{I saw this at a screening put together by the band a couple days before a performance.}

Dengue is a special act. They’re the only group doing revival work that’s genuinely important. It’s been a decade now since I fell in love with Cambodian rock after hearing the first few seconds of Jam 10 Kai Theit (Wait Ten Months More) from the Golden Voice herself, Ros Serey Sothea on The Rough Guide to Psychedelic Cambodia. The melding of East & West sensibilities was perhaps never better than it is on that track though there is a gold mine of little heard songs from that era. 

In recent years, thanks to interest by Americans Paul Wheeler and subsequently John Pirozzi, there has emerged an unthinkable amount of material from the era that was thought as surely lost. There are literally dozens of albums, particularly from Sinn Sisamouth—who is one of the most influential musicians of the 20th century in terms of the density of his impact upon his own culture. To say he was the Khmer Elvis does not even begin to describe his legacy. Elvis may have been called The King, but Sinn Sisamouth was true royalty. 

But it was Sothea who cemented my fascination with Khmer music. The phrasing of her delivery and intonation is positively enchanting. [See “Oun Chong Chub Chor Cha” for an example where her musical choices are allowed to take center stage.]

To get back to the subject—Dengue Fever is a special act—but they are just a simulacra. An important simulacra, yes, but a simulacra nonetheless. This documentary brings this fact to the forefront—that they are in a sense a cultural forgery. Do not for a second think that what they are doing is disrespectful or exploitative. That could not be any further from the truth. For the Khmer that cherish this music, it is deeply moving to see another culture—and especially one so deeply revered as the all-powerful America. If an American visits Cambodia, they will undoubtedly get a thumbs up—America l’aw—when they reveal where they’re from. To be clear Khmer people don’t respect America so much as they’re jealous of it. 

No, Dengue Fever is a forgery only in the sense that it tells the story of a group of Californians wandering through an exotic land. It’s very much not a story of Khmer people, but rather Americans experiencing Khmer people. You see this in the almost obligatory mention of past suffering. To a Khmer person, this wouldn’t be brought up. It would be a fact so universal that to point it out would be odd. But when foreigners visit this country, suffering becomes a black hole from which light cannot escape. Like a black hole, the image is heavily distorted by the time it enters the eye. Khmer people are seen as survivors—as brave, as noble, as inspirational. How can someone who’s gone through so much smile so easily? It’s comments like these that cloud the minds of tourists who seek a parade of suffering so that they can demonstrate how empathetic they are. All too much, the local peoples are objectified as instruments of enlightenment for those passing through. 

When it comes to film, Khmer people are hesitant about the very prospect of seeing a movie from or about Cambodia because it very likely means watching a film about Pol Pot times (as it’s referred to domestically), and they’d just rather not dredge up trauma. The only situation in which people address the topic is because they want to know… why? Why did this happen?

I taught English to the students at the country’s pharmaceutical university. Cambodia has among the very highest rates of PTSD in the world. For one of the assignments they had to write an essay that provided potential solutions to this issue. According to one student, a young woman named Savly, “The diagnostic manual should have a specific category for mental illness associated with mass atrocity. It is not an individual, but a national burden, and the burden will not be lifted until the country at large feels certain that it will not happen again. […] We cannot know that something will not happen again unless we know what caused it.”

Sleepwalking Through the Mekong is thankfully only partially a document of tourism through others’ pain. It mostly sticks to the music, but it does also dabble in the comedy of the language barrier. There were a couple moments that knocked dead the Khmer portion of the audience. But this thing is riding hard on the ambiance provided by its nearly wall-to-wall soundtrack. 

I wondered during the screening how bad a film this would be without the music, but then that’s just not a fair question to ask. That’s like asking if Khmer cuisine would be any good without lemongrass and fish sauce. 

(For anyone interested in this topic, do not miss John Pirozzi’s follow-up Don’t Think I’ve Forgotten)