend that, always finding the beauty that still pervades what we do and why we do it. Tell us about Neary Rattanak.

MS Let’s say that okay, men are gold. It's like a part of the ring, the setting. But you need that precious gem to complete the ring, right? Whether that is crystal, diamond, ruby or sapphire. We campaigned everywhere — and when I say campaign, I mean that we went together, always together. Even people who were not from my party, like the prime minister, said she's right. This is about our precious gems. That name Neary Rattanak is still used for the National Programme for Women’s Empowerment in Cambodia, and it's a name for the fight against gender violence. Gender violence means human trafficking, domestic violence, sexual abuse, marital rape. And then the value of women who have to sell their bodies so that they can raise their children, they make a daily income. They call them prostitutes; we say they are sex workers. So I went to work with them at night, while I was campaigning for women’s rights. I went to karaoke, I would go to brothels.

You see, ‘Precious Gems’ is not just the campaign name. It's about giving value to who you are. If society devalues women like dirt, whose responsibility is it, whose fault is it? How do you fix it? With the law, the system, with opportunities; by changing culture, changing the minds of the people. Women cannot do it alone. Men have to be with us. The whole culture has to change.

There is one thing I want to end with, which is how I feel about the sense of space. When Malika came here, to my cabin in Rhode Island, she opened up the whole space —

ML She is referring to the house in Rhode Island where she's living now, which I helped to renovate when she was exiled from Cambodia and came to the US.

MS When you go to the village, they don't have separate rooms. Most spaces are communal. It’s a community; maybe you don't have privacy, but you have that sense of taking care of each other. If you live in closed rooms, you can't breathe. So for me, I want space, open space. I fight for that space, I fight for justice. It's about true freedom of space, of the ocean and water, the river — and the lake.

MLThank you so much, Mak, it's been such a joy to build space with you and to have this opportunity to speak together, from the heart.

KOOZ I'm glad it felt that way. Thank you both so much.

Bios

Malika Leiper is director of cultural affairs at the industrial design practice Stephen Burks Man Made. Originally from Cambodia, she is interested in the culture of design across various disciplines with a particular focus on emergent contexts in Southeast Asia. After completing her master’s in urban planning at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, she consulted with restaurants, non-profits, local governments, and museums on research and strategies to build creative cultural capacity, often through public programming and community engagement. She approaches design as a collaborative process of translating knowledge and insights from different worlds into one common language through technical, moral and utopian applications. Most recently, Malika has contributed to Disegno Journal #34 as a Het Nieuwe Instituut inaugural emerging writing fellow with her first published short story, When The Words Don't Exist.

Mu Sochua has dedicated her life to advancing women’s rights and democracy in Southeast Asia, driven by the personal tragedy of losing her parents during the Khmer Rouge genocide. During her time as Cambodia’s Minister of Women and Veterans Affairs, she mobilised 12,000 women to run in commune elections resulting in over 900 being elected, ushering in a new generation of female leadership in Cambodia. She also authored the Domestic Violence Law, negotiated an agreement with Thailand to curtail human trafficking in Southeast Asia and allow Cambodian women trafficked as sex slaves to return home instead of being jailed as criminals. Now in exile in the US after fleeing large-scale opposition crackdowns in 2017, Sochua is president of the Khmer Movement for Democracy (KMD), a pro-democracy movement working with women and young people to help educate the diaspora about civic rights, finding their voice, and fighting for a better Cambodia.

Shumi Bose is chief editor at KoozArch. She is an educator, curator and editor in the field of architecture and architectural history. Shumi is a Senior Lecturer in architectural history at Central Saint Martins and also teaches at the Royal College of Art, the Architectural Association and the School of Architecture at Syracuse University in London. She has curated widely, including exhibitions at the Venice Biennale of Architecture, the Victoria and Albert Museum and the Royal Institute of British Architects. In 2020 she founded Holdspace, a digital platform for extracurricular discussions in architectural education, and currently serves as trustee for the Architecture Foundation.