Phnom-enal

(Clever title, I know. Refers mostly to the Russian Market --pictured-- which I cannot begin to talk about here for fear of being unable to stop.) Back in Vientiane, after a week in Phnom Penh. In the flurry of company meetings and client dinners, I didn't see much more of the city than the road from the hotel to the office, but it took hold of me still. Cambodia seems to be the kind of place that winds its way into your system and never quite lets go (not unlike their fermented fish, my naive effort to "eat local"). Every expat I met, it seemed, had come to Cambodia meaning to casually hop on by, but instead found themselves sending for their pets and bargaining for silk drapes six months later.

After the relative calm of Vientiane, Phnom Penh is jarringly rambunctious. In the new construction and glossy billboards, set against dirt roads and carts peddling sugarcane, it is clearly churning to modernization. The juxtaposition is fascinating and feels a bit absurd, as if I walked in on the country in the middle of a drastic costume change. The healer's cell phone rings in the ancient temple, an oxen-drawn cart parks outside an internet cafe. I can sit on the guesthouse balcony with a latte and read the Times from my wireless laptop, while watching baby-slung women across the way wash their sarongs in large tin tubs that collected last night's silty rainwater.

Defining these changes is hard. As a culturally sensitive tourist, it's trendy to cluck what-a-shame over the strip mall where the rice fields used to be, or the concrete that sucks the charm out of the riverside, or the fluorescent lights that compete with the full moon. But that's growth! It's ugly and it pollutes and sometimes it wrecks your view. And it's reviving this shattered city. Even more, it seems to me that this jerky evolution is the difference between a country that devours just enough foreign aid to squeak ahead, and one that is beginning to move of its own momentum--the progress isn't as pretty, but it's more sustaining.

What nags at me more than those lost kodak moments is growth's companion gentrification. Prices are rising faster than wages. The impact doesn't seem to have started its real hit yet, but it's looming. In conversations with Cambodians, foreigners are the most easily indicted for this crowding out. What's new, though (and selfishly refreshing), is that barang--the bad guys, coming in with their foreign money to push the locals out--no longer means Americans. In fact, around here no one seems to be paying us much mind; we're tired news. It's China and South Korea that have taken notice and are being watched in turn.

Even for all this, Phnom Penh isn't hostile to foreigners in the least (unless those emerging powers just render my whiteness that much more harmless). Vientiane is warmly welcoming, but Phnom Penh was positively bold. To get to the office, I walked down a few back roads, between rows of houses. Children yelled 'hello!' then burst into shrieking laughter when I smiled hello back. Women shouted 'hi' and coaxed their babies to wave. Young girls and boys bent around the sides of their motos to hail me jubilantly as they passed. I almost felt guilty, worried that they mistook me for someone famous. In school, children are taught English by rote, so many offer the same packaged salutations, a "hello-are-you-well" or "hello-what-is-your-name". And the small boys selling water by the tourist sights have been trained to use a few pat phrases heartbreakingly well, in a sing-song cadence: "will-you-remember-me-madam?"

The awareness of foreigners and eager attempts at English are a piece of the larger sense I got of Phnom Penh as self-consciously international. Much of the place is named for other places--the Sydney Hotel, the Mount Everest Restaurant, the New York Standard--and English or international schools are ubiquitous. Gratifyingly, though, this new, global identification seems to come not from an envy of other cities but a curiosity about the wider world in which Cambodia is finally able to take its place.