The first half of my reflections from this summer in Cambodia:
June 18, 2009
7:02am
There’s one moment I savor more than any other when coming to Cambodia – or any new place for that matter, and that’s the first sniff when the airplane cabin doors are open and you step down onto the tarmac. It lasts but a few seconds – your nose flooded with the scent of a place you haven’t been able to relish in a while. Cambodia smells like sweat, and fish – its pungency strong like the aromatic fissure at the epicenter of the wet market. It certainly is not the most pleasing of fragrances I know, but there is no other smell that embraces you and welcomes you quite like this one.
2:34pm
I have been studying for 5 hours! It hurts my head but I am reading history and writing essays IN KHMER!!!
June 21, 2009
3:18pm
This expat lifestyle is glamorous and comfortable but I am thankful that it is temporary. For the last three years my sole interaction with Phnom Penh has been on the Global Urban Trek, where the goal is to facilitate a trajectory for US college students to come to love and learn from the third world urban poor. My job was to organize month-long home stays in urban poor communities and lead them in working alongside community organizations that take a holistic approach to development – all under the umbrella of understanding God’s love for justice and the poor. It was intense, and real, and right.
This is not the Trek. We live in a nicely furnished flat in Boeng Kang Kong (expat central). How I know it’s a world of difference from most of the people in Phnom Penh is not the fact there is a 24-hour guard at the gate, or even that there is wifi in our apartment, but that there is drywall in our apartment! Drywall! In Cambodia! Where you sweat taking a shower! I’ve only lived in wooden (and sometimes tiled) homes in Cambodia. This drywall is livin’ large indeed.
More so than the living situation, it’s the type of people I’m identifying with. We get shuttled to the Royal University in a nice Benz van, and shuttled wherever we want to go. We go out at night dancing on floating pontoons, drinking watered down cocktails that costs a day-laborers average wage. I’m not living with a poor family and eating what they eat or following their pace of life; I’ve just adapted my American pace for hotter weather. Because of where we live and what we do, the type of people I interact with are completely different from what I am used to. The poor are not my neighbors – they are the ones rapping on our car windows, the ones asking for 1000riel between the bars we hop to and from. They are statistics we read about and discuss in Khmer class, and no longer the faces we see everyday. They are the peddlers and street vendors I don’t have to frequent because I’m not on a tight budget. This distance is the starkest contrast in Trek vs. Expat and it is disturbing to think that had I not Trekked for the last three years, I would have come to think that Phnom Penh was all nightclubs with exotic names and orphanages with desperate ones.
Thank you, Global Urban Trek, for teaching me where our hearts should be.
June 25, 5:31pm
Dirt.
My feet are not dirty enough. In fact, they are quite clean in a disturbing way.
Our Mercedes Benz van picks us up each morning at 7:30am, after everyone has gotten their ice coffee and breakfast food down on the corner (pavement). Once we get to the Royal University of Phnom Penh we walk down a sterile pathway shouldered by koi ponds (concrete). Sometimes I drink expensive coffee and study at Café Sentiment (brick). And though my feet get a little dirty walking around our apartment (tile), the dust is mostly our own doing.
I’m ok with this lack of dirt (more than ok with it, actually) but I am very aware of what dirt on one’s feet means and what story each coat of it tells.
* * *
July 2, 2009
Part of our language program entails learning about various organizations in Phnom Penh. We visited the Transcultural Psychological Organization (TPO) and listened to a presentation on their work with mental health in conjunction with the Khmer Rouge Tribunal.
I was certainly glad that such an effort existed and I can only see goodness from it, but it got me thinking about the broader scope of the Tribunal – about the need for healing of not just individual lives, but of an entire national and cultural identity.
I think back to our Cambodian enclaves in Long Beach, Lowell, and Tacoma; to the other families resettled in other US cities and towns that had to learn how to shovel snow or ride the bus – what does the Tribunal mean to people like my parents, my grandmother? Those who are 30 years removed from an experience they would rather be 31 years removed from?
I actually have not talked to my parents about it yet, but I hope that for them and for other Cambodians abroad, that it is not just a 2-minute segment of video clips and anchorman commentary broadcasted at 7am on Saturday mornings (always pre- and post- their good morning karaoke). My hope is that it brings healing and gives perspective on lives turned forever upside-down.
The Khmer psychologists at TPO firmly believed that the Tribunal is what the country and its people need in order to move forward – to know the truth of what happened those 4 years, to make sense of the egregious atrocities to human life, to shed light on the nightmares and give voice to the silences, and to unearth the two million buried memories and properly lay them to rest.
July 4, 2009
As the clock struck midnight last night at the Riverhouse Lounge along Phnom Penh’s Sisowath Quay, the DJ suddenly stopped the music and played “Happy Birthday”… to America. I had a moment of intense pride and patriotism – induced mostly by Obama and a little by watered-down tequila (from a Khmer man in a sombrero nonetheless) – and I started to sing along. But a moment of clarity of surrounding and place shut me up – we were, after all, in an upscale bar teeming with expats serving $4 cocktails. Freedom and liberty are worthy of celebration but hard to revel in while on a balcony overlooking the muddy Mekong and the beggars and street children she keeps watch over at night.
July 6, 2009
10:17pm
I met Boomer last night, one of the 150 or so Cambodian-American deportees who have been living in Cambodia since they were detained and deported from the United States. Since 2002, U.S. Immigration (Homeland Security) has been ejecting it’s Cambodian-American criminals - those one-time refugees who were handed green cards on gold(ish) platters. Growing up, they got involved in risky activities and did their time. From petty theft to murder to, in one case I heard about, disciplining her child (in legal terms, child abuse), the US’s memorandum of understanding with Cambodia pretty much says it’s one strike and you’re out, even if you came to the US in the 80’s as a refugee. Once they get here it is hard to find work, and the mental and emotional stress of exile is overwhelming. The most recent batch arrived in Phnom Penh few months ago.
Despite the adversity, Boomer has perspective on it all that keeps him surviving. And the calming truth he has come to is exactly what I have been mulling over lately. That perhaps in the bigger picture of things, Cambodian Americans are meant to come back here and help rebuild. We were just sojourning in the U.S. – Nehemiahs in waiting - and really, we were just supposed to get educated and develop skills and come back home.
I’ve struggled each time I’ve come with looking differently and talking differently; with being of a different class and worldview; with being able to come and go as I please; with being one of the lucky ones. Still, my heart is here and Boomer helped me see that maybe I’m not as different as history has intended.
Of course the U.S. is still my home but the more I learn about Cambodia, the more I feel that the U.S. is devoid of a history and culture I personally feel connected to. You come here and see an ancient temple, or etymologize a word in Sanskrit, or hear a Buddhist chant and instantly you feel connected to centuries of history and cycles of life. The American story begins just a few hundred years ago, and honestly, leaves me still wondering just exactly who I am.
Then again, perhaps my story is exactly what the American story is – one in which the absence of a past leads us to look forever forward.
July 8, 2009
7:07am
Juxtaposed.
Last night we went to the one-year anniversary of UNESCO awarding World-Heritage site status to Cambodia. It’s a source of tremendous pride for Khmers because there has been much conflict with Thailand over the land, with violence escalating after an international body recognized it legally last year as Cambodia’s.
The celebration was in the Olympic Stadium and a sea of white-shirted attendees filled the venue. After the white-shirts started to leave (they had paid $3 for admission with a t-shirt), the masses of others who had been waiting at the gates were allowed to come in. They were the young and the old (mostly young) who just wanted to celebrate and see the live musical performances.
It was raucous, young, and full of patriotism. The venue was jam-packed to the gills (so much so that I didn’t even feel the pickpocket who snatched my camera) and the heat suffocating but full of life. As they cheered and danced and stood to wave their flags, I could clearly hear and see and smell that this was where the heart and soul of Cambodia was – in its youth and their pride for their country.
Immediately after this we went to Elsewhere, our we-need-a-break-from–the-heat-so-let’s-pay-$5-for-drinks-and-jump-in-the-pool place. It is somewhere quiet, tranquil, with plenty of space (also full of expats). With its rim of tropical foliage and pleasant water cascading down rock walls, Elsewhere is exactly where you want it to be – elsewhere.
So far my trip has been about these juxtapositions. If they keep coming, I just might forget which side I’m on.
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