From SR to NYC

To: August 24, 2009
From: May 23, 2009 / Marble Composition Notebook No. ? / NYC

It’s May 23rd and I’m back in NYC. Nine months gone and it’s still home, still very much the same, and yet not so as well. Washington Square Park has been rebuilt and unveiled and it still has as much open space, as much potential as a meeting ground for hundreds, and so I know now that what I’d heard, what I’d feared, has not come to pass, either because the threats of monitoring, of rearrangement of boundaries and parts to keep the people corralled, was untrue or—what I hope, or, more likely—the threat of constraint drove the neighborhood, the New Yorkers, my New Yorkers, to put heads together and throw a fit until they made themselves not just heard, not just known, but a force that promised to be a mule-stubborn and a permanent, itchy thorn. God bless the thorns in sides.

And so now I’m here on this concrete wall, back against the light post, Northeast corner of things, first place I talked enough to Abby Durden to freak her out, listening to this woman in a black dress—Summertime! Summertime!—play guitar, sing her and others’ songs, and the light is through the leaves and I am walking through a dream, woke up in Siem Reap 30-odd hours ago, the world mine and also off, also alien, behind gauze, and I love it here. It is what I know, the drunks on the bench in front of this gal, singing along to Floyd, lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, this everything bagel well-toasted with olive cream cheese, strong iced coffee, just a dash of milk, no sugar, these folks playing chess, the taxis and it’s greener too, artful bike racks around St. Mark’s cube, quieter traffic, or am I just clouded behind that gauze, behind last night’s blunt, jet lag and dregs of airplane sake still in me?

You get in between worlds and you get that new vantage, get clear of the personal plagues that are site-specific, and with that distance see how quickly the fabric is rewoven, always decomposing and re-growing, always torn down, always rebuilt. And of course things aren’t always rebuilt, but here, man, here where I live, where I learned how to live with myself, how to be an adult, this Rome keeps breathing, rebuilding, and I like to think We the People are the red blood cells, the antioxidants, my people, and I miss this all because I see now how it changed without me and, though this is irrational and silly, my feelings are hurt a little.

And I guess that’s how I know I can never fully leave here. A growing, glowing understanding, even with all this gauze in between, that I am of this place, that Asia will be a way of experience, a particular lens or specimen for a set amount of time, but I am very much and forever American, forever a New Yorker and a Southern boy too, and that growing glowing, that is a knowledge of just how lucky that makes me, and all of the responsibility that comes with that, I know it and accept it and love it too because it’s a gift to be chosen by Fate to have the time and the means of gestating this kind of consciousness. We get to carry each other—indeed, Mr. Hewson. And, man, the guitar gal has just started up ‘High and Dry’ and I’ll go back to Brooklyn and hit the pavement with Tony, and this is the United States of America, with all its crippled government and culture of consumption, but so much more too, so much of the twenty different cultures embodied in these strangers collected around me on this Washington Square concrete, listening to this melody beneath these trees, in this lick of breeze, so much fallible potential.

You leave to look back and see. The world of the last generation mutating profoundly, this generation’s lives the axle upon which this Past will turn under to drive up this new and coming Present.

So much in such little time. The gauze will be cut away at some point. What kind of new sight will I be blessed with?

This Old House

The House

2635 Bella Vista Ave.

Lexington, Ohio 44904

Dear House,

Do you remember the fit that my siblings and I threw when we were told that we were going to move out of you?  You would have thought that my parents were torturing us by daring to build a newer, bigger house about five miles away.  I remember sitting in my brother’s room for a miniature protest meeting and resolving together that we simply wouldn’t do it, wouldn’t leave.

But we did, of course, just as I’ve moved away from a whole string of places since—the beige carpets and cozy basement of junior high and high school, my claustrophobic college dorm rooms, that first strange attic apartment that I shared with three other girls, the honey-colored floorboards of the little Chicago studio on the lake, the exposed brick and low ceilings in Jersey City.  Leaving a place behind always fills me with the sad slippery feeling of time getting away from me, but each move, truth be told, has been easier than the last, and when I move out of my current Cambodian abode, it may be the easiest one yet.

I do not mean to imply that it is not a nice house.  It is large (enormous to my eyes that had become calibrated to New York apartment sizes) and far more comfortable than what I had envisioned before I left the U.S.  And yet, there is something weirdly forbidding about the place, something elusively Cambodian.  Maybe it is the small windows or swollen intractable doors or the way the stuffy rooms hold heat.  Maybe it is the glue-sniffing teenagers who occasionally jump our fences and pilfer things out of our windows.  Maybe it is the memories of the time that all the cheap plastic plumbing fixtures broke at once and flooded the place in the middle of the night.  Whatever it is, the house has always seemed to give us more of a polite handshake instead of a warm embrace.

Occasionally, expat friends in Siem Reap will ask us to housesit, and we usually jump at the chance, not because they are nicer, more luxurious houses (though that is certainly the case) but because they feel so much more lived-in than our own house.  During housesitting stints, I go around absentmindedly touching things—children’s toys, expired medications, family snapshots, the worn corners of books.  These are families who have decided to stay in Siem Reap for much longer than I will, and the spaces where they live have a warmth and permanence that I sometimes forget can exist.

Now, our lease almost up, we are looking for a new place of our own, though it is still uncertain if we will be able to find anything better than our current rental.  Cambodian houses, at least the ones that Khmer build to rent out to Westerners, are weird.  They are candy-colored concrete monstrosities with cavernous tiled rooms and no closets and kitchens without stoves.  It is as though one person made a sketchy blueprint of what he thought a Westerner would want and hundreds of Khmer landlords have been blindly following suit ever since.  What’s strange is that most of them wouldn’t think of living in a place like that themselves.  Many of the houses that we looked at had tiny wooden shacks in the back or side yards where the landlord lived with his or her family.  Sometimes we would gaze wistfully out of a back window in some bubble-gum pink rental to these little houses with dogs and cooking fires and laundry drying on the line—they looked so real compared to the buildings we were standing in.

Maybe it is because they were built by and for the people who inhabit them.  There is a photo I think of sometimes (either real or somehow created in my mind from stories my parents told me) of my mother smiling in front of you, a half-finished house, holding Dawn’s hand and carrying Ryan around like a little bundled papoose.  My father, a junior high guidance counselor at the time, did the electrical work and put up drywall in the evenings to save money.  Though none of us could remember them, perhaps it was those evenings that made you feel so much like ours that, seventeen years later, my siblings and I couldn’t bear the thought of leaving.  It has been years since I have thought much about you, old house, or taken the time to miss you, but now, on an orange tiled porch thousands of miles away, I remember you and remember what it feels like to be home.

Fondly,

Shannon

Re: Kentucky Fried Cambodia

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Tea and Indifference

Dear Kent,

This morning, I was making tea, and I read the name on the tea canister—the Thai company Phuc Long—and I didn’t even smirk, didn’t even think about making a joke about it. And that’s one indication that perhaps I have been living here too long. Here’s another:

Yesterday, I was walking down the street, and the guy with no arms who sells books out of a box hanging around his neck asked me for some money. I wasn’t carrying my moto helmet under my arm (as I usually do, marking me as an expat rather than a tourist), and he didn’t recognize me at first. And then he remembered me from around town, and gave a sort of shrug and a not unfriendly smile, as if to say, “Sorry! You’re a regular here. Of course you’re not going to give me anything.” And then we both sort of chuckled and walked past each other, and it wasn’t until I was about half a block away that I got a sickening chill at my own indifference.

Has living in Cambodia made me less capable of sympathy? Even after close to a year here, it’s hard to know the “right” way to behave in the face of other people’s poverty and trauma. Feel it too much and you’ll be incapacitated; feel it too little and you’ll be some sort of Marie Antoinette (“Let them drink Angkor Beer if they have no potable drinking water!”). To feel as if you belong here at all, you have to become a little inured to the realities of landmine victims and grubby children, and to act otherwise is to be viewed as a sap by both Khmer and expats. Once, I went into the local Mexican restaurant and two expat women were sitting there with a little Khmer boy for whom they had purchased dinner. They seemed a little sheepish though, because after they had ordered, they noticed that, unlike most of the kids hanging around Pub Street at night, this guy had new tennis shoes, went to a government school reserved for the solidly middle class, and had a mother who was keeping an eye on him while chatting with her friends across the street. Of course, there are far worse things than buying a child, any child, a Coke and a quesadilla, but they felt as if they’d been duped, giving help to someone who might not need it the most. It was such a tourist thing to do. And we roll our eyes at tourists, the people who swoop in for a week or two and throw money at the first problem they see, regardless of whether it will do any lasting good. (Then again, at least they’re doing something. What am I doing? Has anyone in Cambodia benefited from my writing so far?)

And if I’m sometimes less sympathetic than I should be toward Khmer, you should hear my internal monologue about Westerners and their problems. Woe to the person whom I overhear complaining about heat, insects, potential bacteria in the water or uncomfortable bus seats; they will be silently excoriated by me. Firstly, haven’t they ever opened a guidebook about any Southeast Asian country? And there’s another level to my reaction, the part of me that has always considered myself sort of a wimp. “If I can handle this,” this part of myself says disdainfully, “then you must be the lowliest of pansies.”

What’s worse, I actually like this tougher side of myself sometimes. It makes me feel hearty and resilient and less likely to feel sorry for myself. It’s not as if I’ve forgotten about the fact that, should I fall into penury tomorrow and die a slow death of starvation, that I still will have lived a more comfortable life than 99% of Cambodian citizens. But sometimes it is an asset to be able to witness the misfortunes of others and, instead of feeling crushing depression at the state of the world, feel sort of…well, lucky. And yet…

I was talking to my monk friend Savuth about how, in the Buddhist view of things, human love is a kind of suffering, just like hate is. It is hard, having been raised amidst Western ideas, to wrap my head around this. To a Westerner, the Buddhist ideal of “detachment” sounds suspiciously like indifference. But I think what Savuth was talking about was achieving a philosophical equanimity—you should feel sympathy and pity for wealthy crooks and beggar children alike, because they are both suffering as part of the human condition. My friend Elizabeth long ago told me something similar in a different way—“Just because root canals exist, doesn’t mean that getting a papercut isn’t painful.”

But isn’t that just like me, to look at a problem cerebrally instead of dealing with the sticky business of how to feel? I am confessing all of this to you because of the horror on your face when we had dinner in New York and I told you about the Big-Headed Baby, the monstrously deformed infant whose mother takes him to all large festivals, where she begs for money, a container for change placed on the corner of his dirty blanket. Who wouldn’t feel sympathy for the child? But I have a hard time feeling pity for the mother, when she must be aware of the glut of nonprofit organizations in Cambodia who could possibly help her child—it is simply more immediately profitable to parade him around like a circus act. Even so, you looked a little taken aback by my callousness when I said this. And maybe you should have been. I cannot conflate my own attitude with Savuth’s universal sympathy—nothing proves this more than my very disparate feelings toward the Big-Headed Baby and his mother.

So where does this leave me? Vainly hoping that I can force myself to feel for both the root canal patient and the papercut victim? Cambodia never provides any easy answers; it only makes it harder to ignore the questions. Perhaps that means that I have not lived here long enough.

xoxo,
S

Re: Hieronymus Vox

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


Dear Abs,

It took us forty hours to get from my apartment in Brooklyn to our apartment in Siem Reap. And now, after a few days of waking at five a.m. and crashing at eleven p.m., I find myself sitting on our front porch in a chair with a maroon cushion, in the white-blue of dawn, reading some of Joan Didion’s stuff from the Sixties. She’s referenced Hieronymus Bosch twice in sixty pages.

And that has given me an expanded perspective on my neighbor across the alley, who is right now washing his car while blasting Celine Dion from rattling speakers. This guy, like most anyone over the age of thirty here, almost certainly lived through the ghastlier sort of Boschian horrors that make the American social disintegration that inspired such dread in Didion no more than stubbed toes or the inconvenience sparked by behind-schedule busses. I have already well-documented the fact that Khmer love their pop music cheese; this culture could be the promised land for Late Night Delilah, her opportunity to expand her brand of darkened bedroom hush and empathetic maternal wisdom from America’s Lite Rock stations into a global franchise. But my understanding of this Khmer taste keeps gaining nuance whenever I’m presented with a new lens through which to see Cambodia’s past butting at the backside of its present. So the wide-spread cultural affinity for sticky-sweet and dramatically-romantic pop songs, epitomized by my neighbor, whose Celine Dion has been followed up with a Khmer translation of that Seventies banality Every sha-la-la-la; every whoa-oh-oh-oh, is now a product of the Boschian Khmer Rouge terrors that have made Cambodia what it is today.

Which brings me to our late-night discussion in Richmond at the Denny’s across from the old Reynolds Metals compound. “Is the issue,” you wondered, stopping to consider your next words, “one of not knowing how to approach the vocabulary?” We were talking about marriage and love, but that core issue of words and how we do or do not use them—how we express in the present our experience of the past—feels very appropriate to Cambodia today. Words, after all, are the only tools that have standardized meanings that we all share, more or less. I think we forget their power because we live in an age dominated so thoroughly by the flickering image and the clicking mouse that scrolls from one to the next, but ten months in Cambodia are an unpleasant reminder that words can still be powerful enough to build a bridge to ruin. And they’re frequently as banal as the sha-la-la-las and whoa-oh-oh-ohs too.

If you travel around Cambodia, you’ll pass many, many, many signs over schools, homes, the red-dirt roads, advertising for the Cambodian People’s Party. Every once in a while you’ll come across a similar ad for the opposing Sam Rainsy Party or, even rarer, the Human Rights Party. These signs are inevitably battered by age, their lettering faded to outlines and the color of soured milk. If you read the paper, you’ll never, ever read anything about the Human Rights party. Rights in Cambodia? Get outta here.

But you will read about Sam Rainsy. It is the only party other than the CPP to have any significant representation in parliament, though its 26 seats are dwarfed by the CPP’s 90. Prime Minister Hun Sen and his CPP are waging a war on the SRP. They’ve marginalized it, now they’re going to eradicate it, la-di-da, the same old song and dance. A few months ago the editor of a pro-SRP paper printed a speech by Rainsy in which he accused the CPP Foreign Minister of being a former Khmer Rouge cadre. The editor, Dam Sith, was slapped with a two year prison sentence and serious fines for the spreading of “disinformation” and “defamation.” A lawyer for two SRP Members of Parliament was given a prison sentence as well because he “made a mistake” in defending the MPs, who were being ridden out of town on a rail. What makes these cases interesting is their vocabulary.

On Sen’s demand, and as the only possibility of avoiding jail time, Editor Dam wrote a groveling apology, saying he “failed to act properly and seriously affected the honor” of the CPP leadership. “I am asking for the highest permission of [the party] to forgive me,” he wrote. “In exchange for the generosity of the CPP leadership, I promise to discontinue the publication of my paper. I promise to support the ingenious CPP policy in the building of the country’s progress.” The word on the street is that Dam will have to join the CPP himself as well. When human rights NGOs complained, the Khmer court system issued a statement: “Mr. Dam Sith decided to close Moneaksekor Khmer for his personal reasons, and no one forced him to close.” The defense lawyer also apologized of his own free will because, according to a party official, “it is an individual’s responsibility that when he makes a mistake he must say sorry.”

This stuff isn’t limited to political enemies, except that anyone saying anything less than glowing about the country counts as a political enemy. The head of the Khmer Civilization Foundation, an organization charged with protecting and promoting Cambodian culture, worried that the heat from a light show staged nightly in Angkor Wat as an expensive tourist draw might damage the temple. He was slapped with a two-year jail sentence for “disinformation.” The sentence was rescinded when he wrote a formal apology. When the World Wildlife Federation issued a report citing pollution in the Mekong as a major threat to endangered Irrawaddy river dolphins, the government decried the findings as “all lies.” When the government decided not to kick the organization out of the country (as it has done to Global Witness, whose reports on systematic human rights abuses have also been labeled “all lies”) the in-country director of the WWF labeled the government’s moderation “a positive response and a good sign in working together to conserve the dolphins.”

My gut feeling whenever I read this stuff is hatred; what the world media and governments decry as simple corruption becomes more and more every day the stuff of Orwell and Solzhenitsyn, despotic crackdowns on the road that leads to The Purges. But what’s the point of me hating? So sitting on my porch while the neighbor booms his music, songs that I find dumb, adult expressions of fairyland weddings and stuffed bear dreams, I start to reflect on how stupid all of this is. Letters of apology? That hardly seems worthy of any tyrant worth his salt. An editor or lawyer notes offenses committed, is sentenced to jail, and then is freed, so long as he says sorry. It just seems so childish to me, like keeping someone in a headlock and nuggy-ing his scalp until he calls himself a fag. I want no take backs! to get some play while they’re at it. And yet Hun is a seasoned despot; he would not insist on apologies and then let it go at that unless the security of his position obviated the need for the physical purges of his enemies and unless he had something real to gain by the public shaming of them. I suppose this is what they talk about when they talk about the importance of saving face in Asia. The groveling of that editor, the way he was forced to use his own words to embarrass and attack himself, that was language turned to power. So was the WFF rep who labeled the party’s defamation of the truth as a positive response. Hun could have killed the Cambodian citizens with relative ease (they do it quite successfully in Russia) or could have let the prison sentences stand and doom his critics to a slow purgatory. Both responses would have served as the examples that he wants his critics to be. Instead, Hun chose to impose self-incrimination, to force his adversaries to denounce themselves and then claim the denouncing as honorable. The technique is a classic, but what interests me right here is the potency it grants to words in an era where many of us fear the loss of that potency.

Words like apologize and sorry so often feel benign. How many times have you used or experienced I’m sorry as a verbal place holder in a fight, a meaningless errrrgh that allows a person to catch her breath before battling on? You work in the State Department for Christ’s sake, at least half of your world must be cluttered with empty rhetoric and Doublespeak. I imagine that in the world of Washington D.C. there is a particular language behind the language, a way to understand the words of the true meaning that is implied, to the seasoned individual, by the actual words used. The average American understands that the majority of words that our leaders publicly utter are just wisps of cloud, that when President Obama talks about a bright future of “clean coal,” he’s really talking about stroking the hand that feeds. Even I must get angry at the occasional NY Times story just to keep my morality and understanding of the world centered. We in the States have steadily divested our vocabulary of meaning. But in Cambodia, vocabulary is still power. Words like corruption and Khmer Rouge cadre are still potent enough to require official distortion and abuse, require the degradation of words like honor and generosity.

And that brings me back to Hieronymus Bosch and my Lite Rock neighbor. He surely knows that the Foreign Minister and Hun Sen were both Khmer Rouge. This is something everyone knows. But there is no ripping out of toenails, no systematic rape, no skewering of babies on bayonets these days. Making a newspaper editor beg for forgiveness is not the same as taking him into the jungle and beating his head in, right? So in the world of relative experience, living under a tyrant is not so bad, eating one’s own words not so abusive. This is the post-Boschian Cambodia, the post-Khmer Rouge world. Things are more civilized than that now. And that’s worth celebrating with the comfort of a soft rock cheese-puff.

xxx,

Jason

Twinning

Dear Elizabeth,

Can you picture a more quintessentially American scene than this?  It’s the day before Father’s Day, and we’re at a picnic on the border between Virginia and West Virginia, and there’s a playground and red wagons and potato salad and two-liter bottles of soda and picnic tables covered with checked plastic tablecloths and small sticky children stained with red Jell-o and their harried parents chasing after them.  And the only thing that distinguishes it from thousands of identical scenes all around the nation is that this happens to be a gathering of Twinsanity!, a club for the mothers of twins, and every child, all of them under four, has a small mirror image orbiting and colliding with itself.

We went to West Virginia to visit good friends of Jason, who have two cherubic one-year-old twin boys, and as often happens with babies, I found myself spending a lot of time staring at them.  What must it be like, I wondered, to have one’s own DNA out there in the world, a part of you yet always separate?  Liam and Calum, the twins, seem much like other babies I have known, except that there is this other half to them.  Though they don’t lavish much focused attention on each other, they always seem somehow aware of the other’s presence.  If someone bumps into them, they look up, but if they bump into each other, they seem oblivious, as if contact between them is a foregone conclusion, the same as a non-twin bringing her own hands together.  Emily, their mother, says that they recognize each other’s names but they don’t call each other anything yet; then again, “me” is a hard concept for any toddler to understand, too, and maybe even more complicated when you’re a twin.

You have explained to me, better than anyone I have ever known, what it feels like to be a twin and what it feels like when your twin is no longer with you.  I’ve been thinking of those conversations a lot lately, not only because of Liam and Calum, but because it’s been a very strange month back here in the U.S.  It has been wonderful, of course, to see my family and friends again and to eat abundant amounts of cheese, and also to remember parts of my personality and habits that I forgot about while I was in Cambodia.  (I am friendlier, here, I think, but also more impatient—I have theories about why, but they’re not particularly interesting.)  But there is a mirror image of this feeling, too, when a sudden panicky awareness rushes over me that I left someone behind in Cambodia, someone like me but more independent, tougher, clearer-headed.  And it makes me wonder if traveling, and particularly living in a different culture, means dividing yourself, twinning yourself.

In my most content moods, this seems like a grand phenomenon, a way of being more flexible, more versatile, than I thought I could be.  It is reassuring, somehow, to think that we are all capable of slipping into other skins, chameleon-like, just by changing our whereabouts.  But in my darker moods, it seems like a burden, a state of always feeling that I am forever missing a part of myself and yearning for it.  Culture shock, I guess is what most people call it, but that doesn’t seem an adequate description, because it sounds like a malady, like something that can be cured.  I’m not sure if there is ever a good way to merge lives led on two different continents.  And what about when I leave Cambodia for good?  Does it mean reconciling different parts of one’s personality, or, like you have had to do, reconciling oneself to a world where you cannot have your other half?

I have two more weeks here, in this nation of our birth, a world of movie theatres and paved roads and Twinsanity picnics, and there is a familiar version of myself that loves being here.  But it won’t be long until I am back, until I can curl up in the back of your shop and reacquaint myself with the shadow self that I left in Siem Reap.  I miss you, and I miss her, too.

With love,

Shannon

The Steam of the New Year

Dear Dick Clark,

New Year’s Eve, with its raucous promises of good things to come, has long been one of my favorite holidays.  For years I was faithful to Dick Clark’s New Year’s Rockin' Eve, dutifully tuning in each December 31^st to watch you play ringleader to the mayhem in Times Square, even when you had to start bringing in Ryan Seacrest as backup (a lame substitute for you, Mr. Clark, if I may be so bold).  I even recall one year, when a friend got held up on an international flight, and I recorded your coverage of the stroke of midnight so it could be replayed for him several hours later.  But I have come to realize over the past few days of Khmer New Year celebrations that perhaps Cambodia has a thing or two to teach America about ushering in a new year.  Giant glittering dropped balls, drunken choruses of Auld Lang Syne, and Beyoncé: in these matters, our homeland still clearly has the upper hand.  Other aspects, however, must be more closely considered.

First there is the timing of Khmer New Year, which is governed by the lunar calendar rather than the solar one.  Our own new year always seems destined to play second fiddle to Christmas, overshadowed by that barrage of gift-giving and family obligations.  Who, after all, has the energy to make strict resolutions as the holiday season finally gallops to a finish?  In Cambodia, though, New Year comes during the hottest dog days of summer, with no other holidays to compete.  First there is the desert of long hot afternoons, during which one’s body is up to nothing more strenuous than being parked under a ceiling fan to consider the passing of time, and then, like an oasis, comes the biggest celebration of the year.  One tradition that has emerged is to throw water and baby powder at people, supposedly to symbolically cleanse and freshen them for the upcoming year, but which has the added benefit of rinsing or absorbing the gallons of sweat that everyone is producing.

On the second matter I am more torn.  Don’t get me wrong—I have always loved the rather debauched nature of American New Year’s Eve.  The high heels, the alcohol, the dancing: it all adds up to a bacchanalian type of revelry that I hold near and dear to my heart.  But Khmer New Year, in spite of having its fair share of drunken parties, seems to maintain a sheen of gentle innocence that is inarguably appealing.  We went to watch some of the students at the Buddhist school play traditional Khmer games.  I’m not sure what I was expecting, but what I got was a bunch of teenagers and young twenty-somethings enthusiastically engaged in musical chairs.  It was heart-achingly sweet, and seemed to hearken back to a time in America’s history that we are both too young to remember.  Even the dance parties seem less about showing off and more about joining in, everyone eager to teach me those delicate apsara wrist circles and a line dance that appeared to be a pigeon-toed version of the Electric Slide.

And what of the intensity?  From my current perch, there seems something almost aggressively ferocious about the Western countdown.  It’s all about setting up the conditions for one perfect instant—by the stroke of midnight, you have to be at the right place, with the right person to kiss, at the right level of champagne tipsiness, and if you’re not, you run the risk of entering the new year on a disappointing note.  There is no such pressure with Khmer New Year, mostly because it is spread out over at least three days (and often colors the atmosphere of the following weeks with easy-going revelry, a period termed “the steam of the new year”).  Even the Khmer name for the holiday, Bon Chuol Chnam, means “the festival of entering the new year.”  I like that word “entering” because it indicates a process, not just an event.  In Cambodia, the new year does not appear at the snap of one’s fingers; it is an act of becoming.

And finally (and this, I think, is where Khmer New Year really gains an advantage), there’s a generosity inherent in these festivities that don’t seem apparent in our own.  Maybe it is simply that in America, we are a little worn out with the spirit of the season by the time New Year’s Eve rolls around, but good tidings here sound refreshingly genuine.  Last night, on the final evening of the three-day holiday, Dave and Amy (two visiting American friends), Jason and I happened past a madcap and charmingly amateurish drag show and stopped to watch for a few minutes.  We were pulled inside and enthusiastically provided with chairs and beer.  It began to dawn on us that we’d just unwittingly crashed a private party, a shindig for the young staff of a big restaurant.  We were underdressed and smeared with baby powder from an earlier stop at a carnival, but no one seemed to mind.  They chatted with us, led us out onto the dance floor, and urged us to partake in their wildly exuberant games of tug-of-war and tandem floor skiing.  By the end of the night, we’d all been invited to an upcoming wedding.  “Gee,” Amy said.  “I feel like next New Year’s Eve, I’m required to pull a few people off the street and invite them to my party.”

And isn’t that what a new year should be about?  A fresh start that allows you to become a better and kinder version of yourself by the time the next one rolls around? 

Susaday Chnam Tmai, Mr. Clark.

Warm regards,

Shannon Dunlap