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.