Creator
Arn Chorn-Pond
Musician, teacher and human rights advocate who founded Cambodian Living Arts.
Arn Chorn-Pond is a Cambodian musician and human rights advocate who survived the Khmer Rouge years as a child by playing music. In 1998 he founded the organization that became Cambodian Living Arts.[1][2]
Early life
He was nine years old when the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975.[1][3] He has said that his parents owned an opera company and that he was separated from his family at about that age.[4] The Boston Globe places the loss of his family in a Khmer Rouge camp set up in the temple where they had prayed, and gives 60 survivors among the 500 children held there.[5]
The Khmer Rouge gave him a flute and ordered him to play revolutionary songs, and music kept him alive.[1][3] In his own account he also played the khim, the Khmer hammered dulcimer.[4] He was later made a Khmer Rouge soldier, escaped into the jungle and reached the Thai border in 1980.[1][4][3]
In the United States
Rev. Peter L. Pond, an American, brought him from the border to New Hampshire in 1980, at 12, and adopted him along with 15 other Cambodian children.[3][4] In 1984 he spoke about the Khmer Rouge years at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York.[1][2]
He studied at Brown University and left after two years to found Children of War, an organization for young people affected by conflict. By 1988 he was touring with Amnesty International's Human Rights Now! concerts. He later completed his degree at Providence College.[3] In Providence he cofounded the Southeast Asian Big Brother/Big Sister Association and founded Peace Makers for troubled teens. In 2000 he was youth program coordinator for the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association in Lowell, Massachusetts.[5]
Cambodian Living Arts
In 1993 he returned to Cambodia and founded Cambodian Volunteers for Community Development.[5] In 1998 he founded the Cambodian Master Performers Program, which paired five students with surviving master artists.[2][6] In 2003 he described splitting his time between the United States and Cambodia.[7] The program took the name Cambodian Living Arts in 2009.[6]
Cambodian Living Arts describes him as its founder and as the founder of Living Arts International, and as its spokesperson. He is closely involved with the Khmer Magic Music Bus, which brings master musicians to perform in rural villages.[2][3] The Arn Chorn-Pond Living Arts Scholarship is named for him.[3]
Awards
He received the Reebok Human Rights Award, the Amnesty International Human Rights Award in 1991, the Kohl International Peace Prize in 1993 and the Anne Frank Human Spirit Award in 1996.[5] Cambodian Living Arts gives 1988 for the Reebok award.[2]
In books and film
He is the subject of the documentary The Flute Player by Jocelyn Glatzer, and his childhood is the basis of the novel Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick.[7][1]
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 Seth Mydans, "From the Killing Fields", review of Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick, The New York Times (May 11, 2012), reproduced by the Cambodia Tribunal Monitor
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 Cambodian Living Arts, Arn Chorn-Pond (undated)
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5 3.6 Jack Brook, "Songs of Survival", Brown Alumni Magazine (January 27, 2022)
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 Arpita Mitra, "His Story Never Died: An Interview With Arn Chorn-Pond", The Diplomat (May 20, 2020)
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 5.2 5.3 Stan Grossfeld, "Traumatic lessons put to good use", The Boston Globe (June 19, 2000)
- ↑ 6.0 6.1 Hélène de La Rochefoucaud, "Cambodian Living Arts fête ses 15 ans mais ne prend pas une ride", Lepetitjournal Cambodge (January 2014), in French
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 POV, The Flute Player: film update (January 20, 2003)