The Apollo 11 moon landing in 1969.
“One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”
It was broadcast worldwide on live TV, with an estimated 500 million viewers, the largest TV audience for a live broadcast at the time.

Did my parents see it? One of my coworkers was curious, and so I asked my mom. Her response was something like this:

TV? Noooo. We didn’t have a TV. No one in our whole neighborhood had a TV. You had to be quite wealthy to have a TV. And electricity was also very expensive.

My uncle who was a businessman in Thailand had a black and white TV. When we visited his family, they turned on the TV for us to see. The store where they sold medicines – a pharmacy, which was pretty far from my house – also sold TVs.

Our family had a little fridge/freezer – about the size of a college dorm fridge. And that was a luxury – we were very lucky to be able to have that. We were one of the few families with one. We’d store our leftovers in it or use it to make ice. We would put the ice on our fruits to cool them down and then eat them. It was very hot in Cambodia and that was so refreshing. We thought about making ice and selling it, but Grandma said electricity was very expensive – we wouldn’t be making a profit.

We also used the freezer to make our own frozen dessert – we’d mix some coconut milk with sugar and mashed fruit, such as longan, put it in a plastic bowl, and freeze it.

..but everyone did know about Apollo and people were talking about it. It was in the newspaper. And people heard about it on the radio, which we did have. There are old Chinese stories about the moon (Chang’e, the Moon Festival, rabbit)… <laughing> but they didn’t find any rabbits up there…