Baby's First Bribe

The last time I ran an obstacle course was fifth grade, Joshua Eaton's field day. In that one, I think I had to carry an egg with a spoon. This one was a little different: three separate police stations, two trips to the embassy, frantic calls to the home base (thanks, Mom & Dad), a fruitless search for my tuk-tuk driver, accidental Khmer glamour shots ('passport photo' was lost in translation), and a minor obsession with "official" stamps.

It was about the time I was sitting in front of the district police chief, karaoke on mute behind me, thumbs inky blue from vigorously stamping my prints on Khmer police reports I couldn't even read, trying to explain to my translator why a MasterCard had been in my stolen wallet ("No, it's not a very special card for a master, it's just like a Visa....No, not like a visa to get into a country. Like an American Express--you know American Express?...A money card. A card with money!...No, from a bank, but...You know what, just don't worry about it, it's--...Yes, exactly like a calling card."), that I began to wonder why I was on the other side of the world in the first place. The police station had more cots than desks, and two televisions with karaoke machines but nothing close to a computer. The chief wrote laboriously, seeming to relish the chance to use his white-out stick. We were almost done when noon hit and he promptly capped his pen--lunch time; we'd have to come back later. And later and later still, until it finally became clear that I'd keep running in circles until I greased the appropriate hands for that elusive Official Stamp, without which I wouldn't be able to leave the country. I'm trying to rationalize it as paying $50 for the privilege of experiencing an authentic piece of daily Khmer life (just like Plymouth Plantation, right?). Poorer, but triumphant, I now have both a new passport and the Stamped letter that ordains my exit from Cambodia.

Where the police station was frustrating, going to the embassy was touching, in a wrenching kind of way. The building is brand new, and something of a fortress--it's palatial and heavily guarded, betraying no signs of life. When I went, I was ushered quickly through the American Citizen line; the other door (slower to open) was the immigrant visa line. To get an American visa here is to win the lottery, quite literally. In that line, the Cambodians were dressed up despite the heat, waiting anxiously for their appointments to make their pleas. Across the street, in the shade of a big banana tree and with Wat Phnom looming behind them, clusters of relatives knelt waiting, all eyes trained on the door in anticipation of their sister or husband or son re-emerging with their verdicts. Projecting their dramas from the flickers of emotion rounding their faces triggered a surge of platitudes that I know to be stale, but that feel sharply fresh to me in this moment. I got through the embassy quickly, before a new visa case was even called. Feeling irrationally guilty, I caught myself hiding my head a bit; when the exit door opened, I darted out and quickly away from the gently hopeful stares.

The ants go marching one by one, hurrah...

I developed an affection for the house geckos, once I got used to the shadows they made as they skittered around the walls of my room at night. I learned quickly to watch for snakes when traipsing through the higher grasses in flimsy flip-flops. I use the stray dogs as a (totally legitimate) justification for not going running. I skirt the cows in the road on my bicycle, and I even spare the big beetles by gently plucking them off my pillow and letting them scurry out the window. Though I won't ever pretend to be hardcore, my threshold for squeamishness is rising considerably.--I learn to deal with it. But oh, oh!, the ants.

If it were just an ant game of tag on my floor, or a few playing connect the freckles on my arm, I wouldn't mind. But where there's one, there are six hundred. It was my fault when they found their way into the foil-wrapped energy bars. And when I found them coating my rain jacket, that was on me too--I'd left a candy wrapper in the pocket. The next morning, I sleepily dumped some vitamins into my palm and realized the fish oil tablets were moving; the ants had found their way through the child-proof top. I stashed anything that had ever been exposed to any possible derivative of a food product in my fridge. When I got back to the hotel, the flash mob was newly congregated on the ankles of a pair of pants; I blame it on the organic cotton. I quickly overcame nobler impulses and got more liberal with the aerosol can of carcinogens. Oh, but the ants are smarter. As I slept, they seized my laptop, pouncing on the stale crumbs between the keys, testament to many desperate paper all-nighters. As I typed at a cafe the next day, little red bodies crawled out from underneath the keys. Apparently, I'd interrupted lunch at the new hot spot, QWERTY. A waiter walked by, did a double-take, and walked back. He pointed to the ant-covered plate next to me, and was about to apologize when he broke into laughter, waving over all his waiter friends: these ants were crawling out of the CD drive, blazing a trail right to my melted chocolate chips. They were in the fan, in the USB port, in the battery. They didn't just want that old sprinkle; they wanted everything. Short of killing my computer with poison, I was at a loss: my limited Lao lets me say 'turn right', íce cream' and 'not too spicy'; 'can you fumigate my laptop?' is a little out of my league. I hopped the nearest tuk-tuk to the office, and dumped the computer on the IT desk, wildly miming the motions of dismantling the laptop and sweeping out the ants. The shy IT manager smiled calmly and said blushingly in Lao--to a colleague who whispered the translation later--that the ants must have come because I was so sweet.


And speaking of pests...
I am back in Phnom Penh, happily absorbing more of the city than I got a chance to see last visit. I've been indulging in tuk-tuks to get to work--here, they are small chariots, strangely ornate and a lovely way to zip around. Yesterday morning, rattling by the Royal Palace, I was thinking just that as I reached into my bag to grab my sunglasses when--poof!--in the space of a blink, two boys whizzed by in a moto, reached in and yanked my bag right out of my arms. I shrieked and pointed, but no one else seemed particularly surprised or interested in giving chase. I've been warned about the drive-by snatchings, but still it was the brashness of it that took me aback--in the middle of the day, in slow-moving traffic, right out of my lap.

So at the moment, I am a bit of a floater: living on borrowed cash, phoneless, and without any form of identification. In an unnerving way, it's strangely liberating...there's nothing left to lose. At the same time, I hate my sudden suspiciousness, especially in this place where so many people are so warm. I walk now with my backpack on my front, arms wrapped around it like a pregnant belly, eyes darting around. But even in my guardedness, people are open. My tuk-tuk driver was so upset that he he told the others outside the hotel, so they've now formed a small posse that watches out for me. Instead of walking out to "Killing Fields, lady?", it's "you take care today, madam."

*

It's more than just that, but for reasons I can't yet identify--and in the face of the theft of roughly 2/3 of my worldly possessions--I am startled to find myself close to loving it here.

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.