Hello, I love you, let's get married...or not

The time has come to chit chat about an area of life where Cambodia and America have very little to do with each other: love, dating, and marriage.

I'd like to start with a disclaimer: It'd be easy to read this as saying one thing is better than the other and therefore it's stupid to continue and really now. I don't mean for it to be that. I'm just trying to lay out some things I've noticed, and if I disagree with something, it's because I come from where I do, and believe what I do. It doesn't mean it's wrong.

So let's start with this: Cambodia still has a tradition of arranged marriages. From what I've seen, it's not uncommon for a relative to meet what they consider as a potential mate and introduce the two. A marriage a month or two months later is not uncommon either. Even in the case that the two are boyfriend and girlfriend, it's the parents who talk and decide if they'll be engaged. Monks are consulted and depending on a number of factors, a lucky day for engagement and marriage is decided.

Marriage is a very important thing, and most people are married fairly young -- especially women. Twenty-five and single is not a good thing. Marriage -- and children -- is the ultimate goal.

Perhaps for this reason, or some other factors I'll get to, things get serious very quickly. Love happens abruptly. I know a number of expats who get frustrated with dating Cambodians because on the first or second date, the latter has proclaimed their undying love (hence the title of this post).

I've actually noticed this when it comes to friendships as well. In general, I have the feeling that most people here have a fundamental aversion to being alone. It might be the family focus, the fundamental unit of existence. But being alone is a bad thing (and let me tell you, I know a lot of people in the west like this too). It means loneliness. It means listening to your own thoughts, which go into a lot of bad neighborhoods.

There must always be at least two. Simple things, like going on an errand or something. There are always two. While, for example, it is perfectly normal to see an expat alone in a cafe with their laptop, you almost never see Cambodians alone. They work in groups.

Anyway, back to the friendships. Awhile back, I met a Khmer woman outside of the ballet school. We had a short conversation, small talk, and she asked for my number, which I gave. I didn't think much of it, but then she started to call. She wanted to talk, wanted to know what I was up to, if I could come hang out. I don't have much time, but undeterred, she would call multiple times a day, and when I'd say maybe I could meet up next week (a normal time frame for me), she said she missed me.

I found it completely bizarre, and a little uncomfortable. When, on my birthday, she convinced me to go eat something, and I told her I had maybe twenty minutes then I had to get back from work, she thought that was too short, but yet, when we were there, in person, she was so shy. She wanted to drive around Koh Pich, but I said I had to get back to work, and when she called, I said I couldn't talk.

I didn't think she was a stalker, or dangerous. I know that, for Cambodians, it's perfectly normal to call your friends at least once a day to see what they're up to, what's going on. Still, I had to back off from any kind of contact, because it became very clear to me that we were just unable to relate on the most basic level of what we expected from such a friendship. For me, the thought of missing someone after speaking with them for some five minutes was utterly foreign. I have very little time, and I wasn't going to hop on a moto and spend hours not talking with someone I barely knew.

That's the thing -- talking. I've learned that it's pretty normal for couples to not know that much about each other -- for wives not really to know what their husbands do or how much they make. That just baffles me, coming from the communication culture.

I wonder sometimes if the tendency I've noticed in people my age to "fall in love" very, very quickly stems from the desire to insert love into the arranged marriage situations. Now, their world is fill of love songs in which the singer is either proclaiming their undying love for their girlfriend or boyfriend, who has usually either cheated or left them. I wonder if it's their way of making sense with the traditional marriage and the modern love, or if it just comes from that fear of being alone. Whatever it comes from, I've seen it enough to know it's a common thing. There's not much between "stranger" and "best friend" or "future spouse" or "love of my life."

There's a young couple that always goes to one of the cafes I do a lot of work in. I think they come in every day. It's always just the two of them, and they cuddle next to each other and watch videos or something on a laptop or a phone. After a couple hours, they'll get on their separate motos and go home, presumably. I wonder how long they've known each other, and when they'll get married -- because I assume, that's the next step.

It's easy to see why, then, cross-cultural relationships are so hard. I would never say never, but let's be honest: this is the girl who doesn't want to think about tomorrow, let alone next week or next month or next year, the we-are-together-right-now-for-as-long-as-that-lasts. I don't want to have to know if we'll be married or not, and no, you do not get to say you love me if you've met me once. That's not possible, you don't know me, I don't know you.

I've seen it work on a few occasions, so I know it's possible, with a hell of a lot of negotiation. But again, it's not that one side is better or not, it's just completely different views, with completely different cultural expectations. I think love can -- and does -- transcend all of that, but you've got to find two parties willing to walk the tightrope and meet in the middle of the chasm.

And as a last note -- in the cafeteria at CTN, the older woman who always works there came over to chat briefly today.

Question number three was, do you have a boyfriend?

Hey, those are my friends you're talking about

I get this question a lot from expats : What do you think of Cambodia?

Usually it’s said with a little smirk, a smile or a sort of knowing look in the eye, because they know what you’re going to say. It’s what everyone says, among expats. It’s the only story you hear, just with different variations, but for the most part it never changes.

They like the weather and they like how easy it is to make money and live. But the people?

All I ever hear is how Cambodian people make life difficult. How they have no ambition, only play around on their cell phones and never work, never learn, resist passive-aggressively, and generally speaking the country would be better off if Cambodian people were not as they are.

There are exceptions, but they are exceptions, few and far between. I can count them on a few fingers, the people who have positive stories and outlooks, who are not convinced that the people of this country are either lazy, stupid, or just generally annoying and frustrating.

Most people, when pressed further, will admit that they don’t really think Cambodians are stupid, just uneducated, and they know there is a difference. But either way, there’s nothing to be done. There’s nothing there.

Let’s be clear: Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge regime took a culturally and industrially advanced country and razed it to the ground. They killed the culture, the education, and yet still even now the tribunal has not yet officially established that what happened was “genocide.”

Let’s also be clear: the formal western professionalism and training and discipline does not exist, if it ever did, it is gone, vanished, lost. The education system is pitifully funded and the teachers have not been formally trained. I’ve asked a couple people what they are studying, because everyone is in university and studying something (that’s 60 percent of the country population under twenty-five). Banking and finance for one, and I wonder – to work where?

Where can he work with that? In a bank in Cambodia with the other thousands studying the same thing? What if he wanted to get out? You go anywhere else with a degree from Cambodia right now and they laugh you off. Another guy is studying tourism, with a few million others. That might get him a little further, but not much.

Someone described it to me as realizing this country is deeply intellectually and emotionally hurt, and that is true. Most Cambodian people I’ve met are emotionally much more immature than their western counterparts. But where have they learned? Their parents are scarred, and there’s a void of emotional coaching. Emotions aren’t discussed, treated, talked about—it’s Asia, for one, and why would you? There’s too much hurt there.

It is also true that there is a general lack of energy and ambition, and certainly a general lack of the cut-and-dried western professionalism I and my expat counterparts grew up with, were drilled with since childhood. Smartphones just got here, and everyone is always on them. There is no real professionalism training. The teachers are late. There aren’t role models for that.  

What I mean to say is, the genocide is over now. But the country, and it’s people, even those who never experienced it, are scarred by it. That is the truth, and there is truth to the expat stories.

But there are times when it is all I ever here, and I just get tired.

Because I’ve met young people who think differently. I’ve met Cambodians who are passionate. I’ve seen sparks, I’ve watched people push themselves, and be proud. I’ve talked with people who don’t like what they see.

Yes, of course, they do stuff that bothers me, like answer their cell phones at inopportune times or come late to important things.

But I see potential. Someone told me right now there is nothing, maybe the kids who are in high school right now. Yes, but I would also add those in university. The kids my age.

They aren’t going to change the country in two weeks, or two months, or two years. Does any country change so fast? Time takes time. They don’t know how yet, they don’t have the tools, and maybe they won’t ever. But at least a few of them will make sure their children do, however that happens.

The older generation cannot physically overpower them forever, because they are dying. There are so many young people, and there is potential. They don’t know it yet. They haven’t grown up, hit walls, fallen down. They haven’t had the hard teachers, the tough training. The survivors of the genocide are farmers. They have no education to pass on, and the young people now have to figure it out themselves – all while being bombarded with modernity that no one has ever taught them to use or abuse. They are faced with an enormous, fast-paced world, with very few tools to deal with it.

And yet.

Beyond all the potential or no potential, the future and the past, there are these few simple facts:  I work with Cambodians on a daily basis. They make me laugh, make me smile. They’ve comforted me when I’m upset, I’ve comforted them. They make me angry sometimes, yes, and frustrated. But we’ve talked, laughed, shared jokes. Sometimes we just shake our heads and say, yeah, it just doesn’t translate.

Essentially, I’ve found them to just be people, trying like the other five billion people in the world to be happy, and these are the stories I never hear from the expats. It’s always about how life is being made difficult, or how the country is messed up, but not about people being people, people you can talk to, people who worry about their health (like anyone else), who don’t know if they can really do what they want (like anyone else), who get upset with each other (like anyone else) and wish things were different (like anyone else).

Those are the stories I live with every day. Not good,  not bad, just life, like anywhere else, with anyone else. Yes, in a completely and totally alien culture, but people like me. And when all I hear, day after day, time after time, is how frustrating, annoyed, uneducated, difficult, and generally upsetting Cambodian people are, it really gets to me.

When it comes down to it, the fact of the matter is that those are my friends they’re talking shit about. My friends they are putting down and dissing. Yes. Sometimes I do want to throw things at them. And so? Do we understand each other perfectly? Absolutely not. And so?

At the end of the day, those are my friends, and hearing them constantly put down hurts, as it does tonight, and the reason I took the time to write down these words and send them out to the world. The expats can have their reality, but I'm not part of it. 

I'd like to keep it that way. 

Paying it forward, mosquitos, and hourglasses: Tuesday Night Chatter

They say giving is better that receiving. As a culture, we are taught to give because that's good, and unselfish, and the more you give -- and the less you expect -- the better of a person you are. There's also the pervasive idea that whatever you receive, you must pay back. In fact, simply receiving that which is freely given is downright uncomfortable.

And yet it's something I've been learning for years now. Whether it's free lodging during a transition time, rides when you're stuck without transportation, vacations when they are really necessary, or simply a good meal here or there, the people responsible do not expect repayment, and nor do they particularly want it. If something must be done at all, one person just told me to pay it forward.

I am not rich. By Cambodian standards, I'm well-off, by American standards, I'm dirt poor. For me, I have everything I need, and if I'm careful, some things I want. But these things are cycles: I have enough, for example, to offer to pay for my students' transportation if it means they can participate in a show that I think will be really good experience for them. At some point in my life, I'll probably have enough to pay for someone's meal, might have a car or a motobike I can use to take someone somewhere they can't get to themselves. Pay for someone's vacation.

I don't feel like I have to. Receiving that which is freely given is beautiful, and yet, so is giving and knowing that the gift will be sent along and passed forward, the cycle continuing.


The mosquitos are back, and so is the heat. The cool season was not really cool at all, though perhaps it's because I forgot what the hot season was like. I didn't much notice the change except for the few cool mornings in late December. But I did notice the heat. And the mosquitos.

Were they this bad before? I assume so, as I've been bitten much less in the past few months but seem to remember that during the wet season I was constantly being munched upon.

Speaking of before, and time -- why am I always talking about time?

I was biking home from work today and thinking that I've been here just over 7 months now, which is no time at all and yet fairly significant. I found myself wondering what sparkling clean streets and sidewalks might look like, and if I'd notice them. I was trying to find a picture online of the motorbike I want to buy eventually and could only find these enormous models, nothing like the little things filling the streets here.

I was thinking about how I literally knew nothing about this country before I arrived and well, I still don't know a lot but Cambodia is not just the name of a country very far away that I may or may not have read in a textbook at some point. I was thinking about how no one knows the street names or numbers, they just know how to get where they need to go and how things look, and how I think in terms of what is near what. Thinking about how the Phnom Penh traffic is normal to me, and I feel perfectly comfortable on my bike, weaving through traffic. On the routes I usually take, I know where each pothole is.

It doesn't seem that long, and it seems like a lifetime. I'm dearly looking forward to my upcoming trip home for a thousand reasons, but sometimes I find myself a little apprehensive about re-entering that rich, western world on the other side of the ocean. Cambodia is where I live and sometimes I forget it's a third-world country, because it's just what it is and that's that. But sometimes I remember, and think about the first-world, and wonder what it will look like -- and though I know, in theory, I think the actuality will feel different than the memory.

Including -- and perhaps especially -- the food. At the beginning I found Khmer food very strange and the taste odd, but now I actually really enjoy it. I don't know how to cook it, so my diet at home has gotten pretty pathetic, but I miss it when I go without for a certain time. At lunch today, digging the meat out of a whole grilled fish and pulling it off the bone with my teeth, I thought about the Gillian who wouldn't go near fishheads, and laughed a little.

I've been quite anxious to leave the past couple weeks, in desperate need of a vacation (one month of high stress and lack of eating well and sleeping well somewhat alarmingly shaved 3-4 kilos off me and I still don't know where from), but I guess today I took the time to look around and think that, although it is nothing like my life before, this place is pretty cool.

And besides. At the rate in which time is slipping through my fingers (more so than usual, I mean), tomorrow I'll be on a plane.

That will be pretty cool, too.

Go away, borohte: "Foreign Living Art"

After filming the informal showings during my summer workshops, and collecting the footage filmed by my translator on his iPhone, (and minus all the footage from my solo workshop thanks to an ill-placed spectator), I had a lot of film, and a friend of mine named Bernadette Vincent mashed it all up into a lovely reel style 7 minute video (link is here).

Cambodian Living Arts, who after all, facilitated the workshops, picked up the video and put it on their website and facebook, and prompted an entire cultural debate.

One person said, this isn't Cambodian, CLA used to do good work but now this? He asked, shouldn't it be called Foreign Living Art instead?

Others responded that this IS living art, it evolves and grows and creates. But it is destroying my culture, the guy repeated. Only Khmer can save Khmer culture.

He's not alone. For many people it is a legitimate fear. How do you deal with a generation more interested in contemporary than the classical? People here have seen their culture almost entirely vanish during the Khmer Rouge. There are no teachers, masters left. No wonder they are anxious. They have only begun to reconstruct, and now this western kind of culture is mixing in with the old and they worry, and perhaps rightly, about that what came before.

I'm sure you know where I stand. You can't keep culture in a box. I responded at one point, but I'm not trying to save Khmer culture. I'm just here to teach and encourage and experiment and learn. My background is in Western dance, and that's the only thing I know how to teach. The students enjoy it and I try to encourage them to be proud of their work, take control of their art, and be unafraid to create.

Is that destroying Khmer culture? Am I distracting them from focusing on what's important? Is it the west doing what the west does and would every one be better off if I took my westernness to the west where it belongs?

Of course I don't think so, and of course I don't know for sure. I think it's not about any one culture but the cross-culture, two fundamentally opposing cultures and dance learning from each other to explore what's possible.

Is that destroying Khmer culture?

Honestly, I think that'd be giving myself FAR too much credit.

Me vs the Motos (I always lose)

The bikes are at the bottom, competing with the cyclo taxis for last place, but since a loaded cyclo is not stopping as quickly as a bike, the bike get the bottom spot.

Next are the motorbikes, who all have inferiority complexes and like to think they are on top, even though they're smaller. They also think they're faster than everyone else, which isn't true, everyone goes at right about the same pace. But the motos think they're fast and they think they're important, and they always cause the most trouble.

Next are the tuk tuks, though they are arguably below the motos, as even though they are bigger they are slower. I can't figure out how they got the reputation for driving too quickly.

Up next are the smaller cars, which are usually somewhat unobtrusive but bigger than the rest.

Then the large SUVs, the number of which is booming as the nouveau-riche find various ways to show off, and so the bigger and the more prominently "lexus" is splashed across the side, the better. The drivers, usuall checking or talking on one of their three iPhones, know they are bigger than everyone and just go when and where they want -- except they, unlike the motos, stop for red lights.

Above this is a collection of large lorries and trucks, and in and out of the above mess are your various moto trailers. Not counted are the vendor carts, usually on bicycle or moto, puttering along.

In the U.S., if there is no light and a four way stop, everyone will stop and one by one go in order. Here, everyone goes forward until someone is in their way, and then waits to sliver through whatever available space they can find. Red lights do not mean stop, they mean if there is traffic, stop, and if not, go.

There are the hotshots on their absurdly large motorbikes that you sort of crouch strangely atop and blast through traffic, something that motos piled with young school students also do. One of the worst is, I think, the female drivers, who are really quite passive-aggressive. They sit with their knees held daintily together, and worm their way through the traffic, pulling past so close you just have to brake and let them pass.

Someone is always getting cut off. Someone is always going down the wrong side of the street, and there is always a near collision between someone at least once on every ride. People seem to accept these as everyday, as they don't honk, just screech the brakes and wait to see who will move first. At most a dirty look or two is exchanged.

The horns are used instead just to warn people they are coming.

Although I know how to deal with it, it's always stressful and I still get frustrated with the moto drivers. I think if they just learned that red light means stop, and the city invested in some stop signs, already life would be improved.

And in the mean time -- I'll just keep getting cut off.

Stumbling in on sacred ceremonies: with photos

It just so happened that today, of all the days I might have chosen to check out the School of Fine Arts here in Siem Reap, they had invited a couple old masters to work with the kids and to honor their presence, decided to do a whole ceremony, honoring the spirits of the dance. 

The set up is quite extravagant: at the head a table with the mask for the giant role and a bunch of apsara headresses, then a line of candles on either side, in descending height - but not ordinary candles, towers of greens and wax, with cones at the top, an egg, and then the smaller candle - and then the offerings, mostly bananas and other fruit. One plate -- all gold and ornately carved -- held a cooked chicken. In between the line and by the table, a bowl of water and a coconut. Finally, a giant pot of incense sticks, and a plate with many candles stuck on it. 

They were in the process of setting this all up when I arrived. Sitting and waiting were the students, in their uniforms. There were perhaps fifty in total, though my estimating skills are a bit iffy. The boys - maybe the music students? - in yellow. All the girls in the traditional tightly buttoned top and wrapped pants -- the very young in light blue shirts and green pants, the mid age in red pants and white tops, and the older in the colors of their choosing. 

Bustling around the offerings, lighting candles, were the older girls, the teachers watching with a close eye. At last, with everything lit and the room filling with incense smoke, the orchestra took their places, a mix of young students and older masters. 

The first song, everyone in the room began to bow, the traditional hands to head and then to floor three times, then bent over. After that, they just remained sitting, hands in the 'sompiah' or namaste position. After a few songs, six girls got up, each taking one offering, and then performing the basic apsara gestures (which, happily, I've learned to recognize) -- and in fact, as I've been told, this is what apsara was created for, rituals and ceremonies only, not shows. 

They put the offerings back after that, and -- my goodness, I thought, this is a LONG ceremony -- five other girls got up and performed a full apsara dance, five or ten minutes long. I don't know what it was about, though I assume it is to pay homage to the ancestors. 

With that, the incense almost burnt out and the candles dripping wax everywhere, the fruits of the offerings were broken open, a banana or two unpeeled, the eggs opened, and the orchestra played a final song, everyone repeating the bowing sequence from earlier (including me, I was doing my best to follow). 

The ceremony at last closed, everyone began to split up the offerings, happily eating them. I guess the ancestors had had their fill, and food does not go to waste here. One of the old masters offered me a bunch of longan, one of my favorite fruits here. I took it with both hands -- I'm learning the gestures of respect -- and ate them, thinking to have fruit touched by the spirits of the dance is pretty darn cool. 

I had some time to kill after that and made friends with a kitten, who kept trying to attack my hands, but adorably sat on my lap for awhile -- cats always seem to understand I love them. The rest of the day was just a nice lunch with a couple of friendly elder British guys who are apparently launching a theater company in town, teaching, and dinner at a off-the-beaten-path falafel place, which may or may not have been a bad idea on a still tender stomach. But I wanted to, so that's just me thumbing my nose at whatever bacteria I picked up...

Here are some pictures of the past days' adventures...

Falafel for lunch the other day. I've been in a mood for it I guess.

The School of Arts. 

The offerings. 

The headresses. 

My new friend. :)

Some days...

You just have to quit.

Prahok is a common Cambodian seasoning, often used in soups. It's earned the nickname "Khmer cheese", though I have not been able to figure out why. A quick look at wikipedia tells me it's a paste made from fermented fish and something else, and well, either way --

It was in the soup I had for lunch, and I am not a happy camper. 

I'm including this in the blog because it's part of it. Tomorrow marks the end of my second month here, and the previous two have been one long adjustment process, whether it be in attitude, culture, body, mind, spirit, etc. 

People are not standing on their heads here, but the world is literally upside-down. My students have started friending me on Facebook and it's making me wonder what their lives are like, have been like, will be like. I don't know, and probably never will, know what their day to day existence is like, and nor them, mine. That doesn't mean we aren't or can't be friends, or that we aren't more similar than probably either of us would think. 

It just does make me think, at times like this, when I am feeling really far from home and projecting my anger at the over-fermented prahok onto the country as a whole, which isn't fair at all but hey, let's talk more tomorrow. My day to day life is not ridiculously altered, but yet fundamentally, it is. 

Sometimes it's a lot like home. Sometimes it's not. And sometimes I sit back and think and realize that no, everything is different here. 

My sympathetic co-worker said it like this, "Some foreigners can't take the Khmer cheese."

That is what I am here, a foreigner. As always when I make statements like that, I don't mean it in a bad way. It's just the way it is. It is foreign to me and I am foreign to it. 

Even getting used the fact of being a foreigner is foreign. The circles never end, and sometimes it gets really tiring. If everything was the same, but people stood on their heads, I think it might be less strange. 

I am literally on the other side of the world, and most of the time I don't really notice. Gravity works the same here, after all. But some days, I do, and others, I'm forced to. 

All part of the adventure, as much as I wish sometimes it weren't. But if it wasn't...well, of course it wouldn't be the same, now would it?

UPDATE: By the evening the prahok had found its way out, and I was able to munch on bread and rice for dinner. I am now sitting in my fantastic little solar, playing stupid computer games, and am back to being okay with life. It doesn't change the point of this post, but I thought you might want to know.  

Tuesday Night Chatter

Welcome back to Tuesday Night Chatter! I've been thinking about this a lot since I decided to do it last week and thought I'd try something....readership on Pixie Dust Chronicle is up (are you a member yet? Oh you aren't? What are you waiting for?), and I thought it could be fun -- or not -- to use this series to interact with you, my dear readers.

So here's the deal: is there anything you want to know about living here that I'm not addressing? Questions about anything, about me or the blog, my mission or the moon, this adventure or past ones or future ones? Ask it in the comments and I'll try to answer it in the next week's issue of Tuesday Night Chatter. If there are no questions, I will assume that I have done such a good job that I have actually covered everything, and will just continue on my merry way as before, but it could be fun! Ask away, my friends!!

So what's on my mind tonight?

I'm thinking a lot about private tutoring, and specifically my four-year-old. His mom is the sweetest and most patient woman imaginable, hiring a young twenty something with no formal teaching training to spend time with her kid, but -- what I sort of thought would be a 'spend time with the kid and talk to him' has turned into a 'sit down and teach him for one hour.'

Now, I don't mind learning, and I don't mind the pay. But I'm wondering if it's worth it. Do I spend the time and the energy to become a good preschool teacher, when teaching is neither my expected career nor -- more importantly -- my passion, just because the pay is good and the job regular?

I think you know where I'm leaning, even though to ditch the job may be considered stupid. Hey, I've done stupider things in my life.

I'm also thinking it's too darn hot (you can all say, "well, what were you expecting???" now). Of course I knew, and don't expect it to change any time soon, but nevertheless after a certain point it gets tiring to be constantly sweaty and unattractive.

What else...I really need to do dishes, as I've developed the terrible habit of putting them off until the next day and since 'the next day's have been blurring into each other at a speed that can only be described as remarkable, they tend to pile up. I also need to figure out what I'm doing tomorrow morning; another function of the time passing this fast is that I'm never exactly sure what day it is.

It's so interesting, living here. One of my other private tutoring clients, and probably my favorite because of her motivation, is Chinese, and sometimes we just halt the lesson to talk about the different cultures. Like tonight, how Chinese people apparently don't touch each other and how she finds it very strange that the French kiss each other all the time.

I brought that up -- I think -- because it's just one example among thousands of how I'm becoming so aware of my westernness, and what the east really is -- or at least what I perceive it to be. I do feel like a 'foreigner', constantly and sometimes uncomfortably aware of my own otherness. I wonder if that will ever go away, or if in six months I'll still feel like I stick out like a sore thumb as much -- and I don't really mean in looks.

I guess the past couple weeks have been a struggle, though I don't like using that word because it adds a color I don't mean to paint with. This week especially I've been on the "now what" side of things -- if I'm being very honest, I did come with a vision of westernizing the dance here, and have found out from all sides that that's not in fact what I should be doing at all. So now I have to figure out what's next, what's left, what to sell and what to keep, and what, really, the hell I am doing here.

Like I said. I've done stupider things.

Tonight's chatter has been a bit more philosophical than I really intended, but it does reflect what I'm thinking besides the inanities of dishes, a few hundred mosquito bites, and being constantly disgustingly sweaty. I have, after a full ten days, learned how to use my new phone (also the most basic model you could get), my visa has been extended, and I am still dubiously waiting for the Post Office to deliver a few very important items. My brief and somewhat alarming spell of being allergic to my apartment seems to have passed, and I seem to be manifesting my homesickness by being constantly hungry.

As I said, leave questions in the comments. Expect the usual serious and pointed blog posts (I don't think I'm kidding myself...), that is until next week this time and I can blast you with the more plebeian aspects of existence.

PS. The fruitseller update is that this week I got a free bagful of berries to go with the usual haul of apples, bananas, mangosteen, a grapefruit, and something I suspect to be a pomegranate (the seeds of which she dumped into my hand to try before I decided to take one, then threw in a second to make the weight an even kilo.) I think I like this woman...

PPS. Last time at the Supermarket I bought some normal instant coffee, having at last finished the 3-in-1 crap I had before -- only to discover that either I have the proportions totally skewed or this stuff is even more crap than the previous incarnation. Whoops.

Gillian vs. The Tourists: Sovanna Phum Arts Association

I just returned from seeing a performance at the Sovanna Phum Arts Association (www.shadow-puppets.org) -- as you can guess from the URL, they mainly do shadow puppets, employing various arts students and graduates. I think it's either entirely or almost entirely a male troupe, though that might have just been this performance.

Their theater is in the south of Phnom Penh, somewhere you would not expect to find a theater. It's on the side of the road essentially, a slanted tin roof to cover it and maybe five lights. The stage itself is wood, with a white screen for the puppets. Backstage is hidden by black sheets, and the audience sits on wooden benches, each progressively taller than the one in front of it.

The audience was mainly expat -- I suppose it's advertised by tourist agencies as an authentic experience with the Cambodian culture, as there are very few performances to choose from. There was a live orchestra, and we were welcomed by the director, a man with a kind face and broken English, but a wide smile.

The performance was a mix of shadow puppets and classical dance, telling a story from the Ramayana involving a lot of fighting and a demon masquerading as a Prince's wife. All sorts of good stuff, in other words. They gave us a program explaining the story, though I finally noticed that if you pay attention, you can follow the story, even with the puppets.

The puppets themselves are made of some unidentifiable pliable substance, maybe paper, and intricately cut to represent different scenes. The dancers use them both behind and in front of the screen, their own movements often mirroring the sentiment of their puppets'. The pictures do tell the story, though occasionally -- something I found somewhat strange at first -- the orchestra stops and one of the band members speak/chants the words of one of the characters -- more like theatre.

I have seen enough of the classical dance to start to recognize the characters, and am building a sort of base of knowledge to understand what's going on. In fact, even though most people say it's just slow and boring, I'm finding this to be patently untrue. There is emotion, there are dynamics -- you just have to know how to watch.

As the performance began, the lights went out. There were five shadow puppets, without people, resting in front of the screen, and one by one the performers came out to kneel in front of them and bow. Paying respect to the stories they represent and the art form, I would guess. On the center three, incense sticks were stuck into the puppets and lit. A solemn ceremony, and after talking to Sophiline I understood its importance.

Not so, apparently, everyone around me.

As soon as the lights dimmed and the ceremony began, the tourists began snapping nonstop flash photos.

Now. In any kind of performance, you don't take flash photography. It is common courtesy and common decency, I don't care what kind of show it is. But then to do so during a very obviously sacred ceremony? Sacred dance depicting a sacred text? It's not just flat out disrespectful, but disgusting.

Not only that, but they didn't stop. Each time a new character appeared onstage, out came the cameras, and the flashes. Who cares if you actually see the performance, right? You gotta get the shot of that weird monkey creature. Besides, you don't know what's going on anyway, so may as well just photograph. Say you went to see real Cambodian dancing.

You might have guessed by now that I was livid. I was trying to block out the flashes and focus on the performance, but couldn't help seething. Who the hell do these people think they are, to storm into this country and this performance and take flash photography during a shadow puppet show, without any trace of shame? Oh look, we also went to see the local dance, isn't it amazing, here's a picture....

I'm sorry. That's not how it works.

Perhaps I'm overreacting, but the whole sorry business reeked of patronizing and arrogance. They wouldn't dare take flash photos in a theatre back home, but who cares here, right? It's just a dump of a theater, a roadside sideshow?

No, my friends, you hopelessly clueless and hopelessly arrogant people. No, this is art, art that has existed for thousands of years. It is a story that's been told a thousand times, and danced a thousand times, and when the performers put their hands together and bowed to the floor at the beginning, chanting and lighting incense, they were acknowledging a history and a sacred tradition that is intricately and inextricably tied to their culture.

But you missed that. You were too busy taking a picture.

The master at work: Khmer Arts, pt 2

The dancers laughed with each other, making fun of the movements like any dancers do, pausing to hitch up their pants, a recurring problem. They stopped to stretch out cramps, and in the off time stretched their hands back to achieve the seemingly impossible curved hands of the form.

During one of the breaks, Sophiline came up to me, and invited me to the stage. We sat on the stage, concrete but covered with a soft carpet, and started to talk about her work, and what I'm looking to accomplish.

She was very supportive of the idea, and discussed some of her own experience "braiding" her work with the contemporary choreographers who come, that she does what she does best and they do what they do best, and they braid it together. She said she had six dancers who might be interested in working with me, and we spend a long time discussing how important it is that it be just two collaborators, on equal footing and with equal authority.

"Otherwise," she said, "it's just another form of colonialization, and Cambodia doesn't need that. We've suffered enough."

She called the dancers back and had them introduce themselves one by one. They went back to rehearsal and I sat on the side of the stage, watching as they tried to space a piece. At one point, they were trying to work on one section. Whatever Sophiline was seeing she didn't like, and sat the company down to watch as she herself did it.

While the others were clearly trying hard, stretching their hands and working to make the movement slow and beautiful, it was clear the movement was inside Sophiline's bones. There was no effort, no stretching or trying, just pure elegance.

I had already started to notice it earlier when the company was working; while before the classical dance seemed boring, and uneventful, here it was trance-like and elegant, and I could appreciate its beauty. I didn't know the stories they were telling with their hands, but watching Sophiline, I thought I got a sense of the emotion behind it.

At the end, she sat them all down and gave a full twenty minutes of notes, captivating just speaking -- and I didn't understand a word of the Khmer. I've known some -- but precious few -- people with that gift. Whatever it was she was saying, it was important, and I think it had to do with challenging themselves and pushing farther, as well as having self-confidence and presence onstage.

When the company left and she returned, I wanted to ask about her mission for the company, but asked if it was okay to talk. She said it wasn't really a good time, she was hungry -- but then something stopped her.

The short version, she said, is that I try to do everything. To build the classical form to be just as good, and then better, as it was in 1960, to make new choreography with the traditional form, and to investigate the contemporary form of the traditional.

But, she said, everyone thinks that to be contemporary, you have to be western, but I disagree.

It's funny: people say the Ministry of Culture isn't happy she's doing that contemporary work, and the westerners discount it because it doesn't look any different from the traditional dance.

It was another wake up call, a sort of 'duh' moment. Yes, me too, I had been thinking of 'contemporary' as synonymous with 'western', but yet she was talking about something different. An exploration, a deepening of her own form, her history and her training, and seeing where else it could go.

Thinking back now, about watching her work, fixing the angles of the hips and the shoulders by infinitesimal degrees, pulling the arm back an inch or adjusting the fingers ever-so-slightly, and then how the form just flows from her body, and it makes absolutely perfect sense. To make what she does -- this perfect and easy elegance -- into something that it's not, just to be western and therefore 'commercial' (another point she brought up), would be a massive and disgraceful disservice.

Especially after what she said about honoring where she comes from.

You still have a lot to learn, kid

The first time I showed my choreography to my students, they watched with some confusion. Later, my translator admitted to me he didn't really understand what was going on. Where were the shapes, he wanted to know, that tell you what is going in the story?

I wasn't sure what to say. Cambodian dance is such that each hand position, each shape has its own meaning, a kind of shared cultural language that people use to tell the story. I said, well -- there are no shapes. It's how you do the movement that makes the difference.

I guess, he said, it's dancing from the heart.

Just one difference among thousands between the two art forms. Okay, I thought, so the fusion I want to make has to reflect both ideas.

But today I had a conversation that made me realize that it's not just how you do the movement that differentiates the two cultures. It's also how you present it.

This idea I have to "produce" something is, apparently, a very, very western way of looking at things. The idea of fusion is maybe not as much, but going into something with the goal of performing, a final product in a professional venue -- doesn't that, my lunch meeting partner remarked, sort of take away from the process itself?

My instinct was to say no, of course  not, and what's the point of doing something if you don't have anything to show for it at the end?

I guess if I'm serious about this fusion thing, it can't just be in the movement -- but how it's presented, how the process is approached. I still intend to show it somehow, but I have to put that aside in order to really truly go into the development process with an open mind. What comes will come, and neither I nor any of my collaborators should have a final result in mind to cloud the creative process.

Yes, I keep having these breakthroughs, I keep learning, and then I find out that I still have so much more to learn, and so many cultural habits to let go of. Things I don't even think of as being western brand me as other before I even understand why, but at least -- thank god -- people keep reminding me, and helping me see exactly how far I have to go.

And this is just the beginning.