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CAMBODIA & VIETNAM ESSAYS
You're Hired? I first visited Phnom Penh in January of 2005. The place was mesmerizing. A city with few functioning traffics lights but with traffic moving so languidly it didn't need them. Thousands of small motorcycles navigating intersections like fish adept at their instinctual migration. Markets dense with vendors who could sit patiently all day in twelve square feet of floor space, surrounded by mangoes...
Expecting Me. 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. 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 (symbols of Cambodia everywhere)...
What Makes Something "Cambodian"? The photograph above was taken on the top floor of a guesthouse I stayed in in Siem Reap, a town known to the world as the gateway to the fabled Angkor Wat. I took this snapshot on my way to breakfast, with the morning sun illuminating towels and sheets hung the previous day to dry. It is of course the light that brings this photograph to life. The way the orange towels and yellow blanket are back lit. The way the black towels are opaque. The way the sun is rising on the world with a glaring brilliance at 7:00 AM...
Buddhism and the Khmer Rouge: Shortly after the Khmer Rouge came to power on April 17, 1975, Ieng Sary, the minister of foreign affairs announced there would be freedom of religion in Democratic Kampuchia. A few months later, Khieu Samphan, head of state, claimed in a speech, "Our people have the right to practice whatever religion they like and the right not to practice any religion at all." In actual practice, Buddhism was nearly eradicated during the brief four-year period of Khmer Rouge Cambodia (the fate of Cambodia's Muslim and Christian populations was similarly if not more grim)...
A Morning Walk: Every morning I take a walk after breakfast. And another after lunch. And often a third before dinner. My guesthouse is a block from the Siem Reap River with its trees and water and bridges, and walking along this river is the centerpiece of each walk, the place where I go for exercise, observing, and all the other simple pleasures of walking...
The Cambodian Market: Wheel of the Quivering Meat Conception: I once heard that a Buddhist student asked his Tibetan master if plants were not also sentient beings which we kill when we uproot them, and the teacher replied that they were...
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...
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...
Inside Saigon: Fate is defined as "the development of events beyond a person's control." My newest home is The Liberty Hotel Saigon South. I chose the hotel from the internet, and fate assigned me to room #410. In numerology 410 is a 5, a number which is "unpredictable, always in motion and constantly in need of change." That makes sense, because once I arrived in this room I wanted to get out...
Inside Level One: I am in Bangkok. The room number of my hotel is 379, numerologically a 1. I arrived here Thursday night, to a room with no desk, barely enough floor space for yoga, and a window that looks out at a concrete wall. Now I'm looking again at the meaning of 1. I'm looking at it four days later, after I taught a meditation weekend to fifteen people, mostly Thai, but also Western expatriates working in Bangkok...
Inside Hanoi: I'm staying in the "old quarter" of Hanoi. The streets are narrow, twisting and behind the main streets, which are not large, are alleys upon alleys. Like Saigon, it is a warren of commerce and residences, some of it visible from the street, some not. Yesterday was the first day of Tet, the new year's celebration and in the morning the streets were empty, the storefronts and houses closed and gated...
Cambodia Has No Highway Patrol: I call this photograph Cambodia Has No Highway Patrol. I've taken several pictures of vehicles loaded up with cargo well beyond their seeming capacity, not to mention breaking point, but nothing I've seen or photographed cames close to this Guinness-Book-of-Records stack of mattresses. In Cambodia it seems like the more stuff on a vehicle the older the vehicle is, and in this case the springs and chassis of the pickup truck are well worn indeed, not to mention how limited the windshield visibility...
Inside My Hotel Room: In a way, there's very little that distinguishes this hotel room. It needs paint, the ceiling's ugly and the drapes are worse. It's number is 107, numerologically an 8. I looked up the meaning of eight online, but the meaning didn't mean much to me when I read it. This room does have two things going for it, however: a door to the porch and white towels the maids fold on the bed in the form of leaves or flower petals. The maid's handiwork adds beauty and care to a room that is otherwise all perfunctory - a cheap television set and vase with a plastic rose.
Homage To Cambodia: Below are selections of writing about Cambodia I made during my five trips there, taken between January 2005 and November 2007. I had the good fortune and indeed privilege to spend over four-hundred days in Cambodia...
Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia. This is the extrordinary documentary made by John Pilger about the rise and fall of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, including sections on America's secret bombing of Cambodia by the the Nixan administration. This documentary has never been screened in the United States.
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