Cleaning Husband’s Feet

Allow me to share an activity at a wedding ceremony. At the wedding, there are a number of activities, and one of them that is well known to everyone, young and old, male and female, is Cleaning the Husband’s Feet. The bride is made to knee down just in front of the groom who is standing on a cube-shaped stone and the lady, with some little water, and cleans his feet, with the accompaniment of the beautiful Cambodian traditional wedding music. Needless to explain, every Cambodian understand that he or she will clean the feet only for someone whom he or she has a great respect. It is still practised today though the gender equity has been promoted in this country, and I have to say that the current women rights activitists were among those who clean the feet, but never have I heard they compaign to eliminate this practice or to add another element into this, that is, the man has to do the same thing for the woman. Every lady does it in order to fulfil the celebration and it’ll be strange to hear a lady questioning why she has to do that. Her mother is usually the first person who will shut her up and make her do it in order to prove herself as a good daughter in the family. In the end, she will do it to be named a Cambodian lady.

Interestingly, I only came across an old Khmer book (Khmer is the language of Cambodia) that explains about this. The man stands on the heavy stone and his leg is cleaned by his celebrated wife with pleasantly cool water. There are underlying messages that the man should be heavy-hearted (we usually say ‘as heavy as a stone’ and, heavy-hearted, in Khmer means ‘being very patient’) and the woman should be the one who cools down all the heating problems at home. Cambodians women are traditionally expected to be the one to provide pleasant shade at home from the hot sunlight (the unpleasant matters), and keep the big problems small, and the small problem nothing. I only got to know early this year. This is very helpful and good justification for the practice.