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Overview
This video was produced by Niborom Young in 2001 to help organisations working with migrants from South East Asian cultures, particularly Cambodian, where the practice of coining ('rubbing the wind') is used for health reasons. A coin is drawn down and outwards from the spine in slow, smooth strokes, using a lubricant. The practice can relieve headaches, fever, chest pain, dizziness and stomach cramps. The red marks from the coining disappear after a few days.
The red marks were often mistaken by health professionals, teachers and social workers as signs of abuse, but coining is a common home health practice in South East Asian communities. The video demonstrates how, why and when coining occurs in the Cambodian community, and was an educative tool promoting understanding of alternative cultural health practices.
Niborom Young (née Oum) was born in Phnom Penh, Cambodia in 1947. She arrived in New Zealand as a Colombo Plan student in November 1974 after being offered a place on an English-teaching course at Victoria University in Wellington. However, at that time Cambodia was in a state of civil war and her city was shelled constantly. She didn’t want to leave her husband, children, mother, and siblings, but her mother told her to seize the opportunity.
Just weeks later, the war escalated, and Cambodia’s borders closed. The New Zealand Government gave permanent residence to Cambodians stranded here. Unable to get news of her family, Niborom was devastated.
In 1980, when Niborom worked as an interpreter in a refugee camp on the Thai–Cambodian border, she heard they were all dead. Later, she discovered that her son and one sister had survived, and arranged for them to live in New Zealand.
Niborom has been a teacher of English as a second language, a refugee and migrant counsellor, and Khmer interpreter. She is a Justice of the Peace, and honoured with the Queen’s Service Medal for her contribution to the Cambodian community.
The scars of war never really heal, but remarried, Niborom has built a new life with her husband Victor Young and their son Chester. In 2015, Niborom published a collection of oral histories: I Tried Not to Cry: The Journeys of Ten Cambodian Refugee Women.