n a recent Wednesday afternoon, in Siem Reap, Cambodia, professional mixed-martial-arts fighter Justin Wong found himself sparring in a boxing ring with his wife, Jaime Higa, at the Angkor Fight Club, where they’re both regulars. The twenty-eight-year-old Wong held the pads as she lunged at him. Last fall, Higa was offered a job in Siem Reap, a tourist town best known as a jumping-off point for the historic temples of Angkor, and the two decided to relocate here from the Bay Area. Wong, a professional mixed-martial-arts fighter since 2008 who came up through amateur kickboxing in the United States, wasn’t sure, when they made the move, how his cage-fighting career would evolve. “Then I got excited,” Wong said, of his early research. “You don’t need to spend all that money to compete and it’s a small, tight-knit community. It’s been great.”
Today, Wong is part of a slowly but steadily growing M.M.A. scene in Cambodia, the result not only of an influx of expats but of longtime Khmer boxers embracing the sport as a complement to their storied ancient art. Like M.M.A., Khmer boxing—also called pradal serey, and sometimes known, outside Cambodia, as muay thai—is a combat sport in which fighters frequently use their elbows, so the transition from one to the other is fairly seamless. Both inspire aggressive and intense fandom in those who enjoy the brutal, bloody dynamics of the bouts. But while martial arts have ancient roots here—bas reliefs on the walls of the roughly nine-hundred-year-old tombs of Angkor Thom show soldiers engaged in hand-to-hand combat—many organized combat sports, including M.M.A., had, until recently, floundered.
“Sometimes, people ask, ‘Why there are no Khmer coaches my age?’ ” Nicholas Chevdar, the thirty-eight-year-old owner of Angkor Fight Club, said. “It’s because they were all chased out. . . . The coaches my age are virtually nonexistent, because the sport died.” After the United States dropped 2.7 million tons of explosives on Cambodia, during the Vietnam War, the country endured the reign of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, which, from 1974 to 1979, oversaw a genocide that claimed the lives of at least 1.7 million people, roughly a fifth of the nation’s population. According to researchers at Yale University, athletes, including many martial-arts masters, were among those specifically targeted. (The Communist regime saw them as particularly bourgeois.) The Khmer Rouge also killed many who were in its own ranks, including fighters.
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