Tuk-tuk by Rita
Share Article A Cambodian loudspeaker blasted: Now Here This!
The tuk-tuk leaves in five minutes departing for points unknown. A massive short celestial event known as Your Sweet Life on the tourist conveyor belt departs in five minutes.
You are advised to assemble all necessary documents, certified approval stamps, water, greasy guide books, sunscreen, funny money and so on. You will visit Raw Mind on your short, fast, easy tour.
Bring your life with you and a glossy germane Laughing Cosmic Planet guidebook with creased missing pages.
If you attempt to read while moving at the speed of light - 186,000 miles per second - you will discover a new sensation and perspective in another dimension beyond sight and sound.
You are a vanishing particle in space. You will be surprised or traumatized depending on your sensitivity to realize your experience at Angkor is not about seeing and feeling temple magic and energy.
You will DO Angkor. Check it off your to do list. Less is more. Please conclude all private and group discussions, agreements, disagreements or false reasonable arguments with your fellow travelers. Talking time is finished.
The tuk-tuk driver has his helmet and vest. His vest has a green four-digit number. If he tries to bring you into Angkor without the vest he faces massive surprises. He will lose his job.
If he loses his job he will return to his village with his ten children sleeping in hammocks. He will plant rice and provoke white cows with Marxist control sticks. He will manipulate plowshares through mud. The biggest dream for many young Cambodian men is to be a tuk-tuk driver.
If he loses his tuk-tuk job his family may starve to death. This is a common problem here - Death by starvation. If you survive you win. Life loves a winner.
If he dies you will be held in escrow. - Old French; a scrap, a roll of parchment.
A tuk-tuk driver has an easy job. He drives you to a temple and crashes out. You feed him. He takes you back where you started. You pay him and he goes home. He gives his wife some money. He spends the rest drinking Angkor Draft with friends.
He makes $15-25 for the day.
The average Cambodian’s daily wage is $3.00.
Woman drivers are rare in Siem Reap. Like clean drinking water, sanitation, quality health care, OK condoms and student talking time in robotic factory schools.
Women work in massage parlors, restaurants and guesthouses. They are the guest and you are the house. Your house has 1,001 symbolic rooms: the basement is where your unconscious demon fears and ocean dreams live-breath-laugh and dance revealing inner visions.
Clean all your rooms. Your word janitor takes out the garbage.
Don’t sweat the small stuff. It’s all small stuff. Atoms make up everything.
You are a housekeeper of perception, sensation, form, symbols, silence & nothing.
A woman doesn’t work as a tuk-tuk driver because:
- it’s too dangerous
- it’s inappropriate
- it’s foolish
- they lack the cash
- they lack education, intelligence, drive, initiative
- they haven’t broken free of ingrained social and cultural oppressive stereotypes. The System believes her place is in the home, producing offspring, nurturing kids, cooking, feeding the dead incense, feeding the dying, feeding the elderly, feeding the kids, feeding hubby, washing, and cleaning. She’s happy.
- her family will kill her with love and affection.
Thirty years ago a Cambodian woman was lucky to finish primary or 9th grade like in Sapa, Vietnam. She married young. She stayed home forever and a day. She produced children in assembly line operations with high quality control standards, modern medicine and umbilical cords.
It will take another generation before women become tuk-tuk drivers.
Your mother was appointed to have you.
