Things their ancestors passed to me': Clam digging in Arizona runs deep for Cambodian families - The Arizona Republic
The morning sun dances off the Verde River on a hot July morning.
Nostalgia drove Sray Campanile to travel more than an hour and half from her home in Buckeye to this spot in Tonto National Forest. She sits in the shallow middle of the river at Needle Rock Recreation Site, reclines and stretches her legs in the water. This feeling — the gentle current tickling her spine, slivers of cool water slipping between her toes — takes her back to her childhood in California, where she and her parents would collect Asian clams and snails as food from freshwater ponds and streams around Stockton.
Now, decades later and hundreds of miles away in Arizona, she's trying to recreate her memories.
Asian clams, an invasive species found in the Verde River and other Arizona waterways, thrive in abundance in Cambodia. Campanile's California clamming adventures reminded her parents of their own childhoods in Cambodia where they enjoyed sultry summer days catching swamp eels and snacking on sun-dried clams.
On this particular morning, Campanile is waiting for another woman, Jenneen Sambour, who's on the way. The Arizona Khmer Facebook group brought the two women together. Like Campanile, Sambour's parents are Cambodian refugees and she too grew up clamming with her siblings. Sambour was born in Rhode Island where she and her family used to go digging for quahogs and littlenecks at Narragansett, using their toes to feel around for clams in the sand. Later they'd grill the clams until their mouths opened, then season them with lime juice and pepper.
Sambour's mother comes from Battambang in northwest Cambodia, the same province as Campanile's family. Many fish andmollusks live in Tonlé Sap, a freshwater lake located partially in Battambang and fed by the Mekong River, a lifeline for Southeast Asia. The lake has fed Cambodians for centuries, though climate change and human development are threatening its ecosystem.
Sambour was first inspired to rekindle her family's clamming tradition by the Arizona Khmer Facebook group, where members recently started chiming in with suggestions on where to find clams, called 'leah' in Khmer. Several people also shared childhood memories of family clamming trips in Arizona.
Recently, there's been an increased interest in clam digging in the group, said Staphany Pich, one of the group administrators, who recommended clamming at Needle Rock Recreation Site, a river beach and picnic area northeast of Scottsdale.
"It's in our culture in Cambodia," said Jack Ngan, another member of the group who moved to Maricopa four years ago from Long Beach. He comes from generations of fishermen.
"That's where my family comes from, fishing. Ask, who's a fisherman in your family? Who catches crab? Who catches crawfish? They'll tell you who," he said. "Even my wife's side. Her dad fishes every week. That's what we do."
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How Asian clams ended up in Arizona
Corbicula fluminea, better known as the Asian or Asiatic clams, came to Arizona as stowaways.
Asian clams are a freshwater species native to eastern Asia and Africa. Over the years they spread to other parts of the world through human activities, such as the shellfish trade and recreational boating. They are also believed to have traveled to the U.S. with immigrants who brought them along as a food source.
Asian clams were first recorded in Arizona in 1956 when they were found in the Phoenix canal system, according to former Arizona State University researcher John Rinne's 1974 report, "The Introduced Asiatic Clam, Corbicula, in Central Arizona Reservoirs."
The report suggests that it was most likely a tourist, fisherperson or aquarium hobbyist, possibly from California, who introduced them to Arizona. They have since made themselves at home in most of Arizona's major river systems, reservoirs, canals and urban lakes, said Jeff Sorensen, invertebrate wildlife program manager for Arizona Game and Fish Department.
"They are very invasive, and once they invade our waters they are pretty much here to stay," Sorensen noted.
Asian clams are usually less than an inch long, but can grow up to 2½ inches, according to a U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service summary. They have an average lifespan of two to four years, but can live up to seven years.
In Arizona, the invasive bivalves likely compete with native pea clams and other filter-feeding macroinvertebrates for food and habitat, Sorensen said. They live on the surface or slightly buried in sand, silt and gravel, and feed on plankton. Asian clams don't have the ability to attach themselves to hard surfaces, unlike quagga mussels, an invasive species that can clog pipes, colonize boats and starve fishing holes.
In Phoenix's canal system, clam beds form where silt builds up. The clam beds are removed when the canal section is drained for maintenance, said Brian Moorhead, an environmental scientist at Salt River Projects. Irrigation pipes are in a similar situation in which silt buildup and clams are removed from the pipes at the same time.
There's not a good way to determine the cost of clam damage because it would be impossible to determine which came first, the silt or the clams, Moorhead said.
Since people harvest these clams for food in Asia, Sorensen isn't surprised people would do the same in Arizona's natural rivers. He's never heard of anyone harvesting tiny pea clams, less than a centimeter small, because they wouldn't have much meat.
Clams are filter feeders, meaning they may ingest any heavy metals or pesticide residuals found in their environment. Asian clams, however, are not tolerant of heavily polluted waters, Sorensen said. Though, as with to other fish and wildlife harvested for food, it is important to always properly cook them.
Small and plain-looking Asian clams may not inspire the romantic lore of oysters, their seawater relatives with the lustrous pearls, or scallops with their Venusian shells, but for some in Arizona's Cambodian community, harvesting and cooking Asian clams triggers fond memories.
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A forest of cottonwood, willow and mesquite trees frame the Verde River.
Campanile pulls a handful of debris out of the water, the loose dirt falling between her fingers. She suddenly hollers with delight, "Oh, I found another one!"
At first glance, it looks like a pebble. But sure enough, a yellowish-brown clam about 2 centimeters long rests in the palm of her hand.
Campanile has been piling her clams on a round, white plastic lid she found littered on the river bank, and she's glad when Jenneen Sambour arrives with her children and a friend, as well as more utilitarian supplies: a Lowe's paint bucket for clam collection, a gas camping stove, a water jug with attachable dispenser, and quite importantly, a resealable plastic bag of yellow kroeung.
"I am a hunter," Campanile jokes. "Jenneen is the cook."
Kroeung, sometimes spelled kreung, is a Cambodian ground spice paste used as a marinade or base for many Khmer dishes. The tangy fragrance of Sambour's kroeung escaped from bag, offering hints of makrut lime leaf, lemongrass, garlic, chilies, galangal and turmeric powder, which gives the paste its yellow color.
"It's like when your parents don't know what to make, they say, 'We're going to cha kroeung it,'" Campanile says.
"And everyone has their own recipe," Sambour adds.
Before the pandemic, Sambour's family tried to travel to Cambodia about every other year to visit relatives in Battambang.
There, she usually bought clams from a roadside market, where a vendor would sell them sun-dried on a metal sheet and peppered with salt, sugar and chile flakes. Sambour can almost hear and smell the memories — the rattling sound of a vendor shaking a tin can of clams to entice her, the waft of dry spices. Sambour said she would eat them like sunflower seeds, popping them whole in her mouth, sucking out the clam meat, then spitting out the shells.
Her Verde River expedition with Campanile is her first clamming experience in Arizona since moving to Phoenix in 2016.
"I just wanted to reminisce about the days I was in Cambodia," Sambour says when she's calf deep in the river.
The water is clear and shallow enough that she can pluck the clams out on sight. They look just like the clams she used to snack on in Cambodia.
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Sambour plans to stir fry the clams with kroeung for a dish called cha kroeung leah. Campanile made white jasmine rice that morning and another friend who's tagged along, Paul Smith, brought an array of vegetables scrounged from his kitchen — Napa cabbage, sweet potatoes and corn cobs.
"They're so tiny, can you even taste them?" Sambour asks later at the picnic table, where people are serving themselves paper plates of cha leah, stained yellow from kroeung. "They look like little shells. This is like Khmer mac n' cheese."
Sambour hopes to open a Cambodian food truck later this year, though fresh river clams won't be on the menu as they're too labor intensive, she says.
Pich, a first generation Cambodian American, said her mom usually cooks Asian clams one of two ways: Covered in spices and left to dry in direct sunlight on a cookie sheet or stir-fried with ginger, green onions, chiles and parsley, with the excess sauce poured over rice.
Her family would eat sun-dried clams with white rice and a salty, sweet and spicy tamarind dipping sauce made with tamarind pulp, palm sugar, fish sauce and bird's eye chiles.
With sun-dried clams it's like eating oysters, Pitch said. You can taste the river they came from.
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Pich has fond memories of weekend picnics in the forest with family and family friends, hiking to clamming spots discovered through word of mouth, places she can't pinpoint on a map today.
"I think just being in the river was my favorite part, in the forest," she said. "Sometimes you see wildlife out there and it's just very calming and serene. You hear the water, the river flowing. You see horses."
The hottest part of summer has usually been the best time to go clamming, as that's when the clams are the biggest, she said.
Her family would use the metal cover of a fan to rake for clams, sifting through the dirt like they were panning for gold. When they weren't looking for clams, she and the other kids played pranks on each other in the water, pretending sticks were snakes.
The smell of lemongrass chicken skewers on the grill would bring them stomping back to the river bank where their parents would shove balls of rice, barbecue chicken and pickled daikon in their mouths.
She hopes to have more weekends free next summer so she can set up barbecues and clamming excursions.
"I know in the Arizona Khmer group, a lot of people came from California and usually, they either know a spot there or would pick some clams up from family or friends," Pich said. "So coming here, they didn't know you can get it yourself and now that they know, they want to check it out themselves."
Clamming in Arizona requires a fishing license from Arizona Game and Fish Department. Ngan says it is important to go with a group and advises people to wear a life vest to protect against unexpected river depths and currents.
His uncle introduced him to some of his favorite spots in California and Arizona for fishing, crawfish trapping and clamming.
There's a good area for clamming on the Gila River north of Phoenix Raceway, he said. Another spot is at the Verde River Recreation Site, just north of Needle Rock, where in just two to three hours of clamming, he can usually fill a five-gallon bucket.
He's also gone clamming at Saguaro Lake by Butcher Jones Recreation Site, but it was there he was swept about half a mile down the river when the current was too strong. That's why he recommends people go clamming in a group, never alone.
His other tips for new clammers come from family experience. Clams filter water as they breathe, so to avoid eating dirt, his family soaks them in clean water so the clams will spit out the debris. When collecting clams, he suggests only keeping the ones with mouths closed or barely open. A clam with its mouth wide open means it's already dead.
While occasional clam raking along the river is not likely to cause much harm to the shoreline or aquatic habitat, it is best to minimize those impacts, Sorensen said. The rivers, after all, are home to native fish and wildlife.
"The same message applies to all of the recreational users on the river — be respectful of the place, and help clean up trash along our river," he said.
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"I feel happy because as I got older, my parents stopped going, and I haven't really heard of people going as much," Pich said. "Now to kinda see my generation and younger people interested in going makes me happy that it's a thing happening again, the gathering."
There's an estimated 339,000 Cambodians living in the United States, more than a third of them in California, according to the 2019 American Community Survey from the U.S. Census Bureau. The majority of Cambodians are Khmer and ethnic minorities include the Cham people. Many Cambodians resettled in the U.S. as refugees after escaping genocide under communist dictator Pol Pot. From 1975 to 1979, the Khmer Rouge regime killed between 1.5 and 3 million people through starvation, disease and mass executions.
Ngan's parents were among the survivors. The Khmer Rouge forced his grandmother and his mother to work on collective farms, he said. While working in the rice paddies, they sometimes found fish and would hide them in their pockets, drying them later to make fish jerky, they told him.
Fishing saved their lives. Ngan carries this memory on.
After a long morning of clamming in Arizona, Ngan's house typically becomes the meeting spot for 20 or so family members who gather in his living room. Those who didn't clam, like his mother and grandmother, take on cooking duties — stir-frying the catch in oyster sauce or steaming them open with just water and butter.
He wants to give his son and daughter the knowledge his grandparents, parents, aunts and uncles gave to him.
"I show them how to do these things, how to look for places, how to find clams with your toes and feet," Ngan said. "Hopefully they can enjoy that when they grow up. Kids nowadays, it's just Fortnite and electronics. I have to force them to go with me. But I want them to enjoy nature and see not just me, but the things their ancestors passed to me."
Creating connections on the river
For Campanile, this clamming trip is a way to reconnect to her roots. She didn't hang out with people from the local Cambodian community until last year, through Wat Khmer, a Buddhist temple in Buckeye. From there, people informed her about the Arizona Khmer Facebook group.
Campanile thinks her parents' knack for foraging came from when they were living in Cambodia. In California, her parents would take her hunting for wild asparagus, mushrooms and beetles.
At Needle Rock Recreation Site, Campanile bends down on a dirt path to inspect a patch of sprouts with small violet flowers. It looks like something her mother would pick to cook with, but she's too scared to try.
"You would never go hungry with her," Campanile says. "My parents are so resourceful. They just know where to go, how to find things. I've been here seven years and wanting to go clamming, but I didn't know where to go."
She thought of her mother, who's camping in the Bay Area with Campanile's brother, sister, nieces and nephews. They're scouring the coast for spider crabs to pickle and gaper clams with fat, protruding necks. Her sister likes to grill their necks and dip them in prahok, a fermented fish paste.
Feeling a little wistful, Campanile says this clamming trip makes her wish she and her siblings could all be together again, like when they were kids, waking up at the crack of dawn for an adventure and racing each other to their parents' van.
For her two daughters, their idea of clamming is picking up seashells on the beach, she says with a laugh. She hopes they will come clamming with her next time.
"When I had them, I was in the military," Campanile says. "We were never really around my family to do all that. So now that we can, I want to show them, this is what mom used do when she was younger."
Priscilla Totiyapungprasert is a food & dining reporter with The Arizona Republic. Reach her at Priscilla.Totiya@azcentral.com. Follow @priscillatotiya on Twitter and Instagram.
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