Wet Season: What I Look Like Here
Dear Mignon,
Even after twenty hours on a plane, flying away from you, there are few people I can imagine in more vivid detail. Perhaps it is because we have always looked so completely different. As a teenager, it was both a torment and a comfort to be the inconspicuous one, to take shelter behind your glossy goldenness 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 much 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 anyone, 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 and find nothing strange there at all.
With much love,
S
Cool Season: Native Tongue
Dear Mme. Dahlberg,
I do not want 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 merely modest when I say that I came out of four years of French class 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 year, 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 telling 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. 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
Hot Season: Tea and Indifference
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, I still will have lived a more comfortable life than ninety-nine percent 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 paper cut 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 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 paper cut 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
Wet Season: Learning to Fly
Dear Dad,
Perhaps you have wondered why I have not written to you sooner. But actually, I have been writing this letter 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 shocked, 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 cyclists 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. But there was something else there, too, something about perseverance and propensity for change, something that reminded me of you and of many of the people I have come to know here in Siem Reap.
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
Shannon Dunlap is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. While living in Cambodia, she was a regular columnist for The Phnom Penh Post and created the blog Forwarding Addresses (www.forwardingaddresses.blogspot.com) with Jason Leahey. They now edit the blog PitchKnives & ButterForks (www.pitchknives.com), telling stories of food from the seed to the platter. Shannon currently lives in Brooklyn and is working on a novel for young adults.