Forwarding Addresses

Comforts of Home

2009-12-20T11:02:00.000-08:00

Dear Monisha,

When I was nervous about moving to New York, here is what you said to me: “Everyone always complains about how New York is too crowded and too expensive and smells like urine. And that’s all true. And you’ll love it.”

You were right, of course, and perhaps about more than just the city. In Cambodia, it was the same trick of reverse psychology—it was the difficult, uncomfortable things that I came to hold most tightly. Cambodia from the back of a wheezing moto, with dust in my teeth and amoebae turning my stomach, this weird, lawless, striving land. Why are my eyes tearing up when I think of the mud and poverty, things I hated for fifteen months? It might be simple masochism. Or it might be that we have to love a place after we have spent so much time overcoming its difficulties, the same way we love cantankerous cars and naughty children. But I think that the truth may be something stranger yet, and more universal—that the borders between comfort and discomfort are thin and constantly in flux.

Nowhere is this more apparent than where I am sitting right now, perched at the end of a week-long visit to India, which has been sandwiched between leaving Cambodia and returning to the U.S. I flew into Calcutta, a city you have been to, a city you have roots in, to visit one of the sweetest, most level-headed people I knew in graduate school. Saloni is now living in her family home in nearby Jamshedpur. How do I describe the feeling of being there after Cambodia except to say that it was comfortable, almost overwhelmingly so? India is a country easily accessible to Americans like me through its books, its movies, its dance clubs, its dairy products—all of the things Cambodia lacks. We were nowhere near a tourist town like Siem Reap, but hospitality toward strangers was the norm nevertheless. Not just Saloni but dozens of relatives whom I’d never met went out of their way to welcome me, entertain me, feed me endless quantities of rich food. It was so over-the–top, this treatment, that I think most people would have felt a little awkward, but whenever I said so, Saloni shrugged and said, “This is just the way it is here.” Land of a lot, we began calling it.

On the day before I left, we went to the Hindu temple in Calcutta dedicated to the goddess Kali. Here was the India that people and warned would overwhelm me, a Bruegel painting of countless dirty children and beggars and rough-looking dogs, all the things I’d felt myself reflexively looking for since I left Siem Reap. Saloni snapped her fingers in front of a child whose supposed mother was asking us for money and I knew that she was checking to see if the baby had been rented and drugged, the same way they are rumored to be in Cambodia. We walked in bare feet through the street and into the temple where frenzied masses of people were pushing, crying out, falling over each other as they moved in a human cascade past the alter. Men with sticks pushed back the chaos of flesh for a split second so that paying tourists like us could get a glimpse of the goddess’s three eyes, narrowed with wrath, before we were whisked out to a sunken square where goats are sacrificed in the mornings. Our guide, who seemed equal parts priest and con man, told us to touch the alter because it is “anti-danger.” Why goat sacrifice in a mostly vegetarian religion? Why anti-danger, when the mysterious sludge gumming my feet to the ground seems like perhaps most dangerous thing I have seen in India? We pushed our way back out, zigzagging through the ferocious crowd, everything a dizzy crying spin. Was it desperation or religious ecstasy that was pressing in on us? This is life lived close to the surface, and if the temple is not built upon the limits of sense, as it feels to me, it is at least at the limits of comfort.

Back in the car, Saloni was a little horrified at taking us to the Kali temple. “I was born in a crazy country,” she says. The car driver said that not many tourists come there anymore. I ask why, and his smile says, “Isn’t it obvious?” How do we reconcile these two intertwined worlds, the generosity of Saloni’s family and the meanness of the world outside the temple? And yet, it makes some sort of sense to me—comfort and discomfort are all part of the same country, the same experience. There is bound to be some sort of discomfort wrapped up in “a lot,” whether it is my own shrinking in front of the unknown or Saloni’s frustrated exhaustion at the constant thread of obligations to the same family members who adore her.

And now I am high above the ground, flying back to a country that is easiest and most comfortable, that is home. Is ease what I want, though? I am nervous, soaring above the darkened clouds and arctic waters. Being in Cambodia has blurred all the lines between what I want and what I need, between what is comfortable and what is not. I am no martyr, certainly, since that would mean taking on discomfort for a greater good. I have done so at times out of circumstance and at times to fulfill some sense of pleasure or expectation that I do not fully understand. You are the same, I think—I can call up so distinctly your almost frighteningly iron work ethic buried beneath the thinnest layer of warm blankets and a stuffed Snoopy. I send this wishing only comfort for you while knowing that we, and maybe everyone, will always find new ways of standing in the spaces between, for no other reason than it is what we do.

With love,

Shannon

Re: Cambodia's Norman Rockwells

2009-12-12T09:08:00.000-08:00

To: Norman Rockwell’s Ghost
From: Jason Leahey / Bed of Room 1A / Golden Land Hotel / Battambang, Cambodia

Dear Norman,

I’m sitting here in the Golden Land Hotel in Battambang, Cambodia. Battambang translates to “ Big Stick.” Once upon a time, way, way back so that people know none of the names, a man lost a stick here. There’s a big statue of the guy, a Khmer Everyman kneeling and holding the stick in both upturned palms. This must have been some sort of fantastic, boom-stick wand, the loss of which caused such a ruckus that people named a city after that ruckus.

The Golden Land is charging me ten dollars for one night, a double bed, air-con, hot water, cleanliness with decent and crisp sheets. My girlfriend turned on the TV, only to fall right off into sleep, leaving Psycho on the television. This is appropriate. I decided to write you earlier this afternoon because walking around this town got me thinking of your primo, Once-Upon-a-Time Americana, and this movie could be labeled the same. With Psycho, you have a supremely post-war, bad wallpaper, sexually dysfunctional America. It seems to me a tight rendering of a national schizophrenic psyche, the country that nuked the Japanese, encoded maneuvers in Navaho whispers, and cooked up the Marshal Plan.

And with you, Norman, well, you’re propaganda. I don’t mean this is a mean way; I’m becoming of the opinion that everything is propaganda of some sort, that it’s simply the opposing team that gets tagged with the label. But you’re at the other end of the post-war spectrum from Hitchcock. With the exception of your finest—and truly fine—works Freedom of Religion and The Problem We All Live With, most everything is lily white. You sold a charmed idea of our national self, a freckle-faced America that surely had some basis in reality, but was ultimately dream of a country both simpler than the one surviving the war and more individual. The soldier returning home gets fanfare from neighbors who all know him by name, the boy next door sliding down the drain pipe. The two youngsters flirt in formalize fashion at the soda counter, the cop on the seat to them actually a friendly face. There is not a fast food franchise nor Coke Zero can to be found. Your characters undoubtedly would speak with different accents, language yet to head toward homogenization by the great, LCD equalizer that is television.

Walking around a city like Battambang, which has few tourists and little of the gobbling foreign investment that is paving Phnom Penh, I was struck by the multitude of hand painted signs adorning the businesses. I thought of you because though your work is a representation of an American community more personalized that we have today, these paintings in Cambodia are that personalization. They’re not meant for a mass audience or to build consensus. They are the front doors to the lives and work inside, faces of Cambodia’s own post-war landscape, and they are absolutely beautiful.

Take this sign, for instance. I love this. You can get your fan fixed in Cambodia. Have you ever tried to get a fan fixed in the United States over the unity past ten years? Okay, you wouldn’t have because you’re dead, but let me tell you, it’s nearly impossible to do so. For the cost of fixing one, you could buy two new Chinese imports on the shelves at Target and dump the old one in the garbage. Planned obsolescence, Norman, it’s the zeitgeist.

And then there are the signs for laundry...

tailors...

internet...

moto maintenance...

and the humble key.

They show you who in the community would be interested in these services. Cannon cameras that still use 35 millimeter are best used for you couples getting married.

Printing services are ideal for ceremonial invites.

Seeing these makes me lament the passing of a more idiosyncratic America, the kind of rosy ideals depicted in your paintings but which have basis in fact all the same, the world witnessed through the windows of my family’s dark blue Chevy station wagon, locally owned department stores, hardware shops named after the family clan, radio spots for the local bicycle shop, their song, “Feeling good, gettin’ in shape, Nowww, you’re feelin’ great. Agee’s Bicycle, we bring out the best in yooouu!” playing on the Saturday morning drive to pick up tools and honey-do list supplies.

Beehives, tasty food, the promise of quality services and products for the kind of person you want to be. That’s the basis of all advertising, and I love that here the idea of what to be is given one-of-a-kind shape by a hand and brush rather than a banner printed up by the thousands and shipped out en masse across the planet.

Look at this: this woman is connected to the Great Modern Telecommunications Network.

These two are practicing and preserving an ancient form of Khmer martial arts.

This guy is James Bond and this other fellow is a modern Khmer striver and achiever.

Someone chose to paint as cell phone wallpaper a landscape of decimated, lonesome swamp. Who in the hell came up with that? It’s fantastic. Something like this would never make it in the States unless the testing audience was some kind of Mississippi nihilists clique.

Copyright and intellectual property laws are ignored here, these dwarfs, preserved by the Grimm’s and impounded by Disney, a case in point.

And here’s a transsexual Bugs Bunny proving the competency of this business’ pumps, a Winnie the Pooh who let his honey turn to mead.

Many of the products sold in Cambodia are sold world-wide or elsewhere in the region (though I have only seen the corn-flavored pop sickles in one store near our house), but the services on hand in places like Battambang and Kampot have not turned into products yet. The people who perform the services haven’t either.
Condom campaigns in Vietnam are modern enterprises with glossy posters and billboards. In Cambodia, the painted condom tells you what’s up.

Down the road, this billboard tells you not to drop found artillery into the fire.

These are all this moment in time’s documentation of what is valued, what is needed, what is wanted. Real day-to-day needs, rather than the duplicitous psychoanalysis of market research, determines these signs. Cambodian children need to understand that you can’t play with unexploded American ordnance and their parents should know where to get a fashionable hairdo. Just as American children needed to see your painting of the little girl integrating New Orleans public schools.

And it heartens me to see the hand of man, rather than machine, in this documentation.

Learning to Fly

2009-11-15T21:34:00.000-08:00

Dear Dad,

Perhaps you have wondered why it is that I have not addressed a letter to you sooner. But actually, I have been writing this one in my head for many months now, maybe for years, even, and waiting to commit it to the page until it was finally the truth. I rode a bicycle yesterday.

You should not feel concerned or guilty that it took me this long. I offer this reassurance only because when you found out that I could not ride a bicycle about a year ago, you looked a little horrified, as though you had forgotten something important, and responded by gamely running down the sidewalk and holding up the back of a bike as your twenty-seven-year-old daughter wobbled ineptly through the streets of Westerville and demonstrated little to no signs of improvement. Most people master this skill before they have lost all their baby teeth, but then, if anyone understands that I am not like most people, it is you, who have borne my eccentricities and stubbornness for many years now. For one, let us not forget that I was far from an athletic child, finding solace only in books, and you responded by trying to be as excited about Academic Challenge meets as you would naturally have been about basketball games. Also, I was not always receptive to help, as witnessed by my disturbing meltdown in the parking lot of the school when you tried to teach me to parallel park a car. Anyway, it was in no way your fault that you did not personally usher me over this particular milestone.

I will admit, however, that it might have been a less humbling experience if I had learned when I was six like everyone else. There were many aborted attempts. There was the time I went with my friend Kent (another non-biker) to practice in a park in Brooklyn, but we could not figure out how to adjust the seat, so we gave up and drank margaritas instead. There was the time you tried to help me in Ohio, and though I think all those avid cycling enthusiasts in spandex shorts were trying to be encouraging by giving me waves and thumbs-up as they whizzed past, it was a little humiliating. And then, of course, there was Cambodia, where not only are biking conditions far from optimal, but also where advanced knowledge of two-wheel vehicles is taken to be much more of a given than most of my skills. One evening, soon after we moved to Siem Reap, I was practicing in a hotel parking lot, providing the local tuk-tuk drivers with some novel entertainment, and one of them walked over to where Jason was watching. “No,” he said, pointing to me and sadly shaking his head. “Cannot. Is impossible.” Later I would recognize that that is a favorite English phrase around here, but at the time, it felt like a good summation of my public shame. I should admit that I did not handle these failures with very much grace or patience.

Given these setbacks, it was a revelation to finally feel my feet pedaling steadily under the blue fluorescent lights of the Royal Empire Hotel last night, weaving around parked tour buses, waving at the baffled-looking drivers. There was no reason that this attempt was any different than the rest, except that this time, for some reason, it worked. “Bah! Bah!” the tuk-tuk drivers yelled, finally. “Yes!” I felt victorious, much as when, right before I moved to New York, you looked at me proudly. “If living in Chicago has taught you anything,” you said, (what would follow? A reference to my college GPA? The degree you shelled out thousands for? My first real job? None of the above…) “it’s how to parallel park.”

Maybe it would be an exaggeration to say that the most important thing I have learned in Cambodia is how to ride a bike, but then again, maybe not. After all, is it not the small obstacles that surprise us, that cause us to stumble, that embarrass us, and consequently, that teach us the most about ourselves? Yes, I learned something about my shortcomings—it reinforced that my poor motor skills are not going to carry me to a victory in the Tour de France. But there was something else there, too, something about perseverance and propensity for change, something that reminded me of you.

Keep the bicycle chains oiled for me. We will go on a ride together, even if it is frozen and icy by the time I make it back to Ohio.

With love,

Shannon

Comparisons

2009-11-10T22:56:00.000-08:00

Dear Adam,

One thing that I admire about you is your tendency to become tremendously excited over psychological research that most people will never read or even hear about. It is a sign, I think, that some people find their ideal career path, you among them. I can remember an almost ecstatic glint to your eye when you told me about how monkeys instinctively compare rewards they receive with those of their peers, that they can sense fairness and unfairness and behave accordingly. You described with glee the video you had seen of pissed-off monkeys flinging cucumber pieces at the researchers when their cagemates received more-greatly-coveted grapes for performing the same task.

It is normal, I suppose, that comparing one’s own situation and background to the surrounding landscape can radically shape one’s view of both. Take Ye for instance. Or at least, take what you can of her—I’m afraid to say too much about her, like her real name or the name of her business, for fear that it will get her into trouble with the Burmese government. It will have to suffice to say that she is a sweet, middle-aged, soft-spoken woman who provided me with a truly kick-ass vegetarian meal while I interviewed her, but that this gentle exterior belies a backbone of pure steel. Because she was an educated woman when the junta took over in 1988, she had to leave. But she still knows very well what is happening there—she has family members there, her eldest brother died after being kept as a political prisoner, she was there on a visit during the monk protests of 2007, she went back with an NGO after the 2008 flood to help with relief efforts.

And though it was interesting to hear stories about her native country, it was also intriguing to hear her talk about Cambodia, which has been her home for the past thirteen years. The model in her head that she uses as a point of comparison is Burma, and mine is the West. While I can be griping and cynical about shortcomings in both Cambodia and America, she knows how bad things can actually be and views things as constantly improving here. Where I see people being strong-armed into paying lip service to Hun Sen, she sees a steady, gradual gain in personal freedoms. Where I see people burning plastic on the street, she sees school children in Phnom Penh beginning to pick up litter as community service, something she remembers doing as a little girl in Burma. Ye and I cannot help but compare Cambodia to what we have learned to expect—it is simply what humans (and monkeys) do. Yet that inevitably distorts things, sometimes doing the objects of our gaze a disservice.

Perhaps it is just some form of preemptive nostalgia as my days in Cambodia continue to dwindle, but I think that sometimes I speak too harshly of it. Yes, the corruption and abuses of power can be sickening, and there are inconveniences everywhere (may God strike me down if I ever again complain about the pace of road construction in America). But many people here have managed to pull together happy, ambitious lives out of absolute nothingness in less than a generation. In light of that, there is reason to be optimistic that the details will improve with time, and how far Cambodia has come deserves to be applauded sometimes, at least as much as we point out how far it has yet to go.

Last week was Bon Om Tuk, one of the biggest Khmer holidays of the year. I sometimes think of it as being a little like Thanksgiving, since there is a harvest-festival element to it. But the central entertainment is the boat races down the river which signify ancient Khmer naval victories, and during the evening awards ceremony, dozens of boats lined up under a shower of fireworks. “Kampuchea, Kampuchea, Kampuchea!” the announcer shouted, and everyone raised their oars in the air and began to dance on the boats. It seemed more heartfelt than any Fourth of July festival I’ve ever attended. Jason and I wandered up the street and released a pra-tip, a floating lantern, for luck, and we stood there for a long time watching the hundreds of lights bob past, the wishes of a nation drifting down the river.

How can I ever understand Cambodia on its own terms without comparing it to bigger, more powerful countries? I don’t think I can. But Cambodia is bound to shape my perspective, too. I think sometimes about another strand of your research, about creativity and living abroad, about how living in a different place actually changes the neural pathways in one’s brain. Can you design a new experiment? I wonder if you can promise me that expat life not only makes you better at solving problems, but also more forgiving of them.

Warm regards,

Shannon

Re: Alleys and Passages

2009-10-25T04:17:00.000-07:00

To: A.C. Evans / Brooklyn, NY / USA
From: Jason Leahey / stoop-side bar / Siem Reap, Cambodia

Dear T,

There are real alleys, real passageways in Siem Reap, and now also The Alley and The Passage. The people walking back and forth are not all white, but they are all dressed the same. You grow up with history books, old photos, and the world seemed then like an endless assemblage of hats, mustaches, shirts and smocks and skin from leather to tracing paper. Faces like dry sink holes and faces like cool water still in its bowl.

The probability of barbarity, caught in a black and white photo and held at bay by expanses of ocean and endless streams of bills, that stirs you. You think, “The world is endless, the people infinite.” Boredom was inconceivable so long as you had the gumption to leap out there, believed that no leap was too far.

I’m sitting here at what is called The Alley. Or maybe this is The Passage. Initially in the creation of Pub Street, of the Siem Reap that feeds and whets the tourists, this was called one of the other, Alley or Passage. There are restaurants here, bars, slate cemented in place when the rest of the sidewalks in town, what sidewalks there are, are tiles hammered into the sand. The Alley, The Passage, think gentrification, think 4^th Avenue counted as Park Slope...

Oh, man, remember when we were walking home along there back in 2001, somewhere close to dawn, and we passed that apartment door opened to the street and just the end of two legs and a pair of sneakers jutting out over the lip of the stoop, the fucking Wicked Witch of the East, body swallowed in the dark of the hallway and you laughing that crazy hee-hee that you do, over to snap a photo? Your compass on the world is like twenty-six degrees northwest, man, or maybe really southwest, and whenever I think of that fact I like to make it Due North for a bit because yours is a good gauge to follow when turned around.

...So The Alley, The Passage, you get this nice string of restaurants and a gallery or two, shops selling T-shirts with Tin-tin in Cambodge on them, that sort of thing, and then about a year and a half ago another Alley or Passage, this one with more artistic retail, opens one street over.

And then Lonely Planet comes through and they pull the mix-up, call the Passage the Alley, or vice versa, and when the thing comes out all the businesses have to change their business cards because what’s in Lonely Planet, that’s reality, Due Polaris, and you pretend otherwise at your own financial peril.

So I’m sitting here in The Alley Passage because they have fifty-cent drafts and I need to be away from the house for a bit, read and write, save dinner money by going to town on this bar’s peanuts and popcorn...

A Scout is trustworthy (!), loyal (!), helpful (I hope), friendly (try to be), courteous (when it’s warranted), kind (!), obedient (never), cheerful (on good days), thrifty!!

...and everybody walkin past is dressed more or less the same. And it’s a superficial thing, silly, but it dissapoints me. Like I’ll have to leap out of a plane onto the Mongolian Steppes to find a person I can set eyes on and think, “Now what the hell is going on there.” An American doctor who lives here, a guy named Varoon, wearing khakis, just walked by and when I presented this quandry to him, he said I best leap out of a plane into a place with no people if I want the exotic, and I guess that’s most likely true.

And I guess that’s okay, too. People are people are people and if there’s one great truth that travel instills in a person, it is that. And so maybe I shouldn’t expect anything new and wonderous from my fellow humans. Lord knows, exotic smocks from the Ottoman era or wince-worthy head piercings from the (then)-soon-to-be-ravaged Tropics or whatever else can’t be guides to it. And Lord knows, too, I haven’t rambled far enough anyway, but...

But there’s a little loss in me that even in Cambodian jungles people know that Micheal Jackson died, that everything from Nordic He-men to scuttling sea crabs have heard of Coca-Cola, etc., etc., ad nauseum. And I really like Michael Jackson and can roll with Coke, more or less. It’s just that sometimes if feels like my exploring has been done for me. The arm of the American (half-)Century is long. That’s the other awareness travel instills. So the exploration will have to be of the self, for you of the twenty-six degree Southwest, mine the twenty-six degree Mountain Atlantic, whichever Due Polaris, and still everything hurdles out from the high-pressure center faster and faster, until all of this collapses on itself, to be blown out again.

Keep the faith.

-J

Original Facebook Sin

2009-10-15T04:23:00.000-07:00

Dear Krista,

I wish I did not know how many sex offenders lived in your county. I also wish that I did not know what level of Mafia Wars that Jackie has completed, nor what color Erin decided to paint her dining room, nor how long it has been since Rayna’s two sons had haircuts. But it took me a long time to figure out why knowing any of these things bothers me.

First, let it be known that I harbor no real ill will toward you. This is in spite of the fact that my most vivid memory of you was when you wouldn’t let me read your transcription of the lyrics to “Ice Ice Baby,” when we were ten years old because you decided I wasn’t cool enough to learn them. I swear that I’ve recovered from the slight, and I’ve heard from reliable sources that you turned out to be a very friendly person and that you married David, who I always found pleasant albeit a bit maudlin. To say that we have ever been friends, though, either back in the days when you would scorn me on the school bus or nowadays when I haven’t seen you in the flesh for something like ten years, would be a gross exaggeration. That’s why it came as a surprise when, after I finally caved to sustained peer pressure and joined Facebook, I received a notification mere hours later that said, “Krista Knox added you as a friend.”

Technologically savvy people tell me that I could have clicked “Ignore,” and we probably would neither have been the worse for it, and yet I can’t bring myself to do that, either out of politeness or dark curiosity, for anyone with whom I can recall having a single conversation. The altercation about Vanilla Ice alone put you in that category. And so I clicked “Confirm” when faced with your request and many others.

And, oh my, what a deluge of information followed. I now know that my friend’s mom hosts a cooking show on the local cable channel and that my college roommate’s brother has a second child and that my boyfriend’s sister-in-law’s eye hurts today. But the vast majority of revelations come from people like you, people I went to elementary and high school with, which I suppose is only natural since we spent a lot of time squeezed into the same small town and then mostly went our separate ways. Without Facebook, I probably would have gone years, maybe a lifetime, without remembering some of these people, but now that I know where they are, it all makes perfect sense. Of course Elisa is in pharmaceutical sales, of course Tricia is a nurse practitioner in Pittsburgh, of course Sarah is a history teacher at our old junior high. And I should think, “Good for them!” and close my browser, but human feelings are rarely that simple.

There are times when I wish I could erase some of what I’ve seen in this strange digital landscape. Surfing Facebook fills me with the same dread, depression, and insatiable yen for more that an alcoholic must feel when entering a bar. This is not easy to admit, but usually the first feeling that washes over me when I look at the profile of a former Lexingtonian is cruel scorn. The things that people post often seem self-involved and petty and bizarre to me. I like to blame this on being so far away from our hometown, and I think that it does have something to do with seeing others through a lens that has become shaped by Cambodia. How can I care if Mike is hitting the gym to lose weight when I live in a country where most people survive on rice alone? How can I not roll my eyes at Brittany’s Week 23 Mommy-to-Be musings when five Khmer women die in childbirth every day? Jason says that this kind of superiority complex is useless, and he’s right, of course. It’s no better than the childish disdain you held for me and my “Ice Ice Baby” naiveté, and I’m frankly ashamed of it.

What’s worse is that it’s always mixed with a kind of acid jealousy. I envy the security and ease and distractions and blithe obliviousness that show in some of these profiles. “Is this all you want?” my scornful side says, while secretly wanting at least some of the same things myself. It’s not that I mean to devalue what many of them have—the marriage and the kids and the steady job—but it’s impossible to imagine myself arriving there by the same path that they did. That’s what’s at the heart of it, I think, the fact that writers cannot use the blueprint that seems to have delivered happiness to lots of the people I grew up with.

Then again, it’s only Facebook and who knows how faithful a copy of real life it is. I know how little of me is on my profile—a few links to articles, a silly photo of me in sunglasses. Could anyone we knew in high school find out anything about me from this? But I’m sure they make assumptions, just as I do. Do they think I am a fool when they read that I am living in Cambodia and that I’m a writer, or are they a little envious, or is it the same complicated blend of emotions that swamp me when I look at a few spare facts about them?

Maybe you are asking yourself why I don’t just delete my account or at least stop checking it, and that’s probably a wise suggestion, Krista. But I can’t—there is some part of me that is tainted by tasting the fruit of Facebook and cannot go back. I need to see Brittany’s baby photos, I need to know how Renee’s honeymoon went, I even need to know the results of whatever weird quiz you’ve taken most recently. And I need to know that maybe you’re curious about me, too.

With nostalgia and everything else,

Shannon

My Bipolar Flood Response

2009-10-09T03:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Llalan,

On Monday morning, my editor at the newspaper called and asked me to churn out a funny little column about the flood that had wreaked havoc across Cambodia a few days previously, and so I did. I made light of the smelly pestilential water that is still thigh-high on our street and my wacky antics with a bug-zapper as thousands of mosquitoes zeroed in on my arteries. I think it turned out okay, actually, hopefully even kind of funny. You can read it, if you want, since it’s probably more amusing than this letter.

But was there any truth to that article? I’m not sure. The rain has seriously dampened my mood. I would like to believe that this is some kind of sympathetic response to all the damage that’s been done to Cambodia by forces outside of its control—all the people who are still out of their homes, all the people whose businesses have been damaged, all the people in the countryside who are bound to come down with positively medieval diseases like cholera and dysentery in the days to come.

But my dourness is probably due to more selfish emotional triggers. My work schedule is destroyed. No one wants to be interviewed while they’re trying to deal with their own flooding issues. Most days, the water outside our house (one of the few areas in town still flooded, by the way) is too deep to take our motorbike out, meaning I have to trudge for ten minutes through nasty shit-water, my plastic-wrapped laptop pathetically clasped to my chest. I spend most of this walk imagining that if this was happening somewhere in America, there would probably be some hunky National Guardsman to carry me to safety, where friendly relief workers would feed me cookies, and by the time I have finished these fantasies, my desire to spend the next six hours writing has significantly diminished.

Ah, but then I just feel like a spoiled First-Worlder. As I wade out of the muck, feeling sorry for myself and wearing an expression like a wet housecat, all my Khmer neighbors smile sunnily at me, laughing at their predicament and hoisting their infants out of the floodwater. But then I think: what the hell is wrong with these people? Isn’t there something terrible about a society that has completely given up on the idea of the government or anyone else in power helping them at all, even in times of crisis? Sometimes, this washes over me even during easier days—sudden flashes of anger that nothing is getting better for ninety-five percent of the people here, and that most Khmer are too sucked in by the leaders’ lame promises or too afraid of the alternative to complain above a whisper. Look, I know that in America people disagree, sometimes in a violent, ugly, ineffectual way, about what will make the country better. But at least there is a sense that people care about making the country better, rather than just beating the odds in some idiotic Darwinian system. What is wrong with the leadership of this country? They are living parasitically off the misery of their own people.

So which is more true, my lighthearted column or this pointless rant? Both. Neither. I was certainly happier while I was writing my column, not because of any situational difference, but because the act of writing forced me to find humor in it. So should I then limit myself to writing mildly funny but disposable material, or send my blood pressure through the roof by writing angry blog posts? I think that most of the time writers want to believe that they are writing to inform or entertain or change the opinions of others, but maybe it is only a way of reassuring or convincing ourselves of what we are feeling at any given moment.

Grumpy, yet still full of fondness for you,

Shannon

Feline Certainty

2009-09-30T22:42:00.000-07:00

Dear Prof. Bouldrey,

I took your Fundamentals of Prose class the first semester that you taught at Northwestern, and the first assignment, if I remember correctly, was to write a five-page essay about cats. I think the purpose of the exercise was to prove that a writer can find meaning even in an arbitrarily chosen subject, and a seminar room full of writers can therefore find twelve different meanings. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote about, something about the grace of cats. I know that the grade you gave it was probably overly generous. And I know that if I were rewriting it today (and perhaps this was your point all along), it would be a very different essay.

I’ve decided that my best shot, if the Buddhist worldview turns out to be true, if we really are stuck in a cycle of death and rebirth, is to hope that I come back as a cat next time around. I decided this when our friend Savuth came to our house for lunch last weekend and told us that most monks want to be reborn as monks, since they will never reach enlightenment in this lifetime and their best chance is to keep getting closer, life after life. Being impatient, I found the idea of hundreds of future lives as a monk sort of a downer. There are other options. You can be reborn in paradise, but I think too many nasty things about people for that to happen, or you can be reborn in hell, though since I don’t make a habit of killing people or stealing things, I might be able to avoid that one. Or you can be reborn as an animal, which I have heard is mostly reserved for humans who are lazy in this life. (Am I lazy? Possibly. Even though my brain is wrung thoroughly dry at the end of every day from working on a book about Cambodia, even though I have not been this mentally tired since the days when I was in your class and stayed up late writing papers about renaissance drama and 20^th Century British cinema, I still feel vaguely guilty about the fact that I sit around for long periods of time, thinking and staring into space and calling it work. I even found a name for this phenomenon in a Paul Theroux book—Künstlerschuld, or artist’s guilt.) At any rate, I am angling for what is supposedly the most fortunate of animal births, that of the housecat.

For anyone who has ever had a housecat, it will not be hard to imagine why Buddhists consider them lucky. Even in Cambodia, where animals usually lead a fairly dismal existence, our two cats, Bissou and Soma, have managed to hit pay dirt. When their original barang owner couldn’t keep them anymore because of the landlord’s dogs, she convinced us to take them in for the duration of our stay. They are scrappy and lovable. They hide dead lizards under our rugs and piss on our pillows if we’re away too long, and we still find them entirely adorable. I find myself watching their movements, mesmerized, for long periods of time, a phenomenon my friend Narisa calls Cat TV.

I envy their lifestyle, one of rest and close observation. I envy their purring, which they do loudly and often. When they squeeze their eyes shut and purr, it looks as though their entire beings, both body and mind, have been given over to concentrating fully on the pleasure of the present moment, something I have always had trouble doing. Some experts have speculated that purring is like meditation or prayer, since even the act of purring seems to soothe sick or stressed cats.

I envy most, though, how snug an evolutionary niche they have found. When they open their mouths, gaping pink yaws of toothy weaponry, it is easy to imagine that they are only a few genes away from panther. They are tiny killing machines—all fangs and claws and stringy muscles—and they exercise this predisposition by terrorizing the insects, spiders, rodents, lizards and birds of our yard. The other day, I wandered onto the porch and witnessed Soma staring down a coiled snake. Worried it was poisonous, I tried in vain to call her away from it, until she threw me a look as though I was insane, slit its throat with her claws and began to pulverize its skull with her teeth like some sort of feline Rikki-Tikki-Tavi. And yet, despite this inborn stealth and brutality, cats have managed to appear as something wholly different to a specific species of mammal, ingratiating themselves to the humans who can make their lives easier. Soma and Bissou can widen their teddy-bear eyes and curl up like little furry doughnuts in my armpit in the middle of the night, and I feel as though they are tiny, vulnerable creatures, reliant on my petting and kibble, even though they have already proven otherwise. It is nothing short of genius.

What of my own evolutionary niche as a writer? I am a nervous journalist, an immature novelist. Sometimes I think that my niche is the bizarre life I have right now, living in a place long enough to love it and hate it in equal measure and trying to capture the whys and wherefores of that duality on the page. I wonder, though, if that will even turn out to be a niche at all. And if it is, do I (and Jason, too, especially with me in tow) have the fortitude to do this all over again? Reading Paul Theroux or Jonathon Raban or Robert Kaplan, I have a hard time imagining myself at fifty-something traveling the Mediterranean and beyond by myself. When that fantasy fails, I find myself worrying that I have missed my niche altogether—maybe I would have been an excellent carpenter or dental hygienist and I have gone to all this trouble for nothing. The only comfort is that I might still have some time in this life to figure it out, and that next time, in feline form, I might be better equipped to find a secure place in the world.

With fondness,

Shannon Dunlap, School of Communication ‘03

Re: the Swiss Family Robinson

2009-09-23T02:25:00.000-07:00

To: Martha Bowen / the Fruitful Present

From: Jason Leahey / the Green Crown of the World

Dear Marf,

It’s sometime in the first week of September and I’m naked in a hammock in a treehouse in the top of the jungle canopy somewhere in the middle of nowhere in Bokeo Nature Preserve in the northwest corner of Laos. I can walk all 360 degrees of this little deck, with its mattress and its oiled canvas mosquito net, its mosquito coils and stacks of thin white candles, and see nothing but mountain after mountain off into the horizon and the sun setting pink in the clouds.

The air is wet and cool and the sound of thousands of humming, cricket-ed, barked, buzzing songs. The original world’s or, rather, our original world’s, white noise. And that puts me to wondering if it is also the beeps and thrumming and rocketing, ratcheting code of some other thing’s assembled digital playground. If I could play in our digital universe and give something as wondrous as this singing, peaceful dusk to some other conscious life form, I would happily leap into the Twenty-first Century and all of our keystrokes and double-clicks and ergonomic chairs.

Love,
Jay

Locomotion

2009-09-15T02:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Zachary,

Even when you were barely two years old, you had a gift for the mechanics of getting from here to there. When we were snoozing in the early morning while your parents were at the hospital with the very newly born Ally, you woke in time to drag me to the window for an event that was essential to your happiness. “Trash truck,” you told me authoritatively as said vehicle made its anticipated appearance. And I think that I have never impressed you so much as when, several years after the trash truck ceased to enthrall you, I told you that in New York I took a train to work every day in an underwater tunnel.

And so it is you that I think of whenever I find something better or more unusual than that NJ PATH train—Vietnamese sleeper buses, Asian tuk-tuks, even our own wheezing but intrepid motorbike in Siem Reap. How marvelous it was to board a night train in Bangkok for the exotic mystery of Chiang Mai, knowing how much you would love the waffle stands, the rainy train station, the attendants in smart uniforms helping us to find the correct car.

What is it about train travel that so captures the imagination? I find particularly wonderful the sleeper trains that keep doggedly chugging ahead while I am off in some dreamworld. Even the process of changing my rather ordinary seat into a curtained little bed, complete with reading light, was somehow magical when performed in under sixty seconds by an erstwhile servant of the Thai railway system.

And then, after nodding off in the rhythmic darkness, there is the wonder of awakening in a different landscape altogether. First the foggy softness of dawn, and then the lush green tunnel of vegetation through which you stumble to the end of the car to brush your teeth and then, just as you begin to feel claustrophobic, the jungle subsides enough to show you that you are in the mountains. The blurred tree trunks outside the window are actually only the canopy, the height of them falling far below down the steep sides of misty mountains that will never seem anything but unfathomable to someone born in the comforting open flatness of the American Midwest. I think, perhaps, you would even have been fascinated with the baby cockroach that I discovered flirting with the cuff of my pants, and with that in mind, I tried to approach him with the same adventurous spirit.

Onward, onward, we pressed through the early morning, through small towns just waking up, entire lives unfolding before my eyes in the instant the train rushed past them—market sellers setting up their stalls, siblings struggling into their rain ponchos, the sleeves of a moto driver flapping with his gaining speed. Do people glimpse me like this sometimes, catching me in some ordinary moment that gives them an intrinsic understanding of the shape and rhythm of my life? Do the people outside the window ever glance up and see my pale face pressed against the glass, caught in a supremely unordinary moment?

That, perhaps, is why train travel is so special, the way it so defies the mundane. Unlike car travel which can be lengthened or shortened, sped up or slowed down at our will, trains are only ours for the time it takes to get from here to there, and no matter how much a part of me wanted to stay on the rails, another part itched for an endpoint, a destination, a disembarkation. A final stop always marks the beginning of something new, whether I am climbing the platform stairs into Manhattan or stumbling into the bright warmth of the Chiang Mai train station. Endpoints are what assure us that we are moving forward. What All aboards and Last stops—milestones, celebrations, commencements, deaths—await both of us are beyond my speculation. I only know that even now, there are real and metaphorical trains ahead, some of them already pulling into the station.

With love,

Aunt Shannon

From SR to NYC

2009-08-26T06:25:00.000-07:00

To: August 24, 2009
From: May 23, 2009 / Marble Composition Notebook No. ? / NYC

It’s May 23rd and I’m back in NYC. Nine months gone and it’s still home, still very much the same, and yet not so as well. Washington Square Park has been rebuilt and unveiled and it still has as much open space, as much potential as a meeting ground for hundreds, and so I know now that what I’d heard, what I’d feared, has not come to pass, either because the threats of monitoring, of rearrangement of boundaries and parts to keep the people corralled, was untrue or—what I hope, or, more likely—the threat of constraint drove the neighborhood, the New Yorkers, my New Yorkers, to put heads together and throw a fit until they made themselves not just heard, not just known, but a force that promised to be a mule-stubborn and a permanent, itchy thorn. God bless the thorns in sides.

And so now I’m here on this concrete wall, back against the light post, Northeast corner of things, first place I talked enough to Abby Durden to freak her out, listening to this woman in a black dress—Summertime! Summertime!—play guitar, sing her and others’ songs, and the light is through the leaves and I am walking through a dream, woke up in Siem Reap 30-odd hours ago, the world mine and also off, also alien, behind gauze, and I love it here. It is what I know, the drunks on the bench in front of this gal, singing along to Floyd, lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, this everything bagel well-toasted with olive cream cheese, strong iced coffee, just a dash of milk, no sugar, these folks playing chess, the taxis and it’s greener too, artful bike racks around St. Mark’s cube, quieter traffic, or am I just clouded behind that gauze, behind last night’s blunt, jet lag and dregs of airplane sake still in me?

You get in between worlds and you get that new vantage, get clear of the personal plagues that are site-specific, and with that distance see how quickly the fabric is rewoven, always decomposing and re-growing, always torn down, always rebuilt. And of course things aren’t always rebuilt, but here, man, here where I live, where I learned how to live with myself, how to be an adult, this Rome keeps breathing, rebuilding, and I like to think We the People are the red blood cells, the antioxidants, my people, and I miss this all because I see now how it changed without me and, though this is irrational and silly, my feelings are hurt a little.

And I guess that’s how I know I can never fully leave here. A growing, glowing understanding, even with all this gauze in between, that I am of this place, that Asia will be a way of experience, a particular lens or specimen for a set amount of time, but I am very much and forever American, forever a New Yorker and a Southern boy too, and that growing glowing, that is a knowledge of just how lucky that makes me, and all of the responsibility that comes with that, I know it and accept it and love it too because it’s a gift to be chosen by Fate to have the time and the means of gestating this kind of consciousness. We get to carry each other—indeed, Mr. Hewson. And, man, the guitar gal has just started up ‘High and Dry’ and I’ll go back to Brooklyn and hit the pavement with Tony, and this is the United States of America, with all its crippled government and culture of consumption, but so much more too, so much of the twenty different cultures embodied in these strangers collected around me on this Washington Square concrete, listening to this melody beneath these trees, in this lick of breeze, so much fallible potential.

You leave to look back and see. The world of the last generation mutating profoundly, this generation’s lives the axle upon which this Past will turn under to drive up this new and coming Present.

So much in such little time. The gauze will be cut away at some point. What kind of new sight will I be blessed with?

This Old House

2009-08-10T21:48:00.000-07:00

The House

2635 Bella Vista Ave.

Lexington, Ohio 44904

Dear House,

Do you remember the fit that my siblings and I threw when we were told that we were going to move out of you? You would have thought that my parents were torturing us by daring to build a newer, bigger house about five miles away. I remember sitting in my brother’s room for a miniature protest meeting and resolving together that we simply wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t leave.

But we did, of course, just as I’ve moved away from a whole string of places since—the beige carpets and cozy basement of junior high and high school, my claustrophobic college dorm rooms, that first strange attic apartment that I shared with three other girls, the honey-colored floorboards of the little Chicago studio on the lake, the exposed brick and low ceilings in Jersey City. Leaving a place behind always fills me with the sad slippery feeling of time getting away from me, but each move, truth be told, has been easier than the last, and when I move out of my current Cambodian abode, it may be the easiest one yet.

I do not mean to imply that it is not a nice house. It is large (enormous to my eyes that had become calibrated to New York apartment sizes) and far more comfortable than what I had envisioned before I left the U.S. And yet, there is something weirdly forbidding about the place, something elusively Cambodian. Maybe it is the small windows or swollen intractable doors or the way the stuffy rooms hold heat. Maybe it is the glue-sniffing teenagers who occasionally jump our fences and pilfer things out of our windows. Maybe it is the memories of the time that all the cheap plastic plumbing fixtures broke at once and flooded the place in the middle of the night. Whatever it is, the house has always seemed to give us more of a polite handshake instead of a warm embrace.

Occasionally, expat friends in Siem Reap will ask us to housesit, and we usually jump at the chance, not because they are nicer, more luxurious houses (though that is certainly the case) but because they feel so much more lived-in than our own house. During housesitting stints, I go around absentmindedly touching things—children’s toys, expired medications, family snapshots, the worn corners of books. These are families who have decided to stay in Siem Reap for much longer than I will, and the spaces where they live have a warmth and permanence that I sometimes forget can exist.

Now, our lease almost up, we are looking for a new place of our own, though it is still uncertain if we will be able to find anything better than our current rental. Cambodian houses, at least the ones that Khmer build to rent out to Westerners, are weird. They are candy-colored concrete monstrosities with cavernous tiled rooms and no closets and kitchens without stoves. It is as though one person made a sketchy blueprint of what he thought a Westerner would want and hundreds of Khmer landlords have been blindly following suit ever since. What’s strange is that most of them wouldn’t think of living in a place like that themselves. Many of the houses that we looked at had tiny wooden shacks in the back or side yards where the landlord lived with his or her family. Sometimes we would gaze wistfully out of a back window in some bubble-gum pink rental to these little houses with dogs and cooking fires and laundry drying on the line—they looked so real compared to the buildings we were standing in.

Maybe it is because they were built by and for the people who inhabit them. There is a photo I think of sometimes (either real or somehow created in my mind from stories my parents told me) of my mother smiling in front of you, a half-finished house, holding Dawn’s hand and carrying Ryan around like a little bundled papoose. My father, a junior high guidance counselor at the time, did the electrical work and put up drywall in the evenings to save money. Though none of us could remember them, perhaps it was those evenings that made you feel so much like ours that, seventeen years later, my siblings and I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving. It has been years since I have thought much about you, old house, or taken the time to miss you, but now, on an orange tiled porch thousands of miles away, I remember you and remember what it feels like to be home.

Fondly,

Shannon

Re: Kentucky Fried Cambodia

2009-08-04T02:14:00.000-07:00

From: writersblok@hotmail.com

To: robertleahey@XXX.com

Hi Dad,

Thanks for faxing that stuff to Sallie Mae. That’ll keep them away from the door for a bit. In getting all the papers in order, the Ts crossed, etc., I called their main number and got caught in the endless automated voices and choices. So I went for my standard technique, which is to press ‘0’ many, many times very, very rapidly. But they’re slick. Whereas that will usually get you a long pause of dull air, followed by a fembot saying, “Please wait, while I transfer you to the next available representative,” Sallie only gives you, “That is not a valid choice.”

Eventually, after choosing many numbers that transferred me to other numbers to be chosen that transferred me to still other numbers to be chosen, I ended up with an Indian guy who said his name was Max. Max was on top of it. He gave me everything I needed to know in about a fifth of the time it took me to get to him in the first place. One of my intentions in this rigmarole was to consolidate my loans, since interest is now just above 2%. Sweet. But Max told me that Sallie Mae doesn’t consolidate anything anymore. They just don’t do it, period. I’ll be at 2% until they decide or are allowed to jack it to 7% or 8% and that will be that.

So this torques me off severely because, in the most immediate sense, it goes against my best interests. Not that Sallie Mae has any reason to have my best interests at heart; it’s just not what they exist for. But it speaks to a broader symptom of rot in America that turns my frustration into hatred. What is the rationale for inserting a private middleman (woman) in between students and the public money the feds provide as school loans? There’s no benefit to the students, to the feds, or to that larger aim of creating and supporting an educated populace. Sallie and Freddie and their siblings and cousins exist solely to take a cut of the funds that the populace themselves contributed in the first place. Sallie and Freddie don’t really do anything, at least not anything of value.

And that brings me to the hatred and, further down the Stream of Consciousness from that port, to Cambodia. Sallie and her ilk treat us as nothing more than tiny pocketbooks from which to squeeze profit. They obviously lunch with health insurance companies. And then I read how Goldman-Sachs' CEO takes in another monstrous bonus and I think, “These people are pigs.” They use our money to buy influence in order to take more of our money. There is something inverted in these relationships. So now, Cambodia:

One of the chapters in the book Shannon and I are working on concerns Cambodia’s changing relationship to its food. This was inspired by the opening of a KFC in Siem Reap. KFC is the only foreign fast food company in the country and Shannon thought it’d be cool to investigate Khmer thoughts on this, the attitudes of Yum! Foods (KFC’s owner), and what it’s like to have your Extra Crispy chicken come with soup and rice rather than a biscuit (oh, but for a even a single biscuit!) and potato wedges.

So we took Savuth to lunch yesterday and asked him his thoughts. It was all too charming in its picture-perfect way. Vuth can’t ride on a moto with a woman because he’s a monk, so I dropped Shannon off and picked Vuth up and rode through the morning sunshine and over the river with his orange robe flapping behind us and in my side view mirror. We bought him the Snack Pack, which included an Original Recipe drumstick, a Spicy wing, a white bread roll, a dollop of mashed potatoes with gravy, and a thimble-sized lump of coleslaw, as well as a Pepsi, though he’s a Coke man himself.

This was Savuth’s first time in what he called, “a modern restaurant.” The first time was a buffet in a hotel he was staying in while attending an ecumenical conference in Phnom Penh. That food did a number on his stomach (the nature of which we were left to determine by the way he smiled shyly and looked at the floor), but he liked KFC. He had actually seen a news broadcast on the restaurant while at that conference and told us that, at the time, he’d imagined himself one day with lots of money, free of the robes, and giving Colonel Harland Sanders’ secret recipe a try. KFC is expensive by Cambodian standards, though Savuth’s meal cost just shy of three bucks, and young people consider it a sign of status to dine there. When we asked Savuth what he thought of the restaurant itself, he said it was pretty. When we asked him in what ways, he said, “I think it is clean.”

After taking him back to the wat so he could host his daily radio show, I though about a Taco Bell across from the Sixth Avenue ball courts in Greenwich Village, how it was permanently shuttered after hidden cameras taped and broadcast video of a battalion of rats crawling over every flat surface night after night. A week or two after the ignominious closing, someone Sharpie-d “Rats all, folks!,” on the lowered security gate. And sitting here now I think of the time you said it was a testament to the hardy American constitution that though we all eat out all the time and secretly know that so many of our restaurants are unsanitary, so few of us get sick from them. (We get heart disease and long-term, debilitating illnesses, but these are from the composition of our food, not from the filth in their preparation.)

Cambodians are used to their foods prepared without refrigeration, of flies and bugs crawling over their ingredients, of only unclean water used to wash hands. We interviewed many Khmer diners in KFC and they echoed Savuth’s feeling that the food prepared out of sight in an airy, white-walled, and air conditioned space was the cleanest option available. Cambodia’s experience of our fast food is the opposite of ours. What we think of as cheap and rather lowly, they think of as expensive and a sign of affluence. What we assume is relatively unsanitary, they believe is optimally clean. And what about physical health, if KFC and the local Pizza Hut knock-off are actually nutritious? Savuth didn’t understand the question. Food is food; nutrition extends to simply getting something to eat.

So I think of the perversion of America’s Greed Pigs, how they contribute to making a Democracy of the People an oligarchy with compelling window dressing. And then I think of the fact that Cambodia is so happy to get food they associate with us and with the pinnacle of lush modern living. So I should be happy that we have at least the level of control over our government that we do. And the Khmer should examine very closely the new options open to them.

Love,

Jay

Tea and Indifference

2009-07-26T22:02:00.000-07:00

Dear Kent,

This morning, I was making tea, and I read the name on the tea canister—the Thai company Phuc Long—and I didn’t even smirk, didn’t even think about making a joke about it. And that’s one indication that perhaps I have been living here too long. Here’s another:

Yesterday, I was walking down the street, and the guy with no arms who sells books out of a box hanging around his neck asked me for some money. I wasn’t carrying my moto helmet under my arm (as I usually do, marking me as an expat rather than a tourist), and he didn’t recognize me at first. And then he remembered me from around town, and gave a sort of shrug and a not unfriendly smile, as if to say, “Sorry! You’re a regular here. Of course you’re not going to give me anything.” And then we both sort of chuckled and walked past each other, and it wasn’t until I was about half a block away that I got a sickening chill at my own indifference.

Has living in Cambodia made me less capable of sympathy? Even after close to a year here, it’s hard to know the “right” way to behave in the face of other people’s poverty and trauma. Feel it too much and you’ll be incapacitated; feel it too little and you’ll be some sort of Marie Antoinette (“Let them drink Angkor Beer if they have no potable drinking water!”). To feel as if you belong here at all, you have to become a little inured to the realities of landmine victims and grubby children, and to act otherwise is to be viewed as a sap by both Khmer and expats. Once, I went into the local Mexican restaurant and two expat women were sitting there with a little Khmer boy for whom they had purchased dinner. They seemed a little sheepish though, because after they had ordered, they noticed that, unlike most of the kids hanging around Pub Street at night, this guy had new tennis shoes, went to a government school reserved for the solidly middle class, and had a mother who was keeping an eye on him while chatting with her friends across the street. Of course, there are far worse things than buying a child, any child, a Coke and a quesadilla, but they felt as if they’d been duped, giving help to someone who might not need it the most. It was such a tourist thing to do. And we roll our eyes at tourists, the people who swoop in for a week or two and throw money at the first problem they see, regardless of whether it will do any lasting good. (Then again, at least they’re doing something. What am I doing? Has anyone in Cambodia benefited from my writing so far?)

And if I’m sometimes less sympathetic than I should be toward Khmer, you should hear my internal monologue about Westerners and their problems. Woe to the person whom I overhear complaining about heat, insects, potential bacteria in the water or uncomfortable bus seats; they will be silently excoriated by me. Firstly, haven’t they ever opened a guidebook about any Southeast Asian country? And there’s another level to my reaction, the part of me that has always considered myself sort of a wimp. “If I can handle this,” this part of myself says disdainfully, “then you must be the lowliest of pansies.”

What’s worse, I actually like this tougher side of myself sometimes. It makes me feel hearty and resilient and less likely to feel sorry for myself. It’s not as if I’ve forgotten about the fact that, should I fall into penury tomorrow and die a slow death of starvation, that I still will have lived a more comfortable life than 99% of Cambodian citizens. But sometimes it is an asset to be able to witness the misfortunes of others and, instead of feeling crushing depression at the state of the world, feel sort of…well, lucky. And yet…

I was talking to my monk friend Savuth about how, in the Buddhist view of things, human love is a kind of suffering, just like hate is. It is hard, having been raised amidst Western ideas, to wrap my head around this. To a Westerner, the Buddhist ideal of “detachment” sounds suspiciously like indifference. But I think what Savuth was talking about was achieving a philosophical equanimity—you should feel sympathy and pity for wealthy crooks and beggar children alike, because they are both suffering as part of the human condition. My friend Elizabeth long ago told me something similar in a different way—“Just because root canals exist, doesn’t mean that getting a papercut isn’t painful.”

But isn’t that just like me, to look at a problem cerebrally instead of dealing with the sticky business of how to feel? I am confessing all of this to you because of the horror on your face when we had dinner in New York and I told you about the Big-Headed Baby, the monstrously deformed infant whose mother takes him to all large festivals, where she begs for money, a container for change placed on the corner of his dirty blanket. Who wouldn’t feel sympathy for the child? But I have a hard time feeling pity for the mother, when she must be aware of the glut of nonprofit organizations in Cambodia who could possibly help her child—it is simply more immediately profitable to parade him around like a circus act. Even so, you looked a little taken aback by my callousness when I said this. And maybe you should have been. I cannot conflate my own attitude with Savuth’s universal sympathy—nothing proves this more than my very disparate feelings toward the Big-Headed Baby and his mother.

So where does this leave me? Vainly hoping that I can force myself to feel for both the root canal patient and the papercut victim? Cambodia never provides any easy answers; it only makes it harder to ignore the questions. Perhaps that means that I have not lived here long enough.

xoxo,
S

Re: Hieronymus Vox

2009-07-18T05:58:00.000-07:00

From: writersblok@hotmail.com
To: davisabigail@XXXX.com

Dear Abs,

It took us forty hours to get from my apartment in Brooklyn to our apartment in Siem Reap. And now, after a few days of waking at five a.m. and crashing at eleven p.m., I find myself sitting on our front porch in a chair with a maroon cushion, in the white-blue of dawn, reading some of Joan Didion’s stuff from the Sixties. She’s referenced Hieronymus Bosch twice in sixty pages.

And that has given me an expanded perspective on my neighbor across the alley, who is right now washing his car while blasting Celine Dion from rattling speakers. This guy, like most anyone over the age of thirty here, almost certainly lived through the ghastlier sort of Boschian horrors that make the American social disintegration that inspired such dread in Didion no more than stubbed toes or the inconvenience sparked by behind-schedule busses. I have already well-documented the fact that Khmer love their pop music cheese; this culture could be the promised land for Late Night Delilah, her opportunity to expand her brand of darkened bedroom hush and empathetic maternal wisdom from America’s Lite Rock stations into a global franchise. But my understanding of this Khmer taste keeps gaining nuance whenever I’m presented with a new lens through which to see Cambodia’s past butting at the backside of its present. So the wide-spread cultural affinity for sticky-sweet and dramatically-romantic pop songs, epitomized by my neighbor, whose Celine Dion has been followed up with a Khmer translation of that Seventies banality Every sha-la-la-la; every whoa-oh-oh-oh, is now a product of the Boschian Khmer Rouge terrors that have made Cambodia what it is today.

Which brings me to our late-night discussion in Richmond at the Denny’s across from the old Reynolds Metals compound. “Is the issue,” you wondered, stopping to consider your next words, “one of not knowing how to approach the vocabulary?” We were talking about marriage and love, but that core issue of words and how we do or do not use them—how we express in the present our experience of the past—feels very appropriate to Cambodia today. Words, after all, are the only tools that have standardized meanings that we all share, more or less. I think we forget their power because we live in an age dominated so thoroughly by the flickering image and the clicking mouse that scrolls from one to the next, but ten months in Cambodia are an unpleasant reminder that words can still be powerful enough to build a bridge to ruin. And they’re frequently as banal as the sha-la-la-las and whoa-oh-oh-ohs too.

If you travel around Cambodia, you’ll pass many, many, many signs over schools, homes, the red-dirt roads, advertising for the Cambodian People’s Party. Every once in a while you’ll come across a similar ad for the opposing Sam Rainsy Party or, even rarer, the Human Rights Party. These signs are inevitably battered by age, their lettering faded to outlines and the color of soured milk. If you read the paper, you’ll never, ever read anything about the Human Rights party. Rights in

Cambodia

? Get outta here.

But you will read about Sam Rainsy. It is the only party other than the CPP to have any significant representation in parliament, though its 26 seats are dwarfed by the CPP’s 90. Prime Minister Hun Sen and his CPP are waging a war on the SRP. They’ve marginalized it, now they’re going to eradicate it, la-di-da, the same old song and dance. A few months ago the editor of a pro-SRP paper printed a speech by Rainsy in which he accused the CPP Foreign Minister of being a former Khmer Rouge cadre. The editor, Dam Sith, was slapped with a two year prison sentence and serious fines for the spreading of “disinformation” and “defamation.” A lawyer for two SRP Members of Parliament was given a prison sentence as well because he “made a mistake” in defending the MPs, who were being ridden out of town on a rail. What makes these cases interesting is their vocabulary.

On Sen’s demand, and as the only possibility of avoiding jail time, Editor Dam wrote a groveling apology, saying he “failed to act properly and seriously affected the honor” of the CPP leadership. “I am asking for the highest permission of [the party] to forgive me,” he wrote. “In exchange for the generosity of the CPP leadership, I promise to discontinue the publication of my paper. I promise to support the ingenious CPP policy in the building of the country’s progress.” The word on the street is that Dam will have to join the CPP himself as well. When human rights NGOs complained, the Khmer court system issued a statement: “Mr. Dam Sith decided to close Moneaksekor Khmer for his personal reasons, and no one forced him to close.” The defense lawyer also apologized of his own free will because, according to a party official, “it is an individual’s responsibility that when he makes a mistake he must say sorry.”

This stuff isn’t limited to political enemies, except that anyone saying anything less than glowing about the country counts as a political enemy. The head of the Khmer Civilization Foundation, an organization charged with protecting and promoting Cambodian culture, worried that the heat from a light show staged nightly in Angkor Wat as an expensive tourist draw might damage the temple. He was slapped with a two-year jail sentence for “disinformation.” The sentence was rescinded when he wrote a formal apology. When the World Wildlife Federation issued a report citing pollution in the Mekong as a major threat to endangered Irrawaddy river dolphins, the government decried the findings as “all lies.” When the government decided not to kick the organization out of the country (as it has done to Global Witness, whose reports on systematic human rights abuses have also been labeled “all lies”) the in-country director of the WWF labeled the government’s moderation “a positive response and a good sign in working together to conserve the dolphins.”

My gut feeling whenever I read this stuff is hatred; what the world media and governments decry as simple corruption becomes more and more every day the stuff of Orwell and Solzhenitsyn, despotic crackdowns on the road that leads to The Purges. But what’s the point of me hating? So sitting on my porch while the neighbor booms his music, songs that I find dumb, adult expressions of fairyland weddings and stuffed bear dreams, I start to reflect on how stupid all of this is. Letters of apology? That hardly seems worthy of any tyrant worth his salt. An editor or lawyer notes offenses committed, is sentenced to jail, and then is freed, so long as he says sorry. It just seems so childish to me, like keeping someone in a headlock and nuggy-ing his scalp until he calls himself a fag. I want no take backs! to get some play while they’re at it. And yet Hun is a seasoned despot; he would not insist on apologies and then let it go at that unless the security of his position obviated the need for the physical purges of his enemies and unless he had something real to gain by the public shaming of them. I suppose this is what they talk about when they talk about the importance of saving face in Asia. The groveling of that editor, the way he was forced to use his own words to embarrass and attack himself, that was language turned to power. So was the WFF rep who labeled the party’s defamation of the truth as a positive response. Hun could have killed the Cambodian citizens with relative ease (they do it quite successfully in Russia) or could have let the prison sentences stand and doom his critics to a slow purgatory. Both responses would have served as the examples that he wants his critics to be. Instead, Hun chose to impose self-incrimination, to force his adversaries to denounce themselves and then claim the denouncing as honorable. The technique is a classic, but what interests me right here is the potency it grants to words in an era where many of us fear the loss of that potency.

Words like apologize and sorry so often feel benign. How many times have you used or experienced I’m sorry as a verbal place holder in a fight, a meaningless errrrgh that allows a person to catch her breath before battling on? You work in the State Department for Christ’s sake, at least half of your world must be cluttered with empty rhetoric and Doublespeak. I imagine that in the world of Washington D.C. there is a particular language behind the language, a way to understand the words of the true meaning that is implied, to the seasoned individual, by the actual words used. The average American understands that the majority of words that our leaders publicly utter are just wisps of cloud, that when President Obama talks about a bright future of “clean coal,” he’s really talking about stroking the hand that feeds. Even I must get angry at the occasional NY Times story just to keep my morality and understanding of the world centered. We in the States have steadily divested our vocabulary of meaning. But in Cambodia, vocabulary is still power. Words like corruption and Khmer Rouge cadre are still potent enough to require official distortion and abuse, require the degradation of words like honor and generosity.

And that brings me back to Hieronymus Bosch and my Lite Rock neighbor. He surely knows that the Foreign Minister and Hun Sen were both Khmer Rouge. This is something everyone knows. But there is no ripping out of toenails, no systematic rape, no skewering of babies on bayonets these days. Making a newspaper editor beg for forgiveness is not the same as taking him into the jungle and beating his head in, right? So in the world of relative experience, living under a tyrant is not so bad, eating one’s own words not so abusive. This is the post-Boschian Cambodia, the post-Khmer Rouge world. Things are more civilized than that now. And that’s worth celebrating with the comfort of a soft rock cheese-puff.

xxx,

Jason

Twinning

2009-06-23T15:13:00.000-07:00

Dear Elizabeth,

Can you picture a more quintessentially American scene than this? It’s the day before Father’s Day, and we’re at a picnic on the border between Virginia and West Virginia, and there’s a playground and red wagons and potato salad and two-liter bottles of soda and picnic tables covered with checked plastic tablecloths and small sticky children stained with red Jell-o and their harried parents chasing after them. And the only thing that distinguishes it from thousands of identical scenes all around the nation is that this happens to be a gathering of Twinsanity!, a club for the mothers of twins, and every child, all of them under four, has a small mirror image orbiting and colliding with itself.

We went to West Virginia to visit good friends of Jason, who have two cherubic one-year-old twin boys, and as often happens with babies, I found myself spending a lot of time staring at them. What must it be like, I wondered, to have one’s own DNA out there in the world, a part of you yet always separate? Liam and Calum, the twins, seem much like other babies I have known, except that there is this other half to them. Though they don’t lavish much focused attention on each other, they always seem somehow aware of the other’s presence. If someone bumps into them, they look up, but if they bump into each other, they seem oblivious, as if contact between them is a foregone conclusion, the same as a non-twin bringing her own hands together. Emily, their mother, says that they recognize each other’s names but they don’t call each other anything yet; then again, “me” is a hard concept for any toddler to understand, too, and maybe even more complicated when you’re a twin.

You have explained to me, better than anyone I have ever known, what it feels like to be a twin and what it feels like when your twin is no longer with you. I’ve been thinking of those conversations a lot lately, not only because of Liam and Calum, but because it’s been a very strange month back here in the U.S. It has been wonderful, of course, to see my family and friends again and to eat abundant amounts of cheese, and also to remember parts of my personality and habits that I forgot about while I was in Cambodia. (I am friendlier, here, I think, but also more impatient—I have theories about why, but they’re not particularly interesting.) But there is a mirror image of this feeling, too, when a sudden panicky awareness rushes over me that I left someone behind in Cambodia, someone like me but more independent, tougher, clearer-headed. And it makes me wonder if traveling, and particularly living in a different culture, means dividing yourself, twinning yourself.

In my most content moods, this seems like a grand phenomenon, a way of being more flexible, more versatile, than I thought I could be. It is reassuring, somehow, to think that we are all capable of slipping into other skins, chameleon-like, just by changing our whereabouts. But in my darker moods, it seems like a burden, a state of always feeling that I am forever missing a part of myself and yearning for it. Culture shock, I guess is what most people call it, but that doesn’t seem an adequate description, because it sounds like a malady, like something that can be cured. I’m not sure if there is ever a good way to merge lives led on two different continents. And what about when I leave Cambodia for good? Does it mean reconciling different parts of one’s personality, or, like you have had to do, reconciling oneself to a world where you cannot have your other half?

I have two more weeks here, in this nation of our birth, a world of movie theatres and paved roads and Twinsanity picnics, and there is a familiar version of myself that loves being here. But it won’t be long until I am back, until I can curl up in the back of your shop and reacquaint myself with the shadow self that I left in Siem Reap. I miss you, and I miss her, too.

With love,

Shannon

The Steam of the New Year

2009-04-19T01:08:00.000-07:00

Dear Dick Clark,

New Year’s Eve, with its raucous promises of good things to come, has long been one of my favorite holidays. For years I was faithful to Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin' Eve, dutifully tuning in each December 31^st to watch you play ringleader to the mayhem in Times Square, even when you had to start bringing in Ryan Seacrest as backup (a lame substitute for you, Mr. Clark, if I may be so bold). I even recall one year, when a friend got held up on an international flight, and I recorded your coverage of the stroke of midnight so it could be replayed for him several hours later. But I have come to realize over the past few days of Khmer New Year celebrations that perhaps Cambodia has a thing or two to teach America about ushering in a new year. Giant glittering dropped balls, drunken choruses of Auld Lang Syne, and Beyoncé: in these matters, our homeland still clearly has the upper hand. Other aspects, however, must be more closely considered.

First there is the timing of Khmer New Year, which is governed by the lunar calendar rather than the solar one. Our own new year always seems destined to play second fiddle to Christmas, overshadowed by that barrage of gift-giving and family obligations. Who, after all, has the energy to make strict resolutions as the holiday season finally gallops to a finish? In Cambodia, though, New Year comes during the hottest dog days of summer, with no other holidays to compete. First there is the desert of long hot afternoons, during which one’s body is up to nothing more strenuous than being parked under a ceiling fan to consider the passing of time, and then, like an oasis, comes the biggest celebration of the year. One tradition that has emerged is to throw water and baby powder at people, supposedly to symbolically cleanse and freshen them for the upcoming year, but which has the added benefit of rinsing or absorbing the gallons of sweat that everyone is producing.

On the second matter I am more torn. Don’t get me wrong—I have always loved the rather debauched nature of American New Year’s Eve. The high heels, the alcohol, the dancing: it all adds up to a bacchanalian type of revelry that I hold near and dear to my heart. But Khmer New Year, in spite of having its fair share of drunken parties, seems to maintain a sheen of gentle innocence that is inarguably appealing. We went to watch some of the students at the Buddhist school play traditional Khmer games. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but what I got was a bunch of teenagers and young twenty-somethings enthusiastically engaged in musical chairs. It was heart-achingly sweet, and seemed to hearken back to a time in America’s history that we are both too young to remember. Even the dance parties seem less about showing off and more about joining in, everyone eager to teach me those delicate apsara wrist circles and a line dance that appeared to be a pigeon-toed version of the Electric Slide.

And what of the intensity? From my current perch, there seems something almost aggressively ferocious about the Western countdown. It’s all about setting up the conditions for one perfect instant—by the stroke of midnight, you have to be at the right place, with the right person to kiss, at the right level of champagne tipsiness, and if you’re not, you run the risk of entering the new year on a disappointing note. There is no such pressure with Khmer New Year, mostly because it is spread out over at least three days (and often colors the atmosphere of the following weeks with easy-going revelry, a period termed “the steam of the new year”). Even the Khmer name for the holiday, Bon Chuol Chnam, means “the festival of entering the new year.” I like that word “entering” because it indicates a process, not just an event. In Cambodia, the new year does not appear at the snap of one’s fingers; it is an act of becoming.

And finally (and this, I think, is where Khmer New Year really gains an advantage), there’s a generosity inherent in these festivities that don’t seem apparent in our own. Maybe it is simply that in America, we are a little worn out with the spirit of the season by the time New Year’s Eve rolls around, but good tidings here sound refreshingly genuine. Last night, on the final evening of the three-day holiday, Dave and Amy (two visiting American friends), Jason and I happened past a madcap and charmingly amateurish drag show and stopped to watch for a few minutes. We were pulled inside and enthusiastically provided with chairs and beer. It began to dawn on us that we’d just unwittingly crashed a private party, a shindig for the young staff of a big restaurant. We were underdressed and smeared with baby powder from an earlier stop at a carnival, but no one seemed to mind. They chatted with us, led us out onto the dance floor, and urged us to partake in their wildly exuberant games of tug-of-war and tandem floor skiing. By the end of the night, we’d all been invited to an upcoming wedding. “Gee,” Amy said. “I feel like next New Year’s Eve, I’m required to pull a few people off the street and invite them to my party.”

And isn’t that what a new year should be about? A fresh start that allows you to become a better and kinder version of yourself by the time the next one rolls around?

Susaday Chnam Tmai, Mr. Clark.

Warm regards,

Shannon Dunlap

Re: Expat Life

2009-04-11T00:01:00.000-07:00

From: writersblok@hotmail.com

To: gosloe@XXX.com

Dear Saloni,

It was fantastic to talk to you the other evening. You have such a lovely laugh and a matter-of-fact way of being supportive, as if the kind, the helpful, the sympathetic response is simply a matter of common sense, with no subjective take of me, your friend, entering into your opinion at all. Life here is hard, and the only people Shannon and I have to commiserate with over this fact are each other. I don’t think many of our families and friends really understand the stresses and creeping uncertainties of living in (rather than just visiting) a culture 180˚ across the globe from your own culture, let alone doing so while trying to make a living on art. I figure first and foremost that you are good at understanding all of this just because you are you: kind and empathetic and street smart in a sweeping Great Art of Living sort of way.

But then there is the expat factor, you having lived in New York, a long way from Jamshedpur. When you are a traveler, a visitor, there is movement to your days, the adrenalin that comes with adventuring and discovery. Settling into one house or one town, finding work, developing new habits and the practice movements that make them, that is an entirely different kind of adjustment. You are taking the Life of Adventure and trying to, needing to, make something stable out of it. And that’s hard, hard, hard. Some days I go to the public market and wander the food aisles, trying to remember what I used to cook at home and what to buy to make a dinner. You get seduced into thinking you are in some kind of home because you pay rent every month to the same person, and then small things such as a meal, or the standard practice of local weddings blasting music through a Stones-concert-worth of speakers at five a.m., or the disregard for driving with lights on in the dark sneak up and smack you with anger or confusion or exhaustion.

The other ingredient to these past eight months is the fact of a writer’s life. Writing anything worth a damn is hard enough at home, and though you make well the point that I’m absorbing too much stimuli to get a good piece of fiction going, I get panicky when stuck in that rut. There is only so much time!, only so much money saved!, only so much endurance and oh so much that must come out of this situation Shannon and I have created. Family and friends ask us why don’t we come home and spend another year teaching, ask us what we have sold lately, ask us when we will be coming home because they miss us. They miss us for us, but for themselves too. They don’t understand what we do and that makes them scared and uncomfortable. They don’t understand that the requests they make of us may make them feel better but will hurt us greatly. When your calling lacks a regimented progression of achievements, it can get very hard to assess your own accomplishments. There is no pre-determined flow here, no widely accepted system of cause and effect such as: Kaplan Review...LSAT...application...law school...clerking...employment. So we end up trying to keep up our own spirits in the face of confusion and even anger from those we love while trying to actually work at and accomplish something at the same time.

Doing all of that in a thoroughly alien environment is profoundly difficult and draining, as you know. Just existing here for eight months is an accomplishment, a success in its own right. I know this, but hearing it from the mouths of others is so important. That part of Jay that’s ambitious to the point of desperation and fatigued disappointment, the worming Doubt, those get in the way of that recognition. I know you know all this, and I know you know it more profoundly, having come out of a much more conservative place than I have. In retrospect, I can think of times when you tried to convey all or part of this to me, and though I thought I understood, I did not, could not, could not understand it fully anymore than loved ones back in the States can understand where I am now. I have a much greater understanding of how you must have felt your three years in New York and a real admiration for what you did there. You are very brave, I now understand.

I sit writing this, and I remember you singing that Jain prayer to me and Quincy on the pier at Maribar, and though I remember that is was so beautiful, I cannot remember the way it was beautiful. Though the notes are lost to me, I have the memory of being shocked at the beauty of the song ringing out over the water and beneath the moon and how much it moved me, moved me though I will never understand its meaning, and so I believe that your voice announcing your presence to rural Virginia and the way it stole my breath away are surely creations of an expat life as worthy as any short story or essay.

Much love... your buddy,

Jason

The Things I Hate

2009-04-05T04:32:00.000-07:00

Dear Ted,

You hate many things: smoker’s breath, Ernest Hemingway stories, Scott Bailey, deadlines, people who are too good at karaoke. I may, in fact, know more about the things you hate than the things you like, and that is how I know that you are my friend, because when two people tell each other what they hate about the world, it doesn’t mean that they’re misanthropes, just truthful with each other. You also hate people who sugarcoat things, so I should admit that it’s not always roses and sunshine over here. Cambodia is a vibrant country full of strong and beautiful people. There are also some aspects of it that annoy the living shit out of me. These are, in truth, small matters in the global scheme of things, but it often does not feel like it when you have to look at them every day, and I thought it might be time to get a few things about Cambodia off my chest.

Dog Genitals
Let us begin with the fact that I come face to face with more furry testicles every day than I have in a lifetime in the United States. Yes, one would see the odd purebred Boxer kept for breeding strutting his stuff in Washington Square Park. But apparently no one in Cambodia has ever heard the gospel of spaying and neutering your pets. These omnipresent canine nuts cause multiple problems. For one, they lead to dozens of gnarly-looking, agitated and mistreated strays roaming the streets. (If the Buddhist notions of karma and rebirth are true, then you should fervently hope that you don’t land yourself in the animal kingdom of Cambodia next time around. Stoned pigs strapped to the back of motos on their way to slaughter, irritable crocodiles displayed in tiny cages, the howl of kicked dogs in the night—it’s a PETA nightmare.) For another, dog nuts seem to be a magnet for a whole host of diseases that I sincerely wish I knew nothing about. Scaly, itchy, misshapen, bleeding, ripped open, or swollen to the size of cantaloupes—you name a symptom, and I have seen a poor dog afflicted with it in his most sensitive of parts. And the horrors are not just limited to genitalia. All female dogs that are even months beyond puppyhood sport slack, stretched-out teats that all but drag in the dust. These do not seem as susceptible to disease, but as I watch them whipping painfully to and fro when a female dog so much as trots, it puts me in mind of the realities of mammalian aging and a mortal depression begins to set in.

Dirt
For a while, I could not understand why my fingernails were perpetually dirty here. And then I realized that it’s because I always have mosquito bites and scratch them. I am where the dirt is coming from. A layer of Cambodian dirt mixed with my own sweat is permanently caked on my skin, and no amount of showering will remove it. I wonder sometimes how many pounds of dirt I must have ingested since arrival just by opening my mouth or licking my lips. Now, during the hot season, the dirt becomes airborne and then comes to settle on my pillow, my toothbrush, my dishes. This, I think, is actually preferable to the wet season, when the whole of Siem Reap turns into a giant mud puddle which gets splashed up the back of my legs as I walk. And surely my feet will never be the same again. I have never been a foot fetishist, but the sight of a fresh pedicure on some newly arrived Western tourist alongside my calloused, grubby paws is enough to cause me actual physical pain. The issue was not even resolved by a trip to Dr. Fish, the place at the night market where hundreds of fish will eat the dead skin off your feet. My soles did, indeed, feel softer but were still stained the reddish-brown of Cambodian grit.

Bad Jokes
I love the Khmer for their good cheer. Old women smile toothless grins and try to stroke my cheek, and happy babies yell “Hello!” from every street corner. But there is a serious mismatch when it comes to our notions of what is funny. Aside from Khmer pop music, the most popular entertainment offering on long bus rides is a strange variety show which seems to consist mostly of shrieking drag queens and a small child dressed up as a surly pirate. Maybe there is smart dialogue that is simply lost on me, but judging from the reaction of fellow bus riders, the mere appearance of that pirate is enough to make all the passengers almost pee their pants with laughter. And for some reason, my fellow inhabitants of Siem Reap cannot—cannot—get over how funny it is that I go jogging in the morning. Running apparently registers just above pirates on the laugh meter. It is not uncommon for at least eight tuk-tuk drivers to double over in laughter as I jog past, and all of them then proceed to make the same joke. “One, two, three, four,” they yell like a military drill sergeant, occasionally running along with me for half a block before collapsing to the ground in peals of hilarity. “But you saw me yesterday,” I want to say, “and you did the same thing.” Weird foreign habits are apparently the bad joke that never gets old in Cambodia.

Hairy Moles
Just a few moments after trudging over the Cambodian border for the first time, we stopped to ask for a taxi at a deserted hotel. The valet may have been helpful; I am not certain because all I could do was stare at the astonishing mole on his chin and the handful of black whiskers, each maybe four or five inches long, growing out of it. It was alarming, as though a large paintbrush had begun to sprout from his face, and it waggled at me tauntingly whenever he spoke. What I couldn’t have known then is that he is hardly alone among his countrymen. It’s rare to see any Khmer men sporting facial hair, except for this one glaring exception. Khmer men and women alike seem to be attempting to grow long, ZZ Top-style beards, but only from their moles. Everywhere I go, hairy moles are leering at me. When I asked our seventeen-year-old buddy Han (my go-to guy for this type of question) about the phenomenon, he said that people believed it was “unhealthy” to cut mole hair. He was a little foggy on what would happen if the hairs were cut, but whatever it was, it was bad.

But what can I do about any of this? The best approach I’ve found so far is to shrug and laugh politely one more time at the jokes of tuk-tuk drivers. Besides, maybe it is important to hate a few things, no matter where you live. It’s a way of reminding yourself of the things you like. May you dream tonight of Fitzgerald and nonsmokers. As for me, I’ll close my eyes and think of home, of loofah sponges and The Colbert Report, mole-hair clippers and neutered beagles.

Fondly,
S

Re: Blog Pictorial Cheat

2009-03-27T01:29:00.000-07:00

From: writersblok@hotmail.com
To: andrewcleahey@XXX.com

Andrew,

Man, I know email makes long distance communication like nothing. That’s all good, sailors in the Persian Gulf watching realtime videos of the children they didn’t see before shipping out and such. There is the lack of folded paper and moth holes and all but, well, I’ve said it a lot and I’ll say it a bunch more and people will just get tired of it so I won’t say it here. Instead, I’ll tell you what else I’m thinking regarding email correspondence, then get frivolous.

Being in touch with loved ones all the time is good, but having it available every day does have a way of building momentum. Instead of having a week or even a month to let something simmer before putting it down in ink and sending it off on the ankle of a carrier pigeon or in a bag on a freighter puffing across the South China Sea, you got the love of home Like Right Now, whenever you want more or less, and that love is good but when you’re over seas and haven’t actually seen someone for months and months you kinda want to be profound or at least deeply felt in each communiqué and that’s just real hard to do if you’re reading and responding every other day.

(As an aside: in Saigon there is, in the center of a serious roundabout whizzing with cars and motorbikes, a tall statue of the man who introduced the carrier pigeon to the Viet people. He is wearing a hat that, to me, whipping around it only once or twice on the back of a moto, looks very much like a medieval gnome’s hat, a kind of pointy-ended, floppy-sack hat that makes me think of straw roofs and guilds, and his mouth is a joyous shout, like a serious, passionate belt, because off the end of his hand a bird, presumably the pigeon, is flapping up into history to....to what? Deliver mail, I guess. Is this the Vietnamese Pony Express, Teaspoon from The Young Riders? I have no idea the significance of it, why this guy gets one of the only statues not of Uncle Ho. The books only say, “There’s a statue of the man who introduced the carrier pigeon.” It’s strange, it’s odd; did the carrier pigeon particularly advance their society? Did it carry messages that helped finally whup the Chinese? It’s like you go to Lubbock and the only thing you read about the Buddy Holly statue is, “In the town square there is a statue of a man playing guitar.”)

Phew. Okay. This was going to be my Get-Out-of-Jail-Free letter, my pictorial cheat, and it’s becoming D.F. Wallace-ian. D.F. Wallacious.... It was a low few weeks there. Now it’s all... Snappy! I’m having coffee after abstaining for about two weeks and, boom, I’ma eat the spoon, man!

Okay, my point on the communication tip: you want to have something to say when you write because isn’t there more than enough unavoidable talk that doesn’t say a damn thing? and that same principle applies to these letters we’re putting out there. If you’re gonna put something down you got to make it worth the energy and time and, man, sometimes it takes a long-ass time to get to that. To make it: Deeply....Felt. But then this week, I’ve dropped the ball a few weeks, this week I think, “Ah, we have this form. Yeah, Shannon’s brilliance,” and such, me originally thinking constraints make new things happen and that’s certainly true, but constraints can also be....a Free Pass.

So Big Realness takes a break. Wanna hear something cool and check out some pictures? Yeah, you do.

Savuth, the monk we teach with/learn with/hang out with, always invites us to wat events and such. So we ended up waking at six last Saturday morning to attend what Savuth called “The Gratitude Festival,” a two-day celebration of the man who wrote the first Khmer dictionary and translated the books of the dharma from Balay (apparently an Asian equivalent of Latin) into Khmer. “How long ago did he live?” I ask. “Oh, I think maybe a long time ago,” Savuth answers. A holiday honoring an ancient man of learning? Sweet. “Maybe fifty years, a hundred years,” Savuth says. “Oh, well…”

We show up to the wat and it’s a madhouse. There is a parade and Shannon and I are to march in it but there’s this crush of bodies, monks and laypeople, the largest collection of old, shaved-headed women I’ve ever seen, occasionally a big cauldron of bubbling strew discovered as we wind our way through the mass. The monks know us, we’re the only barang around, so by enough pointed fingers we eventually find Savuth (his buddies calling him simply “Vut,” which I dig) and we’re in the parade, different schools and such represented just like a parade at home, Shannon and I with Build Bright University, the uni where Savuth now studies things like Public Administration and Economics which, I promise you, coming from within Cambodia sounds as normal as attending Sleepy Gulch High, Smoky Mountains, TN and taking a class in Aeronautics Engineering and Black Magic. This is the group behind us:

Whenever Celebrated Monk of Learning was

alive, they got a photo of him, because there he is.

As with any parade, no one reeally knows what’s going on and the people in charge are kind of flipping out because, I think, it’s just really hard to accept that getting this many people to walk in some sort of regimented way is something of a lost cause, unless you’ve been broken and rebuilt at boot camp or Catholic school. But ya gotta try, and after fits and starts and Savuth making repeated cell phone calls, some groups behind us start moving past, including this bunch of school kids. The teacher is obviously one of those noble souls in charge.

Apparently, a Japanese organization funds a music program at this school. And what are they playing?

Hooters, man!, hooters like the instrument that inspired the band name, their tune, “And we danced...like a wave on the ocean, romanced...da da da....we were liars in love and we danced!,”etc. Eric Brazilian and the other guy from Philly, Rob something, those dudes knew composition. They wrote and played everything on Cyndi Lauper’s first album, did you know?, which is damn good album. They played Desmond Child to Jon Bon Jovi on a solo album too, if you care. Which you totally do.

So these kids are playing and they’re cute a hell, though this guy doesn’t seem
to think so...

....and I take a picture of Savuth.

I like this picture because he seems to think that Buddhist modesty must prevent him from smiling for

cameras, except when he’s really jazzed and can’t help it. I also like this picture...

...because the guy’s a good teacher and he looks it here.

And then, “Oooh,” he says, “can I take.” And he snaps our photo and then calmly wanders off with our camera, snapping away, handing off to another monk when he has to regulate, and your immediate instinct is to say, “Umm, hey dud

e?” but, well, he’s a monk, and you know he’s not gonna bust it, though if he did you’d be S.O.L. because, well, he’s a poor monk, so....

He comes back to us when the battery’s dead, having taken dozens of photos, including this one, which gives a sense of how long this thing was. We never saw the beginning nor the end even though we wrapped around both sides of the river and could see thousands of people stretched along each one.

And then there's this, which proves that women can totally rock the non-dyed, no-nonsense look if they so choose,...

....and this, of Gong, a nineteen-year-old monk who is way into asking me my opinions on the relationship between man’s imperfect nature and the requirements of a life of Deeper Consciousness, and then...

...this dude, whom neither Shannon nor myself nor Savuth have ever seen before but who obviously knows how to represent.

Let’s stop for a minute and really appreciate this guy...

Okay.

Here we are, the three of us, me with the Cambodia national flag and Shannon with the Buddhist flag, and all of us just melting, man, so incredibly hot, down into the pavement. I ask Savuth if the robes are hot, and the man who seems to start every other sentence with “maybe” says, “I do not think maybe.”

Savuth is very worried we are going to delete his pictures. We assure him to the contrary. He has a computer but no way to get the pix from camera to ‘puter, so we say we’ll charge the battery and bring the cord when we teach on Monday and he seems relieved, though still nervous. Monday comes, and while the kids are in partnered groups working on pronunciation through a simulated job interview, I step out onto the porch and get this shot through the window:

I think these windows are so cool. After the class we teach and then the class where we are taught, Savuth says we can come to his room. This is unprecedented. Seriously, and Shannon?, a chick going into a monk’s room?!, this should be in the paper. I’m super psyched, this is a real present and I was going to go into it more but this has turned into a long letter. I Am Jason; I Am Long. (Shannon says I’m an idea person and she’s a narrative person, which may well be true, and which I like at first thought, though I need to ruminate on it more.)

So, you leave your shoes at the bottom of the step and you tread up good, solid wood steps to a wooden (everything is wooden) covered porch and it’s just after dark and there are dogs around and some music and chanting off in the dark and it’s peaceful, just lovely, and I think of Boyscout camp, though Boyscout camp could not really be called peaceful, though maybe just wooden porches and dogs and the nighttime are peaceful, which I’ll ruminate on too when I’m done with the idea guy vs. narrative gal bit, and Vut opens the door and, man, it was just perfect.

This small but ample room, a dry erase board covered with scrawl, books stacked up next to and around a sizable cot with a pink mosquito net hanging above, a cardboard tray of two dozen cans of coke in one corner, a glowing computer on a desk cluttered with more books, nestled into a corner next to the dry erase, and I tell Savuth how cool this is, and he laughs, says, “Ah, you say so cool but it is hot,” turning on a little fan that’s above a small shelf where a Radio Shack radio sits. And he pulls a sliding bolt I hadn’t even noticed before on the wall and the top bit of a horizontally-split door swings open into the nighttime jungle and I just love that I’m here, even just once, just to see how new something relatively familiar can be, how familiar something so totally foreign can be, and just, just because.

And now, finally, we come to this. I plug the camera into the computer and wait to see what’ll fly. Behind me, six monks have filed into the room, offered Shannon a seat and stare at me to see what will happen. I type up a folder name and there’s a collective “oooo” from the monks. What’s the deal? Ahh, I see, it’s the typing. The guys kinda bug out, and they want me to type, just type. I’ve got the ten-finger typing game down, man, because Mom made me take typing Freshman year at Tucker, and so I go to town, bang out “Today at the school we taught all of the lovely children to say dirty words. No, not really. We taught them good words,” and I may as well have juggled with my feet, everyone was so excited.

Well, the computer's taking a while to figure out what those new files are, and I gotta take a picture, man, even though I can’t get the whole room, and so I get this:

Oh, I love it; it’s like the guys are planning a serious heist or something. And then I snap this, where Savuth’s neck is so thick he’s obviously the Tough in Charge.

The camera finally loads, all is well, and I want to give the monks something back. “Do you guys know the wacky photo routine?”

No, they do not. “You do the Very Normal Photo and then you do the Wacky Photo. Here, Savuth, take our picture.” He takes us at Very Normal:

“No, no, don’t give it back. Here, take it again, take the Wacky Photo.” He takes this:

They all screech with laughter. It’s fantastic.

But we have to go eat dinner now, “gnyam aha pay-lin-yay,” and we head toward the door. “You know what you are, Savuth? You are a scholar. You know scholar?” He does not. I write it on the dry erase board.

“A life-long student,” Shannon says.

What You See Is What You Get

2009-03-13T00:34:00.000-07:00

Dear Maureen,

Being a foreigner in Cambodia often feels like one big web of miscommunication. At the most basic level, of course, this usually has to do with my minimal Khmer vocabulary. Even when I can find the right words, there’s a good chance I’ll mangle them beyond recognition, and likewise, I hate seeing the shattered look on a Khmer person’s face when he thinks he is speaking English to me and I cannot, for the life of me, understand a single word. But the missed connections are more than just a problem of language. Even when someone speaks English well, there are still dozens of cultural potholes that we can fall into.

Here’s one that comes up all the time: Khmer people exist in a world in which everything is taken very literally. Sometimes this manifests itself as funny little cultural quirks. (You want an ice cream sandwich in Cambodia? It’s a baguette with some little scoops of sorbet stuffed inside.) But I didn’t realize how compelled Westerners are to turn everything into an abstraction until I saw their ideas constantly being lost in translation, and that can be utterly maddening for everyone involved. An American friend of mine was tearing her hair from her scalp one night, because, in trying to explain to a Khmer employee why something he did was unprofessional, she made the grave error of turning to analogy. Spinning out a reversed scenario, she asked, “How would you like it if I did that to you?”

He was completely baffled. “You didn’t do that to me,” he said.

“That’s not the point. What if I did?”

“But you didn’t.” This, in various forms, was repeated ad nauseam, until, nerves frayed, both parties resorted to dark looks and chain smoking.

At the Buddhist school where Jason and I teach an English class full of teenagers a few times each week, our attempts to recreate Western education techniques fail miserably. Pictionary seemed like a grand idea, but the students were easily frustrated because they didn’t understand the concept of drawing anything besides a very literal rendering of the word. Given the word “party,” a Westerner might draw a cocktail glass or a disco ball, party hats or a birthday cake. Our Khmer student drew four people sitting at a table—that is, after all, what parties often look like. When trying to get her teammates to guess “teacher,” another student drew a picture of a monk, at which point her team guessed “monk” repeatedly. We suggested adding something to the picture, but she was confused—why would she draw an apple or a chalkboard or a pencil when the word was “teacher”?

If Pictionary was arduous, Twenty Questions was a complete catastrophe. The class seemed perplexed by the notion of “guessing what we were thinking.” (Why would they do that? Why couldn’t we just tell them?) When we convinced them to start asking questions, the queries tended to be hesitant and completely unrelated. “Is it pizza?” one girl asked hopefully. “Is it a duck?” asked the next student.

Even after we corrected this habit of asking about single items and provided them with some hints, the game limped along pathetically. “Okay,” I said. “So remember, it’s not served hot and it’s something round. What could it be?”

“Is it soup?” one student asked innocently, at which point I had to restrain an urge to hurl an eraser at him. The lesson had ceased to be about English at all—it had become an exercise in abstract thinking and logic. On days when we give up and teach by rote, the students are relieved, cheerfully repeating our monotone pronunciations. If this happened in a Western classroom full of seventeen-year-olds, one would conclude that surely learning disabilities were to blame. But on the contrary, our Khmer students are very bright, picking up and remembering vocabulary and grammar rules quickly. It does not have anything to do with intelligence level. But what does it have to do with? At first I thought the explanation would involve complicated notions of Eastern thought and perspectives, and perhaps it does, but I think that the more likely answer is that most Khmer people can’t think abstractly because nobody bothered to teach them how.

Skills like creative thinking and basic logic feel innate to me, like an inborn part of my personality, but I’m beginning to realize that they’re probably not—I was taught them just like so many other things, at school, from my family, and in my backyard, playing with you. The reason that this letter is to you, even though we have long been out of touch and there is only the most miniscule possibility that you will read this, is because playtime with you when we were very little girls is the first time I remember learning that an abstract imagined world and a real world could coexist. “I am Maureen,” you said to me when you first came to my porch. “Do you want to see my magic tree?” And for the next few years, summer vacations were full of magic trees and blue whales swimming in the back yard, of royal tea parties and dastardly villains lurking in the basement.

In a country razed to nothingness just a generation ago, my Khmer students have never been taught to pay attention to anything other than the very real and pressing world around them. Maybe it is a little like America in its infancy—I used to dread when early American literature was assigned in high school, all those texts of Thomas Payne and John Smith and Cotton Mather that speak of much passion and hard work but little imagination or whimsy. They were men who were busy inventing a nation, and they had no time to invent anything else. I see echoes of this in Cambodia. Paintings by Khmer artists, for instance, are not valued for originality of content or technique, but rather for their careful precision in replicating a few standard designs. They can recreate a temple backlit by a sunset perfectly, but would they ever be able to translate their inner life onto the canvas?

It makes me painfully aware that a life like mine, one dedicated to thought and art and invention, could only have been hatched in a handful of very fortunate countries. On the one hand, it makes me newly appreciative of the country of my birth and desperately grateful for that blue whale that was sparked into existence in a landlocked Midwestern town. But it is both a heady and terrible realization to know that those deepest and most private parts of the mind, the mental pathways that serve as the foundation of one’s self, are yet one more sign of the privilege that I did nothing to deserve.

And so I hope that wherever you are, you have managed to make good on our lucky beginnings. I hope you still have the sense to have a magic tree.

With love,
Shannon

Re: Sex is Everywhere, Sex is Nowhere

2009-03-06T23:28:00.000-08:00

From: writersblok@hotmail.com
To: rachel_gussman@XXXX.com

Dear Rae,

I read today in the Phnom Penh Post that a prominent opposition politician and human rights spokeswoman in Malaysia has resigned because nude photos of her have been making the rounds of the country’s cell phones. She’s not posing for the camera in these photos; she’s not caught in any act. She’s simply asleep in bed. “I wish to state that I am not ashamed of my sexuality as a woman and a single person,” Elizabeth Wong is quoted. “I have broken no laws. I stand by the fundamental principle in a democracy that everyone has a right to privacy.”

Malaysia is very Muslim and very conservative. Ms. Wong had a broad base of support among a number of ethnic groups and Malaysia’s women. “She is a single person,” a government official is quoted as saying. “How can she allow a man into her room when they are not married?"

I read it and could perfectly imagine a constipated man with angry, angry eyes shaking an index finger. Viciously conservative Muslims are pretty much as the viciously conservative American Christians would have you believe, with the additional fact that they are more similar to each other than is comfortable to admit. It’s not hard to conjure up the glee behind Malaysian government doors, the handshake, cash, and position handed with a wink to the boyfriend who sold himself, to the stranger whose warmth won Ms. Wong over. Sex as a weapon, sex as a wand, sex with eyes open and sex with eyes shut. In Cambodia and, it seems, in most of Southeast Asia, sex is the world’s warming winters, the outsourcing of interrogation, the 15-year-old that everyone at the Thanksgiving table knows is sleeping with her boyfriend. It is the thing glaring and loud but still largely ignored, the thing berated but given permission, forbidden to all but acceptable for some, denied its very existence yet made a foundation of society and the economy. Sex is everywhere and nowhere.

If you take the red dirt road outside our gate fifteen yards to the right and then make another right onto a different red dirt road and follow that out into the open country, in ten walking minutes you’ll come to Bakheng Entertainment. Bakheng is a Khmer disco but looks more like a set piece from Scarface the morning after, a cross between new money Miami and Disneyworld’s Frontier Land. The neon sign that hangs over the road, a pink swirl of a moon in the black night, gives a pretty good visual foundation. Just add to your mental image an open courtyard with wagon wheels bedecked with Christmas lights atop the surrounding walls, thatch-roofed bungalows going to seed in the brush where the courtyard’s tiles end, and young men careening in and out of the front gate stacked two or four to a motorbike, their motors whining off into the fields.

You go to open the door and suddenly it is opened for you, three or four eager men in suit jackets buzzing around the entrance, arms swept wide, “come in, come in,” and you walk into an entranceway lined with women in short skirts and prom dresses, dozens packed shoulder to shoulder against the wall, one after the other after the other until you realize you have dozens of women, thirty or forty girls, from which to choose. The DJ is crushingly loud and another tier of women, these in waiters’ slacks and high white collars, swarm around you waving cardboard tokens with pictures of beer, “To drink, sir? To drink, sir?,” and there’s machine-made fog and cheap green lasers like Def Leppard used in ‘88 and it’s all so much, all so much like sailing smack-dab into a school of luminescent fish that rush around and below and above you, that you can’t get it all arranged in your head, that you have to make it to the safety of a high stool with someone’s beer token in your hand and wait to see what you’re brought and what you’ll pay and just what the scope of all of this is.

Bakheng isn’t a whorehouse. The DJ spins English-language hip hop and the dance floor is packed, bodies clipped in blacklight, heads and arms and feet, and you think, “Man, those kids are really good” until you stare for a little longer and realize, no, they’re not good dancers, not really good dancers at all, just nineteen-, twenty-one-, twenty-five-year-olds clustered in single-sex groups and hopping up and down like happy rabbits, girls touching their girlfriends, boys touching their mates, nothing co-ed at all, no dance floor sophistication or flirtation, no moves, just kids bouncing like embarrassed kids under the momentarily-deceptive pulse of light and fog. The odd girl you see trying out some of what she’s learned from hip hop or karaoke videos looks out to lunch, her attempts at the slinky waist groove or a grinding pelvis a gag, something that breaks her and her girlfriends into immediate giggle fits. Even freed from adult supervision, these folks take no steps toward carnality.

This isn’t just the hesitation of the inexperienced or the reserve of the culturally-shy. A friend of ours, a native New Yorker who owns a shop that employs a few Khmer men, told us one afternoon of the conversations she’d been having. One of her guys was using her computer to watch porn and she started asking him about sex in Cambodia. Blow jobs come up and it turns out her guy and his friends thought such a thing was pure fiction, akin to citizens of Mumbai breaking into dramatic choreography in the middle of a Bollywood film. When she explains that oral sex is a regular part of most Westerners’ sex lives, the men just stare at her dumbfounded. “Jason, it was just beyond, Beyond, BEYOND them,” she says. She asks them how often they have sex with their wives and the say about once a month. When she asks them if they masturbate to make it from one month to the next, they have no idea what she’s talking about. A little sheepishly she uses the phrase jerk off and they nod sagely and say, “Oh, you mean being silly.” They have heard tourists use the phrase as an epithet. “No,” she says, “you know, like what you did when you were a kid and just figuring it out.” The guys have no clue what she’s talking about. So she takes a banana and, again rather sheepishly, tries to give them the sense of things. “And Jason,” she says, “they fucking FREAKED THE FUCK OUT! They were just screaming with laughter and they said, ‘Why would you do that to yourself?’ and I said, ‘Well, because somebody else isn’t doing it for you,’ and they were rolling on the floor."

All of these guys had at least a few sexual relationships before getting married, almost certainly with prostitutes or one of the bar girls that trade sex for a man’s patronage of the bar where she works, and my New York buddy asks if any of these woman have given them blow jobs. They shake their heads. When she asks them if would feel comfortable suggesting it to their wives, they fall back into fits of laughter. What a ludicrous suggestion. Wives would never, ever, ever do that, uhmm-uhmmm. When my friend treads lightly into the topic of the men giving oral sex to their spouses, their eyes screw up suspiciously. “What do you mean?” When she suggests that women have orgasms – “What happens to the man during sex can happen to the woman, just differently” – they sit back with wide eyes and shake their heads. And foreplay?, forget about it. That’s just something a ‘massage girl’ sells to paying customers.

“So when you have sex with your wife,” my friend asks, “how long does it usually last? I mean, all of it?”

“Oooh,” one of the men replies, considering his answer. “About two minutes.”

“And what does your wife do?”

“She looks up at the ceiling.”

All of this is not just a different cultural experience of sexuality. The kinds of things we consider relatively open aspects of sexuality are denied to both the individual and to partnerships. Surely the French passed on a little knowledge in their 80-odd years here, but that too has been lost to decades of civil war. These sex acts aren’t so much forbidden as they are fantastic impossibilities, things being conception. It reminds me of a story told by another friend in Siem Reap, a Texan who has worked in the Middle East for the past thirty years. “Men and women are kept completely apart in Saudia Arabia until the day they are married,” he says. “So boys, to deal with their natural urges, they have sex with their buddies, have sex with animals. It’s not uncommon at all for a husband to come storming into a clinic dragging his wife behind him and angrily shout that his wife will not bear him any sons. So the doctors separate the couple and ask them questions and pretty soon they find out that the husband has been putting it in the wrong place because that’s all he knows and no one has told him any different. It’s a different planet, man, it really, really is. That’s why I call it Sodomy Arabia.”

The Texan is also the person who has told me that the only source of blow jobs from a Khmer is from the ladyboys, the transvestite prostitutes that stand casually in the town’s royal gardens until late into the night, waiting for a john. But the ladyboys, they work the end of Pub Street too, grabbing at the arm of a Western man while the cops yawn and look on. And at Bakeng, the DJ stops spinning every half hour or so to make way for a five piece band and a handful of karaoke singers whose eyes are dead tackle as they sing Khmer pop songs. These girls cost one hundred dollars a night, a Khmer friend tells me. “Very expensive.” How much for the girls lining the entranceway? “Maybe twenty dollars.” And those two men who take turns amongst the female karaoke singers? “Oh, many hundreds of dollars.” At the end of the live music set, once the DJ is back and the awkward teens are again packed onto the floor, the singers join the girls working the doors in small rooms that dot the walls of the place, disappear behind doors with a man or a boy and return in short order.

The kids dancing know this. The wives in the country know this. The government and the monks and everybody else with their feet on this ground for more than a couple of days knows this. Dozens of door fronts across Siem Reap are lit red every night, the girls sitting out for the casual passerby to assess. Everyone is aware and everyone is participating in some way yet nobody shares what they do or don’t know. Everyone is playing a game that no one knows the rules of. Men get sex ed from prostitutes and both the prostitutes and wives get their sex from lying on the backs and waiting to see what happens. The blind lead the blind and a country decimated in every conceivable way, a country full of sadness and anger and loss, adds sexual frustration to the list of burdens that are ready to make a person blow his or her top. And across the country, serious money trades hands every night, people and their confusion with themselves and their partners supporting a large slice of the national economy.

My initial instinct is to be disgusted by the hypocrisies in all of this, and then to try to understand those hypocrisies as they are in the social order, and then I end up reminded of home and the cultural duality of our own American culture. You can find many American movies over here and the other day, flipping through the stack, I passed The Bratz Movie, the adult glamour and anorexic skulls and pouty lips and cocked hips of the characters and the dolls that inspired them just adult sexuality and pathology rouged up for pre-adolescents. Those toys are popular, man. Parents buy them for their little girls, the ever-present sex in pop culture aiming for a younger and younger audience. And what that says to me – after the initial conclusion that most people will bite down on just about anything waved under their noses – is that even as grown-ups and parents that allure is too much to resist, that somehow sexuality is so fundamental and all encompassing that many of us instinctively process it as a ‘given’ for kids that have yet to reach puberty, even when we don’t know we’re doing so.

Sex is that fundamental, right? We do ourselves no favors by reserving its faintest echoes, its vaguest acknowledgment, for those only of a certain age or secured safely in classrooms or the family kitchen. But we do do all of that and we deny that elemental quality even as we cannot help but acknowledge it by the toys we buy and the movies we show to our kids. “Get a load of this, check out how fun this is,” we seem to say. “But don’t let us see you enjoying yourself.”

And that’s Cambodian sex in a nutshell as well, the cultural arrangement that keeps men and women from public touching but which sends all of the men to those very-public brothels. So the similarity between our American Evangelicals and Malaysia’s Conservative Muslims is not an isolated similarity. Our sex may not be the same as Cambodia’s, but the two share a certain psychology, a certain psychosis suffered by our families and their families. It comes down to Doublespeak that says of something that hurts, “This feels good,” and says of something comforting, “This feels bad.” And so I'm writing to you because it's good to know someone else with the incite to say, "Now wait just a goddamn minute here..."

Love,
Jay

Cambodian Silver

2009-02-27T21:34:00.000-08:00

To the students of Miss Miller’s first grade class:

You know more about me than I know about you. During your recent writing unit on “special friends,” I have been told, your teacher used me as an example. It is an honor that I have done little to earn, except for growing up alongside Miss Miller and occasionally spoon-feeding her Dairy Queen Blizzards on long car trips. That, and driving across the Everglades once to retrieve her when she forgot the date of our vacation, missed the plane and had to fly into Miami instead. These are relatively minor requirements, given the length of our friendship.

That length is important, I think. You have not yet had the chance to be friends with anyone for eighteen years, but I hope that time will remedy that for all of you. I do not trust people who lack very old friends the way I trust those who have them. We need people from our past to remind us of who we used to be, to serve as a connection to all the beauty and ugliness of our former selves. It is one of the difficult things about living in Cambodia—that no one here, save for my boyfriend, has known me for longer than a few months. It is too easy to feel lost in the whirlpool of the present.

But friendship has ways of adapting even under imperfect conditions. Here, where everything is in constant flux, friendships spring up quickly like hothouse flowers; things bloom that could never take root in colder climates. Take Elizabeth, for instance. She is one of my closest friends here. She is a lightning bolt trapped inside one tiny human body, a blur of color that leaves Diet Coke cans and homemade valentines in its wake. I have come to adore that energy, to crave her company because of it. But could we ever have been friends back when we both lived in New York? One a quiet and introverted writer, the other a high-powered insider of the fashion industry—I doubt very much that our paths would have crossed, and if we did pass each other on the street, we were probably too busy staring down our noses at the sidewalks of our very different Manhattans. But here, none of that seems to matter. We live in Siem Reap, we like books, we like Cheez-its, we think Khmer aerobics classes are funny—all of this is far more important than the points in our lives where our paths diverged.

Most of that, of course, is due to Elizabeth’s generosity, not Cambodia (she is unusually gifted at being whoever other people need her to be), but there is something about the transient nature of this place that strips friendship down to its simplest parts. In some respects, I know Sheree very little. I have only a small assortment of collected facts about her life (probation officer with an easy smile and a Newcastle accent). And she is leaving in just a few short weeks, so it is highly unlikely that I will ever know her in the same way as my older friends, the kind whose voices and thoughts and personalities have become a part of my own. But these brief snapshots of Sheree—lanky atop a horse on her birthday or doing an ingenious comedic impression of her meddlesome grandmother—give me a sense of her solid goodness, kindness peppered with just enough frankness to make her sweet nature interesting. That immediate certainty has its own kind of weight when it comes to friendship. One day when we first came to Siem Reap, I was feeling sad, and Hak, the young Khmer guy who manages the guesthouse we were staying at, gave me a free cup of coffee and a heartbreaking look that said, “I’m sad sometimes, too.” And that was it. That was enough. I rarely see Hak, our conversations are brief and often a little awkward, but because of that one understanding look, he is a friend. Bonds are forged quickly in Cambodia out of necessity, but that does not make them less important.

Perhaps it is strange that something as small as a single cup of coffee or a horse ride could be the foundation for friendship. But then, maybe it is always that way. When I was nine years old, miserable and scared to be going to a new school, a blonde girl in a white sweater walked down the aisle of the school bus, and from her eyes alone, gentle and blue behind thick glasses, I knew that she would sit down beside me, that she would save me with her friendship because I needed her to so badly. If there is a lesson in that, it is simply that these small kindnesses around which our lives come to revolve happen unpredictably but with regularity, and they encapsulate everything that I find good and right about the world. The person sitting next to you today on the school bus or the person you wrote about as your “special friend” just might be the one who will send you emails about her first grade class when you are eighteen years older and half a world away from one another. I hope that in this respect you are as lucky as me.

With friendship and affection,
Shannon

Global Rock A-Go-Go

2009-02-19T23:31:00.000-08:00

Dear Joe,

I don’t know exactly why I’m writing this to you. If you are able to get a hold of these sentiments then you’re probably already aware of all that I’m about to describe. Still, ‘Learning to Fly’ just came over the headphones and that space and warmth in Petty’s melody and chord changes, Campbell’s slide swooping down the neck and off through clouds, they made me feel that elevation and you, no matter that at this instant the Heartbreakers are the messengers, you are such a foundation for the collective elevation possible in all of our sounds, and so this goes out to you, to you because you’d like hearing it I think.

I’m American, a writer, know more about rock n’ roll than maybe anything else. I live in Cambodia. A few months ago, unable to sleep, I turned on our TV and surfed through the all-night martial arts fests to land on channel 42, MTV China. In the midnight hour the show was Alternative Nonstop and the video, I quickly realized, was a Mandarin cover of Tori Amos’ ‘Winter.’ The Chinese Tori looked just as eccentric and sincere as the real Tori. She had in her stare that same combination of aggrieved and haunted present in the real Tori’s videos, though her voice, alas, her voice had none of the sex, none of her elemental sex. Save the character of the voice and the change in language, though, the new ‘Winter’ was identical to the original. And the video, the video was Tori Amos to the core, a young-20s Chinese woman with a hurt mouth and penetrating stare captured in jump cuts and collaged film stock, abstracts and editing straight from 1992: a moth on a window pane, jump...now a piano silhouetted black against a Bleach White Nowhere, jump...now the eyes softened beneath a giant yellow daisy worn as a hat, jump...now the mouth gobbling up a real live daisy, jump...now a piano in the rain, jump..now a dancer in mid-leap, jump, now those eyes, jump, now a red wash jump now eyes jump now a blue wash jump now eyes now eyes now now... jump cut, jump cut, stark solitary whimsies, stark solitary absurdities, a montage of stark beautiful abstracts that set to the Chamber of Raw Soul melodies of Tori Amos, to the delicate and unflinching melodies of Tori Amos, ended up thoroughly Tori Amos, even eighteen years and an ocean away from the cultural moment that announced her.

I will be hard pressed to ever find this Chinese ‘Winter’ again. Though Chinese videos sometimes have entire choruses or isolated phrases sung in English (like the specimen that followed ‘Winter,’ in which all is Mandarin until the last line, when our boy shocks us by singing “Merry Christmas” to our girl as he gives her a red scarf...always red, they are all about the red), there is no real way to track down the song. The website is in Mandarin and I do not know anyone fluent in both Mandarin and English and who happens to be up-to-date on what’s nonstop and alternative in the PRC. So I sat on our uncomfortable rattan couch in the dark by myself and listened to China’s musical youth come to me and go away again, a bit of it unfamiliar and cool, a lot of it unfamiliar and confusing, all of it fleeting flashes of song that will become miracles should I ever actually hear them again.

One thing that become clear in those hours is that though a few select Western artists are played regularly - Pink and that godawful Killers song about dancers, Rihanna and Tizzy Bac – most of the acts are Chinese in face and language but thoroughly Western in musical styles, visual themes, musical subculture, video stylings. People wear Gap clothing and the station spots are riffs on Keith Haring. Characters in videos text each other in English and a good few of the dance sequences are pure Michael Jackson. A lot of the videos of boys with guitars look straight out of 1984. Every boy band is 2001 all the way; I caught a video where the guys were all Chinese versions of the Backstreet Boys, each dude having his moment to dance up to the camera and have his Chinese name plus his Western alias – Nick!, David! – stamped out across the bottom of the screen. The VJ I kept seeing wore a T-shirt with a cartoon of Pete Doughtery wearing a pork pie hat, though neither the Libertines or Baby Shambles were anywhere to be found. The VJ kept trying to beatbox too and he was no great shakes at it either, be sure. After a couple of hours MTV China went from being a fascinating study to being terribly boring and that too seemed imported from the States. Finally, a power ballad came on, the band playing in an empty warehouse, the camera swooping forward and flanking the band, epic moves like the epic atmospheres shimmering out of the song’s keyboards, the camera making another pass, this one swinging towards the keyboardist’s proclaiming finger, all of this Western to the core, mid-‘80s to the core, all of the qualities checkmarked on a notepad, from the grand echoes of British orchestral pop like O.M.D. to the murmur-then-piercing cry of a dozen American New Wave bands. I kept waiting for a cover of ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn.’

Every time I turn on the tube I check channel 42 and it is always the same.

What’s fascinating to me, the way I read these particular symbols on our Collective Invisible Map, is that fifty-odd years after the Cultural Revolution, the capitalist explosion in China has led its youth culture firmly to the Western model. You gotta make the sales, right?, and it’s the kids who have the pocket change, right? A few of the videos displayed, in the lower left corner where MTV would usually name the artist/album/label, just an artist name and an email address. It is as if the explosion of potential and product has been so rapid, people already represented on the tube can look for more work, advertise themselves so nakedly, an amateurish air hanging over everything even when the production budget is no joke. There’s money to be made!, empires to be built!, needs to be created and met!! So you’ve got this ‘free’ market birth, a speeding-train economy that will not simply ride the coattails of the Acceptable Westernness that has come before but must acquire it, digest it as completely as it has digested our Westward Expansion, our slave labor, our glut of automobiles, our environmental disaster. The PRC must digest it to keep growing, to leapfrog ahead to the Next Great Step Forward. I don’t know how the world depression spiraling toward us will affect this. But I do know what I thought that night, what my half-informed conclusions were. I watched and thought that by so thoroughly crushing its own people and culture for so many years, the Chinese government left the country at cultural Ground Zero, at least in terms of the popular cultures that grow when disposable income and upward mobility develop in a country. So without organic models to build upon in their own country, they go to the West, a ready-made seedbed of all the temptations and treats a teenager could want. I’m sure there’s an equivalent for the young professionals, for the middle-agers, for the toddler set and pre-teens, etc., blah.

It all makes sense and I mean no libel against Chinese culture. Culture always pollinates widely, whether through Marco Polo or Phoenician oarsmen or jazz drummers in Paris bistros. Or the Clash. Today’s global pop culture has been cross-fed between the prosperous Western World and the open and prosperous Eastern societies like Japan since the end of the second World War, about the same point in time in which China (most recently) hobbled itself, shut its doors, and starting killing itself. Now that China has the taste of growth and a global weight to shift around, it naturally goes to the youth culture models that sprouted from the Baby Boom, the visions of Bright Young Things happily consuming endlessly, a never-ending climb of unlimited growth and product.

But see, I’m looking for a way to not neglect the wonder in this situation, to see this pollination in terms of people rather than just the dollars shuffled about. I know that wonder is there; I listen to Streetcore and ‘Johnny Appleseed’ and hundreds of other songs and people to remind myself. And I know you’re dead, Joe. But I had all of these things to say and I felt that in the spirit of Global Rock A-Go-Go I could sent this up and out to you and maybe some part of whatever you now are will pick it up traveling through the air. Julian Schnabel made a damn good movie about you and the soundtrack is Strummer all the way, Lena Horne to African dub to Elvis, so many notes and beats compressed onto a tiny mirrored table coaster, probably made in China, now that I think about it. And Schnabel puts on the soundtrack a recording of you from a radio broadcast and it says this: “People can change anything they want to, and that means everything in the world. Greed, it ain’t going anywhere. They should have that in a big billboard across Times Square. Without people, you’re nothing.”

Indeed.

And so I sit on this terrace in this hopeful and wretched country and I think how this music is spread through all of us, how Chinese kids worrying over a math test or how far to go on a date are listening to music that comes from a place you and I were lucky enough to be born in, and one of that music’s miracles is that everyone wants it, and everyone takes it and makes it theirs, whether in the occasional piano confessional or the legions of hip hop hustlers minting themselves every day across the planet, appropriates it and re-interprets it, and that is the footing of all art, what the intellectual property lawyers can never understand because they are mere mercenaries, mere mercenaries, the fucks. And that gathering-in of such disparate tribes across all continents and ideologies? That’s a gift, man, a gift that works only if we use it right. So maybe that’s why I’m writing to you: because you made that inclusion and commonality your core and it is a noble core, and it recognizes the responsibility in being the ones imitated, that influence is not limited to art but both separate and through art can influence the way we earn our pay, the way we treat our neighbors, the way we spend our money, the way we value the air we breath and the water we drink and the land we tread. And that means everything in the world.

Miss you, Joe. Cheers.

-Jason

Displacement Vector

2009-02-12T21:40:00.000-08:00

Dear Mr. Smith,

Let me be frank—I do not remember much of what I was meant to have learned in your class, and it was not long after our paths crossed that my life diverged definitively from science courses of all sorts. I have some vague recollections of time spent in lab, swinging pendulums to and fro and trying to figure out how to power a small car with a mouse trap. But I would be hard-pressed to explain the significance of any of those experiments. So I was surprised, to say the least, to find myself standing atop a mountain in northern Cambodia last weekend, thinking about Newtonian mechanics.

We had gone to Kulen Mountain as part of a birthday celebration and set up camp next to a waterfall, a site that Khmer people consider sacred. The night had been colder than we expected (the group dreamed, collectively, of woolen socks), so despite a beer-infused barbeque the previous evening, it wasn’t hard to rouse ourselves at 5 a.m., clamber into the back of a pickup truck, and set out in pursuit of the sunrise. After a jouncing, tailbone-testing drive and a scramble up a steep incline, we arrived at the site of a former monastery just minutes before the sun climbed above the thick wall of trees.

And then I started feeling horrible. The place had a craggy, severe beauty to it, with Buddhist statues and shrines dotting the rocky landscape, but I felt anxious as soon as I got out of the truck, wound tight inside for no discernible reason. Our Khmer friend Dine told us that the monastery had been destroyed by the Khmer Rouge and used as a base, and that it now attracted few visitors because of the rough road. A sad story, to be sure, but hardly a novel one for anyone who has spent much time in Cambodia. And it wasn’t that I was envisioning the murder of monks as I watched the sun break free of the horizon; it wasn’t so much the history of the place as the place itself that was disconcerting, somehow out of kilter. I didn’t speak much on the drive to our next destination.

At the top of a massively wide set of stone steps, surrounded by frangipani trees and bougainvillea, lay the reclining Buddha, a carving so big I could have used his big toe as a pillow. Certainly the statue had played silent witness to much strife and human suffering in his hundreds of years; even his original diamond eyes had been pried loose at some point and replaced with non-descript black stones. But the entire feel of this place was different, soothing instead of enervating, placid instead of desolate. It was as though a foul smell had just been blown away by a sudden breeze.

How can I possibly capture the magnitude of that change? It’s not the first time I have felt it in Cambodia. I know many people who love the ancient ruins of the Bayon temple just north of Siem Reap. I am not one of them. The place is famous for the giant stone faces that stare out into the distance, and as I stood among them I felt immediately dizzy, lightheaded. It’s not that I got creeped out because the eyes were looking at me, or anything like that. The place just felt somehow bad to me, as though the air was choked with sadness. Yet as soon as we moved on to the next site (the Terrace of the Leper King, which you might judge, on name alone, to be more off-putting) I felt fine again.

Though I have certainly felt happy or sad or awed or contemplative at tourist spots in America, it is not the same as what I experienced on the top of that mountain. Perhaps you cannot truly feel a place if you are too much a part of it. I am reading Jonathan Raban’s book Old Glory, about his voyage down the Mississippi River. There is a deep pleasure in recognizing the state fairs and fishermen that the Englishman describes, even when he is poking fun at them. Never do I see the American Midwest so clearly (or miss it so much) as when it is mirrored back to me by an outsider.

I bristle at the New-Agey notion that I am picking up “vibes” from certain places, but I struggle to come up with better explanations. I hoped, out on the mountain, that maybe a man of science like Newton would be able to help. In physics, displacement is the vector that measures the change between the initial position and the final position of an object. At Bayon or in the ruins of that monastery, am I simply feeling a vector that has been drawn too long, like a violin string stretched to the point of breaking? Was there something about the reclining Buddha statue (a shape, a smell, a shadow) that made it somehow more familiar to me and therefore more comfortable? Because how can we help but feel our endpoints except in relation to where we started? But that does not mean that I can compel myself to stop drawing out vectors in my wake. It only means that I hope to be able to see all of it someday (the initial position, the final position, the directional line in between) with the same clarity as the ones I drew with the help of rulers and graph paper while sitting in your classroom.

Sincerely,
Shannon Dunlap

Teetering on the Edge of the Page

2009-01-29T21:32:00.000-08:00

Dear Dawn,

One of my earliest memories is of listening to you read aloud the entire series of Little House on the Prairie books, a set of texts that has, weirdly, begun to come back to me in vivid detail ever since I came to Cambodia. (The maple candies they made in the snow, the leeches clinging to Laura’s legs in the creek bed, the way her aunt and uncle looked at each other at the Christmas dance, and even the bookmark of red and green braided yarn that you placed between the pages—do you remember?) And then there was the local library where I would come to visit you in the summers, the explosion of possibility that was the children’s room—endless shelves of Encyclopedia Brown and Boxcar Children, and I would read them all, I was certain, because even at six, seven, eight, I valued intellect above all else, and besides that, my big sister worked in this place, making it at least partly mine.

All of this is to say that I don’t really remember learning how to read, but I have to think that you were at least partly responsible, and for that I am grateful to you. For most of life, my affair with books has seemed a gift. But I regret to report that here, in Cambodia, reading is more problematic. It highlights all my eccentricities, draws out my hermit-like qualities. Is it possible that books, our old friends, are responsible for turning me into a social misfit?

Before I left New York, one of my coworkers asked me which three books I would take to a desert island. This is an impossibly difficult question for any true reader, but he had developed some rules to guide me. Rahul had spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, and he insisted that when I packed for Cambodia, at least one volume needed to be one of impressively beautiful and intricate language. “Because let’s face it,” he said. “You’re going to eventually get tired of being around people who can’t speak English very well.” Cambodia and its pidgin English has not turned me into a book snob; I have always been one. But it is true that the list of people here who can carry on a conversation about a book is very short, resulting in the double wallop of both superiority and guilt that I feel when I am, say, reading an E.L. Doctorow book on the porch while a crowd of people follow a garbage truck up the street to pick through my neighbors’ trash. No matter how many strides Cambodia makes in the next fifty years, those people will never be reading Doctorow, and who knows how many generations will pass until they get his equal who writes novels in Khmer. That was the first ominous sign—the inevitable gap that reading puts between me and the culture I currently live in.

But there is more. The sight of our rickety rattan book shelves has begun to fill me with despair, not because of what’s there, but because of what’s not. Let me be clear—I am nowhere close to running out of things to read. Jason and I agonized over which volumes to bring, and, taking up an inordinate amount of luggage space with our choices, humped many pounds worth of books through the Bangkok airport, down the coast to Sihanoukville, north again to Phnom Penh, and then onward to their current home in Siem Reap. I have not made it through even half of them yet. Plus, our roommate has a taste for the classics, and I’m sure I could spend much of the remainder of my stay finally reading Don Quixote. There are also many secondhand bookstores (though these are subject to the dubious tastes of Western backpackers—I typically avoid these shops, afraid that I will not be able to resist the urge to chuck the extensive Jodi Picoult and Robert Patterson collection into the street). So it is not books that I miss. What I miss is the freedom of not knowing which book I am going to read next. I miss Barnes and Noble, I miss the Strand, I miss having an address that Amazon can actually find. I miss the children’s reading room of the Lexington Local Library.

So far I have been talking about things which are merely a shame or an inconvenience, but we are now about to veer into the territory of questionable mental stability, because more than ever before, it seems as though the authors of the books that I read here are speaking directly to me. I almost wept while reading the preface (the preface, for Heaven’s sake) of Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion. “Yes!” I wanted to tell her. “I am shy, too! I am bad at talking on the telephone, too! I, too, like drinking gin!” For the past five days, Joan has been soothing me, talking to me about my family, my failures, my neuroses, my departure from New York.

That happens to be a book of nonfiction, but fiction is even more capable of cutting to the quick. There is something about Cambodia, be it the quantity of time I spend in my own head writing or the primal fragility of the life around me, that seems to strip away artifice and make my psychological simplicity painfully obvious. I am as transparent as a character in a novel with an omnipotent narrator. It is me that Naeem Murr is describing when Lew needs someone to hurt more than he hurts, it is me that Donna Tartt is describing when Harriet can no longer see life through the windshield, but only through the rearview mirror. Who but John Steinbeck could understand that I have the repressed anger of Tom Joad, the wounded optimism of Rose of Sharon?

And all of this, you might say, is not a bad thing, simply a deeper connection to the written artifacts that have always mattered to me. The problem is that it has resulted in a revulsion at the flesh and blood, particularly that of Western origin, that surrounds me. These authors seem so much more real to me than the hordes of volunteers and tourists I brush elbows with every day. Unlike most Khmer, they could read Wallace Stegner if they wanted to, but most opt for sudoku instead. Have I always been such a snotty misanthrope? Was it just easier to hide in America? I can’t remember. All I know is that I want and need to have more in common with Joan Didion (even if it is a version of Joan Didion that only existed thousands of miles and forty years away from the here and now) than I have in common with that German girl at the next table who is dangling a pedicured foot over the back of a chair while she eats breakfast and thumbs through a guide book.

What has our brainy bookishness earned us, sister o’ mine? E.L. Doctorow doesn’t live in Siem Reap, Denis Johnson doesn’t take me out for drinks on Friday nights, not even J.K. Rowling is interested in Khmer karaoke. No one told us in elementary school that a spot in the highest reading group would come at a price. Because any time you excel, any time you separate yourself from the rest of the pack, you are also learning to isolate yourself.

And yet all of those pages, Little House in the Big Woods to The Grapes of Wrath and everything that came between, are so much a part of me that it is hard to imagine, let alone wish for, any alternative. Nothing I have said here changes the fact that I need books now more than ever; it is no small feat for printed letters to provide the kind of purpose and beauty that they have for me. It’s just that it’s lonely out here on the prairie sometimes, and I wish that Laura Ingalls Wilder was around to keep us company.

With love,
Shanny

Re: Inauguration Night

2009-01-23T07:38:00.000-08:00

From: writersblok@hotmail.com
To: T.Turner@cnn.com; R.Pittman@mtvnetworks.com

Dear Ted Turner and Robert Pittman,

I am writing the two of you not because I think you will necessarily agree with the following opinions, nor to blame you for Frankenstein developments that have been out of your hands, but because I feel that you, as early speculators in the new horizons of the Media Age, might have the historical insight to find these thoughts interesting.

I am a 31-year-old American who now lives in Cambodia. In third grade I sat on the cafeteria floor and watched on the school’s only TV the Challenger exploding. Standing in my grandparents’ living room three years later, I watched a joint USA-USSR glasnost youth event in which Jon Bon Jovi and Richie Sambora played an acoustic Wanted Dead or Alive before the camera cut to a Soviet rocker in glossy red stretch pants strutting across the stage. In high school, I was not interested in the primitive multimedia component of a Billy Idol album a friend showed off on the office computer after Chorus, and the next year I used paper stolen from school and a xerox at my job to print-up handmade ‘zines. In college I went online and discovered quick-and-easy porn and by the time I graduated, Napster was at its last gasp. As a young man, I watched on TV as the Twin Towers collapsed two miles from my apartment. As I grown man I subscribed to the Sunday Times out of tactile nostalgia, and now in Cambodia I read NYTimes.com most every day. When I was born there were three TV networks and PBS. Three decades later, I can watch hundreds of channels on a pocket-sized telephone. The whole world – the world beyond the world – is now coded for anyone.

That’s quite an evolution in one young life, as profound as the Enlightenment or the Industrial Revolution, and not nearly finished yet. The changes have helped countless lives in countless ways, expanded our definitions of ourselves, made some visionaries like yourselves very wealthy, changed the very tides of our brainwaves. I cannot help but notice, however, that as our definitions of who we are as Humankind expand, the communion between the world and our individual selves narrows in some important ways. Allow me an example:

I moved to Asia when the 24-7 scrutiny and passions surrounding the 2008 election became too much. I couldn’t get out of bed without hearing, reading, seeing some pointless bit of candidate minutia analyzed like it carried the weight of D-Day. With the rumblings of our shaky economic foundation in my ears and resentment of our District of Columbia caste in my gut, I left for Siem Reap, where I watched Obama’s victory speech and felt the heartbreak you only feel when, after years of emotional triage, the ground beneath you is suddenly alive again and you are finally safe enough to truly experience just how painful it is to watch your home cut away at all that is good within itself.

Thus it was with great excitement – with anticipation of even greater Heartsong – that I looked forward to Inauguration Day. On the 19^th, I settled into an internet cafe and, lured by the headline Inaugural Celebrations Could Last 10 Days, read that five of my favorite people in the world played the Lincoln Memorial during the previous day’s kickoff event. There are few artists as dear to me as the four members of U2 and Bruce Springsteen. They are strong forces for good in the world and I am loyal to them in a way only surpassed by my loyalty to family and tribe. And yet...

The youtube thumbnail I double-clicked to open Bruce’s performance was titled We Are One. U2’s thumbnail included the same because the event was an Event, a planned performance that needed a brand name. When the opaque screen retracted along the base of the Memorial to reveal a red-robed church choir and Bruce in his motorcycle boots and acoustic, my heart leapt. In the other Firefox tab I had open, the canyon-echo shuffle from Edge primed me to be swept up into the grandness of this historical moment. And all of that was a problem.

It was a problem because, “Free at last, they took your life, they could not take your pride; in the name of love,” sounds to me like a decree. “Sky of longing and emptiness – dream of life – sky of fullness, sky of blessed light” is comfort and relief and defiance. I am possessive of these things; on record they have elevated me through innumerable trials and I treasure them. But beneath Lincoln – a place of which I am also possessive, a place where man’s brotherhood to fellow man is stated eloquently and in stone – Bono and Bruce left me deflated. It wasn’t just that The Rising needs its bass and drums as much as its choir. It wasn’t just that Bono’s strutting Missionary of Love-routine was unusually clumsy (“This is for you.....Joe Biden!”) and particularly overblown (“Forty-six years ago Martin Luther King had a dream. And in two days...that dream comes true!”) The problem was that everything – from the day’s Official Title to Obama’s awkward attempts to nod along with Bruce to the way the crowd, already happy, turned completely ecstatic when they noticed the camera swooping down on them by crane – all of it was expressly clear: I was being told to be stirred in my soul. The laws of the Media Age made sure I understood: This is a tremendous day. Look, we are at the Lincoln Memorial. Look, the colors of America are gathered around the reflecting pool. Look, we are all one! We Are All One!!

King’s dream has come true? Not reeeally. But the packaging needs that. It needs to ensure a certain level of meaning or else it’s not worth packaging, can’t stand up to the all the other packages. So our reactions to the world, the communions between ourselves and these very real things that would stir our souls, are not allowed to develop on their own. We don’t have the opportunity to be moved as our individual, idiosyncratic selves because a professionally-designed Proof of Profound Purpose roots preemptively in our eyes, then our brains, then our hearts.

The pre-gaming on the day of the Inauguration was, of course, defined by the same laws of the All Media-All the Time! world. I arrived at an American-owned bar in downtown Siem Reap at ten o’clock (the oath was taken at midnight Tuesday, our time) and the news ticker at the bottom of the screen was clicking furiously:

NOW: VIPs arrive
NEXT: Representative Feinstein’s opening remarks
LATER: Joe Biden takes VP Oath of Office

A talking head is using as many words as possible to tell us that this is the first time Chief Justice John Roberts will give the oath of office. Anderson Cooper nods sagely and then the ticker tells us that only seven oaths of office have been taken on this, the west side of the White House. Anderson Cooper disappears and on the TV screen Dustin Hoffman mutely mouths to someone off camera, then a brief few questions with Steven Spielberg, then half a glimpse of the back of Jimmy Carter’s head. The Bush Srs walk down the red carpet and George looks near-dead in a neck brace, then the Carters, both looking younger, healthier, happier. The ticker at the bottom reads: There are 58 different federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies involved in this inauguration, then a female voice from somewhere says that Obama will lay his hand on the bible last used by Lincoln, then Hillary Clinton shows up and a male voice from somewhere makes sure we all remember her own candidacy, then Ted Kennedy teeters by in a hat almost worthy of Andre Benjamin...

Wait, wait, what?...DC’s not even a state...And who cares which lawn we’re looking at?...And when did entertainers replace artists replace men and women of philosophy and thought and learning? Why the hell am I looking at John Cusack?

I bet you were in there yourself, Ted. You might not be as camera-ready as John Cusack but I’m sure your checks were at least as generous.

So the Siem Reap bar is selling shots of blue curacao, red grenadine, and whipped cream at two bucks a pop and the place is packed to the gills and the ticker now reads:

NOW: President Bush takes his seat
NEXT: Joe Biden takes VP Oath of Office
LATER: Barack Obama takes Presidential Oath of Office

...and we watch a variety of unknowns in suits and dresses pass through unknown doorways accompanied by unheard narration from unseen CNN anchors and now, now Dubyah emerges to jeers from the bar and the ticker tells me:

F
A ‘Hail to the Chief’ being played for
C President Bush for the last time
T

...and WHO CARES?! TELL ME THE COLOR OF HIS SHOES, WHY DON’T YOU, THAT I SHOULD BRUSH THREE TIMES A DAY, WHATEVER YOU GOTTA TO FILL THE TIME, MAN?! Can’t I just watch, can’t I just feel, can’t I just process on my own, with my own juices flowing and the room for my own synapses to fire, free of chatter chatter, every little sneeze an earthquake? White space, time to think, a bit of silence, these are good things, yes? These help keep us ourselves. And so I think how I hate this Jabbering Age but how I can’t let it stain this moment for me, it is the world we live in after all, only life after all, and then...a woman’s voice, a talking head.

“More people,” she says, “will watch this event than any other event in all of history.”

I believe it.

And that’s a profoundly good thing, another result of our media empires. The world can see proof of our return to some of the best parts of ourselves and that, as a friend of mine’s English father once said, “Sometimes it takes them a long while, but the Americans usually get it right.” And then, although part of me had been sad to miss being in the bosom of all of this hullabaloo back home, I realize that I am on the other side of the planet watching and hearing the same thing as my fellow Americans stateside, save those lucky few crammed onto the Mall.

So I wonder: do I lament the homogenization of experience and feeling driven by the Media Age, or am I grateful for the age’s power and hope most of it rests in the hands of the just? Not that what I think makes a lick of difference. I just know youtube can’t change the way I feel about The Unforgettable Fire and Darkness on the Edge of Town and that I read in the paper today of the opening of the Obama Barbershop in Sudan. I know that crammed into that bar, when the Man declared “Science will retake its rightful place” a woman let forth a cry as if some hungry dream had been boiling inside her for years, needing to be freed. I know that the eyes of the men were naked like some part of childhood still lived inside them and still believed in the Great Thing inside ourselves that we all think has been shut away in our journeys of years.

Stealing Time

2009-01-16T02:42:00.000-08:00

To an object of brief infatuation during my eighteenth year:

I think, perhaps, that we have mostly forgotten about each other. Not the other’s existence—you know that I am here in Asia and I know that you are leading a life both familiar and foreign to me, with a mortgage and a spouse and even some offspring. It’s the rush of details that has faded a little, that overwhelming tidal wave of puppy love which I swore I’d never forget but which has ebbed, of course, with the passage of a decade. Moments come back to me still, though, and lately it has been a note that you scribbled on the back of a poster, a gift to me. “I hope this is not a stolen season,” it said, cribbing a little from the Bard for the sake of young romance.

Stolen seasons. It seems to me that we spend our whole lives trying to avoid them, skirting one while simultaneously backing into another. Six months ago it felt like time was something stored in a square but shoddy box, leaking minutes from every crevice. I would run to the New Brunswick train station, fleeing office hours with surly freshmen, only to find that the train was running forty-five minutes late. Life was a pattern of rushing and waiting, a halting race toward something difficult to name. Surely, I thought, it would be different in Cambodia. I would wake with the sun, I would eat when hungry, I would sleep when tired, and time would return to some kind of blessed natural order.

That is not what happened. If anything, travel makes us more obsessed with time than ever. Our recent trip to Vietnam reinforced this. Reminders of time are everywhere—train schedules, hotel check-in times, the speed of a motorbike racing the sun. The Vietnamese like rules and the tour guides were full of useful benchmarks. “If you can get a good photo in the next five minutes, you will have five minutes to use the toilet.” And New Year’s Eve, which I spent in Hanoi watching lighted Chinese lanterns rise as if by magic and drift slowly through the skies above Hoan Kiem Lake, is the ultimate reminder of time. If it has been a bad year, we try to seal off its damage; if it has been a good one, we mourn its passing.

Back in Siem Reap, it is really no different. I watch the numbers change on my laptop clock, waiting to rack up another hour of freelance work. Even unpaid work becomes about time—if I can just force my mind to concentrate on this story for two more hours, surely, surely, something good will come of it. But it is more than these counted hours and minutes and seconds. Everything we do is under the looming expat deadline of when the sand in the hourglass will run out on this adventure. “You’ll be home in no time,” my grandmother says on the phone, her voice quavering. “You’ll be back safe before we know it.”

The last English literature class that I will likely ever take was a dry seminar called “Time and the 20^th Century Novel.” The syllabus was packed full of philosophers, everyone from St. Augustine to Husserl to Heidegger telling us what time is and what we should think of it. But it’s fiction that provided the template that made the most sense: Proust’s rope of memory, descending out of the dark to rescue us from unconsciousness. But a rope, a tether, can be restriction in addition to a safety line. When I wake up in a strange Southeast Asian hotel room, feverish and panicked with dreams, the first thing I want is to be able to see my watch and yet the position of the hands never seems to satisfy me.

Will we ever escape this cycle of stolen seasons, my bygone sweet, or has everything since our moment of puppy love been wasted hours? Will I ever do what I want, write what I want, before time inevitably runs out? If I could give you anything, it would be time enough to be the people we dreamed of being under Midwestern skies full of stars. Please return the favor. I can use all the help and time that I can get.

With fond nostalgia,

Shannon

American Jungles

2009-01-08T20:30:00.000-08:00

Dear Marf,

I just bought 450 milliliters of beer for 63 cents plus a serious shot of local rice vodka for the same. Eyeballing it, I’m guessing 450 milliliters is around sixteen ounces. I don’t really know. I just know this vodka would take rust off your tricycle. Shannon’s reading The Grapes of Wrath and I’m taking a break from Denis Johnson’s new one, Tree of Smoke. The book is 800-some-odd pages and will branch into, I’m guessing, a deranged autopsy of the American war in Vietnam filtered through the lenses of characters’ Bible Belt-assuredness, bureaucratic indecencies, and substance abuse-induced trauma. Parallels to the globe-arching lens on our current military cash-suck clusterfuck seem inevitable. It seemed an appropriate read.

It’s doubly appropriate because I’ll need something to do on the roughly 48 hours of bus ride we begin tomorrow. My 31^st birthday will be spent on the road, with a bed in Saigon the hyphen between the two halves of the journey back to Siem Reap. At some point in the future – probably at many points in the future – I intend on raising a finger into a conversation and proclaiming, with a blur of booze at the edges of my tongue, “When I had my birthday in Saigon…” It’ll be awesome. Most any sentence that begins, “When I…,” and ends with “Saigon” is bound to carry some weight. Different kinds of weight depending, yes, but...

We’ve taken to renting motor bikes and driving all over Hell and Gone. At times I feel great and at other times like the H.S. Thompson-adolescence inside is grappling for the handlebars, still others like I’d better clench those brakes tight because we’re so high we’re looking down at clouds and there ain’t any guardrail between this loose-gravel asphalt and the edge where Air meets Cloud over Nothing. This is all an interesting test of will against impulse. Not to get too symbolic, but…

One of those moto rides was up and over the mountains north of a town called Sapa, the mountains that separate it from another town called Lai Chau, an ugly place surrounded by sublime (Lonely Planet’s word but still the best one) countryside that butts up against the Chinese border at Yunan. Sapa is the tourist hub of the area and the saving grace of Vietnam’s ethnic minorities. There are fifteen Hill Tribes and they are the poorest of the poor. They could compete with Cambodia’s poor. They age young, make lots of babies, die young. Aside from rice and opium farming, they’ve got no lifeline but that coming from the pockets of Sapa tourists, that money used to buy the brilliant and surprising textiles the tribes’ women sew, the explosions of gaudy color sold for pennies. Most prominent among the tribes are the H’moung - -

I have to take an aside here to say that the man bringing us our drinks is rocking the solo ‘stach and has the most beautiful smile, and I wonder at the sources people call upon to keep not just smiling but actually open to humanity, regardless of Life’s firepower leveled against them, and at the exquisite power of beaming that to the world like they are radio towers of nothing but Summertime Singles, kind enough and full of promise enough to be intimidating and inspiring.

-- The H’moung and the mountains. Okay. So we took the motor bike off the beaten track outside of Sapa, fled the mini busses and tour groups and ended up descending the mountain into pyramidal terraces of rice paddies, around and around, and ultimately trekking by foot along a narrow path, followed at the heels by two H’moung girls. Ma is eleven and Tsu is fifteen, and soon we were long, long gone from the Actual Path, wandering through bamboo forests that wash everything green, over waterfalls, up the sides of more mountains where we gave clementine oranges to a band of five snot-nosed kids (all the hill tribe kids were snot-nosed, sick) the youngest two and the oldest not beyond five, no adults even in echoing distance. We broke out of the jungles onto the crest of another mountain and half-a-dozen villages were spread up and down the elevations of the land beneath us, spread so far beneath us that people could not even dream of being specks, and then the endless rice terraces, the endless rows of indigo plants tracing the terraces, clouds cascading down the slope, then blown gone, and it was all so beautiful – too beautiful – and so I have to note My American Studies Friend, my friend who sees the world’s cogs and wheels as I do, that I looked off to my left, up away from those terraces testifying to Man and Woman’s place in the land, and I saw as clear as day in my Mind’s Eye all of it erupt in fire, tilted my head back to the sun and watched jet fighters scream overhead, played in my brain Jesus-man Willem Defoe and Dana Delaney, Mathew Modine grinning like a cat and that dude from Wings scalped on Hamburger Hill, whomever wants to be there, clasping hands, all Outcast Niggers ‘cause it’s real man! and you don’t know! and they’ll never feel lit like you do back home…etc.

It is, I guess, real that the gap between jungle predator and the folks by the living room TV must have been the whole Pacific Ocean. But I only know that from what has been presented for me to devour on the big screen and the tube. Ron Kovic himself couldn’t compete except for the fact that Tom Cruise played him. Tim O’Brien has stuck it out but I don’t see over the jungle the things he details on his pages. There I was, in the actual jungles of NVA territory, and though I myself could process the beauty of the land spread around me, I could not escape the mythical place Vietnam occupies in the American rearview mirror when it came to intellect, emotion, the way my own boots fit against the dirt and stones.

The thing that doubles the weight is that the Vietnamese obviously see me through a similar lens. No, maybe it’s that they see me through the same instrument of devastation, but the lenses we each use are irrevocably incompatible, mine shaped by artists’ interpretations of a world only a director or a creative consultant knew, the Vietnamese lens shaped by real life. And then what of the lenses of those middle-aged American men who sit off by themselves while their wives bargain at the market with H’moung women, who wait for their turn further south, touring the DMZ? The weights brought to bear on an American sentence ending with the word Saigon are spread so wide across our culture. They are many varied weights and are not all equal, yet they all feel like burdens. It’s…is it a shame? Can a person say something that broad and have it mean anything? I know it must sound naïve and useless to say, but the unpassable chasms between one people and the next make me very sorry and, when high above the clouds looking down on Man and Earth, very sad. Adulthood is accepting the lost possibilities in the world. Righteousness is finding new ones.

Much love to you and V. Miss you.

-Jay

These Pants Were Made for Walking

2009-01-07T19:11:00.000-08:00

Levi Strauss & Co.
1155 Battery St.
San Francisco, CA 94111

To Whom It May Concern:

I wish to inform you of an exciting new business opportunity. Levi Strauss, long an established and respected leader in the casual clothing industry, has yet to move into the couture sector of the marketplace. I have developed a failsafe plan to change this. Why not offer your customer a garment with a life of its own, with a story to tell?

Here is how it will work: you will send me two pairs of standard Levi’s 501s, one for me and one for my travel companion. We will then wear them on far-flung adventures and write up a detailed report of how travel has matured the pants into entirely new and one-of-a-kind garments. You will then be able to sell them under a special label (called perhaps Jeans Beyond Borders or maybe simply Passport, Please) for no less than $800 per pair.

During a recent trip to Vietnam, I prepared two prototypes for you. Both pairs of blue jeans were put through the most rigorous of aging processes. Over thousands of kilometers and two and a half weeks of non-stop wear, they have been meticulously shaped into objets d’art. Here are a few descriptive details that will hopefully capture the kind of exemplary craftsmanship you can expect from us.

-small stain on one knee from the juicy drippings of a freshly-wrapped spring roll dipped in fig-green banana-peanut sauce

-splotches of mud along the shins from Sapa, where we followed two Black H’moung adolescents on a hike through terraced rice paddies and bamboo forests

-grime and slight fraying along the cuffs from a rainy day of walking through the ruins of the Imperial Enclosure in yesterday’s capital, Hue

-wear below the back pockets from leaning against a tree at a mammoth outdoor Catholic Christmas Eve mass in today’s capital, Hanoi

-minor fading on the thighs from a damp kayaking foray among the limestone rock formations of Halong Bay

-deep and musky smell from the hours spent at markets and street stalls eating noodle soup and drinking Bia Hoi and apple wine

-front pockets ragged and ink-stained from the constant poking presence of note-taking pens

-sagging around the knees and hips from too many successive days spent on outmoded buses and rickety sleeper trains

-small tear (on the calf of male garment) from a wee motorbike accident that ended in a heap of dirt at a rural construction site along the mountain pass to Lai Chau (This is actually a fib. There was, indeed, such an incident, but the tear is from some heedless grappling with a guardrail during an attempt by the wearer to take a leak by the side of the road. This lie should not undercut our authority, but merely prove to you our commitment to both dramatic flair and your own subsequent financial gain.)

I am even willing to throw in a few extras to add to the air of authenticity:

-one $2 replica of a VC issue belt bought from the army surplus market in Saigon

-one map of Cuc Phuong National Park, home of a 1000-year-old tree, the Silver Palace cave, and a primate sanctuary for special breeds of Vietnamese langurs that look like they’re wearing sporty Bermuda shorts

-a random assortment of Cambodian riel and Vietnamese dong stuffed carelessly into the front pockets, totaling approximately 66 cents in US currency

We will, of course, split any profits with you, enabling our next pant-weathering excursion. I am pleased to inform you that I have also met a number of travelers who are willing to be employed by you in a similar capacity—sweet young French Canadians, exuberant students from Singapore, Australian geneticists, and many more. An enthusiastic workforce and a boost to your bottom line are yours for the taking. I await your reply and anticipate a long and profitable business partnership.

Sincerely,

Shannon N. Dunlap

Capital Christmas

2008-12-29T18:54:00.000-08:00

Dear T,

I’m on a bus east out of Hanoi heading to Halong Bay, which I expect to be as shockingly beautiful as the other parts of Vietnam I’ve explored. I was flipping through one of my notebooks looking for the details and impressions that I recorded as I experienced them in Saigon, in Hanoi, in Sapa and the northwest mountains along the Chinese border. And then ‘The Killer’ shuffled to the front of the ipod queue, and I got swept up for four minutes in the great immolation of Life on the Run, and that seemed a sign to put some of those impressions in a letter to you.

You’d love Hanoi; it invites you to be submerged in it on its own terms in a way you’d eat up. Whereas in Cambodia everyone is out to make a buck off you and so all English and smiles, smiles, smiles, in Vietnam they could care less. They’re a society of post-Soviet communism, that in-name-only communism in which people rake in the dough from a liberalized market but keep lips buttoned tight under the scrutinizing eye of conservative single-party rule. But it’s their scrutinizing eye and that’s the bread and butter of it I think. The Vietnamese don’t need your tourist dollar and, “Oh, by the way, you ravaged our lives and our land, so you can just fuck off.” I have received more than a few hateful glares and a couple of instances where older men jab their fingers my way, spit words I cannot understand but whose resentment and disgust I can feel. That’s more than fair but it has come to kinda hurt my feelings. Silly.

The younger people, though, those under thirty-five, they’re thriving in their knock-off American brands and on gleaming new motos. I just don’t exist to most of them; I’m not a symbol of death and destruction, I’m just something moving too slow in their peripheral vision. People here are prideful and busting with new growth, new income, new ideas of what is possible to achieve. I can’t see the Vietnamese ever tolerating a return to the stagnation of a government-mismanaged economy. The young men dress sharp, the women are elegant and stylish, older men in crisp-cut suits remind me of my grandfather. You walk through Hanoi and it’s the living embodiment of my sense of 19^th Century America, industry and commerce at breakneck speed, no traffic laws and no regulation on innovation, tip back the bottle at the end of the day, toss some money around if you got it and get up and do it again. This is all the greenest example of the Capitalist Good Life that I’ve ever seen. It’s plain that the Vietnamese are communist out of national pride - out of a means of self-determination - not ideology (which makes me think long on why people in other parts of the world flock to fanatical Islam.)

This is worlds away from Cambodia. There are national heroes here stretching back for centuries. We visited the Temple of Literature, a national university founded in the 11^th Century, and inside saw row upon row of ancient stone tortoises supporting steles documenting the origins and lives of centuries’ most learned men. On Christmas Eve we went to St. Joseph’s Cathedral (religion was re-legalized in 1990) expecting a small mass in a half-filled church. Instead we got the multitudes crammed into a gated yard and spilling all over the streets, watched an hour of little girls dancing to a Praise His Name! folk song and then a bizarre Vietnamese-Spanish rendition of ‘Felice Navidad,’ people buying Santa Claus puppets and then attending a full mass in Vietnamese, the festivities of the high commercial season blending with The Christ Mass, everyone participating and high on the wave of something too unfamiliar for me to thoroughly decipher. Back out into the street and around the lake Hanoians raced at top speed on their motos, waved their red flags with the single gold star, screamed and shouted and rolled like a human lake across the plaza that caps the north end of the true lake, beat drums, a rally in honor of the national football team beating the Thais, a rally in honor of being Vietnamese and being hardcore to the bone, a rally of gold stars on red satin, gold hammers and sickles on red satin. Earlier that day we had lost ourselves in the city’s endless alleys and dead ends, the narrow passages no more than three feet wide and the houses stretching high all around, a maze like what I’d imagine in Cairo, in any city so close to celebrating its thousand-year anniversary, and hundreds of motos honking on the other side of every corner, swooping through the passages toward us as we’re flat against the wall, the sun setting and losing us in twilight warrens that spilled us out next to a reservoir surrounded by old tenements crumbling down, being built back up, a neon BAR flickering pink in the grey of sunset, spilling us out next to food stalls where the BBQ’ed heads of dogs were waiting behind glass to be served, lips charred back and leaving teeth and jaw jutting out like werewolves or strychnine victims, spilling out next to schools releasing kids into the evening to create traffic jams in their uniforms and oblivious happy chattering, next to bia hoi stands where men sat on toddler-sized plastic stools and drank fresh-brewed beer, next to that lake, a lake that in mythology delivered to a great Viet king the sword to drive out the Chinese after a thousand years of occupation, a lake that on that Christmas Eve was the hub for Hanoi’s masses to wave their banners to the sky in so much red.

I get sucked into these things and I miss you ‘cause I know how we’d go about it. Of all my tribe, your appetite and stamina for the world is closest to mine. You got to come. We got to go everywhere. All in good time.

-J

Cambodian Cash

2008-12-26T04:38:00.000-08:00

Dear Ryan,

Cambodian paper notes are called riel, and like a lot of countries’ money, they come in all the colors of the rainbow—an indigo shade for the smallest 100 riel bills, pink and burgundy for the 500, blue for the 1000, and so on. But it doesn’t take very long to realize that the national currency is really just for show. I rarely buy anything larger than a snack on the street with riel. For all intents and purposes, Cambodia runs on the pure green of U.S. dollars.

On a personal level, this is very convenient. I haven’t had to spend any time thinking about exchange rates. ATMs will spit crisp prints of Jackson and Grant at you with the push of a button. One needs only to be careful that the bills don’t get carelessly left in a pocket or the bottom of a purse. I was confused by the way cashiers fastidiously examine every millimeter of a bill for tears and imperfections, until I realized that trading in a currency not really your own means that you have no easy way of taking money out of circulation or putting more in. Why it is U.S. dollars rather than euros or yen, I really have no idea. I suppose it is because (at least until recently) it was the most stable currency around. But I am just guessing, as I do about most financial matters in Cambodia.

One thing is certain—Cambodia has embraced capitalism with wild fervor and, with it, an almost manic striving for wealth. To step outside the front gate is to be immediately bombarded with people trying to sell me something—a tuk-tuk ride, a massage, a piece of fruit. And that same desire for money is on every rung of the economic ladder. A Western friend asked a Khmer friend who the Cambodian people considered heroes, and the Khmer couldn’t come up with a good answer. All he could say is that most Khmer would consider anyone with money to be a hero.

I am not trying to bash the Cambodian people. They have been pillaged and picked apart for centuries longer than the U.S. has existed, and the fact that they have scraped together even a semblance of stability and normalcy just one generation after a mass genocide is nothing short of miraculous. But it exhausts me, sometimes, noticing how much further they have to go, in matters both large (a mess of an education system, poor health care) and small (the postal service seems more inclined to hold packages hostage rather than actually deliver them). It’s like America in the early nineteenth century, except with more cell phones. And for them to move from the third world to the first one is going to take a lot more time and money. Which begs the question, where does the money come from?

I’m no expert on the Cambodian economy, but it doesn’t seem like they’re thriving in terms of manufacturing or exporting goods. There’s no way they can compete in that department with surrounding countries. There’s tourism, I guess, but Angkor Wat is the one big attraction, and everyone here in Siem Reap who owns a business is expecting a dry spell due to the economic crisis the world over. So a lot of Cambodia’s money is still coming from foreign aid. And while I’m not begrudging them that and feel like it’s worth it if it keeps things from crumbling into chaos again (Cambodia has not yet turned me into a Republican), it’s frustrating to see signs that the money is being misused or mismanaged.

A lot of foreign money gets poured into NGOs, some of which seem to be little more than scam operations. There are plenty of reputable, upstanding NGOs, too, but even they seem sometimes misguided. For example, I went with a newly-founded organization as it was making its first delivery of school supplies to a poor rural district. The kids were excited about the books and pencils, but word had spread through the village and there wasn’t nearly enough to go around. The NGO staff were also handing out candy, and as I watched I couldn’t help thinking, "These kids’ teeth are rotting out of their heads and we’re giving them candy? How about toothbrushes?" A feeling of utter hopelessness took root in my stomach when the NGO leaders started to ask the villagers about how to expand the school and their basic response was, "Why? Whether you finish first grade or sixth grade, you’re going to be working in a rice paddy." A part of me kept thinking that maybe they should spare everyone the trouble and just divide up the Western staff’s salaries among the villagers so they could all go buy a house someplace else—instead of teaching them to fish, just give them the damn fish, already. All I’m saying is that even with the very purest intentions behind an enterprise, it often seems like the blind leading the blind.

But any trespasses of the NGOs pale in comparison to that of the corrupt government. It’s taken as a given here that everyone and his brother is skimming a little (or a lot) off the top. And if government officials are getting rich that way, what incentive do they have to make their country a more pleasant place for the masses? Giant billboards of the prime minister, Hun Sen, and his top two lackeys are everywhere, and Jason and I have come to refer to them as the three stooges. Nonetheless, Hun Sen seems to be remarkably popular, even though he’s a former member of the Khmer Rouge, a fact that everyone seems to conveniently overlook. That’s like if, in the post-Civil War U.S., Robert E. Lee took over the presidency after Lincoln got shot. Or maybe like if Osama Bin Laden renounced radical Islam tomorrow and we thanked him with a prompt appointment to the Supreme Court.

But what’s the alternative? I’m not sure why I’m telling you all this except that I think Cambodia needs some sort of uber-financial consultant—some big mythic version of you who will come along and tell not just individuals but the whole country what to do with its money. Wouldn’t it be nice if someone could take this mess and with some deft computations tidy it into a nice secure investment portfolio? Because even I, the member of the family with the least financial acumen, can see that when it comes to Cambodian cash, something always smells fishy, and it’s not the Tonle Sap lake.

With love,
S

Re: Stadium Cambodian

2008-12-19T05:19:00.000-08:00

From: writersblok@hotmail.com
To: andrewcleahey@XXX.com

Andrew,

Dude, I’m listening to ‘Boys of Summer’ and I know I don’t need to tell you how perfectly awesome it is. Shannon hates it; I mean she C A N N O T S T A N D it. Every time it comes up (which is fairly often, actually) she lets out this long groan. No amount of explanation of how the guitar in the bridge sounds exactly like seagulls, nor how the keyboard rhythm section sounds perfectly like sunset in a beach town – not a rosy, tropical sunset beach town but an All-American, Eastcoast, twilight between hazy-afternoon-glare and neon-boozed all-the-trash-you-can-be nighttime sunset – none of that makes a lick of difference. Man, the tune’s a good testament to what you could do with arrangement in an ‘80s pop style… Ha, she just walked in to tell me that what she thought was bamboo when she bought it at the market was actually a kilo of shredded ginger, and when I turned up Winamp (stick it, Apple) she flung out her arms like a bird and scrunched her shoulders up like a palsy victim and fled out of the room. I can’t sell her on AC/DC either. Anyway, this all reminds me of how Emily just didn’t get Red Dawn.

I put on ‘Boys of Summer’ because I was going to write you a letter about a Khmer pop concert, needed a little accompaniment, and then got distracted scrolling my way to Pat Benetar. Now ‘Shadows of the Night’ is on and the keyboard bombast is pretty spectacular. You know what else is spectacular and even more ludicrous? Stadium concerts in a country just getting the hang of sponsorship and showmanship.

A little bit ago Shannon and I rode our bike – me pedaling and her shotgun on the little package rack on the back – northwest out of Siem Reap. We’re looking on assignment for the Cambodian Magician, a ropey guy who leaps through hoops of knives for captive Khmer audiences. A moto driver pointed us toward the road out of town and soon we’re out into No Man’s Land, miles of flat dirt and scrub unlike the typical lush scenery. Huff and puff, huff and puff, and as we’re both starting to think of bagging the whole thing, we turn a corner and blam!, the horizon holds what on first look seems to be some kind of castle, as odd a thing to see as if you were wandering across the Mongolian Steppes and came upon a Navaho Casino. Turns out it’s a stadium-sized stage and in a few hours the last show of a three-night get-down ends the ten-year-anniversary party Khmer TV3 is throwing for itself.

The show has what all stadium shows have: a massive stage decked out with tremendous lighting rigs and two jumbotrons, the throng milling about a giant gravel parking lot, sponsor banners four stories high and company booths lining the lot, people hocking disposable bits of plastic that flash and whiz for half an hour before being tossed on the ground. The primary sponsor is Colgate, and their banners feature a white doctor looking confident next to an as-white-as-possible Khmer family grinning sparkling white teeth. The Colgate company booths are selling Honeysuckle Salt-flavored toothpaste to an endless crowd. On the vast, grey gravel, people have set up roulette wheels made of index cards and chopsticks and a woman illuminates her three-card-monty table with flickering candles. At the edges, where Colgate has turned the shuddering candle light to the blasting pink and green of neon tubes, players throw darts at balloons tacked to the wall, trying to win bottles of squid sauce or liters of Sprite.

The music on stage is atrocious, soft nothing with an airy whine substituting for melody. The dancers, however, those guys are something to see. They’re more or less on par with Van Halen in the ‘Hot for Teacher’ video. Watching them clunk and stagger through their moves, studmuffin grins on their faces, I realize that this, like seemingly everything in Cambodia is done jackleg. It is as if everyone from the choreographer to the performers to the producers all have the general idea of what they want to do (in this case ape routines from New Kids on the Block) but none of them really know how to go about it. In keeping with the modern Khmer spirit, no one is an expert but collectively they reach some semblance of competency, at least to a level acceptable to the crowd packed shoulder to shoulder in front of them.

The whole country is like this. Our washer was busted and when the two teenager boys sent by the landlord couldn’t fix it, they hefted it out of the front door. Oh, I guess they have a truck, I’m thinking. No. One dude climbs onto his motor scooter and the other guy gets on behind him, balancing a full-sized washing machine on his lap between them, the thing looming a foot and half above their heads as they weave out the gate and off through the gullies. Public trash at even the big hotels is beyond spotty and public maintenance of roads consists of dumping loads of dirt after five months of monsoon rains have made those gullies, so people use rubble and coconut shells and trash to smooth out their moto rides home. A friend took his grandmother to the hospital because her blood seemed to be clotting, making her lightheaded, and what did the good doctors recommend? A good massage to get that blood flowing, or else to push the clot to her brain, everything relative to education, understanding, the tools at hand. Society here is a kind of wonder. There is not enough infrastructure, leadership, or skills to successfully assemble all the pieces of daily life, yet collectively some workable system is developed. It’s like assembling scattered audio tracks of a Beatles song into something by Sonny and Cher. You recognize that things aren’t really the way the should – or maybe could – be, but everyone makes do in a relatively cheerful and oblivious fashion.

The only exception I’ve detected is the machinations of the government. Those guys have their society down cold, knocking out opponents and consolidating land, money, and power with only loud words spoken calmly and the slow and steady reconfiguring of what is and is not legal. Those guys have learned from the failure of the Superpower to their north and the success of our Superpower to their west. “Common criminals” is something I read a lot in reference to them, their peers in the north of India and Pakistan, leaders all across the African continent. That quality of leadership seems to be an intrinsic characteristic of Developing World societies, and as I reflect on the similarities between them and our Wall Street and K Street criminals, I am reminded of an Op-Ed piece I read, I think in The Wall Street Journal, that was the Developing World’s welcoming of the U.S. to their family.

I guess we have more or less ignored our homegrown conmen for ten or twenty years. Or maybe we just have felt powerless or unqualified to address them. Either way, that means we have something in common with jackleg Khmers. We make do with what we have before us. Anyway…

This email went in a different direction than I intended. I still want to convey the kind of jolly bumbling quality to so much of life here. It’s worth ending, then, by telling you that those geniuses that worked with Colgate to put on that show saw fit to top the male headliner with a Jennifer Aniston hair cut, cover the bass player’s head with a Seattle-style stocking cap, and have the female headliner rough-riding the air at the end of the stage, going to town cowboy style and singing, “Oh, I want it, Oh, I want it,” in between long strings of Khmer.

Love you,
Jay

Running on Two Continents

2008-12-11T22:44:00.001-08:00

Dear Deanna,

I knew, even before the starter’s pistol went off, that this letter would be for you. You’re the one who ran a half-marathon before, the one who sent me information about how to train. But it wasn’t until someone asked me why I was doing such a thing that I realized that I’d never asked you the same question, nor could I provide a very good answer for myself.

Not having a good answer caused terror to set in just before the race began. Did you experience this, joining the crowd at the starting line in Columbus? I was standing in front of the imposing steps to the causeway of Angkor Wat, and my hands were trembling so badly that I could barely safety pin the number to the front of my shirt. After all, you know that I am not really an athletic sort. I have never learned to ride a bike, become uneasy and clumsy the instant a piece of sporting equipment is placed in my hands, and have always been picked last for every team, from preschool Red Rover to Dunlap family reunion volleyball games. My body is not going cooperate, I thought, not for 21 kilometers. Why am I doing this?

The easy answer, the one that I use most often, is that I do it for the runner’s high, and that’s at least partially true. Maybe you use this explanation—being the mother of three small children is undoubtedly stressful, and maintaining a thirteen-year marriage (even if it is to my adored brother) must have its difficulties, too. I started jogging on a regular basis when I first moved to New York and felt lonely, then more when my relationship with Jeremy started to hit the rocks, and more still the summer after we broke up. Running through the streets of Jersey City could sometimes flip a switch in my brain, could allow me the luxury of daydreaming about how the next day would be better. But we both know that the runner’s high doesn’t always cut it, that sometimes you need life to cooperate. I remember a day a year and a half ago when I crumpled onto the living room floor in tears after a run, wondering why I didn’t feel any better. A few hours later, my friend Jason came over to hang out. A movie, a bottle of wine, a kiss, and suddenly the race course had taken a sharp turn, went stretching out in a different direction, one that led, eventually, to Cambodia.

Running in Cambodia is different than running in the US. In some very straightforward ways, it’s difficult to train here: stray dogs and chickens chase me wherever I go, moto drivers tease me, and it is always either muddy or dusty, resulting in red-stained sneakers and frequent coughing fits. But it’s difficult in subtler ways as well, producing some mutated reversal of the runner’s high. Cambodia is simultaneously beautiful and ugly, pure and corrupt, friendly and forbidding, and to run through the streets is to force yourself to see all of that. For a long time, I wasn’t sure how I fit in here, what I was supposed to be doing, or even if I wanted to stay. There have been many days when I couldn’t write about this place, couldn’t even think about it, but at least, I thought, every time I put my running shoes on, I was seeing it.

I think that’s why the idea of running the half-marathon through the famous temples appealed to me: that somehow I would see them differently if I looked at them in this context and understand the ancient and complex fabric of this place better. That’s not exactly what happened. There was so much adrenaline, so many people—it was hard to meditate on the secrets of the Khmer empire. All I had time to process was that, after weeks of feeling as though I was stumbling into obstacles, it was all a little easier than I thought it would be. My body did not fail me; the training you suggested had done its job and I ran every step of the way. But there was something else, too. I was used to the climate, I didn’t need to take a hundred tourist’s snapshots during the race, and I could speak some words of Khmer to the children who had come to give the runners encouraging high fives. This is a strange place, I thought, looking up at the carved stone faces that are over six hundred years old. But it is also a home.

And so, even after crossing the finish line, the running continues. That is the best answer that I can think of right now—that we run because there is always more ground to cover. We are in different hemispheres right now, and for now my course stays in Cambodia, but someday we will run a race together and prove to ourselves one more time that we are tougher than we think.

With love,
Shannon

Re: Holiday Fowl and Khmer Kitchen

2008-12-06T22:01:00.000-08:00

From: writersblok@hotmail.com
To: abbydurden@XXX.com

Dear E.A.,

We had a good Thanksgiving. Shannon and I got all jazzed to have four or five Khmer friends over for as good of an approximation of the holiday as we could fashion. We ended up inviting 9 people in addition to ourselves and our roommate. Then we realized that we only had 2 stove tops and a toaster oven that is 30 centimeters wide. Well, we assembled a brigade of borrowed toaster ovens and went to town, doing a good job of sneaky beans (string bean-mushroom thingamabob), mashed potatoes, stuffing, salad, fruit salad, etc. In lieu of turkey I went out and found what I thought were chickens. Turns out they were ducks. So I took those 2 ducks I'd purchased and went and found actual chickens. They're all over the place here in the afternoons and evenings, killed fresh that morning and cooked until they're the color of dirty tallow. In a communication breakdown, I asked the sellers to simply cut off the heads, but they instead went Thor-style with a meat cleaver and tossed everything into a bag. "Oh, there's the right side of the head...oh, there's the left...oh, there's a piece of eyeball." When re-heating the birds in one of the toaster ovens, I made sure to pull the bills from out of the assemblage of parts. The Khmers were all about this big platter of bird I’d assembled; the Westerners took the occasional wing and went to town on the sides. A lot of it ended up going to Sheba, the dog of a French friend.

Also, I won a gift certificate from this business called Cooks in Tuk Tuks, which takes you to the local open-air market, explains all the exotic foods and herbs (referred to as "fertilizers," for some reason), and then takes you back to a nice restaurant where they make your food in front of you and let you participate. (I feel it’s worth noting that I won the gift certificate at a culinary pub quiz when I responded to the question What is another name for Sago? with the answer Sago the Wise. Apparently sago is sea tapioca but it sound Middle Earthian to me.) Anyway, back from the market the cook made us all this good grub and, after a desert of sweet potato with sago (!) in coconut cream, he pulls me up to help make prohoc. What is prohoc, you ask? The cook holds up individual bowls of grey fermented fish goop, garlic, salt, chilies, sugar, some other ingredients that escape me now.

Then, the last bowl: "Rat ans," he says.

"Red anne?" we ask.

"No, rat ans."

"Rodin?"

"Rat ans." He gives the bowl to Shannon, we both look down.

"Oh, red ANTS!"

Tiny in their bowl they looked like three-dimensional stick men broken and heaped upon each other at the bottom of a ceramic mass grave.

"Adult rat ans," he says, pointing at the stick men. Then he points at the little white specks tossed in to the mound. "Rat ans children."

"Red ants’ children?” we ask.

"Yes," he says, pointing at the larvae. “I catch the ans in the garden and put them in the freezer.”

I follow the dude’s directions and make and eat the prohoc. The ants have a bit of tang to them. “Why do you add the ants?” we ask.

“You can use lime if you have no ans.”

“Good to know.”

“The ans are sour, so prohoc is not too sweet.”

Awesome. My palette is coming along nicely.

- R.J.

My First Tropical Disease

2008-11-28T03:29:00.000-08:00

Dear World Health Organization,

I am pleased to announce that I have isolated a new strain of disease in Southeast Asia. I believe the reason it has gone so long uncategorized is because of some striking similarities to the common cold, but long hours in the lab and a harrowing personal bout with said disease have convinced me that we are dealing with an entirely different beast. I will enumerate in this letter the additional symptoms that appear alongside the more mundane congestion, coughing and fever.

Paranoia:
This symptom usually has an early onset, starting with the certainty that the contracted disease is definitely malaria or at least dengue fever. Even after these suspicions have been quelled, paranoia will simply shift onto a new object, usually one’s romantic partner. Patient may feel as though partner has switched dramatically from sympathy (“You poor thing.”) to mild disinterest (“Are you coughing or puking in there? Just coughing? Oh.”) This perception, combined with a complete lack of symptoms in the romantic partner, may convince the patient that she has been purposefully and maliciously infected.

Homesickness:
This may manifest itself in a hatred of all things Cambodian (“If it wasn’t so muddy here I would be better by now”) or a desperation for all things familiar and unobtainable (“My kingdom for a Cheez-it”). May be combined with previously listed symptom to produce rage in the patient at the thought that romantic partner is probably at a special café that specializes in crossword puzzles and Boggle while patient is dying on couch.

Impairment of Judgment:
Disease can cause patient to make poor decisions, including (but not limited to) taking a generic decongestant which may be a mislabeled elephant tranquilizer, jogging at the crack of dawn with the conviction that it will actually make one feel better, and watching terrible movies on the only English-language cable channels, featuring slightly out-of-fashion actresses like Sandra Bullock and Kim Basinger being hurled into states of despair.

Despair:
May be a direct consequence of poor film choices (“Why must Kim Basinger’s son die of an African snake bite? Why?”) or a separate phenomenon. Patient may begin to assert that death is imminent and engage in elaborate fantasies about repatriation of remains.

This matter requires immediate attention and swift action on the part of WHO, with an eye toward vaccination and eventual eradication. Much work remains and you can rest assured that I intend to see it through to the bitter end. Also, please note that the name The Shannon Syndrome has a certain je ne sais quoi and is currently available for use.

Sincerely,
Shannon N. Dunlap

Re: Global Branding

2008-11-20T20:00:00.000-08:00

From: writersblok@hotmail.com
To: obama@obamaforamerica.com

Dear President-elect Obama,

Congratulations on your victory. Though American, I live in Cambodia, and myself and a handful of other Westerners gathered at a local bar at 9:00 a.m. on our November 5^th to watch the returns in real time. There were not many of us, and even fewer Americans.

Khmer don’t care about your election or what Americans think of you. In contrast to what seems to have been the predominant feeling across the planet for the past seven years, Cambodia still likes America. The Khmer teenagers my girlfriend and I tutor in English pronunciation eagerly tell us, “American accents are the best.” I don’t know why this is the case. There are more Brits, Canadians, and Australians spending tourist dollars here than there are Americans. Thai, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese shows dominate on local cable TV. The bootleg films available do seem to be largely American, but they are all dubbed or have subtitles. From the pragmatic standpoint of winning the generosity of a tourist, a local person would be better served to know Australian slang or practice using pants only when referring to underwear.

So what is the reason for the average Khmer to still love America when most of the globe has grown accustomed to hating us? In a country where the vast majority of people are uneducated and thus cut off from the tides of international news, does the legendary promise of the Land of Opportunity still reside in the collective conscious? I asked my Khmer friend Diné. “They know America is very powerful,” he said, smiling around a Marlboro Light. “They want to better their lives, so they want to sound like Americans when going for job interviews. Many Khmer do not even know that other countries, they speak English.” I asked the monk that tutors Shannon and me in English, and he said that America is very generous in its aid to Cambodia, apparently either unaware or unconcerned that until the 1990s we supported the maniacal Khmer Rouge as the official regional enemy of Communist Vietnam. But average Khmer people now live calmly alongside former KR soldiers. The prime minister is a former KR head honcho and well liked. Out of decades of chaos has come a respect for strength and stability above any notion of justice. America has the widest shoulders and the best carrots and sticks, and we are widely admired for it.

Every Thursday, Shannon and I go to the pub quiz hosted at an English-owned ex-pat bar named Funky Munky. Money raised goes to local NGOs. Aside from the occasional British football team pennant and the odd LP cover tacked to the wall, the decorations at Funky Munky consist of large, framed silkscreens of legendary Americans with Guns from our popular fiction. There is, of course, Robert DeNiro, surely the most frequently displayed American gangster and mad man, here as Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver and Jimmy Conway from Goodfellas. There’s also a picture of Christopher Walken about to lose Russian Roulette in Deer Hunter, Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry, and a 12-year-old Natalie Portman test aiming in The Professional. There’s even a charming black-and-white film still of a handlebar-mustachioed Lee Marvin showing off his six-gun alongside cowboy Jack Palance. I’ve seen this same décor in scores of college dorm rooms, most pizza parlors in New York City, and in bars across the world. Its style is on display on the covers of most of those bootleg films for sale in the Khmer markets. This is an integral part of our global brand, a part of our national image that is incredibly potent. And standing in the Funky Munky a day after your victory speech in Grant Park, I thought of another part of the American image.

I was cynical when you first announced your candidacy two years ago. Your bonafides as a true reformer were lacking. But by this fall, I was as worn down and as terrified of another GOP victory as everyone else. I put my hope in you. And as I watched in disbelief my home state of Virginia turn blue on CNN’s scoreboard and your victory declared, I felt, as simply as if a switch had been thrown, that my country was mine again. After seven years of watching the judiciary, legislature, executive office, fourth-estate press, and general citizenry stray ever further away from my code of ethics, I was suddenly terribly lonely for my home. How powerful, the popular belief of the pack.

I moved to Asia in part to avoid the crush of the 24-hour coverage of the campaign and I had no interest in watching the empty heads chattering at the commentator’s desk. Just as I was thinking that I’d need to leave the TV to keep my happiness safe from those useless human markers between ad spots, those voices just nothing to me, just air and narcissus-breath to me, the camera pulled away to Chicago streaming into Grant Park and I felt like my breastbone might finally crack to let the air and light in. When was the last time a quarter-million Americans gathered in one place and were happy? When has anyone ever seen Al Sharpton smile? I come from a city where statues of Confederate generals line the grandest street, and still that city has voted for you?! It is astounding, and as the camera panned over my ecstatic countrymen and woman, I saw evidence of what I hope we will recognize: that we are all truly The People; of, by, and for each other, and thus, ourselves.

This, Senator Obama, is the part of America that I want promoted to the world, and it is the part of America that you have made your flagship marketing initiative. I don’t blame you for making our best ideas of ourselves into slogans and T-shirts; we live in an age where all is product, and we are all bound by the rules of that age. So I don’t blame you for using U2’s cathedral chiming to close your DNC speech, even though it turned the evening into a propaganda music video. I don’t blame you for the way your campaign sold an abstract like ‘hope’ until the letters were worn translucent and the word was as substantial as the idea of fog in a morning of gray rain. We certainly need hope and you, my friend, are an exceptional namebrand for it. What I want, then, is for that image of America gathered in Grant Park to be as widely admired by the world and on display in the pubs and markets of Cambodia, as is the brute business sense associated with our brandishing of a gun.

I am no fool. I know that a whole universe exists between what we all say and who we all really are. But I am choosing to believe that you are genuine, that your unparalleled adeptness at the political machine has thus far serviced, rather than clouded, this genuineness. You are galvanizing and we need that. We need you because we desperately need each other. You were a good product on the shelf, and we have bought you, Barack Obama. I hope you are as superhuman as we now need you to be.

Sincerely,

Jason Leahey

Lords of the Snack

2008-11-11T22:11:00.000-08:00

Dear Mom,

I hadn’t written a letter to you yet because I knew that when I did it would have to be about food. Over the course of my twenty-seven years, you have generously nourished and soothed me with enormous quantities of food (anyone who has encountered a pan of your brownies knows what I mean), and it seemed only appropriate that a letter to you somehow connect to that theme. But the Cambodian food scene left me uninspired. It’s not that Khmer food isn’t good, but it is somewhat repetitive, particularly for vegetarians. I will soon be a connoisseur of any conceivable combination of vegetables and rice noodles. Anything that does not involve meat, I’ve been told, is not considered a real meal. But then along came a holiday that impressed upon me how grievously I had overlooked a crucial culinary category.

The Water Festival, or Bonn Kam Tdeu, takes place when the rainy season ends and the water in the river reverses. The holiday turns the banks of the Siem Reap into a massive carnival for three days (complete with a rickety and startlingly rapid Ferris wheel). There are two notable features to the Water Festival. One is the boat racing. Teams of about twenty-five people in coordinated t-shirts climb into traditional Cambodian boats and paddle down the river in an endless series of head-to-head matches. They look like crew races but with a more flamboyant rowing style. The other essential component of the festival is the vast array of snack food. You literally cannot take two steps without bumping into a snack vendor. Hundreds of Khmer people (sellers and eaters of snacks alike) pour into the town from the countryside provinces to watch the races and, apparently, work on raising their cholesterol levels. I am no stranger to snacks, certainly, but the Water Festival proves that the Cambodian people are light years ahead of me—veritable Snackmasters.

Here is a just a small sampling of what’s on display, some of which I’ve tried and others which I have actively avoided:

-moon-shaped pastries, crimped on the edges and filled with caramelized onions

-chilled pieces of sugarcane, nubby little cylinders that are strangely tasteless until you bite down hard, at which point they give up a gush of sweet juice, leaving only a woody pulp that you spit out

-tiny prawns, flattened (shells and all) and deep-fried into a shrimp pancake, their beady black eyes gazing up through the batter

-plastic bags filled with mysterious Technicolor fluids

-freshly made crepes drizzled with Best Cow sweetened condensed milk

-popcorn cemented into enormous balls with sugar syrup

-sliced green mango, served with little individual packets of a spicy, salty dipping mixture

-pure white dumplings stuffed with pork, their little puckered tops hidden beneath the domed metal lids of steam trays

-lotus pods, which look like bright green shower heads and can be broken open to get to the raw edible seeds

-many variations of sweet fried dough, which Jason has grouped into the Trans Saturated Snack category. My favorite are the wee doughnuts, deep-fried to a satisfying crunch, and topped with something that tastes like a sesame version of peanut brittle.

-carts full of color-coded kebabs, piled up neatly and waiting to be fried and put on a bed of cucumber and basil

-great mounded trays of boiled peanuts

-“bamboo rice,” or hollow sections of bamboo filled with coconut milk, beans and rice and then grilled until you can strip away the bamboo like a banana peel and eat the sticky finger food inside

-perfectly spherical bits of bright red meat that, when skewered and grilled, resemble a kindergartner’s drawing of a caterpillar

-short, fat ears of roasted corn

-“barbequed eggs,” stuffed full of spices and cooked in their shells on hot coals

-bags full of kreuk moh, a sort of Khmer sundae, in which geometrically shaped bits of custard are drenched in sweetened condensed milk and topped with shaved ice

This is only a partial list, and I feel confident saying that there are still more that I have not yet discovered. An afternoon of tasting has left me sluggish and craving something green, so I will end this letter and make myself a salad. But rest easy knowing that two days of the festival remain and that my snack needs are being more than adequately fulfilled. And also know that I still desperately miss your brownies.

Love always,
Shannon

Native Tongue

2008-10-30T21:46:00.000-07:00

Dear Mme. Dahlberg,

I do not want to you to feel wholly responsible for the fact that I am miserably monolingual. After all, it could not have been easy to be the sole high school French teacher in Lexington, Ohio, the only local expert in a language not your own, the lone Francophile amidst the fields of corn. But I do not think I am being conceited when I say that I was one of your most promising and attentive students for the four years that I sat in your classroom, nor am I being modest when I say that I came out of those four years lacking the ability to speak any French. Half of the expats in Siem Reap are French, but I would rather feign mental retardation when I meet one of them than try to strike up a conversation in my pidgin français. And if I can’t speak even a fairly common Romance language with any fluency, how will I ever be able to tackle Khmer?

Mind you, learning Khmer is hardly a prerequisite for living in Cambodia. Everyone here, from the tuk-tuk drivers to the wealthy businessmen, can speak English, and one’s fluency is usually a good indication of one’s affluence. ESL textbooks and workbooks are everywhere (though I’ve yet to find similar ones that teach Khmer). Children and young adults love to test out their English skills on us with stilted but spirited conversations. We have been told that American accents are especially respected, and when I see Obama and McCain orating from every television screen, I understand why. Unwittingly, and through pure luck and happenstance, I have been fluent in the language of influence and power for over twenty years. For a monolinguist, it is the most fortuitous possible position, and I can’t help but feel some guilt for stumbling into it.

Maybe because of this guilt, it is important to me to be able to speak at least some semblance of the local language. I refuse to look like a tourist for the next ten months, unable to pronounce even the blandest pleasantries correctly. Let the record show that I tried, in advance, to prevent this from happening, by purchasing “Talk Khmer Now!” for my computer, which features two decidedly Anglo-looking people whose lip movements do not match the words they are supposedly saying. But a single CD-ROM gave me little insight into a language so complex that it’s difficult to pronounce even the name of the language correctly (despite being spelled “Khmer,” it’s pronounced, inexplicably, more like “k’mai”), and while the software was marginally successful in teaching me a few single words, I am still incapable of stringing them into sentences (“Rice yes meat no please thanks big-big!”)

Since the intricacies of Khmer grammar seem to be something only a real teacher can convey, Jason and I went in search of one at the local monastery, Wat Bo. A monk named Savuth was convinced to take us on as students, though he usually teaches English and seemed a little nervous about the prospect of teaching Khmer. Nonetheless, he told us we could come as often as we want, and when we mentioned the subject of formal payment, he looked embarrassed and said something supremely monkish, such as, “If you will learn to speak the Khmer language, this will make me happy.” Savuth’s request seems like an exceedingly modest one, but I worry that making him happy will be a little harder than scoring an A in French IV.

Apparently, the sight of crazy white people wandering around the monastery is not an everyday occurrence, and two other monks showed up at our first lesson, counting on the potential entertainment value of the event. Savuth got right down to business, trying to teach us how to say I. This sounds simple enough, but the way you say I varies widely depending upon whether you’re talking to your grandmother or to a monk or to the King of Cambodia. A simple k’nyom will do if I’m talking to Jason, for instance, but for the king it’s knyom prea-ang meh cha, and God only knows what would happen if I had to speak to both of them at once. If I wanted to say something to Savuth, like “I think I might feel faint if I have to look at any more of the absurdly complicated Khmer alphabet,” I would have to say, “K’nyom prea-cah ro nah…” or something of the sort, just to express that initial pronoun, at which point I would have forgotten the rest of the sentence.

After an exhausting assortment of Is, we moved on to learning how to tell someone your name. “Listen,” Savuth said. “Cheameuooioereh,” or some other combination of vowels I have never heard before. “K’nyom cheameuooioereh Savuth.”

“Chamore?” I said hopefully.

“Cheameuooioereh,” Savuth said, moving his mouth in a way that I cannot hope to replicate.

“Shamoo?” I said, feeling smaller and smaller. This went back and forth for a while, until Savuth settled back to drink some Coca-cola and compose himself and I slumped dejectedly while one of the monk audience members told me, “Clever student! Clever student!” in a way that I found extremely kind but unduly optimistic.

The lesson ended with Savuth trying valiantly to teach us how to say, “See you Monday!” and then waving goodbye as we sputtered gibberish back at him.

Mme. Dahlberg, where did we go wrong? Am I really such a dullard that acquisition of a foreign language is beyond my reach? Or did all that time in the middle of an enormous and powerful country muffle all the other voices of the world? Keep fighting the good fight, Mme. Dahlberg—we need people who can talk to each other, and Savuth and the rest of the international community deserve better than a one-trick pony like me.

Best wishes,
Shannon Dunlap

Re: Angkor Lite FM

2008-10-24T03:15:00.000-07:00

From: writersblok@hotmail.com
To: rmarx@XXX.com

Dear Richard Marx,

I am writing to let you know that you are absolutely huge in the nation of Cambodia. I mean you’re a veritable titan. This is no small feat; though one would expect various trappings of Western culture to be embraced by Southeast Asia, Western music has yet to deeply penetrate the Khmer market. Though I find the music echoing from the local wats alluring and the traditional instruments played in the streets lovely, popular music here is, by and large, comprised of Khmer-language ballads with melodies as soft as wet bread and beats as compelling as a fork. Though one time I heard English-language hip-hop from a passing SUV and once even saw videos from Mary J. Blige and Lupe Fiasco, the limp native tunes seem to be the most ubiquitous music across the widest measure of society. They are the bread and butter of the thriving karaoke-cum-brothel scene. Their videos are played loudly and incessantly on every bus line for hour after hour after hour. Ninety-eight percent of them involve:

a boy standing in a beautiful river and mourning a lost girl
a girl standing in a beautiful river and mourning a lost boy
a boy standing in a beautiful river and sticking it to the lost girl who is trying to make amends
a girl standing in a beautiful river and sticking it to the lost boy who is trying to make amends.

Khmer young and old, hip and bumpkin, lean forward, elbows on knees, and watch intently as the Khmer words pass across the bottom of the screen. Occasionally someone sings along. But nary a word of English is to be heard.

Except your words, Richard. In the six weeks I have been here, I have heard Right Here Waiting multiple times, in multiple social situations, and in multiple forms. You might be saying, “Well, that’s my biggest hit; it’s no surprise it finds a home in the international market alongside Soft Rock Classics like (Love Lifts Us Up) Where We Belong.” You might be saying, “Right Here Waiting is in every mid-level piano practice book printed since 1989, it was only a matter of time.” You’d be right, Richard, but your ignorance and humility is leading you to sell yourself short. Though your song is inevitably a potent part of the Soft Rock Classics mix that I occasionally hear in tourist establishments, it is also the sole English-language song that I have found treated as equal to the Khmer pop videos. It is the only song I know of to not just cross the cultural divide, but to bridge it. Lest you think that the art of letter writing leads me to embellish facts, let me state here and now that all of what follows is one-hundred-percent truth:

The morning my lady and I left Phnom Penh for Siem Reap, I woke up with Shoulda Known Better flexing itself in my brain. There was no reason for it - my cassette of your debut is in a box in The States - and yet there I was, snarling to Shannon in the shower, “Shoulda known bettah…then to fall in love with yo-ou…now love is just-a faded memory.” Then, just because the spirit moved us, we traded verses of Right Here Waiting. Two hours pass, we’re on our way north, and what comes onto the bus television after one of those limpid Khmer ballads? A fan-fucking-tastic cover of Right Here Waiting sung in English and Khmer, that’s what. The video is an American Bandstand-type set up, a round-faced and sincere man singing from a small center stage, Khmer couples in prom attire turning across the floor, arms rigid, partners held a basketball’s width apart and smiles unflinching. “Whatever it take,” sings the man in time with the karaoke prompt. “Oh! How my heart breaks?” Then, only one day later, Shannon and I are sitting in an outdoor café that doubles as a butterfly sanctuary and, after a delicious Celine Dion cover (that number where she bellows, “I’m your LAY-DAAEEH!”), Right Here Waiting comes on again, this time a full-English cover sung bravely by a Khmer. Another week and a half passes and, lo and behold, we’re having a drink when at the next table over a Belgian woman starts in with her own rendition. The best part? When we laughed and tried to engage in a tête-à-tête with her table over the long reach of your staff-writing arm, that other table was confused. They’d just arrived in town. They were just singing your song because it popped into their heads apropos of nothing. And do you know what just came over the café speakers when I was writing the sentence before last? A pretty solid rendition of Now and Forever, a twinge of Khmer accent whispering above the clatter, “Until the day the ocean doesn’t touch the sand, now and forever, I will be your man.” All of this is the gospel truth.

I don’t know just what it is about the Khmer experience that makes you so relatable. I’ve dwelled on it and there’s precious little similarity between Cambodia today and the United States at the end of the 1980s. It’s true that Khmers seem to be suckers for a good ballad of lost love but I don’t think that alone is enough of an explanation. I wonder if it is the combination of loss and patient waiting that is the key. If, in a country where every family includes the memory of a loved one stolen away by war and torture, there is deep resonance in the declaration, “Whatever it takes, or how my heart breaks, I will be right here waiting for you.”

The point is this, Rick: you’re in the bloodstream here, part of the cultural compote of the moment. Your song is not merely enjoyed by people in a distant land; it inspires them to make it their own. I’d put a lot of money on the bet that few people here know your name. I’m sure they haven’t seen your videos, not even the super sweet one in which you morph into a Major League slugger and take a fastball from Dennis Eckersley. I bet you the engineer and producer who set up those local recording sessions of Soft Rock Top Tens don’t even know who you are. And that’s okay. You’re as ubiquitous in Cambodia as 7-11 is at home. Americans don’t need to know the ingredients of a Coca-Cola Slurpee; that doesn’t keep them from needing one every now and again. Cambodians count on you being there and trust that you will be. That’s a trick, Richard, and I suspect you know that. It’s one thing to be a fancy face that keeps tabloids in gossip. It’s a whole other planet to craft a song that survives without you.

Warm regards,

Jason Leahey

The Loneliest Martini in Cambodia

2008-10-20T22:16:00.000-07:00

Dear Llalan,

Thanks once again for your efforts to shower me with your superior knowledge of beer the last time we saw each other in Boston. Your lesson has been on my mind more than once in Cambodia since bars are many and varied here and not an uncommon destination for an expat writer prone to periodic attacks of displacement anxiety. I will freely admit that I was a terrible student—terms like lager, ale, stout, porter, and pilsner have become impossibly muddled in my mind. And though I may have pretended that I understood the difference between hoppiness and yeastiness that night in Cambridge, I will take this opportunity to admit that I still have no idea what you were talking about. But while I am certainly not the best judge of beer quality, I thought that as one of your oldest friends I owed you a considered and well-researched survey of the region’s brews.

Beer is very cheap here. Seventy-five-cent happy hour specials are easy to find, and if you go into any bar at any hour and are still sober five dollars later, something has gone horribly awry. In most cases you get what you pay for. That is, cheap Asian beer tastes much like cheap American beer—not very good. Jason has flashbacks of the beer truck at the St. Mary’s Social Union Annual Picnic whenever he tastes Anchor; I am curiously transported to sweaty frat parties of my past whenever I make the poor decision to drink Chang. I have already heard expat urban legends about formaldehyde lurking in the kegs of Angkor beer. Worst of all is Bayon, which advertises itself as “The Beer of Cambodia,” but which has an oddly chemical odor and a dishwater aftertaste. But even a beer novice like myself can tell that when it comes to the pours of Southeast Asia, there is a clear standout. During your time in Thailand, did you have the pleasure of drinking Beerlao? I say with confidence that it is the most perfect $1 beer you will ever find. One sip would convince you. Complex and layered, yet still refreshing in the heat, it is a giant among its puny peers. Even in one’s darker, more brooding moments, the golden sheen of an ice-cold Beerlao can has the power to calm and cheer.

And yet, I am no beer connoisseur and find myself turning to other potables as the need arises. But what to choose? Ordering wine is never a good idea. Even the nicer restaurants have offerings that would make any oenophile blanche with fear. I bought a bottle of palm wine at the grocery store thinking it would be the Cambodian version of table wine, but found that it was instead a kind of syrupy liqueur which smelled a little like paint thinner. Down the street from our house is a shack with a large sign that says “Dara Local Wine,” but I think it specializes in the rice-based moonshine that I have not yet had the courage to try.

Cambodians do, however, seem to be fond of their mixed drinks, producing endless lists of strange concoctions. At one dark restaurant at the edge of Phnom Penh, I unexpectedly found the Bee’s Knees, that old flapper favorite that I thought everyone had abandoned except for me. While I have to question some of the combinations (the Picador, made by mixing only tequila and Kahlua, seemed particularly ill-advised), I do appreciate the potential for creative names—the Blue Dragon, the Amnesia, the Journalist, the Japanese Slipper, the Gin and Sin (which I like mostly because it implies that gin is the virtuous component of the drink).

Jason is fond of Cambodia’s zealous mixology because it frequently involves the fresh fruit juices that he so adores. But this often means that a waiter will bring over a tremendously effeminate pink or peach or creamy yellow number with umbrellas and cherries and curly straws, set it down in front of me, and giggle helplessly while Jason tries to slide it over to his side of the table with his masculinity intact.

As for me, I am not a fruity drink kind of girl, preferring my booze to taste like booze. This philosophy fits poorly within a society that prefers all of its beverages tooth-achingly sweet. Order an iced coffee with milk and forget to say the word “fresh” and you’re likely to end up with half a can of sweetened condensed milk in the bottom of your glass. My desire for a non-sweet cocktail inspired a safari for what seems to be the most elusive quarry in all of Cambodia—the perfect gin martini. Mind you, the words “dry martini” appear on almost all drink menus, but what you get if you order it varies widely. The one thing that all versions have in common is that they do not resemble martinis. One consisted almost entirely of sweet vermouth. Another involved pineapple juice. The most peculiar incident was when I was brought a shot of brandy. Say the word “dirty” and you will ignite a storm of confusion and apologies amongst the bewildered bar staff.

And then, just as I was beginning to think that it didn’t exist, my hunt ended on a quiet rooftop bar in Siem Reap. A cool and delicate glass already beading with perspiration, the sharp, clean scent of juniper wafting toward me, the single green olive bobbing in time with the rustling banana trees below. It may have been the only one of its kind in this lonely country, and I like to think that we soothed each other in equal measure.

Oh, Big Lla, I do miss you. What good is a frosty glass without a friend beside you? Please know that I think of you often and also know that, while I am loath to ruin any potential Christmas surprises, the Beerlao logo does look particularly fetching when emblazoned on a t-shirt.

Bottoms up,
S

Cricket Canapés and Arachnid Amuse-Bouches

2008-10-15T20:05:00.000-07:00

The Food Network
75 Ninth Avenue
New York, NY 10011

Dear Executive Producers:

We’d like to call your attention to a new programming opportunity that we have been developing. Specially designed to capture the sector of the market interested in adventurous eating and culinary bravery, we feel it fills a gap in your current schedule.

As we become ever more aware of our global community and our impact upon it, the interests of the discerning gourmand are broadening accordingly. Though every serious foodie knows the environmental toll of the West’s industrial cattle production, how many know that many of the under-developed cultures of the East find protein in animals and animal parts most Westerners have never even considered as food? In a shrinking world, dishes and ingredients once considered exotic are available as never before, and the cosmopolitan eater expects the food media to keep him on the cutting edge of gastronomic opportunities such as these.

Accordingly, please find enclosed the transcript and a short sample of the pilot episode of “From Crepes to Chitin.” We look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,
Shannon Dunlap and Jason Leahey

Transcript from 10/10/08

S: We’re in Cambodia this week, outside of Phnom Penh and cruising by bus up National Road 6 on our way to the small town of Skun. I’m here with Jason Leahey, renowned food critic, and I think I’ll let him describe what exactly we’ll be doing there.

J: Arriving drunk and eating bugs.

S: Yes, Skun does have a singular distinction, in that it is the French-fried spider capital of the world. Many Cambodians travel to the town for a taste of the region’s specialty. A little research into tourism in Skun reveals few attractions save for its trademark delicacy.
Jason, can you give me an approximation of how many people in the United States you expressed excitement to about eating bugs? Just an estimate.

J: It’s true that in my zeal for travel, I told many people—dozens? A score, maybe?—that I was jazzed to eat bugs.

S: How many bugs have you eaten since arriving a month ago?

J: You are tricking me and backing me into a corner. (Sigh.) I have eaten no bugs.

S: What makes you most nervous about eating the bugs?

J: I think it’s that they’re fucking bugs, man. We saw some at a roadside stand, and they had crickets, which I’m sure taste like the crunchy stuff at the bottom of a French fry basket, but they still look like crickets, which is a bit of a hurdle. And the tarantulas, they make daddy long-legs look like tiny little punks.

S: Are you more nervous about the cricket or the tarantula? Because you will try both today. Am I correct in thinking that?

J: Yes, I have committed myself to trying both. It’s the tarantula that makes me nervous. Maybe we should have done this afterwards. I’m starting to get jittery. Yeah, I guess it’s mostly about size with the spider. But there’s also that big ol’ abdomen. What’s that going to taste like? Like the inside of a fire-roasted marshmallow? Will there be a texture issue? That’s my main concern.

S: In case you’re feeling too sorry for Jason right now, we have come up with a plan to make him slightly less nervous. Would you like to tell our viewers what time it is?

J: Almost ten in the morning.

S: And how many beers have you consumed?

J: Approximately two and a half in the past forty minutes.

S: Would you like to describe for us how you’re feeling?

J: Mostly sleepy. It’s been a while since I’ve gotten drunk in the morning. Though there is a measure of collegiate nostalgia to it. Mostly I’m just focusing on what I need to do.

S: Do you know anything about the nutritional value of bugs?

J: I imagine there’s protein. Some salt and serious fat, too.

S: There is protein, in fact. I read that spiders and crickets have more protein by weight than beef, chicken, pork or lamb. And the cooking kills the venom, so you don’t have to worry about that.
I know you’re just doing a straight sampling today, but can you give us an idea of what might go well with the bugs? Condiments? Wine pairings?

J: Wine would definitely be something red. A little spicy. A shiraz, perhaps. And they’d probably go well with other Cambodian delicacies that we’ve seen, like barbequed entrails and pork faces and deep-fried chickadees.

S: Is there anyone to whom you’d like to feed a bug?

J: Hmm. I hesitate to answer that since I don’t know what it will be like. If it’s exciting and new then it will inspire me to feed it to someone different than if it’s vile and revolting. So given that, it could be anyone on the spectrum from my brother Andrew to Rupert Murdoch.

S: How are you doing on your third beer?

J: You know, it’s Anchor Smooth, man. Goes down easy.

ROLL FOOTAGE OF BUG CONSUMPTION >>>

S: Alright, we are back with Jason Leahey, on the other side of the spider, as it were. Can you describe what you’re doing right now?

J: Smelling my fingers. What do they smell like to you?

S: Familiar, actually. Like salad dressing, maybe?

J: I would not have said salad dressing.

S: Can you tell us how you’re feeling right now?

J: I’m feeling pretty good. I feel like I climbed a mountain. I don’t know if I’ll be going back to that mountain, but still.

S: So you won’t be eating bugs again any time soon?

J: No. And I’m a little disappointed in myself. There’s a part of me that was hoping that I would love it—that I’d just be walking down the street tossing crickets into my open mouth on the way to the malt shop to have a shake with my baby in between cricket munchings. But that’s not how it was.

S: Can you give us a rundown on the differences between cricket and spider?

J: Cricket—you had to pull off just one leg because it had like, little harpoons on it.

S: I think those are the legs that they make the singing noises with.

J: So I just ate a musician? Bummer.

S: Go on.

J: The crickets, you just put them in head-eye-goobery-antenna-end first. And there wasn’t a lot there. They tasted vaguely fishy. And greasy, very greasy. But that tarantula, you bite into one of those legs, and you’re just chewing, chewing, chewing. Not really breaking it down, but just beating it into tiny pieces. But the abdomen—that was pretty fucking gross. It looked a little like the inside of a moldy old samosa. It was just mushy and mealy and fishy-tasting.

S: It looked like the inside of a fig to me. It didn’t taste like a fig?

J: Not remotely. It was just gross. The Spider King will hate me. Forgive me, Spider Father, for my trespasses.

S: Okay, I think that’s enough for today. Thank you, Jason, for taking us on this culinary ride to Skun. Today’s episode has been brought to you by Anchor Beer.

J: Goes down smooth.

Insect Consulting, Inc.

2008-10-07T21:39:00.000-07:00

TO: American mosquitoes
RE: Poor job performance

I regret being the bearer of bad news, but I feel you have a major problem to confront. It has come to my attention that the American mosquito industry has approached a point of crisis.

During the years of my childhood, you seemed to be enjoying a period of great prosperity. Your superior organizational skills and efficiency were the stuff of neighborhood lore, and I fastidiously avoided any area of stagnant water that might serve as your headquarters. But let us face the facts: in recent years your performance has been slipping. Yes, there was a brief surge of business during the West Nile scare, but even during those heady days, people were more grossed out by the dead birds everywhere than they were frightened of you, and it did nothing to add to that year’s bottom line.

If the situation does not improve immediately, you risk a massive and hostile takeover by foreign competitors. I have recently been touring the Cambodian mosquito industry, for instance, and I feel that they are poised for dominance of the market. Every aspect of their infrastructure is superior: biologic construction, breeding grounds, stealth tactics, etc. They seem to be drawing more liters of blood per capita than ever before.

Their brand image is superb. Humans, particularly the non-native ones, fear the trademark welts, notable for their size, duration, and peculiar bruising factor. The mortal fear of malaria and the unpreventable dengue fever only serves to add to brand recognition and visibility. There are observable results in the wild swatting behavior of tourists and expats, their carrying of smoking mosquito coils from room to room like sacred talismans, their sudden fits of tearing at their own flesh in the middle of the night. It is rare that the number of bites on my legs at any given time dips below fifteen. When it comes to Cambodian mosquitoes, we are simply talking about a better, more advanced product.

And they are achieving this level of production in a market saturated with obstacles. When was the last time American mosquitoes had to deal with mosquito nets? We’re talking about thirty-five, forty, even fifty percent DEET repellents flying off the shelves, here, all of which does little to affect Cambodian mosquito morale or effectiveness. And you guys are being taken down by citronella candles and a product named Skin So Soft? Please.

So it should come as no surprise that layoffs are imminent. If you don’t want to see American mosquito jobs being lost to foreigners, drastic measures must be taken quickly. It may be time to invest extensively in new egg production or training facilities or at least to move into the Lyme disease sector long dominated by the ticks. The ball is in your court, and the Cambodian mosquitoes are waiting for your next move.

Sincerely,
Shannon Dunlap

Re: American Meltdown

2008-10-04T05:14:00.000-07:00

From: writersblok@hotmail.com
To: BigDaddyWeeze@XXXXX.com

Brother Reece,

Your summation of the American Meltdown was the most succinct, clear, and blackly poetic explanation of the thing I’ve heard or read. I don’t really understand the default swaps you described even though I read that part three times, but I’ve saved the email for further study. Study of this con is good because to dwell on it with any part of my body other than the head is just too much. Shannon and I went to a chat with three Buddhist monks this evening (the county is almost entirely Theraveda Buddhist). On one end was a dude about my age who spoke excellent English and had a lot of carefully considered things to say, and on the other end was a teenager in glasses who was was so enthusiastic he just couldn’t stop himself from talking, even when the performance troupe of landmine victims was ready to begin in the garden downstairs. (That reads like a joke but it’s not; people here are all sorts of mangled and some of them are now musicians or other sorts of performer.) In the middle was a guy approaching forty-something who at one point pulled a cellphone from beneath his robe to check a text message. The super sharp guy told us how the Latin roots of ‘philosophy’ mean ‘love’ and ‘wisdom.’ The eager beaver told us that the Latin root of ‘religion’ means “reverence for or pondering of God.” The somewhat bored middleman talked about the relationship between intention and action.

And that put some sort of understanding and cohesion to the words I was laying down to you earlier in the day. We were in this terrible Western café for their wireless access and they were playing the Beatles’ collection of number one songs. ‘Let It Be’ came on at about the time I realized there was a muted TV on the wall above us. Along with OJ’s conviction and the sale of $6 billion in weapons to Taiwan, I learned that the New & Improved Bailout Plan has passed both chambers. It made me want to heave or break something or maybe curl up and pretend to snooze. I was having a hard time loving because I was finding it a bit too much to forgive lack of wisdom.

But what are we to do? I love ‘Let It Be’ for its remarkable ability to give me hope and a modicum of peace that, if I can keep on top of things, can last long after its three minutes have passed. Simplicity, brevity, and the brilliance to acknowledge and build upon the forms and sentiments that have worked for centuries. And though it did give me a moment of peace this morning, I can’t feel it as a lesson to live by at the moment. Part of me wants to take those bankers and traders and idiot homebuyers and all the deregulation Republicans and flog them in the street. We have to raise a ruckus until America’s backs – so broad and multitudinous, as you said – are respected and treated as more than frames from which we hang our bellies and our grabbing, snatching, buying eating directionless aimless arms. Remind me later to bitch to you about the peculiar indecencies of Boomer-specific self-centeredness and apathy. The Tyranny of the Foolish. The Reign of the Overgrown Children. I am livid and impotent. Surely the monks would wag their fingers at my lack of Peace of Mind.

And yet McCartney’s melody and repetition and Harrison’s clean and honest guitar, a choir chained down on Earth. Striking that balance between being a reed bending in the wind and throwing down a little regulation and a slap or two to those who need it, that’s a hard trick. Maybe it is Life Skills 101. For five or six years no I’ve been promising to run to Martinsburg when the system collapses, and now that it’s come I find myself having fled even further than West Virginia. I’m 10,000 miles from you and now scared to be so far from Home.

The papers and tube talk about the greed of a few in Wall Street and Washington but we know that it’s more than a few. When you and I were kids, parents bought school clothes at the thrift store because they knew we’d outgrown them in six months. People ate dinner at home and saved long and thought hard before buying a (single) TV. Sometime in the past fifteen years or so most everybody started buying whatever the hell they wanted and charging it to plastic. Shopping for its own self is a pastime? Please. Those bankers and traders and bureaucrats are still villains, but they’re villains of our particular time and moral compass. We have abandoned any respect for philosophy, for the cultivation of love and wisdom. And we have certainly replaced any real respect for any idea of God or gods with a faith in the Might Makes Right of the Market. Our intentions? Uhhh, just floatin along and blinkin at the sun, man; got myself a sweet new ride and two weeks this summer in the Caribbean. Shannon and I are in Siem Reap at the moment, Cambodia’s boom town as the ancient temples of Angkor are hacked out of the jungle and the Tourism Money Train picks up ever more speed. People have flocked in from the provinces to make better lives for themselves. They want what we have and can use what we have to get it. Or so they think. There are blocks and blocks of hotels under construction. Nobody’s told these guys that the world owed more money than it has…

Did you know that every country has a code for the phone? France is 33, Cambodia is 085, etc. Know America’s code? One. That’s it. We are not just omnipresent culturally, we are woven through the hardware of World Society. We invented the phone, the airplane, the pre-packed sub division, the pre-packaged tour to the Third World. There’s a responsibility in that.

The Cellphone Monk said something else: that Cambodia has people who are Buddhist by tradition and those who are Buddhist by understanding. Those rooted in tradition, the familiar rituals of family life, bring lotus flowers to the statues of Buddha and ask for winning lottery numbers. Those who work to understand work toward bringing themselves (and others, by default) a bit of peace and dignity. We need to understand our power and responsibility and I’m tired of feeling like I’m condescending when I think that way. America turning back to a time when it thought before it bought isn’t a bad thing. I love America, but like Leonard Cohen (also a Buddhist, now that I think about it) said, “Love is not a victory march.”

Don’t start building your house until I’m home, okay? I’ll work for you for peanuts if you’ll teach me those skills. After ‘Let It Be’ the café played ‘Help’ and ‘Yesterday,’ in that order. Life makes its own Art. On the other side of the glass, Siem Reap kept hustling, oblivious of the tidal wave, working for that American tourist dollar.

Give my best to Emily and a kiss on the head to the boys.

Much love,
Jay

Kinds of Rain

2008-09-26T21:30:00.000-07:00

Dear Grandma,

You told me once that when you watch the evening news, you always check the weather in whatever place I happen to be living. It’s a connection—a way of looking out for me. You did this when I lived in Chicago, you did this when I lived in New York. You got nervous about any inclement weather I might have to face. And now I have moved to a point beyond the edge of the weather map, which I know has only amplified your worries. So here is a special meteorological report, just for you.

I arrived in Cambodia near the end of the rainy season. How can I explain the rain here? In the mornings it comes down in long silver strands, drawing straight lines from the sky to the ground. Even in this crowded, chaotic city, that kind of rain seems to bring a hush, sort of like the muffling quality of Midwestern snow, and it can be calm and pretty—a rain painting. Or sometimes, in the middle of the day, a spattering of heavy raindrops will appear out of nowhere. The sky directly above will be clear and sunny, but fat blobs of water will splash onto my shoulders with the weight of coins. But in the late afternoon or evening, thunder booms in the distance and the rain comes down like watery missiles being fired into the ground. And then the wind picks up, creating enormous buffeted spheres of air and water droplets that roll through the streets like they’re chasing someone.

Two days ago, I witnessed my first flash flood. While Jason and I were walking to a museum, the rainclouds seemed to tip over all at once, drenching everything in an instant. In the shelter of a coffee shop, we licked ice cream cones and watched the tuk-tuk drivers, the men who own the little motorized taxi carts, throw on ponchos the colors of spring flowers and snap covers onto their vehicles. The gutters were full of turbulent currents when we climbed into one of the tuk-tuks; the streets had turned into canals just a few minutes later. The driver stopped and pointed at the block with the museum—the road had become an impromptu swimming pool for the neighborhood kids, who were unfazed by the still-torrential rain. “Back?” the driver asked us. “Go back?” That was when we made the questionable decision to climb onto the barely-there sidewalk and go on foot instead.

It was impossible not to think of all the stories you’ve told me about the floods on the Ohio: how you’d have to move all the furniture upstairs and then move it through the windows onto boats when the water reached the second floor; how it would be weeks or months until you could move back in and your father would have to keep the water moving through the house with brooms so that a knee-deep layer of mud didn’t collect; how the wooden floors warped under all that water until every board looked like a crumpled length of ribbon.

So I thought that, surely, this rain would shut Phnom Penh down for hours or even days. We gave up on walking to the museum—the entrance was at the end of a long swirling river. I had to close my eyes while we waded across the street, so I did not have to look at the paper cups and dead leaves and dog poop floating past my ankles. We fled to a nearby restaurant where I could wash my feet in the sink of the restroom, and as I did, I wondered how I would ever make it back to the apartment. So I found it curious that none of the native city-dwellers seemed to be treating the situation as a disaster. Hundreds of motorbikes and cars went about their usual business, plowing through the streets and leaving great rooster-tails of water in their wake. In the bars and restaurants, people were relaxing and laughing and beginning to order their after-work drinks. In minutes the rain had stopped; in an hour the floodwaters had disappeared, leaving behind a city that looked like it had received no more than a light shower. The rain here, just like lots of other things in Cambodia, works in mysterious ways, and I don’t pretend to understand it yet.

Whenever I talk to you on the phone, we speak of the weather, the droughts and storms in Felicity and wherever I am. But this is not because we are making mindless chitchat the way other people use weather talk. It is because you, more than anyone else I know, understand the importance of weather, the power of it. Tornadoes have been known to rip through entire communities just up the road from you, lightning now kills more people each year in Cambodia than landmines do—when you ask me how the weather is, I know it is not as simple a question as it seems.

So let me add, to offset this talk of storms, that there is lots of weather that happens between these brief spells of rain. The clouds disappear as soon as you turn your back. And if you’re lucky, there’s a dry period just as the sun gets low in the sky. It’s good to sit on the balcony when there’s a Golden Hour, that time of day that photographers love, when the angle of light makes everything soften and glow. The old buildings, the rusted gates, the teeming streets—suddenly they all look inviting and almost familiar. I sit and watch the world go by, and I think of you on your porch, and I hope that the sun is on its way to make an evening just like this one, for you, on the other side of the world.

Love always,
Shannon

Re: The Art of Walking

2008-09-20T04:09:00.000-07:00

From: writersblok@hotmail.com
To: acevans11@XXXXX.com

Dear T,

This place is a photographer’s dream. Every day I step out with my camera and every night I’ve taken maybe four pictures. There’s just too much; putting a lens between yourself and the city is like putting horse blinders on. This is a 360° place and nowhere is that more apparent than in the street. Crossing the intersections of Phnom Penh is the true making of life into art. There are precious few stoplights and they are only occasionally obeyed; neither the right nor left side of the street is especially reserved for the flow of traffic. Thousands of motorbikes dart every which way, every inch of empty space a potential new current. Neaveau riche Land Cruisers, chugging whales, plow through so many fish, so many expendable, unprecious lives. Your form and the rhythm of your steps keep you alive to the next curb.

The streets are newly paved, but their quality conjures a recent past of pig-mud ruts, the medieval Europe of school books where waste buckets are tipped from second story windows. Gleaming hotels and condos ringed in razor wire have sprouted every few blocks and they loom like fresh pink seashells above slums where families of six live in tin-roofed shacks the size of a hotel bathroom. The apartment we’re crashing in is of the same kind, though Kate tells me it does not count as wealthy when compared to the homes of long-term expats, those who have turned UN funding into paychecks while in the service of bringing Cambodia into the Global Community. “Cambodia is a dream because even if you’re poor, you’re not that poor,” Kate says, pointing from the balcony toward the hovels and tents and off down the muddy alley toward the moon, the whole city beneath her index finger. I follow the arc she draws and I hope it – or some other yet-discovered comfort – is sufficient for me to feel justified in my lifestyle here. But I could never consider myself poor.

Maybe I should not come to feel justified in my lifestyle here. Lifestyle, what a word. Doesn’t situating our days and nights in this, that, or the other fashion insult us? That’s rhetorical; I know your answer. But the seduction of a justified expat life is so compelling it is scary. Everything is so inexpensive and damn near everyone is so genuinely nice. I’ve never been to a friendlier place nor met a friendlier people. I’ve called “sustai” (hello) to hundreds of people and only two or three haven’t smiled and returned the same. It defies imagination how people so brutalized have remained so…I want to say ‘sweet.’ Their smiles could make it so second-nature to just accept the pleasures of buying whatever I want, being serviced whenever I want. For instance, Kate has a housekeeper who comes three times a week. She’s not a good housekeeper, but that’s beside the point. I don’t want a fucking housekeeper, no matter how affordable. I want to take care of my own mess. But then you get to thinking, “well, it is providing income to someone who needs work, Jay. Maybe you should think of it as charity.” I’m figuring I’ll choose a different method of giving charity, but you get my point. The social paradigm is arranged such that there is no easy way to Do the Right Thing.

I’m not even sure what the Right Thing is anyway. Take those chi-chi condos and apartments. I’ve learned that Kate’s place is down the street from Tuol Sleng, the infamous torture house of the Khmer Rouge. No Khmer in his right mind wants to live so close to such a thing, so only those who have no choice and we Westerners who don’t know better do so. Other neighborhoods in the city have less Dark Ages poverty in them. You’re crossing the street like a game of Frogger, and you realize a lot of those motos are new. There are a good number of hip teenagers with complicated haircuts zipping about come four o’clock, some plugged up with iPod earphones. And the SUVs are fucking monstrous. Yesterday, I saw a Lexus (with, inexplicably, a metal plate reading Toyota riveted to the flank) larger than any car or truck I’ve ever seen, no lie. Expats tell me that there is a growing middle class, that a middle class will emerge in the next generation or two, this, that, or the other. And middle classes are essential; they keep money in-house and have the time and finances to demand a little respect for a people now and then. So then I guess I shouldn’t talk trash on the Pink Palaces and Kate’s cleaning lady. But still, those gas-chugging dinosaurs. Those bitches aren’t sustainable tools of a strong middle class. They are the tools of a take-the-money-and-run class, the kind of Golden Umbrella-ed Thieves who have about tipped our economy off the ledge. They’ve tricked America into these fleeting toys and we, with the benefit of widespread education, haven’t known better. What kind of outcome can be expected from a beat-down people just getting a glimpse of The Good Life? It’s worth noting that the only modern and shiny new buildings here besides our Dreamland apartments and the occasional (only occasional) government building are gas stations and huge car dealerships. The dealerships seem to be mostly Japanese, but the spirit and style are All-American, these unwieldy things trying like beached whales to double-park, the man inside talking on a cell phone while the motos stack up behind like blood cells backing-up in a clogged artery. Cell phones, they’re ubiquitous. You can be in the full-on ‘hood and you’ll still see multiple – multiple! – shacks decked out in bright new phones for sale, the tell-tale yellow beach umbrella out front like a Golden Arches. And everyone but the monks and those women who still wear Khmer pajamas to the market wear western clothes. To paraphrase Obama, “America: the world’s last best hope…,”for all the stuff you need. We’re everywhere, dude. I think I will never find a place we aren’t. Maybe the Mongolian steppes, in tents where we burn buffalo chips for heat.

But I’m being a bitch; I’m just squawking because I can’t find Jason’s Perfect World where everybody values exactly what I do. Cell phones and obscene traffic are better than genocide and colonial subjugation, right? They’re good, these Western toys, even though they’ve brought along the insidious side of Global Capitalism too: government officials want the dough so they lease public land to this Chinese firm or that Russian mob for 200 years; homes are in the way of turning the central lake into a mall, so tenants are evicted at Army gun point. Etcetera, etcetera, the collateral damage of Progress, the usual Growing Pains.

As I get more comfortable with crossing the road without a crash helmet, I’ve noticed that the locals have it down to an instinct, a kind of Zen Glide that looks effortless. I think they must be so hyper aware as to be beyond awareness: sight, analysis, muscle movement so in-synch they’re simultaneous. You need to know the situation so stone-cold that you are both aware and oblivious. You need to dance across the street and give in to the flow around you too. You need to look without looking. Like you do passing the babies begging in the dirt, like you do buying that SUV whale and trying to park it.

A’ight, that’s enough of that. Hope ya’ll are settling in to Brooklyn life.

Peace,
J

What I Look Like Here

2008-09-17T04:45:00.000-07:00

Dear Mignon,

Even after twenty hours on a plane, flying away from you, there are few people I can imagine in more vivid detail. In high school, I thought it was because we looked so completely different—your tall glossy goldenness apparent even when we were awkward adolescents. As a teenager, it was both a torment and a comfort to be the inconspicuous one, to take shelter behind you and know that watching eyes were directed elsewhere. Ever since, I have had a gift for vanishing, for flattening myself against the backdrop. In Cambodia, it is different.

I have become suddenly, glaringly visible. I am aware of things I never thought about in New York: my height, my weight, my clothes. There, I could have worn a Halloween costume and marched through the park playing an accordion and would have attracted only a passing interest. You know this as well as I do—it is a city in which you have to work to be noticed.

But on my first full day in Phnom Penh, I stepped around the corner to the market and into a cultural pothole. There are rules to how one dresses to buy dragonfruit. How could I have known that Kate, in her spangled leggings and movie star sunglasses, was within the boundaries of decorum, but I, in a plain tank top and shorts with my pale knees exposed, was not? I’m not sure why I didn’t ask her before I left the house instead of after, when I could see all over her face that no, it was not okay. “Everyone was looking at you,” Jason said, and I am such an oaf that I didn’t even notice.

He is my partner here, more clearly my other half than ever, out of both love and necessity. But together we are otherness squared, the combination of us drawing infinitely more eyes. Two days ago, at a waterfall outside of Sihanoukville, a group of giggling little boys stuffed wads of pink toilet paper up their noses and made faces at us, posing spontaneously and eagerly when we pulled out a camera. But as they continued to trail us, watching with rapt attention as we walked, as we waded into the stream, as we clumsily put on our lace-up shoes, there was no ambivalence about who was the object, about who really belonged in front of the lens.

Even when we are separated, Jason tells me more about what I look like than the mirror does. On the other side of a window at a roadside bus station in rural Thailand, he seemed the center of a complex diorama—the only non-native, all pale skin and hiking boots, staring dumbfounded at the steaming pots of unidentifiable food. Slumped in the bus seat, an undetected observer, I reflexively thought, “God help us.”

Don’t misunderstand. I am not some poor little white girl; I chose to come here knowing that I would be a foreigner, an outsider. This is their country, not mine, and they have every right to notice the strangers among them. I certainly notice the smattering of other white people and find myself disliking them—for their loudness, for their rotundity, for their ugly socks and tourists’ t-shirts. Given this, I find it remarkable that no one here seems to shower me with the same disdain that I feel for the other foreigners; it is rare that a Khmer person looks at me with anything besides a mixture of kindness and curiosity.

Even so, that curiosity is new to me. I find myself staring at the ground sometimes as I walk, a version of peek-a-boo in which I convince myself that if I’m not looking at anything, no one is looking at me. But we learn as infants that we don’t disappear when we close our eyes. These anonymous watchers, what are they seeing? What are they thinking? And how have you managed to live your whole life under everyone else’s gaze?

The last time you visited me in New York, the waitress at the pancake house asked us if we were sisters and insisted that we looked so much alike, which we found strange and laughable. Here, they would probably say the same thing, our similarities much more salient in these surroundings than our differences. But maybe there is more to it than that. What could the waitress see, as we sat there sipping our coffee? Maybe it is a little like spotting two people in love, the way it is visible in their faces, on their bodies. Maybe that waitress could tell how we grew up together, how infrequently we get to see each other now, how dear you are to me, and somehow all of that translated in her brain to one fact—that we looked just the same.

And if that is true, I wonder what it means for the way I look at Cambodia and for the way it looks back. Maybe there will come a moment when this place and I will develop enough fondness for each other that we’ll take a long hard look at each other and find nothing strange there at all.

With much love,
S

Dear Home,

2008-09-09T03:51:00.000-07:00

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We are flying over the Bering Strait, a slow curve Southwest and headed toward the east coast of Siberia. The map in the airline mag shows the crags and borders of a vast expanse of dirty white and pale aquamarine, the colors for cold and empty. The rest of the world is spread down the page below in a patchwork of desert tan and arid corn and a dozen shades of fertile, breathing green. Outside the window, the real world of cold and dirty Siberia first shows through gaps in the clouds, wispy itself somehow, the physical embodiment of Nothing, land as unsubstantial as Emptiness. And then the plane continues its curve, tracked on the Hallmark-sized screen on the back of the seat in front of me, over a band of clouds as artfully arced as a mountain range and then the mountains themselves are below. The map labels them as the northern tip of the Kamchatka Penninsula, the place where the Shirshov Ridge rises out of the Bering Sea onto land. Names that have no meaning for me. Even from this height they are huge and everywhere and empty of all life. Wasteland, like the winds have stripped everything but the endless endless maze of impenetrable rock. Nothing could live there. I have never seen anything no natural be so antithetical to Life. It is what God made when It felt as hard and merciless as a factory spitting out steel for bayonets. It is the end of the East.

More of a slow curve, down through clouds, and we’re above a green amoeba of islands, splotches of something I won’t ever know or feel, still devoid of any signs of human endeavor, settlement, presence. Hard-boned animals, at least, could live there. But not even an insect could know those Shirshov mountains, those Dostoyevsky, salt-mine death mountains….

We are going backward, the Westward Ho! of American migration marching so far Shannon and I have come back to the beginning. The unknown place from where the World’s Tribes first clawed out of Oblivion, broke apart and reformed and destroyed and made anew and fanned out so far that we’ll never remember where we first knew what we were. What awaits? Lands of Byzantium, Orthodox droning, Killing Fields and lush jungle and empty beaches and spices I’ve never imagined…languages I’ll never understand, more tribes I’ve never heard of. The shape of Earth as it has been carved by Nature and History and the forever rising upward and falling back of hundreds of thousands of generations of my people: Humankind, the most wondrous and terrifying creature to exist on this most bedazzling and beautiful of planets. The earth spins clockwise, we fly counterclockwise, toward the New Adventure in a lifetime of them. May we have them always until we are gone.

Love,
Jason