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I have a great advantage: I write from the perspective of my own voice. I'm not copying anyone's voice. It's my voice. I have the advantage of being a writer of English as a second language.

Chath Piersath

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Chath Piersath
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Great
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More quotes by Chath Piersath

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I think every writer has their waves of inspiration and their ways of doing things. But writing is very difficult for me. It's something I haven't practiced as diligently as my visual art. I've been doing visual art because I think it's easier for me to construct, whereas words are very difficult.
Chath Piersath
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I have some advantages of viewing from the two lenses, the two perspectives. I think that a lot of visual artists who come back here from the United States and are Cambodian also write from their American references - looking inside the old culture, and looking at themselves as an American looking into the country where they were born.
Chath Piersath
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Often when people tell their story, they talk about their strengths and resiliency. It's really about their determination and their aspiration to survive and live.
Chath Piersath
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You get closer to your own humanity by understanding the stories of other people and the struggles they have.
Chath Piersath
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I think that there are certain feelings and things you can convey in a simple form that people can see and understand.
Chath Piersath
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I am a community social psychologist and a lot of my work deals with social work and helping people overcoming addiction and trauma.
Chath Piersath
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Every day you are bombarded by so many different things. When you sit down to process everything, it can become interesting visually. You can incorporate a lot of those things that you internalize.
Chath Piersath
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I think every person has a unique story to tell and we each have the different life events that happen to us and sometimes we may feel sympathetic toward a certain aspect of that life event.
Chath Piersath
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Sometimes I fantasize about learning to write in Khmer. Because if I could write in Khmer, my perspective would be very different, because I'm both an outsider and insider and I see the writing in a different way. My description would be different from, say, a local writer.
Chath Piersath
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I'm doing a collaborative project with another artist, Mary Hamill. My project is to gather the oral history of war widows, starting with the women of my village, Kop Nymit.
Chath Piersath
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You have to experiment with different mediums and things around you [making art].
Chath Piersath
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I liked museums but I wanted to be a dancer, I wanted to go into performing arts, or be a writer.
Chath Piersath
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I used to despair about the condition of the world, to feel a sense of hopelessness now I find more and more that I need to focus on what I can do, however little it is, to help others.
Chath Piersath
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A lot of my work is process-oriented. I delve into my work and sit alone in silence and work with the material and process it, like talking to yourself.
Chath Piersath
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Even though I'm not privileged in the money world, I'm privileged in other ways: I had greater access to education, I can travel, etc. It's the same with writing: the freedom to move in and out of different places, of different realms of existence, of different life forms.
Chath Piersath
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Everything around you can use. It's like your tools and your material. Whether it's in performing arts like dance, or visual arts, or poetry, a lot of those elements can come and help you, can trigger your creativity. But you have to be open, be aware, and you have to be ready to look.
Chath Piersath
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Art is really about how you capture different things you see around you and bring them into forms and words and shapes and meaning.
Chath Piersath
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The family I grew up in had three generations of widows.
Chath Piersath
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All throughout my work, even in the United States, I have worked with the greater Cambodian community.
Chath Piersath
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Some people have witnessed the killing of their husbands, or they survived other horrific things. My sister is a widow but her husband was killed after the Khmer Rouge. There are different periods in which violence has occurred, and differences in how these women became widowed and how they survived afterwards.
Chath Piersath