Five tales from Siem Reap

Every day that I was in Siem Reap, a small town in Cambodia, I had Paulen on hire. He was my motorbike driver. I liked him. He was punctual every morning, talkative and keen to show me the sights. I particularly appreciated the fact that he was hardy and cheerful despite less than pleasant driving conditions, for it was the height of the rainy season, and every afternoon, we'd be caught in the torrential monsoon.

The second day, we went out to Roluos, a village about 15 km to the east, where the earliest temples of the Angkor period could be found. As we left the last of the temples, Paulen said, "I take another road back to Siem Reap, the scenery more beautiful."

I'll come to the beauty in a minute, but the detour was a bit longer than by the main road, maybe 20 km in all, about 40 minutes. Unfortunately, the sky broke open the minute we set off and for the rest of the journey, we we puny against the monsoon. The frenzied rain stung us relentlessly, the howling wind bit us to numbness. We could barely see. Our bike felt like it was ramming through walls of water, at least when there was road. Other times, we had to twist-walk the bike around massive potholes, all the while half-crouched against the buckets of water crashing onto our heads.

Our feet were swimming in our flooded shoes, mud had long ago splashed up our trousers, and our bladders were full, though we were so wet, it wouldn't have made any difference if we peed as we drove. All the while I hoped the camera bag would remain waterproof. I have a good bag, it's been through sleet, snow and river rapids, and has always kept my equipment dry, but 40 minutes of ceaseless monsoon, I don't know. I hope so. 

Paulen had to drive with his head down most of the time, so that the beak of his cap could keep the darts of rain from striking his eyes. There was so much water stringing down from his saturated baseball cap through the back of his neck into his shirt, it tickled him sometimes, and he scrunched his shoulders repeatedly. I tried to put my hand on the nape of his neck to help divert the water, but it was no use. There was just too much water everywhere. In any case, most of the time, I had my hands full holding on to my straw hat, always on the point of being blown off by the wind.

Despite all that, I still had time to look at the scenery. Indeed it was a lovely route, as Paulen promised. The ricefields were serenely beautiful in the monsoon, the bunds, hedges and trees blurred to impressionism by the beating rain. The land disappeared softly into the occluding curtains of water within just 300 metres, with darker silhouettes of groves and coconut palms coming ghostily through from beyond. The foreground was a quilt of rice paddies, but being quite late in the season, the rice was quite tall, so it was mostly a wet green patchwork carpet edged by bare-mud bunds and dark ditches that sparkled with fragments of sky as the bullets of rain beat into them. 

Thatched houses stood discretely here and there, and under the eaves sat crosslegged, farmers, farmers' wives and their children, looking expressionlessly at the pouring rain. Or so I imagined of their faces, for the whole tableau was washed so heavily, the details were obscured. The scene was far from still; it trembled, bowed and rebounded with every sweep of the wind. The fresh green carpet swished to silver as sheets of watery air swept across. Trees swayed and branches cracked. Palm fronds nodded heavily at us as we passed, and buffaloes belly-deep in the rising water looked quizzically at our groaning bike through drippy eyes. The low sky was a rolling grey all the way to somewhere out there, indistinguishable from the Tonle Sap Lake. A steady drumroll of thunder followed us at every turn, bracketed by periodic lightning. Each burst of lightning would light the landscape and freeze it to my eye for a split second, like a flashbulb going off, forever imprinting a momentary scene into the mind. And then it'd be dark wet grey again, an ocean of a sky bathing a land where people believed that water is life. It was a kind of Eden.

But it was strewn with landmines. Even if it had been dry, I couldn't have gotten off the bike and walked into the fields to take a picture. Yet farmers have to risk it every day, or else, they can't plant, they can't harvest, they can't survive. The danger is real. You see kids all over Cambodia, you see otherwise able-bodied young men and women, with one leg blown off, and a whole life ahead destroyed.

Two

Another day, Paulen drove past the vicinity of his home. His father's home actually. He lived with his parents, though he's 30 and married.

He pointed out a group of half-brick, half-wooden houses in a grove of trees. They looked quite nice, certainly better than poorly ventilated townhouses. The family moved into Siem Reap over 10 years ago, when his father, a civil servant in the Fisheries Ministry, was posted here.

I could see some electricity poles, so they had power. "Do you have a well in your garden?" I asked him, making a guess that they didn't have piped water.

"Ya, we dug it ourselves, my father and I, when we first moved here."

"How deep does it go?"

"5 metres," he replied.

"You and your father dug a well five metres deep?" I repeated slowly, as the idea sank in. That seemed pretty deep. I might get severe claustrophobia to be stuck down a crumbly hole 5 metres underground. "You actually dug it?" I asked again, "not just drilled a tube down, a kind of borewell. I mean, dug a big hole?"

"Ya, dig with spade."

I was impressed. How many of us, pampered urbanites, have to dig our own wells to provide ourselves with water? How many of us would even know how to dig and shore up a well? Water is such a fundamental thing, yet we can't fend for ourselves to obtain it.

Three

Now, Paulen considers himself part of the modern generation. And he is eager for his country to catch up with the world. Sometimes too eager. On one occasion, I caught him in denial of what he considered not-so-flattering facts.

I had noticed that many men in Siem Reap, the smaller villages and farmsteads wore a chequered pink kilt, rather than trousers. They weren't so common in Phnom Penh, but outside the capital city, about half the men were dressed like this. I wanted to know the local name for it. I asked Paulen as we were driving.

"What do you call the cloth that people wear around the waist and their legs, you know the pink-coloured cloth?"

"They wear trousers," he said.

"Not everyone," I said, somewhat surprised by his answer. "Look, we've just passed another farmer and he is wearing that cloth."

"Not many wear like that," he insisted.

"Quite a lot," but I realised that I should assure him I wasn't looking down on it. "It looks quite convenient for them. And you know, I've been to Burma, Malaysia, Indonesia and Thailand, and lots of people wear a cloth like that."

"Only poor people and women wear like that. In the town you don't see that anymore."

I knew that was not true, but I wasn't going to argue that point. "Yes, but all I want to know is what is it called? People wear the same thing in so many countries, but they call it by different names. I think it would be interesting to know what name you call it here in Cambodia."

"Only some poor farmers and ladies wear like that now."

"Yes, but in the old days, the men wore it too, didn't they?" And while saying that, the thought occurred to me that Paulen was probably one of the new Cambodians today who thought it below their dignity to wear one.

"In the old days, maybe," he conceded.

"So you have a name for it, surely, that's all I want to know," chuckling as I said that, to put him at ease. "You know, in Burma they call it the lungyi."

"Here we say sompuot."

"Have you heard of the word sarong? It is used in Malaysia and Thailand."

"Yes, sarong. For ladies." He was finally discussing the subject without getting too hung up on it.

"Oh, I see, that's interesting, and for the men?"

"Sng."

As Singaporeans, are there some aspects of our society that we consider uncouth, backward, and that we tend to play down? They may be fairly commonplace, and no visitor can escape noticing it, but we pretend nonetheless that it happens only rarely -- only the poor people do it -- that kind of thing? What about retching and spitting in public? What about squatting on a toilet pan, leaving shoemarks for the next person to sit on? What about clipping one's nails while riding in a bus? Or housewives going to the market in their pyjamas? We cringe, don't we, when we think about that?

Four

One guy who always wore the sompuot -- and I used to see him twice a day at least -- was the son-in-law of the woman who owned the guest-house where I stayed. Her whole family seemed to be living in the same house, including her married daughters, sons-in-laws and their infants.

This son-in-law didn't have a regular job. He did some freelance translation work, his English was quite good, really. I'd see him pottering around the house every day, always barechested, with nothing but a sompuot. And I mean nothing. On two occasions, he sat down facing me to chat, bringing his legs up to the seat in doing so, and his pouch and cock were fully visible to me. If I hadn't known he was the father of the toddler girl nearby, and the husband of the young woman just hanging up the laundry 4 metres away, I'd have wondered if he was making some kind of pass at me.

Anyway, on the last morning, I saw him getting dressed, with shirt, trousers and shoes. This looked infinitely more fastidious than he had ever been before.

"Where are you going?" I asked him.

"I'm going to see the King."

"No kidding!" I didn't know whether to believe him or not.

"It's true."

Well, it was certainly possible. King Sihanouk was in residence in his villa about 500 metres down the road; where we lived was within walking distance of the King. So, this is what a small kingdom is like. You can wake up one morning, great dressed, saunter down the road and see the King. How many other places in the world are there, where one can do that with little more ceremony than visiting your local abbot?

"But," I was getting very curious now, "what are you going to see the King about?"

"I'm the interpreter for CNN. They are coming to interview the King today."

Well, that made sense, but it didn't make the situation any less mind-blowing. This was a humble guest-house of wood construction. The rooms don't even have airconditioning, we sleep under mosquito nets every night, we wash ourselves by scooping water out of an earthen vat. We're as third-world as you can get, hell, this guy here has hardly worn any clothes for the last few days I've known him!

Yet, out of this household, is going to emerge the official interpreter for CNN. He's going to amble just 500 metres, across a bridge over the stream called the Siem Reap River, to King Sihanouk's villa. He's going to be brought to the meeting room, he's going to bow before his monarch, sit amidst microphones, recording equipment, cameras and sound engineers, and his face and voice may well be beamed by satellite all over the world by this evening. Then he'll come home, eat a fish-and-rice dinner and disappear into third-world oblivion again. The TV set downstairs does not even have CNN channel, so he's not going to be able to see himself tonight.

We often think of the pre-industrial third world and the information-technology first world as two separate spheres. But here before me is someone who's gliding between the spheres like it's second nature to him, all in a day's work. Sompuot-simplicity under a mosquito net one minute, high-tech satellite news the next. It is almost surreal.

And then I turn and look at myself. I'm standing here by the doorway, watching this surreality get dressed. I am a witness to this moment of transition between the worlds, I may be the only person who realises this transition is happening here and now, just standing here watching him pulling on his socks. Wow!

Five

At least the son-in-law had a part-time job. Sruong, the elder son (of the guest-house owner) had never held a job before in his life. He was 25, and I'd see him every day lounging around the house, often as naked as his brother-in-law. He was the one I spent the most time chatting with when I got back from Angkor in the evenings. We spoke about lots of different things, including National Service and girlfriends.

Paulen, my motorbike driver, who was five years older, at 30, had told me military service was compulsory. That was ten years ago. He was posted to a remote base and they found themselves frightfully close to the Khmer Rouge frontlines. All the while there, he was scared shitless. He'd never want to have anything to do with the army again.

Sruong, on the other hand, said it wasn't compulsory anymore, but I might have misunderstood him. Anyway, in his case, he said, "That time I was angry with mama, so I joined the army."

"Where were you based?"

"Not far from here, in the hills about 30 km away, but we had nothing to do there. Everyday, nothing to do."

He was bored to distraction, and quit the army a few months later. And came home.

Many young men around the world can probably identify with that. Angry with mama, enlist in the army, then discover it's no solution.

He's had nothing to do ever since. He doesn't even help out around the guest-house. His mother and sisters do the cleaning, laundering, registering the guests, handling payments and so on, and anyway, it isn't such a busy place. This young man, and his equally unemployed 20-year-old younger brother, -- an extremely friendly, easy-going little fellow with a big smile who talks to you like he's known you for ages -- never lift a finger to do anything around the place. I have the feeling that they all consider housework to be women's work, and the sons are just pampered from the day they are born. Those of us with traditional Asian family backgrounds will know the feeling.

"Have you had sex before?" I asked him.

"Yes, three years ago."

"Who with? Did you know the girl, I mean was she your friend, or did you pay her?"

"She was my friend." Then he went on to explain the complications that can arise when you think you're getting free sex from a girlfriend, but she later demands money, and so on ... it's too complicated to deal with that here.

"Was she your girlfriend?" I asked, coming back to the subject.

"Yes."

"So, is she still your girlfriend now?"

"She's in Phnom Penh, studying. I still talk to her."

"But do you love her, is she still your girlfriend?"

"I don't know." Nor did he seem to care very much about the emotional relationship, if any. He went off talking about the great sex they had, about three or four times, and then she left, and it's been dry ever since. It's so difficult getting sex in Siem Reap.

"This town is very small, you know."

It was my fault for opening the subject. Thereafter, he came back to it every evening. I soon realised that in the absence of a career, or anything to keep busy with, he was now all consumed by the question of when and how he was going to get laid again. It had been three long years. He talked about his fantasies, and all sorts of impractical plans to attract girls, while giving himself a handjob every day. He had looked longingly a few times at the women travellers staying in their guest-house, but "that would be impossible. I can't do it in this house. Mama will kill me."

Poor thing. A horny young man stuck in hicksville. Spending nearly every waking minute wondering how to get his rocks off.

Millions and millions of young men around the world can probably identify with that too.

© Yawning Bread 

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