Andrew Turco - A year in Cambodia

During PiA orientation, there’s always a useful spiel about the difference in culture expectations and norms between where we’re going and what we’re used to at home. In some places, it’s counterproductive to show anger. In some places, respect towards one’s elders or teachers are of the most important concern. In some places, saving face is more valued than the truth.

In many ways, I feel that Brendan and I have treaded well, trying to act as appropriately within the context of Cambodia as is reasonable. I’ve become a master whiner in negotiations and still remember to leave with a smile and warm thank-you after I’ve finished listening to the seller lie to my face about how he won’t profit at the price I’m offering.

About two weeks ago, Brendan and I realized that we’ve culturally adjusted by falling into the “maybe not so much” routine. After all, it’s so harsh to say no. It’s better to say maybe. On two separate occasions on the same day, we both dropped the “maybe not so much” line when we were chatting with other foreigners. Example of use: when you’re on a trip, a motorbike driver might suggest a sight to see along the way to wherever you’re going. It’s really not your priority to see this random something. Just give him a, “Maybe I don’t think I want to see it so much maybe.” (Usually, I just throw in as many maybes as possible). I say this all moderately tongue-in-cheek, but I really have started doing it without realizing it. Saying an outright “no” legitimately seems a little rude to me now.

Nonetheless, even with all of our attempts at cultural adaptation, Phnom Penh can seem deceptively Westernized on occasion. In contrast to the countryside, there are ATMs all around, I can get Old Spice deodorant if I know where to look, and young kids ride around on motorbikes in order to get to their favorite nightclubs. Two pieces of information that were recently communicated to me in relation to gender roles and relationships, however, reminded me that, although Phnom Penh’s a large city, it still often plays by the same socially conservative rules that the rest of the country does.

Before I leave for good, I decided to invite the other teachers over for drinks and some snacks in order to say proper good-byes. I picked this coming Saturday, the last one before I leave, knowing that most of them work additional jobs on weekday evenings and during the day on Saturdays. Having gone out with “the guys” on a few occasions later in the evening, I set the time at 8 PM, figuring that would give everybody enough time to get home from work and have dinner and would logically allow me to serve dessert rather than putting the get-together awkwardly at the nearly universal 6:00 dining time.

After sending out an email invitation this past weekend, replies slowly started coming in. While most of the men replied yes, however, many of the women said that they would unfortunately have to decline because it was too late to be out. Finally, Somaly put it most clearly when she told me that, as an fyi, 8:00 might be seen as being too late for a decent Cambodian woman to be going out. I’ve changed the time to 5:30 and have since gotten a much more positive response. But I wonder what they would think of our Princeton parties with start times of 10:30 at night, and I wonder how they don’t feel restricted within the guidelines of this rigid social expectation.

About three weeks back, however, a slightly more frustrating and angering cultural expectation was revealed to Brendan and I just as we were leaving our old apartment for the comforts on Street 29.

When I was originally looking into the Yogjakarta PiA post way back in time, Anastasia gave me a little bit of context with which to make my decision. Our conversations ranged the gamut, and two of the things that most stick out in my mind are her saying how, when she was posted in Yogja, she used to be pressured into taking multiple baths a day and that, whenever she had male visitors to her apartment, the door always had to remain open and they could never stay the night.

In a city as large as Phnom Penh, there’s some sense of anonymity, even if that sense is clearly shown to be false every once in a while. Although I was originally cautious of not breaking what I expected were conservative gender expectations, in terms of having female friends crash at our apartment, before they became an issue, I came to believe that the conservative view wasn’t as strong here as I’d imagined it would be. Looking back, that deception was probably partly because of the number of foreigners here who don’t follow those rules and by the fact that a younger generation of Cambodians is clearly interested in pushing those rules a little further than what they currently allow.

In our old place, we always had to walk through the tunnel and into the rear courtyard of the nearby buildings to get to our apartment, in the process passing children running and screaming, mothers cooking, women standing and chatting, and teenagers staring vacantly from their perches on stools, railings, and parked motorbikes.

With the exception of the mother and daughter who cooked right below us, Brendan and I had, on a few occasions, expressed disappointment to each other about how coldly we felt the people around us treated us. Starting from the first night we moved in, our Khmer greetings were rebuffed and not reciprocated with even an acknowledgment, nonetheless a greeting back or a smile. Throughout our year there, we would come in and especially the women would simply look at us stone faced. We could be trying to lug heavy things up to our apartment, arms completely full, and they would rarely even make an effort to move out of our way. To sum up, I actually have few strongly negative but also no especially kind words for the people who lived around us. The only people we felt we had any sense of repore with was the friendly mother and daughter below us who always said hello back when we greeted them and usually smiled in our direction as we walked through.

After a couple weeks of living there, it quickly felt less like a community that we were a part of and more of an anonymous living arrangement. In turn, we began to treat it as such. Shortly after we moved in, PiAers seemed to decide that Phnom Penh was this year’s IT destination. Over the course of the year (and mainly just from December to February), we had over twenty-five people stay with us at various points. Plus, friends in the city, like Rabia, certainly came up to our place, whether for Khmer lessons or to rendezvous before dinner.

Over the past few months, Brendan has become friends with a Cambodian woman who now often swings by to say hello or to join for dinner. Literally two days before we switched apartments and at a time when this friend was apparently coming over to our place independently and not with Brendan, one of the Khmer women who lives near us stopped her on her way down the ally and warned her. As Brendan retold the story to me, the neighbor explained how we brought multiple women back to our place often to do things that would be inappropriate in Khmer society and that she should watch out for being fooled into believing we thought she was anyone special. She had been given the warning so that she would not fall prey to “our ways.”

In reality, we’re partly to blame by interpreting their lack of friendliness to mean that they didn’t notice us. In fact, we have had many visitors stay the night with us, and especially around Christmas and International New Year’s time, many of them, by coincidence, were women - though all innocent visits.

Nonetheless, Brendan and I were more than a little angry by their feeling that it was their business to “warn” someone that we were friends with about us when they’ve never even gone out of their way to simply say hello to us in the eight months that we lived there. I probably stand guilty of making as similarly untrue assumptions during my year here. It’s inevitable when there’s such a language and cultural barrier, but our anger over this situation was compounded by the fact that they probably formed these baseless initial impressions when we received our first guests: Leslie, our boss, and then Brendan’s own sister. Overall, it was disheartening and much less of an interesting cultural revelation than the surprising but honest replies from my friends at RUPP had been.