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October 25, 2008
"Have you been working out?" "Nah, I've just been drinking Special Muscle Wine."
So, almost since I got off the plane, I've been assaulted by billboards for "Special Muscle Wine." The ads usually include bevies of attractive women surrounding a suave young man-about-town and promises of cash prizes for the lucky winner who pulls a "golden ticket." (The sister product of S.M.W. is Golden Muscle Liquor, by the way. I approve of the "full of good words" naming strategy) The logo on the bottle depicts a bodybuilder in repose reminiscent of Steve Reeves, which looks like it hasn't changed for many years.
"SPECIAL MUSCLE WINE is the most reknowned PRODUCT OF CAMBODIA. It has been praised as NATIONAL LIQUORS for over 40 years. Major ingredients include deer's antler and many precious chinese herbs. Besides its distinctive taste, it helps to build up a strong physique and mental state. It is particularly effective at alleviating rheumatism and fatigue."
The "40 years" part intrigued me; was there muscle wine in pre-KR Cambodia? My daily commute usually takes me past the Lao Hang Heng Wine Company's headquarters on Mao Tse Tung Boulevard, so while I can tell you that they were ISO 9001 certified at some point (as they trumpet proudly on their many billboards) I know little else about the history of this company. I assume it was founded by an entrepreneurial Han chinese, given the name of the company, but I may have to arrange a visit to know more. For now, I was content to buy a flask-sized bottle of it at Lucky Market.
It wasn't quite as disgusting as I thought it would be. In fact, it was actually pretty good mixed with the apple-blackcurrent juice we had stashed in the fridge. Still, the artificial taste of it suggests that intemperate consumption could result in a killer hangover. I do like products that fight the rheumatizz, though...
Posted by flynn at 7:48 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
October 18, 2008
Fun and Interesting Knowledge
One of the best things about teaching at the Royal University of Phnom Penh is the opportunity it gives me to get to know Cambodia in a much deeper and more fulfilling way than I would have if I just came through here as a tourist. The smallest conversational turns can teach me things I definitely wouldn't have learned otherwise.
I had lunch the other day with an Australian professor in the RUPP Chemistry department, who mentioned that one of his colleagues had written his master's thesis on the chemistry of prahoc. Prahoc is the fermented fish paste that forms the basis of most Cambodian dishes. It's been said that "You're not Cambodian if you don't eat Prahoc." It's similar to the Vietnamese fish sauce mam tom, but smellier. Anyway, the actual process of making prahoc involves a lot of steps dictated mostly by tradition. Basically, they salt the fish over several days, which kills all the normal bacteria that would otherwise cause it to rot, and then letting it be for a while, which gives time for a certain class of halophilic bacteria (salt-loving bacteria) proliferate, working all sorts of strange and interesting biochemical transformations on the fish. Eventually you get a protein-rich paste that won't go bad, but smells horrible before you cook it, mostly due to trace amounts of cadaverine present. Normally it's diluted with water to use as a sauce, and when you cook it all the bad smell burns off. And thanks to a chance conversation, I now know far more about food fermentation than I really need to.
Another interesting bit of cultural learning came up on thursday when my low-intermediate class and I were working with the present perfect tense (have seen, have gotten, etc.) I was asking if anyone had ever seen a ghost. It seemed a reasonable question, since many Khmer believe in ghosts, and they had mentioned them before when we were discussing Pchum Ben, the buddhist festival of the dead. (During Pchum Ben, they go to the pagoda and honor the spirits of their ancestors and other "poor ghosts," throw rice for them, etc.) One of the students said that yes, he had seen a ghost. It happened when he was a little kid going "to the sweet shop, to buy sweets." He saw a great big fat man, the biggest he had ever seen, going from one tree to another. The man had no legs and no face, but a full head of hair. Apparently this ghost was a tai horng, the ghost of someone who had died by accident. Cambodians seem to classify ghosts by how the person died; simple ghosts are people who died by old age or sickness, and preay ghosts are of women who died in childbirth. They have long fingernails, big eyes, long hair, a long tongue, and blood everywhere. They are one of the most feared kinds of ghosts.
Then they asked me about ghosts in America. They probably asked partly out of curiosity and partly because students who have TV have the Discovery and National Geographic channels, which often have fun pseudoscience programs about ghost hunters to fill out their schedule. So I imagine that to someone trying to grok American culture from its TV, ghosts and aliens would probably seem pretty important.
I explained that more people in cambodia believed in ghosts than in America, but that yes, some people did believe in ghosts. I explained that American ghosts are not typified by how they died, at least as far as I knew, and that oftentimes American ghosts are site-specific; this led me to explain the verb "to haunt." I talked about the idea of "unfinished business" that often surrounds a ghost's haunting, and mentioned that my mother might have seen a ghost once.
Then they asked me about dracula, and I had to tell them that vampires were only on TV, though I did explain the basics of how they work, so that they can better enjoy the movies.
Posted by flynn at 2:04 PM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
October 10, 2008
Strange things
A non sequitur before I have a sequence to break: I'm really weirded out by the discourse of skin color here. I've gotten used to cambodians (who vary greatly in skin color, usually depending on how much vietnamese or chinese heritage they have) describing themselves as "black" or "white." That's pretty normal, and has varied greatly across time and culture. (There's a good section on skin color descriptions of Early Modern Europe in Who are You by Valentin Groebner). What does stick in my craw is the almost universally unquestioned belief that lighter skin equals greater beauty, and often higher worth, period.
Now, I know this is a quasi-universal behavior that has appeared in cultures wholly devoid of european colonialism, including Aztec Mexico, Medieval Japan, and Moorish Spain. Still, I can't help but feel disturbed by the almost unconscious acceptance of it. As a small example: when I asked my students to provide an example of writing they have done in the past for Essay Writing, one of them gave me a compare/contrast paper of her former teachers, focusing far more on appearance than their teaching styles, and showering praise on the light-skinned one.
My finely-honed sense of American egalitarianism (not to mention my personal sense of aesthetics) are being constantly tweaked, and I'm not really sure what to do about it. It doesn't help that every street is plastered with advertisements for GLOW brand skin whitener, either.
At times I think that despite all the warnings otherwise, the europeans did colonize minds here. I'm reminded of Jun'ichirÅ Tanizaki's 1920s novel Naomi, which centers around a salaryman's obsession with the titular eurasian-looking modan garu.
Getting back to actual events, class is actually going really well, though I have been party to two soap-opera style moments this week. Drama ensues after the jump.
. First, one of my students came up to me on Tuesday and asked if we could talk about a problem he was having. I said, "Sure, go ahead," as I tried to put on an air of professional empathy. There was a male student in the class, he said, whom he could not stand to be around. He and the other student had a history. I asked general questions, balancing my desire not to pry with my need for enough information to help him. "It is about love," he said. Which really put me in a corner--either he and the other student had been competing for the love of a third party, putting the wrong two-thirds of a love triangle in my classroom, or they had been lovers of the kind that dare not speak its name. The former was more likely, the latter improbable but very important to be sensitive about. It turned out to be the former, which was somewhat easier to deal with. None of the other teachers in essay writing had had former romantic rivals in class together, but they were able to arrange a transfer for the aggrieved student.
It's too bad, really. I liked the student, and I think he would have enjoyed thursday's (surprisingly successful) lesson on causation. I even managed to introduce the idea of necessary and sufficient causes, scaffolding toward it first by talking about the causes of fire as fuel, air and ignition (I started by differentiating between what makes something happen, and what makes the happening possible.), and hammering the point home by bringing the discussion back to the topic of one of our first classes:"A pile of wood is not a house." (wood is necessary to build a house, but it is not sufficient on its own. You need a plan, builders, etc.) If you can't tell, I was pleasantly surprised and fairly satisfied with that lesson, though ideally it should have included a bit more pair and group work than it did.
The second event is more direct, and pretty dramatic. On Thursday after my second class, I was cleaning up my papers and minding my own business when I noticed that there was still a group of students in the classroom. Initially I figured that maybe they were sticking around to discuss how wonderful prepositional phrases were (In the lesson, I had finally gotten to employ two skills I never thought would come in handy: diagramming sentences, and phrase structure linguistics as practiced in Chomsky's Syntactic Structures) As I looked more closely, however, it appeared that one of the students was crying. I walked over to see if I could help, and the students told me that she had a "weak heart" and that sometimes she had to go to the hospital. Long story short, I end up carrying a convulsing student down six flights of stairs to a tuk-tuk, where some of her friends went with her to the hospital. I really hope she's okay, and I guess I'll find out Monday.
I'm glad I'm racking up the good karma, because otherwise I would feel really guilty about all the times I refuse or ignore the the impossibly adorable street urchins of Phnom Penh. They're cute, they're stubborn, and they view any gesture of human kindness as an advertisement of an easy mark. Anything, even eye contact, is like blood in the water for them. Some of them aren't even orphans--the begging is organized and controlled from above, hopefully in a manner similar to Threepenny Opera.
Posted by flynn at 1:02 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack