US President Barack Obama\u2019s historic first trip to Southeast Asia ended with a questionably disrespectful greeting Cambodia\u2019s First Lady Bun Rany shared with him.<\/p>\nUS President Barack Obama\u2019s historic first trip to Southeast Asia ended with a questionably disrespectful greeting Cambodia\u2019s First Lady Bun Rany shared with him.<\/p>\n
Obama became the first ever U.S. president to visit Cambodia earlier this week, when he ended his four-day visit to the region by attending the annual East Asia Summit it was hosting.<\/p>\n
The president had made it clear he was only in Cambodia to attend the summit. According to the Daily Mail, Obama met Prime Minister Hun Sen that White House officials described as tense, with the president emphasizing his concerns over the Cambodian leader\u2019s poor democratic leadership model and the country\u2019s worsening human rights abuses.<\/p>\n
Just before dinner, Sen formally introduced his wife, Cambodia\u2019s First Lady Bun Rany, to the president.
\nRany greeted Obama with the traditional \u2018sampeah\u2019 greeting, a pressed-hands gesture that signifies respect for a person.<\/p>\n
Where a person\u2019s hands are placed and how deeply they bow during the gesture indicates their level of respect for the person they are greeting, the report said.<\/p>\n
Rany placed her hands at chest level and tilted the upper half of her body slightly, leading the editorial board at Investor\u2019s Business Daily to believe that she was showing disrespect to the president, the report added.<\/p>\n
\u201cFirst lady Bun Rany greeted Obama with a traditional \u201csampeah\u201d pressed-hands greeting reserved for servants, a little dig that was probably lost on him but not to Asians,\u2019 the editorial board wrote.<\/p>\n
A sampeah at mouth level is reserved for bosses, elders or higher-ranking people. For parents, grandparents or teachers, a sampeah is typically raised to nose level and when saluting the king or monks, the sampeah is raised to eyebrow level, the report saId.<\/p>\n
According to Investor\u2019s Business Daily and a few bloggers, however, Rany\u2019s sampeah was only \u2018fit for a servant\u2019.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
US President Barack Obama\u2019s historic first trip to Southeast Asia ended with a questionably disrespectful greeting Cambodia\u2019s First Lady Bun Rany shared with him. Obama became the first ever U.S. president to visit Cambodia earlier this week, when he ended his four-day visit to the region by attending the annual East Asia Summit it was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[688],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-180594","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-infotainment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180594","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=180594"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/180594\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=180594"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=180594"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nagalandpost.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=180594"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}