Lonely Girl Travels

So, remember that photo in the last post of the baby in a doo rag? Well, thanks to technology, a keen sense of irony and a friend willing to tote a shopping bag of presents back to the States of me, this was able to happen:

This is my youngest nephew Ethan, back in San Francisco, sporting the latest in Cambodian infant fashion. The photo appeared in my Inbox this morning. It was a nice Christmas treat, seeing as though the previous day’s attempt the Skype into Christmas Eve was foiled by a faulty wifi connection.

But how, you may wonder, did this fine piece of headwear reach young Ethan? The more savvy among you will know that Cambodia has a woeful postal system—as in, there basically isn’t one. There’s no mailmen; I’ve been told all the city’s PO Boxes are currently full; even so, you frequently receive other people’s letters in your PO Box, and vice versa; and, fun tidbit, private postal companies will only track packages until they reach Cambodia—at which point parcels enter a literal black hole and arrive 2 months later, at a rate of 50/50. While sending packages tends to be more successful than receiving them, you’ve still gotta go through a private company like DHL or UPS, whose rates for letters begin at $50.

So much finagling was done to bring Ethan this small slice of patriotism. Let’s retrace the journey together:

1. Meet up with a friend earlier this month at a “Christmas Village Craft Sale”—because it sounds like a hoot and what else are you up to on a Sunday afternoon? Pursue the array of shiny shit glittering under the pulse of epileptic lighting and mention, somewhat wistfully, how easy it’d be to buy presents for your nieces in a country where the pervading cultural aesthetic is akin to a 6-year-old girl’s brain on amphetamines. Your friend, who’s traveling to the States to spend Christmas with her boyfriend’s family, spontaneously offers to take a load of gifts with her and ship them from Seattle. Accept before she can change her mind.

2. Run around town finding small, light-weight gifts for people. For grown-ups, get boring, tasteful grown-up stuff, such as a krama scarf and a selection of Kampot peppers. For the kids, embrace the tacky: an Angry Birds t-shirt, glittery headbands, pink poofy hair clips. For the older kids—being your sister, and 18-year-old nephew—get ironic shit: t-shirts with nonsensical English words and an Apple logo, a cassette tape of Khmer pop, a bling kit (fake cellphone and gold chains used as offerings at altars). Chuckle to yourself, and consider the fact that you might be having more fun buying these presents than anyone could possibly have receiving them.

3. Wrapping: What’s cooler than gifts wrapped in newspaper? Gifts wrapped in Khmer newspaper. Khmer looks really cool, all squiggly and swirly; buy a stack of old papers at the market for 12 cents. Remember, once you get home and start wrapping, how much Cambodian newspapers like to publish pictures of dead bodies—motorbike accidents and murder victims. While perhaps the 18-year-old would find this culturally interesting, you figure this is not what a 2- or 6-year-old wants to see on Christmas morning. Carefully cut these photos out.

4. Hand off presents to Bel. Thank her profusely.

5. KEEP IT A SECRET! Holiday surprises are fun, and what’s more of a surprise than getting gifts from your daughter/sister/aunt from the anti-postal nethers of Southeast Asia? Well, a lot of things, but it’s still pretty cool. So do not mention any of this during your weekly Skype date with your parents.

6. Get up Christmas morning, which is Christmas Eve in California, and hurriedly make coffee and get on the computer and wait to connect to your family. The video will be out again, which is a major bummer, and you’ll spend 20 minutes trying to connect through FB video chat and iChat and AIM, but none of it will go through. Realize how much you were looking forward to seeing everyone. Cry.

But before you get off, your mom will tell you how a mysterious package arrived that morning. It had no return address, but they could see from the stamps that it was from Washington. They don’t know anyone in Washington. So they opened the package to try and figure out who it was supposed to go to—maybe it was sent to their address by accident—and they saw a bunch of little gifts, and they saw a card, and they thought—“Well, we’d better open the card to see who these are for.”

“And then we read the card, and it was from you!”

Smile. Your mom will say it was highlight of her day.

Then the connection will cut out.

So when you wake up the next morning, after a Christmas spent nursing another stomach flu, and see a pic of little smiley Ethan in his Cambodian Yankee chic, it’ll be pretty fucking sweet. It’ll be the highlight of your Christmas, and you’ll cry a little again—not because you feel far from home, like last time, but because you feel a little closer.