The bus from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap took more than eight hours, with roughly three at various stops. Traveling on the ground, I got glimpses of Chey Odam, Skun, Khum Andoung Pou, Kompong Svay, Baray Santuk, Stueng Saen, Stoung, Kampong Kdei and Damdek, etc.
Though their meanings are likely to be banal, foreign place names are extra evocative. Casablanca, for example, just means “white house,” and without Joe Biden, even, and Timbuktu denotes “mother with a large navel” or “place covered by small dunes.”
I was once on a Laotian bus that stopped in Xeno. Of course, Zeno claims you can’t get anywhere because, first, you must reach half that distance, and half of that, ad infinitum. Since each half is progressively smaller, so must you become. By the time you sort of get to Xeno, Laos, you’re just a mycoplasma, or the Coronavirus, so tiny and rare, it needs all of the Jewjewed media to blow it up to mega Holocaust dimension, so this open-ended holocaust can be executed. It is, by far, the greatest crime ever.
The gorgeous Cambodian landscape is liberally marred by plastic trash, as is Laos’ and much of Vietnam’s. Land, sea and air have all been fouled by this inveterately disrespectful species, though, admittedly, we’re damn good at ceremonies, festivals, parades, pageants and concerts! These sly monkeys know how to party, baby!
In Siem Reap for nearly three days, I keep hearing this plaintive and reverential music, with xylophone, oboe, fiddle, gong, a small drum and/or gentle wailing so heartbreaking, I wouldn’t mind dying, like, right now. This goes on from dawn to dusk. At first, I assumed it wafted from some nearby Buddhist temple, and associated it with Muslim prayer calls. This sound must be constant to remind self-infatuated dolts that God, thus death, is not just near, but hovering right over their arduous joy ride. Finally, I learnt this was Cambodian funeral music. Within half a mile of my room, there have been three recent deaths, so I’m always tugged and towed to the beyond.
In Phnom Penh, I paid just $107 for six nights at Hotel Zing. Here, it’s $135 for the same span at Hakhuot Angkor Residence, on Smiling Circuit Street. There’s a solid wooden table just outside my room, where it’s always quiet, except for the heavenly or hellish music and birds chirping. I swear I even heard a parrot.
All rooms face a leafy garden with five slender trunked palmyra palms, the national tree, plus areca palms, banana trees and two dozen other varieties, some with red, pink or orange flowers. This miniature jungle is a lame requiem for the fact Cambodia is being criminally deforested at a tragic pace.
Here and there, cat-sized ladies kneel, their hands clasped. Painted gold, they’re makuta crowned. Two midget elephants flank five steps into a swimming pool, so modest three strokes and you’re at the end, with its greatest depth at just four feet.
I’ve seen no one in this pool but two middle-aged Brits, who appear to be long-term residents. They’re here singly. Yesterday, they talked about eating options and world politics, with both agreeing Australia has gone off the deep end.
Lady, “Did you see what the cops did to that 64-year-old lady? They punched her!” Then, “Yesterday, I saw on YouTube Xi Jinping with Justin Trudeau. Xi said that conversation between us was private, so why did you leak it to the media?! You just don’t do that! As Trudeau was going, “Bleh, bleh, bleh,” Xi just walked away. You can tell Xi can’t stand this Justin Trudeau. He humiliated him, he did.”
Hakhuot Angkor is a 13-minute walk from garish, loud and basically deracinated Pub Street. Although there’s a bunch of intriguing restaurants near there, including Hela Greek Kitchen and some Mexican joints, I won’t likely head that way again.
As for Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom, I haven’t been there. Again, I’m arrested by the most banal and localized. If only I had more time to just roam around my immediate neighborhood, with its Go Global School, Royal American International School, Only Dog Shop in Cambodia, Chinese tea house, excellent fish amok at Best Mom and two mung bean filled and sugar flecked balls of fried dough for just 24 cents, as sold by a 12-year-old girl outside the hangar-like market on Psar Kraoum.
Among the photos displayed outside Only Dog Shop, I counted six cats, two chickens and a rabbit. Most fascinating, this taxonomy, but why complicate matters? Everything that breathes is dog enough. I’m reminded of a Fischli and Weiss’ sculpture of a vaguely human faced obese quadruped, “Animal.” At least Cambodians don’t think a ladyboy, eunuch or some bearded fatso in a clingy, see-through dress is a woman.
Go Global School advertises “STUDY METHODS FOLLOWING THE 21ST CENTURY PHILOSOPHY.” This is, of course, ludicrous, if not menacing, for what has the 21st century brought us but relentless falsehood leading to the destruction of societies, minds and beauty? Engulfing us all, it has been a deluge of bullshit, and we’re the luckier ones, for we haven’t been murdered.
For Cambodians over 12-years-old, the “vaccination” rate against Covid is 95%. This sounds tragic, but at least they haven’t been subjected to Pfizer or Moderna, but have relied almost exclusively on Sinovac and Sinopharm from China.
That’s bad enough, a restaurant owner told me. In her village, a 25-year-old woman became paralyzed and a 60-year-old man died, soon after “vaccination.” Jabbed twice, she won’t consent to any more. She knows of people who have been “vaccinated” five times!
At her village school, she studied English, but has picked up a lot more running her restaurant.
“We were very poor. I sleep on bed with my mother, my brother. Chickens sleep here,” she laughed.
“How could you sleep next to chickens. They make so much noise.” I meant roosters, of course, but when speaking to foreigners with limited English, you shrink your vocabulary.
“Chickens don’t bother me. I sleep.”
Though her restaurant serves very good Khmer and Western dishes for super cheap, it’s nearly always empty. Covid nonsense kept tourists out, and now the war in Ukraine prevents most from returning, she thought.
“Europeans are broke!” I agreed. “They’re paying too much for electricity,” I pointed to a wall-mounted fan, “and now it’s getting cold over there.” Hugging myself, I shivered. “America, too, is in trouble. There are so many people living on the sidewalks!” I pointed to the dusty, sunbaked sidewalk just outside.
“Really?”
“Yes, in every city, there are all these people sleeping outside. Children, old people, many old people. They live like animals! They go crazy! If you go on YouTube, you can see all these videos of Americans sleeping outside.”
On her phone, I pulled up a video of Kensington, Philadelphia, “Look! That’s my city.”
She was aghast, “This America?”
“There are good neighborhoods, bad neighborhoods, but in every American city, you can see this, and it’s getting worse!” Then, “You see, the Americans who come to Cambodia are the rich ones.” Again, I had to oversimplify. “The poor ones,” I pointed to the Kensington video, “they don’t go anywhere. It costs too much money to come to Cambodia.”
“I know poor American. He comes here, he can’t pay, I give him food.”
“Really?! How old is he?”
“He is old. Maybe 65.”
“How long has he been here?”
“Maybe 20 years.”
“Twenty years! And he has no money!”
“His room, he pays 25 dollars one month.”
“That’s really cheap! Is it clean?”
“Yes, clean. You can get room here for 15, 14.”
“This man, how does he make money? He had money?”
“Boom boom girl. He lose money. He buy boom boom girl motorbike.”
“Now, he’s old.”
“He old. He don’t have money. He lose kilo.”
“And he doesn’t go home…”
“He no money. He like Cambodia.”
“America is too expensive. Here, he pays $25 a month. There, he must pay, I don’t know, at least $700. In the US, he may have to sleep on the sidewalk!”
This man sounded so interesting, I had to meet him, of course, so I parked myself at that eatery, downed cans of Angkor and wrote until he showed up. That very afternoon, he did.
Putting your donations to the best possible use, I bought us many cans of Angkor. Since leaving Vietnam ten days before, I hadn’t had a sustained, complex conversation, so was more than happy. Mentally challenged, we got a bit loud, but no one seemed to mind. In fact, a Canadian lady who showed up couldn’t help but chime in a bit. In Cambodia to build wells, she had to leave very soon, for the heat was killing her.
Super articulate, the man spun me his life story. Let’s call him Max, for he has lived maximally from a minimal beginning in small town Iowa.
His birth father was a heavy machine operator who often fell asleep at the dinner table. When drunk enough, he sometimes beat his wife. From this chaotic household, a three-year-old Max was plucked by the state and adopted by another Scotch Irish couple. Though also blue collar, his adopted father was a contractor, so had money. At age four, Max was asked what he wanted before starting school, so he said the complete set of the Britannica Encyclopedia.
“When I was five, the teacher showed me some picture book, so I said I wasn’t going to read that. I had already read Tolstoy’s War and Peace.”
“No fuckin’ way, man. At five?”
“I sure did.”
“Almost no American household has War and Peace, and your dad was a blue-collar guy!”
“He bought me whatever book I wanted.”
“No fuckin’ kid in the middle of Iowa has ever heard of Tolstoy, man. Come on!”
“But I did.”
“So you’re like a freak, man.”
“When I was in the 11th grade, the CIA paid me a visit.”
“To do what?”
“To recruit me, I was so brilliant.”
“So what did you do?”
“I listened to God and said no.”
“God told you to not join the CIA?”
“He didn’t say so in so many words, but he conveyed to me that I shouldn’t be joining these evil bastards.”
“At that age, how did you know they were evil bastards? That was your chance to get out of Iowa, man! It’s amazing you said no.”
“I listened to God. I’ve always listened to God.” With both hands, Max touched his diaphragm, as if God was located just beneath his lungs. “God made us and he’s always in charge of us. That, you must remember.”
A year later, Max got out of the US on his own terms, by joining the air force. He was stationed at Upper Heyford in late 1975 when the US sent a wave of nuclear armed B-52’s towards Russia, he said, but Armageddon was somehow averted after they were met by Russian MiGs.
Leaving the military, Max returned to the US to marry then divorce three times, before leaving for good, “I’m so happy to be out. It’s one nasty country filled with ignorant people who want to kill you!”
“It is nasty and ignorant, but most Americans aren’t that bad, man. They’re very disdainful and angry, though.”
“They’re very disdainful because they still think they’re number one!”
“And most of them haven’t been anywhere else long enough to make a comparison! They don’t know that as soon as you leave the USA, you feel better!”
“You damn right.”
Joe Bageant also talked about this. That’s why he’d rather live in a Belizean village with erratic electricity and minimal food options.
Max claimed to have visited 200 countries, then admitted he had never been to Africa, South America or the Middle East. He said he had spent 20 years in Russia, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, 18 in Cambodia, five in Vietnam and one in Malaysia, with substantial time also in the Philippines. To visit just 100 other countries must have taken up another year or two, no? Altogether, they add up to at least 45 years spent abroad for this 64-year-old. Though not impossible, it’s highly unlikely, since he had enough time stateside to dump three American wives.
Canadian band The Guess Who, “American woman / Stay away from me / American woman / Mama, let me be // Don’t come hangin’ round my door / I don’t wanna see your face no more / I got more important things to do / Than spend my time growin’ old with you.” Do check out the Butthole Surfers’ hilariously pathetic version.
At his peak, Max made $4,000 a month doing IT work. He lavished money on boom boom girls, Christmas and New Year’s parties, but also charities, he said, for he never forgot God. Having applied for Social Security payments, he should be back on his feet any day now. Coupled with his military pension, he’ll have $2,800 a month, a boffo sum in Cambodia.
On his phone’s homescreen is an image of himself with a Cambodian woman, both in traditional wedding garb. Though he said she was 35-years-old, she looked a decade older. Conversing mostly through Google Translate, they have been together five years, though without any boom boom, oddly enough. She has a 4-year-old daughter he adores.
“I told my girlfriend we’ll live normally, so money can be saved for our daughter. I want to see her become a doctor, and not through some Cambodian university, for they only have witch doctors here! I want to send her to school in Vietnam or Thailand.”
“Shit, man, you’re sure planning far ahead! That’s, like, 20 years from now.”
“Though I may not be here, I want to make sure she’ll be OK in life. That’s what God wants me to do.”
Max shouldn’t count on a woman who disappears as he loses pounds. Though he says she piously sweeps a Buddhist temple for no money, she’s actually an aging bar girl who walks streets, I’ve been told. Their prenuptial photo is merely their heads pasted onto found bodies.
“Do you miss anything about the States, Max?”
“The food. I think about it every day.”
“Like what?”
“Like a really good porterhouse steak with a baked potato.”
“You can’t get it here?”
“No way, man. They don’t really understand beef here, or ovens.”
The Southeast Asian landscape isn’t made for cows, but water buffaloes. Still, there are good beef dishes here, though a decent steak is hard to come by.
I finish this piece at Best Mom, where it’s quiet. Three feet from me is a sand-colored dog, dozing. On the menu are several pasta dishes, as taught to the cook by an aging Italian restauranteur, passing through. Though not the wisest choice, I just ordered “Spaghetti with Bacon and Egg.” In Phnom Penh 4 1/2 years ago, I had the worst chicken fried steak with fried okra imaginable, but since it was available in such an improbable setting, I had to try it.
In Cambodia, people aren’t buzzing about the war in Ukraine or Scrabble variants, but a woman who lost her newborn to one or several giant snakes. Depending on who you ask, they either ate the baby or simply whisked her away, to a better place perhaps. The Khmer Times, though, claims the nutcase wasn’t even pregnant.
I’m only a few miles from what was the greatest city on earth. Cambodians were once kissed by the divine, and they haven’t forgotten. We haven’t always been masked cattle cowed by just about everything.
Here comes my dinner. Not expecting much, I find the tagliatelle to be surprisingly good, with just enough Parmesan and bacon to highlight the pasta. Like Japanese, Italians never overlook noodles.
The cook has only left Cambodia once, on a brief trip to Bangkok. Even Phnom Penh scares her. Though making an entirely unfamiliar dish, she cares enough to infuse it with love.
In Italy, this would only be the first course, followed by some meat dish, perhaps an osso buco, but hey, I’m on some back road in Siem Reap, man!
I’ve been the only customer at Best Mom for 3 1/2 hours, and it’s a Friday. This isn’t right, but that’s the new normal. We’re being strangled.
It is dark. I raise an Angkor to what remains of our sanity.
3 comments:
“The gorgeous Cambodian landscape is liberally marred by plastic trash, as is Laos’ and much of Vietnam’s. Land, sea and air have all been fouled by this inveterately disrespectful species,”
How true, but I must admit that in Thailand it used to be worse. There have been some meager efforts to turn that around such as paying the poor for plastic recycles. Although it’s a small dent, but it’s still a dent.
PS
For those who like tribal facts, and to the woke liberals who hate them; the worst litterbugs in South East Asia? - Chinese tourists.
You might be lured into complacency, thinking that the world has gotten over it, but no, Covid is still the weapon they use against humanity. G20 just concluded with a statement that world rulers will work together toward a universal vaccine passport to ensure smooth international travel when the next "pandemic" hits (unleashed).
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