Origins · No. 01

The first teacher.

Before there was a shop, there was a dance — and a woman who carried a country across an ocean.

Leakhena's mother, Sokhanarith Moeur, was a classical Khmer dancer.

Long before the shop, long before Leakhena herself, she was a performer in Cambodia — trained in the dance that had been passed from teacher to student for centuries, its gestures as specific as a language. When her family left Cambodia, they were admitted to the United States in part because of who she was and what she carried: a living record of a culture the world was in danger of losing.

She raised her children in Connecticut, half a world from Phnom Penh. But in the house where Leakhena grew up, Cambodia was never far. Her mother taught the dances she had learned — the curve of the fingers, the weight shifted slow onto the ball of the foot, the low bent knee. She taught the music. She taught the names. She taught, above all, that what can be lost can also be kept — that a culture lives in the small, careful acts of remembering.

She is why I came home. She is why the shop exists.

Leakhena would not stay in America forever. The pull was too strong. When she returned to Cambodia as an adult, she returned with her mother's quiet insistence in her ear — that the work of keeping a culture is not abstract; it is done with the hands, in the home, in the small choices of what to hold onto.

For Someone I Like opened in 2017. In every sense, it is her mother's shop. Every maker we represent is part of the same long project: keeping something beautiful alive, one object at a time. Every piece on the shelf is, in a way, an offering. Every purchase is a small act of continuity.

She is our guiding spirit. We carry her forward.

— Leakhena & Daniel

This is the first letter from the FSIL Journal. Each Friday we send one story from the shop — a maker, a piece, a small moment. The full journal lives at forsomeoneilike.com if you want to read ahead.

Next Friday: Monnyreak Ket, the Phnom Penh illustrator whose postcards you may already have in a drawer somewhere. We sit with him and talk about the work.