Sarrut, 34

Madison, Wisconsin | April 8th, 2021

Date of interview: July 13th, 2020

What is your ethnicity? Do you also know if you are also part of Chinese, Vietnamese, Cham, Thai, French…? 

Well, I say I'm Khmer. With the breakdown of my family’s side, let's say my mom, I know my mom's great grandpa is Chinese. He actually moved to Cambodia and fell in love with a Cambodian woman, and then the kind of lineage started from there. My dad and his family have always been in Cambodia. 

How connected do you feel to Khmer culture?

Growing up in America, in Madison I think society tried to really preserve the Cambodian culture. So, I say I was forced into ruom-ing/រាំ-ing (dancing), robam/របាំ (dance), and my dad was actually a lakorn star from back in Cambodia. That’s why we were forced, so we got into that too. We also kind of made some waves because we were like the only girls doing robam/របាំ (dance) and lakorn stuff, or stick fighting parts. Normally there are girls in here but they're the drama opera singers, but we liked the stick fighting part and so my dad taught us that. So growing up, we were pretty into Khmer culture; we went to temples weekly, and we celebrated New Years quite a bit and all that. Growing up though as we got older, I feel like in Madison, the Cambodian community weakened off in trying to preserve it, and I don't know if it's funding or if people just got exhausted, so I kind of trickled away from Cambodian tradition‒besides food because my mom still makes amazing food, thank goodness. The cool thing, though, is that my generation seems to be trying to stir that back up. There's a lot of people I know that are now working at the temple and working with other organizations that are keeping the tradition alive. I see now more young kids that are dancing robam/របាំ. They actually have a robam/របាំ school, which we didn’t; we did all that voluntarily back in the days like in somebody's basement. It was all volunteer. This just seems like in order to get it going still, the generation decided, “let's make it more formal, make it organized, give the kids a little more incentives,” because‒I don't know what it is about being American, it just seems like we need some sort of gratification or something to do these things because extra work, right? I'm still not really part of it, but I'm proud that the Madison Cambodian community is starting back up and if anything even more in a better fashion than when I grew up.

Can you describe your skin color?

I say caramel. Of course, I change throughout the season. I’m way light during the winter; my wife says I'm white mocha during the winter, and when I'm in summer that I'm like mocha-mocha. But I say on average, I’m like caramel.

How would you say others would describe your skin color, especially Cambodians?

They say I'm white. Like, “Oh, she's white; she's very light skin.” They would just say I'm white. They say saw/ស (white), “Oh, a nih saw nah/អានេះសណាស់ (this one’s so white).” Then my sister, she's darker, so they straight up say that she's khmao/ខ្មៅ (black).

Where do you think your skin, hair and features come from? 

I look really identical to my mom and my mom, she has some Chinese in her lineage, and definitely the light skin comes from her side than my dad’s. My mom's super light and my dad is super dark, so it's funny and that's how we kind of divvy up the siblings too just by our skin tone. [If] you’re light, we would say we're more from mom's side. My facial features and everything are straight up like my mom. I would say my hair though is more like my dad just because he's getting really thin hair and his hair curls a bit at different times of the day or year, length and humidity, it seems like my hair responds the same way as his than versus my mom's full head of hair.

How do you feel about your skin color?

When I don't think about it, I do like my tan and my tan abilities that I get, how I get this nice brown in the summer, and I don't burn. But when I think outside a little bit more deeper, I have a hard time with it because people just say I’m light skin and therefore it's beautiful, but also growing up with the people saying, “She's beautiful ‘cause she's light skin.” As a kid it always made me feel uncomfortable because again, you kind of get paraded around or you’re the token child. When guests come in, they shove you to the guests and I have to sit among them and be around strangers all this time. They were allowed to pinch my cheek, give me a little kiss on my cheeks, and all that stuff. They expected me to just be around a ton of strangers and it was always awkward for me when I was a kid growing up, so I wasn't comfortable with the compliments, and then where it was like “Oh she's beautiful, but she has a horrible smile.” That's with the adults in Cambodia, but [with] the Cambodian society, I always wanted to run away because I didn't want that awkward feeling because I know they're like, “Oh she's light skin, let me do whatever and try to make her prettier.” 

Amongst my peers‒being light skin, I kind of felt like I was being hated on. My sisters, some of them being darker, they're like, “Everybody loves you because you're light skin,” I'm like, “Oh, okay.” Then some of my friends too, they do the same thing because of what they see. Because they’re darker, they get the whole meaner comments and they would say the same like my older sister where they’re like, “She has beautiful features, but she's dark,” like womp womp, for some reason. So, of course she has that in her head somehow. I've never said that to her, but she has that against me as if I say it. It wasn't comfortable for me growing up either, so for me, I like my skin tone when I'm out in the sun and I know I don't burn, so I like that for myself, but then I do get uncomfortable about the beauty behind it.

Are you the darkest, lightest, or middle tone in your family? Could you speak more about that?

I’m middle tone in my family. My brother is lighter and my sisters are darker. Somehow growing up, my darkest sister ended up getting lighter, so now she has lighter tones. She's not brown, she's more olive than anything else. So of course, she's getting those compliments and stuff from the Cambodian adults now too, and she's like, “Oh, now I see.” But for me and my family, our parents didn't choose any different, like I said, the siblings were the ones who we treated each other differently just because it was learned behavior. We observe and people love you more because of your skin, and then also the nicknames that they gave my older sister for being darker, it’s just pretty horrible. Growing up within the family, [from] my parents, there wasn't much, but from our siblings, there was a little bit more of an issue.

Where are you on that spectrum of skin color with respect to the rest of Cambodia?

Having been there, I feel like I'm actually still in the middle spectrum. We visit family and we've had family from both sides of the super poor to pretty wealthy where they actually have their own mansion and servants. It's kind of interesting how the people with [darker] skin tones‒how they're treated like the poor community versus the wealthy community. Overall, I scale more on the middle side, and then if I want to go a little bit further, my family from the poor side, they’re darker so they still say, “Oh man, she's beautiful because she's light skin.” I had very light skin cousins and when we went out to the market, they would wear long sleeves and bonnets to do everything to preserve their light skinness. No suntan or anything, they don't want to do that. Even though it’s 104 degrees, they're still wearing long sleeves, I'm wearing a tank top, and then our cousin tried to wear a sleeveless, and her husband and everybody else started yelling at her. “What do you think you're doing?” She's like, “It's hot,” and they're like, “Go put on clothes, you're naked.” I'm like, “Oh, am I naked?” but they're like, “Oh, you're fine,” I guess ‘cause I'm American, I'm not really Cambodian then, so she had to run back and put on. They wear like sweatshirts, not even a thin long sleeve, like it's sweatshirts, so I'm like, “That's crazy.” 

So, that's an example that I noticed. I don’t know, it could be the woman thing to wear, you know, the man thing to tell her what to do. I feel like Cambodians still like very old school traditions because the women were all in the kitchen cooking, serving, every time, and the guys were just chilling drinking beer. Then they get the whole piece set up in front of them and the women still help break down food for them, even peeling, breaking meat and all that. Then they were doing the same thing to us and I felt horrible. I'm like, “Oh my God, let me help, “ and they're like, “No, no,” because I'm the guest. It’d be disrespectful for their family if I did something that they're supposed to be doing; it’s their job or whatever. So again, that's on the poor side. Going over to my wealthy cousins or aunts, almost all of them were lighter skin. I did not see many dark people or darker on the spectrum. I am kind of more the darker one once we get over there. For them, being wealthy and them having servants, the servants are darker. It kind of blows my mind how old school or how that is still around. They have darker servants, and a lot of the people in that neighborhood were just lighter skin, and they lived kind of more western style I would say. There wasn't the whole women need to do this, women need to do that; they were more able to have a more free mind.

Do you see people who look like you in any other forms of Cambodian media?

I never really thought about it. Also the exposure that I really had more of is just some of the lakorn videos that we used to look up. I don't really follow any news media or look up any music videos or things like that, but the media I’m used to probably something older from back when I was more in lakorn and robam because we were trying to learn more moves and all that. In that sense, these performers were pristine white lights. They put on the extra makeup to make them even lighter, or I think they did. In that sense, I didn't feel like I was represented at all because it just seemed like they're these godlike performers. We always just felt like we're just kids imitating them; we're never going to be those dancers. So growing up being a robam and lakorn dancer, I was like, “I don't feel like I'll ever get to that level,” because I wasn't thinking I was represented in that sense; I didn't really think about it because that's just the automatic feeling I had of where I'm like “Oh my god, these are amazing godlike features. I'll never get there.”

If you were to be casted in Cambodian media, what role would you be casted as, not meaning what would you like to play as, but what would the Cambodian media producers put you as and what do you think your lines would be?

They will probably put me as the tuor/តួ (main actor) girl’s friend, maybe servant or something, but maybe someone whose role to be like, “You’re okay, you're super beautiful and he'll love you eventually,” or whenever we're talking some other type of sense to it. That's probably the role that I would get in those Khmer movies. The main actors are always, again, super light skin. And that’s the best role, otherwise I'm gonna be probably a bystander where they went shopping and I just did a transaction.

Why is it, or why do you think that elite spaces in Cambodia are significantly lighter?

I don't know how Cambodia's mindset got there. I don't know if it has to do with lighter skin people coming in to colonize or always been in the rulership. I know we had a lot of Chinese influences too which we tend to think they have lighter skin.  To me, even the American culture is that light skin has always had a more powerful or superior role, and dark skin continued to get suppressed. I know growing up, my parents are like, “You'll do great because you're light skin. You're gonna sleep well; you’ll actually have a bed to sleep on,” versus dark skin: “You're gonna work out in the field all day; you're probably sleeping on the floor.” That was their mindset and they would tell us “You're gonna do well because you're light.” That's it. Not because I have any skill set, or anything like that; it was just ingrained in them. At least, I'm thankful to have grown up here where I was allowed to question that and allow myself to be uncomfortable, and think about it a little bit more. I feel like over there, you just follow things because that's just how it is and that's the way it is. Especially being a woman, you cannot question shit, otherwise you're gonna be super disrespectful or seen as some unmeritable woman or something like that. Women tend to be the change, so I think that might be why. Maybe history, they seem lighter being in power, but things won't change because women don't have a voice.

How would you say that colorism affects your life?

It’s affected me quite a bit. Like I said earlier how being light skin and but yet having crooked teeth, it definitely created that shy bordered child and I grew up with that for a long time. Throughout high school even, it took me a while to break out of my shell. Even now when someone’s complimenting and saying I’m beautiful, I still get the shudders. It's kind of funny that you're talking about this now because there's so many apps or programs where you get to create your own avatar and it really makes me think about like, “I know I have Asian eyes, I'm like this, not that Asian, like this angle…” It’s so interesting how that is spelled out a lot and all these apps now, but I don't think the facial features and my hair really affected me too much. Mainly it’s my skin tone and the word “beautiful” really had an impact on me, and people would think like, “Oh, you should be used to taking compliments and all this stuff.” I really shudder from it because it's not a real compliment; it's just because my skin tone’s light and you just think [that’s] beautiful, so that word is still hard for me to even say. 

Unfortunately, it affected me quite a bit. The interesting thing is that because of these avatars and somehow these things are coming up more that I've been able to get past it a bit. I'm 34 now; I'm just now getting over that kind of traumatization, if you could call it traumatization. As a kid growing up, I was around Cambodian culture quite a bit, and 34, I'm just now kind of able to get over what beautiful meant and what beautiful could actually mean outside from what I learned: “Oh, beautiful is just light skin because that's how the Cambodians thought.” There's so much more to it, and now I can kind of say I am beautiful outside, not just because I'm light skin but because of other things about me even if it’s “I love my eyes, I do like my eyes,” but then there's the inside part too that’s beautiful too. It took me until now to really develop my own definition of beautiful, and get past what I grew up thinking what beautiful was because I was shunning from it.

“It took me until now to really develop my own definition of beautiful, and get past what I grew up thinking what beautiful was because I was shunning from it.”

Have you ever been offered any skin lightening/bleaching products? Have you used those products? How long? What were your thoughts about it?

I've never been offered those products. It could be just because I kind of stepped away and stopped trying to be around the Cambodian society because of that. But growing up, I know my mom, and she's lighter skinned than me, she got shoved that stuff in her face quite a bit and she would buy it and a lot of them. I don't recall what they said, I think a lot of them were in Chinese, but they would be off her skin tone by like five degrees. She's already light, and they were just like, “You need to get lighter.” Back then we had more Cambodian door-to-door salespeople, so they're selling rugs, they're selling rice cookers, they're selling all this stuff, we had a lot of door-to-door Cambodian salesmen. I think most of them were from Chicago and they would travel up to the different Cambodian neighborhoods in Wisconsin and Minnesota, and there's this one lady that I know, we have quite a few, but there's this one lady who was the meanest, meanest lady ever who says the most blatant awful thing that Cambodian people could say to each other, and she sells. I was like, “How are you letting this happen to you, mom?” This lady would come and throw out all her products, and then she's like “You think you're light? No. You need to make yourself lighter. This is what is going to make you beautiful. You see that little dot on your face? That's ugly.” This, that. She would use curse words, and my mom bought a lot of shit from her. It's mainly my mom that I was exposed to who was somebody who really wanted to get the lighter makeup. It might be [because] I don't like to wear makeup at all like I refuse because all the makeup is like this fake whiter white, like that looks creepy, so no. But my mom, she would have those crazy makeup but I don't know what they say; they're definitely in Chinese.

What about Cambodians who are much lighter than you, what kind of jobs were they doing?

See, I think it has to do with region because when we checked into hotels, like when we were in Battambang and Siem Reap. Like in Battambang, when we checked in with the front desk person, most of them were more on the darker spectrum. Then when we went to Siem Reap and then‒my wealthy family’s side is from Takeo, it's a few hours from Phnom Penh. In Takeo, Phnom Penh, and Siem Reap, I feel like I saw when I checked in hotels, they were lighter skinned, again like my skin would be the darkest and then lighter from there. So, I think it has to do more with regions than roles within the regions. 

What about people who are darker, what kind of jobs do you see them working?

Like I said, my dad's side, because he’s in Battambang, all the family brought in their own talents. They’re kind of a little more darker, so they did more automobile work, the hands on [work], and the skilled type service. My lighter skinned cousins from there, they actually did hair and makeup. In Takeo, but again these are my wealthy cousins, everybody owned their own business, they just ran it, and then they changed their mind and then they opened another business. They're lighter skin on that side. 

How do you think your life would have been if you were darker? If you had a smaller slender nose. How would your relationship with your family be like?

My oldest sister actually has that exact same feature growing up. She was darker and she actually had the slender nose. So knowing how they treated her–and she was skinnier. 

But growing up, knowing some of the names they gave her, not my family but the kids and the Cambodian society, it's kind of tough. Definitely would not enjoy that as much. 

You mentioned the outside world would be a little different, so how would other Cambodians in the community treat you if you were just darker?

If I was just darker, I’d probably get less attention and if I still had my crooked teeth I would really get less attention. I might get the awful ugly name calls. They gave me the name calls for having crooked teeth, so that mixed [with being dark]‒you know how they can combine names, like my sister being skinny and dark, they call her svet kdet tonsay/ស្វិតក្ដិតទន្សាយ (so skinny that your anus resembles a rabbit’s anus). But it's like, “What the hell? What does that even mean?” but it was in a negative context so we took it as an insult. Even though I had buck teeth, they called me me kahop/មីកាហុប (gap toothed), so I could only imagine they would add some stuff to that too just because I'm dark skinned.

What about your relationship with members of the opposite gender within Cambodian societies? It doesn't necessarily have to be in a romantic situation.

I had an arranged marriage growing up. My parents wanted me to marry their friend’s son, and then I'm like, “Out of all your kids, it had to be me,” because of course, I'm the token light child. And so around that family, I had to be the perfect princess type shit, and whenever they came over, I had to serve them. I guess around the dad figure, I had to pretend like I'm his daughter pretty much like I served him, speak to him, and act like I'm this perfect child who’s also trying to act like an adult. But, he did treat me as if I was his daughter too, so that’s my relationship with the opposite gender but it's always like “I gotta be the traditional good girl, be in the kitchen, listen respectfully, bow my head and all that shit.” I had to be perfect around him, so that that's my impression.

How old were you when you were put into this arranged marriage?

I was aware about it when I was like five, but I've always had this arranged marriage, I guess, because my older sister would tell me about it. I think it was about five and that family was coming to visit us, and my sister's like “Is it that guy who gives Sarrut money?” I'm like, “What? What guy gives me money? I want money.” She's like, “Yeah, there's this guy who just gives you money, and then you just sit with him,” which I'm like, “Okay, that's great.” But, I was arranged with his son. I don't know when that actually happened, but my first time being aware about it I was really young. It broke off because I think I was 13, and they moved into our neighborhood, and I kind of rebelled against a lot of the Cambodian traditions just because I was just against a lot of it. I had Black friends, and there was a guy that I was interested in and so I walked around a neighborhood with Black friends, I held hands with one of the Black guys, and they saw that, and was like “Your daughter was holding hands with a Black guy; we don't want her anymore.” So that's how that ended, and I was like, “Yes!”

You said you were five and you also mentioned that you think that you were put in the arranged marriage because you were the lightest out of your siblings. Would this mean that you were conceptualized as even the lightest child, even when you were that young? 

Yeah, I would believe so. It's interesting too because by that time, my parents had four kids, my oldest is again, she was dark fresh out of the womb, she's three years older; then my brother, can’t get married with him; and then my other sister came out just a year after and she was darker too. 

How do you think your life would be different if both of your parents were light Cambodians. Thinking about the inherited privilege that they would have gotten, and that would have shaped your life, so what kind of education would you have? What kind of house would you be living in and where would you be located? 

Unfortunately, if both of my parents were very light skin, our family would have been more well off just seeing how my light skinned aunt on my dad side‒they said if you're lighter, you have a better chance of some rich guy marrying you, and that's what she got. And my dad being dark, he worked in the lakorn, in the farms, and ended up being in the army. My mom being light, he got to choose her. I don't know how that really works too, but my mom also came from the poor side of the countryside, so the fact that she was just being picked to be married was a freaking honor because my mom's sister, who was a little bit darker, never had a husband. 

So just going off of those observations, I would imagine that my parents would be really well off just from being light skinned. They’d probably end up moving to those more wealthy cities, probably Phnom Penh or Takeo too. It seems like the lighter skin gets to live as more privileged and get more opportunities, like my cousin got Western schooling and they seem smarter; they get to break out of the tradition and all that stuff. Unfortunately, it seems it takes light skin for that kind of lifestyle, and I think that's where we would have been if both my parents were light.

Knowing that this will be eventually on a public website, is it anything that you would like to add or anything you forgot to say? Or just anything you remembered or just in general what you would like to say to the audience reading this or to the Cambodian community in general?

I just wish for the Cambodian society, and any other society, to just break out of this whole colorism like light’s better, dark’s not or whatever it is because for me growing up, I never saw it as white was better because I felt that there are bad things that happen for being beautiful too. If everybody could just not be hard on each other for the different skin tones. We all have problems, and skin color should not be of them. If we could stop doing that stuff, and actually learn the actual beauty from inside and people's characters, the world would be so different.