Cambodia Vignettes

Cambodia I

Appnmonkeys

Below are selections of writing about Cambodia I made during my six trips there. I had the good fortune and indeed privilege to spend over four-hundred-fifty days in Cambodia, a country I fell immediately in love with and yet, simultaneously, was anxious to flee - my first visit was only seven days, a trip I cut short from a planned eleven.

When I returned to the U.S., one day, a few months later, I read a New York Times article a friend had sent me about the killing fields and other legacies of the Khmer Rouge era. When I got to the fifth paragraph I was suddenly struck with an overwhelming certainty (or "instruction") that I had to return to Cambodia. That moment began in earnest an odyssey that transformed my life as much or more than any other time, place or person ever had before (save Chögyam Trungpa, though it was he who I most of all felt there).

I use "privilege" in a two-fold sense. Since the time of Herodotus, travel to foreign lands has been an intellectual and aesthetic privilege, a life-expanding pleasure combined with the freedom gained by leaving, always temporarily, one's routine. The other sense is political; those of us of middle-class backgrounds living in industrialized or first-world countries are able to travel because of the wealth of our status, a kind of privilege that is often ignored and has come, at least in part, through legacies of colonialism and exploitation. In short, though economically rather low on the middle-class spectrum, I can afford to travel to Cambodia whereas the average Cambodian could never even afford the cost of a passport (ironically more expensive in Cambodia than the U.S.).

In the globalized and environmentally threatened world of 2010, Cambodia maintains a fragile existence; still recovering from the Khmer Rouge era, “developing” and vulnerable to global forces that threaten to overwhelm it, it is still an agrarian and Buddhist society, a "democracy" mostly in name where the privileged few operate with often lawless impunity, grabbing land or evicting people from neighborhoods they've lived in for decades. Like the majority of the world’s citizens, nearly everyone I have come to know there earns between one and two dollars a day.

We have entered the new era of environmental crisis. As the paradigms of consumerism begins to collapse – even as its momentum increases – the striving for affluence can hardly be seen as a model for "development" or the future. I saw the future in Cambodia, all around me - in the earthy presence of “poor” Cambodian (who, though they work hard, usually seven days a week, never seem to “rush”). Our collective future, if we are to have one, must begin with an increase in simplicity. A rebalancing between first and third worlds. The poverty of Cambodia is dire and our excesses abominable. The potential for mutual instruction and exchange is huge.

Beer

I ate dinner after the rainstorms. Waitresses assembled at my outdoor table like a gang of football referees, trying to understand just what I was saying in Khmer. We eventually arrived, in the universal language of laughter, at a plate of seafood and kale. Beer is served with ice, irregular hunks chipped from blocks men deliver on the back of flat-bed trucks, exposed to the sun, the ice laughably vulnerable. Young women called “beer girls” represent particular companies – Tiger Beer or Angkor – wear tight-fitting dresses, deliver ice cubes, will sit down and talk with you, work in a kind of quaisi-prostitution of availability depending on the restaurant.

To my left was a table of solders; four woman and three men, uniforms but no rifles. Civil servants like soldiers or policemen are paid horribly little (though more than public school teachers) which creates systems of dysfunction and graft. They were handsome in their uniforms, heftier than most Cambodians, carousing, half-drunk, eyes showing desires and frustrations under the languid influence of beer expressed with increasing inaccuracy and blur.

The owner of the places sat at another table with a similar scene of men and women, several beers and sexual innuendo edges. The young waitresses and waiters giggling, innocent, curious and smiling tenderly by contrast. A young mother entered the scene with her baby at her breast, her clothes blackened by filth; she seemed nearly as small as her infant, standing there at the tables, begging. Alternately brushed away or given 300 riel.

An outlandish but understandable custom – coming as it does from centuries of rural life where table scraps were fed to the dogs, chickens and pig and plastic had not been invented – is that dinner napkins (toilet paper kept in small dispensers) and every other discard from the table is thrown to the floor with impunity. At the end of a meal the floor under a table –such as the ones the soldiers were sitting at – might be ankle deep in beer cans and trash (as laughable as the ice cubes).

A young man arrived with his baby – curious that the mother was elsewhere – and sat at a table in front of me. He plunked the baby right down on the tabletop and moved its occupants – a toothpick dispenser and two bottles of condiments in front of his daughter while he offered her smiles and loving adoration. The baby girl, just old enough to sit upright sat, I have to say, like an enlightened emanation, Buddha-like, tulku-like, she sat perfectly, seemingly without tensing a single muscle to keep herself upright. Her ears, cheeks, eyes and head all cheerfully round. She handled and examined the objects offered to her as if they were scepters from a former lifetimes. Eventually she upended the toothpick dispenser and a stream of toothpicks spread across the table. The father reacted with tender humor befitting his daughter and this kind of thing went on without the slightest trace of impatience or gap in affection between father and daughter. As I left, I stopped at his table and said kongya s’aat – beautiful baby. Whether he understood or not, the baby smiled at me in an instant, almost knowingly, as if she was expecting me to arrive here.

Time

Asking to be led and then finding myself led, through visions (made of such things as dreams, feelings in my body, my subtle body, my heart, intuitions, I Ching throws and automatic writing; but most of all intuitive explosions in my heart, a feeling of my spiritual lineage and teacher being present there, sometimes the very sight of them – all of these intangible things, that cannot be easily put into words, together they comprise my most tangible experience).

I seem to know my life only in three months or six-month segments, an approximate measurement of my conviction in these visions and how they endure, asking for my commitment, inspiring me. A segment ends through a sudden, unexpected and completely unpremeditated new vision. A complete surprise. It is uncanny, almost diabolical. Quit your job. Sell your call. Travel to Cambodia. Return again to live there.

On one level these instructions are the stuff of anyone’s life (of my life before). But revealed and acted upon, the conventional line they make is uneven, jagged, finally not the geography of a line but of a circle: inclusive and mysterious and intercepting itself in a way a line never could.

Now I face the same window that I did yesterday, but also six, seven and eight months ago. The third-floor window of a guest house in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It is room #209. Sitting on this bed, facing this window. As in any city, the skyline outside is a graphic, functioning confusion, sketches of time and its chaotic, unjust and often violent histories and incoherent building codes. This window, the floor tiles, the walls, the contents of my two suitcases, all are companions who I know rather well. In the limitation of this six-dollar a night room I am not overwhelmed by stuff. It is a place that somehow invited me to it. Reciprocally, it is a place where I extend daily supplications to the invisible world.

Suchness

During meditation practice suchness returns, sometimes gradually, sometimes like a pan dropped to the floor. Someone leaves the room and I discover the one of me who remains is a more intimate friend, without critique, a far better person, transparent. Sometimes there is not even that one and the mind of the Imperial Drala is present and available to dissolve into. I read the text and if I inhabit the words each one is its own suchness - with new rooms, new paint, exotic plants - announcing something important if my voice will be its tongue. All the effort is to make myself the merest, barest, least noisy receptacle - a landing-platform, host, practitioner, human being. At least it becomes clear – every time – that my life and the curiosities and pleasures of it, its challenges, dramas and opportunities, everything that is worthwhile has come from Him, born when I first saw Him, first read His words, arriving anew whenever I think of Him… and my greatest day-to-day anxiety is that I will forget to think about Him as intensely and intimately as I sometimes have. I fear that dullness a great deal, even as I have found myself swayed by it.

Heat

I’m living in room #209 now - one floor closer to the street, to the noise, to the earth. During Chinese New Year most stay home, celebrate, eat, play cards, watch TV. The markets are closed. The streets are at once far freer of traffic and more nakedly filthy. There is no choice but to see the filth as beautiful, to incline in the direction one-taste. To inhale the smell of garbage deeply. To realize again how quickly it accumulates and how many earn a living from it - sweeping it, collecting it, sorting through is, recycling it, hauling it and sleeping near it or even on top of it. It is everywhere, appearing and disappearing like sunlight itself, leaving behind its residue of grease, grime or filth. Is this waste – found in every city from Berne to Bangkok - not the signpost of the setting sun, the darkening age, the diminishment of vitality and the thinning of the ozone layer, a thermometer of the emerging heat?

Tarantula

Tarantula. A leap from the roasted grasshoppers I ate in Bangkok - bypassing the cockroaches - to a palm-sized arachnid. I buy it on the way to the banks of the Mekong/Tonle Sap (it is these rivers that have arrested me), on that most lovely named of streets, Sisowath Quay. I buy the tarantula from a heap of others. An eight-year old girl sells it to me. I kneel down and she allows me into her world of barter without flinching. Takes 700 real. Puts it in a bag. The Tonle Sap is bordered by Sisowath Quay, the Mekong meets it further down, beyond the city center. Here the rivers spread and the sky opens. Clouds heaped into the distance, violet, a trace of pink, ominous grays. It rained minutes ago and will again. I eat two legs - mostly the taste of salt and chile powder. Brittle. I bite half the thorax off; a mealiness, I feel hesitant. Mild nausea. Anything animal we don't know hints of chicken and I notice that here. Across the river tall coconut trees are silhouetted like unusual mushrooms or minarets. I've stared at this water throughout the last eleven days. Often in the morning, before coffee, with the soft stillness of 6:30 a.m. Even more painful than seeing the garbage dump and the people living there was the sight of water infected by sewage. Whole parts of town, shanty buildings erected besides such waterways, are forced to create such waterways. The water black, opaque as engine oil. A stench. The water is a negative mirror. An injury. Something that shouldn't be. A sinister shadow of our choices. A heartbreak (it does empty into the rivers before me). Such a complex current, mesmerizing elegance under the softening sky, losing it's color as the sun sets. I eat two more legs, the increase of salt and spice welcome after the second bite of the thorax, more ample in my mouth than I expected. Tough. The back of the head is semi-hollow, sweeter. Finally the eyes, the jaws, remnants of the legs from the bottom of the bag. I feel stable and confident. It was near here that I saw an Indian, a sadhu it seemed, two mornings in a row. Hair tied back, matted, in orange robe, dignified, to himself, untroubled, he leaned against a flagpole as I am now, expelled stale air, yoga-wise, from each nostril. Stared at the Mekong in the distance. His eyes like the captain of a ship, responsible to himself. He assumed a full lotus and took up his overt spiritual practice while everyone else went on about him. He inspired me. The tarantula would taste much different unsalted and uncooked. I know village people in Cambodia today rely on insects for a significant portion of their diet. During the Khmer Rouge era and its starvation, many people, especially the city people, were reduced to eating insects raw, secretly. I will miss the sight of these rivers, and look now so that memory records them indelibly. There are surprisingly few commercial craft on the water, none of the stream of barges loaded with stuff you see in Bangkok, just a couple of tourist boats and tiny fishing boats, powered by ancient engines, trolling with nets the size of a bedsheet. You can sit along the river on the granite topped stone embankment that runs for many blocks. Beside it, a wide sidewalk, then grass, then Sisowath Quay. It draws the population to it, and people of all economic persuasions are gathered here, always.

Inside The Chinese Shrine

Every morning I go to a Chinese shrine on Street #1 in Battambang, Cambodia. The shrine is not on the tourist map and I've never seen anyone else inside it, save for the shrine attendant and once, three small boys. I discovered the shrine a week ago, walking along Street #1, walking along the banks of the Sangker River. Harvested rice fields had been burned the night before and the morning sky was thick with smoke, the sun a dull orange globe when it rose above the market and lit the banks of the river. Through the haze I saw the shrine beckoning me. I crossed the street and entered.

The shrine attendant, a short man who had the innocent look of a school child but who I later learned has three children of his own, showed me exactly what to do, which was to offer precise numbers of incense sticks to six shrines and the entrance gate. Twenty-eight sticks in all. When I offered incense to the main shrine the attendant hit a drum and a gong many times. A clamor filled the room and the moment of offering became very real. I couldn't wait to return the next day.

I don't know anything about this shrine, really, and the attendant and I can only exchange a few words in English or Khmer. All I know is what my eyes have told me, and from the feelings I get offering incense. Each time I've offered it has become clearer what each shrine is - a station for the ancestors. This is the most obvious or cliche notion we have about a Chinese shrine, yet the phenomena is real. Without anticipating it, each time I offer I sense my father and mother. Through participation, these shrines have become a place to acknowledge and intangibly meet my departed parents, and other long-dead relatives. After visiting them I feel stronger.

I went back to the Chinese shrine this morning. As usual, the shrine attendant was mopping the floor. I don't know his name. I took eff my sandals and walked across the wet tile, my footprints evaporating as I left them, the mop bucket parked with sudsy water by the front gate. The neatly bundled twenty-eight sticks of incense lay waiting by the donation box, each bound with a rubber band. I dropped a dollar in the box and picked up an offering bundle. I held the incense above a burning candle and lit each stick. I walked back to the entrance shrine and faced the street. The Sangker river was out there, due east, barely moving and green as a frog pond. The incense wafted toward the river. More rice fields were burned last night and the smoke from the rice fires was almost as think as the incense plumes. The sunrise muted and diffuse. I felt gratitude for the view I was seeing now as if for the first time.

I was thinking about the Chinese shrine when I went for my afternoon walk. It would be locked now, as I walked through what remained of this morning's market. The morning vendors had all gone home, most of them anyway, and the street I walked on was clear of pallets, stools, trays and overhead umbrellas. All that remained were fish scales, furiously scrubbed away this morning and covering the asphalt, translucent and now being ground into the hot tar by motorcycle tires and my own footprints. Later I walked through the pagoda I visit each morning, Wat Pippitharam, and came across another small bonfire, smoldering on the fuel of fallen leaves, rotten newspapers and limp plastic bags. No one was tending it and the smoke smelled delicious; pungent and wafting the remains of various species of tree leaves skyward. The fish scales and bonfire smoke alone were enough to make me glad I'd taken this walk. Even the smell of the sewer coming from the storm gates at traffic intersections was welcome and alive.

My trip to the shrine this morning was the same as the other days, in other words, different. As Kierkegaard taught, by limiting ourselves we become more creative. I wouldn't soon tire of the precise limitation of twenty-six sticks of incense. Or of six shrines. Or of the conversation I have with the shine attendant each day, which consists of Hello, How are you? and See you tomorrow.

Another Restaurant

Tonight the rain began during my dinner. I’d walked the immense island of city park that divides Sihanouk Boulevard at Independence Monument. I passed dozens of sidewalk badminton players and boys flying kites into the greying sky. The claustraphobic helter-skelter density of central Phnom Pehn (where a kite could never be flown) gave way to actual sidewalks and the ability to stroll (or even jog, if they did that here).

As the sun set and rain prepared to strike, I could feel the day transition internally that was christened by a swerv into a restaurant I immediately knew I wanted to be in. Silk tablecloths, most commonly found in a tourist place, but filled with Cambodians and the waitresses dressed in uniforms that were clearly not designed for selling beer. While my waitress stood by as I examined the menu, I realized it was her - and the other young waiters and waitress – who had drawn me here, whose wholesomeness I had sensed from the street. Every one of them beaming at me as they passed by my table.

Then I was given a brochure: “All the staff of Komar Pich Restaurant (whose name means ‘diamon child”) are former street children and residents of the Street Children Assistance and Development Program.” The restaurant proving that basic goodness runs very deep but that worthwhile uses of money are rare and that these waiters are otherwise the same children who appear sun and dirt-blackened, selling peanuts on the street, begging, homeless, in rags, sometimes following you for yards, whining for change.

“Look those children in the eye,” the brochure said, “and help us take care of the ones working here simply by patronizing us” (and of course, if you like, donating money or time). The dish of sweetened fish I ordered was small - hardly three good bites - so my waitress and I conjured up something else to go with my steamed rice; char bonlai and moan (grilled vegetables with chicken). Being near her was like being with someone highly trained in the intangible ability to make someone else feel good. As if she was a soldier in that kind of army, with her green uniform and somewhat homely face. I didn’t learn her story, but maybe I would another time.

Inside the Temple Grounds

I entered Wat Pippitharom through the entrance off of Street #3. I turned from the grease and litter-stained street, passed in front of an ancient moto driver and walked through the gate. There is a tangible and immediate shift in atmosphere once inside a temple, though the landscape is often incoherent and akimbo. No predictable pattern and in this wat, like nearly all of them, the main temple was shuttered, locked and looking decidedly off-limits. Besides the central temple it was the monks robes, hanging to dry on makeshift clotheslines, that were the telltale evidence that this was indeed an inhabited Buddhist pagoda. As usual, there were no monks around, or rather, their population was sparse and it took me a while to spot one.

I'd seen a monk earlier this morning, doing his alms round and stopped in front of a hardware store, reciting scripture, while an offeree bowed low with his hands clasped in front of his eyeglasses. The monk, according to specification, was both barefoot and looking detached toward the bowing devotee. Monks are supposed to conduct their rounds barefoot, a sign of their renunciation, and they are not supposed to thank donors for food or other offerings, but to simply accept, without judgement, and if nothing is given, to accept that too. They are supposed to inhabit a mindful and quiet dignity, which is what many of their 227 rules of conduct are supposed to foster. This is why it is always a bit unsettling to see monks punch each other. I've seen this a number of times, a young monk slugging another on the upper arm, a spontaneous burst of affectionate teasing, an understandable expression of young male testosterone but still odd coming from a monk.

Monks are not the only inhabitants of the temple. Many lay people are there, too, some of them poor squatters or old woman who have become nuns, called dounjii, and not nuns in the technical sense since they are not ordained (ordained orders of Theravada nuns died out many hundreds of years ago). The dounjii are most impressive: devout, humorous, friendly, doing work all through the day such as cooking for the monks, washing their dishes or keeping the temple grounds free of litter. Frequently schools are found within the temple grounds, and Wat Pippitharom seemed to have one too, though small. I didn't see the schoolchildren but their bicycles were parked outside the schoolhouse, old bicycles like the ones used in Beijing or Hanoi before capitalism took over, innocent looking one-speeds parked upright and gleaming in the hot sun.

The grounds of the temple occupied an entire city block, de rigueur and thankfully free of signage, cell-phone shops or other commercial activity. And many trees around. Some of them bodhi trees. Some trees immense, huge canopies above dusty courtyards and the buildings monks live in. Some of the monk quarters quite elegant with French influence, including one I saw in this wat with grey shutters over the windows.

I was in another temple last night, Wat Kandal, monks at sunset raking leaves and shoving them onto a small bonfire. Thick smoke from the musty leaves rose and met what was left of the sunlight, smoke and shafts of sun mixing into an iridescent and slightly ominous haze, an activity that seemed both pointless and mesmerizing. One does not often see older monks on the temple grounds. The most senior monks were killed during the Khmer Rouge era and the monkhood has still not recovered from the loss of those who could train the younger generation. Plus most men disrobe after a few years as a monk.

I left Wat Kandal and once outside came across dozens of uniformed children performing synchronized judo moves on the banks of the Sangker River. Wat Kandal, like Wat Pippitharom, was both open to the world and closed from it, certainly a kind of sanctuary, as one would expect.

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