Following Through in Cambodia

Three years ago yesterday I attended Khmer Heritage Night in Portland, Oregon, USA. I was feeling blue and I didn’t really want to go, but I had a story to write, so I picked myself up by my bootstraps. I was, and I am, ever so glad I did. The people at my table on that chilly, rainy night – so different from Cambodia’s delicious December weather – taught me my first word of their language, and I ended the article I wrote about the event with that word – ah goon - which means “Thank you.”

“I think Cambodia is one of my twenty countries now,” I wrote in my journal. “For all they’ve been through, the Khmer are just about the nicest people in the world. I’ve never felt so welcomed.”

I followed through on that intention three years ago. I’ve been living in Cambodia and studying the Khmer language for three months now, and my impression that the people of Cambodia are the nicest in the world has only deepened.

Yesterday evening I recited a rhyme in Khmer for my students. I’m nearing the end of my first-grade reader, and this rhyme was my first group of lofty, not to mention cohesive, thoughts, after pages and pages of letters, then words, then simple yet excruciating sentences. I have always loved learning to read, and here again it is one of my life’s joys to tentatively sound out squiggles and realize I already know their sounds and their meanings. (The first word I discovered this way was the Khmer word for “language.”)

My students are generally as polite and attentive as can be expected of twenty teenage girls at the end of their school day, but when I read that rhyme to them, they were rapt. Afterward, they burst into the kind of applause usually reserved for rock stars. They insisted on two encores. “Can I read it tomorrow?” I asked, intending to convey by implication instead of again today. “You can read it every day!” one student squealed.

Among the privileges of my nomadic life is the opportunity to observe people’s ferocious and tender love, all over the world, for their first languages. Far from inciting xenophobia, this love seems to me to predispose people to love second languages, and third, and on and on.

Khmer is my fifth language. With the exceptions of long-distance running and stone carving – neither of which I have any natural talent for – it is the most challenging project I have ever undertaken. It has 33 consonants, 32 of which have separate subscript forms, 25 dependent vowels, 15 independent vowels, and at least three diacritical marks. The majority of these neither look nor sound like anything remotely familiar to me, and many of them look and/or sound a great deal like each other. The consonants change their appearance and the vowels change their sounds depending upon their attachments to each other. Vowel sounds also change based upon a number of other conditions that I, at this point, can only take on faith and repeat as corrected.

I am unlikely to achieve anything commonly thought of as fluency, especially as I plan to be here only two more months. Khmer is not a widely spoken language. Why, I ask myself when my head swims, am I doing this? It’s not a rhetorical question. I am doing this because I can’t think of anything else I have ever done that has made so many people so happy.

Here is my translation of the rhyme, which, as they left the classroom, a number of my students were reciting:

We are children; we go to school to learn.

We learn to see, we learn to read, we learn to draw and write.

We are good at it, but not really good. We can practice sport.

Well-being.

A Makeshift Market

Blagoveshchensk, Russia 16 December 2001

It’s Sunday morning and I am perched on a south-facing window ledge watching the day begin. In the courtyard below, a woman in a fur hat sets two glass jars on a bench and begins to wait, warming her hands inside the sleeves of her wool coat. One by one, more women arrive, greet each other, and pace back and forth to fight the chill.

Although I am cozy and still wearing my pajamas, I have begun to wait with them. A woman with a big metal can and a blue saucepan arrives and begins to dip what must be milk into the glass jars. Like the women’s breath, the blue-white liquid steams in the freezing air.

The buyers take off their gloves briefly to grasp the currency and coins they place in a pile on the bench, then gather their jars and begin to scatter. The seller pockets the stack of rubles and kopecks, pulls on her gloves, and hurries away. Nothing remains of this makeshift market but a circular impression in the snow where the milk can has been standing. The first rays of sun gleam between apartment buildings and paint the snow gold.

Partying with The Virgin

1 December 2006

for Imelda, wherever you are

It’s early December,

when cold rain begins

to lash the city I left behind

snow rests heavy

on your rocks and trees,

and here we are

in Granada, Nicaragua

crossing the street

to walk in what’s left of the shade,

comparing processions

through our two neighborhoods

these last few days:

my Xalteva, ancient indigenous

pathway to volcanoes,

your Calzada,

leading to the lovely, filthy lake,

where you won’t be caught alone past dark.

They call it La Purisima,

their game of hide-and-seek

with Maria Auxiliadora

along eight dark streets –

one each night –

spokes of the city’s wheel.

All you have to do to be loved like that,

is to stay as chaste as you were born

through all the number of your days -

too late for us already.

La Virgen smiles with old world benevolence

on the mischief of these sanctioned thieves

spiriting her away to the edges of the city

before dawn nine mornings running,

then seeing her safely home

to the cathedral every night,

where her return is greeted with explosions

that remind me of a war

I never had to live through here,

half my life ago. How the time flies.

Nowadays everybody’s welcome.

A few bold tourists play their unsteady

role in the antics, beer bottles held aloft,

big guts outthrust. We laugh politely

with the residents of one more place

we’re trying to call home.

Neighbors

McLeod Ganj, India 30 November 2009

If a story that begins with a four-inch millipede on the kitchen counter at five in the morning can have a happy ending, this one did. As it was undulating and I was trying to figure out how I was going to dispatch it – first definition: to send off something, for example a letter or a package, to a particular destination – and yet not dispatch it – fourth definition: to kill a person or animal – it oozed into a hole between the counter and the splashboard that I didn’t even know was there. I ran for the poster putty. I wonder how many other holes like that there are here.

One of the first things I acquired here was a yellow towel that I promptly shaped into a cylinder and tied with the brightly-colored string that I can tug from outside to seal the gaping space under the door. I found a small mild-mannered beetle in my keyhole once, but I keep my key there when I’m at home, so I don’t envision many invasions through this orifice. But how are six-inch spiders – “Not dangerous, madame,” the hotelier assured me – getting in?

Hunger is the Best Sauce

Atlantic Coast, Nicaragua 2006

A few hours after this photo was taken, it got dark and cold. We hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and while we weren’t quite miserable, we were in the vicinity. Before we wrapped up in our hammocks to shiver in little bundles on the grease-stained deck, I began to talk about the food I would choose at that moment if I could have anything I wanted: lasagne. It was a peculiar approach to coping with hunger – not ignoring but rather indulging it – but it worked. I haven’t just eaten lasagne, I’ve constructed it, and I described the process in long and loving detail, the wide noodles with their wavy edges softening in a pot of salted water with just a touch of olive oil. The ricotta – firm and pure – contrasted with the slightly silly mozzarella and the rebellious parmesan. The sauce of Roma tomatoes, garlic, carmelized onions, a dash of every spice I could find and two dashes of tarragon, salt to taste and taste and taste, brown sugar and grated carrots – the secrets – already simmered all day and wafting about the neighborhood. I hadn’t even begun to layer it, let alone slide it into the oven, and already we’d begun to feel better.

Bells bells bells bells bells

McLeod Ganj, India, 2009...the sounds of each bell tinkling as the bell-seller put them away in the dark last night. I thought I had noted his location so I could return in the daylight, but now I’m not so sure. Here’s a synchronicity: I’m writing about bells and the chime-ringer up the hill began with a little trill this morning before the series, and the series itself seemed even a little more thoughtful than usual – go beyond, go beyond, go still beyond – as if this is a special day for the chime-ringer… Dueling chimers of a sort now, the first delicate and competent, the second loud and rude. 10

Siem Reap, Cambodia, 2010 Wind chimes across the courtyard, pealing gently in the breeze that kicks up before dawn. I could buy a Cambodian cowbell for $20 at an upscale shop. Wonder how much a farmer would ask? I've been thinking there are animals you put bells on and animals you don’t. I’ve seen cats and elephants with bells, but never a pig or a chicken.