by Somaly Mam
I had heard that Paris was the most beautiful city in the world, but I didn’t think so. There was hardly any green, and the city seemed choked and dead, with buildings tightly packed together. There was no space anywhere. Even the celebrated Eiffel Tower didn’t thrill me—it looked like a pile of old iron, nothing like the splendor or power of Angkor Wat. The most surprising thing was to see how people behaved with their dogs. There were dogs inside restaurants and apartments. Cambodian dogs live outside—to us, they’re dirty animals.
I also watched people getting money out of a sort of big box in the wall. So that’s how they do it, I said to myself. When they need it, people just go and fetch money from the box—what a good idea. I folded a piece of paper and slipped it into the slot. Nothing happened. Pierre laughed and explained about bank cards and the whole system, which seems extraordinary to me even today.
We went to stores and saw masses of pointy shoes. My Cambodian clothes looked dismal in comparison.
We were invited to dinner at the house of Pierre’s Uncle Jean. Pierre had warned me that his family was rather conservative. Jean came to fetch me in a nice car—Pierre was somewhere else—and put his seatbelt on. He gestured for me to do the same, but I shook my head to show I didn’t understand. I pulled the seatbelt when he showed me, but he had to latch it for me. When we arrived at his house, Jean got out and closed his door. I was still in the car and had no idea how to unfasten the belt. He mimed the action, but I didn’t know what to do, so he had to unfasten me himself.
I felt I had not just failed a test, I didn’t even know what the test was. At dinner the food was a mystery. Some of it was simply revolting. Fish in cream sauce that I had to force myself to swallow. I thought the cheeses smelled horrible. The French seemed to eat vast quantities of everything, especially meat. I could hardly believe how much they seemed to put inside themselves every day.
I was overcome by it all: the succession of dishes, the abundance of food, and the fact that people left food on their plates. They cut off the fat and left it; they left meat around the bones and didn’t even suck them; then they cheerfully threw it all away, along with the thick fish skin. We would have fed whole families in Cambodia just with these leftovers. In Thlok Chhrov we only ate meat once or twice a year, on special holidays. My mother would buy a half pound of pork for twenty people and chop it up very fine, as a kind of flavoring. We were grateful for every grain of rice we got.
That dinner went on for a long time. At one or two in the morning, everyone was still talking. Pierre didn’t translate anything for me. I was lost, jet-lagged, and hungry because I couldn’t eat the food. Everyone smiled at me, but there was no contact at all. I was Pierre’s little foreign savage, sitting at the end of the table without uttering a single word.
We went to Nice to visit Pierre’s mother. She had a yappy little dog, Tatou, who barked the whole time and ate from a plate at the table, which I found truly disgusting. The plan was for us to live with Pierre’s mother for a while, until Pierre found a job, but I could tell that she didn’t like me. To her I was a gold-digging foreigner who had seduced her son, and I tried to stay out of her way. Pierre was out most of the time, and I just sat in our room with no one to talk to and nothing to do.
I desperately needed to take French lessons, but we didn’t have much money. I had brought a French-Khmer dictionary with me from Cambodia and I asked Pierre to recommend a children’s book for me to read. Pierre told me I’d never manage it, but he bought me a copy of Joseph Kessel’s Le Lion. He was right—it was far too difficult for me. But I told myself I had to do it, and every night I wrote down words I had to learn.
Pierre went off to Paris to look for work while I stayed behind in Nice with his mother. One day I found a copy of the local paper, Nice-Matin. Looking through it, I came upon the classified section. I saw the word “Emploi” and looked it up in the dictionary—it meant “jobs.” I translated a few ads with the aid of my dictionary, and I saw that people were looking for cleaners and maids. I realized that even with little French, I might be able to find work.
I asked my mother-in-law how to get a job, and she took me to a temp agency and dropped me off. She didn’t care to help me, so I just walked in by myself. There were all kinds of foreigners inside. I explained to the director that I wanted to work. I told him, “Je veux travailler,” in a loud voice, and he got the message. He smiled broadly and told me I could start the next morning. I would be a cleaner at the Hôtel Hibiscus on the Promenade des Anglais.
That night, when Pierre phoned from Paris, I told him I had found work. He couldn’t believe it—that I would find a job before he could, without even speaking proper French. I was so happy about the salary. With 2,500 francs a month, I thought, I could begin sending money home to my parents.
The next morning my mother-in-law drove me to the hotel, and I carefully memorized the route into the center of town. When I arrived a Madame Josiane met me and gave me a dozen rooms to clean. She didn’t show me how, and I had no idea how to make a bed properly. I also didn’t know how to use the vacuum cleaner. It was like a long snake and roared at me—I was always frightened that it would suck up my feet or climb up my body. I had to make a great inner effort to control my fear of it. I was also puzzled by the variety of cleaning products.
That first day I didn’t even try to use the vacuum cleaner and I made the bed all wrong. When Madame Josiane came back she said, “Oh la la,” and laughed, and showed me how to do it, using sign language. By the end of the day, I could tell she was pleased with my work. I cleaned behind and under the furniture without being told, and I didn’t stop for lunch, as the other cleaners did—I didn’t even stop work to drink. And I never minded working weekends.
At the end of the month I got my first paycheck. I had only been in France for two months and I’d already earned 2,500 francs, a huge sum of money. In Cambodia that would be a fortune, perhaps a year’s pay. But what was I to do with this piece of paper, a check? Pierre explained that he would open a joint bank account for us, and I should deposit it there. That made me nervous. What if we divorced? Pierre could take all my money. I told him that I wanted to open an account in my own name, and he said, “You’re a real Chinese woman.”
I don’t have a habit of trusting men, and I never really trusted Pierre. Soon after we got to Nice, he went to see his ex-wife and didn’t come back until five in the morning.
Sometimes the hotel clients tipped me. I remember one elderly woman: after I helped her put away her clothes, she took my face in her hands and said, “Mignonne.” I didn’t know the word and asked her to write it down so that I could look it up in my dictionary. She thought I was pretty! I looked at myself in the mirror and thought she must be making fun of me.
After a couple of months of working at the Hôtel Hibiscus I realized that I could make more money at another hotel. The Hibiscus paid badly, and I had to work seven days a week. Also, some of the male hotel clients bothered me. I suppose they saw me as a little Asian girl who wouldn’t make a fuss. I didn’t want to put up with that kind of thing anymore and now I knew I didn’t have to.
I went to work at another hotel. The clientele there was mainly retired people who stayed for several weeks at a time. This gave me the chance to get to know them a little, and those elderly people were the ones who really taught me French. Some of them were very kind: they called me their “little Chinese princess.” I saw that French people lump all Asians together, but I didn’t mind it—Cambodians do the same with foreigners; to us they’re all barang.
I like old people. They deserve to be looked after with respect. Sometimes, if their bones ached, I would rub their legs and massage their ankles. They appreciated that. They began joking with the hotel management that the pretty, pleasant girl was cleaning bedrooms while all the disagreeable staff members waited tables in the restaurant. So I was told to clean rooms only in the morning; at lunch I would wait tables.
I got lots of tips, but that made al
l the other staff jealous. They called me “Chink.” My orders were never cooked on time. Finally, after a few weeks, I cracked. I grabbed a knife in the kitchen and shouted at one girl, “If you keep going I’ll stick this in your belly.” I was surprised to realize that I knew how to say it. It didn’t make me any friends, but it brought me peace. After that they left me alone.
My mother-in-law was still hostile. I cleaned for her, and sometimes I offered to cook, but she didn’t like my food and never spoke to me much. It was always clear that she would prefer to be alone with her son—she constantly tried to drive a wedge between us. When I got home after work in the afternoons, I didn’t dare make myself lunch, even though I was always hungry.
I lost a lot of weight. One time she fed Pierre and me eggs and spinach and gave meat to her dog. I put up with everything, because according to Cambodian custom you have to put up with everything your mother-in-law does and not complain to your husband. A Khmer husband will always take his mother’s side against his wife, so it’s best to endure in silence.
But after we had lived in Pierre’s mother’s apartment for four months, some friends of hers came to visit. They had children with them—the kind who jump on everything and destroy stuff. I said to one of the little ones, “Don’t jump about like that. When the old lady comes back she won’t be happy.” To me this wasn’t any kind of insult. In Cambodia we say “yeh” for any elderly woman—it’s a term of respect. But in Europe nobody wants to face facts; you have to pretend they’re not old, even if they’re elderly. When my mother-in-law got home, the mother of the little monsters told her I’d called her “the old lady,” and my mother-in law was furious. She slapped me and locked me in my room.
She might have thought about how little French I could speak; she could have tried to understand. I was horribly upset. I explained everything to Pierre when he got back. To my surprise, he understood immediately and said it was time for us to find another place to live.
Pierre had just found a temporary job as a lab technician, which made paying the rent easier. We rented a one-room studio on the ground floor of an apartment building, with a little garden outside. The first night I had a nightmare: the garden was squirming with slugs, like the maggots Aunty Peuve’s guards used to throw on my face and body. I screamed uncontrollably. Pierre was horrified, but I spent the rest of the night wearing socks, several pairs of pajama bottoms, gloves, and a hat. I didn’t want any of those slugs to touch me.
But those nightmares were growing rare. The Central Market in Phnom Penh was far away, and I was starting to get used to a new life. One afternoon I left work early and decided to explore the city of Nice, which I barely knew. I took the bus. I got off at a bus stop at random and walked around in an area I didn’t know. I got lost and phoned Pierre, but he told me to work it out myself, like a big girl—if I’d gotten there, I could always get back.
Since the place where we lived was close to the sea, I told myself that if I walked along the coast I’d manage to find my way home. I walked until my feet ached, and when I looked up I saw a sign written in Khmer. Ku tieu Phnom Penh—Noodle soup, Phnom Penh style. I thought I was dreaming. I went in and started speaking to the people in Khmer. They responded. I was overwhelmed and tears came to my eyes. I sat down and drank two bowls of good, spicy soup. Then I had a coffee with condensed milk poured onto ice cubes, the way we drink it in Cambodia.
This is how I made contact with the Khmer community in Nice. The owners of the restaurant said they had a Khmer group and were planning a small festival with Cambodian Apsara dances to celebrate the New Year in April. I had learned those dances as a child in Thlok Chhrov, and they asked me to join the performance.
Then Pierre’s contract as a lab technician ended—it was only temporary, and it wasn’t renewed. I was earning about 3,000 francs a month at the hotel, but our one-room apartment alone cost us 2,500. Pierre had met someone who wanted to start up a medical analysis laboratory in Cambodia, but the negotiations were dragging out. I needed to find work and now knew that there were a lot of Asian restaurants along the coast.
I knocked on all kinds of doors. A Chinese man from Cambodia agreed to give me a job in his restaurant, washing up. He even said that I could eat rice there before starting work. I wouldn’t be working officially—he didn’t want to pay employee charges to the state—but I was just glad to have the money.
Sometimes I got paid, sometimes I didn’t. I used to leave the apartment at six in the morning, walk six miles to the hotel and work there till three in the afternoon, come home at four, then leave at six to go to the restaurant. Pierre would come and get me at one or two in the morning. He always complained that I smelled of the kitchen, and finally I told him I’d walk home alone.
Pierre was never a comforting man—he’s no good at tenderness. He’s straightforward, and his angles are sharp and sometimes cut. There were advantages to this. Pierre taught me to fend for myself, and he made me speak up—he hated it when I was mute.
One summer day at the hotel, I fainted. The doctor said it was overwork and told me to take a two-week break. But I don’t know how to do nothing, and two days later, I was back. The truth is, I enjoyed working at the hotel. I liked looking after elderly people—they seemed to care for me.
After the summer rush was over, the hotel informed me that it was my turn to take a vacation. I had worked for a year, and according to my pay stubs I had accrued four weeks of leave. I had never gone on “vacation” before—I had no idea you had a right to such a thing, and I couldn’t imagine doing what the French people did in Nice. They mostly walked around in colorful clothes and spent money, it seemed to me. We didn’t have any, so that wasn’t an option.
A cousin of my mother-in-law’s suggested we could get temporary work doing the vendange—the grape harvest. He told us he knew a man who could give us work in Ville-franche, harvesting Beaujolais grapes for a month. Pierre thought it would give us some fresh air and a change of scenery, so we went.
Monsieur Marcel was nice enough about it, but when he saw me he said, “She’ll never make it.” I was just a little thing—I weighed about ninety pounds, and he was at least double that. But I told Pierre, “He’ll see.” I was used to physical work.
Pierre couldn’t bear the cold, the humidity, the earth that stuck to his feet. He just couldn’t do the work, but I loved it. It was beautiful to be outdoors and smell the earth, feel grapes in my hand, and I thought cutting grapes was a lot easier than harvesting rice. Pierre was proud of me, and so was Monsieur Marcel. He used to call me “our little Chink,” but he meant it in the nicest possible way.
At set hours, we all stopped to take a break and eat. That’s where I learned to eat cheese and cold sausage—in other words, to become altogether French. I discovered really good country cooking, soups and tasty dishes far better than the plastic sachets of rice I’d had in Paris. Monsieur Marcel and his family were really good people. After the harvest was done there, I wanted to continue, so we went to Gevrey-Chambertin in Burgundy. The manager there was so pleased with me that he gave me a bottle of wine to take home.
But in spite of this good work, we had decided to leave France and return to Cambodia. Pierre had found another job there, with another humanitarian agency. This time he would be working for Médecins Sans Frontières, Doctors Without Borders. Pierre had concluded that he wasn’t made for life in France—it just didn’t agree with him. He wanted adventure, something less settled than a small medical analysis lab in Nice.
I was proud to be going back home. I knew that I had changed a lot during the eighteen months we’d been living in France. I had worked honest jobs. I had learned to look people in the eye and communicate with them directly, as an equal. I knew that when I went back to Cambodia people would no longer look down on me as a white man’s whore. They would see me as a white man’s wife. I was like the people we call Khmers de France—Cambodians who live in France and come back on holiday with money and power and with the white p
erson’s sense of self-assurance. I might have dark skin and I might still look like a savage, but I had proved that I wasn’t stupid, and I no longer felt worthless.
.9.
Kratie
Pierre’s new job was in Kratie, an old colonial town on a bend of the Mekong River, about two hundred miles northeast of Phnom Penh. In November of 1994 we moved into a room in a big house near the river that was rented by several people who worked for Médecins Sans Frontières. Almost all the white MSF team members lived together—it was cheaper that way, and they paid a Cambodian woman to come in to clean and cook.
Pierre didn’t want to pay the extra for the cook—he said it was too expensive, and anyway, he didn’t want to spend all his time talking to other French people. This was what Pierre was like: if we were in Cambodia, he wanted to live like a local. I liked that attitude. He would rather eat rice at roadside stalls with the Cambodian staff members of MSF than share roast chicken with the doctors.
Still, there was a good atmosphere at the MSF house. I used to help the cook clean up. She was an older woman, about fifty, and her name was Veasna, but everyone called her Yvonne because that was easier. At first she was surprised that I helped her. She thought that because I was a Khmer de France I would think I was superior. I told her I wasn’t really a Khmer de France, but I didn’t tell her anything about my past.
I went to see my adoptive parents soon after we arrived. We met in Kampong Cham, which was not too far away; my sister Sochenda was living there, and I wanted to see her and her new baby. Sochenda had married a man of her own choice. After she got her graduation certificate she went to a training college in Kampong Cham and she married a fellow student there. I had heard that both of them were now working in the agriculture ministry.
I was shocked by their living conditions. The house Sochenda and her husband lived in with their two children, and now a third, was pitiful. They were really poor—Sochenda had recently stopped working, because their salaries hadn’t been paid for so long—and they had just been burglarized and had lost most of the things they owned.