PAPER BIRDS

Early this morning I awoke from a strange and distant dream. Already fading, it is, like cotton candy on my tongue. So sweet. So transient.

(Please! Please stay. This is what I would say to this dream, if it were a person, if it were tangible. If this dream goes, dissolves, fades, then I fear that a piece of me will go as well, to where I know not. To that place where dreams go to die, I suppose, that section of our soul that is reserved for all those late-night thoughts and theories that die a short and lonely death, blinded by the harshness of morn. That place we access, occasionally, in those lonely hours before the rise of dawn. That place I long to understand and translate. That place.)

I had returned to my old elementary school's gymnasium, except that it wasn't the one that I actually remember, the one I used to play crabwalk soccer in, the one that housed my Grade 6 graduation dance, but another one, a dream-one, yet somehow even more authentic than its real-life counterpart. Up on stage, my father and other fathers were doing a little dance to the delight of the audience. At a certain point Joyette Heron, all grown up, approached me as I sat in my chair. (Joyette, the only black girl who attended my elementary school, and one who once, near the soccer posts, lifted up her t-shirt and, unsolicited, flashed me a glimpse of her tiny, burgeoning breasts, giving my eight year old self his first up close and personal sight of female nipples.) She handed me a rather clumsily constructed paper bird. I thanked her with a great deal of emotion, realizing, for the first time, that it must be my birthday. Why else would she be giving me paper birds?

The dream was so vivid, so real, so dense, that I did not want to awake. I wanted to wallow in this dreamstate for another, two three hours -- not because that particular dream itself was particularly alluring, no, but because it was other, and that otherness has a depth and a clarity that the 'real' world lacks. That the 'real' world rejects. I wanted to run down the corridors of that dreamschool and knock down its walls, gain entry to the basements and cellars that dwelled within.

My groggy, almost-sleeping mind started to make connections, forge links, construct theories. I imagined a series of corridors connecting dreams to dreams, visions to visions. Those moments of clarity we have in dreams, those intensities of insights -- they are not random, I thought, and they are not lost. They can be found, those moments, and they can be harnessed, and, upon awakening, can be used to alter the very nature of reality itself. If we walk down the corridors long enough, dream will give way to dream, one after the other, each blending into the next, each adding a layer of complexity and confusion that will form their own intrinsic alchemy. If our subsconscious selves are nothing more than the eclectic brew of the twisted madmen that populate our dreams, then perhaps that potion can be digested and synthesized, and ultimately utilized for a larger, nobler purpose.

These were the thoughts I had, insane but logical (as dreamthoughts always are), as the soft pull of sleep tried in vain to tug me further down, while the light of morning, dim but insistent, urged me to rise up and face a more harsh and tactile world.

IF BOBBY HAD LIVED

If Bobby had lived, he would have done it all: ended the war in Vietnam, rescued the underclass from another generation's worth of poverty and despair, united a country that was fundamentally at odds with its own conception of itself. If Bobby had lived, there would have been no Watergate, no IranContra scandal, no Monica, no Iraq. If Bobby had lived, America would have been rescued from itself by itself, by this man, this Kennedy. If Bobby had lived.

These are the kinds of sentiments one has after reading Arthur Schlesinger Jr's. 1976 biography of Robert F.Kennedy, the man he knew so well. (Schlesinger was an adviser to both J.F.K. and R.F.K.) It is almost astonishing to read about how loved, if not revered, Robert Kennedy became in some quarters of the United States; those who think that Bill Clinton or George W.Bush are the focus of a certain hysterical level of hero worship should go on back and check out what Bobby Kennedy lived through in the final years of his life. (This is not to say that Bobby Kennedy was universally beloved; like Clinton, Kennedy had his fair share of detractors, too. But boy, did Bobby Kennedy become something else.)

What allowed Bobby Kennedy access to the hearts and minds of so many Americans? His name, of course; the afterglow from his brother's premature death, most certainly. But it was more than that, deeper than that. Kennedy was the first American leader to show a concerted, passionate engagement with the poor. With those left behind. Not only in America, but all over the world. He had a will and a voice that gave voice to those who had, until then, remained voiceless. He had an aim, Kennedy did, and it was not directed at power for power's sake, but power for the elevation of the underclass.

As somebody living in the early cusp of the twenty-first century, and as a Canadian, no less, it's difficult, if not impossible, to truly understand the intensity of the late sixities in American life, but Schlesinger's book paints a pretty convincing portrait of a nation looking for a leader, almost desperate for a leader. Lyndon Johnson was stubbornly sticking to the war in Vietnam, and it's clear that America was, by then, not buying what he was trying to sell.

Kennedy agonized over whether to run for President against Johnson; his brother, Teddy, told him that now was not the time. When Johnson finally decided not to seek reelection, it was clear that a gap had opened, a gap that Kennedy could, if he defeated his own Democratic rivals for his party's nomination, fill.

He never got the chance, of course, slain by an assassin's bullet immediately after winning the
California primary. (Or was it multiple assasins? I, a certified conspiracy nut, will remain mum on this one.) Kennedy was fatalistic about the possibilities of his own murder; he knew, all too well, what had happened to his older brother, and he knew what could happen to him, and if it did, well, so be it. Life was not about fearing death.

From my perch in Phnom Penh, I've become more and more attuned to the manner in which politics plays a part in people's lives, the way that leaders can shift and sway the tide of history itself. This is a country where, if I even mention the prime minister's name in my class, the air stops, and the tension emerges, and the anticipation mounts: What will be said, and why, and to what end? It starts from the top, is what I'm trying to say, and everyone here, at every level, knows that the top is corrupt and craven and something to be feared, not loved.

Robert Kennedy was loved. I'm not saying a leader necessarily has to be loved, but Kennedy was not loved for something insubstantial or photogenic -- his looks or his family's legacy -- but rather for what he stood for, and what he died for. He was loved because he had a genuine concern for those most of society neglected to acknowledge, let alone advocate for. He was loved because he seemed to embody, to personify, what a leader should be and can be.

As I scan the world's landscape of leaders, from the Putins and the Paul Martins, the Bushes and the Hun Sens, the Chavezes and the Blairs, I see leadership, yes, and madness, certainly, but do I see somebody to love? Do we need somebody to love? Perhaps not. Perhaps looking for love in a leader is akin to looking for control in a parent: necessary, yes, but not the fundamental requriement for the job.

And yet.

It starts at the top. When we see the best in ourselves represented, if only fleetingly, in the eyes and actions of our leaders, something alters. Something within us implores us to do more and be more. A leader should represent not what the country is, but what the country can be. Politics is a game, and politics is power, this I know, but politics is also the means by which a citizen can understand what they and their brethren are supposed to eventually evolve into. When I read a biography of somebody like Robert F.Kennedy, and the eloquent eulogy given by his brother Edward Kennedy (who has, all too often, given eloquent eulogies for his fallen family members), and I scan the present-day political landscape, and I see who leads us, who guides us, it makes me mourn all the more for what could have been and has now been lost.

A PILLOW NOT YOUR OWN

This is one of those mornings. When I already have two, three blogs written out in longhand in a journal lying around in my pocket-sized apartment somewhere, 'important' postings on 'important' topics, but I have forgotten the journal, which means that the blogs remain dormant, undecipherable to anyone but those select few who can painstakingly translate the hieroglyphics that pass for this left-hander's handwriting, those 'select few' being me and me alone, so what you have before you is what passes for a blog entry: random, rambling sentences typed out merely for the pleasure of hearing my fingers tapping keys.

This means that the posting can go anywhichway I please. I could talk about the fact that the Cambodian summer is winding to an end, which doesn't mean much really, because it isn't truly 'summer' at all here, only the rainy season, and, truth be told, I expect it to last a little while longer. Or I could talk about the odd programming habits of 'Star World', a TV station beamed out of god-knows-where, but whose radius encompasses all of Southeast Asia, I suspect, which is odd because all of the shows on offer for lonely, homesick expats, by and large, amount to such scintillating fare as Becker and 8 Simple Rules for Dating My Teenage Daughter, and was it odd, slightly eerie to see John Ritter on my screen again, a year or so after his death? I think it was.

Or I could go deeper, or try to. I could talk about the dream I had last night, where a couple of Cambodians robbed me. They pointed a gun at my face, and asked for money, from me and my compadres, and I gave them my wallet, and even though I knew it was a dream, the way you know that all dreams are dreams when you are having them, it did not lesson the fear, or the shock, or the suspense in seeing if he would, in fact, implant a bullet into my skull. He didn't, and I think my dream then segued into something involving Kermit the Frog and Condoleeza Rice, but that's another dream, for another day.

(Is that my definition of going 'deeper' you ask -- allusions to amphibious muppets and Secretaries of State? I guess it is.)

I suppose you could say that this particular post is flailing and failing, going against every single rule that I painstakingly try to implant in my students' heads: Brainstorm your work; plan your work; revise your work. I've done none of those things here, but I suppose that's the glory of blogging -- no editor to oversee our trials and errors, and no magazine deciding what is and isn't suitable for public consumption.

And who knows? Maybe my crack about Kermit the Frog will make you remember something about your childhood, something you've long forgotten. The night you were sitting on the couch in your rec room watching The Muppet Show, marvelling at the hosting prowess of John Travolta, while above you, in the kitchen, your parents argued about the weekend plans, something about a grandmother, something about a waste of time, their voices rising and rising until you decided that the volume of the TV, too, needed to rise and rise, forcing you to get up and stand up and walk over to hike up the sound, louder, then louder still, until your mother yelled at you to turn it down, for God's sakes, your brother is sleeping, and you said a silent thank-you to the Muppets for taking your parents out of their angered state, if only for a second or two.

Or maybe my offhand remark about my dream from last night will force you, unwillingly, to remember your own dream from last night, the one that dissolved like cotton candy the moment after awakening, but still lurks, craven but shy, at the corners of your waking mind. You will be walking down the street later today, and a memory from that dream will suddenly appear, complete and pristine, at the front of your mind, as clear as the flatscreen TV you have been thinking about buying for two, three months. You will remember that dream for only a moment or two later today, and only its shape, not its content, and then it will pass, as dreams do. You will return to the world of bank accounts and traffic lights. Ten, eleven years hence, the dream will return, at midnight, on a pillow not your own, and you will welcome it back with such warmth and energy that its very absence all of these years will seem like an aberration, a void, that has finally been filled. Then sleep will come, and rob you once more of that dream, and you will awaken in the morning fulfilled but askew, trying to remember what it was you were thinking about before you drifted off to sleep. But bagels are in order, followed by juice, apple and orange, and so you must leave sleep behind, and once more the dream will drift away, sullen and neglected.

This is one of those mornings.

WHAT, EXACTLY, A 'TANNING SALON' IS

I spent a good part of yesterday afternoon browsing around Monument Books, checking out the handful of new books written regarding Cambodia and the Khmer Rouge era, and an even better part of the evening trying to teach my teenage students what, exactly, a 'tanning salon' is, and why, precisely, Coca-Cola is so popular with westerners.

The books look interesting, well-written, informative and insightful; they always are. A few are psychological examinations of why the Khmer Rouge killed the way they did; others are personal memoirs of growing up under, and after, that horrific era. The tenured academics and political pundits continue to pump out the books, and people like me continue to read them, intrigued, mortified, and, ultimately, fascinated by what this country has been through, and why, and for what ultimate purpose.

The young people, though, don't necessarily give a shit.

You can see this as a positive or a negative. I see it as a little bit of both. (As I see most things in life, come to think of it.)

The poor young Khmers are not concerned with the past; they are concerned with getting something to eat and finding a job to feed their family. The rich young Khmers are also not concerned with the past; they are concerned with learning English and trying to figure out, in a few years time, how to find some kind of a job, any kind of a job, in corrupt, scandal-ridden Phnom Penh.

I don't know the inner workings of the average Cambodian family. I've never talked, one on one, face to face, in any great detail, about Pol Pot's regime with any specific Cambodian individual. But I do know, from talking with others who have, that the older generation doesn't talk much, if at all, about what they went through. They keep it inside: bottled up, wound tight.

Think about it. We're talking about people who saw family members slaughtered and killed. People who worked for years under the hot unforgiving sun harvesting rice, their only reward another day of life. People who, quite possibly, were in the Khmer Rouge themselves, who murdered children, who betrayed colleagues. When genocide is less than a generation old, the people who lived through it are, well, still living through it. It goes on, underneath, but it's too painful to articulate, so they just go on living. What else can they do?

The young people are not a literate people. They don't read much, and the TV they watch is usually composed of karaoke-type talent shows, and the websites they frequent centre on chatrooms. They are smart people, however, and I know that they do have questions, many questions, about what their parents went through, and why, and for what final end. These are the questions that the academics are pursuing, and people like me are intrigued by.

The students, though, are interested in, well, life. The future. In wondering why white westerners want dark tans, and spend substantial amounts of money laying under artificial light in order to achieve such an odd and unusual look. And Coca-Cola -- what's the deal with that? I mean, the shit tastes good, sure, but westerners lap that stuff up like it's the elixir of life. They ask these questions, and hang with their friends, and make jokes in class, and do what young people do.

A generation ago, their parents were wondering if they would live to see the sunrise the following week, or the week after that; these kids wonder if the English lesson will be as boring as yesterday.

That's progress.

The books will still be written, the questions will still be asked, the memories will still lay buried. The country may still be poor, yes, but for some, perhaps only a privileged few, the questions regarding tomorrow centre upon what shirt to wear with what skirt. And, in this country, that kind of incremental progress, however incidental and frivolous, is something to applaud.

SOMETHING AKIN TO MUSIC

Just imagine. A father and son, both Japanese, both seated on metal folding chairs in a small conference hall filled with people, both silent. The son drops his videogame console on the floor, a loud thwack reverberating throughout the tiny room. The father flashes his son a sidelong scowl. The boy picks up his game and resumes his game, nonplussed. Moments later, down goes the game one more time, slipped out from between the boy’s fingers yet again, wobbling for a moment or two before attaining an equilibrium of stillness on the floor. The boy reaches to pick up the game, while at the same time the father reaches out his left hand and firmly thwacks the boy upside the head. The father’s eyes remain fixed on the speaker at the front of the room. The boy picks up his game, again, and continues his play. The afternoon goes on, indifferent. I know this.

That game falling, its tinny, metallic thwack. Limited to the confines of that hall, that day, four years ago. It lasted only a moment or two, that moment did. I’m quite certain that neither the father, now approaching middle-age, nor the son, now entering adolescence, ready or not, remembers that incident. It approached, came, passed. It happened. It occurred. Simple. I realize this. (And believe none of it, because that sound, that thwack, echoes still, now, infinitely.)

Having read some of William Shawcross’s book The Quality of Mercy: Cambodia, Holocaust and Modern Conscience, I’m intrigued by his perplexity at a modern world in which two, three million Cambodians can be killed while, mere miles away, similar people of a similar age, people who love and laugh and run and write and shit and fuck as loudly and as humanly as their Cambodian counterparts, can sit in awe in a darkened theatre watching bright lights flicker on a silver screen, as Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford try their best to defeat an imperial army bent on their destruction. While babies were being whacked against trees, their blood and brains forming a red and grey mosaic distinctly, grotesquely at odds with the soft amber hues of Cambodian bark, others were stretching out multi-coloured beach towels on single-coloured sand, applying white lotion to whiter skin, thinking about grocery lists and tan lines and whether or not the lawn really needed to be cut twice this week, despite the rather raggedy length, because two lawn-cuts in one week was, well, if not decadent, at least a little ostentatious, if not anal.

If all of those events occurred simultaneously (as I’m sure they did), and all of them happened in parallel, if not tandem, streams of space and time (as I firmly believe to be true), then what does that signify, in human terms? If millions can go starving in Niger and the Sudan while the rest of us can shop till we drop for shoes and pick our noses and scratch our asses and lick nipples other than our own in front of plasma TVs on layaway, only sixty bucks a month, call now, well, what does that truly mean?

Parallel lives.

Like the Toronto Star article I recently read, detailing the alarming rise of gun violence in recent years in tee-oh, creating a Toronto that is becoming more segmented and divided, a Toronto that has black Canadian youths killing each other with handguns imported from the States, by and large, while white Canadian businessmen and their trophy wives check out the latest shows downtown, because it’s good theatre, affordable theatre, with production values rivaling, if not surpassing, their Broadway brethren in New York, and don’t even get me started on the cuisine around the Royal Alex theatre, which is simply to die for

(pass the ammo)

especially that new Italian place down by the Hummingbird Centre

(going to smoke his cracker ass)

which has a strawberry shortcake dessert type thingee that is, I swear, capable of putting weight on you just by looking at it

(fucking popped him two times, right in the face)

so help me God, it’s true.

Parallel lives.

Like the Cambodia that exists within and beyond the Phnom Penh that I inhabit. The one behind those half-open doors that slide shut when dusk starts to fall, leaving only a slice of light peeping through, with half-glimpsed girls wearing bright blue dresses and dark red rouge, their pimp, handler, owner, lifeline gently smiling my way, tilting his head. Or the police round-up I read biweekly via the Phnom Penh Post, a laundry list of drunken stabbings, enraged strangulations, violent rapes and out of control axe-attacks, all unleashed within the narrow confines of the tiny villages I pass through by bus on my way to that golden weekend beach, that pool-chalk blue sky. And the kids that sell me my morning newspapers, the young girls, already losing, almost daily, their spunk and spark, their cabbage-patch cuteness, who will, all too soon, enter another realm of existence, squalid and sordid, punctuated by bed-spring squeaks and early-morning memories, dim but sweet, of sunlight on skin, warm and soothing, a counterpoint to the stranger, sweatier feel of counterfeit flesh.

Oh, the temp0 of life that pulses and sways as I write these words, that lies beneath and above and between and within the sound of that father’s thwack, the lessons being taught, the roads being built, the knees being scabbed, the oranges being peeled, the cunts being fucked, the scabs being picked, the brows being wiped with cool white cloths, the faces being punched, the lips being kissed, the doors being shut, the dicks being sucked, the bullets piercing skin, the jobs being lost, the legs being broken, the nails being chewed, the arms being raised, the love being borne, the babies being born, all of it simultaneous, unique, unprecedented. Take away the labels: loving, heinous, crude, refined, virtuous, evil, redemptive, condemning. Take away anything but the acts themselves, and we are left with the human condition, period. Sights and smells and tastes and sounds. That sound.

Picture them, that father and son. I do. I still hear that thwack, even if they don’t. That sound, so eerily similar to the sound my own head made while whumping against my high school gymnasium floor, fifteen years ago, my body somehow flying free from the high bars and missing the large blue mat, followed by blackness, and the sound of my phys-ed teacher flashing me two fingers and asking how many, how many, how many do you see?

If I can still hear that sound, whether it be the father striking the child, or my head hitting the floor, then perhaps others can, too. Perhaps that father and son –Japanese, bland, suburban – unknowingly let loose a riptide of condensed emotion that caused a pinprick sized hole in the very temporal fabric of the space-time continuum itself. Not a gigantic hole, no, nor even a large one, but one big enough and wide enough to distort the spaces between us and them, between you and me, between then and now, one just big enough to allow all sights and all sounds to travel at maximum speeds with minimum delay. Everywhere.

Listen.

Can you hear it?

A woman in Niger hears that sound, that thwack, and thinks it is the sound of her own stomach, its hungry, angry growl. A young black male in Toronto, alone in bed, thinking about the Geography test he will have in less than twelve hours time, wondering if he is ready, sure that he is not, hears that sound and thinks that it is a trigger being cocked, a gun being pointed, causing him to sit up straight, the drool from his mouth still stretching in one long, unbroken line of spittle from his bottom lip to his dented pillow, and he vows, heart thumping, to be better than his friends, his environs, his teachers’ expectations. A young prostitute in Phnom Penh, exhausted after her night’s work, slumps in the green-felt chair that sits beside the bathroom in the whorehouse she calls home, and for her that sound is the click of her grandfather’s fingers, the sound he would make while waiting for dinner to cook, and while she can no longer remember his voice or his face, she can remember his smell, dirt and cigarettes and rice, and the memory of his snapping fingers is too much for her, too real for her, forcing tears for the first time in a long time to slowly trace their way down her hollow cheeks. A young boy in St.Catharines, Ontario, falling to the floor, missing that mat, hears that thwack, and just before blacking out, thinks: The universe is folding in on itself.

A lover’s sigh in Belgium; a soldier’s shriek in Burma. The same sound? Emitted from a single source, merely altered and twisted by wormholes of time, emotion, memory?

I am not saying it’s likely; I am not even suggesting it is probable. But in the aftermath of a Cambodian downpour, in the smile of a newborn child, in the thwack of a stranger’s hand, I sense a commonality, a bond, that may begin as nothing more than noise, dissonance, aural and spiritual, but gradually, over time, reveals its true, rhythmic beat -- something akin to music, something lasting and melodic and soothing.

DO NOT RUSH SPOCK BEFORE HIS TIME

I noticed a door I had never seen before the other day. Just down the hall from my classroom. The hour was late and my class was about to start, but I moved foward, intrigued.

The doors were long and wide, clear but opaque. A logo on the door indicated what lay beyond, what lay inside -- a Japanese NGO, having something or other to do with arms reduction in Cambodia.

As I stood there, staring at the logo, the door opened. A Khmer man in his mid-thirties, wearing glasses and a tie and white dress shirt similar to my own, asked if he could be of assistance. He was smiling and friendly and speaking English that rivalled my own, if not surpassed it.

We talked the way strangers talk -- politely, smilingly, each wondering who the other is, and what it is that they want. Turns out that this particular organization, funded by the Japanese government, helps gather together guns in small villages around Cambodia, exchanging the arms for economic assistance. (There are a lot of weapons left over from the Khmer Rouge era still floating around this country.) I asked about the possibility, perchance, of employment with this organization. I told him of my four years in Japan; he told me of his acquaintances in Toronto. Stranger talk, when you grope to find common points of interest. (I have found that if you try to do so, you will usually succeed.)

Made me think, those doors did. They had been there all along, just down the hall, a hop, skip and a jump away, but I never noticed them until that day. Never bothered to notice them. Never ventured that far down the hall.

I can have tunnel vision sometimes, seeing only what I want to see, and nothing more. (I can still remember the disbelieving cry of my mother as I walked out of my bedroom and into the hallway, looked up, and noticed the skylight that had somehow remained undetected by me over the past year that we had lived in the house. ¨When did we get a skylight put there," I muttered to myself. Cue the fainting mom.)

Living in Japan, working in Cambodia -- the stuff of adventure, you could say. I know this to be true, yes, and it certainly has been that, an adventure, but I rarely ever see it that way, think of it that way. I kind of stumbled into where I am and who I am. Despite living in the exoctic environs of ancient Asian countries, I am still suprised to find myself a creature of habit. I find the places I like, the stores I like, the restaurants I like. I fear returning to Canada only because I worry that I will instantly revert to familiar patterns and well-known roads. I try to daily remind myself to go to new places, see new things, meet new people. In June I travelled to Vietnam -- only a four hour drive away! And yet, what an alternate universe. Right next door, all that time. I should have gone sooner.

Whenever I am feeling, well, sedate, I try to find a copy of Travels, by Michael Crichton, a non-fiction book relating his various adventures in various exotic lands. I first read it during my first few weeks in Japan, and it encapsulates so well the disorientation of the traveler, the exotic allure of the unknown, the lessons we can learn, dare we try. My favorite part of his introduction relates to his notion of a kind of received wisdom that we all share, meaning: we want to know everything about an experience before we have it. We want to read the reviews of the movie before we go. We want to hear from our friends if that new restaurant, the one next to the mattress shop, is any good. We want to check out the widest variety of brochures to determine which vacation spot looks cheaper, funner, better.

As Crichton points out, there is a great, almost holy value in simply experiencing something as it happens, without any preconceived ideas foisted upon us by others. I moved to Japan and Cambodia without knowing jackshit about either country, and my experiences and life have been all the richer because of it. Blown away because of it.

As a child, I read the comic-book adaptation of Star Trek III: The Search For Spock before watching the film, which taught me a valuable lesson: Do not rush Spock before his time. Let things come to you, or you to them, but do not read the Coles Notes first. Do not read the back of the book before buying. Do not learn about the plot. Do not avoid the movie because somebody said it sucked. If you are intrigued, that is enough -- read, watch, go. Period.

It is the doors, you see.

The ones we do not even know are there. The ones just down the hall, across the street, across the road. Those are the ones you have to find, and, if not open, at least knock on.

Find that door. Knock on that door. See who opens, and what lies inside.

LOVE HAS ALREADY GONE AWAY FROM THERE

We were talking about other stuff before the conversation shifted, as conversations do. Sitting in the teacher's lounge, killing those last ten, fifteen minutes before class starts, those in-between minutes, when nothing new ever seems to get done, or even started. Empty time.

Earlier that morning during my run I had noticed small groups of Cambodian students clustered around a few of the myriad photocopy shops that litter what passes as Phnom Penh's landscape. My mind flashed back to a CAMBODIA DAILY article I had read earlier in the week, about the ease with which Cambodian students cheat on high school exams. Paying off the supposed 'monitors'. Having their parents throw, yes, throw copies of the answer sheets over the gates of the school, tossing the sheets of paper like bouquets at a wedding. Crazy shit like that. Cambodian shit like that.

A Cambodian colleague, twenty-five years old, nodded his head solemnly as I told him about all this stuff. As a young student, all of his classmates had cheated -- but not him. They would ask him for the answers, him being the smart one, but he would say no, no, you have to do it on your own, and then they'd be pissed. Riteously so.

He did the right thing. That's what he said, and I believe him. He looks like the kind of fellow who wants to do the right thing, a distinct rarity in a country where everyone so often seems to be doing the wrong thing. Always.

The late-afternoon sun feebly shone its way through the window. Everything in the room seemed blue and gray, and I liked that. I took a sip of water. I listened to the air conditioner, felt its chill. Cold. Cold and direct.

It's strange. How the things and topics we talk about can so readily bend and break and reassemble themselves into new formations only ostensibly composed of earlier, related components. Somehow I found myself talking about what it's like to live alone. No parents. No faimly. In Japan and Cambodia. Starting anew.

He longed for that experience, this teacher did. It didn't even have to be in a foreign country; a foreign house would do just fine. He lived with his older brother and his sister-in-law. The brother always told him what to do and when to do it, all the time, constantly. Was it the same in Canada, he wanted to know. That's what so many Khmers ask: Is it the same over there? Are you different? Is it just us? (Isn't that what we all want to ask?)

I nodded. Thought about it. Said that it was somewhat the same, yes, but more people in Canada live on their own, away from their families. They see them on weekends, or every other month. The children put their parents away in a 'special' place when they get too old and they smell too bad.

He sighed.

"That's what I want," he said. "Space. I don't need to see my brother and his wife every night. Telling me to clean the house. I am a teacher, not a cleaner. I see them enough. Love has already gone away from there."

I nodded, thinking how often I've heard Khmers say phrases that sound somewhat odd but are true nevertheless.

Of course, if he lived alone, he would have to do everything for himself, without his brother's help; there was that to consider, he said. And besides, he was still a baby, crying to his sweetheart, begging her forgiveness, enduring his taunts. If that was life, well, so be it.

"I'm twenty-five now," he said, smiling slightly. Gathering his papers and fixing his tie. "I'm a man now."

I gathered my papers and fixed my tie.

The sun was faded now, a muted, half-assed pink. The ash-grey, early evening light dimly lit the dark blue room. The air conditioner was still on high, and I felt it. I stood up and picked up my bag and followed him out of the room.