The Things I Hate

Dear Ted,

You hate many things: smoker’s breath, Ernest Hemingway stories, Scott Bailey, deadlines, people who are too good at karaoke. I may, in fact, know more about the things you hate than the things you like, and that is how I know that you are my friend, because when two people tell each other what they hate about the world, it doesn’t mean that they’re misanthropes, just truthful with each other. You also hate people who sugarcoat things, so I should admit that it’s not always roses and sunshine over here. Cambodia is a vibrant country full of strong and beautiful people. There are also some aspects of it that annoy the living shit out of me. These are, in truth, small matters in the global scheme of things, but it often does not feel like it when you have to look at them every day, and I thought it might be time to get a few things about Cambodia off my chest.

Dog Genitals
Let us begin with the fact that I come face to face with more furry testicles every day than I have in a lifetime in the United States. Yes, one would see the odd purebred Boxer kept for breeding strutting his stuff in Washington Square Park. But apparently no one in Cambodia has ever heard the gospel of spaying and neutering your pets. These omnipresent canine nuts cause multiple problems. For one, they lead to dozens of gnarly-looking, agitated and mistreated strays roaming the streets. (If the Buddhist notions of karma and rebirth are true, then you should fervently hope that you don’t land yourself in the animal kingdom of Cambodia next time around. Stoned pigs strapped to the back of motos on their way to slaughter, irritable crocodiles displayed in tiny cages, the howl of kicked dogs in the night—it’s a PETA nightmare.) For another, dog nuts seem to be a magnet for a whole host of diseases that I sincerely wish I knew nothing about. Scaly, itchy, misshapen, bleeding, ripped open, or swollen to the size of cantaloupes—you name a symptom, and I have seen a poor dog afflicted with it in his most sensitive of parts. And the horrors are not just limited to genitalia. All female dogs that are even months beyond puppyhood sport slack, stretched-out teats that all but drag in the dust. These do not seem as susceptible to disease, but as I watch them whipping painfully to and fro when a female dog so much as trots, it puts me in mind of the realities of mammalian aging and a mortal depression begins to set in.

Dirt
For a while, I could not understand why my fingernails were perpetually dirty here. And then I realized that it’s because I always have mosquito bites and scratch them. I am where the dirt is coming from. A layer of Cambodian dirt mixed with my own sweat is permanently caked on my skin, and no amount of showering will remove it. I wonder sometimes how many pounds of dirt I must have ingested since arrival just by opening my mouth or licking my lips. Now, during the hot season, the dirt becomes airborne and then comes to settle on my pillow, my toothbrush, my dishes. This, I think, is actually preferable to the wet season, when the whole of Siem Reap turns into a giant mud puddle which gets splashed up the back of my legs as I walk. And surely my feet will never be the same again. I have never been a foot fetishist, but the sight of a fresh pedicure on some newly arrived Western tourist alongside my calloused, grubby paws is enough to cause me actual physical pain. The issue was not even resolved by a trip to Dr. Fish, the place at the night market where hundreds of fish will eat the dead skin off your feet. My soles did, indeed, feel softer but were still stained the reddish-brown of Cambodian grit.

Bad Jokes
I love the Khmer for their good cheer. Old women smile toothless grins and try to stroke my cheek, and happy babies yell “Hello!” from every street corner. But there is a serious mismatch when it comes to our notions of what is funny. Aside from Khmer pop music, the most popular entertainment offering on long bus rides is a strange variety show which seems to consist mostly of shrieking drag queens and a small child dressed up as a surly pirate. Maybe there is smart dialogue that is simply lost on me, but judging from the reaction of fellow bus riders, the mere appearance of that pirate is enough to make all the passengers almost pee their pants with laughter. And for some reason, my fellow inhabitants of Siem Reap cannot—cannot—get over how funny it is that I go jogging in the morning. Running apparently registers just above pirates on the laugh meter. It is not uncommon for at least eight tuk-tuk drivers to double over in laughter as I jog past, and all of them then proceed to make the same joke. “One, two, three, four,” they yell like a military drill sergeant, occasionally running along with me for half a block before collapsing to the ground in peals of hilarity. “But you saw me yesterday,” I want to say, “and you did the same thing.” Weird foreign habits are apparently the bad joke that never gets old in Cambodia.

Hairy Moles
Just a few moments after trudging over the Cambodian border for the first time, we stopped to ask for a taxi at a deserted hotel. The valet may have been helpful; I am not certain because all I could do was stare at the astonishing mole on his chin and the handful of black whiskers, each maybe four or five inches long, growing out of it. It was alarming, as though a large paintbrush had begun to sprout from his face, and it waggled at me tauntingly whenever he spoke. What I couldn’t have known then is that he is hardly alone among his countrymen. It’s rare to see any Khmer men sporting facial hair, except for this one glaring exception. Khmer men and women alike seem to be attempting to grow long, ZZ Top-style beards, but only from their moles. Everywhere I go, hairy moles are leering at me. When I asked our seventeen-year-old buddy Han (my go-to guy for this type of question) about the phenomenon, he said that people believed it was “unhealthy” to cut mole hair. He was a little foggy on what would happen if the hairs were cut, but whatever it was, it was bad.

But what can I do about any of this? The best approach I’ve found so far is to shrug and laugh politely one more time at the jokes of tuk-tuk drivers. Besides, maybe it is important to hate a few things, no matter where you live. It’s a way of reminding yourself of the things you like. May you dream tonight of Fitzgerald and nonsmokers. As for me, I’ll close my eyes and think of home, of loofah sponges and The Colbert Report, mole-hair clippers and neutered beagles.

Fondly,
S

Re: Blog Pictorial Cheat

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What You See Is What You Get

Dear Maureen,

Being a foreigner in Cambodia often feels like one big web of miscommunication. At the most basic level, of course, this usually has to do with my minimal Khmer vocabulary. Even when I can find the right words, there’s a good chance I’ll mangle them beyond recognition, and likewise, I hate seeing the shattered look on a Khmer person’s face when he thinks he is speaking English to me and I cannot, for the life of me, understand a single word. But the missed connections are more than just a problem of language. Even when someone speaks English well, there are still dozens of cultural potholes that we can fall into.

Here’s one that comes up all the time: Khmer people exist in a world in which everything is taken very literally. Sometimes this manifests itself as funny little cultural quirks. (You want an ice cream sandwich in Cambodia? It’s a baguette with some little scoops of sorbet stuffed inside.) But I didn’t realize how compelled Westerners are to turn everything into an abstraction until I saw their ideas constantly being lost in translation, and that can be utterly maddening for everyone involved. An American friend of mine was tearing her hair from her scalp one night, because, in trying to explain to a Khmer employee why something he did was unprofessional, she made the grave error of turning to analogy. Spinning out a reversed scenario, she asked, “How would you like it if I did that to you?”

He was completely baffled. “You didn’t do that to me,” he said.

“That’s not the point. What if I did?”

“But you didn’t.” This, in various forms, was repeated ad nauseam, until, nerves frayed, both parties resorted to dark looks and chain smoking.

At the Buddhist school where Jason and I teach an English class full of teenagers a few times each week, our attempts to recreate Western education techniques fail miserably. Pictionary seemed like a grand idea, but the students were easily frustrated because they didn’t understand the concept of drawing anything besides a very literal rendering of the word. Given the word “party,” a Westerner might draw a cocktail glass or a disco ball, party hats or a birthday cake. Our Khmer student drew four people sitting at a table—that is, after all, what parties often look like. When trying to get her teammates to guess “teacher,” another student drew a picture of a monk, at which point her team guessed “monk” repeatedly. We suggested adding something to the picture, but she was confused—why would she draw an apple or a chalkboard or a pencil when the word was “teacher”?

If Pictionary was arduous, Twenty Questions was a complete catastrophe. The class seemed perplexed by the notion of “guessing what we were thinking.” (Why would they do that? Why couldn’t we just tell them?) When we convinced them to start asking questions, the queries tended to be hesitant and completely unrelated. “Is it pizza?” one girl asked hopefully. “Is it a duck?” asked the next student.

Even after we corrected this habit of asking about single items and provided them with some hints, the game limped along pathetically. “Okay,” I said. “So remember, it’s not served hot and it’s something round. What could it be?”

“Is it soup?” one student asked innocently, at which point I had to restrain an urge to hurl an eraser at him. The lesson had ceased to be about English at all—it had become an exercise in abstract thinking and logic. On days when we give up and teach by rote, the students are relieved, cheerfully repeating our monotone pronunciations. If this happened in a Western classroom full of seventeen-year-olds, one would conclude that surely learning disabilities were to blame. But on the contrary, our Khmer students are very bright, picking up and remembering vocabulary and grammar rules quickly. It does not have anything to do with intelligence level. But what does it have to do with? At first I thought the explanation would involve complicated notions of Eastern thought and perspectives, and perhaps it does, but I think that the more likely answer is that most Khmer people can’t think abstractly because nobody bothered to teach them how.

Skills like creative thinking and basic logic feel innate to me, like an inborn part of my personality, but I’m beginning to realize that they’re probably not—I was taught them just like so many other things, at school, from my family, and in my backyard, playing with you. The reason that this letter is to you, even though we have long been out of touch and there is only the most miniscule possibility that you will read this, is because playtime with you when we were very little girls is the first time I remember learning that an abstract imagined world and a real world could coexist. “I am Maureen,” you said to me when you first came to my porch. “Do you want to see my magic tree?” And for the next few years, summer vacations were full of magic trees and blue whales swimming in the back yard, of royal tea parties and dastardly villains lurking in the basement.

In a country razed to nothingness just a generation ago, my Khmer students have never been taught to pay attention to anything other than the very real and pressing world around them. Maybe it is a little like America in its infancy—I used to dread when early American literature was assigned in high school, all those texts of Thomas Payne and John Smith and Cotton Mather that speak of much passion and hard work but little imagination or whimsy. They were men who were busy inventing a nation, and they had no time to invent anything else. I see echoes of this in Cambodia. Paintings by Khmer artists, for instance, are not valued for originality of content or technique, but rather for their careful precision in replicating a few standard designs. They can recreate a temple backlit by a sunset perfectly, but would they ever be able to translate their inner life onto the canvas?

It makes me painfully aware that a life like mine, one dedicated to thought and art and invention, could only have been hatched in a handful of very fortunate countries. On the one hand, it makes me newly appreciative of the country of my birth and desperately grateful for that blue whale that was sparked into existence in a landlocked Midwestern town. But it is both a heady and terrible realization to know that those deepest and most private parts of the mind, the mental pathways that serve as the foundation of one’s self, are yet one more sign of the privilege that I did nothing to deserve.

And so I hope that wherever you are, you have managed to make good on our lucky beginnings. I hope you still have the sense to have a magic tree.

With love,
Shannon

Re: Sex is Everywhere, Sex is Nowhere

From: writersblok@hotmail.com
To: rachel_gussman@XXXX.com

Dear Rae,

I read today in the Phnom Penh Post that a prominent opposition politician and human rights spokeswoman in Malaysia has resigned because nude photos of her have been making the rounds of the country’s cell phones. She’s not posing for the camera in these photos; she’s not caught in any act. She’s simply asleep in bed. “I wish to state that I am not ashamed of my sexuality as a woman and a single person,” Elizabeth Wong is quoted. “I have broken no laws. I stand by the fundamental principle in a democracy that everyone has a right to privacy.”

Malaysia is very Muslim and very conservative. Ms. Wong had a broad base of support among a number of ethnic groups and Malaysia’s women. “She is a single person,” a government official is quoted as saying. “How can she allow a man into her room when they are not married?"

I read it and could perfectly imagine a constipated man with angry, angry eyes shaking an index finger. Viciously conservative Muslims are pretty much as the viciously conservative American Christians would have you believe, with the additional fact that they are more similar to each other than is comfortable to admit. It’s not hard to conjure up the glee behind Malaysian government doors, the handshake, cash, and position handed with a wink to the boyfriend who sold himself, to the stranger whose warmth won Ms. Wong over. Sex as a weapon, sex as a wand, sex with eyes open and sex with eyes shut. In Cambodia and, it seems, in most of Southeast Asia, sex is the world’s warming winters, the outsourcing of interrogation, the 15-year-old that everyone at the Thanksgiving table knows is sleeping with her boyfriend. It is the thing glaring and loud but still largely ignored, the thing berated but given permission, forbidden to all but acceptable for some, denied its very existence yet made a foundation of society and the economy. Sex is everywhere and nowhere.

If you take the red dirt road outside our gate fifteen yards to the right and then make another right onto a different red dirt road and follow that out into the open country, in ten walking minutes you’ll come to Bakheng Entertainment. Bakheng is a Khmer disco but looks more like a set piece from Scarface the morning after, a cross between new money Miami and Disneyworld’s Frontier Land. The neon sign that hangs over the road, a pink swirl of a moon in the black night, gives a pretty good visual foundation. Just add to your mental image an open courtyard with wagon wheels bedecked with Christmas lights atop the surrounding walls, thatch-roofed bungalows going to seed in the brush where the courtyard’s tiles end, and young men careening in and out of the front gate stacked two or four to a motorbike, their motors whining off into the fields.

You go to open the door and suddenly it is opened for you, three or four eager men in suit jackets buzzing around the entrance, arms swept wide, “come in, come in,” and you walk into an entranceway lined with women in short skirts and prom dresses, dozens packed shoulder to shoulder against the wall, one after the other after the other until you realize you have dozens of women, thirty or forty girls, from which to choose. The DJ is crushingly loud and another tier of women, these in waiters’ slacks and high white collars, swarm around you waving cardboard tokens with pictures of beer, “To drink, sir? To drink, sir?,” and there’s machine-made fog and cheap green lasers like Def Leppard used in ‘88 and it’s all so much, all so much like sailing smack-dab into a school of luminescent fish that rush around and below and above you, that you can’t get it all arranged in your head, that you have to make it to the safety of a high stool with someone’s beer token in your hand and wait to see what you’re brought and what you’ll pay and just what the scope of all of this is.

Bakheng isn’t a whorehouse. The DJ spins English-language hip hop and the dance floor is packed, bodies clipped in blacklight, heads and arms and feet, and you think, “Man, those kids are really good” until you stare for a little longer and realize, no, they’re not good dancers, not really good dancers at all, just nineteen-, twenty-one-, twenty-five-year-olds clustered in single-sex groups and hopping up and down like happy rabbits, girls touching their girlfriends, boys touching their mates, nothing co-ed at all, no dance floor sophistication or flirtation, no moves, just kids bouncing like embarrassed kids under the momentarily-deceptive pulse of light and fog. The odd girl you see trying out some of what she’s learned from hip hop or karaoke videos looks out to lunch, her attempts at the slinky waist groove or a grinding pelvis a gag, something that breaks her and her girlfriends into immediate giggle fits. Even freed from adult supervision, these folks take no steps toward carnality.

This isn’t just the hesitation of the inexperienced or the reserve of the culturally-shy. A friend of ours, a native New Yorker who owns a shop that employs a few Khmer men, told us one afternoon of the conversations she’d been having. One of her guys was using her computer to watch porn and she started asking him about sex in Cambodia. Blow jobs come up and it turns out her guy and his friends thought such a thing was pure fiction, akin to citizens of Mumbai breaking into dramatic choreography in the middle of a Bollywood film. When she explains that oral sex is a regular part of most Westerners’ sex lives, the men just stare at her dumbfounded. “Jason, it was just beyond, Beyond, BEYOND them,” she says. She asks them how often they have sex with their wives and the say about once a month. When she asks them if they masturbate to make it from one month to the next, they have no idea what she’s talking about. A little sheepishly she uses the phrase jerk off and they nod sagely and say, “Oh, you mean being silly.” They have heard tourists use the phrase as an epithet. “No,” she says, “you know, like what you did when you were a kid and just figuring it out.” The guys have no clue what she’s talking about. So she takes a banana and, again rather sheepishly, tries to give them the sense of things. “And Jason,” she says, “they fucking FREAKED THE FUCK OUT! They were just screaming with laughter and they said, ‘Why would you do that to yourself?’ and I said, ‘Well, because somebody else isn’t doing it for you,’ and they were rolling on the floor."

All of these guys had at least a few sexual relationships before getting married, almost certainly with prostitutes or one of the bar girls that trade sex for a man’s patronage of the bar where she works, and my New York buddy asks if any of these woman have given them blow jobs. They shake their heads. When she asks them if would feel comfortable suggesting it to their wives, they fall back into fits of laughter. What a ludicrous suggestion. Wives would never, ever, ever do that, uhmm-uhmmm. When my friend treads lightly into the topic of the men giving oral sex to their spouses, their eyes screw up suspiciously. “What do you mean?” When she suggests that women have orgasms – “What happens to the man during sex can happen to the woman, just differently” – they sit back with wide eyes and shake their heads. And foreplay?, forget about it. That’s just something a ‘massage girl’ sells to paying customers.

“So when you have sex with your wife,” my friend asks, “how long does it usually last? I mean, all of it?”

“Oooh,” one of the men replies, considering his answer. “About two minutes.”

“And what does your wife do?”

“She looks up at the ceiling.”

All of this is not just a different cultural experience of sexuality. The kinds of things we consider relatively open aspects of sexuality are denied to both the individual and to partnerships. Surely the French passed on a little knowledge in their 80-odd years here, but that too has been lost to decades of civil war. These sex acts aren’t so much forbidden as they are fantastic impossibilities, things being conception. It reminds me of a story told by another friend in Siem Reap, a Texan who has worked in the Middle East for the past thirty years. “Men and women are kept completely apart in Saudia Arabia until the day they are married,” he says. “So boys, to deal with their natural urges, they have sex with their buddies, have sex with animals. It’s not uncommon at all for a husband to come storming into a clinic dragging his wife behind him and angrily shout that his wife will not bear him any sons. So the doctors separate the couple and ask them questions and pretty soon they find out that the husband has been putting it in the wrong place because that’s all he knows and no one has told him any different. It’s a different planet, man, it really, really is. That’s why I call it Sodomy Arabia.”

The Texan is also the person who has told me that the only source of blow jobs from a Khmer is from the ladyboys, the transvestite prostitutes that stand casually in the town’s royal gardens until late into the night, waiting for a john. But the ladyboys, they work the end of Pub Street too, grabbing at the arm of a Western man while the cops yawn and look on. And at Bakeng, the DJ stops spinning every half hour or so to make way for a five piece band and a handful of karaoke singers whose eyes are dead tackle as they sing Khmer pop songs. These girls cost one hundred dollars a night, a Khmer friend tells me. “Very expensive.” How much for the girls lining the entranceway? “Maybe twenty dollars.” And those two men who take turns amongst the female karaoke singers? “Oh, many hundreds of dollars.” At the end of the live music set, once the DJ is back and the awkward teens are again packed onto the floor, the singers join the girls working the doors in small rooms that dot the walls of the place, disappear behind doors with a man or a boy and return in short order.

The kids dancing know this. The wives in the country know this. The government and the monks and everybody else with their feet on this ground for more than a couple of days knows this. Dozens of door fronts across Siem Reap are lit red every night, the girls sitting out for the casual passerby to assess. Everyone is aware and everyone is participating in some way yet nobody shares what they do or don’t know. Everyone is playing a game that no one knows the rules of. Men get sex ed from prostitutes and both the prostitutes and wives get their sex from lying on the backs and waiting to see what happens. The blind lead the blind and a country decimated in every conceivable way, a country full of sadness and anger and loss, adds sexual frustration to the list of burdens that are ready to make a person blow his or her top. And across the country, serious money trades hands every night, people and their confusion with themselves and their partners supporting a large slice of the national economy.

My initial instinct is to be disgusted by the hypocrisies in all of this, and then to try to understand those hypocrisies as they are in the social order, and then I end up reminded of home and the cultural duality of our own American culture. You can find many American movies over here and the other day, flipping through the stack, I passed The Bratz Movie, the adult glamour and anorexic skulls and pouty lips and cocked hips of the characters and the dolls that inspired them just adult sexuality and pathology rouged up for pre-adolescents. Those toys are popular, man. Parents buy them for their little girls, the ever-present sex in pop culture aiming for a younger and younger audience. And what that says to me – after the initial conclusion that most people will bite down on just about anything waved under their noses – is that even as grown-ups and parents that allure is too much to resist, that somehow sexuality is so fundamental and all encompassing that many of us instinctively process it as a ‘given’ for kids that have yet to reach puberty, even when we don’t know we’re doing so.

Sex is that fundamental, right? We do ourselves no favors by reserving its faintest echoes, its vaguest acknowledgment, for those only of a certain age or secured safely in classrooms or the family kitchen. But we do do all of that and we deny that elemental quality even as we cannot help but acknowledge it by the toys we buy and the movies we show to our kids. “Get a load of this, check out how fun this is,” we seem to say. “But don’t let us see you enjoying yourself.”

And that’s Cambodian sex in a nutshell as well, the cultural arrangement that keeps men and women from public touching but which sends all of the men to those very-public brothels. So the similarity between our American Evangelicals and Malaysia’s Conservative Muslims is not an isolated similarity. Our sex may not be the same as Cambodia’s, but the two share a certain psychology, a certain psychosis suffered by our families and their families. It comes down to Doublespeak that says of something that hurts, “This feels good,” and says of something comforting, “This feels bad.” And so I'm writing to you because it's good to know someone else with the incite to say, "Now wait just a goddamn minute here..."

Love,
Jay

Cambodian Silver

To the students of Miss Miller’s first grade class:

You know more about me than I know about you. During your recent writing unit on “special friends,” I have been told, your teacher used me as an example. It is an honor that I have done little to earn, except for growing up alongside Miss Miller and occasionally spoon-feeding her Dairy Queen Blizzards on long car trips. That, and driving across the Everglades once to retrieve her when she forgot the date of our vacation, missed the plane and had to fly into Miami instead. These are relatively minor requirements, given the length of our friendship.

That length is important, I think. You have not yet had the chance to be friends with anyone for eighteen years, but I hope that time will remedy that for all of you. I do not trust people who lack very old friends the way I trust those who have them. We need people from our past to remind us of who we used to be, to serve as a connection to all the beauty and ugliness of our former selves. It is one of the difficult things about living in Cambodia—that no one here, save for my boyfriend, has known me for longer than a few months. It is too easy to feel lost in the whirlpool of the present.

But friendship has ways of adapting even under imperfect conditions. Here, where everything is in constant flux, friendships spring up quickly like hothouse flowers; things bloom that could never take root in colder climates. Take Elizabeth, for instance. She is one of my closest friends here. She is a lightning bolt trapped inside one tiny human body, a blur of color that leaves Diet Coke cans and homemade valentines in its wake. I have come to adore that energy, to crave her company because of it. But could we ever have been friends back when we both lived in New York? One a quiet and introverted writer, the other a high-powered insider of the fashion industry—I doubt very much that our paths would have crossed, and if we did pass each other on the street, we were probably too busy staring down our noses at the sidewalks of our very different Manhattans. But here, none of that seems to matter. We live in Siem Reap, we like books, we like Cheez-its, we think Khmer aerobics classes are funny—all of this is far more important than the points in our lives where our paths diverged.

Most of that, of course, is due to Elizabeth’s generosity, not Cambodia (she is unusually gifted at being whoever other people need her to be), but there is something about the transient nature of this place that strips friendship down to its simplest parts. In some respects, I know Sheree very little. I have only a small assortment of collected facts about her life (probation officer with an easy smile and a Newcastle accent). And she is leaving in just a few short weeks, so it is highly unlikely that I will ever know her in the same way as my older friends, the kind whose voices and thoughts and personalities have become a part of my own. But these brief snapshots of Sheree—lanky atop a horse on her birthday or doing an ingenious comedic impression of her meddlesome grandmother—give me a sense of her solid goodness, kindness peppered with just enough frankness to make her sweet nature interesting. That immediate certainty has its own kind of weight when it comes to friendship. One day when we first came to Siem Reap, I was feeling sad, and Hak, the young Khmer guy who manages the guesthouse we were staying at, gave me a free cup of coffee and a heartbreaking look that said, “I’m sad sometimes, too.” And that was it. That was enough. I rarely see Hak, our conversations are brief and often a little awkward, but because of that one understanding look, he is a friend. Bonds are forged quickly in Cambodia out of necessity, but that does not make them less important.

Perhaps it is strange that something as small as a single cup of coffee or a horse ride could be the foundation for friendship. But then, maybe it is always that way. When I was nine years old, miserable and scared to be going to a new school, a blonde girl in a white sweater walked down the aisle of the school bus, and from her eyes alone, gentle and blue behind thick glasses, I knew that she would sit down beside me, that she would save me with her friendship because I needed her to so badly. If there is a lesson in that, it is simply that these small kindnesses around which our lives come to revolve happen unpredictably but with regularity, and they encapsulate everything that I find good and right about the world. The person sitting next to you today on the school bus or the person you wrote about as your “special friend” just might be the one who will send you emails about her first grade class when you are eighteen years older and half a world away from one another. I hope that in this respect you are as lucky as me.

With friendship and affection,
Shannon

Global Rock A-Go-Go

Dear Joe,

I don’t know exactly why I’m writing this to you. If you are able to get a hold of these sentiments then you’re probably already aware of all that I’m about to describe. Still, ‘Learning to Fly’ just came over the headphones and that space and warmth in Petty’s melody and chord changes, Campbell’s slide swooping down the neck and off through clouds, they made me feel that elevation and you, no matter that at this instant the Heartbreakers are the messengers, you are such a foundation for the collective elevation possible in all of our sounds, and so this goes out to you, to you because you’d like hearing it I think.

I’m American, a writer, know more about rock n’ roll than maybe anything else. I live in Cambodia. A few months ago, unable to sleep, I turned on our TV and surfed through the all-night martial arts fests to land on channel 42, MTV China. In the midnight hour the show was Alternative Nonstop and the video, I quickly realized, was a Mandarin cover of Tori Amos’ ‘Winter.’ The Chinese Tori looked just as eccentric and sincere as the real Tori. She had in her stare that same combination of aggrieved and haunted present in the real Tori’s videos, though her voice, alas, her voice had none of the sex, none of her elemental sex. Save the character of the voice and the change in language, though, the new ‘Winter’ was identical to the original. And the video, the video was Tori Amos to the core, a young-20s Chinese woman with a hurt mouth and penetrating stare captured in jump cuts and collaged film stock, abstracts and editing straight from 1992: a moth on a window pane, jump...now a piano silhouetted black against a Bleach White Nowhere, jump...now the eyes softened beneath a giant yellow daisy worn as a hat, jump...now the mouth gobbling up a real live daisy, jump...now a piano in the rain, jump..now a dancer in mid-leap, jump, now those eyes, jump, now a red wash jump now eyes jump now a blue wash jump now eyes now eyes now now... jump cut, jump cut, stark solitary whimsies, stark solitary absurdities, a montage of stark beautiful abstracts that set to the Chamber of Raw Soul melodies of Tori Amos, to the delicate and unflinching melodies of Tori Amos, ended up thoroughly Tori Amos, even eighteen years and an ocean away from the cultural moment that announced her.

I will be hard pressed to ever find this Chinese ‘Winter’ again. Though Chinese videos sometimes have entire choruses or isolated phrases sung in English (like the specimen that followed ‘Winter,’ in which all is Mandarin until the last line, when our boy shocks us by singing “Merry Christmas” to our girl as he gives her a red scarf...always red, they are all about the red), there is no real way to track down the song. The website is in Mandarin and I do not know anyone fluent in both Mandarin and English and who happens to be up-to-date on what’s nonstop and alternative in the PRC. So I sat on our uncomfortable rattan couch in the dark by myself and listened to China’s musical youth come to me and go away again, a bit of it unfamiliar and cool, a lot of it unfamiliar and confusing, all of it fleeting flashes of song that will become miracles should I ever actually hear them again.

One thing that become clear in those hours is that though a few select Western artists are played regularly - Pink and that godawful Killers song about dancers, Rihanna and Tizzy Bac – most of the acts are Chinese in face and language but thoroughly Western in musical styles, visual themes, musical subculture, video stylings. People wear Gap clothing and the station spots are riffs on Keith Haring. Characters in videos text each other in English and a good few of the dance sequences are pure Michael Jackson. A lot of the videos of boys with guitars look straight out of 1984. Every boy band is 2001 all the way; I caught a video where the guys were all Chinese versions of the Backstreet Boys, each dude having his moment to dance up to the camera and have his Chinese name plus his Western alias – Nick!, David! – stamped out across the bottom of the screen. The VJ I kept seeing wore a T-shirt with a cartoon of Pete Doughtery wearing a pork pie hat, though neither the Libertines or Baby Shambles were anywhere to be found. The VJ kept trying to beatbox too and he was no great shakes at it either, be sure. After a couple of hours MTV China went from being a fascinating study to being terribly boring and that too seemed imported from the States. Finally, a power ballad came on, the band playing in an empty warehouse, the camera swooping forward and flanking the band, epic moves like the epic atmospheres shimmering out of the song’s keyboards, the camera making another pass, this one swinging towards the keyboardist’s proclaiming finger, all of this Western to the core, mid-‘80s to the core, all of the qualities checkmarked on a notepad, from the grand echoes of British orchestral pop like O.M.D. to the murmur-then-piercing cry of a dozen American New Wave bands. I kept waiting for a cover of ‘Every Rose Has Its Thorn.’

Every time I turn on the tube I check channel 42 and it is always the same.

What’s fascinating to me, the way I read these particular symbols on our Collective Invisible Map, is that fifty-odd years after the Cultural Revolution, the capitalist explosion in China has led its youth culture firmly to the Western model. You gotta make the sales, right?, and it’s the kids who have the pocket change, right? A few of the videos displayed, in the lower left corner where MTV would usually name the artist/album/label, just an artist name and an email address. It is as if the explosion of potential and product has been so rapid, people already represented on the tube can look for more work, advertise themselves so nakedly, an amateurish air hanging over everything even when the production budget is no joke. There’s money to be made!, empires to be built!, needs to be created and met!! So you’ve got this ‘free’ market birth, a speeding-train economy that will not simply ride the coattails of the Acceptable Westernness that has come before but must acquire it, digest it as completely as it has digested our Westward Expansion, our slave labor, our glut of automobiles, our environmental disaster. The PRC must digest it to keep growing, to leapfrog ahead to the Next Great Step Forward. I don’t know how the world depression spiraling toward us will affect this. But I do know what I thought that night, what my half-informed conclusions were. I watched and thought that by so thoroughly crushing its own people and culture for so many years, the Chinese government left the country at cultural Ground Zero, at least in terms of the popular cultures that grow when disposable income and upward mobility develop in a country. So without organic models to build upon in their own country, they go to the West, a ready-made seedbed of all the temptations and treats a teenager could want. I’m sure there’s an equivalent for the young professionals, for the middle-agers, for the toddler set and pre-teens, etc., blah.

It all makes sense and I mean no libel against Chinese culture. Culture always pollinates widely, whether through Marco Polo or Phoenician oarsmen or jazz drummers in Paris bistros. Or the Clash. Today’s global pop culture has been cross-fed between the prosperous Western World and the open and prosperous Eastern societies like Japan since the end of the second World War, about the same point in time in which China (most recently) hobbled itself, shut its doors, and starting killing itself. Now that China has the taste of growth and a global weight to shift around, it naturally goes to the youth culture models that sprouted from the Baby Boom, the visions of Bright Young Things happily consuming endlessly, a never-ending climb of unlimited growth and product.

But see, I’m looking for a way to not neglect the wonder in this situation, to see this pollination in terms of people rather than just the dollars shuffled about. I know that wonder is there; I listen to Streetcore and ‘Johnny Appleseed’ and hundreds of other songs and people to remind myself. And I know you’re dead, Joe. But I had all of these things to say and I felt that in the spirit of Global Rock A-Go-Go I could sent this up and out to you and maybe some part of whatever you now are will pick it up traveling through the air. Julian Schnabel made a damn good movie about you and the soundtrack is Strummer all the way, Lena Horne to African dub to Elvis, so many notes and beats compressed onto a tiny mirrored table coaster, probably made in China, now that I think about it. And Schnabel puts on the soundtrack a recording of you from a radio broadcast and it says this: “People can change anything they want to, and that means everything in the world. Greed, it ain’t going anywhere. They should have that in a big billboard across Times Square. Without people, you’re nothing.”

Indeed.

And so I sit on this terrace in this hopeful and wretched country and I think how this music is spread through all of us, how Chinese kids worrying over a math test or how far to go on a date are listening to music that comes from a place you and I were lucky enough to be born in, and one of that music’s miracles is that everyone wants it, and everyone takes it and makes it theirs, whether in the occasional piano confessional or the legions of hip hop hustlers minting themselves every day across the planet, appropriates it and re-interprets it, and that is the footing of all art, what the intellectual property lawyers can never understand because they are mere mercenaries, mere mercenaries, the fucks. And that gathering-in of such disparate tribes across all continents and ideologies? That’s a gift, man, a gift that works only if we use it right. So maybe that’s why I’m writing to you: because you made that inclusion and commonality your core and it is a noble core, and it recognizes the responsibility in being the ones imitated, that influence is not limited to art but both separate and through art can influence the way we earn our pay, the way we treat our neighbors, the way we spend our money, the way we value the air we breath and the water we drink and the land we tread. And that means everything in the world.

Miss you, Joe. Cheers.

-Jason

Displacement Vector

Dear Mr. Smith,

Let me be frank—I do not remember much of what I was meant to have learned in your class, and it was not long after our paths crossed that my life diverged definitively from science courses of all sorts. I have some vague recollections of time spent in lab, swinging pendulums to and fro and trying to figure out how to power a small car with a mouse trap. But I would be hard-pressed to explain the significance of any of those experiments. So I was surprised, to say the least, to find myself standing atop a mountain in northern Cambodia last weekend, thinking about Newtonian mechanics.

We had gone to Kulen Mountain as part of a birthday celebration and set up camp next to a waterfall, a site that Khmer people consider sacred. The night had been colder than we expected (the group dreamed, collectively, of woolen socks), so despite a beer-infused barbeque the previous evening, it wasn’t hard to rouse ourselves at 5 a.m., clamber into the back of a pickup truck, and set out in pursuit of the sunrise. After a jouncing, tailbone-testing drive and a scramble up a steep incline, we arrived at the site of a former monastery just minutes before the sun climbed above the thick wall of trees.

And then I started feeling horrible. The place had a craggy, severe beauty to it, with Buddhist statues and shrines dotting the rocky landscape, but I felt anxious as soon as I got out of the truck, wound tight inside for no discernible reason. Our Khmer friend Dine told us that the monastery had been destroyed by the Khmer Rouge and used as a base, and that it now attracted few visitors because of the rough road. A sad story, to be sure, but hardly a novel one for anyone who has spent much time in Cambodia. And it wasn’t that I was envisioning the murder of monks as I watched the sun break free of the horizon; it wasn’t so much the history of the place as the place itself that was disconcerting, somehow out of kilter. I didn’t speak much on the drive to our next destination.

At the top of a massively wide set of stone steps, surrounded by frangipani trees and bougainvillea, lay the reclining Buddha, a carving so big I could have used his big toe as a pillow. Certainly the statue had played silent witness to much strife and human suffering in his hundreds of years; even his original diamond eyes had been pried loose at some point and replaced with non-descript black stones. But the entire feel of this place was different, soothing instead of enervating, placid instead of desolate. It was as though a foul smell had just been blown away by a sudden breeze.

How can I possibly capture the magnitude of that change? It’s not the first time I have felt it in Cambodia. I know many people who love the ancient ruins of the Bayon temple just north of Siem Reap. I am not one of them. The place is famous for the giant stone faces that stare out into the distance, and as I stood among them I felt immediately dizzy, lightheaded. It’s not that I got creeped out because the eyes were looking at me, or anything like that. The place just felt somehow bad to me, as though the air was choked with sadness. Yet as soon as we moved on to the next site (the Terrace of the Leper King, which you might judge, on name alone, to be more off-putting) I felt fine again.

Though I have certainly felt happy or sad or awed or contemplative at tourist spots in America, it is not the same as what I experienced on the top of that mountain. Perhaps you cannot truly feel a place if you are too much a part of it. I am reading Jonathan Raban’s book Old Glory, about his voyage down the Mississippi River. There is a deep pleasure in recognizing the state fairs and fishermen that the Englishman describes, even when he is poking fun at them. Never do I see the American Midwest so clearly (or miss it so much) as when it is mirrored back to me by an outsider.

I bristle at the New-Agey notion that I am picking up “vibes” from certain places, but I struggle to come up with better explanations. I hoped, out on the mountain, that maybe a man of science like Newton would be able to help. In physics, displacement is the vector that measures the change between the initial position and the final position of an object. At Bayon or in the ruins of that monastery, am I simply feeling a vector that has been drawn too long, like a violin string stretched to the point of breaking? Was there something about the reclining Buddha statue (a shape, a smell, a shadow) that made it somehow more familiar to me and therefore more comfortable? Because how can we help but feel our endpoints except in relation to where we started? But that does not mean that I can compel myself to stop drawing out vectors in my wake. It only means that I hope to be able to see all of it someday (the initial position, the final position, the directional line in between) with the same clarity as the ones I drew with the help of rulers and graph paper while sitting in your classroom.

Sincerely,
Shannon Dunlap