Winter sucks. It’s cold and I hate it. I grew up in
New York, where winter is colder on average than even
the winters some of my Canadian friends know (particularly
my friends from the lovely and naturally insulated city
of Vancouver). Like my Canadian friends, I’ve got my
trusty took (though I almost never call it that), as well
as scarves, gloves, coats, and good long underwear. But
unlike Canadians, I simply can’t deal with the cold.
I bitch and complain and start counting the days until
Spring.
The Pusan winter is not nearly as bitter as that of
New York, but it’s still a winter, and as such, it
sucks. There are some nice wintery things happening
though, chestnuts roasting on an open pushcart, music
in the air, and excessive alcohol consumption. As nice
as these things can be, they still don’t exert the
same kind of power over me as the old summer standbys:
“beach,” “hammock,” “palm tree,” “Pina
Colada.” Who can complain about these?
In winter, my thoughts inevitably turn to summer for
solace, and I reminisce about lazy days spent in fairer
climes. At this time last year I was in Cambodia, and
I’d happily go there right now if I could. Cambodia
doesn’t leap to mind as most people’s idea of a
dream vacation spot, but it does have all the summer
essentials in spades and then some. Okay, it does rain
a hell of a lot in the monsoon season, but I never thought
of reaching for a pair of wool thermals. In fact, the
weather there is normally so damned warm that wearing
clothes at all is primarily a means of keeping people
from staring at your genitals.
Cambodia has several reputations, most of them bad.
Stories of sex, drugs, and violence precede Cambodia
wherever it goes. People stare at Cambodia yet try to
avoid eye contact. The whole country is like the kid
who after school did weird things which nobody ever
really saw yet couldn’t resist talking about with
perverted glee. But some people, many of them former
or current problem kids themselves, dive right in for
a look-see.
I knew I had to go there. Though I’m not exactly
a problem child, I do have a fascination with sex, drugs,
and violence. Coming from New York, which is also a
place with a wild reputation, I suspected that many
of those crazy stories about Cambodia were probably
half-true and had perhaps gained a lot of their drama
from Hollywood, sensational media reports, and overeager
imaginations. I’ve met plenty of people who imagine
New York to be a place where people are always running
around dodging bullets and popping each other off at
traffic lights as nonchalantly as they’d read the
newspaper. Things like that do happen, though it is
far from a feature of daily life. In some parts of New
York, you are as likely to hear gunfire as you are to
hear the mating call of a wildebeest. I don’t know
if Cambodia has wildebeests, but I was pretty sure I
could leave my NYPD flak jacket at home.
*
I’ll never forget the exhileration of arriving in
Phnom Penh. Cambodia started happening the moment I
arrived at the terminal and didn’t let up until the
moment I left. Outside the terminal, I was immediately
thronged by guys who wanted to be my driver/guide/trusty
sidekick. There were about ten of them and they were
all saying more or less the same thing, “I know a
good hotel, very cheap…”
I chose my guy based on a simple formula; he was the
one who harassed and annoyed me the least. His name
was Joon, or Jun, or Juwon—I never did manage to prononce
it correctly even after spending a few days with him
in Phnom Pehnh. I told him my name was John and he got
very excited and exclaimed, “My name same!”
I got on his bike and we roared out of the airport
lot and onto a wide boulevard. The road was paved, but
there was somehow very little air in the dust I was
breathing. Before us swirled the fleeting forms of hundreds
of other small motorbikes, and the noise was nearly
deafening—a thousand engines become one—probably
like the sound that would come from Satan’s hotrod.
It was instant chaos, like sticking your head into a
beehive, and it turned out to be the best road in the
whole damned city.
I was instantly fascinated. Sensory overload, no, sensory
assault, and I fell into a bug-eyed reverie on the back
of the wailing motorbike. Through the smoke and the
dust Joon was screaming, “Yoo wa BA?”
“Huh?” The English language goes through some interesting
twists on Cambodian tongues, and it would take me a
while to get used to Joon’s English. But here he repeated
himself and put his hand to his mouth, and I realized
he was asking, “You want pot?”
I do smoke occasionally, and it was nice of him to
ask, but I declined mainly because my head was spinning
all by itself. And I was more concerned with finding
a room and dropping my gear. “No thanks Joon. Not
now.”
Joon was undaunted. “You want lady? Vietnamese lady
five dollar lady bar. Very beautiful!” He was screaming
over the din and turning to face me, which was very
unnerving. On driving in the Third World, P.J. O’Rourke
once wrote, “Never look where you’re going; you’ll
only scare yourself.” There’s truth to that, but
it doesn’t make you feel any better when your driver
is blindly heading into what looks like a monster rally
of Hell’s Angels on ephedrine.
In the time it took to get downtown, Joon gave me the
lowdown on everything from drug orgies to blasting away
at the shooting range with rocket-propelled grenades.
It seemed he had a thousand contacts and he offered
to arrange whatever I wanted to do. I was initially
startled by his versatility, but I was later to discover
that nearly every Khmer has the ability to become an
instant middleman. If they don’t have what you want,
they go get it. Once at a restaurant, I asked the waiter
if he had Chang beer. He said yes and took off running
down the street. He returned ten minutes later with
my Chang. If I had known he was going to do that, I
would have ordered six.
I had chosen a guesthouse arbitrarily from a travel
guide, because I thought it better to give any address
at all than be led to a place where I would be overcharged
so my driver could collect a commission. Joon had never
heard of the place I suggested, but he looked for it,
or at least made a very convincing show of looking for
it.
He took us down streets which quickly became thicker,
narrower, dirtier, and less like anything I had ever
seen—craters full of water and loose bricks, the mad
traffic of motorbikes and cyclos, and chicken, children,
and dogs alike screeching and shitting as we nearly
ran them over. There were more “hazards” than “road”,
and we were bobbing and weaving, avoiding death and
maiming by feet and inches.
The driving in Phnom Penh is Darwinian, and the laws
are those of the jungle. Contrary to popular belief,
New Yorkers generally obey the rules of the road, because
most of those rules are vigorously enforced. We watch
what the other guy is doing, and unless he’s from
New Jersey, we usually assume he’ll do the right thing.
In Cambodia, the only thing you can safely assume is
that the other guy is utterly unpredictable, and as
a consequence, you become a very alert and skillful
driver. Or you die. Either way, the driving gets better.
Classic natural selection.
Joon was an excellent driver; that is to say, in Phnom
Penh his technique made perfect sense and was the only
“sane” way to drive. In most other places he would
have serious problems with the law and would make few
friends among his fellow motorists.
Our search for the guesthouse took us down some squalid
streets, though no matter how awful the roads were,
they all had names or numbers that followed a logical
ascending order. Despite Phnom Penh’s Third World
chaos, they actually have a First World system of named
and numbered streets, which is something that World-of-its-Own
Korea has not yet gotten around to. In Korea, one gives
directions by means of landmarks, which works as long
as the building you chose as your reference point was
not torn down last week and replaced with a Pizza Hut,
as sometimes happens.
Apparently, my chosen guesthouse too no longer existed,
so I gave up and agreed to a place that Joon recommended.
It turned out to be cheap enough (six bucks a night)
and comfortable, with a veranda looking out over the
madness of 51st street, a couple of blocks from the
central market. I dropped my bag in the corner and read
the house rules, posted on a sign on the wall. Point
number two had me wondering exactly what would constitute
a “wrongful use of electricity,” and point number
six was downright baffling: Please leave explosives
with the guesthouse owner.
I had spent a few weeks in Thailand, and I left with
some scrapes and mosquito bites on my feet that would
not heal in the moist climate. Because they were so
small, I neglected to clean them properly and they became
infected. It was hard to walk because the cuts lay in
the path of my sandal straps. When I arrived in Phnom
Penh, my feet were hurting, so I sat on the veranda,
propped my feet on the rail, and began what was fast
becoming a ritual application of antiseptic.
The cuts had been open and bleeding for so long I was
beginning to wonder if they’d always be like that,
some kind of tropical stigmata that would follow me
for the rest of my life. And I started wondering if
those people who claim to have the wounds of Christ
were not just dummies with poor hygeine habits like
me.
I looked out from the veranda at the city below and
felt a pang of guilt. If the city had been manic before,
it was starting to fire itself up even more as night
approached. God knows what dark wonders were bustling
in the streets below, and there I was on my first night
in Phnom Penh, nursing a couple of busted-up feet and
watching lizards eating flying bugs around the flourescent
light in my room. Should I stay or should I go,
I thought, and was still wrestling with that question
when I fell into a deep sleep.
*
Joon picked me up the next morning for a day of sightseeing.
We took in most of the main sights: The Silver Pagoda,
Wat Phnom, a Khmer Rouge “detention center” cryptically
called S-21, and the infamous Killing Fields, which
is somewhat surreally announced by a large sign which
reads, “Cheong Ek genocidal Center.”
These were well worth the price of admission, but the
most interesting thing to me was the whole of the city
itself: the people, the energy, the madness, the filth,
the gracefully crumbling French colonial buildings and
the clumsily crumbling everything else. The city buzzes
and rocks, and it’s impossible not to be affected
by its energy. I was affected mostly positively by it,
but then again, I was there only a week.
The perpetual motion of Phnom Penh does have some rather
nerveracking mainfestations. All of the selling is aggressive,
and the touts there are harder to shake than their counterparts
in Bangkok or Saigon. They are poor after all, so it’s
hard to be angry with them, especially because most
of the selling is virtually indistinguishable from begging.
One young kid offered me a book for sale, a guide to
the temples at Angkor Wat. I came with a copy of the
same book, so I told him I had it already. He wouldn’t
accept that excuse, and he said, “Your book not same.”
There followed a brief “disagreement” that went
something like this:
“My book is the same.”
“Not same.”
“Same.”
“Not same.”
And so on until it became clear to me that the only
way to get rid of him (he was now at my side, half-trotting
sideways to keep up) would be to show him. I dug the
book out of my bag and held it up. They were indeed
identical, and I said again, “Same.”
He looked at the book unfazed and said, “Buy one
more.”
*
On the motorbike, Joon turned to me and handed me a
pack of cigarettes. I opened it and found it stuffed
with pot. “How much?” I asked.
Joon turned and sang his answer, “It’s up to you.”
It seems to me now that this is the motto of Phnom
Penh—it’s up to you—because nobody there
is going to tell you otherwise, and if someone does,
you can pay them off for a pittance. Sex, drugs, and
wanton violence no longer the exclusive province of
rock stars and Hollywood brats. You too can be a flagrant
degenerate for the cost of…well, it’s up to you
but it ain’t much. Intellectual and spiritual elevation
is all quite available there too. The choice is yours,
live or die. Take that step, and that’s all it is—just
a step. It’s all right here in front of your eyes,
whatever you want.
And it’s hard to feel shame there because there are
no judges, only merchants. Buyers and sellers guided
only by the logic of the market. Ethics are not evident.
Where are the reproachful glances? The shame-on-you?
Men negotiate sex with teenage girls and the madams
are somebody’s cute little grandma. It’s up to you
because grandma doesn’t care. Who is there to tell
you to stop, to remind you to pause and check to see
that you are not becoming a monster?
If near-anarchy can be properly called freedom, then
Cambodia is the freest country I know. The freedom is
exhilerating, even if it means something as simple as
drinking a beer and smoking a joint on the back of a
weaving motorcycle. For many, that freedom proves too
much to handle. The excesses of debauched foreigners,and
of the Khmers themselves, are slowly coming to light
in the form of backpacker gossip, bizzaro news reports,
and seamy softcover travelogues, but a lot more goes
on there than anyone will ever know.
Cambodia changed my perspective on Korea too. Sometimes
I complain about Korea and its rule for everything.
Korea’s solution to the problem of social organization
isn’t ideal, but pure freedom is more demanding than
I’d ever imagined. Cambodia often obliged me to examine
my beliefs, which was exhausting at times but ultimately
enriching. It is also a good place to learn what proportion
of your behavior is determined by legal and ethical
constraints, because there aren’t any. I became grateful
for some of Korea’s societal rules, because those
rules, at their best, are about making people comfortable;
they provide an easy way out of the awkward predicament
of not knowing what to do.
And when I flew back to Korea from Cambodia, Seoul
had never before seemed so damned clean and well-organized.
They still hadn’t named the streets, but that’s
just a matter of time. And I suddenly wished I had packed
my thermal underwear.
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