The other day I came out of the Internet cafe and said hello to the owner of Nike's Pizza House, located right next door. (Originally it was named 'Nikee's', with that extra 'e', but the owner said that some foreigners said that 'Nike' was a famous shoe brand that customers would recognize right away. So, in went the new 'e'.)
"How are you?" the owner said. He is a Chinese Khmer who is always smiling and always talking; despite the fact that he has eight, count 'em, eight, children, he apparently doesn't lack energy. (I personally side with the theme song of the old seventies Dick Van Patten show, that eight is enough to fill our lives with joy. But that's just me.)
We chatted for a minute. He asked how my work was, and I told him that I wasn't teaching anymore (though I might be soon), that I had moved on to a different job.
He was a bit confused.
"You only have one job?" he asked.
"Yeah," I said.
"Why don't you have two jobs?"
A pause.
"Well," I said, "one's enough for me."
He smiled and nodded and looked a little bit confused.
In Cambodia, I have always held the belief that Cambodians are, well, a little bit lazy.
Intelligent, yes, and compassionate, sure, but most Cambodians will do the absolute minimum of work necessary to get the job done. (This is not necessarily a bad thing; the opposite, overwork to the point of exhaustion, is not necessarily the greatest of endeavors.) There is an old expression: The Vietnamese plant the rice; the Cambodians watch it grow; and the Laotians listen to it sing.
But the pizza shop owner's comments stuck with me, because I've heard them before, from different people, in different variations.
Most Cambodians, by necessity, work two, three jobs. The students I used to teach at the university usually went to two or even three universities -- one in the morning, afternoon and evening, the philosophy being: one degree is great, but why not go for three B.A.s at the same time?
(Which, of course, leads to situations in which the students never complete their homework because, teacher, they have to finish their homework from their other schools, and weekly, sometimes daily (hourly?) scenarios where students high-tail it out of your class because you see, teacher, they have to go write an exam at their other university.)
Still, I realize I was wrong to a certain extent; I bought into the stereotypes I usually spend so much time trying to tear down. Cambodians are workers; they will work two or three jobs and not complain. (I can't see many westerners doing that.) They work because they have to, and they need to; my perceived vision of them being 'lazy' stems from the fact that they do not do more than they humanly have to to get by in life.
Which, when you think about it, is not all that bad a philosophy to live by.
It leaves time for other things in life, like life.
Saturday, April 23, 2005
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
MY GUT FEELING SAYS...
"But in reality, intuition is the condensation of vast prior analytic experience; it is analysis compressed and crystallized...It is the product of analytic processes being condensed to such a degree that its internal structure may elude even the person benefitting from it...The intuitive decision-making of an expert bypasses orderly, logical steps precisely because it's a condensation of such orderly logical steps in the past."
- Herbert Simon,
The Wisdom Paradox
You decide to buy the ticket and get on the plane. Or not. That little feeling in your stomach that is half-way between a claw and a caress tells you to avoid stepping on the boat, so you do, and the boat sinks. The stranger in line beside you at the movies cautiously asks you for a drink, and you agree, equally cautiously, and you end up getting married. (Then divorced.)
All because of non-rational, non-linear thought processes that we call 'intuition'. (Doctors may call it 'indigestion'.)
Is it as mysterious and cosmically cool as we like to think, though? Or is there a more intellectual, analytic process at work, one that is decidedly more rational but exceedingly less exhilarating.
Apparently Herbert Simon, author of the excerpt from his book, um, excerpted above, thinks so. Intuition, he seems to argue, is nothing more than the repository of experience; intuition is nothing more than a neurological short-cut to the proper choice in any given situation, based on the accumulated wisdom we have made from other decisions we have made in the past.
Hmmmm...
Sounds logical.
But what about when we encounter an experience that we haven't had much experience in, uh, experiencing?
I decided to come to Cambodia, in large part, because I had gone to Japan. I made the decision in Japan, flying here directly from there. I thought about the pros and the cons, the long-term consequences and the short term consequences, the interesting points and the potentially dangerous points. (Via a technique learned from Edward DeBono -- a simple one, but remarkably effective.) So it was somewhat analytical, yes, but I still followed my gut. (Which was much bigger then, my gut, but I don't think weight actually influences the intuitional process.)
But coming to Japan for the first time was a pure 'intuition' decision. I had no experience in much of anything at age 23; I just thought about it and thought about it and thought about it, and the little voice in my head and my stomach said: Ah, fuck it -- just go and see what happens. I didn't rely on past experiences travelling overseas, 'cause I hadn't been overseas; I didn't compare the working possibilities to other high-level jobs I had, 'cause I hadn't had any other high-level jobs. I just went because I felt it was the thing to do.
So the adult and analytical side of me agrees with Simon's article in principle; many of the decisions we make come from remembrances of things past, and evaluation how those memories compare with the choices in front of us in the here and the now.
But the irrational side of me, the eleven-year old side of me that refused to ever watch Star Trek: The Next Generation because it would be a betrayal of Captain Kirk and his crew, finds all this analytical mumbo-jumbo distasteful. (A vow I kept, although I did see a few of the movies featuring Picard and his gang.) There's so much about the brain that we don't know, so many alleyways and caverns within our gray matter that still await exposure. I would like to think that there are mystical underpinnings at work; that intuition serves as a shortcut to some spiritual force in the universe that does not guide our progress, no, but hints at what is karmically best and proper and true for our journey through (what we call) life.
That's just my gut feeling, anyway.
- Herbert Simon,
The Wisdom Paradox
You decide to buy the ticket and get on the plane. Or not. That little feeling in your stomach that is half-way between a claw and a caress tells you to avoid stepping on the boat, so you do, and the boat sinks. The stranger in line beside you at the movies cautiously asks you for a drink, and you agree, equally cautiously, and you end up getting married. (Then divorced.)
All because of non-rational, non-linear thought processes that we call 'intuition'. (Doctors may call it 'indigestion'.)
Is it as mysterious and cosmically cool as we like to think, though? Or is there a more intellectual, analytic process at work, one that is decidedly more rational but exceedingly less exhilarating.
Apparently Herbert Simon, author of the excerpt from his book, um, excerpted above, thinks so. Intuition, he seems to argue, is nothing more than the repository of experience; intuition is nothing more than a neurological short-cut to the proper choice in any given situation, based on the accumulated wisdom we have made from other decisions we have made in the past.
Hmmmm...
Sounds logical.
But what about when we encounter an experience that we haven't had much experience in, uh, experiencing?
I decided to come to Cambodia, in large part, because I had gone to Japan. I made the decision in Japan, flying here directly from there. I thought about the pros and the cons, the long-term consequences and the short term consequences, the interesting points and the potentially dangerous points. (Via a technique learned from Edward DeBono -- a simple one, but remarkably effective.) So it was somewhat analytical, yes, but I still followed my gut. (Which was much bigger then, my gut, but I don't think weight actually influences the intuitional process.)
But coming to Japan for the first time was a pure 'intuition' decision. I had no experience in much of anything at age 23; I just thought about it and thought about it and thought about it, and the little voice in my head and my stomach said: Ah, fuck it -- just go and see what happens. I didn't rely on past experiences travelling overseas, 'cause I hadn't been overseas; I didn't compare the working possibilities to other high-level jobs I had, 'cause I hadn't had any other high-level jobs. I just went because I felt it was the thing to do.
So the adult and analytical side of me agrees with Simon's article in principle; many of the decisions we make come from remembrances of things past, and evaluation how those memories compare with the choices in front of us in the here and the now.
But the irrational side of me, the eleven-year old side of me that refused to ever watch Star Trek: The Next Generation because it would be a betrayal of Captain Kirk and his crew, finds all this analytical mumbo-jumbo distasteful. (A vow I kept, although I did see a few of the movies featuring Picard and his gang.) There's so much about the brain that we don't know, so many alleyways and caverns within our gray matter that still await exposure. I would like to think that there are mystical underpinnings at work; that intuition serves as a shortcut to some spiritual force in the universe that does not guide our progress, no, but hints at what is karmically best and proper and true for our journey through (what we call) life.
That's just my gut feeling, anyway.
ZOMBIES -- GOTTA LOVE 'EM (OR ELSE)
Last night on TV I caught the first few minutes of the remake of Night Of The Living Dead that came out in the early nineties. (The reason for the remake, I think, was that the writer-director of the original flick, George Romero, was shut out of the considerable profits that resulted from its success, and he, naturally, wanted a bit of financial payback that was long overdue; he was a writer and producer of the new version, which Tom Savini, special-effects grand goremeister, directed.) I hadn't seen the flick in probably eleven, twelve years, and so I was a little surprised to find myself more than a little freaked out by the opening cemetary scene, complete with lurching zombies and a screaming woman and ominous music that sounded, well, ominous. (I remember watching the original version and the new version back to back in my bedroom in St.Catharines with my friend Mike, both of us trying to stay up all night one New Year's Eve back in early high school, and back-to-back zombie flicks seemed like the way to sustain our sleepy selves. Haven't thought about that night in a long time. That was many years ago.)
Zombies are scary. I don't know why. I think it's because there's just something fundamentally wrong with them. Dead bodies dressed in suits are not supposed to shamble around among us. And they're so relentless, zombies are; they shuffle and poke their way forward, never getting deterred, never getting discouraged. They come, slowly, and they will keep coming, undaunted, until they eat you, and kill you. Simple. Primal. Almost unapologetically, ghoulishly pure.
I haven't seen any of the new zombie movies that have popped up over the last few years -- the recent remake of Romero's Dawn of the Dead, or 28 Days Later -- but there's a reason why they keep coming back. (The movies, that is -- not the zombies. I'm sure they have their own reasons, the zombies, but I know not what they are...)
Horror is all about metaphor, and zombies are a perfect, twisted metaphor for who we (sometimes) are and what we (potentially) could become: mindless, shambling shells of our former selves. Romero's original Dawn of the Dead was set in a shopping mall and was a savage indictment of consumption and excess; he has a new zombie film set to premiere sometime this year called Land of the Dead, and I imagine he'll take some more incisive shots at what western society has (d)evolved into.
The one downside about zombie films is that they are, by their vary nature, awfully repetitive, derivative and one-dimensional. There's not much that zombies can actually do; you have to have a pretty clever story, with intriguing characters, as well as appropriately spooky music and visual flair to offset and somehow accentuate the gloomy monotony of zombies shuffling through graveyards and parking lots.
Still, they're an acquired taste, zombie movies are. (As are zombies themselves.) Not everyone's cup of tea. If done poorly, these flicks are atrocious to sit through and easy to forget. If done well...
You may find yourself looking over your shoulder every now and then as you leisurely wander through your local park on warm, spring afternoon, as dusk paints the sky its patented brand of purple. You may glance nervously at the lingering shadows that start to form between the bushes, behind the shrubs. You may start to slowly tremble when you hear behind you footsteps that softly pad their way across the grassy field. Towards you. And you alone.
Zombies are scary. I don't know why. I think it's because there's just something fundamentally wrong with them. Dead bodies dressed in suits are not supposed to shamble around among us. And they're so relentless, zombies are; they shuffle and poke their way forward, never getting deterred, never getting discouraged. They come, slowly, and they will keep coming, undaunted, until they eat you, and kill you. Simple. Primal. Almost unapologetically, ghoulishly pure.
I haven't seen any of the new zombie movies that have popped up over the last few years -- the recent remake of Romero's Dawn of the Dead, or 28 Days Later -- but there's a reason why they keep coming back. (The movies, that is -- not the zombies. I'm sure they have their own reasons, the zombies, but I know not what they are...)
Horror is all about metaphor, and zombies are a perfect, twisted metaphor for who we (sometimes) are and what we (potentially) could become: mindless, shambling shells of our former selves. Romero's original Dawn of the Dead was set in a shopping mall and was a savage indictment of consumption and excess; he has a new zombie film set to premiere sometime this year called Land of the Dead, and I imagine he'll take some more incisive shots at what western society has (d)evolved into.
The one downside about zombie films is that they are, by their vary nature, awfully repetitive, derivative and one-dimensional. There's not much that zombies can actually do; you have to have a pretty clever story, with intriguing characters, as well as appropriately spooky music and visual flair to offset and somehow accentuate the gloomy monotony of zombies shuffling through graveyards and parking lots.
Still, they're an acquired taste, zombie movies are. (As are zombies themselves.) Not everyone's cup of tea. If done poorly, these flicks are atrocious to sit through and easy to forget. If done well...
You may find yourself looking over your shoulder every now and then as you leisurely wander through your local park on warm, spring afternoon, as dusk paints the sky its patented brand of purple. You may glance nervously at the lingering shadows that start to form between the bushes, behind the shrubs. You may start to slowly tremble when you hear behind you footsteps that softly pad their way across the grassy field. Towards you. And you alone.
Tuesday, April 19, 2005
POINTING FINGERS IN CAMBODIA
Yesterday or the day before, I'm not sure which, marked the 30th anniversary of the Khmer Rouge's takeover of Phnom Penh. (I'm sure you threw a party with popcorn, Coke, party favors, all the fixings, to celebrate the whole shebang). Anyone who has spent anytime in Cambodia can tell you: In some respects, everything's different; in others, it's as if the whole murderous reign happened only last year, or last month, or even last week.
Last night at Panasastrasa University, New York Times and former Washington Post journalist Elizabeth Becker, the author of When The War Was Over (the first book I read and probably the best book I've read on the Khmer Rouge), gave a short lecture, followed by a rather lively, animated discussion. Her talk centred around her memories of Phnom Penh during the early seventies, when Cambodia was in the midst of a civil war, before Pol Pot and his homicidal gang took over the country. She actually met Pol Pot, interviewed him, but this was before anybody knew that he was 'Pol Pot'; she got chills just from the encounter, but even she did not know the depths to which his regime would eventually descend. She spoke of how literate Cambodians used to be, the spirit of goodness and generosity that they exuded and that she still found here, embodied by the owner of the Monument Books bookshop, who was trying to be a good and honorable man in a society drenched in corruption. It was her first visit here in ten years; she was sickened by the wealth that exists hand in hand with the grinding poverty.
During the q and a session following the lecture, a recurring theme arose: blame. It was ultimately, and almost eloquently, expressed at the end of the question session by a Khmer university professor, who wondered: Why aren't we focusing blame on the U.S.'s role? The UN? China? They are culpable; they played a role in Cambodia's demise.
In some respects, he's absolutely right. And the young Cambodians were right to applaud so feverishly and approvingly whenever anybody mentioned the Vietnamese or Americans that needed to be held accountable. Question after question centred on: ______ is to blame, and _________ is at fault.
And yet...
Elizabeth Becker made a point that I agree with: Cambodia's tragedy of the 1970s was, at its core, a Cambodian tragedy. It was an internal civil war. Other countries share blame, as does the UN; indifference and collusion have their own sentences of guilt.
But there's a trend in Cambodia that is natural, understandable, but not, in the end, acceptable: the pointing of fingers. It's the Vietnamese fault. It's the Americans fault. It's the UN's fault. It's China's fault. Even now, many Khmers are worried that Vietnam still wants to invade Cambodia. Even now, politicians somehow expect the US to save the day here to atone for their past sins, while Becker made clear: You know what? The US just, doesn't, care. Cambodia is too small, too insignificant, too politically worthless in the grand scheme of things; it's the Rwanda and the Sudan of Asia, to a certain extent. Cambodia is Asia's baby now, and besides, America, as the lone superpower, will, by necessity, do whatever it wants; you can blame till the cows come home. If the US wants to invade a country, it will do so; if the US wants to bomb the shit out of a country, like it did in Cambodia, searching for Vietcong, it will do so. It is not fair and it is not right and it is, like it or not, the way that the world works; for Cambodians to expect America to accept blame is pointless, politically naive, and futile. The country is rooted in the past, which is fantastic for religion and culture and fatal, absolutely homicidal, for advancement and moving forward.
And this ceaseless, even relentless desire to blame outside sources overlooks and underestimates the degree to which this twisted revolution arose from the Khmer people themselves. The Germans have accepted responsibility for their Nazi, wartime past, moved on, and the world, more or less, has forgiven them; Japan has yet to accept blame for their own WWII atrocities, and their ongoing textbook and ocean-border disputes with China are a sad testament to how wartime resentment can linger. And fester. I don't think that Cambodians have even begun to come to terms with their own role in their own descent. (I'm not blaming them, believe me; this country has suffered and suffered. I think their fears and concerns are valid and necessary -- but not helpful, not realistic.)
As Becker also pointed out, this country so desperately needs a Khmer Rouge UN Tribunal (which will, hopefully, begin soon), because if the Cambodian Khmer Rouge can get away with mass murder then, of course they can get away with corruption now. If the government can get away with slaughtering innocents for years on end, of course they can get away with stealing land that doesn't belong to them.
There is an unexamined, festering wound in this country that has not been healed, and until the Cambodians who masterminded the massacres (those still left alive, at any rate) are put on trial and put in prison, the lesson of 1975-1979 will be: We can kill whoever we want, and get away with it.
And if that's the case, then the corruption will continue, and so will the pointing fingers, looking for someone, anyone, to take the blame.
Last night at Panasastrasa University, New York Times and former Washington Post journalist Elizabeth Becker, the author of When The War Was Over (the first book I read and probably the best book I've read on the Khmer Rouge), gave a short lecture, followed by a rather lively, animated discussion. Her talk centred around her memories of Phnom Penh during the early seventies, when Cambodia was in the midst of a civil war, before Pol Pot and his homicidal gang took over the country. She actually met Pol Pot, interviewed him, but this was before anybody knew that he was 'Pol Pot'; she got chills just from the encounter, but even she did not know the depths to which his regime would eventually descend. She spoke of how literate Cambodians used to be, the spirit of goodness and generosity that they exuded and that she still found here, embodied by the owner of the Monument Books bookshop, who was trying to be a good and honorable man in a society drenched in corruption. It was her first visit here in ten years; she was sickened by the wealth that exists hand in hand with the grinding poverty.
During the q and a session following the lecture, a recurring theme arose: blame. It was ultimately, and almost eloquently, expressed at the end of the question session by a Khmer university professor, who wondered: Why aren't we focusing blame on the U.S.'s role? The UN? China? They are culpable; they played a role in Cambodia's demise.
In some respects, he's absolutely right. And the young Cambodians were right to applaud so feverishly and approvingly whenever anybody mentioned the Vietnamese or Americans that needed to be held accountable. Question after question centred on: ______ is to blame, and _________ is at fault.
And yet...
Elizabeth Becker made a point that I agree with: Cambodia's tragedy of the 1970s was, at its core, a Cambodian tragedy. It was an internal civil war. Other countries share blame, as does the UN; indifference and collusion have their own sentences of guilt.
But there's a trend in Cambodia that is natural, understandable, but not, in the end, acceptable: the pointing of fingers. It's the Vietnamese fault. It's the Americans fault. It's the UN's fault. It's China's fault. Even now, many Khmers are worried that Vietnam still wants to invade Cambodia. Even now, politicians somehow expect the US to save the day here to atone for their past sins, while Becker made clear: You know what? The US just, doesn't, care. Cambodia is too small, too insignificant, too politically worthless in the grand scheme of things; it's the Rwanda and the Sudan of Asia, to a certain extent. Cambodia is Asia's baby now, and besides, America, as the lone superpower, will, by necessity, do whatever it wants; you can blame till the cows come home. If the US wants to invade a country, it will do so; if the US wants to bomb the shit out of a country, like it did in Cambodia, searching for Vietcong, it will do so. It is not fair and it is not right and it is, like it or not, the way that the world works; for Cambodians to expect America to accept blame is pointless, politically naive, and futile. The country is rooted in the past, which is fantastic for religion and culture and fatal, absolutely homicidal, for advancement and moving forward.
And this ceaseless, even relentless desire to blame outside sources overlooks and underestimates the degree to which this twisted revolution arose from the Khmer people themselves. The Germans have accepted responsibility for their Nazi, wartime past, moved on, and the world, more or less, has forgiven them; Japan has yet to accept blame for their own WWII atrocities, and their ongoing textbook and ocean-border disputes with China are a sad testament to how wartime resentment can linger. And fester. I don't think that Cambodians have even begun to come to terms with their own role in their own descent. (I'm not blaming them, believe me; this country has suffered and suffered. I think their fears and concerns are valid and necessary -- but not helpful, not realistic.)
As Becker also pointed out, this country so desperately needs a Khmer Rouge UN Tribunal (which will, hopefully, begin soon), because if the Cambodian Khmer Rouge can get away with mass murder then, of course they can get away with corruption now. If the government can get away with slaughtering innocents for years on end, of course they can get away with stealing land that doesn't belong to them.
There is an unexamined, festering wound in this country that has not been healed, and until the Cambodians who masterminded the massacres (those still left alive, at any rate) are put on trial and put in prison, the lesson of 1975-1979 will be: We can kill whoever we want, and get away with it.
And if that's the case, then the corruption will continue, and so will the pointing fingers, looking for someone, anyone, to take the blame.
Monday, April 18, 2005
INTERTIA AND ADVANCEMENT, AND ALL THEIR SWEET, RESONANT FALLOUT
What am I doing here? Why am I still here?
These questions, more or less, were recently posed to me by Jenn (www.1ljenn.blogspot.com) in response to one of my postings, and they are actually quite good questions, valid questions, complex in their simplicity and difficult in their essentialness.
There are a thousand answers I could give, or none at all, and the silence would be just as telling as the abundance. (But if I offered silence, then this would be a blank blog, sort of a Buddhist approach to blogging, perhaps, but ultimately not that satisfying, I think. I've actually heard the sound of one hand clapping, I have, and it's not as interesting or fulfilling as the sound of two hands typing. I swear. Silence has its limits.)
Was it Einstein that said bodies in motion tend to stay in motion, and those at rest tend to stay at rest? (It was either Einstein or Elvira, queen of the night, but I'm not sure which.) The thing about travelling abroad, living abroad, is that you are simultaneously in motion and at rest. At rest, in the sense of having a home, a place to work, a city to live in. In motion, in the sense of being constantly bombarded by people and places, things and stuff, that alter your trajectory and instill a sense of wonder at the world that is not impossible to find at home, no, but is more difficult. More elusive and transitory.
It's easier to find wonder here, even amidst the poverty, perhaps because of the poverty. On the weekend I went with a friend and a few others to the province of Kompong Speu, about an hour outside of Phnom Penh, to a village whose name I no longer remember and could never pronounce, and we stayed at the house of a student at my old university, a gentle young man kind enough to invite a few foreigners to his house for the end of the Khmer New Year. (The Khmer New Year lasts about a week or so, and is filled with drinking and dancing and dousing, using water, of anyone and everyone who happens to be in sight. Said water often seen hurtling from the hands of a delinquent youth on the back of a moto or the side of the stree6; said water often seen slamming into your face and your neck and your chest.)
The village was another world -- in this one, but not of it. Located about an hour from Phnom Penh, accessible by a main road that gradually, windingly leads to smaller, divergent paths, it is small and dusty and dirty and green and lush and, above all, fasincating. Populated by 150 families, all of them farmers, it is a reminder that the world can, and often is, a small and contained place, oblivious to the grandmasters who plot and plan our lives.
The houses are wooden, often two stories, suspended on stilts above the land, overlooking rice fields and dirt fields and home to six, seven, eight and more people per plot. There are no cars or motos; people travel by bicycle, or they walk. They have animals to lead, pigs and dogs and cows and chickens. An abundance.
Being a foreigner in a place like this is to be a guest and a celebrity, a curiosity and a marvel, all in equal measure, simultaneously. We participated in various games that, even now, in
retrospect, seem distant and unreal, a memory viewed through a foggy glass. I was blindfolded and given a large stick; up ahead, twenty or so feet in front of me, hung suspended on a rope tied between two poles were three small pots filled with water. I had to walk five steps, then swing, three times. If I was lucky enough to hit a pot, well, it would break, and water would fall, and I would avoid the falling shards of pottery, and a group of happy Khmers would make some money while others would lose it (as even the poor love to bet).
Alas, it was not to be. I swung three times, but failed to hit a pot, knocking only the horizontal beam. In my darkened, blindfolded state, I thought it was a ceramic pot; I thought I was half-way lucky. Only when I the blindfold was removed and I was faced with the laughter and applause of a hundred and more Khmers did I realize my folly.
There were more games -- sackraces, amongst others -- followed by a night of eating and dancing, with the adults and children enjoying the last few, lingering hours of the Khmer New Year in an open field, with a blaring soundsystem, with endless beers, with laughing children and adults and teenagers dancing, dancing, dancing, as only the Cambodians can do. There was a wide and dark sky, a half-shrouded silver moon, the sounds of laughter and youth; there was all of this, and more. (I'm not even mentioning the night spent sleeping under the gossamer spread of a mosquito net.) Another world was exposed to me, and I eagerly, almost greedily, took a look. And another. And another.
Even the flat-tire on the car ride home couldn't dampen the good feelings that had been gathered and cultivated the day before. (Chaos is mandatory in Cambodia.) The sister who studies English so hard, in love with the tangled syntax and grammar; the fierce hugs of the commune chief; the smiles and respect afforded to us by the townsfolk, who have nothing, and yet willingly gave us it all, and more -- this is what I recall, what sticks. These images, and the strange, almost mystical fabric of Asia itself, its superstitions and people, the hazy fabric of reality that seems to tear and glimmer more often, more brightly, than back home.
Why do I stay? If I wanted to be anywhere else than I would be somewhere else. If I was supposed to be in a different land, or my homeland, than I would be there. I stay because in two months, two years, I might be gone, and I need to live now, here, in this place.
I stay, for now, which is all I have, because I want to advance -- or, if not move forward, at least expand the paths of my inertia, broaden my stability, dig a trench not longer, no, but deeper, wider, stronger.
These questions, more or less, were recently posed to me by Jenn (www.1ljenn.blogspot.com) in response to one of my postings, and they are actually quite good questions, valid questions, complex in their simplicity and difficult in their essentialness.
There are a thousand answers I could give, or none at all, and the silence would be just as telling as the abundance. (But if I offered silence, then this would be a blank blog, sort of a Buddhist approach to blogging, perhaps, but ultimately not that satisfying, I think. I've actually heard the sound of one hand clapping, I have, and it's not as interesting or fulfilling as the sound of two hands typing. I swear. Silence has its limits.)
Was it Einstein that said bodies in motion tend to stay in motion, and those at rest tend to stay at rest? (It was either Einstein or Elvira, queen of the night, but I'm not sure which.) The thing about travelling abroad, living abroad, is that you are simultaneously in motion and at rest. At rest, in the sense of having a home, a place to work, a city to live in. In motion, in the sense of being constantly bombarded by people and places, things and stuff, that alter your trajectory and instill a sense of wonder at the world that is not impossible to find at home, no, but is more difficult. More elusive and transitory.
It's easier to find wonder here, even amidst the poverty, perhaps because of the poverty. On the weekend I went with a friend and a few others to the province of Kompong Speu, about an hour outside of Phnom Penh, to a village whose name I no longer remember and could never pronounce, and we stayed at the house of a student at my old university, a gentle young man kind enough to invite a few foreigners to his house for the end of the Khmer New Year. (The Khmer New Year lasts about a week or so, and is filled with drinking and dancing and dousing, using water, of anyone and everyone who happens to be in sight. Said water often seen hurtling from the hands of a delinquent youth on the back of a moto or the side of the stree6; said water often seen slamming into your face and your neck and your chest.)
The village was another world -- in this one, but not of it. Located about an hour from Phnom Penh, accessible by a main road that gradually, windingly leads to smaller, divergent paths, it is small and dusty and dirty and green and lush and, above all, fasincating. Populated by 150 families, all of them farmers, it is a reminder that the world can, and often is, a small and contained place, oblivious to the grandmasters who plot and plan our lives.
The houses are wooden, often two stories, suspended on stilts above the land, overlooking rice fields and dirt fields and home to six, seven, eight and more people per plot. There are no cars or motos; people travel by bicycle, or they walk. They have animals to lead, pigs and dogs and cows and chickens. An abundance.
Being a foreigner in a place like this is to be a guest and a celebrity, a curiosity and a marvel, all in equal measure, simultaneously. We participated in various games that, even now, in
retrospect, seem distant and unreal, a memory viewed through a foggy glass. I was blindfolded and given a large stick; up ahead, twenty or so feet in front of me, hung suspended on a rope tied between two poles were three small pots filled with water. I had to walk five steps, then swing, three times. If I was lucky enough to hit a pot, well, it would break, and water would fall, and I would avoid the falling shards of pottery, and a group of happy Khmers would make some money while others would lose it (as even the poor love to bet).
Alas, it was not to be. I swung three times, but failed to hit a pot, knocking only the horizontal beam. In my darkened, blindfolded state, I thought it was a ceramic pot; I thought I was half-way lucky. Only when I the blindfold was removed and I was faced with the laughter and applause of a hundred and more Khmers did I realize my folly.
There were more games -- sackraces, amongst others -- followed by a night of eating and dancing, with the adults and children enjoying the last few, lingering hours of the Khmer New Year in an open field, with a blaring soundsystem, with endless beers, with laughing children and adults and teenagers dancing, dancing, dancing, as only the Cambodians can do. There was a wide and dark sky, a half-shrouded silver moon, the sounds of laughter and youth; there was all of this, and more. (I'm not even mentioning the night spent sleeping under the gossamer spread of a mosquito net.) Another world was exposed to me, and I eagerly, almost greedily, took a look. And another. And another.
Even the flat-tire on the car ride home couldn't dampen the good feelings that had been gathered and cultivated the day before. (Chaos is mandatory in Cambodia.) The sister who studies English so hard, in love with the tangled syntax and grammar; the fierce hugs of the commune chief; the smiles and respect afforded to us by the townsfolk, who have nothing, and yet willingly gave us it all, and more -- this is what I recall, what sticks. These images, and the strange, almost mystical fabric of Asia itself, its superstitions and people, the hazy fabric of reality that seems to tear and glimmer more often, more brightly, than back home.
Why do I stay? If I wanted to be anywhere else than I would be somewhere else. If I was supposed to be in a different land, or my homeland, than I would be there. I stay because in two months, two years, I might be gone, and I need to live now, here, in this place.
I stay, for now, which is all I have, because I want to advance -- or, if not move forward, at least expand the paths of my inertia, broaden my stability, dig a trench not longer, no, but deeper, wider, stronger.
Friday, April 15, 2005
WHERE DOES IT STOP?
It's difficult keeping track of Canadian politics abroad, given that I mostly rely on www.thestar.com or, occasionally, www.borque.org to keep me up to date, but reading recently about the kick-backs, bribery and all around money-going-where-it's-not-supposed-to scandals back home has reinforced how far I've come in the last few years in understanding a little more clearly how the world works. (Notice I said a little more clearly; I still don't really understand what the world does, and why, and towards what purpose, but I know more than I did five, six years ago, and I guess it would be scary if that weren't the case.)
Scandals at the UN involving huge sums of money. Scandals at home in Canada involving Canadian politicians funnelling money to people and corporations that will support their causes. Scandals and uproar between Japan and China, as each side baits the other with nationalistic rhetoric. Just today in the New York Times there was an interesting article analyzing how the Chinese government was carefully orchestrating the latest round of 'spontaneous' protests against Japan. And all of these crooked shenangians inevitably seem to involve money and power and connections among the elite of the elite.
Maybe it's just because I've been living in Cambodia for almost two years. The pages of the Cambodia Daily routinely depict the kickbacks that take place between those who want to move on up in the world. Hell, I've had to do it myself. Upon losing my passport last year I had to give the nice and friendly policeman a little bit of bribe to make the transactions go smoothly. (Yes, I lost my passport. Not recommended, and especially not recommended when you're living in freakin' Cambodia, because the Canadian embassy here doesn't do new passports; only the embassy in Thailand can make new ones, and so I had to wait a month for a new one, and the thing is, it was a new passport I had lost, my old one having reached its four score and ten, or thereabouts, and the moral of the story is: Scott is a knob. A first-class one.)
This is an entire country that is essentially run by greasing the palms of those who have what you want. And I've gradually realized that I was really, really naive about how the world works, and what it takes to move ahead, and how power corrupts, absolutely.
Part of Canadians current outrage has to do with our essential naivety, I think. The government's not supposed to be doing these things, we say. How dare they think they can get away with it!
Sentiments I agree with one hundred percent. But the reality is, well, to a large extent, the world over, this is what governments do, plain and simple. And it's not only limited to governments; one only has to look at the boys of Enron and Martha Stewart to realize that those on top, those in power, do not play by the same rules as everybody else.
I'm not saying the entire social system and governmental, military-industrial complex everywhere in the world is fundamentally corrupt. What I think I'm saying is that there are channels and avenues of illicit interactions that have always been there, are there now, and will continue. You can't stop them; you can only circumvent them. You can put safeguards in check. You can have, like, laws. (Cambodia is pretty much a lawless society; chaos and anarchy results. On the roads, in my school, in the courts. And in my house. But that's, um, another blog...) As Chris Rock so wisely pontificated, "A man is only as faithful as his options."
When your options multiply, fidelity becomes an endangered, cloistered species.
But where does the culpability end? I'm putting the blame on the Martha Stewarts and Paul Martins of the world, but what about me? I had to pay off the police chief to get my passport back; I'm part of the same system I'm so gleefully indicting. I have no excuse, I say; I do what nees to be done, I say. I believe it and it's bullshit and I can't reconcile the two. Where does it end, and where does the blame, should the blame, stop?
Scandals at the UN involving huge sums of money. Scandals at home in Canada involving Canadian politicians funnelling money to people and corporations that will support their causes. Scandals and uproar between Japan and China, as each side baits the other with nationalistic rhetoric. Just today in the New York Times there was an interesting article analyzing how the Chinese government was carefully orchestrating the latest round of 'spontaneous' protests against Japan. And all of these crooked shenangians inevitably seem to involve money and power and connections among the elite of the elite.
Maybe it's just because I've been living in Cambodia for almost two years. The pages of the Cambodia Daily routinely depict the kickbacks that take place between those who want to move on up in the world. Hell, I've had to do it myself. Upon losing my passport last year I had to give the nice and friendly policeman a little bit of bribe to make the transactions go smoothly. (Yes, I lost my passport. Not recommended, and especially not recommended when you're living in freakin' Cambodia, because the Canadian embassy here doesn't do new passports; only the embassy in Thailand can make new ones, and so I had to wait a month for a new one, and the thing is, it was a new passport I had lost, my old one having reached its four score and ten, or thereabouts, and the moral of the story is: Scott is a knob. A first-class one.)
This is an entire country that is essentially run by greasing the palms of those who have what you want. And I've gradually realized that I was really, really naive about how the world works, and what it takes to move ahead, and how power corrupts, absolutely.
Part of Canadians current outrage has to do with our essential naivety, I think. The government's not supposed to be doing these things, we say. How dare they think they can get away with it!
Sentiments I agree with one hundred percent. But the reality is, well, to a large extent, the world over, this is what governments do, plain and simple. And it's not only limited to governments; one only has to look at the boys of Enron and Martha Stewart to realize that those on top, those in power, do not play by the same rules as everybody else.
I'm not saying the entire social system and governmental, military-industrial complex everywhere in the world is fundamentally corrupt. What I think I'm saying is that there are channels and avenues of illicit interactions that have always been there, are there now, and will continue. You can't stop them; you can only circumvent them. You can put safeguards in check. You can have, like, laws. (Cambodia is pretty much a lawless society; chaos and anarchy results. On the roads, in my school, in the courts. And in my house. But that's, um, another blog...) As Chris Rock so wisely pontificated, "A man is only as faithful as his options."
When your options multiply, fidelity becomes an endangered, cloistered species.
But where does the culpability end? I'm putting the blame on the Martha Stewarts and Paul Martins of the world, but what about me? I had to pay off the police chief to get my passport back; I'm part of the same system I'm so gleefully indicting. I have no excuse, I say; I do what nees to be done, I say. I believe it and it's bullshit and I can't reconcile the two. Where does it end, and where does the blame, should the blame, stop?
Thursday, April 14, 2005
WHO SAYS WE CAN'T HAVE NEON SIGNS FLASHING ON OUR FOREHEADS THAT SIMPLIFY AND ADVERTISE WHO AND WHAT WE ARE?
Having just watched The Upside of Anger, the new Kevin Costner/Joan Allen/dysfunctional family flick that was actually quite good, entertaining and moving and funny, I've come to a couple of conflusions:
1) Actresses today, young and old, have no wrinkles, at all, on any portion of their faces stretching from their forehead to their ears. They all look as if they've never spent a day oftheir lives in any kind of real-world situation that involves stress or precipitation or perspiration. There were four daugthers in this movie, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty-four or so, and the mother, Joan Allen, who must be in her mid to late forties, and none of them had anything even remotely resembling real, honest-to-goodness facial expressions that looked authentic. Why? Because they've all botoxed the hell out of the foreheads, I'm guessing, which means that when they get really, really angry, their face contorts into various positions, none of them betraying the hint of a wrinkle. Totally takes me out of the movies these days, wondering how all these women have such perfect faces.
2) I really, really don't like titles that thematically state the message of the movie. The Upside of Anger is a clever title and all, but it's so generic and blatant; it's so direct. It's like that movie from a few years called The Myth of Fingerprints. Titles should have a hint of the specific in them, I believe. (Exceptions abound, of course, none more so than Do The Right Thing, the perfect title for a pretty much perfect movie. But exceptions only exist for the masters.)
I do think it would be cool, however, if each of us could have thematic principles related to our lives flash across our foreheads when it's thematically appropriate in real-life situations. Let's say you get angry -- wham, bam, ' the upside of anger' flashes across your face with a neon intensity. That way it would be easier to figure out what kind of a person somebody is, whether they're a prophet or a prick, a saint or a sinner. You could walk into a bar and come across a Fonzie wannabe with a 'Be Cool' sign beneath his brow, or a major-league whiner bitching and moaning about their lack of a salary could have ' Million Dollar Baby' slapped beneath their chin. The possibilities are endless, the likelihood, well, not likely...
1) Actresses today, young and old, have no wrinkles, at all, on any portion of their faces stretching from their forehead to their ears. They all look as if they've never spent a day oftheir lives in any kind of real-world situation that involves stress or precipitation or perspiration. There were four daugthers in this movie, ranging in age from sixteen to twenty-four or so, and the mother, Joan Allen, who must be in her mid to late forties, and none of them had anything even remotely resembling real, honest-to-goodness facial expressions that looked authentic. Why? Because they've all botoxed the hell out of the foreheads, I'm guessing, which means that when they get really, really angry, their face contorts into various positions, none of them betraying the hint of a wrinkle. Totally takes me out of the movies these days, wondering how all these women have such perfect faces.
2) I really, really don't like titles that thematically state the message of the movie. The Upside of Anger is a clever title and all, but it's so generic and blatant; it's so direct. It's like that movie from a few years called The Myth of Fingerprints. Titles should have a hint of the specific in them, I believe. (Exceptions abound, of course, none more so than Do The Right Thing, the perfect title for a pretty much perfect movie. But exceptions only exist for the masters.)
I do think it would be cool, however, if each of us could have thematic principles related to our lives flash across our foreheads when it's thematically appropriate in real-life situations. Let's say you get angry -- wham, bam, ' the upside of anger' flashes across your face with a neon intensity. That way it would be easier to figure out what kind of a person somebody is, whether they're a prophet or a prick, a saint or a sinner. You could walk into a bar and come across a Fonzie wannabe with a 'Be Cool' sign beneath his brow, or a major-league whiner bitching and moaning about their lack of a salary could have ' Million Dollar Baby' slapped beneath their chin. The possibilities are endless, the likelihood, well, not likely...
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