November 7, 2009
Sra Alley
Hearing stories or reading in the police blotter about tragedies in Cambodia, particularly out in the countryside, I sometimes can't help but feel as if I'm contemplating a William Hogarth print. Most stories in the blotter seem to go along the lines of "Person X is drinking with friends, Person Y interrupts the dirinking somehow, so X attacks Y with an axe." There are variations, of course: sometimes it's a son burning down his mother's house for haranguing him, other times it's a group of "anarchistic ruffians" attacking their schoolmates with samurai swords. But it usually involves alcohol, and lots of it. (The Khmer have a saying that sums up their attitude towards imbibing: "Drink, Drink to get drunk. If not to get drunk, why drink?")
But not all drunken attacks make the newspaper. Oftentimes they stay within the home, as the wife and children suffer silently. I asked my students to discuss why some men hit their wives when they are drunk, and after questioning the ambiguity of the posessive plural (how many wives does each man have?), they offered some interesting explanations, but the most cutting was, "because if they hit somebody else, they'd get in trouble." That's one of the less enchanting aspects of 'traditional culture.'
Posted by flynn at 10:12 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
October 29, 2009
"Samnang"
It's fascinating what you learn from casual conversations. Today I learned that one of the elder teachers here at ELSU completely fabricated his name, birthdate, and age after the fall of the Khmer Rouge. He shed the Chinese name he'd had all his life and took on a new Cambodian one, and became five years younger, all with one stroke of a pen. He did it because otherwise he wouldn't be accepted by the teacher training program he wanted to get into. He also devised new names and birthdays for his parents, who speak mainly Chinese. He could do this easily because there were no records in 1980. The last real census had been done in the mid-1960s, and the government had a fundamental problem of not knowing exactly who was living or dead, or even who had been living before the KR period. (That's one of the reasons that estimates of deaths during the KR period vary). Just as land was up for grabs, so was identity. While Samnang is a somewhat extreme case, most people over thirty have no idea what their real birthday is, so they just pick a day.
It's funny: this is the kind of story you'd expect to hear in some academic work about identity in the early modern period, and yet here Samnang is, cracking jokes about when people ask his parents how old they are or what their names are, they say "Ask my son."
Posted by flynn at 12:35 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
October 22, 2009
Tontine au Cambodge
Cambodia does not have a modern financial system. While we Americans have lately come to deride the idea of "financial innovation," there's no denying that we could use some over here. There's no really stable form of investment beyond land-- which is still shaky unless you have ironclad title--or banks, a few of which are fairly deserving of the title "wildcat." This makes it difficult in my history class to explain the idea, for instance, of a national debt. When we're watching the "Connect with English" video series, I have to explain the concept of "insurance" to my students, though I tend to avoid the intricacies of health care in the US. (Here it's a bit simpler: people either pay for care, or they die on the doorstep to they hospitals because they have no money.) There have been baby steps toward modern financial system (the stock market has been "coming soon" since 2007), but in a country this corrupt I reckon it'll still be a while.
For the time being, people have to make do with informal, traditional ways of raising capital.
Continue reading "Tontine au Cambodge"
Posted by flynn at 8:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
October 11, 2009
Don't Call it a Comeback
Friends and Enemies, I'm sure you have been eagerly awaiting the revival of my periodic adventures through the indo-chine. Well, I have reasons but no excuses for my absence. It is difficult to keep up a steady stream of witty bon-mots and socio-cultural observations without encouragement. In fact, it was only after periods of prolonged inactivity that people mentioned how much they missed reading my stuff. So I shamelessly implore you, dear readers: if you want Mr. Flynn to keep writing, let him know when you like something!
In any case, the times find me well. I am once again in Phnom Penh, the pearl of the orient, trying to teach my students the difference between the -ed and -ing forms of participial adjectives. (example: "Teacher, I am boring with this book.") But in addition, I have taken on a new and somewhat quixotic adventure: Teaching American History.
While interpreting the mighty forces that made America the way it is can be difficult even in the home country, it's triply so when your students a) do not live with the liberties that've been a part of anglo-american political culture for 700 years, b) have very little background information on world history before 1914, and c) speak, read, and write english with at best intermediate ability. The History department is not one of the leading lights of RUPP, but there's potential. There will be a lot more updates on this in the future.
So, dear friends, grimace not on my absence, but simply smile at my return. I have much to say.
Posted by flynn at 4:44 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
April 26, 2009
This Land is Your Land? This Land is My Land.
Land rights and forced evictions have become a huge problem in cambodia over the past five years. While Cambodia shares many aspects with squatting and shantytowns around the world, there is one important difference: all titles and claims prior to 1979 were basically eradicated. Families returning home after the end of the Khmer Rouge found themselves in something vaguely reminiscent of the state of nature, albeit one administered by the Vietnamese army. According to Boramy, in the early days you could just move into a house, clean it up, and take possession. (By 1981-82, things had settled enough that while you could still claim open land, houses were pretty much a closed matter). Of course, you couldn't take any house you wanted, because some were specifically reserved for government officials.
And therein lies the biggest problem in Cambodian land issues: if you don't have a clear title to the land (something that seemed like an unnecessary expense in terms of the bribery and fees to make it happen), it probably belongs to the government. And if the government wants to sell off that land to some foreign company or some company run by friends of the government, there's not a lot you can do. The government might make some token effort at restitution, but mostly that involves moving from a central city location you've lived and worked at for 30 years, to some exurb without plumbing, electricity, or decent roads. Too many of the shiny shopping malls and
The land law says that five years of continued possession is enough to grant you a legitimate claim to the land, and that was the law, which was more or less followed until fairly recently. The real estate boom and ensuing rampant speculation (particularly by government and army officials) changed things so that there's a much stronger constellation of private and public forces pushing for unjust evictions, and much less recourse in the face of illegal actions by private companies.
It's a messed up situation, and it's one more reason for you, dear reader, to be grateful that you are not poor and Cambodian.
Continue reading "This Land is Your Land? This Land is My Land."
Posted by flynn at 4:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack (0)
April 1, 2009
Scene and Herd
Most travel/'adventure' blogging is centered around narratives. Often, they seem to revolve around going somewhere with either nature or culture relatively undisturbed by globalization, and the 'deep lesson' the author receieves from such an experience. It doesn't matter if the people imparting the experience have done it a thousand times before for naïve westerners, it's the narrative that ends up on the blog. Either that or it's a 'awareness-raising' post about some sort of downtrodden victim group in need of assistance.
Both are worthy when they come from the right places, but the thing is, everyone wants to do that, regardless of whether their experiences actually match up to the template. That's probably why blogging from afar gets tiring after a while: sometimes life doesn't fit the template. [NOTE: MY ENTRIES DURING KHMER NEW YEAR ARE LIKELY TO FALL UNERRINGLY INTO THIS TEMPLATE]. Sometimes you just get busy living, and it's hard churning that into content. Sometimes the real grain of your experience comes from the apparent husk--strange details and observations, that are common currency to people living here but impossible to guess for outsiders. With that in mind, here are a few interesting things I've seen, heard, or thought about:
-Cockfighting has been banned by Hun Sen's fiat. I wnder if this means that they're not going to have the weekly televised cockfighting on CTN (complete with stats, record, and play-by-play) anymore...
Continue reading "Scene and Herd"
Posted by flynn at 11:43 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (0)
March 24, 2009
Bananarama
My TOEFL students were shocked yesterday to learn that there's only one kind of banana in the United States.
This somewhat odd discussion came out of a listening selection on heirloom crops. For that to make sense, I had to explain the concept of selective breeding, giving cows as a basic example (ie, for dairy, meat, or in the case of Cambodian cattle, physical labor). The biology and environmental sciences students already had some idea about 'biodiversity,' the topic of one of our better master's programs, so this wasn't too much of a stretch for them. Then I explained how the bananas I ate in the states were generally grown in Central or South America, and since they had to keep fresh over a long travel time, they were generally bred for that quality above others.
Cambodia, in contrast, has a very short time-to-market, and generally isn't so systematized in its agriculture. So that means that without even trying Cambodia has many different kinds of bananas that might be considered "heirloom" in other countries. They are incredibly flavorful; I particularly enjoy the short, fat "chicken-egg bananas" you can get on the street in any number of ways. When wrapped in sticky rice and grilled, they're one of my favorite roadside foods.
It's the same with tomatoes (some of which, admittedly, come from Vietnam). But I should note that Cambodia isn't necessarily the organic paradise you might imagine. A lot of farmers buy pesticides and fertilizers with directions and warnings in languages they can't read, and drench their crops with these volatile chemicals in concentrations far above recommended or safe levels. The chemistry department has done some really interesting work in this regard, and education on the matter is an ongoing project for the NGOs.
Posted by flynn at 11:46 AM | Comments (2) | TrackBack (0)
