ទឹកឡើងត្រីស៊ីស្រមោច ទឹកស្រកស្រមោចស៊ីត្រី។
Tɨk laəng trəy sii srɑmaoch, tɨk srɑk srɑmaoch sii trəy Water rises, fish eat ants; water recedes, ants eat fish. Power is on loan from circumstance — when the tide turns, the eaten become the eaters.
It is a complete drama in eleven syllables, and it turns on a single word repeated: ស៊ី, eat. When the water rises, the fish eat the ants — swimming freely over the drowned ground, taking the insects washed off the land. When the water recedes, the ants eat the fish — swarming the stranded and the dead, reclaiming the mud that is theirs again. Same two creatures, same verb, opposite direction. Nothing about the fish or the ant has changed. Only the water has moved, and the water decides who eats.
What it means
The proverb is about power, and specifically about how little of it belongs to the powerful. The fish is not strong because it is a fish; it is strong while the water is high. The ant is not weak by nature; it is weak while it is flooded. Strength is a loan made by circumstance, recallable without notice, and the proverb’s whole work is to keep both parties honest about the terms: the one on top should remember the water will fall, and the one underneath should remember it will rise.
It is, in the Cambodian context, a deeply Buddhist observation dressed as natural history. The teaching of អនិច្ចំ — anicca, impermanence — holds that nothing holds; every condition is in the act of becoming its opposite. The fish eating ants is not a stable fact about the world. It is a phase of the world, already turning.
Where it comes from
No country has a better physical illustration of the proverb than Cambodia, because the water there really does rise and fall on a scale that reorders everything. At the centre of the country sits the Tonlé Sap, the great lake, joined to the Mekong by a river that does something almost no river does: it reverses. In the monsoon, the swollen Mekong pushes water backwards up the channel and into the lake, which swells to several times its dry-season size, drowning the surrounding forest and floodplain. For months the fish own that expanded world, spawning through the flooded trees. Then the rains stop, the Mekong drops, the river turns around and runs the normal way again, and the lake drains — leaving the fish concentrated, stranded, harvested in staggering numbers, and the land returned to the things that walk on it.
So the proverb is not a clever invention; it is a description of the seasonal machine that feeds the nation. Cambodians have watched the fish-world and the ant-world trade places every single year, on schedule, for as long as there have been Cambodians. That annual, total, dependable reversal is the experience the proverb crystallises — which is why it lands less as a warning than as a statement of how things simply, observably are. The water rises. The water recedes. It has never once failed to do both.
How it gets used today
It is reached for whenever power changes hands, which in Cambodia’s hard twentieth century it did with brutal frequency, and the proverb has been used to read regime after regime — the ones on top reminded that the flood recedes, the ones underneath reminded that it returns. In ordinary life it is gentler and more various: said of a demoted manager and the junior who has overtaken him, of a family’s fortunes rising or falling, of a rival enjoying a season of advantage. It can console the person who is currently the ant and quietly warn the person who is currently the fish. The tone is rarely vengeful. It is closer to the long patience of people who have learned, from the lake itself, that no one stays on top of the water for good.
Cousins from other tongues
That power reverses is among the oldest consolations and oldest warnings, and the cousins differ mostly in how fast they imagine the wheel turning, and who turns it.
Chinese slows the reversal to the pace of geology. 三十年河东，三十年河西 — sānshí nián hé dōng, sānshí nián hé xī, “thirty years east of the river, thirty years west.” The Yellow River is famous for shifting its course over time, so a village that stood on the east bank may, generations later, find itself on the west without having moved an inch. The reversal is real but unhurried — measured in thirty-year spans, in lifetimes, in the slow migration of a riverbed. Where the Khmer proverb turns on the monsoon’s annual clock, fast and reliable, the Chinese one turns on a clock so slow that a person might see the wheel move only once. The Cambodian expects the water back this year; the Chinese speaker counsels the patience of decades.
Latin hands the turning to a goddess. The rota Fortunae, the Wheel of Fortune, comes to the Middle Ages through Boethius, writing in prison as he watches his own fortunes collapse: Fortuna turns her wheel for sport, and those she has lifted to the top she will, on whim, fling to the bottom. This is the most dramatic and the most personal of the cousins — there is a who doing the turning, a capricious power above the human, and a strong charge of tragedy. The Khmer water is impersonal and lawful; it rises and falls by season, indifferent, almost serene. Boethius’s wheel is cruel and arbitrary, turned by a being who enjoys the spectacle. One reversal is weather; the other is fate, and fate has a face.
English keeps only the consolation and throws out the warning. Every dog has its day — current since the sixteenth century, with roots in Erasmus by way of Plutarch — promises the lowly that their turn on top is coming. But it is half a proverb compared with the Khmer one. It tells the ant that the water will rise; it does not, in the same breath, tell the fish that the water will fall. The Cambodian proverb is symmetrical and unsentimental — it threatens and comforts in the same line, because the flood that lifts the ant is the same flood that strands the fish. English keeps the cheerful half. Khmer keeps both halves, because anyone who has watched the lake knows you do not get the rising without the falling.
Why it matters
The annual flood, the river’s thirty-year drift, the goddess’s wheel, the dog’s one good day — four pictures of borrowed power, and the differences are all in the clock and the hand on it. The Chinese reversal is slow and authorless; the Latin one is sudden and divine; the English one is partial, all promise and no caution. The Khmer alone keeps the full, balanced, indifferent rhythm — fast, lawful, symmetrical, and tied to a body of water the whole country can see swelling and shrinking outside the window.
That is the quiet authority of it. The proverb does not need to argue that power is impermanent, the way Boethius must, or to promise it the way the English proverb does. It only has to point at the lake. The fish are eating the ants right now. By the time the dry season comes, the ants will be eating the fish, and no one will be surprised, because the water always recedes — and then, without fail, it rises again.