[this photo of Stung Treng should have been posted earlier, but I got a bit confused this morning]

Little girl was sitting on the mini bus and ready to go, like everybody else. Taken off, she tried to get on again. I imagine she does this several times a day.

Back to Cambodia!

[border checkpoint]

Buy, Sell, Beg, Eat, Drink, Look

As published at SubStack, 3/23/23:

[writing station inside Stung Treng Market, 3/23/23]

This morning, I bought an $18 ticket for Don Det, Laos, so this is my last full day in Cambodia. Writing this, I’m sitting in a tiny cafe owned by a Khmer Krom, meaning she’s a Cambodian from southern Vietnam.

Most Khmer Kroms have relocated to Cambodia proper. Here, they don’t have to suffer the condescension, if not worse, from Vietnamese, but there’s another reason, I suspect. Arriving from more competitive Vietnam, they have an edge over laid back locals. Vietnam has 100 million people, compared to Cambodia’s 17. That explains a lot.

Arriving in 2005, the cafe’s owner and her husband were worse than broke. It took them four years to pay off the debts incurred to move here from Trà Vinh, 315 miles away. Back then, it took more than a day to reach this forlorn town. Roads were horrible, and rivers and streams were often crossed by ferries, which meant much waiting.

At first, she worked in a cafe while her husband did construction. At eight-years-old, her daughter became a dishwasher in the same cafe. Too short to reach the sink, the scrawny girl had to stand on a plastic stool.

Now, the same girl owns a jewelry store with her husband. Her dad is a contractor with more than 20 employees working several sites at once. Her brother got a engineering degree in Saigon, but after working there without saving anything, has moved back to Stung Treng.

I met this young man. Divorced just a week ago, he was morose. His wife, also a Khmer Krom, didn’t care to come here, so his son is a country away.

The cafe’s owner, let’s call her Nga, is actually a quarter Chinese and a quarter Vietnamese. Putting on some Khmer music, she told me, “At home we listen to Vietnamese music, but if we do that here, they’ll yell at us!”

They are her fellow merchants in the central market. Jammed with shops, this section is dominated by jewelers selling mostly gold plated junk to villagers who need to bling up for special occasions.

Nga, “If you throw these gold pieces on the ground in Saigon, people wouldn’t even pick them up!” Snarling “gold,” her eyes turn fierce. In her early 60’s, she has tattooed eyebrows and a small mouth that often erupts into hearty he he laughs.

When a thin Vietnamese approached to buy a 50 cent cup with sugar, Nga shouted, “So you are divorced?!”

“Yes, I’m divorced.”

“How many months?”

“Almost a year.”

“Why don’t you become my daughter-in-law. My son just got divorced.”

Barely smiling, the young woman walked away.

To me, Nga explained, “I’ve known her since she’s this small.” Then, “She got married in Vietnam.”

“Just like your son.”

“Exactly!”

So much for the stable Asian family. The hairdresser across from Nga is also divorced, so must raise two kids alone. Yesterday, she was also evicted from her space because, her landlady claimed, she was stinking it up with chemicals.

Seeing her sobbing, Nga decided to rent half of her cafe to this hairdresser. As I type, she’s standing on a plastic chair to put up glass shelves. The mirrors are installed. On casually slapped up red wallpaper are cartoon pigs, elephants, butterflies and hearts. Though she’ll have a new beauty salon in a few hours, there’s no income today. 

[Stung Treng Market, 3/23/23]

Two days ago, Nga showed me a swollen ankle, “I stand so much.”

“You can’t take days off.”

“Sometimes I must, but only to visit Vietnam.”

Mostly for death anniversaries, weddings and funerals, and usually for no longer than two days, and sometimes just a few hours. Retaining her Vietnamese citizenship, she has built a nice house there for her parents, and that’s where she’ll retire, in perhaps ten years.

“You can’t do it sooner?”

“No. I must save some more, but when I’m done, I’ll just enjoy myself. I’ll go to temples!”

Since Nga has a girl employee, I ask Nga why she doesn’t let this girl take over for a stretch, so Nga can rest or stay longer in Vietnam. Her answer, I already anticipated, “If I’m absent for more than a few days, everything is ruined. I’ll lose all my customers.”

“Does she steal?”

“Even your own children steal!” she chuckles.

“If you ask this girl to do anything, you have to do it very nicely,” Nga adds. “If not, she’ll talk back! Sometimes, she just disappears. She comes back when she comes back.”

In Windhoek, Namibia, the cleaner at my gueshouse could sometimes be seen sleeping on the floor in the storeroom. “She sleeps when she feels like it,” my Indian landlord explained.

When France ruled Indochina, they brought many Vietnamese into Laos and Cambodia. The English imported millions of Indians to Africa. If a boss doesn’t know whom to hire, he won’t be a boss for long. Unlike the American government and military, sensible bosses pick the best men.

In Stung Treng, Nga also has a beautiful house, with high ceilings and heavy wooden furniture. She and her husband own a Lexus SUV, paid with $33,000 cash. Her jeweler daughter boasts the same model.

In Phnom Penh, I had a room within sight of its Central Market. In Stung Treng, I’m half a block from where most of its merchants, mostly tiny, gather.

Unlike in the West, small businesses thrive across Southeast Asia. This isn’t just good for people’s pockets, but their souls, and it gives these communities their distinctive liveliness. Across England and Wales in 2022, 400 pubs had to shut down.

Even if I wasn’t a writer, I would still be nourished and stimulated by this vivacious market. Plus, it’s reassuring to be surrounded by your own kind. In Europe, Africa or the Middle East, I was equally cheered in similar settings. In the US, they don’t exist.

In Sidon’s Old Souk, I gladly got lost. In the shadow of Norwich’s Norman castle, I bravely ate mushy peas, surrounded by fellow sufferers. Even after two decades, I still remember that cranky seller of tripes near Florence’s leather market. Too pretty for her job, she had reasons to be pissed. “Eat it with your hand!” she snapped at a customer who had dropped his plastic fork.

Like all of us, or the world itself, she rues what could have been.

So where are we? There are many who dismiss as hysteria forebodings of global disaster. The war in Ukraine is limited in scope, so OK, Russia may win, with Poland, Romania and Hungary also taking bites from that sacrificed nation. Since most Americans can’t find any of those countries on a map, who cares?

Having pocketed his reward, Zelensky will retire to Forte dei Marmi, Miami or Tel Avi. Flatulent with grafts, Jill, Joe and Hunter can slink back to their tailored hells. A superb actor on par with Obama, Trump buys time for his masters. Yes, folks in East Palestine may sicken and die off, but shit happens. Baseball is returning!

In Southeast Asia, the littlest people will continue to perform their tiniest tasks, day by day, and though some may be malnourished or badly housed, they banter and laugh more than their statistic superiors, for they’re not in solitary confinement, with bullshit for every meal. If your life still has meaning, you can put up with just about anything.

It’s not something you can quantify. You have to be here.

 

[Stung Treng Market, 3/18/23]

[Stung Treng Market, 3/19/23]

[just outside Stung Treng Market, 3/21/23]

[just outside Stung Treng Market, 3/20/23]

Happy World War!

As published at SubStack, 3/21/23:

[Stung Treng, 3/20/23]

In Hanoi’s Old Quarter, there are streets named Hat, Fan, Pen, Cotton, Comb and Coffin, etc. As their names indicate, each sells a particular merchandise, though much less so now, to make room for hotels, restaurants, bars and cafes.

On Comb Street, combs went from wood and ivory to primarily plastic. Elephants are mostly gone, and much of the world is denuded of forests. Soon enough, modern man won’t even have a fig leaf to cover his arrogant prick. Derived from oil, plastic is still plentiful, though. When that runs out, we just won’t comb our hair, the few strands we’ll have left after nuclear radiation. Business on Coffin Street will be jumping, if there’s still a Coffin Street.

All over Vietnam, the habit of bunching similar stores is still common, and I’ve seen that, too, in Cambodia. Last night in Stung Treng, I strolled past a row of barber shops, their lit up interiors exposed to the street. Inside one, a beautiful woman removed an unconscionable amount of earwax from a shameless man, lying there contently with one knee raised. Her fingers on his helix, pina and concha triggered such flashes of fugitive memories, it’s a miracle he didn’t cry out, “Please stop, mommy!”

Inside another, a boy of three sat perfectly still and regally erect, as his smiling mother watched. At the bottom of his cape were red scissors and black combs. At the top, curiously, was a racing flag pattern. Launched into this world at the darkest hour, he’s speeding towards our frightful future.

Much less brave, most boys his age would have cried, for it’s scary to have a cutting instrument constantly waving above your head. With a metallic sound, it permanently severs clumps from your person. Parts of you are now scattered on the unclean floor. What are they doing to me? Buzzing, another sinister device presses against your flesh. There’s nothing sane or natural about any of this.

During America’s Shock and Awe attack against Iraq, a country that had nothing to do with 9/11, there was a boy who lost all four limbs. In the hospital, he asked when would they grow back?

How many millions of children has Uncle Sam so cavalierly dismembered or murdered? What does it matter? Americans are incapable of remembering anything, so it’s easy to move on to the next carnage, all in the name of defending freedom and democracy, of course.

In 2017, I interviewed an Iraqi refugee I met in Scranton, PA. Melissa, not her real name, was having a tough time adapting to a new culture while working in a Dunkin’ Donuts bakery. Becoming Americanized, one of her teen daughters was starting to get in trouble. The poor lady was overwhelmed.

Melissa on America’s invasion, “One day, I stand with my father outside, and American trucks, four! come. We see my brothers come home from fishing. Two, three American soldiers jump from trucks, shoot, tat, tat, tat, tat! They kill my brothers, so we get their bodies, you know. We have a good life, but they break it.”

When this was published at Unz, “Clyde” commented, “If it was just her deranged self mooching off us I could almost let it go. But the USA allowing her to bring in five children to mooch is insane. What happened to her husband? Her story about her brothers that were killed by American soldiers may be true, maybe not, maybe they were combatants.”

“Whoever” remarked that even if the story about the brothers was true, the family would have been compensated, so that’s that. “Chris Mallory” sneered “They should all go back to Iraq where they belong.” Jewish “Bragadocious” was simply gleeful, “Time to make the donuts Melissa.”

If Melissa’s brothers were combatants, they were patriots defending their homeland against righteous psychos from very far away. So cheerfully bloodthirsty, are they even human?

For a century, no country has been involved in more wars than the USA. Often, it’s engaged in several simultaneously, not that its mostly lobotomized citizens care very much. If they’re at the lower end, they’re born to “support the troops,” even if their sons come home in shredded or carbonized chunks from countries they can’t find on maps. If they’re of the investment class, war means opportunities, so it doesn’t matter if America loses, for cash will be aflowin’.

Say war profiteers and people will think of weapon manufacturers, but as long as your acreage isn’t bombed, you can rake it in supplying sugar, bricks, shoes, whores or screws, etc., to support the troops, of course, and the folks left behind, too. Everything will be scarce. On top of what war destroys, production and distribution are also crippled, so here’s your chance to cheddar up!

Since it’s never a bad time to quote Norman Lewis, consider this passage about Havana in 1938:

A comfortable white minority, although less in evidence, were hyper-active with financial manoeuvrings, for everyone now believed that a world war was certain, and the international news, after a previous slump in the sugar market, induced a happy frame of mind. It was accepted that neutral countries everywhere did well out of wars, and the first battles of the conflict to come were being fought on the stock market. The Havana sugar brokers sat up half the night at the Hotel Nacionál drinking to Chamberlain’s failed appeasement at Munich. Already the city was awash with money and with the news of the foreigners buying sugar for stockpiling at record prices. The Diario de la Marina published the first photograph of a happy speculator lighting a cigar with a fifty-dollar bill.

Since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine 13 months ago, neither the US nor Zelensky has shown any interest in negotiating for peace. Having cornered Russia into war, Uncle Sam is determined to spread it.

Since the economic integration of Eurasia makes the US irrelevant, it must sabotage this by waging war against Russia and, soon enough, China, but inside the West itself, there are acts of sabotage that can’t be blamed on Russia. Jewjabs, destruction of small businesses, culling of livestock and kneecapping of farming are all examples of this. The West has been attacked from the inside. If this is news to you, just pop another tranq and send one more check to Democracy Now!

There ought to be an Earnest Hall of Fame, with Amy Goodman and Rochelle Wallensky as the first inductees. Look into their eyes! How can you not trust them?

I’m still in Stung Treng, a remote, backward town in one of the poorest countries on earth, and yet, there are no riots, as in much of France, nor unpayable utility bills, as in much of Europe. It does help that each day is as hot as the last. Khmer women used to be bare-breasted, but don’t dangle that thought in front of yours truly. I hear laughter all the time here. It’s not meaningless.

Yesterday, I wrote to a UK friend to ask if the situation there was as crappy as the news indicated. He responded:

Yeah, it’s pretty awful here. It feels a bit like the tightening of a noose. We’re just ignoring our energy bills, for example, and they’re huge. Unlike in America, they can’t turn off our electric here, no matter what […] I just got an email at work, saying that in the past 12 years, the library budget has been cut by £100 million! Inflation is going through the roof. They’ve got big plans for us, as you know.

My friend works in a library. Of course, they don’t want you to be literate. Slaves with even bits of brains may talk back. When I visited him in Brighton in 2015, we had such a wonderful time listening to a jam session at a local Irish pub, and yes, it was the real article, as in a bar frequented by Irishmen and women.

As with everything that existed before the Great Reset, it feels a bit unreal, if not some goofy fantasy. From the end of the world, I write to you, but it’s not over yet. Soulful singing may erupt again, but first, we must call out the Satanic, for they’re not just soulless, but thoroughly evil.

[Stung Treng, 3/19/23]

[Stung Treng, 3/19/23]

[Stung Treng, 3/17/23]

[Stung Treng, 3/19/23]

Pretty good donuts. I bought two for 74 cents.

As her husband and son wait, a woman buys gold. Like all Orientals, Cambodians trust gold to store their wealth. Since most people in Stung Treng can't afford 24K gold, they settle for 18K, 14K or even 9K, and they prefer to wear it as a necklace, bracelet or even anklet. In tiny Stung Treng, there are at least two dozen stores selling gold jewelry.