Archive for the 'Culture Shock' Category

« Previous Entries
Next Entries »

The Young Leading The Blind: Phnom Penh Image

Published June 6, 2011 Cambodia , Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Music , Phnom Penh , Places , Southeast Asia , Subculture 2 Comments
Tags: , , , , ,

This is the image I haven’t been able to get out of my head:

There’s an instrument called tro. It’s kind of like a violin. It’s a traditional Khmer instrument and you hold it low, down by its belly, and you work the strings with your other hand, across your chest or near your neck, like you’re sawing something.

There’s a whole history to it—it being destroyed during the Khmer Rouge time, famous musicians being killed, one surviving, unearthing the one he’d buried in the field before he’d been evacuated, it being one of the only tros to survive, the musician later founding a non-profit to teach the next generation, pass on what was nearly gone and almost died.

There’s a lot of stories like that in Cambodia; you hear so many you start to confuse them, get the facts mixed up and the characters wrong, until it becomes one big story that no one, it seems, can keep straight. But somehow blind men were involved in this one—were they blinded during the KR or later by landmines? Or were they born that way? I never figured that part out. But there were blind men that played the tro, that much I know, and you’d see them in the streets of Phnom Penh, and that’s the image I can’t get out of my head.

The tro players would always be older, battered-looking—the old generation, the 40+ers that had lived through the KR. They’d be walking as they played, being led around through the chaos of the motorbikes and tuk-tuks and vendors on the sidewalk and the busted-up places that were supposed to be sidewalks but were really just rubble—being led by a child, 10 or 11 or so, what was called “the new generation.” The kid would have their palm open, upturned, begging for the musician whose hands were occupied, seeing for eyes that were clouded by a perpetual mist.

But that wasn’t the weird part, the part that has lodged itself in my mind and keeps reappearing. The thing I keep thinking about is the string. There’d be a string tied around the tro player’s waist, and the kid would be holding the string, leading the blind old man like a pet through the streets—though you didn’t know who was whose pet, and how much of it was for show, for pity, for dollars.

The young leading the blind: it would have been a metaphor anywhere else. But this was Cambodia, Phnom Penh, so it was reality, just another scene on the street.

Gabriel Garcia Marquez hated the term “magical realism.” It was, to him, inaccurate, a term applied by outsiders, that dripped with misunderstanding and European paternalism. To him, what he wrote was realism, plain and simple—the so-called “magical” part was just a part of reality for Latin Americans, or Colombians at least.

Why do I think of this now? Why can’t I get the image of a lassoed blind man playing a near-extinct instrument out of my mind? Why did the image only begin recurring once I’d left, was in Laos, and why did I keep thinking of it and thinking of it, once I was back in the States?

Why didn’t it strike me as so bizarre in the moment?—not necessarily normal, in the sense of normal that I know, but as just another happening on the sidewalk, another sight to block out, filter out, shake my head to and keep my eyes straight and mutter “ot tey” to.

I’ve been trying to explain Cambodia and Phnom Penh to people. They ask me how my trip was, how my time there was, and my immediate answer—and the one that seems the truest—is, “Bizarre.” But I can’t really explain why it was bizarre, make any insightful statements or overarching cultural observations. All I can do is present a handful of images, anecdotes, the way they were presented to me—at random, shoved in my face so that all I could do was block them out, file them away to think about later and still not understand: children huffing from plastic bags, and monkeys running across the telephone wires, and the cross and uncross of the karaoke girls’ legs. The tro players and their milky eyes, the children and their upturned palms—but most of all the string.

Didn't take a picture of the tro players. Cause it seemed wrong. But here's another thing that didn't seem so weird at the time: typical sign outside a nightclub.

10 Thoughts on Being Back in the US

Published May 20, 2011 Being American , California , Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Home , Lonely Girl Loves , Oakland , Places , USA 6 Comments
Tags: , ,

1. Riding in my dad’s truck, MLK:
“So what does it feel like to be back?”
Look out the window, lines of lanes and sidewalk. “Everything feels really sterile. And clean.”
“Sterile and clean? Not usually words associated with Oakland.”
Laugh. “Yeah, I guess not.”

Empty

2. Running around the lake, joggers in sweat clothes:
Everyone looks really healthy here—big and robust, cheeks flushed.

3. Whole Foods, walk around for an hour, confused—pick up food, put it back down:
How do you shop in a grocery store? Everything looks plastic.

4. Winter-like storm, long pants and a jacket:
Everyone else may be annoyed, but I’m tickled to death.

5. Waiting to make left turn, watching the cars:
The US feels like a video game, some kind of old-school Atari: little boxes moving through space. The object of the game is to stay between the lines, stay in the lanes, walk on the sidewalk, put trash in the bin…

6. Rapture billboards:
Why?

7. Waiting to meet Nhu and Jacobo outside Bette’s Cafe, watching family:
“But I’m huuuun-greee.”
“Well, we have to wait.”
“But I don’t wa-nnnna.”
American children are allowed to be really obnoxious.

8. Wine meeting for work, varietal characteristics and spit buckets:
This is my job. This is silly.

9. Drive to meeting, park; drive to yoga, park; drive to cafe, park:
My life feels like a video game. I’m not sure what the object is.

10. Waiting at stoplight. Car beside me: bass bumping, boy leaning out of the open window, shirt half-off, arms raised, dancing:
There is nothing, nothing in the world like African-American culture.

Adventures in Vietnamese Bureaucracy: Dong Hoi Visa Shenanigans

Published May 10, 2011 Blunders , Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Independent , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia , Vietnam 4 Comments
Tags: , , , , , ,

I didn't take many pictures amid all this. So here's a boat.

Blond and sun-crisp, with a Marlon Brandon mouth and board shorts, Ben was the first Westerner I’d seen in Dong Hoi.

He lit a cigarette and sighed as his driver secured my backpack to the roof of the SUV. “Where are you from in the States?”

“California.”

“Ah, well,” he exhaled an agitated puff, “this is like the Alabama of Vietnam.”

I’d only spent 20 hours in Dong Hoi, so I wasn’t exactly in the position to agree or disagree. But I could verify that during those hours, I hadn’t seen any other foreigners. I hadn’t been able to communicate with anyone, hadn’t seen any English or any Western food, and I certainly hadn’t seen the travel agency I so desperately needed.

My first clue that I was officially off the beaten path was when the minivan from Dong Ha had more or less slid the door open and pushed me out onto the main strip of Dong Hoi, the tout smiling and yelling back at me, “Dong Hoi.”

I’d been lured to this part of the country by the Phong Nha Farmstay, an independent, family-run homestay that was also one of the few outfitters to run tours to the newly opened Paradise Cave.

But what I needed first was a travel agency—the kind I’d see all over the other places I’d been in the country, English-language signs advertising tourism services. I needed a visa extension: my 3-month, multiple-entry one was due to expire just 4 days before I fly out. While in Laos, I’d spent a good hour researching extensions, grace periods, whether I should just apply for a new visa or try to extend the one I have. I’d come up with zero in the way of solid, conclusive information. You could, it was rumored, overstay by 48 hours with no penalty. After that? Both Google and the Vietnamese Immigration website were wholly unhelpful. My plan was: get to Vietnam, find a travel agency in Dong Hoi, drop my passport there while I went to the farmstay for four days, pick up my passport when I returned to Dong Hoi for my bus to Hanoi. It wasn’t air-tight, but it was the best I could devise.

But after circling a dusky Dong Hoi a few times, I determined that there were no travel agencies. Because there were no Western tourists. I picked up a SIM card and called Ben, from the Phong Nha Farmstay.

“Listen,” Ben told me after I explained my situation, “I’ve got a guy in Dong Hoi.” He gave me the info of a man named Hung. After an ensuing half-dozen phone calls triangulating between Ben, Hung and myself, I ended up at Hung’s office the next morning, 2km down the main highway, a small room crammed with computers and tourism posters—in Vietnamese.

“Why didn’t you just get another visa?” Hung drilled me.

“Because I didn’t know I needed to.”

“Why did you wait so long to apply for an extension?”

“Because I couldn’t find any information on whether I had to extend it or not.”

Hung sighed. “This will be a problem.” He lectured me on much easier it would have been to just get a new visa while I was in Laos. I nodded, not bothering to explain the obscurity of Vietnamese bureaucracy.

He made a phone call; I sipped a glass on tea. He wheeled back over to me, giving a grave-faced and round-about explanation for why I couldn’t apply for a normal extension, why I had to have a rush, one-day extension. Which cost $100.

At which point Ben called me. “How’s it going with the visa there?”

I explained the situation. He sighed. “Let me talk to Hung.” The phone passed back and forth a few times. “Okay, listen,” Ben told me, “what Hung’s telling me is that you can’t leave your passport in Dong Hoi, because if the extension gets denied, we could possibly get fined for having someone illegal at the farmstay.” I chuckled at the idea of myself being illegal. “So it looks like you’ve got to do the rush, sorry bout that.”

After the initial wave of nausea, I succumbed to the idea that I’d have to part with $100. Live and learn—and blog about it so that other poor saps can learn too. Hung told me he’d call when it was done, around 3 or 4 o’clock.

I commenced to wander around the sweltering town of Dong Hoi, the faded colonial streets, the floating restaurants and wooden fishing boats, waving at the boys on bicycles that called out “hello” at me. I’d retreated to the lobby of my hotel—where I’d been the only guest—when Hung called. “There’s a problem with your visa. You didn’t tell me you have a business visa.”

I let out a laugh. “Well, I didn’t know I had one. I applied for a tourist visa.”

“The Immigration office says they need a health check and a letter from your employer to extend your visa.”

“But I don’t have an employer. I don’t actually work in Vietnam. It’s a mistake.”

“Then you’ll have to go to Hanoi. Immigration here can’t do it.”

That was about the time Ben showed up, an SUV packed with family and supplies he’d picked up in Hue. “Well shit,” he said, “let’s drive over to Hung’s.”

There aren’t hardly any Westerners in this province, Ben explained, so they aren’t used to dealing with tourists. The Phong Nha Cave might be the biggest tourist attraction in Vietnam, but that was only for Vietnamese. Westerners are rare, and everything having to do with Westerners exceedingly difficult.

On the sidewalk in front of Hung’s office, Hung shook his head and handed my money back to me. We stood around and ate ice-cream from the corner store, brain-storming.

“I mean, fuck,” Ben said, “you could just overstay.”

His Vietnamese wife Vik shook her head. “No. Better to do it the legal way.”

We discussed options. I could take a bus to Hanoi that night, and get it sorted out there. I could take a bus to Hue, hoping I could sort it out there, then take a bus back to the farmstay. Or I could say fuck it.

“I mean, what’s the worst that’ll happen?” I asked. “Will they arrest me or detain me?”

“No, no. I think officially, they charge you $25 a day. But a mate of mine overstayed and they just waved him through. Worst, I say, is they put something in your passport saying you can’t come back for three years.”

I shrugged. “I can live with that.”

I had something less than a chuckle when I imagined myself actually being an illegal in Vietnam. But after all the day’s shenanigans, I really could live with it..

Blessing of String and Sticky Rice: Day One in Ban Natane

Published May 7, 2011 Budget , Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Independent , Laos , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia 1 Comment
Tags: , , , , , , ,

The man held my open palm in his. In it, he placed a small clump of sticky rice and pork. He raised his right hand to his face, murmured blessings in a language I didn’t understand. He waved a piece of string, then tied it around my wrist.

“He wishes you good health, good luck,” Pauline translated.

I smiled, bowed. Outside the open-air room, lightning stuttered the night sky white.

Sometimes you end up some weird-ass places traveling. Not that they’re weird, so much as it’s weird that you’re there, that you ended up there—that the gods of circumstance conspired, whispering in their thunderous perch above grey rock, to bring you there. And it was like that in Ban Natane.

To say Ban Natane is off the beaten path is an understatement. Cut off from the rest of world by impassable roads, the only way to reach it and its neighboring four villages is through the Kong Lo Cave. Which is how I got there.

I met Pauline trolling the town of Ban Na Hin for travel companions. The boat ride through the cave costs 100,000 kip, so I was on the lookout for people to split the ride with. Pauline sat on the computer in front of her guesthouse. As it turned out, she was a French anthropology student doing her Masters research on Ban Natane and its neighbors; she was meeting her local supervisor and translator the next day and headed back to the village for another 10-day stay. “If you’d like to come with us,” she made that characteristic French popping noise, “it’s no problem.”

On the sawng thaew ride to the cave’s entrance, she filled me in the details. A French NGO was sponsoring the development of eco-tourism in the Ban Natane area. To date, all homestays and eco-tourism in the area have focused on the Ban Kong Lo side of the cave—you take a boat ride through, come back and sleep on the more developed side of the cave.

“No one stays on this side,” she told me, “because tourists don’t know the villages are there.” Since the only viable way to reach the villages is through the cave, Ban Natane and its neighbors have remained quite isolated, not reaping the rewards/wealth of tourism. “In all of last year,” Pauline told me, “only 20 tourists came to Ban Natane.”

The eco-tourism project was focused on developing facilities for homestays and training locals to act as guides into the caves and waterfalls that surround the region. Pauline’s project focused on documenting the traditional agricultural way of life, interviewing locals about the history and their feelings about tourism, and then studying the impact.

Emerging

So the Kon Lo cave became, not my destination, but the passageway into another world. Which actually what it felt like—a limestone cavern like a mouth, dripping with stalagmites, the squeal and swoop of bats, where mist floated off the cool water like thin ghosts. It felt like moving through some deeply internal part of the earth, through its innards or petrified organs.

We emerged on the other side. Where most people turn around, we began walking down a dirt road. My cheap flip flops had finally busted, so I walked the 2km barefoot. In the distance, the sky grumbled. We arrived in Ban Natane just as the afternoon storm erupted.

My homestay was with one of the wealthier families in town. They owned the town’s only shop (and thus had packets of Nescafe in abundance), goods that had all been transported on skinny wooden boats through the cave, as they had been for generations. Even the TV. “TV only arrived here three months ago,” Pauline told me. “So the children,” she gestured towards the little ones gathered rapt around the glowing screen, “they are like this.”

The storm cleared and she showed me around the village. Everything enthralled me—I am, as previously admitted, a total city kid, so the presence alone of ducks, pigs, chickens and goats was thrilling, let alone the sarongs and hoes and looms beneath the stilted houses.

We shared dinner with the family that night, as we would for all our meals during my 2-day stay. As isolated as it is, the food was all local, not by trend as it is in the Bay Area, but by necessity—foraged snails, fish, frogs. “Frog season has just started,” Pauline translated from her Lao supervisor, “so we will eat a lot of frog.” (Sure enough, I had it 4 meals in a row.)

Walking that night, we three were called over to a large house. I could tell it was a wealthy person’s home because it had a ground floor, constructed of brick—like the TVs, this was new, Pauline told me, as traditional homes were all stilted and wooden. “It means you need more space, and have the money to build it.” She paused. “So modernity is already coming.”

Men sat on the floor around a type of altar, banana-leaf adorned in white flowers. It wasn’t a mystical vibe—they sat in polo shirts and slacks, chatting casually. A large silver bowl of pig parts, a leg and half a head, lay beside baskets of sticky rice.

We were motioned to sit, a village-made scarf thrown over our left shoulders. The man in charge began talking—“a blessing,” Pauline whispered. He held another man’s open palm, put a clump of food and a plastic cup of lao lao in it, chanted, tied the string. Then everyone commenced to bless each other.

“It’s a ceremony called baci,” Pauline translated. “They’re having it for special visitors—the district chief came today.” People took photos with digital cameras; I assumed those to be the wealthy and important visitors.

We were soon called into the mix. I wound up with a bangle of string around my right wrist and an even fuller tummy. The storms continued in the sky outside. Old men smiled as they blessed me, as they blessed each other.

And I had one of those moments when your life feels like a dream, some foreign place you don’t quite understand how you ended up in. Yes, I rode an old wooden boat through a cave and walked down a dirt road—but how I really got to Ban Natane or that ceremony, I suspected, had little to do with that. It didn’t make sense, to my Western mind, why I’d be so welcomed, so embraced here.

And so blessed.

***

Travel Tips: Getting to Ban Natane

It’s actually pretty simple, even if you don’t have an anthropologist as your guide. Take your day bag, sturdy plastic sandals, a good flashlight and some snacks with you on your boat ride. It’ll still cost 100,000 kip, even if you only take it one way. So it goes.

Get off at the snack stands. Only buy the snacks if you’re desperate; since they have to be transported through the cave, they’re fuck-all expensive. Anyway, there’ll be a blue sign that haphazardly explains the homestays:

From the snack stands, there’s two dirt roads. Facing the sign, Ban Natane is down the road to your left. Straight ahead, across the bridge, is another closer village, though from what I understand, there’s less facilities for homestays. If you arrive in Ban Natane and say “homestay,” you’ll get hooked up. Or just show up and look like a Westerner, and they’ll know what to do with you.

Bringing a Lao phrasebook would be goddamn useful. There may be some people floating around who speak a few scraps of English; there’s rumored to be an English teacher at the school in the village, though she was out of town when I was there. If you can manage to communicate, there’s bikes you can rent or a couple good treks to go on, if it’s the dry season. Next month, an NGO will be holding a tour guide training course for locals, so I imagine there will be much more in the way of communication and tour options shortly.

My Legs in Laos and My Heart in Cambodia

Published May 1, 2011 Cambodia , Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Laos , Places , Southeast Asia 4 Comments
Tags: , , ,

From the bus

“It’s crazy,” Alicia leaned over and whispered, a precipitous landscape of green huffing past the bus window, “how much healthier people look here.”

We sat in the cramped seats of a leaky-window bus, an 11-hour ride from Vientiane up to Luang Prabang. We passed mountains of limestone that rose up like the Angkor towers, dense forest and slash-and-burn fields of black, where smoke spindled like skinny incense. Punctuating the wild were villages of thatched-roofs and rusty satellite dishes, women swatting plastic bags at the flies that hovered over their roadside produce stalls, dirt-faced children who looked up, startled from inside doorways, then smiled and waved.

It was our fourth day in Laos.

I nodded; Alicia was right. There were the racial differences—lighter skin, sharper eyes—but also a kind of impoverished solidity to the people: lean but sturdy, skin firmer, less taut than that of their Cambodian neighbors.

Laos ranks among the world’s poorest 20 countries, and it endured its own US-fueled war and rounds of secret, incessant bombing. But there’s a difference between Laos and Cambodia, a lack of trauma that feels palatable.

We arrived that night in Luang Prabang, the country’s biggest tourist attraction—a Unesco-site of colonial chill. Vientiane was pretty mellow itself, but it’s hard to get a feel for a country by one city, especially its capital, often bound to be wealthier than the rest of the place.

It’s been a week now, and little differences between Laos and Cambodia have continued to reveal themselves to me. Like there aren’t private security guards sitting in plastic chairs outside every restaurant and guesthouse. There aren’t girls, bare arms folded and legs crossed in short skirts, sitting in similar plastic chairs outside of karaokes. I haven’t seen twelve-year-olds on the sidewalk, hunched over and breathing deeply into plastic bags that fill and deflate, fill and deflate, with the rhythm of addiction.

The foreigners are different too. There’s more backpackers, nearly exclusively backpackers, it feels, all wearing a uniform of flip-flops, shorts, Beer Laos tank tops and hungover sunburns. I’ve only seen a few Western white men with local women, and in most of those instances, they’ve had mixed-race children in tow. I haven’t seen any older burn-out travelers, with missing teeth and weathered skin and the particular wiriness that decades of addiction bring (think Iggy Pop in sandals).

I’ve read the newspaper a few times; it hasn’t been filled with stories about child rapes and murders and bizarre happenings (ie: a monk being disrobed for getting caught having sex with a married woman). Signs in my guesthouses haven’t advised me against having sex with children. I don’t finish all my food at a street stall, go to pack it up and take with me, then realize there aren’t street kids to give it to. There’s sidewalks, and the electrical wires stretch down the streets in smooth, discernible lines.

I hadn’t expected these differences. They’d existed in Thailand, but Thailand is wealthier, didn’t survive a war just a few short decades ago. I’ve been experiencing them as a series of little moments, realizations, that have started to add up in me, assemble in a line, make some sort of shape—a constellation of tragedy, a map of the way tragedies continue to exist in us, reverberating like sound waves or the rings inside trees when you cut them down and turn them sideways.

Cambodia, I’d thought, didn’t seem like a place that a genocide had occurred in. Phnom Penh, when I’d first arrived and walked its blossom-lined streets, didn’t seem like a city that had been evacuated, abandoned, left to crumble and rot for four years.

But the longer I’d stayed, the more I’d become aware of these strange things, little fucked-up moments that sparked and burned like dying stars. They felt like glimpses in to something too terrifying to look at squarely. So I suppose I didn’t look, didn’t think about them more deeply than a passing pang. This is how you deal with suffering, the same way I step over junkies in the Tenderloin: you build a wall around yourself, and you need this wall—if you let it all in, you might snap, go over into that dark side you’ve glimpsed and not ever come back. It happens; it sounds dramatic but you’ve seen it happen, like the kid in middle school who takes too much acid one night and is never the same. It could be you.

What I mean to say is that I normalized all the trauma in Cambodia, in the way people normalize everything—begging children and tuk-tuk drivers that couldn’t read maps, karma-scarves faces atop pick-up trucks, eyes that blazed black in the dust.

Sometimes it takes leaving a place to really know it—the way I’ve come to know the US much better by having traveled outside it. And now that I’m in Laos, somewhere chiller and possessed by a less horrible history, I’ve suddenly become aware of all these observations that were collecting quietly in me. It’s made me reconsider Cambodia, redefine it by a comparison country. And oddly, it’s made me miss it, crave it, the way we love things we can’t save.

“I was glad I went,” Suki said as we strolled the night market tonight. “There were some cool moments and it was really educational, but man,” she paused, shook her head slightly and her earrings followed her, glimmering, “I was ready to leave. It was heavy there.”

“How do you mean?” the writer in me asked, wanting details, specifics, scenes to cite.

Spooky dolls at the market

“I don’t know, it was just this heaviness in the people.”

I looked around at the gentle bustle and glowing lights of the market, and nodded. “I think I know what you mean.”

The Lucky Ones at the War Museum

Published April 13, 2011 Being American , Cambodia , Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Places , Southeast Asia 5 Comments
Tags: , , , ,

Instruments of death don’t die. They rust.

Fifteen minutes from the happy pizza restaurants and nibbling-fish pedicure tanks of Siem Reap’s Old Market area is the War Museum. It’s not much of a museum, per se—it’s a grassy field filled with mango trees and the skeletal carcasses of tanks, missiles and planes used during the Cambodian civil war (the 1960s Lon Nol era through the fighting of the mid-90s). The “exhibits” sit exhausted and silent in the heat of the field. They’ve been striped for parts, all that’s left of them slowly turning brown, the same brown as the the earth.

“The memorials in Cambodia are so raw,” Anna’d remarked. “At Auschwitz, everything is behind glass or protected. You felt more separated. But in Cambodia, at the Killing Fields or S-21, there’s less between you and the stuff you’re seeing.”

I thought of Anna’s comment as I walked into the War Museum, past the massive helicopters that slept like corpses in the entrance. I’ve never been to Auschwitz or any similar genocide memorials, so I don’t have anything to compare the ones in Cambodia to. But there’s definitely a rawness. And it’s a rawness you feel in the whole country, not just at the memorials, but that the memorials seem to capture, to be the pure essence of, in a way that reminds me of whiskey distillation—too pure, the uncut soul of the thing, that if’s not diluted could kill you.

A guide approached us, a young man in a fake Lacoste shirt, frayed stitching and tell-tale grin on the alligator’s face. He was missing an arm; a nub extended beneath the sleeve, a little past his shoulder, and you could see it move around in there as he walked.

A sign announced that guides were free, so we went along with him, assuming a small tip would be expected. He spoke English well and was knowledgeable about the artifacts, mute metal that sat, refusing to decompose. Small wooden signs had explanations penned in a haphazard English.

“What is your nationality?”

“USA,” I replied. A pause. “We’re American.”

“Ah. America is rich country. Cambodia is poor. So if a pilot not fight well, if a soldier not hit target, he get killed—it a waste of ammunition. The pilot, they cannot eject from the plane, they trapped. The soldier get locked inside the tank, and if he don’t fight good, he stay in and die. We find still the bodies in many of these tanks.”

We stared at the machines; they reminded me of dinosaur bones or the great cranes at the Port of Oakland—metal with so much power, sitting still.

As we walked, he told us the story of how he lost his arm: when he was 14, his dad brought home a landmine. He was trying to dismantle it; we couldn’t make sense of why. The bomb exploded, killing his parents and two siblings, and leaving him with a belly full of shrapnel and one less arm.

“I’m lucky I’m okay,” he told us. “But I am very lonely, I have no family.” He went on to explain the difficulties of life as an amputee in Cambodia, with discrimination and lack of healthcare. He paused, looked at us. “You are very lucky, you have family.”

Types of landmines

We kept moving. He pointed out common types of landmines, explaining which countries they’d been made in: Russia, Bulgaria, the US. He told us 1-2 people a day in Cambodia are still injured by unexploded ordinances. “You are very lucky, your country no have landmines.”

As he stood talking, I slid a modest note into the “Donations for Landmine Victims” box. He watched me. When he finished explaining the table of empty shells, he pointed to the box. “This money go to the government first, then the people. The government take a lot.” I squinted my eyes, nodding slowly. It’s true—there’s a lot of corruption in Cambodia. But I could also sense where this was going. “It better you give to the people.”

I cocked my head as he lead us away. Everything I’ve read in every country I’ve been to—including the sign at the guesthouse I’d just left (that among other things encouraged me to not have sex with children)—tells you not to give directly to people but to worthy, legitimate organizations. It was unsubtle foreshadowing.

He kept us moving at a steady pace. I thought of my guide at the pre-Angkorian temples a week earlier—also missing an arm but older, darker, a man who only spoke Khmer. I thought of the way he’d clasped his phantom hands behind his back, and the way it made something in me pound, then sink.

This guide didn’t clasp his hands. He was wearing short sleeves.

We paused under the hot breath of the sun. “How many sibling you have?” he asked each of us and we each responded.

“That good. You lucky. I have no brother or sister now.”

We came to a row of wooden shacks, displays of exploded bombs. They looked like peeled fruit, like some modern-art interpretation of peeled fruit that you’d see in some chic lounge, that was trying to make some sort of terribly deep and obvious statement. But this wasn’t art and it wasn’t a lounge—it was a shack and twisted metal.

They’d sawed the blown bits of his arm off with a wire. Because he was young and still growing, he had to go back every four years, to have the bone re-sawed. He couldn’t afford to get the shrapnel from his belly removed; at $100-200 a pop, he said he’d had to leave it to float around in there.

“In America I hear they make a machine arm.” He looked around at all the dead, rusted machines. “Maybe soon they make it in China. It will be cheaper there, and if I work enough, one day I can get. This is my dream: you come back and I can give you a hug with my robot arms.”

We got to the end of the tour. “It is good if you give a tip,” he told us flatly, “so I can pay for my surgery. Many people give $20-30 each person.”

Suki and Alicia looked at me. They’d each been in the country less than 24 hours. I considered the fact that a construction worker makes $3 a day, your average tuk-tuk driver $5. I considered the fact that my daily budget was $30.

He stood a few steps back, staring at us, waiting. “Can you give us just two minutes?” Suki asked.

We whispered, gathered bills. We gave him a fair tip, said thank you.

Then he walked back to our tuk-tuk, heavy with sweat, our ankles covered in dirt the color of rust.

Good Lord, That’s A Lotta Money: A Trip to the US Embassy

Published March 29, 2011 Being American , Cambodia , Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Phnom Penh , Places , Southeast Asia 11 Comments
Tags:

The culprit

Damn these full-page visas.

When I started traveling, I loved getting passport stamps. They were like tattoos—when you first starting getting tattooed, all you want is more, more, and you stare at the ones you have, and you look at the remaining blankness and fantasize about the ones you’ll get. Western Europe, I thought, was a real bummer—you got only one (extremely boring) stamp for entry into any of the Schengen Zone countries. Lame.

Enter SE Asia—the land of senseless beauracracy and full-page visas. They hungrily consume your passport, taking up space that could easily fit five to six entry stamps to more modest, reasonable countries. Two of these, and I realized I was quickly running out of room in my passport.

It was time for a trip to my Embassy.

Here I should interject—for the non-Americans and the non-traveling Americans, which is most Americans—that filling up my passport does not make me a world traveler of epic proportions. It simply means that the US issues the skimpiest passports you’ve ever seen.

“Look at this thing!” I exclaimed, holding my passport up sideways, showing Anna its anorexic profile.

“Aw, that’s the cutest little passport I’ve ever seen.”

“And guess how long it’s good for?” I paused, preparing her for the indignity. “Ten years! Ten fucking years! What am I supposed to do with this—go to Canada once a year?” And I flung it on the cafe table like the mildly offensive thing it is.

American passports have improved; they now come with 24 pages. But when mine was issued, they still came with a measly 14 pages. Which is annoying, but serves as yet more evidence that Americans don’t travel like the rest of their Western counterparts.

But we recently hit a record high: a whopping 30% of Americans hold passports. (Tell this to a person of any other Western nationality and they laugh heartily.) And, I’d soon find out, there’s evidence of that too.

So it was off to the US Embassy. I’ve never had a reason to visit an Embassy before, and it felt a little like a field trip. I was mildly excited. I queued up under a shady awning at 1pm, eager to be one of the first in line for the two daily hours allotted for walk-in services.

The door opened at 1pm exactly (ah, American punctuality) and a grim-faced guard waved me in. I passed through a metal detector, was told I need to check my bag. I left that room, walking through a manicured courtyard (ah, the American affection for well-groomed lawns) and into another room, where another man examined my passport, wrote down my info, handed me a visitors badge and waved to enter the next room.

It was like a little air-conditioned slice of America. Posters on the wall: “From Sea to Shining Sea,” portraying different landscape shots; pictures of smiling, racially diverse faces; a sign suggesting that I like the US Embassy on Facebook (now, why on earth…). There was a drinking fountain—not a water cooler, but a drinking fountain—and I took a sip just for the novelty of it. A picture of Uncle Sam pointed down at me, and I smiled.

I lined up at a service window, fenced off with red partitions. I’d heard that they’d recently started charging for additional passport pages. I’d assumed that, now flooded with an influx of traveling Americans, this would be some sort of modest administrative fee; I had $30 in my wallet. I got to the window and told the clerk I needed more passport pages, and asked how much it would be.

She handed me a form. “It’s $82.”

I blinked. “$82?” I repeated. Maybe I heard her wrong.

She nodded. “$82.”

I briefly considered quoting the old Chris Rock skit from I’m Gonna Get You Sucka: “$82? Good lord, that’s a lotta money. How much for one page? How bout I photocopy a page and staple it in myself?”


Apparently the original skit doesn’t have the tag line. But you know what I mean…

Something told me this would not be an effective bargaining technique. Besides, this was the little slice of America, and in America, we don’t bargain.

“Um, okay,” I said slowly. “Well, I didn’t think it would be that much. Do you take credit cards?”

“No,” she smiled. “Cash only.” So it wasn’t totally a slice of America.

I asked the clerk’s opinion on whether I’d actually need more pages. I showed what I had left—two unstamped pages, plus the back amendment pages. I told her the countries I’d be going to. Did she think the customs agents will be able to squeeze the stamps in? (If it were Mexico or Italy, it’d be no problem; those fools will stamp right over of other stamps.)

“I think it’ll be okay for this trip. But it’s the same price here as in the States. So if you think you’ll need more pages anyway, you may as well get them while you’re here.”

Ah, American customer service: she was right. I don’t even know where the Consulate is in San Francisco. Right now I’m living a 5 minute walk from the US Embassy; in Phnom Penh, the task would only chew up an hour or so, as opposed to a whole day.

I nodded. “Okay, thank you. I’ll be back.”

And so I went back yesterday, went through the whole process again. And I must say that there’s something vaguely comforting about the whole thing—even though I don’t feel myself missing the States at all, there’s something sweet and reassuring about being surrounded by the Americana images, the American accents.

The funny thing about the Embassy here—and I’ve been told this is particular to this Embassy—is that services for Americans and services for Cambodians are done in one room. You sit in little chairs and wait for your number to be called, which sounds boring (and it is) but you’re provided with some pretty keen people-watching. Conversations between clerks and customers are done through a glass window, over a small speaker, and that provides for some pretty keen eaves-dropping.

A Cambodian man was trying to secure visas for his family to come to the States. He’d failed to follow the correct procedures and was stumbling to answer questions. He didn’t seem to understand the concept of needing to provide DNA-test results for his kids. I felt embarrassed for him.

I also saw the most Mexican Khmer man in, well, perhaps anywhere: cowboy boots, cowboy hat, big belt buckle and blue jeans, one of those air-brushed Cholo shirts with a picture of a foxy lady on the back, saying something “Por Vida.” I was ravenously curious to find out his story, but he left before I had a chance to sit down next to him and get nosy. Sometimes Khmer people with especially round faces look vaguely Mayan, and in my mind I imagined him having resettled in Texas or California and one day deciding: “Fuck it, if everyone thinks I’m Mexican, I’m rolling with it—por vida.”

A man next to me struck up conversation. He was Cambodian; having lived in the US for 10 years, he’d recently returned and was hoping to get a job at the Embassy. He asked why I was there, and we shared a laugh about how ghastly expensive my simple task was.

“I think it’s because more Americans have passports now—they’re milking it.” I leaned in, lowered my voice, “They found a new way to rip us off, you know?”

He nodded. “Maybe the pages be made of gold.”

I chuckled. “We can only hope.”

I got my passport back and the new pages were not, in fact, made of gold. They were made of paper. Very smartly decorated paper, with fanciful American images—totem poles and majestic eagles and buffalo so darkly colored I don’t know how a stamp is supposed to be readable over it. There are quotes from famous Americans about democracy and freedom and something from Ronald Reagan about living in a world “lit by lightning” that I’ve been unable to make sense of.

The new pages are insultingly over-priced, audaciously gaudy and not entirely practical—in short, very very American. And what can I do but shake my head, both annoyed and amused, with the vague affection one feels for their native land, their home country, their home.

My new plump passport

The Anti-Irony of Cambodian Fashion: The English-Language T-Shirt Edition

Published March 26, 2011 Being American , Cambodia , Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Offbeat , Phnom Penh , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia 5 Comments
Tags: , , , , , ,

“I like how cheesy it is, you know?” Mathilde said this morning, ashing her anorexic cigarette and looking across the street, at the teenagers hanging out at the Best Friend Cafe. Fake acid-wash skinny jeans, emo sideswiped hair-dos, bedazzled trucker hats positioned atop boys’ heads in a perch reminiscent of Abe Lincoln—the styles donned so earnestly by Cambodian youth would be only be seen on the most ironic of Western hipsters. And even then…

“It’s not so serious as in Europe,” she continued. “We would think this was so cheesy, but why not? If they like it, if they think it looks good, why not?”

One of the things I love most about Cambodian fashion—and it isn’t the stripper shoes or cutesy pajama prints or polka-dot pants—is the utter sincerity with which ridiculous clothing is worn. Ridiculous to Western eyes, I should say. And tonight this was exemplified by the t-shirts for sale at Phnom Penh’s Night Market.

On Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, along the riverside, tents are erected and a fair-style stage put up; vendors set up booths, teenagers with mediocre voices and sleep-walk-y dance moves perform on stage, mobile phone companies set up opposing stands with megaphones blasting promotions at one another, food stalls sell skewers of myserious deep-fried meat products, and diners take off their shoes and sit on straw mats, eating off thin wooden sticks. It’s nice. It’s a good mix of foreigners and Khmers, the riverside breeze is sweet, and until the mosquitoes drive you away, it’s pretty fucking luxurious to sit out and enjoy the night.

So we’ve been making a habit of grabbing some food and sitting out under the stars—or what would be the stars, might be the stars, behind the haze of city lights and smog. You can’t really be sure anymore. You don’t really go there to buy things—some tourist trinkets, fake floral arrangements (okay, I bought one of those for my apartment), and clothing. Clothing for local teenagers, I should say.

Tonight I took to photographing some of the t-shirts I felt best exemplified the Cambodian fashion spirit within the particular sub-category of Putting English Words On A Shirt Immediately Makes It Cool.

Rule #1: It doesn’t really matter if what’s on a shirt makes sense or not—as long as there are English letters, you’re half-way there.

Rule #2: It really doesn’t matter.

Rule #3: Product placement is a key component of English-language t-shirt fashion. It doesn’t matter if it’s the actual logo of a product, as long as it refers a Western, and preferably American, product.

Hey Apple marketing masterminds: you should really think about doing a Cambodian edition of those PC vs Apple guys ads. Do you see any PC t-shirts out here? I don’t think so…

Rule (?) #4: It also doesn’t seem to matter if the senseless phrases evoke repulsive imagery of, say, spoiled food products.

“Punk Rock Tonight Love Me”: I almost bought this one. It was too small.

“Power Over Pimples”: Fuck yeah! As someone who endured 12 years of acne, I wanted to high-five this t-shirt and jump joyously in the air like… the people on this t-shirt. The text was also English, singing the praises of an acne-fighting cleansing solution.

So, um, in a country where a shitton of kids get strung out on glue sniffing and paint huffing, I didn’t know what to make of this. Was it supposed to be funny? One thing’s for sure: I don’t think the affected demographic is perusing for new shirts at the Night Market though…

Rule #5: Content Over Accuracy

“Joy, Look For It Evert Day”: This shirt says it all. There’s a certain sweetness to it all, what would be convenient to call an innocence, but I think it’s something other than that, less simple or more simple or in any case different.

“Cambodia’s not a post-modern culture,” someone was explaining to me. “So there’s not a lot of irony. There’s a playfulness for sure—but more of a sincerity to the work.”

She was talking about contemporary art, but I thought about her comment looking at the shirts tonight. And I think it’s true for the fashion as well. And I agree with Mathilde—I like it. Coming from a world of ironic everything—ironic moustaches, ironic wolf-howling-at-the-moon shirts, ironic gangsta rap listening and ghetto blasting, ironic malt liquor drinking and crack smoking (yes, really)—it’s pretty fucking refreshing to enter a world of sweetness and anti-irony. It’s not any less self-conscious, it’s just self-conscious in a different way. It makes you feel like we’ve missed something in the Western world, that we’ve lost something, gotten away from something, something I can’t quite name but that makes me horribly sad, in the smallest way, heavy like a pebble.

But I’m Western. And I can’t switch worlds, switch roles, ease myself into a different way of thinking. The t-shirts are, to me, ironic.

Yawning teenager working the teddy bear stand

WTF Moment of the Day: Street Monkey

Published March 15, 2011 Blunders , Cambodia , Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Phnom Penh , Places , Southeast Asia 4 Comments
Tags: , , , , ,

So about once a day here in Phnom Penh I have a massive WTF moment. I’ve been catalouging them: a boy stabbing birds, Western beggars, my guesthouse posting a sign about not offering “the sex services,” and pretty much any occasion I open the Phnom Penh Post. Strange things, bizarre things that my Western brain can’t compartmentalize—where all there is to do is shrug, shake your head and say “What the fuck…”

Today’s WTF moment came as I was walking home. It was a mellow day, filled with writing and street food, and I was retiring early, walking down a dusty road lined with corrugated metal fences, behind which the humming of machinery had ceased for the day. Men still wearing their hardhats bicycled past; teenagers in school uniforms clustered at the street corners, eating grilled meats from street stalls.

Then I saw this fellow:

Now, I’m familiar with street dogs and street cats and rats and mice and raccoons and squirrels—but WTF?! A street monkey? Phnom Penh isn’t the fucking jungle; it’s a city.

Where did the little guy comes from? Why wasn’t he in a zoo? Why was he just chilling there, riffling through a bag, trying to fish out a little food, sticking his red ass in the air as he repositioned? Why was no one doing anything? Why were they all going about their business like it was no big deal, perfectly normal for a hairy primate cousin to be out and about on a humid late afternoon?

I stood and watched him. I took a picture. A security guard down the road looked at me curiously—What’s this crazy white girl taking a picture of a monkey for?

The monkey tired of the plastic bag, threw it aside. He stretched his limbs and turned, looking into the traffic. He began to cross the street slowly, the same way I do, sensing out the rhythm of the road. He knew what he was doing. He was better at crossing the street than most tourists. The motobikes and tuk-tuks and cars slowed and swerved seamlessly around him—just another monkey cruising across the street.

Then he spotted me.

I still had my camera in my hands; maybe he was offended that I was taking pictures, objectifying him like an animal in a zoo. He gave me a real menacing look, bared his teeth slightly. He walked towards me.

Here I should clarify that I am 100% a city kid. I used to be afraid to swim in water I couldn’t see the bottom of. I’m easily impressed by the appearance of any stars whatsoever. Wildlife freaks me out about as much as uber urbanity freaks other people out. And everything is wildlife: from the geckos on the wall to the squeaks of bats. If it’s not a cat or dog, it’s probably got rabies and wants to eat you.

I thought of Greg, who I met bicycling breathlessly down a dirt road in Southern Italy. Greg was straight outta Queens, his speech peppered with more “yo”s than my own “hella”s. He’d just run into a herd of sheep in the road. He’d freaked—what were they doing? (“Probably grazing,” I offered.) Wildlife, fuck that. He hadn’t wasted any time in pedaling the other direction, and I immediately understood his panic.

And so the gangsta street monkey swaggered towards me. I moved slowly (“keep it cool, don’t ask scared, he can smell your fear”), stepping carefully, one foot at a time, in the opposite direction. When he disappeared between two parked cars, I walked briskly away, shaking my head and thinking, “What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.”

Two Cambodias

Published March 12, 2011 Cambodia , Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Phnom Penh , Places , Southeast Asia 6 Comments
Tags: , , , , ,

“The Cambodian people are just so lovely.”

You’re apt to hear this from other Westerners as you travel throughout Southeast Asia; you arrive in Phnom Penh and you’re apt to agree. A friendly, welcoming, almost shy demeanor, so vastly different from the brashness of their Vietnamese neighbors—it’s entracing, in a way, and a part of you falls in love with it, with the endlessly smiling faces, the hands pressed together and the small bow, say, when you pay your tab at a restaurant.

“How could they have possibly killed each other?” you hear people ask. “It’s amazing to think the Khmer Rouge could have occurred in a place like this, where the people are just so nice.” And as you graze the surface—stroll along the riverside, say, or stop for a coffee at a shady little street stall—it’s easy to wonder the same thing.

But you stay here a little while and you begin to see things—shadows that move like stray dogs, so that you think they’re stray dogs, until you look closer and realize: no, no, that’s something else. And it’s like there’s two Cambodias—the one you see on the surface, during daylight hours, and the other, some strange Other, of darkness and violence and short skirts sitting outside neon nightclubs, and weird, weird shit you couldn’t possibly ever understand.

“It’s out there,” Rachel said, nodding. “And all you need to do is scratch the surface—” she flicked her finger in the air “—and you see it.”

Flipping through the two English-language newspapers, you catch glimpses, between the black newsprint that smudges onto your fingertips in the heat. Western pedafiles, human traffikers, drug busts. You read a story about a local military captain being punished for using his gun “anarchically”, shooting it recklessly into a crowd of people. Because no one died, he doesn’t face any criminal charges. Instead, his head is shaved and he’s forced to go a military detention center, what sounds like a work camp, where he scrubs toilets and collects rubbish. He’ll be forced to work until “his attitude changes, then he’ll be set free.”

You read another article, about the murder/rape of a 25-year-old girl in a village in the Cham province. She’d been scratched, maimed, her vagina set ablaze. And yet it’s what the article mentions in passing, without further explaination, as though it were a given, that you find most disturbing. “Even in a time when every week brings fresh news of a horrific assault on a woman or child, the brutality of Lim Kim’s death stands out.” It’s determined that the attacker must be married, because otherwise he would have just married the victim after raping her and wouldn’t have had to kill her. “Something made him unable to be responsible for his actions,” the local police had determined. The reporter had gone on to interview villagers; they reported being “scared of the ghost of the body, but most of all the attacker”—as though it were perfectly normal to be scared of the murderer girl’s ghost, but not of an attacker.

Tim’s telling you the lead-in to some story, some hapless night. It took place at the first Western nightclub in Phnom Penh, where prostitution isn’t the worst of the city’s nightclubs, but certainly still present. “It’s called Heart of Darkness—”

“Wait,” you stop him. “Are you fucking serious? The first Western nightclub in the city is called ‘Heart of Darkness’?”

He nods and you laugh, because what is there else to do in the face of such a blatant metaphor—if you wrote in a book, you say, it’d be over-the-top symbolism. But here it is, in real life, staring you in the face, and there’s nothing to do but shake your head and laugh.

“You should always take a taxi at night,” Patricia tells you at the club, giving you the number of a taxi service. “The police clock off at 9. So sometimes, the moto or tuk-tuk driver will call a friend, and there’ll be someone waiting at your apartment with a gun to rob you. The taxi costs more, but it’s better.”

You program the taxi number into your phone.

You’re having dinner with Susan and she mentions in passing that the number of mob killings are down. “Mob killings?” you ask. “Oh, yes,” and she tells you about the phenomenon of mobs of people spontaneously beating and stoning accused theives to death. “It was really bad seven or so years ago, several a month. They came under pressure from the UN to get a handle on it. It’s pretty rare in Phnom Penh now, but it still happens in the provinces.”

“A girl was double raped earlier this week,” Tom tells you, “and her attackers only had to pay a $125 restitution. The case didn’t even go to court.”

“We’ve secured scholarships for several kids to go back to school,” Romi tells you when you visit Tiny Toones.

“Are the school fees very high?” you ask.

“No,” she sighs, “it’s the bribes that really add up.”

“Bribes?”

“Yes, the teacher bribes. They don’t always call it that, but it’s like this: the teacher photocopies a lesson. They say, ‘I paid for this photocopy, so you must pay me.’ If you don’t, you don’t get the lesson, you can’t take the test, you can’t pass the class. So it’s like this. But,” she shurgs and looks out at the shaded lot of squealing children, “this is Cambodia, and this is how it is.”

You nod. You’ve given up trying to wrap your head around it, trying to fit it into some compartment of Western understanding.

But it doesn’t feel bipolar; it doesn’t feel like a contradiction, or like it’s at odds with itself. You feel, on an intuitive, unnameable level, that it’s two sides of the same coin—that it’s born from the same place, the beauty and grace and warmth, and the violence and corruption and darkness—born from the same mystery down there at the center, and not so far from the surface.

You think of Elliott Smith. Which is embarrassing and ridiculous, but you think of him anyway—of the beautiful ballads, the immense tenderness, the way you cried across the Atlantic when his song came on your iPod and the news of the death was fresh, an another lifetime that’s not so long ago sometimes, not as far as you’d like to think. And you think of people asking, “Man, how could he write such beautiful songs and fucking stab himself in the chest?”

And you’d always thought, “That’s how.” And you think of it now, though you’re not sure why, though it’s not at all the same thing—though you laugh at your silly, silly gut for telling you it is.

Lauren Quinn is a writer and traveler currently living in Hanoi. Lonely Girl Travels was a blog of her sola travels and expat living from 2009 to 2012. She resides elsewhere on the internet now.

Join 490 other subscribers

Buy This Sh#t

Categories