Nam to Cambodia

By Omar

It feels soft here after the mercenary rush of Saigon, said Happy Ghost. Vietnam’s population is 93 million. Cambodia has 18 million. Vietnam is about hustle and money. Cambodia is about survival. Memory. Hope and work for a better future  ... heavy weight  ... no one talks about the past … memories are dead  ... gentle smiles and resilient people.

An emotional IQ level of -7 lives in Turkey, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, and China. Do the math. Perpetual adolescence is an epidemic endemic disease.

That’s what happens when you kill all the educated people, said Rita. It will take a generation and then some until we get our heads and hearts adjusted. It explains our reality and ground truth.

Vietnam is a smaller version of China and Cambodia is a small version of Nam.  

Vietnamese plant rice, Cambodians watch it grow and Laotians hear it grow.

What does this say about sensation and awareness in three separate cultures, asked Rita. Everything.

One day it felt great to put on solid walking boots at 0515 as narrow Saigon alleys stirred to life. How the gentle soul and metatarsal support pressure delighted the skeletal structure. Roll the bones. It’s a walking meditation … Posture … Alignment … It’s a long walk … Walking makes the road.

At 0600 Tan San Nut airport was deserted below a soft orange sky. Outside or inside a terminal we are all terminal cases. I met a Vietnamese woman, 60, widowed now for a year returning home to Perth after visiting her son and grandchildren. She shared pictures of her standing by the ocean, with friends when she was 38, with her son, at a party. She talked how she and her husband were farmers for ten years in Australia. How she misses him. How she remembers her son. She looked wistful and resigned to her fate. She’ll grow old with friends in Perth remembering.

In the departure area a woman working for the U.N. in Geneva and her boyfriend were visiting Cambodia for two weeks. She planned to visit her girlfriend, another U.N. worker in Phnom Penh, the capital. Agrarian. Rural. Her friend’s been there three months working on the trial of a Khmer Rouge leader.

She does admin work. She says it’s a real mess. The other international legal representatives bicker and fight amongst themselves. Nothing gets done. The trial lasted 1,001 years. It cost $100,000,000. That’s a lot of zeros for the Year Zero legal campaign. A lawyer said, it’s not about Justice, it’s about Procedure.

A Swiss woman in Siem Reap worked for the U.N. in various African assignments. She said, I went to a U.N. gathering in Africa. All they did was argue and promote their specific turf and agendas. The internal squabbling was pathetic. It was pitiful.

Imagine, said Rita, You live in Cambodia. One day you wake up. You have money and opportunities to provide everyone with clean water, free high quality education, medicine, safe well-managed shelters for orphans and abused women and all the essentials for everyone who needs it. NGO businesses scream. Shocking! They’d be out of work. They’d have to go somewhere else, like North Korea or Burma. The Cambodians would be completely empowered to run their own country free of outside influence.

Yeah, said Rita, Don’t hold your breath. Why learn how to fish when the fish is free?

Storytellers flew into Cambodia on a prop-jet seating 100 jaded travelers on the one-hour flight. Low and slow. Whir.

A caustic European woman said to her husband, Where are we flying today? Siem Reap? Oh how tedious.

Like thousands of visitors they’ll stay for two or three days in a guesthouse or four star hotel, hire a tuk-tuk driver and DO Angkor, eat in tourist restaurants staffed by bored, happy children pretending they are mature and sensible.

Look at all the people European tourists say, how sweet. They will tour 8th century Khmer civilization with their mechanical cameras, not their heart. They’ll dance under stars with lightning. Tourists zoom around and leave. We came, we ate, we drank, we toured, we slept, and we left. Hail Caesar.

We skimmed west over the mighty Mekong, brown snake rivers, rice fields, strong lush green land, water and islands with southern mountains looming through low grey clouds. The baby plane soared, floated, turning north over the Tonle Sap Lake. It is the largest lake in Asia fed by water flowing from Tibet through China and Laos.

All the way down to the delta, said Gravity.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged

Visceral Realists

By Rita

We are in a small sleepy river town in southern Cambodia, said Rita. Faded yellow neglected French colonial buildings face a river, corroding iron bridges and green mountains.

A block long incomplete cement shell of a new market to revitalize neglected downtown failed. $70,000 start-up costs. Nada. No takers. It will never be built because of Fear & Superstition & Ghosts.

From 1975-1979 the Khmer Rouge hung severed heads along the walls to teach survivors Life Lesson #1.

Shut your mouth and blend in.

Survivors stir woks and sell the same thing. Boredom.

Don’t speak of gruesome true facts, said Leo, It reminds me of atrocious atrocities, genocides, purges and 40 million peasants starving to death. Let them eat grass, bellowed Mao waving his little Red ideological book. Eat my red words comrade. Peasants stole copies from the Friendship Store. This makes great toilet paper, said the proletariat.

Kampot is famous for black pepper, which is nothing to sneeze at, said Rita. The Shakers live in Ohio. One minor quest of the literary outlaws is to get the pepper from Cambodia to Ohio. Buy land. Two buy sea. Water dilutes the effectiveness, taste and aroma. The pepper will need to be grinned down by hand. A Khmer laterite stone pestle and mortar is ideal. Most adults here are confused and sullen and apathetic breeding happy children, said Rita.

For good reason, said Tran. I know how it feels to be an abandoned ghost with a disability in double jeopardy. I’m laughing because I am a survivor … everything is fucking hysterical above ground. I lost my right leg when I stepped on a landmine playing in a field near my village south of Da Nang. I was five. I lost my family in the war. Maybe they died. Maybe they wandered away.

You never know.

The sleepy town, villages and country are famous for people experienced in Milling Around, said Rita. For cultural, historical, educational, environmental, emotional, intellectual and economic reasons milling around is a popular daily activity.

This unpleasant fact cannot be denied or ignored or forgotten like Tran’s missing leg. It needs to be up front because it is a clear immediate fact and way of life.

Limited job opportunities, substandard education, lack of medicine, faint hope and inconclusive futures enhance Milling Around.

It kills time alleviating boredom, the dreaded lethargic tedious disease. Milling Around kills the human spirit. No Initiative. Period. How sweet. How charming. It’ll take another generation to clean it up with high hopes. Cambodia is alive with ghosts.

Zeynep, Rita, Tran, Devina, Leo and Omar are invisible ghosts feeling comfortable with energies, vibrations and frequencies. They are floating experiences.

Immediate and direct, said Zeynep. I am western on the outside and eastern on the inside, a chameleon and a prescient systems analyst.

This is a talk-story.

Impermanence and non-attachment is reality. Movement is my mistress and my meditation. WE are here to go. The deeper the silence means deeper the bliss.

I am the music between the notes. I am the silence between hammer and anvil music. I am the poetry between the lines.

I became my ghost-self in 1970 after 364 days in never-never land, leaving Vietnam in one coherent piece, said a reliable narrator. Where I met Tran in a hospital. He taught me courage. After a war everything is easy.

Z: As a writer and artist I bear witness revealing my imaginary sense data using a Mont Blanc 149 piston driven fountain pen, Moleskine notebooks, watercolors, brushes, and cameras. I won’t go into the technical details about the optical equipment.

I am two cameras said Rita. Kinds?

I am a sweet little Leica D-Lux 6. I am a bulky Nikon D-200 with a 35mm 1.4 lens. Ya gotta Leica the Leica. Play sounds. It’s small with excellent optics. Black with a cool little red circle on the front. Small and powerful like me. One for my left eye and one for my right eye. Dual dynamic visual acuity.

How do we interpret visual sensation? I am chained to the earth to pay for the freedom of my eyes, said Omar the blind seer.

Begin with a telescope then use opera glasses then a microscope.

I am a prime lens, said Z. From the spotlight to the floodlight and back to the spotlight.

I am the truth of your imagination, said Leo.

I am synesthesia personified possessing the ability to hear colors and see sounds, said Tran.

I may grow old, but I will never grow up, said Rita. She shared a story about Cambodia. The kingdom has a long violent history. Remember the Killing Fields, S-21 high school prison, and genocide with 1.7 million people killed, slaughtered, raped, mutilated, gone, erased. Year ZERO. Can you wrap your mind around that factoid?

It was a third of the total population. People don’t talk about it because they are super superstitious. Survivors live with the cold hard unpleasant fact. Old people are rare. It is curious. It’s 2023 in the long now.

Writer: After writing and editing The Language Company in Kampot for five months I moved to Battenbang for three months. A Khmer boy in a java & tea joint said the reason everyone stares at me is because all my generation was killed. They see you as a ghost, he said.

I am Happy Ghost.

I am surrounded by happy, laughing, curious, kind, childlike, grateful and beatific humans. Comedic. Sweet. How simple life is. How monosyllabic.

Yeah, yeah. Let’s dance, said a survivor.

Book of Amnesia Unabridged