Storyteller

by Zoe Daniel

  There’s a high demand for expat housing, partly because Phnom Penh is still a hub for post-Khmer Rouge NGO workers and international development agencies, but also because of increasing business investment from places like China and Korea. Some houses are renting for up to five thousand dollars a month, which would be way beyond us even if we weren’t living on one wage. It also seems totally wrong, in a place where three-quarters of people live on less than two dollars a day, to pay that much rent.

  In the afternoons I put the kids down to sleep and leave Sokha watching them while I trail around inspecting house after house, led by chirpy young real estate agents. They all show me mansions no matter how many times I describe the simpler style of house that I’m looking for and our limited budget. Many of the houses are completely over the top. One has six spa baths. Inevitably there’s a chandelier and a Disney-style winding staircase complete with a chrome or gold handrail. I begin to despair: it’s clear that something similar to our temporary villa won’t be easy to find.

  Finally I hook up with a very camp Khmer real estate agent, Kettya, who drives a black Lexus and dresses in a sharp pinstriped suit. We have fun in the afternoons checking out houses and apartments around town. Most are unsuitable but intriguing, and our explorations give me a great sense of the city. There are some potentially spectacular French-style apartments along the riverfront but they all need work, and their stairs and balconies won’t suit a baby and a toddler. One particularly fabulous place has a view over the river, an indoor plunge pool, a rooftop garden and two giant bedrooms separated by antique carved-teak doors – but it’s abandoned, dusty and partly trashed. I wonder who lived here before. There’s paperwork sitting open on the writing desk, so it seems that the previous occupant took off in a hurry.

  Then Kettya takes me, under sufferance, to a house across the river.

  By Phnom Penh standards it’s semi-rural, about a twenty-minute drive from the main part of town. I’m resistant to the idea partly because I want to be able to go regularly to the gigantic domed Central Market to buy fish, fruit and veg, and to wander the stalls of lotus flowers and carnations. And I love to treasure hunt at the tarp- and tin-covered Russian Market, where you lose your weight in sweat but it’s worth it to find Vietnamese hand-painted crockery, Indonesian batik and Khmer carved-stone figurines. I also want to take the kids to playgroup and later kindy, and I’d prefer to use tuk-tuks rather than get a car, as I’m daunted by the lack of obvious road rules. So living close to the city is important.

  But when we arrive at the house Kettya has in mind, I revise my view.

  It’s tucked down a small, rutted dirt lane where buffaloes are grazing on the verges. A two-storey white house on an enormous block, it isn’t colonial era but rather an Asian–European hybrid with timber window shutters and huge wooden front doors. The garden is immaculate: bright bougainvillea and other tropical flowers amid a sea of green, interspersed with giant lotus-filled clay water pots.

  There’s no chrome or gold. The steep, imposing staircase has a simple iron balustrade and the living room is furnished with tasteful Asian timber. The windows have insect screens, not glass, and big fans hang from the ceiling. Upstairs there are four bedrooms plus an office, and a huge terrace overlooks the garden.

  Across the street is a squatter camp where construction workers from a nearby building site live with their families in tin shanties. I’m reminded of Africa when smoke rises from their cooking fires and hangs like a giant mosquito net over the settlement. The house feels familiar and far closer to reality than the expat enclave on the other side of the river. It’s fairly rustic but seems functional, and it’s luxury compared to what the squatters are coping with.

  We come to love our house, but it certainly isn’t the most practical of abodes.

  As in much of Phnom Penh, the electricity goes off daily because the power grid can’t cope with the demands of the fast-developing city. We have to use a noisy and expensive diesel generator or simply wait for the power to return. Appliances often short out because of power surges, and one night a power point explodes at three o’clock with flames leaping out of the wall, scorching the living-room floor and triggering the smoke alarms we’ve brought from Melbourne.

  Then there’s the humidity. In the wet season everything is damp and you can’t hear yourself think when the storms hit. The torrential rain falls in cooling sheets, blowing droplets through the fly-screens and leaving a fine mist on everything downstairs. The window shutters bang and swing in the wind, and fifteen-foot palms in clay pots get picked up and thrown around willy-nilly. When it’s raining, giant black crabs come out of the sandy garden. Sometimes they crawl up to the screen doors, one claw raised as if they’re knocking to enter and get out of the rain. I keep the crabs outside if I can, along with the rats, mice, geckos and bats.

  Our outdoor kitchen has a roof but no walls – it’s just a 1970s-style bar with a wobbly two-burner stove and a sink. Eventually we ask the landlord to enclose it with flyscreens, and I hang a couple of orange lamps shaped like pumpkins over the bench. It has a certain charm, but it’s infested with plenty of geckos and occasional mice. One night I accidentally cook a gecko that has somehow made its way into the microwave.

  When I ask the landlord about the mice, he sends a guard to put down bucket lids smeared with sticky goo. The next morning we wake up to high-pitched squealing from the poor mice that have run across it and are stuck fast. I try to shield Arkie, but he delightedly follows the guard, who peels the mice off the sticky gum and then feeds them to our locally adopted dog. Another mouse, discovered frantically swimming in the upstairs toilet, is scooped out and meets the same fate.

  The guard comes running again, trailed by Arkie and the dog, when I shriek after spotting a cat-sized rat on our front terrace. He laughs, grabs it by the tail and smashes its head against the wall of the house, leaving a bloody splodge. He then walks casually away, swinging the rodent like a handbag, the dog cavorting beside him. Arkie and I are left agape.

  Twice I ask the guard to release critters that he’s caught for Arkie to keep as pets. One is a frog tied to a string, Arkie dragging it hither and thither. The other is a giant black crab, also on a leash.

  Arkie has a great life playing with the guard, the dog and his friends from the squatter camp, who take turns riding his trike and have water fights with the hose. Sokha supervises, Pearl hanging on her hip, while I write articles for a local magazine on the upstairs terrace, smiling at the laughter from the garden below.

  I’ve given away all our old clothes to the families across the road, and I grin ruefully when I peer off the balcony to see kids of six or seven running around wearing Pearl’s stretchy size 0 or 1 Bonds baby suits. Whenever I can, I feed them all lunch or make a chocolate cake in a vain attempt to fatten them up. At the very least, it makes them smile.

  I deal with my reluctance to drive and buy a second-hand Toyota RAV4, then spend each day dodging Cambodian traffic police. They pull me up for nothing in particular except to extort a ‘fee’. There are few white women driving around Phnom Penh and I’m an easy target.

  Initially I pay the few dollars they demand, wanting to avoid an even bigger ‘fee’ at the police station. Then, infuriated, I start just slowly driving off while holding a one thousand riel note – worth about twenty-five cents – out the window. When the children and Sokha are in the car, they find this hysterically funny, believing that Mummy is slightly mad. The officers never get angry when I drive off. They’re initially mystified and then break up laughing as I watch them in my rearview mirror.

  Being pulled up is particularly ludicrous because there are no real traffic rules in Phnom Penh. Smaller gives way to bigger, and the traffic just slowly flows, the black Lexus 4WDs driven by government ministers, bureaucrats and their cronies in the lead, with everyone else moving around them.

  As in South Africa, there’s a widening gap between rich and poor. Cambodia has a wealth of natural resources but they’r
e controlled by a few rather than being exploited for the common good. Corruption is rife and politics is dominated by the government of Prime Minister Hun Sen. It’s clear that very few are very rich and just about everyone else is struggling.

  This makes me feel a bit embarrassed as I set up house, buying brightly coloured fabrics to have made into cushions, curtains and bedspreads, and pretty candleholders and lanterns, but at least all the money I spend goes into the local economy. It takes time to collect even kitchen basics as there’s no one-stop shopping in Phnom Penh. I find cutlery in the Central Market and a pile of dusty Ikea plates to match the ones we have in Melbourne in the weird upstairs section of a supermarket.

  When I can’t locate a can-opener in the supermarket, I ask at the checkout in a combination of sign language and English. A young woman promptly appears with the can-opener, opens a can of tomatoes from my shopping on the counter and presents it to me. I’m speechless before I realise that she thought I wanted to open the can, not buy the can-opener – which is, in fact, not for sale. The staff are unimpressed when I don’t want the open can, but I can’t really see how I can carry it in the car. In the end I shake my head but pay for it anyway, because the cost would be deducted from their wages.

  Cambodian salaries are incredibly low. We pay our nanny and housekeeper above the going rate, but together they earn just a couple of hundred dollars a week.

  The standard of basics like education and healthcare is low. We have our share of health disasters and find that money can’t always buy what’s required if it just doesn’t exist inside the country. It’s only when something goes wrong that you realise how far out on a limb you are, even though the main cities are relatively developed.

  On a family holiday with Rowan’s mum to Angkor Wat, I’m out walking Pearl in the pram when I get a call from Rowan. Arkie was jumping on the bed in the hotel room when he fell and split the bridge of his nose on the windowsill. We set a place to meet and Rowan screeches the car up beside me, with Arkie in the back pouring blood on his granny’s lap.

  We head to the only decent hospital in town – a Thai-run private facility that’s huge and spotless but empty, presumably because it’s so expensive that the locals can’t afford it. Rowan goes green at anything remotely surgical so I leave him and his mum with Pearl and take Arkie into emergency. He’s stopped crying, but not for long.

  The hospital doesn’t have anything to anaesthetise him so they put him in a straitjacket and then cover him in a sheet with a hole in it, just big enough to reveal the cut. Arkie is terrified, wriggling and screaming, and I’m also fighting tears and fear. The doctor makes five excruciating stitches as I lie on top of Arkie to keep him still, trying to soothe him with a few inadequate words. It’s very distressing as he quite understandably screams the place down. Years later he still has a little scar but thankfully doesn’t remember how he got it. I know I will never forget.

  We’re not long back in Phnom Penh when we’re testing the medical system again, this time with an illness. Where this particular bug comes from, I don’t know, but Cambodia is notorious for poor food safety. Street food is high risk because it and the plates are often washed in dirty water. Even food you cook yourself can make you sick, partly because some of the local vegetables are grown on the edges of open sewers. I take to buying salad vegetables imported from Thailand, but as an extra precaution I wash our fruit and veg in Condy’s crystals, otherwise known as potassium permanganate. Apparently it kills germs, but it also leaves me with permanently purple-brown hands.

  The bug hits us despite my precautions. It’s the first major health scare we’ve had with the kids, so it’s extremely distressing. Arkie goes down first, and he’s hit so hard that he passes out. He ends up virtually comatose and on a drip at the fantastic but small SOS International Clinic in Phnom Penh. The clinic is staffed by both Khmer and expat doctors, and a Melburnian doctor is on duty. He gives me an antibiotic as a pre-emptive strike and I avoid the bug. I sleep in the clinic, in bed with our little boy. He stabilises, narrowly avoiding evacuation to Bangkok. Pearl and Rowan then succumb, but not as severely.

  Diagnosis takes many tests. In the end there’s no definite answer, but the best guess the doctors can make is typhoid, a severe form of salmonella poisoning caused by contaminated food or water.

  In spite of all that, we truly love our year or so in Phnom Penh. Now I remember it as a golden period of fun and adventures accentuated by the challenges of living in a different culture in the developing world. Lots of friends and family come to visit from Australia, and we explore the country from Angkor to the coast and everywhere in between.

  Arkie goes to a little crèche a couple of mornings each week while I spend time with Pearl, usually at Le Jardin. She’s an easy baby with a sunny nature, but like Arkie she’s mobile early, walking at nine months, so she’s hard to keep up with. She’s chatty early, too: her first word is jingjoik, Khmer for a small gecko. Both kids pick up a smattering of Khmer.

  For Pearl’s first birthday we throw a big pool party, inviting the great network of friends with children I’ve made through mothers’ groups and play dates. Pearl is a true tropical baby. She was first in the water in Darwin at a month old, and at a year she can swim like a fish on her own. I make a birthday cake shaped like the number one. It’s pink, of course, and covered with fairies and flowers.

  About three years have passed since I worked full time. I’m still happy being free, although I still sometimes cover the Khmer Rouge trials for the ABC and have been writing the occasional article for an Asian lifestyle magazine. I’m thinking about a Masters in Journalism. That’s enough. In fact, Rowan and I have started talking about having another baby, a priority for both of us. Our family doesn’t feel quite complete.

  Then something happens that changes our outlook altogether.

  I hear from a friend, the ABC correspondent in Bangkok, that she won’t be extending her contract. The position will be advertised shortly, and covers a demanding patch of Asia that includes Cambodia, Thailand, Burma, Vietnam, Laos, Malaysia, Singapore, the Philippines and Brunei.

  I’m confronted with everything I’ve been avoiding since we left Africa.

  ABC postings are rotated every three to four years. If I don’t apply now, the window will close. We’re already living in the region. It’s obvious that I would be a strong candidate.

  But Rowan is only one year into his two-year contract. We’re settled, and I’m not actually sure if I want to work at all, let alone in a job that means being on call 24/7, lots of pressure and too much travel. The idea of so much time away from the kids is almost unbearable and I’m feeling a strong pull to have another child.

  Rowan, as always, is encouraging. He’s happy to set up a consulting business out of Bangkok, freelancing the sort of training that he’s been delivering to local journalists in Cambodia. He also thinks, rightly, that leaving Africa early left me with unfinished business.

  I’m tormented. How can I balance this job with motherhood? Do I want to? If I don’t, will I ever get the chance again? How will the kids cope without me when I’m travelling? What if I get hurt covering a conflict situation or a natural disaster? And if I take this job, will it be too late to have another baby at the other end?

  We’re on holidays with the kids in Malaysia when I do the interview by phone from the verandah of an old house overlooking rice paddies and swaying palm trees. Rowan takes the kids for a walk and a swim while I tell a panel in Sydney why they should give me the job. In the past I’ve found these interviews grueling. This time is different. I live in the region and I know the issues. I’m confident I can do it, but it’s a question of whether I want to.

  The assignments editor, Bronwen Kiely, poses the hardest question: ‘How will you deal with all of the travel when you’re a mum with small children?’

  The truth is, I don’t know. Rowan and I are acutely aware that this job will bring big changes. ‘I’ve done one posting already,’ I respond. �
�I’m not walking into this blind. I know what the job will take away from my personal life.’

  A week later I’m back in Phnom Penh, idly wandering around the Russian Market, when I get a call to say the job is mine.

  There’s an instant rush of adrenaline and satisfaction. After three years I’ll be stepping straight back into the workforce where I left off, into a fantastic job.

  But I’ve never had even one night away from my children. Now I’m committed to three years of covering anything that the region throws at me, and the reality is that I’m going to spend a lot of time on the road.

  I go to bed that night feeling overwhelmed, like I’m going to the gallows. But it’s my decision, and the deal is done.

  THREE

  April 2010

  ‘Mummy, you forgot your helmet!’

  It’s early morning and I’m walking along our sunny tree-lined Soi in central Bangkok from home to the office. Our 1950s Thai house is one of a handful of homes that have somehow survived development in the city centre. Rustic and tropical, with ceiling fans, teak floors and shutters, and no glass in the downstairs windows, it has the same feel as our Cambodian house – except it squats low between multi-storey condos, hiding under the canopy of giant old trees, an oasis amid the madness of the mega-city that is Bangkok.

  Arkie’s blond curly head is sticking out our front gate. In his hand swings my blue combat helmet, ‘TV’ plastered across the front in white tape. He scolds me as I walk back and take it from him. ‘Mummy, don’t forget your helmet, okay? The redshirts are dangerous.’

  ‘Okay, mate,’ I say. He’s arranged his three-year-old features into a stern expression, blue eyes beneath a furrowed little brow. ‘Don’t worry.’ I grin and pat his head, then walk off back down the street.