A Change of Guard

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Tuesday 21 May 2013

I Tested out Three Cambodian Spiritual Practices


 
An entrance to a Cambodian home covered in chalk drawings of crosses and skulls to ward off evil spirits.

By Nathan A. Thompson
http://www.vice.com
 
Vitray's first memories are of the tent cities in Thailand where Cambodian refugees found safety during the killing-fields era of the Khmer Rouge regime. Vitray was one of the lucky ones, as his family eventually managed to emigrate to America—to a Nashville ghetto plighted by bullets and crack cocaine. At 24, he traveled to Phnom Penh to get engaged. A handsome American citizen, he was quite a catch, so his father arranged for him to marry Dain, his pretty second cousin. They were happy for a while. And then the nightmares started.


Vitray was haunted with visions—bloodied bodies, tortured faces, flesh torn from bones. Night after night the horrors returned until he was too terrified to lie down. Then Dain began to change; she suddenly seemed ugly and her serene expression began to look stupid and infuriate Vitray. He began to hate her and the way she affected an American accent and laughed in a high-pitched shatter of tinnitus-inducing screeches.


Vitray was originally betrothed to another Cambodian girl before Dain—a girl who, according to Vitray's family, was pretty angry that she'd been snubbed of the opportunity to marry an American citizen. Vitray’s sister Molika told me the rest of the story: “I never believed in curses until I saw what happened to my brother. He was in love with Dain, and then he suddenly hated her,” she told me. “Then he got sick with Bell's Palsy. To this day, the doctors don’t know the cause, but people told me that the family of the girl he was originally betrothed to put a curse on him.” Read the full article here.

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