Kalyanee Mam on Knowing Your Taste

Emergence Magazine is an online publication with annual print edition exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories and more.

Taste of the Land tells the story of Cambodian-American filmmaker Kalyanee Mam’s search for a spiritual relationship with her homeland. In this companion essay by Kalyanee, she delves deeper into her experiences of cheate—the Khmer word for “taste”—and how she came to understand that to truly know the essence of the land, one must know its taste. Tracing her life back to its very beginnings, she shares her first “land-taste”—the sweet flavor of Battambang oranges—and the many tastes that came after that slowly deepened the yearning in her heart to truly know the soils, waters, mountains, people, and plants of Cambodia. As she reflects on the spiritual fallout of her family’s severed relationship with their homeland, she also contemplates the essential connection that was kept alive through stories, language, and food shared by her parents. 

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Kalyanee Mam is a Cambodian-American filmmaker whose award-winning work is focused on art and advocacy. Her debut documentary feature, A River Changes Course, won the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize for Documentary at the 2013 Sundance Film Festival and the Golden Gate Award for Best Feature Documentary at the San Francisco International Film Festival. Her other works include the documentary shorts Lost World, Fight for Areng Valley, Between Earth & Sky, and Cries of Our Ancestors. She has also worked as a cinematographer and associate producer on the 2011 Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job. She is currently working on a new feature documentary, The Fire and the Bird’s Nest.

Photo by Jeremy Seifert