This piece was reprinted in Damau.org

Introduction: Andrew Lam is an editor of New America Media in San Francisco (CA) and the author of Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora. His English adaptation of Nguyen Mong Giac’s short story, “Letter in Care of Distant Clouds” (“Thơ Gởi Cho Đám Mây Xa”) appeared in the anthology Once Upon a Dream: The Vietnamese-American Experience (Andrews & McMeel: 1995). Asked about his experience regarding this short story, Andrew Lam reflected, “I was asked to pick and translate some of the works written in Vietnamese by 1st generation Vietnamese Americans and Mr. Giac’s was among a few that I read in anthologies of short stories (tuyen tap hai ngoai? )…. This is as far as my memory of that time goes …. I suppose [this is an]adaptation instead of translation because something does not translate well and therefore needs to be recreated – some metaphors don’t translate at all for instance – or some expressions and old sayings lose complete meanings when translated.” Nevertheless, his “adaptation” is an evocative and mostly faithful rendering of Nguyen Mong Giac’s subtle yet incisive style in the original.

That night, Grandma and grandson wrote a letter back to Vietnam. Grandma said to grandson: “Ha, remember to write clearly. Your hand writing’s so hard to read.”

Ha was surprised: “Grandma, when did you look at my homework? You know how to read already?”

“Of course not. Your Mama said so. I am too old to learn.”

The boy was curious: “Why didn’t you go to school before, Grandma?”

“Back then only boys got to go to school, girls stayed home and learned how to cook and sew.

I was a good baker. No girl in the whole village could sew or cook as well as I did.”

The old lady fell into a trance-like reverie of her youth. The boy asked: “Are you sleepy, Grandma?”

“No. I was just remembering … but never mind. You keep on writing.”

But the grandson refused to let her off the hook without a full explanation. He pressed on:

“What were you remembering, Grandma?”

Grandma smiled, her voice trembled slightly: “I was real naïve. Your Grandpa came with the go-between to my house to propose and I didn’t even know it. I was busy playing hopscotch, and I bunched up my front shirt to hold in these tamarind seeds that I’d collected, showing my belly button. Your great grandmother called me into the house to serve tea to the guests. When I brought tea to the guests, my hand was still holding up this bounty of tamarind seeds. Who would have guessed your Grandpa noticed the nice white skin.”

Ha laughed. He couldn’t imagine Grandma playing hopscotch and showing her belly button to his Grandpa. He laughed so hard he had tears in his eyes. Grandma stopped him:

“What’s so funny? You’re all the same when young. Come on, keep writing.”

Ha readjusted the oil lamp’s wicker a little higher. “What should I write, Grandma?”

Grandma cleared her throat and said: “Remind your mother to remember to light incense in your grandfather’s altar each night.”

Ha was worried: “But how do I write it, Grandma?”

Grandma was curt: “Just write. Tell your mother to light the incense.”

“But before I write that … I can’t just say light incense, it wouldn’t look like a letter like that.”

Grandma nodded: “You’re right. Why don’t you write a few lines to make it look like a letter.

You’re in sixth grade, so you already know how to write letters.”

Ha didn’t want to admit that once his epistolary essay was a source of comic relief to his classmates. It was so embarrassing. He quietly began the letter with these sentences:

Letter from Grandma–and me-to Mama. Me and Grandma’ arrived to Kuku Island on 5.12.82. Mama the ocean was full of big and mean waves. I threw up. Grandma also threw up. You are probably worried about Grandma a lot. That day I also worried a lot. Grandma was just saying, when you get there remember to study hard and listen to Uncle Lien, I’m leaving, when we heard gunshots. And I almost pissed in my pants. Grandma was worried that I might get shot so she held on to me and shielded me. Those guys on the boat kept rushing us. It took a long time before we could climb aboard. When we got out to sea, Grandma remembered she had to go home, and asked those people to let her off . . . .

Grandma saw grandson writing without asking her opinion, she started to worry. She tapped his shoulder: “What are you writing so much?”

Ha proudly answered: “I started by telling how we got on the boat so our family would know. So that Mama would stop worrying, Grandma.”

“You can tell the story?”

“Of course, Grandma. Let me read it to you.”

Ha began reading. The more he read, the more he realized he had overused the word a lot. He really liked the phrase pissed in my pants but his mother hated it. But he already wrote it, what can he do? Grandma nodded, complimenting him that he wrote well and to the point. Of course, you can’t just start by telling someone to light incense stick. His Mama is probably worried, she thought, wondering if I am alive or dead after they found out about the escape and arrested all those people. 1 should tell my daughter where I am, so she wouldn’t worry. The young ones these days are so smart.

Ha asked: “Should I mention about the incense now, Grandma?”

The old lady, who completely trusted her grandson now, answered quickly: “Yes. You go ahead and write so that your mother wouldn’t forget. I just worry that your mother would be too tired coming home from work. She might just forget.”

Ha felt more confident. He wrote: “Grandma and me we miss home a lot. . . .” Ha caught himself.

Again a lot. He erased the two words, thought a bit more, then added terribly.

Grandma saw Ha hesitating, thought he forgot, so she reminded him: “You go ahead and write. Tell mother that even if she were tired, she should remember. . .”

“I remember Grandma. I am wondering how to write it so Mama can remember it for a long time.” The boy held the pen for a while, his face appeared serious. Grandma remained quiet, respecting his deep reflection. A bit later, Ha continued:

It’s real funny. Grandma just told me how when she was young she was so busy having fun that she let Grandpa see her belly button. Did she tell you that story, Mama? Grandma worries that you will fall asleep after cooking dinner and forget to light the incense in Grandpa’s altar. Remember to light the incense, ok, Mama! . . .

After adding the exclamation point, Ha stopped. He asked happily: “Do you want me to read what I just wrote, Grandma?”

Grandma shook her head: “No need. Write fast before the lamp runs out of oil. You tell Mama that each time she lights the incense sticks she should tell your Grandpa that I am already here, he shouldn’t worry. And tell him that if he is a powerful spirit, he should follow Grandma so Grandma can light incense for him, too. He’s so far away.”

“Can he really come over, Grandma? He should try a safer route, instead of the way we came, it’s too dangerous.”

Grandma was again lost in the idea that she could once again talk to the ghost of her husband and did not hear Ha’s comment. He continued to write:

Grandma prays often that if Grandpa is really a powerful spirit he could come over to stay with Grandma. Poor Grandma! She went to the pagoda to pray to Buddha and then told me to go to church to pray to God. I’ve tasted the Host. But they didn’t put enough sugar in it. And it’s so small.

He barely finished writing when Grandma said: “You write and tell your Mama to give the chickens water. And it’s quite windy where the pigpen is. She should buy some old tin sheets down on Bach Dang Avenue to block the wind. It’s easy for pigs to get cold and die, and your mother already spent too much money to buy bran and cassavas to feed them.”

Ha thought Grandma was being excessive. Mama already gave to his younger sister Ri the task of giving water to the chickens. As to the pigs Mama had spent so much money feeding them, of course she would take care of them properly. Besides, who knows, by the tie this letter reached Vietnam, his mother might have already sold all the pigs for some cash. But he knew he couldn’t argue with Grandma, so he wrote:

In the two ration bags they distributed to me and Grandma for five days, there are only two small sugar bags. There is coffee but Grandma wouldn’t allow me to drink it. She exchanged it for fish to make soup. We got four cans of food. I love curry chicken more than pig pâté, even though the pâté can is even bigger than the one you bought once. We’ve been eating pâté for a month now. I can’t stand it anymore.

Ha glanced at Grandma, afraid that she might find out he is writing about himself. Grandma did appear suspicious. She asked: “Did you mention to your Mama to buy tin sheets yet? It’s cheaper at Bach Dang than at Chuong Duong. Last year I went with your Uncle Lien, before he went to America, and found out it was almost a hundred dong more.”

Ha quickly answered to hide his impatience: “I wrote everything you told me already.” Then he became bolder: “Let me read it to you.”

Grandma shook her head, as he predicted. For her part, she did recognize how inconsiderate she was. How can she be thinking of pigs and chickens and the dead, and not her own daughter? And the old lady knew her daughter too well: she must be losing sleep over her precious son. She quickly told Ha: “Why don’t you talk about your situation? Tell your mother that you are doing well, that you gained a little weight. Yesterday at the hospital you gained a kilo and a half, right?”

Ha was delighted. Enough about pigs and chickens. After a few moments of deep reflection he wrote:

As for me I am doing well. I go fishing every day. Here there are plenty of fish, Mama. Plenty to make soup with, and plenty to play with too. Yesterday I caught three colorful fish: purple green gold red. They have long fins that expand into fans. I also picked up woods for Grandma to cook and in a few days I will begin English lesson. I gained (Ha bit his lips) three and a half kilograms. Mama, you can’t call me Skinny Ha anymore.

Grandma tilted her head and squinted her eyes for a good look at her precious grandson. His serious face reminded her of Ha’s mother, when she was cute and behaving like a pampered child with her own mother. Grandma felt a bit uneasy, a little sad. Time goes by so fast, how a child’s smile changed into an adult’s tears of sorrow.

She was thinking of this and that until she remembered some unfinished business at home and quickly told grandson: “Ha, are you done? You have to write this right away. If we forget people will talk. You write and tell Mama the day we left, I still owe Mrs. Tu Set two dong of sugar, and one dong of pepper. I also borrowed from Aunty Bay a knife for cutting betel nuts and forgot to return it. I thought I see you to the boat then I’d return home . . . .”

“How come Mama and Papa didn’t see me off, Grandma?”

The old lady looked around, and lowered her voice: “Your father just got out of re-education camp and they haven’t given him back his papers. He couldn’t go anywhere. Your mother works for the state so she can buy cheaper rice for the entire family. If they’d seen you to the boat, they might have been unlucky. . . .”

Ha missed his family so much. “Then why did they want me to leave? Grandma, I really miss Mama and Papa and Ri a lot.”

Grandma rubbed his hair, trying to console him: “You are a boy, you must be courageous and reasonable. You have bad family history in the eyes of the government. What future can you have? You go live with Uncle Lien and study hard. You might become someone important. Besides, Heaven and Buddha have made me come along to take care of you in the end. What else do you want? Just write.”

Ha thought the business of owing a few dong is not so important, while his debt to his elders is endless. He wrote quickly:

Grandma wants you to return Mrs. Tu Set three dong, Miss Nam her knife. Ri: Chau, Mr. Nhat Truong’s son, borrowed my 101th Smurf and Tintin in the Land of Black Gold comic books. Has he returned them? You go over and ask for them back and make sure no pages are missing. My comic books and magazines, you go ahead and read but don’t mix them up and don’t let your friends borrow them. You should take care of those plastic cars. Put them back in the box or they would break. You can use my leather bookbag but try not to get it all scratched up . My best friends, Huy, Ha, and that comedian Bao Quoc, do they ask about me? Do they talk about me at school? Are you done with finals? My English teacher must miss me very much, much, much . . . .

Ha stopped writing, satisfied with the three muches at the last line. Grandma seemed surprised, wondering what made him laugh. She asked: “Aren’t you finished yet? I only owe money to two people.”

Ha turned red and lied: “I mentioned it more than once so Mama would remember.”

Grandma didn’t know what to think, but she remembered the knife and the betel nuts: “I realy miss chewing betel nuts. Do you think they have them in America?”

Ha answered immediately: “Of course, Grandma. Aunty Thang said they have everything in America. Stinky tofu, fish sauce, garlic, hot pepper, betel nuts. Whatever you need they have. In places where the Vietnamese people live you just go around the corner and buy them. If you live far away you have to drive. Some people drive for a hundred kilometers just for a bowl of noodles sometimes.”

Grandma seemed worried: “How bothersome. I get sick smelling gasoline. Every time I ride in a car I throw up. Once we get to Galang, how do we go to America from there?”

Ha answered based on his fantasies: “By airplane, Grandma. Zoom and you’re there.”

Grandma was full of concern: “Has any airplane ever crashed?

Ha thought about it, and about parachuting, and answered happily: “Of course, very often.”

With innocent enthusiasm, he added: “I heard that if you get in a crash and don’t have a parachute, you’d die. Your body is smashed into pieces, each less than a hundred grams. That’s what they say in the books.”

Grandma whispered: “How awful! When we get over there, you better write a letter to America to tell Uncle Lien to bring a car to pick us up.”

Trying to not obsess over the image of a crashing airplane, Grandma continued: “Do you still have room? Half a page only? You tell Mama that when we get to Galang you will take a color photo and send it back. I will tell Uncle Lien of your Mama’s situation so he can help. The medicine and the fabric your Mama made you memorize I remember too. Uncle Lien will send them home often.”

Ha’s face dropped. His family’s honor had been bruised. He thought of his papa who’d rather endure poverty than ask for help. Once, when Uncle Lien sent some gifts home to Grandma, she shared half of the presents with Mama. Mama was so happy, she brought black fabric and those bottles of Tylenol to show Papa. But Papa wasn’t happy. His parents ended up in the backyard talking for a long time. When they returned, Papa’s face was sullen, and Mama’s eyes were red.

Since then, each time Grandma brought Uncle Lien’s gifs to Mama, Mama had to wait for Grandma at the gate and they would enter the house through the back door. The day that Ha left, Mama waited for Papa to leave the house before she brought out a sheet of paper and wrote down the names of fabrics and Western medicines that had values in Saigon. She told Ha to memorize them al so he could recite them to Uncle Lien. He loved Mama very much-he always wanted to hug her whenever she was despairing over money. But deep down, Ha liked Papa’s way of thinking better. He vaguely recognized in Papa’s way of endurance something brave that deserves respect. That was why Ha wrote at the end of the letter:

Right now Grandma and me we don’t know when we will go to Galang. When we get there I will take a color photo and send it home to you immediately. I will smile real big so you and Ri can see how well and happy I am. Mama, Grandma says you shouldn’t worry. The ship that takes us to Galang is very big, not like that tiny boat we took from Bac Lieu. As for you Ri, I hope you will study well. Oh, I forget, if you come over here, there are plenty of plastic bags for you to recycle. They throw plastic bags all over the place, each one is clear and thick and I think of you having to collect those ugly and thin and stinking ones for the government recycle program. When I get to America I will buy metal toys and send them to you. When I come back to see you, we’ll go to the zoo to feed rotten guavas and sugarcane to the monkeys and elephants. Ri, do you remember when that monkey almost got my hair, and that elephant sprayed water on you and you got all wet?

Signed: Ha and Grandma.

It was late into the night when the two were done with the letter. Ha proudly signed the letter as if he were a president signing an important bill in front of his people. He wanted his Grandma to make an X mark next to his signature but she refused, saying it was not necessary. Ha missed his Papa, loved his Papa, admired his Papa. But before he left, Mama said if he writes, never to mention Papa. The police may well read the letter, they would know that Ha had escaped. They will take his Papa back to the re-education camp again.

Re-imagining the Self, Re-imagining America

Writer reconciles opposing life experiences to forge his American identity

Andrew Lam, an editor with New America Media, says President Obama is advancing acceptance of Americans with “complicated biographies.”

Vietnam-born American writer Andrew Lam is an editor with New America Media. He recently published the book Perfume Dreams: Reflections on the Vietnamese Diaspora.

By Andrew Lam
Special Correspondent
America.gov

When he proposed that memorable test of a first-rate intelligence — “hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function” — writer F. Scott Fitzgerald was talking about hope and hopelessness and his own fragile mental state. I find that test nevertheless practical as a guide to look at one’s place in our quickly shifting world, and to approach that persistent question of what it means to be an American.

We live indeed in a time far more complex than the one in which our grandparents grew up. Communication technology, breakthroughs in the sciences, the integrated global economy and unprecedented mass movements have unraveled old institutions, shrunk the distances, rendered borders porous and radically altered the way we perceive ourselves and our world.

Let me offer my own biography as example. I was born in Vietnam in the middle of a war, fled to America as a young refugee when it ended, grew up to become an American writer and journalist. Encompassed in that one sentence is a myriad of opposed ideas. The world I knew as a child was defined by clanship, bound to an agrarian-based ethos and the practice of ancestral worship — a sedentary society that viewed the borders as real demarcations, nearly impossible to cross. The world I live in now requires communicating across time zones and hemispheres, traveling from one continent to another and negotiating among different languages, dissimilar cultures and once far-flung civilizations.

If the Vietnamese child was beholden to a singular sense of looking at himself, rooted in the belief that the rice fields and the land was all that ever was, the American adult is a bona fide cosmopolitan. I am American and Vietnamese. I am both a San Franciscan and a citizen of a global society. I am part of a diaspora that spreads itself in the last three decades into 50 countries around the globe. On my Facebook account, I have friends and relatives from four continents. At any given day I communicate — via cell phone, skype, chatroom, email, text messaging — with others from down the street to halfway across the globe.

I am hardly alone. If the famed tower of Babel did long ago fall, it seems now certain that it did not turn into dust. Instead it transmuted into a marvelous horizontal grid of many voices. The Hmong girl in Oakland is texting to her Mexican boyfriend in San Jose who is on Skype with his abuela in Oaxaca. The Austrian H1B technician is talking on the cell phone with his boyfriend in Singapore while chatting on line with his co-workers in Silicon Valley. The teenager who calls herself Blaxican — black father, Mexican mother — is holding hands with her boyfriend who calls himself Japorican — part Japanese and part Puerto Rican — as they push the stroller carrying their global village baby toward some intricate future.

Meanwhile the U.S. demographic is shifting toward a reality where non-white groups are emerging as majorities, undermining what we traditionally held as majority vs. minority, mainstream vs. ethnic. In San Francisco where I live the population is so diverse that no one group constitutes more than 50 percent, but more than 100 languages are spoken on a given day.

Diversity, of course, is nothing new. What is new is at the dawn of the 21st century, we finally overcame our xenophobia, our fear and distrust of “the other” to embrace and celebrate our complexity in an epic and historic way. We elected Barack Obama, son of many soils, and the first U.S. president with a global biography — Muslim father from Kenya, white mother, raised in Hawaii and Indonesia with a half-sister who is part Indonesian and married to a Chinese, half-siblings and a grandmother in Kenya and relatives in Kansas.

Obama, arguably the most famous figure of our time, has opened the door wide to that growing public space in which other Americans with mixed background and complicated biographies — Latino Muslims, black Buddhists, gay Korean Jews, mixed raced children — can celebrate their multi-narrative with audacity. Obama gives us license to embrace our various inheritances and still call ourselves Americans. If F. Scott Fitzgerald told us to hold opposed ideas and function, Obama worked through them and prospered.

We have learned to tolerate and accept pluralism as reality, but we have only begun to realize that it is not just our society that has become decentralized and pluralistic but individuals — multicultured, multiracial, highly interconnected and steeped in media-rich civilization — have themselves become decentralized and pluralistic.

But what holds opposed ideas together? What connects them?

A sense of openness. An acceptance that identity is not fixed in stone but open ended. Eloquence and the imagination, and a willingness to find lines of articulation among differences.

I have said that I’m cosmopolitan but I do not mean I jet-set to five-star hotels around the world. I am someone who endured apprenticeships — l’ve learned to love the English language through years of reading and writing; I have come to embrace French romantic music despite my antipathy toward French colonization; I delight in Japanese anime cultures and am learning Japanese because of it; and I hold an enduring fascination for Vietnam and her contemporary history and continue to find inspiration in her struggle. All this, strangely enough, makes me American.

The essayist Lance Morrow once noted that “the interpretation of America has always been a species of self-discovery.” Every generation needs to redefine and articulate what its American identity means. I am emboldened by President Obama’s biography, for mine too is rooted in numerous particularities and as rich as it is rewarding, and it continues to refute simplification.

For those interested i moved some of the stories, essays and videos over to redroom.com
here’s link http://www.redroom.com/author/andrew-q-lam

I’ll be posting stories there concurrently as on NAM as well as speaking events. like this one coming up at Nieman Narrative Journalism Conference at Harvard March 20-22nd.

Also check out my latest essay on identity written for a state department website: Re-imagining the Self, Re-imagining America

Cheers

Andrew Lam

These three pieces were written over 3 visits to Cambodia in the early 90’s, the first 2 way before the age of the Internet… I am posting them now in light of the current Khmer Rouge Trial going on in Phnom Penh. I was sent to Cambodia in 92 then 94 by Pacific News Service, then again in 2000. I even managed to interview some former Khmer Rouge fighters in Siem Reap the first time around.

In any case, these below are some vignettes of
my experience when I was a cub reporter a long, long time ago…

Enjoy

Andrew *

Three Letters From Cambodia

By Andrew Lam
I

Phnom Penh – The old woman wrapped in a faded sarong is screaming at a flame tree on Sihanouk Boulevard in Phnom Penh this morning. Passers-by eye her warily. A young teenager in school uniform – blue pants and white shirt – pauses, taps on his own temple, then giggles. “Chkuot (crazy),” he says.

The old woman is not alone. The world’s attention has moved on but Cambodia, after three decades of warfare, remains a country plagued with problems, chief among them mental stress and mental illness. Approximately one out of three people suffers from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, according to a recent survey found based on 700 in-depth interviews conducted by TPO (The Transcultural Psycho-Social Organization). In all, up to 40 percent of Cambodians have trauma-related mental illnesses and 15 percent are virtually incapacitated.

It’s a country full of disturbing flashbacks and nightmares and murderous impulses. “It’s alarming,” says one foreign health worker. “If you count up all kinds of mental related symptoms, it’s probably two out of three people.”

But Kall Kann, director of the Dutch-supported TPO program, warns “people should take the survey with a grain of salt….There are not enough statistics to make accurate measurement of the problems here.” Kall, 30, lost four members of his own family during the Khmer Rouge reign when more than 1.5 million Cambodians perished. Essentially everyone old enough to remember the war is related to, or knows, someone who was killed.

Kall says he is strong, busy, and optimistic. Above all, “I focus on one thing and I can forget about the rest. This is my survival skill.” Yet Kall also warns of “a culture of mistrust and violence here that affects everyone. There is peace now but the problems and violence continues.”

Kathleen Hayes, managing director of the small but influential English language Phnom Penh Post, says, “Cambodia is a country where most people have been personally traumatized and the rest are nurtured by those traumatized people.” There are very few positive models, she adds. “The police brutality is legendary here.”

Sophal Ear, a World Bank officer and Cambodian American who comes here frequently, observes, “The threshold for violence seems really low in Cambodia. I think it has something to do with the value of life in Cambodia… Beating someone to death isn’t going to land you in jail. You can’t count on the courts, so you get retribution immediately.”

Violence, in fact, becomes part of the communication process, says Doctor Mustafa Elmasir, a consulting psychologist from Palestine. “Cambodians are not known to talk about their problems. They simply hold it in and then express it through violent acts.”

Thus treatment is a Herculean task. How can an individual be treated for a disease that has, in effect, infected the whole society? Worse, in a country where surviving is the order of the day, where violence continues, where land mines have created more amputees per capita than anywhere else in the world, and where the poor-rich gap is so vast now that the poorest feel dehumanized, psychological treatment is the lowest priority.

Traditionally, people with mental problems have been chained to their beds or simply left by relatives to die in the forest. Some seek solace in Buddhism but Kall is skeptical. “Buddhism is interpreted as acceptance of karma here. People are told to accept their fate so they don’t deal with their problems adequately.”

Ultimately, individual treatment is not as effective as group treatment, says Dr. Mustafa, who hails from the Middle East. “Counseling in Cambodia has to be done within the context of family and village.”

Kall cites the case of a woman whose father and husband were killed during the Khmer Rouge time but remade her life and the life of her children. Then her two sons stepped on landmines—one was killed, the other injured, and she went into withdrawal.

TPO’s health workers approached her repeatedly until she finally told her story. “She cried for three hours and then she kept telling her stories until she got better,” Kall recalls. But TPO went further—they asked neighbors to help the woman, and with their help she opened a baked goods shop. She is now a workshop volunteer with the TPO group in order to help others like herself.

She is an exception. Cambodians seem caught in a curious dilemma: the past holds such a grip on the present, but it is a past that has very little way of expressing itself, except through flashbacks and nightmares, and through violence.

The government, pressured by the various NGOs, now requires medical students to take courses in mental health. “Cambodia needs a lot of help,” says Kall,” unfortunately much funding is drying up as the outside world perceives needs elsewhere.”

Without proper treatment, Kall says, sighing, the country will be in limbo a long time. “If people are sick and can’t work, the economy is never going to grow.”

Sophal Ear, on the other hand, says he is optimistic when he goes to Cambodia, depressed when he leaves: “Still these days, I tell you, if there’s a will, there’s a way for Cambodians. After the Killing Fields, I think we, as a people, decided that survival was up to each and every one of us. We’ve been to the bottom, and there’s nowhere else to go now but up.”

II

In Cambodian mythology, men and women once competed to build the tallest mountain and the women, apparently through shrewdness and cunning, won.

Today in Battambang, the Mountain of Women towers over her squat rival, the Mountain of Men. But the mythic victory now seems bittersweet. After 3 decades of war and four years of genocide by the Khmer Rouge, almost two out of three Cambodian adults are females.

“The women survived starvation and hardship under the Khmer Rouge much better than the men,” observes Robert Piper of the United Nations Development Program. “But in peace time they are the ones who most need help.”

Krun Narin, 45, lost her husband and three of her five children to the Khmer Rouge. Repatriated from Thailand by the United Nations, she lives with her two surviving children in a cardboard shack in Battambang.

“The UN gave me some money and some rice, but that didn’t last long,” she says.

UN administrators in charge of the repatriation program admit they should have paid more attention to the disproportionately high percentage of refugees who are single women. Away from the communal security of the refugee camps, many are falling through the cracks of a shredded social fabric.

“The result is even greater urban drift and homelessness, which will make rebuilding Cambodia that much more difficult,” one official observes.

On the outskirts of Phnom Penh, impoverished women from the countryside have set up house in ramshackle huts – forming what one Cambodian America calls “rings of desperation,” around the capital. While 85 percent of Cambodia still lives in the countryside, the loss of men has ravaged the rural labor force, leaving widows and their families no choice but to seek a livelihood in the capital.

The stung Treng province, Dara Sann, whose husband died fighting for the Hun Sen government, recently slaughtered one of her three oxen and sold its meat at the market. “without my husband I cannot plow the field myself,” she says, trying to hold back tears. “Soon I will have to sell my land and maybe move to the city.”

The lack of men is a problem that extends far beyond economics. In Cambodia’s pantheon of divinities, none embodies the Khmer soul so much as the goddess Apsara, whose divine role is to entertain heroes, kings and gods. It is Apsara’s image that holds up the vast stone columns of Angkor Wat. It is Apsara, too, who graces the doors of temples of Phnom Penh’s newly built villas.

Chuong Riem, who lost her right leg in a Khmer Rouge land mine explosion, confides that she has lost all hope. “My mother says ‘a woman without a leg is not a woman,’ and that even if I find a man to marry, my husband would leave me,” she says. She sits on her wheel chair all day, looking out in the courtyard of the hospital. Soon, though, she will have to leave for an uncertain future.

In a majority female society it is, ironically, the men who hold the clear advantage as a precious commodity. Polygamy, once practiced only by the rich, has become increasingly the norm as more and more women, willingly or unwillingly or under pressure, share husbands or boyfriends. “I have four wives in four different villages,” one taxi driver in Battambang boasts happily, “and they are all happy to see me when I visit.”

But if the women now seem more desperate, they are anything but the passive sex. In sheer numbers they form the backbone of the country’s labor force and of family life.

“Women work a lot harder than men in Cambodia, but with less pay and no gratitude,” remarks Sarah Colm, an American who had worked as editor of the Phnom Penh Post in Cambodia in some years.

She pondered the positive difference women might make in the election, now that they also form the majority of Cambodia’s electorate. But many Cambodian women seem more concerned about marriage than about election and the vote.

Bonn Srey, 29, a beautiful, dark skinned woman who witnessed the death of all 13 members of her family at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, is convinced she is ugly. “My skin is so dark, nobody would marry me,” she confided. She has been a maid to a family who took her in ten years ago. “I don’t think much about my future.”

What about the triumphant myth about the Mountain of Women?

It has started to rain. “I don’t know about the story of the Mountain of Women,” Srey responds as she stares out to the street where children are laughing and chasing one another in the muddy water. “I only know in Cambodia there is a Mountain of skulls.”

III

PHNOM PENH—The first thing Pon, the motorcycle taxi driver, wants me to see is the Killing Fields. It’s 9 miles outside of Phnom Penh, a museum of skulls and bones, and it’s only $5 round trip on his motorbike, plus himself as tour guide. How can you beat that?

“Maybe after,” the young man smiles optimistically, “we go shooting AK-47?”

“Shooting AK-47?” I ask, a bit appalled.

“Yes, 25 cent, one bullet.” Pon volunteers. “You can buy rifle, too, for maybe $150 dollars, maybe less, maybe more.”

Buy this. Buy that. The handsome driver in his mid 20s is selling his country’s war wounds most cheerfully.

When I said no to shooting, no to Killing Fields (seen it), Pon, without missing a beat, offers, “I know girls. Very good. Very young. Beautiful. Maybe 16 year old. Only 15 dollars. She go your hotel. OK, OK?”

Pon is lying. The girls can be as young as 13 and come knocking at your hotel room, offering themselves for $5 or less.

“No girls,” I tell him and Pon is a bit crestfallen. The look in his eyes seems to say, “What the hell are you doing in Cambodia then?” And, frankly, I’m beginning to wonder myself.

He isn’t about to give up, though. With some desperation he offers, “OK, ganja, very cheap. I know where. One kilo, 20 dollars.” That’s a lot of marijuana at retail, enough to get you a decent used Honda Civic back in America.

Welcome to Phnom Penh, a kind of sex, drug, and gun Disneyland. It helps that the biggest gangster in the country is a one-eyed prime minister named Hun Sen whose army and the police run the joint.

Run afoul of any of his policemen—many recruited directly from the Khmer Rouge camps as recently as two years ago—and they will kill you without thinking twice.

This is how hit and run drivers are usually handled, and so are robbers and motorcycle thieves. Street justice is condoned by both the state and the people, a shared contract born from years of violence. One day, while walking, I came upon a scene where a bicycle thief had been murdered by a lynch mob. His body lied in a pool of blood. People walked by without paying it much attention. Nearby, two policemen sat on their jeep and smoked cigarette and chatted.

So much time is saved this way. No court trial. No arrest. Crime solved.

“It’s a culture of mistrust and impunity,” Kall Kann, the director of a mental health organization complains. “People don’t participate in public life. They close their doors and shut their eyes.”

Marijuana is supposed to be illegal. So is pederasty, not that it would mean anything to the beer-bellied German who walked past this morning with his 14-year-old Vietnamese girlfriend holding onto his hand as they enjoyed the serene view of the Mekong river.

In fact, there’s a Happy Pizza restaurant. The pies come in “happy” and “extra happy” and I’ll let you imagine what green stuff is sprinkled on the slices. People are known to get so happy from eating the potent pizza that they crawl away, laughing and crying. In Phnom Penh, everything is priced in dollars and if you have enough dollars everything is possible. You can hire bodyguards complete with AK-47s and grenade launchers for about $3,000 a month—as many Chinese businessmen have. I see them escorted here and there carrying black briefcases, taking advantage of the lax import-export laws to sell Chinese products as Cambodians.

It’s like Casablanca here in World War II, where wheeling and dealing is the name of the game, but Phnom Penh is not glamorous, just sad. It hurls contradictory images—monks praying and policeman executing, young prostitutes grabbing customers’ crotches and studious students in school uniforms walking nonchalantly by, incense and ganja smoke, festivals and coups, human rights activists and corrupt generals.

“I’ve been here for two years and I can’t seem to leave,” said Steven, an English teacher. “I go by the brothel in the morning for a quickie. Then I go by after class for another. At night I go see my girlfriend.” He makes $6 an hour, around $700 a month, enough to get high and have sex all day long, that is, between classes. “Where else can you beat that?”

The newest brothel area, Sven Pa, eight miles from town, is a village made up entirely of prostitutes, most of them Vietnamese girls. This is a legacy of the 20,000 UN troops brought in during the 1992-93 period and the demand for prostitutes resulted in thousands of Vietnamese girls being trucked in from rural Vietnam.

“It’s atrocious,” says Robert Wood, a businessman who employs many Cambodian women in his silk business. “Those underage girls do not belong in brothels, they belong in school.”

Indeed. But who will support them while they’re in school? There’s no easy answers. Foreign support is drying up. One teenage prostitute was quoted in a paper recently as saying “I’d rather sell myself than starve.” And, considering that, Cambodia is no welfare system, it sounds practical enough a statement.

After a while I give in to Pon and he takes me to the shooting range. It’s an expensive pastime here. It’s 10 bucks to rent the gun for an hour, bullets are 25 cents a pop. But there are all sorts of foreigners here, playing soldier. One Jamaican man is talking on the phone to someone quite openly about some kind of illegal sales as his bodyguard prepares his gun for him. Another Frenchman is talking on his cell about something related to Khmer antiques. They all have rifles with them, ready to massacre the posts thirty yards away.

I shoot. I feel a rush of adrenaline. I shoot again. I imagine that I’m shooting at all that’s despicable and vile and corrupt in the country—initially. The thing is I grow to like it. The weapon in my hand is a powerful thing. It pulverizes the post in matter of seconds. I lose myself in the process of shooting.

Then suddenly I see why those policemen and soldiers are addicted to this game. It’s thrilling. You feel powerful seeing things blown up, torn to shreds by your own action.

Behind me, Pon applauds wildly. Afterward, at lunch, he begins to show another side of himself: He talks of his five-year-old son. One day, the boy asked him—after hearing news on the radio, that Pol Pot, the Khmer Rouge leader responsible for 2 million deaths here, had died—“Papa, what is Pol Pot?” he asked. And Pon was stricken silent. “I don’t know how to give answer,” he says. “So I say don’t worry about it. Pol Pot is dead.”

Yet I wonder. One afternoon I visited a few villages just twenty miles outside of Phnom Penh, and the poverty was staggering. People have no electricity and life is mud and rice fields and wood and ramshackle huts and nothing else. The market consisted of three stalls and yams, it seems, was the major commodity. The city, on the other hand, seems to float on a new money and extravagance—a kind of opulence that makes rural people restless.

“The poor-rich gap is more vast now than ever before, especially between rural and urban,” Kall Kann, the mental health worker says, sighing.

Pol Pot isn’t dead. It seems to me that conditions are ripe, even if the superpowers no longer want to play the game, to keep his spector around for a while longer.

Drowning Burmese Refugees in Thailand Is Bad Karma

Myanmar’s Junta Gets a Pass from Neighbors

The Lost Children of Laos

Thailand, Land of a Thousand Grimaces

When Buddhist Monks Get Mad

Cambodia and Thailand’s Standoff Threatens Regional Stability

The Ghosts of Cambodia

This piece will be part of a new collection of essays on East-West relations..

By Andrew Lam

Sitting on my writing desk is a framed little card, yellow now with age, and it tells of my American beginning. It’s a picture of a sloop, and under it the word “Sailboat” is written. Mr. Kaesleau, my first teacher in America, gave it to me along with a deck of similar cards many decades ago when I was in 7th grade, and fresh from Vietnam.

The only English I knew back home was “no money, no honey,” and “Ok, GI.” I think I learned it from the noisy Saigon prostitutes who walked the tamarind tree-lined boulevards near the Independence Palace – across from which stood my school where I was taught Vietnamese and French.

Back then I thought English was a rather terse and ugly-sounding language – you don’t have to say much to get your points across, but speak it too long you risk hurting your throat. In America that fear became true. A few months after having arrived to San Francisco, my voice started to break. The youngest in my family, I went from a sweet sounding child speaking Vietnamese to a craggy sounding teenager speaking broken English. “You sound like a hungry duck,” my older brother would say every time I opened my mouth and everyone laughed.

But not Mr. Kaesleau, who took me bowling with some other students and sometimes drove me home. He had a kind face and a thick mustache that was quite expressive, especially when he smiled and wiggled his eyebrows up and down like Groucho Marx. He gave me A’s (which didn’t count) before I could put a complete sentence together, “to encourage me,” as he would say. At lunchtime, I was one of a handful of privileged kids who were allowed to eat in his classroom and play games – speed, monopoly – and read comic books or do homework. It was a delightful sanctuary for the small kids and the “nerds,” who would sometimes get jumped by the schoolyard bullies.

For a while I was his echo. “Sailboat,” he would say while holding the card up in front of me, and “sailboat” I would repeat after him, copying his inflection and facial gestures. “Hospital,” he would say. And “hospital,” I would yell back, a little parrot.

Within a few months, I began to speak English freely, though haltingly, and outgrew the cards. I began to banter and joke with my new friends. I acquired a new personality, a sunny, sharp-tongued kid, and often Mr. Kaesleau would shake his head in wonder at the transformation.

How could he have known that I was desperately in love with my new tongue?

I embraced it the way an asphyxiated person in a dark cellar who finally managed to unlock an escape hatch. At home, in the crowded refugee apartment my family shared with my aunt’s family, we were a miserable bunch. We wore donated clothes, bought groceries with food stamps and our ratty sofa with its matching loveseat came from a nearby thrift shop.

I remember the smell of fish sauce wafting in the air and adults’ voice reminiscing of what’s gone and lost. Vietnamese was spoken there, often only in whispers and occasionally in exploded exchanges when the crowded conditions became too much to bear. Vietnam ruled that apartment. It ruled in the form of two grandmothers praying in their separate corners. It ruled in the form of muffled cries of my mother late at night. It ruled in the drunken shouts of an aunt whose husband up and left her and their four children.

In that house, overwhelmed by sadness and confusion, I fell silent. When my father, who had escaped Vietnam a few days after us and managed to final joined us in San Francisco a few months later, things improved. Within two years we even took our first vacation to Lake Tahoe and Disneyland and in another, we will have moved to our first house in America, our humble American dream.

But by then I had practically stopped speaking Vietnamese all together, becoming as mother said, and not in an affectionate way, “A little American.” It could not be helped. There was something in English that was in stark contrast with Vietnamese. The American “I” stands alone where the Vietnamese “I” is always a familial limitation, the speaker is bound by his ranking and relations to listeners. One is son, daughter, father, uncle and so on and it is understood only in the context of the communal whereas the American “I” – I think, I feel, I know – encourages personal expression.

It would take me a long, long time before I would embrace my Vietnamese again, balancing the American “I” with the Vietnamese “we,” but that, as they say, is another story.

In our refugee home, speaking English was a no-no even if speaking English had already for me becoming second nature. And sometimes, at dinnertime, I would spontaneously sing out a tv jingle with my craggy voice: “My baloney has a first name. It’s OSCAR. My baloney has a second name…” The entire family would look at me as if I were a being possessed. Needless to say, my parents constantly scolded me.

Then one day my brother said with a serious voice. “Mom and dad told you not to speak English all the time, and you didn’t listen, now look what happen. You shattered your vocal cord. That is why you sound like a duck.”

Since no one bothered to tell me about the birds and the bees, I fully believed him. I was duped for what seemed like a long time. But I remember being of two minds: while I mourned the loss of my homeland, I, at the same time, marveled at how speaking a new language could actually change me. After all, I was at an age where magic and reality still shared a porous border, and speaking English was to me like chanting magical incantations. It was indeed reshaping me from inside out.



When I graduated from junior high, I came to say goodbye to Mr. Kaesleau and he gave me the cards to take home as mementos, knowing full well that I didn’t need them anymore. That day, a short day, I remember taking a shortcut over a hill and on the way down, I tripped and fell. The cards flew out of my hand to scatter like a flock of playful butterflies on the verdant slope. Though I skinned my knee, I laughed. Then, as I scampered to retrieve the cards, I found myself yelling out ecstatically the name of each image on each one of them — “School,” “Cloud,” “Bridge,” “House,” “Dog,” “Car”— as if for the first time.

Then I looked up and saw, far in the distance, San Francisco’s downtown, its glittering high rises resembling a fairy-tale castle made of diamonds, with the shimmering sea dotted with sailboats as backdrop.

“City,” I said, “my beautiful city.” And the words rang true; they slipped into my bloodstream and suddenly I was overwhelmed by an intense hunger. I wanted to swallow the beatific landscape before me. For it was then that I intuited that, through my love for the new language, and through the act of describing and the naming of things, I, too, sounding like a hungry duck, could stake my claims in the New World.