by Gail Gutradt
Except when it rains, the family lives, cooks and naps in the shade under the house. Girls meticulously prepare tie-dyed wefts on wooden frames, which women weave into the legendary iridescent Khmer silk. Chickens bustle about their feet. A full-faced old yei sits on her woven mat warming her bones in the sun just like Hotei, the fat joyous Buddha. Red betel nut juice drips from the corner of her mouth. “Hoap papaya?” she calls out, inviting me to share a ripe fruit from a tree next to the house.
Children run about, with or without clothes. Older kids dressed for school in white shirts with book bags and fresh-faced girls with dark skirts pedal by on heavy bicycles. Village women wear nearly anything they can afford: sarongs and tops of contrasting patterns, mismatched and incongruous by our lights, but after a while making a strange new sense. Pink flowers with leopard skin prints, metallic blue Lurex, an argyle sweater. But if you attend a local wedding you will see these same ladies, transformed by makeup and radiant as temple dancers, costumed in the jewel-like silks woven by their own hands in the village.
Some families set up neighborhood shops under their homes and make small market to earn what money they can. For making drinks they may have an ornate cast-iron ice shaver with bottles of sweet syrup in poisonous reds and greens the shades of antifreeze. Slabs of brown coffee jelly are diced up into the flavored shaved ice, and this concoction is served not in a cup but a plastic bag. You sip it through a thin straw. It is cold and invigorating on a sweltering afternoon.
Other shops display Angkor beer in bottles, Fanta in cans, packets of shampoo in long strips. A small girl sells cigarettes from a rusty tin showcase. There is cooking oil, fish sauce, raw palm sugar and fried snacks, all hanging in plastic bags from hooks in the rafters, safe from the predation of animals and small children.
The egg vendor rides by. He drives carefully, skirting the ruts and ridges. Ten layers of egg crates are balanced on a board cantilevered across the back of his moto, the whole miraculous construction secured by a web of bungee cords. Quick mental math gives me the sum: 1,080 eggs. The egg man lifts his cap politely in greeting. Live catfish swim in a bucket of green water clutched between his knees.
In the village someone is celebrating, and the music clangs through the sultry late-afternoon air. I follow a narrow footpath through the mango grove and far out into the rice fields. Now the rice is green, but soon it will ripen to gold, divided by windbreaks of green hedges and trees, and the people of the village will harvest it and then dry and winnow it on mats in their dooryards. Finally, in the vast lands surrounding the village, nothing will remain but a brown stubble. Out here, the sounds of human existence, of weddings and funerals, memorials and festivals are distant, blown away by the wind. Now the light is soft and luminous, like a painting by Corot, but soon there will be only silence and dust, and the hungry cows foraging.
9
Walls
Another evening comes, and Wayne and I have gathered with a small group of children at the crematorium to remember our dead friends and family. On the wall are photographs of some of the three hundred family members who have died, many of whom were cremated at Wat Opot. One photo shows Srey Mum, who died when she was twenty-two days old, a puffy-eyed infant with mittens, propped up on a pillow. Someone has tucked a sprig of yellow flowers behind her picture, where it remains, the leaves dried to a muted olive, the flowers still bravely bright against the gray wall. Another shows both Im Kong, four years old, and his mother, Bun Tevy, who was thirty-six. They died within a month of each other. There are many children and many more adults. The portraits hang side by side in regular rows.
When I first saw the wall I thought of Dust Bowl quilts from the 1930s. Wayne has toned the photographs with the same pastel colors a poor woman might have chosen when she shivered in a sod house in Oklahoma or East Texas, stitching butterflies onto a patchwork quilt made of feed bags and praying for an end to the raging wind. In a sense, the same gales howl outside Wat Opot, and its crematorium wall is a patchwork of lives cut off by AIDS.
One simple act doomed each person on that wall. A rural husband or boyfriend, a farmer from the village, went to the city or the karaoke parlor, a little extra money in his pocket, and had sex with a prostitute or lover, male or female. He brought home a disease that killed him, doomed his wife and infected his unborn child. More than a few young men told Wayne that they had had sex only once in their lives. They were innocent, fourteen or fifteen years old, and went with their friends to a brothel on a dare. They had never heard of AIDS. Maybe it was their birthday.
Wayne has placed the memorial booklet he designed for his own father’s funeral in the lower corner of the glass case that doubles as an altar. His father’s photograph looks out at us, every inch the stalwart churchman Wayne has described.
More children arrive and jostle into the tiny chapel, tumbling and laughing. A quick snake escapes out the door and slips through a drain into the bushes, tasting the air.
Wayne lights a fragment of white candle on top of the vitrine that contains the urns with the ashes of the dead. Each vessel is bound with a string that attaches a small faded photo. Wayne lights a bundle of incense from the candle and flicks it up and down to extinguish the flame. He sits in his battered wicker chair, sits heavily tonight because he is tired from working in the sun all day. He has been building an arched stone bridge across the canal where the ducks swim. He stretches his bare swollen feet out in front of him. Mister Kosal and Miss Kiri scramble onto his lap, soon defending their territory against all invaders.
Miss Punlok perches herself on Wayne’s outstretched legs so she can see her mother’s picture on the wall. Vanny died only a little while ago. She was once a pretty woman. In her photo she wears a flowered dress with a scalloped neckline, and looks worried.
Wayne passes me the lighted incense sticks to give to the children.
Miss Punthea settles herself daintily under the window, accepts the incense and holds it precisely upright between her palms. Mister Vantha lies flat on his tummy on the cool concrete floor. Mister Veha lifts his little sister onto his lap and together they hold a stick of incense. Sampeah tries to set Vantha’s hair on fire with the lighted tip of his incense Pesei, seated against the wall, leans forward and brushes the glowing ash from Vantha’s hair and glares at Sampeah. Vantha is oblivious. Sampeah giggles. Miss Punthea says, “Shhhhhhh.”
Once, when Wayne went to Phnom Penh and I did not have the key to the crematorium, I suggested to the children that we just gather on the tiles outside and have the service there. We could see the photographs through the window. But someone objected that there would be no incense. “It will be okay. We can pray outside,” I said. And they answered, “But if we don’t burn incense, the dead will not hear us.”
So I am surprised when Pesei does not accept his stick of incense. There is a picture of his parents on the wall, standing together on a happy occasion. They were an attractive couple, his mother striking in a red embroidered dress, his father handsome and young in a suit and striped necktie. Pesei does not exactly refuse the incense, but he looks away when I offer it. I say his name softly—“Pesei?”—and offer it again, thinking he did not hear me. But he is clearly troubled, and too polite to argue about something that disturbs him.
We begin the service to remember our loved ones, the one simple daily practice, which is voluntary for the children yet forms the spiritual core of our days.
“Namo Tassa…,” “Hail the Fortunate One,” we intone in Pali, invoking the Buddha, “sama sam poot…,” “freed from suffering, fully enlightened through his own diligent efforts.” In Cambodia this invocation begins all rituals. “Now,” Wayne says in English, “in loving thanks for the lives of our family and friends, we sing …” and the children sing enthusiastically, “Thank you, thank you, Jesus in my heart.” They punch each syllable equally, opening and closing their mouths like hand puppets, so it comes out, “Tank yooo tank yooo Jeeesaa een my haaaaaat!” There follows a moment of passably
silent prayer, and the offering of incense. “Ahhh-men!” they finish, bobbing the incense up and down three times—“Satout, satout, saaa-tout!”—before they escape and begin turning somersaults in the warm evening air.
I notice that Pesei does not chant the Buddhist invocation.
Later, Wayne tells me that one of the local Christian ministers has warned the children that burning incense is a heathen Buddhist practice; anyone who offers their deceased parents the blessings of the fragrant, sacred smoke will be sent to Hell.
10
Pesei
Before I went to Cambodia I enrolled for a month in an English teaching course at a nearby college in Maine. As things turned out I never taught English formally at Wat Opot, but one of the delights of that month was living in a dormitory with foreign students one-third my age who had come to study English. They were from Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Russia, Mexico and Mali. I soon lost interest in the textbook and concentrated on being a conversation partner for any of the students who wanted to practice English. I looked for real-life situations where they could use their new skills. None of the students had a car, so I organized outings to the local supermarket. This was also a dorm-life survival strategy, as summer meals at the university, which were catered by fast-food franchises, could not support sentient life-forms. The foreign students were dismayed and politely scandalized by the burgers and pizza and fried messes passed off as nourishment by an American institution of higher learning.
We decided to avoid the dining room and fend for ourselves. Down in the basement was a kitchen, and there we gathered every evening to cook a banquet of dishes from our native countries. As we ate together we talked and laughed into the night. I felt like den mother to the Peaceable Kingdom, envoy to the United Nations on a good day. This was one of the happiest months of my life.
The foreign students were hardworking and earnest, and they were the guinea pigs for our teaching. One day our professor wrote the words from Norah Jones’s song “Come Away with Me” on the board, and spent an hour parsing the meaning and developing a vocabulary list from the lyrics. Then he asked the teaching students to build another lesson on his.
The song is about two young people who run away together in the night, away from the world’s hypocrisy, to a mountaintop where love never ends. As an exercise, we asked our students to picture themselves as one of the lovers, to think ahead one year, to imagine what might have happened in the meantime and to write the first letter home to their parents. It seemed like a simple task of imagination, but I was surprised to find that for many of my students, what we were asking was impossible.
“Oh no, I could never wait a year, I would have to leave a note when I left, asking them to forgive me. And I would call them the next day so they would not worry.”
“My parents have worked so hard for me, I could not do that, even if I were in love.”
“I could not run away with someone my parents did not approve of. They know what is best for me.”
One young Korean girl summed it up when she burst into tears and said, “I could never do that. I cannot even pretend. It would hurt my parents too much.”
Americans come from a culture of leaving. How else could we have come up with this idea and considered it nothing more than an innocuous exercise? This was my introduction to Asian family values.
Time and again in Cambodia I saw or read about people putting their duty toward family before their self-interest. Were family and self, I wondered, inseparable? Older siblings at Wat Opot accept without question that they will take care of their younger brothers and sisters. I observed no sense of struggle against this, only a question of how best to accomplish what is needed. So when Pesei—who did not, after all, burn incense for his parents that night—began preparing to take on responsibility for his sister, it seemed to him natural, his duty. He would find a way to do it.
The day Pesei turned sixteen he began seriously questioning how he would take care of his younger sister, Miss Jorani, when they leave Wat Opot. Both are HIV negative, come from a middle-class family and have lost both their parents to AIDS.
After their mother’s funeral, their grandmother wanted them to return and live with her in the village, but these two bright youngsters insisted on staying at Wat Opot, where they could obtain an education rather then face a lifetime of labor in the rice fields. Each wanted to reclaim a life lost when their parents died.
There was also a danger that if they returned to the village Miss Jorani might be sold. As a lovely young girl without parents, Jorani is vulnerable. I don’t know whether the children thought about this, nor whether this particular grandmother would have done such a thing—people do all sorts of things when they are desperate—but Jorani would fetch a good price from an Asian businessman or a sex tourist or, more terrifying, from someone with AIDS who believed he could be cured by having sex with a virgin. Despite laws against it, and a highly visible campaign to warn pedophiles that they will be prosecuted, child prostitution thrives in Cambodia as in other poor countries.
Sometimes it is the sense of family obligation that drives young women into the sex trade. I heard one story about a young girl whose family had run up seemingly insurmountable debt. She was the oldest child, and to her fell the duty of helping her parents. Her parents took her to Phnom Penh to earn money as a prostitute. After some time she scraped together the cash needed and called for her parents to take her back to the village. They came to Phnom Penh and collected the money, but they would not take back a daughter who, they said, had “ruined herself.”
Many rural Cambodians do not know their actual birthdays, so everyone gets to be a year older on Khmer New Year. This leads to some anomalies, as a child born the month before the New Year will be officially a year old after one month. In our local school, children are not admitted until they reach a certain minimum height. It gets confusing. So when Pesei turned sixteen, there was no way of knowing how old he was chronologically. Maybe he was only fifteen and a little bit. But just after his sixteenth birthday he began pondering what his life might be after he leaves Wat Opot.
It’s a hot afternoon in April, right after Khmer New Year, and I’m walking across the Wat Opot compound. There’s been no rain since January—not a drop—and it is well over a hundred degrees every afternoon. I am sneaking away to the crematorium for a nap, the only place I know with a midday breeze. I like to rest in the shadows there, on the cool tiles. I figure I will have five minutes of solitude before the kids find me, maybe ten if they don’t notice my sandals out on the front steps.
Before I know it, Pesei falls into step with me, looking serious.
When I first met him, Pesei told me he wanted to go to medical school so he could help his people. Now he says, “I don’t really want to be a doctor.”
“Is that true?” I ask, disappointed. Many of the kids have no realistic plan for their lives, or they continually fantasize about being film stars or karaoke singers. I had been impressed by this thoughtful boy as I watched him one day, sitting cross-legged in front of another boy who had hurt his neck, gently putting his friend’s head through range-of-motion exercises. I could already picture the stethoscope dangling from Pesei’s back pocket as he sat there, holding the boy’s face between his hands, skillfully guiding his head from side to side. He had a healer’s way about him.
“Yes, it’s true,” he said. “You tell foreigners you want to be a doctor and help your people so maybe they will help you go to school.”
Slowing the pace of our walk, I laugh and throw my arm around Pesei’s shoulder, enjoying his candor.
“So tell me, what would you like to do?”
“I want to make movies. But I have to take care of Jorani. She has to go to school. She wants to be a doctor. I want to leave here when I am eighteen and go to Phnom Penh. Where will I get money? Who will help me?”
His questions tumble out. He has obviously been worrying, and I wonder how, starting from this dirt road in Cambodia, surrounded by r
ice fields, this boy will find a way to make all this happen.
“Have you talked with Mr. Wayne about this?”
He shakes his head, looking intimidated. “Maybe you talk to him for me?”
“How about I set up a time with him when you won’t be interrupted by the other children?”
He looks at his foot, moving the sand around in patterns. I realize how alone he feels, how much he needs a parent.
“If you want, I can come with you and help you tell Wayne what you have told me.”
A pretty day. We find Wayne sitting in the gazebo, watching the children as they play under trees heavy with green mangoes. Some of the little kids are giving each other rides in a wheelbarrow. Older boys are collecting trash. Others are playing tag.
The ice-cream vendor from the village arrives on cue, ringing his bell. Wayne has just given the children their snack money, and the vendors know it. With infallible instinct they race their wagons and pushcarts to be first through the gate to relieve the children of their allowances.
“They must have spies,” Wayne complains. But he looks content and relaxed. Wayne loves to sit back and survey the scene and watch what everyone is doing, like a happy god enjoying his still-unsullied Eden, or an inventor who has crafted an impossibly complex Rube Goldberg apparatus that for a few minutes operates smoothly, miraculously, on its own.
He turns to Pesei.
“First of all, Pesei, you need to believe that the universe wants you to have a good life. So don’t worry about money.”
Pesei looks dubious.