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, I still will have lived a more comfortable life than ninety-nine percent 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 paper cut 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 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 paper cut 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
Wet Season: Learning to Fly
Dear Dad,
Perhaps you have wondered why I have not written to you sooner. But actually, I have been writing this letter in my head for many months now, maybe for years, even, and waiting to commit it to the page until it was finally the truth. I rode a bicycle yesterday.
You should not feel concerned or guilty that it took me this long. I offer this reassurance only because when you found out that I could not ride a bicycle about a year ago, you looked shocked, as though you had forgotten something important, and responded by gamely running down the sidewalk and holding up the back of a bike as your twenty-seven-year-old daughter wobbled ineptly through the streets of Westerville and demonstrated little to no signs of improvement. Most people master this skill before they have lost all their baby teeth, but then, if anyone understands that I am not like most people, it is you, who have borne my eccentricities and stubbornness for many years now. For one, let us not forget that I was far from an athletic child, finding solace only in books, and you responded by trying to be as excited about Academic Challenge meets as you would naturally have been about basketball games. Also, I was not always receptive to help, as witnessed by my disturbing meltdown in the parking lot of the school when you tried to teach me to parallel park a car. Anyway, it was in no way your fault that you did not personally usher me over this particular milestone.
I will admit, however, that it might have been a less humbling experience if I had learned when I was six like everyone else. There were many aborted attempts. There was the time I went with my friend Kent (another non-biker) to practice in a park in Brooklyn, but we could not figure out how to adjust the seat, so we gave up and drank margaritas instead. There was the time you tried to help me in Ohio, and though I think all those avid cyclists in spandex shorts were trying to be encouraging by giving me waves and thumbs-up as they whizzed past, it was a little humiliating. And then, of course, there was Cambodia, where not only are biking conditions far from optimal, but also where advanced knowledge of two-wheel vehicles is taken to be much more of a given than most of my skills. One evening, soon after we moved to Siem Reap, I was practicing in a hotel parking lot, providing the local tuk-tuk drivers with some novel entertainment, and one of them walked over to where Jason was watching. "No,” he said, pointing to me and sadly shaking his head. "Cannot. Is impossible.” Later I would recognize that that is a favorite English phrase around here, but at the time, it felt like a good summation of my public shame. I should admit that I did not handle these failures with very much grace or patience.
Given these setbacks, it was a revelation to finally feel my feet pedaling steadily under the blue fluorescent lights of the Royal Empire Hotel last night, weaving around parked tour buses, waving at the baffled-looking drivers. There was no reason that this attempt was any different than the rest, except that this time, for some reason, it worked.
"Bah! Bah!” the tuk-tuk drivers yelled, finally. "Yes!” I felt victorious, much as when, right before I moved to New York, you looked at me proudly. "If living in Chicago has taught you anything,” you said, (what would follow? A reference to my college GPA? The degree you shelled out thousands for? My first real job? None of the above…) "it’s how to parallel park.”
Maybe it would be an exaggeration to say that the most important thing I have learned in Cambodia is how to ride a bike, but then again, maybe not. After all, is it not the small obstacles that surprise us, that cause us to stumble, that embarrass us, and consequently, that teach us the most about ourselves? Yes, I learned something about my shortcomings. But there was someth
ing else there, too, something about perseverance and propensity for change, something that reminded me of you and of many of the people I have come to know here in Siem Reap.
Keep the bicycle chains oiled for me. We will go on a ride together, even if it is frozen and icy by the time I make it back to Ohio.
With love,
Shannon
Shannon Dunlap is a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction. While living in Cambodia, she was a regular columnist for The Phnom Penh Post and created the blog Forwarding Addresses (www.forwardingaddresses.blogspot.com) with Jason Leahey. They now edit the blog PitchKnives & ButterForks (www.pitchknives.com), telling stories of food from the seed to the platter. Shannon currently lives in Brooklyn and is working on a novel for young adults.
THE WEIGHT OF BEAUTY
By Dorcas Cheng-Tozun
"If you went running every day, you could lose some weight.” A maintenance worker with a receding hairline squinted at me as the elevator in our apartment building rose far too slowly. This was the first time I had ever interacted with this man. Unfortunately, he was speaking Cantonese, which meant that I understood him perfectly.
"Mmm…” I responded, avoiding his eyes.
"Really. If you ran every day, you could lose some weight,” he repeated, concerned that I had not given him a proper reply.
I flashed him a tight smile, but I did not trust myself to say anything else before he stepped out of the elevator. As I watched his stooped, retreating back, I tried to remember how I was considered "petite” and "tiny” by my American friends. But the US was, literally, half a world away.
When my husband and I moved to China in the summer of 2008, my body’s relative mass seemed to triple during the time it took us to cross the Pacific Ocean. From my first day living in the industrial city of Shenzhen, my weight was a favorite conversation topic of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances alike. "You’re rather fat,” I would often hear. Or, "Did you gain weight? You look fatter.” If I stepped into a shop, sales clerks would rush forward, stopping my progress with wild gesticulations communicating that they had no merchandise remotely close to my size.
My figure was not the only thing wrong with me in the Middle Kingdom. I had grown up speaking Cantonese in the United States, but I knew barely any Mandarin. And judging by the reaction of the locals, my lack of language skills was by far my greater sin. Restaurant waitresses turned up their noses at me; grocery store cashiers clucked their tongues at me; taxi drivers quizzed me endlessly about my deficiency in Mandarin. My life in China at times felt like a series of one-act plays in which characters emerged with the sole purpose of telling me how stupid, fat, and just plain wrong I was.
"Ignore them,” my husband Ned, whose Turkish and Jewish roots had combined to make him look generically Caucasian, urged me.
"How can I?” I protested. "They’re everywhere.”
"But their opinions don’t matter. They don’t know you.”
That was the problem: they thought they knew me. I was a Chinese woman living in urban China, so knowing how to speak Mandarin was the minimum criterion for proving my sentience. It was equal to a blonde, blue-eyed woman in a cowboy hat and boots in rural Texas barely comprehending a word of English. It just wasn’t supposed to happen.
In exasperating contrast, the locals regarded Ned like a creature with magical properties. They were entranced by his height and broad shoulders, his light hair and green eyes, and they immediately set the bar for cultural competence at zero. All he had to do was say, "Ni hao,” and the same individuals who had been glaring at me as if I had insulted their ancestors as far back as the Tang Dynasty would glow with beatific smiles and tell Ned how amazing his Mandarin was. Ni hao was Ned’s universal password to obtain what would forever be denied to me: respect, attentive service, automatic entry into heavily guarded buildings, and a mysterious fount of Chinese joy and happiness that seemed to emerge only at the white man’s touch.
"He’s so handsome,” Chinese women would tell me, glancing at him through fluttering eyelashes. "Is he your boyfriend?”
"He’s my husband” was a Mandarin phrase I quickly learned to say.
Under the daily barrage of insults and sneers, my former life in the United States as an independent, competent, well-adjusted young woman began to recede from memory. It was as if that old version of me had never existed, as if I had always been the overweight, bumbling idiot that 1.3 billion people seemed to think I was.
I learned to wear an I-don’t-care-what-you-think expression on my face, but in reality, my defenses were only shadows of battlements. I felt as if I was constantly under siege; even the most innocuous encounter could become a surprise assault.
One day I greeted a deliveryman at the door of the office where Ned and I worked. I had done this several times before, and the routine was easy. All I had to do was say "Ni hao,” take the package, and sign for it.
But this time, when I handed the clipboard back to the deliveryman, he scrutinized my signature before eyeing me suspiciously. "Why don’t you have a Chinese signature?” he asked in Mandarin, a stony expression on his face.
"I’m American. I only have an English name.” I spoke slowly and gave him a small, apologetic smile.
"Why don’t you have a Chinese signature?” he repeated stubbornly, red blotches blooming across his forehead.
"I was born in the US I only have an English name,” I repeated just as stubbornly, all traces of the smile gone.
I didn’t understand any of the words he spat at me after that; he was speaking too fast and I was too shocked at his venomous tone. Knowing that I had just been deeply insulted, I refused to give him a response. We faced off in silence for a few tense moments before he turned on his heel, continuing to mutter vitriol under his breath as he walked away.
At that moment, learning Mandarin became my top priority. I contacted a company called New Concept Mandarin, which focused on teaching conversational survival Mandarin. They promptly responded, offering to send a company representative to my office the following day. When I told Ned about it, he asked to join in on the meeting to see if the classes were right for him as well.
The next afternoon, when I heard a knock at the office door, I jumped up from my desk. "I’ll get it,” I announced to the office in general.
Easing the door open, I called a cheery "Ni hao” into the dimly lit hallway. Then I froze.
"Ni hao,” responded the supermodel standing in the doorway.
I couldn’t stop the thought from entering my mind: If this woman isn’t from New Concept Mandarin, she must be a high-class prostitute. My eyes locked first on her dress, a body-hugging, black-and-white-striped mini that revealed every impeccable curve on her petite form. The shine of her straight, long black hair, which she casually tossed behind one shoulder, mesmerized me; her wide almond-shaped brown eyes, her thin upturned nose, and her closed-lip smile left me in awe.
As I stared at her, I remembered how I had barely brushed my hair that morning; how I had a grease stain on my blouse from lunch; how I had an angry zit on my forehead that was probably doubling in size at that very moment.
"Are you from New Concept Mandarin?” I asked in a squeaky voice.
"Yes,” the vision said confidently, with only a trace of a Chinese accent. "My name is Joanna.” She held out a tiny hand adorned by a French manicure.
Feeling oafish, I extended my sweaty, un-manicured hand and awkwardly shook hers. "Please come in.”
I shuffled to the conference table in the middle of the office, conscious that five pairs of eyes followed our progress. The room suddenly felt too open, too public. I didn’t want all my colleagues—and certainly not my husband—seeing what I saw: this epitome of Chinese beauty in juxtaposition with the ungainly, unkempt Chinese American who actually liked to eat.
I invited Joanna to sit in a black swivel chair. She descended gracefully into the seat and crossed her slender legs. I attempted to imitate her mo
vements, but instead I had to steady myself on the armrests when I nearly missed my seat. Clearing my throat to hide my embarrassment, I asked Ned to join us.
As we waited, I tried to look into Joanna’s blemish-free face without flinching. "Are you from Shenzhen?” I asked casually.
"No.” She shook her head, her obsidian hair dancing in synchronized waves. "I come from Jianxi Province. And you? Where are you from?” She gave me another smile, her lips opening this time to show me two rows of unevenly spaced and slightly yellowed teeth.
At the sight, my shoulders relaxed a bit. Perhaps Joanna was human, after all.
I smiled widely, showing off my orthodontically perfected teeth. "I’m from California, in the US” As Ned eased into a seat next to me, I added, "This is my husband, Ned.”
"Nice to meet you,” he said, giving Joanna a neutral smile and shaking her hand briefly before turning his full attention to me, waiting for me to move the conversation forward.
I sent him a happy thank you with my eyes before asking Joanna to proceed.
She spent the next twenty minutes explaining the various classes that New Concept Mandarin offered. I tried hard to concentrate, but I kept marveling at her flawless figure and shining hair. Whenever I felt myself becoming overwhelmed with envy, I would angle my head to catch another glimpse of Joanna’s teeth.
Was she one of the teachers? I couldn’t resist asking.
She shook her head. No, her focus was recruitment and sales.
I began breathing a little easier.
As she neared the end of her presentation, Ned began tapping his foot, his mind wandering back to all the work he had to do. I hastily thanked Joanna and promised we would be in touch.
How Does One Dress to Buy Dragonfruit? True Stories of Expat Women in Asia Page 2