The Rare Cambodian Art of Bokator Khmer Is Making a Comeback!
The Rare Cambodian Art of Bokator Khmer Is Making a Comeback!By Antonio Graceffo (story and photos) |
“We can fight standing up,” explained San Kim Sean, grandmaster of bokator Khmer. At more than 60 years old, he looked as if he was in his 40s but moved like a man much younger. He threw a kick at me, similar to the roundhouse that’s used in a more generic art known as Khmer boxing. The kick missed, and his foot landed beside me. With the ease that comes only after decades of training, he shifted his weight forward onto his kicking leg. Not more than a few inches to my side, he hooked his rear foot around and kicked me square on the jaw. “The dragon whips his tail,” he said, sounding way too much like a character in a Bruce Lee movie. Next, San dropped to his knees and executed an upward elbow strike to my solar plexus. “We can fight on our knees,” he said. Then he dropped to the ground and trapped the kick I’d just thrown at his face. “We can fight from sitting,” he said before prostrating his body and dragging my ankle, toppling my trunk to the ground. “We can even fight lying down,” he added with a chuckle.
Bokator Khmer is a complete martial art that focuses on strikes, drags, traps and locks that function as offensive and defensive tools. It teaches students to use their entire body as a weapon. For example, many arts include the standard head butt, but bokator Khmer extrapolates on that and teaches techniques in which the jaw and the shoulder muscle serve as similarly purposed weapons. “The lion has fangs, and we also use fangs in our fighting,” San explained as he made a fist, then extended his index finger, bending it at the second knuckle. With pinpoint accuracy, he used his “fang” to stab me in a pressure point located behind the clavicle. It was quite painful. “If we train long enough, we can make the finger go through the flesh,” he said with a likable but sadistic grin. “Do you believe that your art is better than Khmer boxing?” I asked. “Of course,” he answered without hesitation. “Do you mean that one of your students could get in the ring with the champion, Eh Phou Thoung, right now and win?” I asked, skeptically. “My students would never be allowed to fight in the ring,” he said. “We are trained to kill.” San then asked one of his young students to attack him. When the kid threw a punch, the master countered with an elbow strike to the throat. “Kill!” San shouted. The student threw a second punch, and this time San stabbed him in the throat with his fingers. “Kill!” he yelled again. The student kicked, and San hit his thigh with his knee, knocking the youth to the ground. The student leapt to his feet and clinched with the teacher, hitting him with knee strikes. San crossed his forearms over the student’s throat and, using his limbs like a pair of scissors, crushed his windpipe with his wrists. “Kill!” he said again.
“You see?” he asked. “You’d never be allowed to do any of that in a boxing ring. But it’s very effective.” The Devoted Few The student returned to his practice. I watched him repeatedly leap into the air and kick a heavy bag with both feet. Each time he landed, he’d be lying on the ground in a controlled position, ready to fight. “That boy has been with me only one year,” San said with pride. “But he already knows 300 techniques. And now he can help me teach the other students.” San explained why it’s so important to pass on the system: Bokator is the ancient Khmer martial art, the predecessor of brodal serey (Khmer free-boxing). Today, the name “brodal serey” has been lost to the world, having been replaced by muay Thai. Many Khmers claim that the Thais stole their fighting art. They believe that the bas-reliefs on the walls of Angkor Wat prove that Khmer boxing predates muay Thai. While the name may have been stolen, the art of Khmer boxing is very much alive—and thriving as a professional sport that’s enjoyed around the world. That, unfortunately, is not the case for the much older art of bokator Khmer. It’s virtually unknown, even in its native land. “Outside of Cambodia, the only thing people know is Angkor Wat,” San said. “They don’t know about our martial art.”
Bokator Khmer uses colored krama (traditional scarves) in lieu of belts. The art contains 10 animal styles. The five white-krama animal forms are the king monkey, lion, elephant, apsara (sacred Hindu nymph) and crocodile. The green-krama forms include the duck, crab, horse, bird and dragon. San began training in bokator Khmer and learning the animal forms when he was just 13 years old. Even then, the art was rare. “Only a few old men knew it,” he said. It was still practiced in some provinces but was unknown in the capital. A friend of the family taught the boy how to fight with his hands. Another friend taught him how to use the long staff. And still another schooled him in the use of the traditional long sword, or dao. Obsessed with the martial arts, San practiced Khmer boxing diligently for three years. Later, he earned belts in judo and karate and became one of only three Khmers to obtain a black belt in hapkido. “I was third dan,” he said. Unfortunately, 1975, the year he became a hapkido instructor, was also the year Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge, led by Pol Pot. The city was ordered to evacuate, and the entire country was collectivized and forced to do backbreaking physical labor with only a few hours of sleep and very little food. “I don’t have to tell you the Pol Pot time was bad—everyone knows,” San said sadly. “My group began with 10,000 to 13,000 people. Two years later, only 500 were still alive. They were either murdered or died of hunger.” Two of his children perished in the chaos. Although everyone suffered, certain groups were singled out for persecution and extermination. Pol Pot declared it to be Year Zero to symbolize his desire to break with the past, and to solidify his intent, he hunted down and killed masters of the traditional Khmer arts—including singing, dancing and fighting. “All of my students and training brothers died,” he said. “I was the only hapkido instructor who survived.” In 1979 the Khmer Rouge fell to the Vietcong. San returned to Phnom Penh and began teaching hapkido. The Vietnamese regime, which was only slightly better than what it replaced, prohibited the Cambodians from practicing the martial arts. “I was teaching in secret, but some Khmer person who was jealous of me turned me in to the authorities,” he said. The Vietnamese said San was trying to build an army and had subversive goals in mind. He would have been jailed, but he and his wife escaped to a refuge camp in Thailand. They spent a year in Nokor Siclium camp, where his wife gave birth to a daughter. In 1980 their paperwork came through and the family was allowed to relocate to the United States, settling first in Houston, where San found work at the airport and taught hapkido to Khmer kids at a local YMCA. Life was good for him and his family, but he missed his culture. Then San vacationed in Long Beach, California, and was amazed at the “Khmerness” of the place. He quit his job in Texas and moved there. Eventually, he found work doing voice-overs on Chinese action movies and continued teaching hapkido. The Rest of the Story “This is all very interesting,” I said—and I meant it. Here was a man who’d overcome amazing odds, for both the love of the martial arts and the love of his people. “But your story is all the way up to 1990, and you don’t seem to be teaching bokator to anyone.” “That will come later,” he said and laughed. “I have to tell you the whole story first.” To be a good martial arts student, you have to have patience. … “I took my hapkido students all over for competitions,” he continued. “And I never once heard the words ‘bokator Khmer.’ In fact, no one knew anything about any Khmer martial art at all.” By this time, San was a 10th-degree black belt in hapkido. “I began to wonder, Why am I doing all this advertising for a Korean art?” he said. He then explained that bokator Khmer is an ancient art, predating even the 1,000-year-old carvings at Angkor Wat. King Jayavaraman VII, creator of the temple city, is depicted in a stance with a Khmer short sword. “Do you know why he was such a good king and why he kept Cambodia safe?” San asked. “It was because he was a martial artist. He knew bokator Khmer. “At that time, there were no rockets, no guns—only swords and hands and feet. And the Khmers could win because our soldiers were trained in bokator.” San then explained why the art, which was once so proud and strong, had faded into near extinction well before the Pol Pot regime: “The masters never taught all their art to a student. They always held back about 10 percent in case the student ever attacked them.” If each generation learned 10 percent less than the previous generation, it’s no wonder the art was on a downward slide, I thought. “Khmer young people don’t even know their own history,” San lamented. “They don’t know about our greatness in the past, the ancient arts which were taught by our grandfathers’ grandfathers, which are running in our blood.” Preserving Bokator San confessed that he began having nightmares about Cambodia. “It was God telling me I needed to come home and help the Khmer people,” he said. So during the early 1990s, he returned to his stricken land to help rebuild the Khmer Hapkido Association. “We still aren’t talking about bokator,” I reminded him. “And you still have to wait,” he told me in his friendly tone.
“But bokator, ...” I protested. He waved his hand dismissively and continued the story. “Finally, in 2001 I left the hapkido school and began teaching bokator,” he said. After dedicating himself to further research, he combed the countryside looking for bokator masters who’d survived the Khmer Rouge and Vietnamese regimes. “They were old,” he said. “Many of them were between 60 and 90 years of age.” The number of remaining masters was small, and none of them was actively teaching. And after having been repressed under the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese, they were afraid to start. “I tried to tell them it was OK, that we already had permission from the government, but they wouldn’t listen,” San said. The old men wanted to stay in the provinces, but San insisted: “You have a great gift, which was given to you by our ancestors. Do you want to steal it from our children? When you die, the art will die with you.” “Did it work?” I asked. “Some of them broke down in tears,” he said. “In April 2004 we held the first bokator conference in Phnom Penh. Now, there are schools in eight provinces. And we are preparing for a national championship.” I’d met hordes of Western martial artists who couldn’t be bothered to practice more than once a week, and before me stood a man who’d risked his life to preserve the art he loved. And he’d even given up a well-paying job in America to return to Cambodia and help recover it. “I really respect what you’ve done here,” I told him. But the interview was finished, and all he wanted to do was kick me in the head some more. About the author: Antonio Graceffo is a frequent contributor to Black Belt. His article "Searching for Tony Jaa: A Journey Into Remotest Thailand to Trace the Roots of the Hottest Martial Arts Superstar Since Jackie Chan and Jet Li — Part 1" appears in the May 2008 issue of Black Belt. |
