A GIRL NAMED 'VICTORY'

Sitting on the table beside the computer monitor here at the Galaxy Web internet cafe in lovely, scenic Phnom Penh, Cambodia, are two things, a book and a newspaper: the book being the first volume of AlexsandrI.Solzhenitsyns' Gulag Archipelago, the newspaper being the weekend edition of The Cambodia Daily, whose cover features a story promising details on the one-year anniversary of Chea Vichea, a union leader assassinated a year ago for doing what a lot of union leaders do here, which is cause some trouble and make some noise.

Solzhenitsyn is the Soviet dissident who chronicled life in the Russian version of the concentration camps, the Gulags. I just started the book, but, to my relief, it's very readable and very involving; the translator did a good job of capturing, in straightforward, energetic English, the tone of Sozhenitsyn's original. (I'm assuming he did, anyways, because I don't speak Russian. Or read it. Or write it. But I have seen Rocky IV man, many times, and that flick features a Russian villian, so that's got to give me some brownie points, doesn't it?)

Two, three, four years ago I wouldn 't have thought of picking up either this book or this newspaper. The stories wouldn't have interested me. The concepts and ideaologies would have been over my head. (A lot of them still are, yes, thanks for pointing that out, but I'll choose to blame it on the Ontario education system, rather than my own thick skull.)

When you live in a foreign country, if you keep your eyes open, and you look around a little bit, you're presented with views of the world that rarely, if ever, mesh with the portrait of life that was painted for you while growing up back home. This can be dislocating, at first; you either examine the different ways that the strange-and-alien-world you're presently wandering through has chosen to express itself, or you put the tinted sunglasses back over your eyes and click back on the National Geographic channel, content to observe the world's oddities, landscapes and strange, backward cultures in between advertisements for hairspray and chewing gum. Just the other night I saw the most bizarre thing, this Discovery channel documentary show where Julia Roberts hung out in the middle of Mongolia for a little while, chilling with the local Mongols, marvelling at the size of the moon and how it loomed over the vast, endless plains.

There's nothing wrong with that view of the world, because guess what? Our globe is a marvellous, bizarre place filled with beautiful landscapes and oddly shaped people, both physically and mentally. It's nice to look at it and ponder it and see how it matches our take on things, how it compares to the streets and blocks that we call home.

But when you're in it, you're forced to look at things. You're forced to interact with people. You're obligated to understand the larger forces that are shaping and directing the little girl with no shoes and dirty cheeks who you buy your newspaper from.

When I taught at a university here, the students ranged in age from fifteen to fifty. I had a fifteen year old student who was super bright, a beaming young girl who always did her homework and once, good-naturedly (I hope), called me a liar because I had said I would give back an assignment the week before and I hadn't yet. (Being honest in this dishonest culture was a big thing for her; she could spot a fib a mile away.) The first time I met this outspoken youth, I read the names of the students in the class, and I stumbled over her name.

"How do you pronounce this?" I asked.

"It's 'Victory," she said.

"Like the English word?"

"It is the English word," she said. "My parents wanted me to succeed in life."

How old would her parents be? Thirty-five, forty, maybe fifty. They would have been young people during the Khmer Rouge era. They would have seen family members killed, or maybe they lived in the Thai border camps for years on end, wondering when their fair share of life's bounty would be made available to them.

I also taught a North Korean kid, whose father owns the North Korean restaurant in town. This kid grew up in Burkina Faso, Africa (one of the worst places to live on the planet), where his proud papa taught Tae Kwan Do to the communist leaders of that corrupt regime. Somebody just told me that he was taking pictures of his classmates last week because a return to good old North Korea was on the table in the next few days. Back to Pyongyang to fulfill his military duties, I'm assuming. Mama mia.

This is all heady stuff for a boy from St.Catharines. Issues of war and peace and genocidal regimes and pudgy dictators with super-freaky hair are personified, presto-changeo, right before my eyes. I'm in the thick of it, with the ever-present option of leaving, while everyone else has to stay. That's the difference, and a grand difference it is.

I imagine most Canadian kids are apolitical. They don't have reasons to be engaged with the forces of good and evil that are everyday occurrences elsewhere around the planet. With immigrants from places like Somalia and Sudan arriving daily in Canada, though, that white-bread, idyllic Canadian world, while still a reality in most parts of the country, will change. Kids will learn about their classmates previous lives. They will listen to stories of torture, and wonder why this has to be. The world will close in on Canada, little by little.

I hope.

This way, young people can at least be aware of what it means to be Canadian. It is not about a flag or a puck or natural beauty. It is about what we have that everyone wants.

You won't find too many kids named 'Victory' in Canada. We haven't felt the need to give our children a name that will inspire them to relentlessly remember the goal of liberation, personal and national, that you must always strive for, despite the seemingly insurmountable odds that threaten to grind you down, day by day.

No, not many kids have to be named 'Victory' back home.

I don't know whether this is something to celebrate or worry about.

TODAY'S FORECAST...

You sit down at twenty-five and stand up at sixty-five.

- Orson Welles on California



What was he talking about? He was talking about the weather, because it's always, eternally nice and sunny and oh so clear in the Land of Schwarzenegger. Blue skies, no clouds, t-shirt weather, shorts weather. Every day of the year.

The same is true of Cambodia. It is always, always, always hot, except when it's cool, which is rare, usually in the mornings, almost always between five and six. Officially, there are two seasons in this country, rainy and dry, each lasting six months. Don't let the classification fool you, though; during the rainy season, it it still bloody boiling -- it just means that on top of the ridiculous tropical heat, you are treated to ceaseless, relentless streams of water for an hour or two in the late afternoon. Right now, as I write, at this very moment, the dry season is, I think, coming to a close, no rain having touched Phnom Penh's streets in, God, I can't remember how long.

I wrote that I think the dry season is ending because it's hard to differentiate between the days and weeks and months here. It's bloody surreal. Back home (or even in Japan), there is rain and sleet and slow and windy days and cool days and brisk days and days when you have to wear a hat or a toque and days where you need a light coat and you have to check the weather reports before leaving the house, or, at the very least, you might want to stick your head out the window and test how things are, just to see which way the wind is blowing.

None of that stuff here.

Just put on a t-shirt and a pair of shorts and you're good for the year. Good for your life.

A good thing and bad thing, I guess. I don't miss the Canadian winters much (or even the Japanese ones), but the seasons that we grow up with shape the barometer by which we measure the passage of time. Without those seasons, there's the danger of existing in this steady, monotonous limbo of life, where one day blends into the next, and the next, and the next, and time's passage begins to seem illusory and unimportant, today being all that matters.

Depending on how you look at it, that might not be a bad thing after all.