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I grew up living hand to mouth in Cambodia. I secretly enrolled in the circus when I was 13, and it became my lifeline out of poverty.
17.09.2023 - 13:49 / insider.com
This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with 31-year-old circus artist Kong Viban, a performer at Phare, the Cambodian Circus . The show performs regularly in Siem Reap and will be on tour in New York in December .
I never thought that I'd become a professional circus artist. But juggling and performing gravity-defying acts for Phare, the Cambodian Circus, has not only brought me joy and fulfillment, it has also helped me make a living. It has become my passport to the world.
It's been an unlikely journey. I was born in 1993 in Battambang, in the northwest of Cambodia. I was the second of four kids. My parents, siblings, and I lived with our grandparents, all of us in a small house on one plot of land.
Growing up, my family lived a hand-to-mouth existence. My grandparents were farmers, my mother sold fish in the market, and my father hawked ice cream around town. All of them had survived the Khmer Rouge but never talked about it. It's likely that they had spent time in refugee camps because most families in our village had come from the same camps.
Whatever my parents made for the day was only enough for that day.
I attended state school when I was eight. When classes were out, my friends and I would go around town collecting trash to make some money. We picked up empty glass bottles, used shampoo bottles, scraps of corrugated iron roofing, basically anything that could be sold for recycling. After we'd split the day's take, I'd end up with about 300 riel, or 7 cents by today's exchange. Back then, 500 riel could get you a serving of bai sach chrouk, or pork and rice, and 200 riel, could get you a bowl of hot porridge.
Some days after school I would help look after the cows. I didn't have a dream back then; all I cared about was my family's survival from day to day. The future wasn't something I really thought of.
When I was 13, my mom moved my older brother and me from the state school to Phare Ponleu Selpak, an arts school that had also begun to offer general subjects. The school opened in Battambang in 1994, but traces its roots back to the 1980s at a refugee camp on the Thai border after the Khmer Rouge regime had devastated Cambodia. In the camp, a French humanitarian, Veronique Decrop, taught children art as a form of therapy.
It was close to our home, it was free, and I could choose what art form to study. A friend of mine was enrolled in the circus arts program, and I really enjoyed jumping from a high point onto a soft mattress, so without telling my mom I enrolled as well.
During my second year of training, I started performing in front of an audience. I finally got picked to perform at the show regularly held in the school's big top. I was nervous at first, but then I
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