« April 2009 | Main | November 2009 »
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
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.
Case in point: the other day, I was hearing one of my co-workers talking about something that seemed to be called a 'tong-ting.' The way he explained it, a bunch of people give money to an organizer. Every month, people kick in certain amount, and then submit a bid. A sort of credit auction happens among the members where everyone submits a secret number representing the interest rate they would pay if they win. If you have the highest bid for the month, you can get out your contributions and get loans from all other members, but then you can't bid again, and you have to pay your loan back in installments until the it ends. The payments from the borrowers thus reduce the required contributions for the remaining members.
The process ends when there is only one person left who hasn't borrowed money, and that person gets all the accumulated money left. So there are basically two kinds of people who "play:" people who need a lot of capital fast for some sort of investment, like buying land or starting a business, and people who play for the long-term, either as a form of investment (since you come out ahead late in the game from all the payments from borrowers) or to win it all.
As I inquired further, I learned that it wasn't called a tong-ting, it was a tontine, the form of annuity developed by Lorenzo de Tonti in 1653. You may remember it from Agatha Christie novels as the long-term investment where members' shares are redistributed upon death to the living members. Here, though, it's mutated somewhat--instead of investing the capital in other things and paying the dividends to members, cambodian tontines increase due only to the members. And instead of going out of the fund when you die, winning the credit bid is called "dying" in the game of the tontine.
Of course, all too often the organizer just runs off with the money, leaving all the participants in the dust. So it goes.
Posted by flynn at 8:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
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