The Living and the Dead

With the usual apologizes to Dodie Smith:  I write this sitting next to a saltwater pool in Cambodia.  A waterfall patters into it from a balcony above.  Surrounding the pool are a mixture of trees:  palms, bougainvillea, bamboo.  Some trees I can't identify, but they are by turns gnarled and youthful in appearance, with dusty dark and spiderweb-like fresh green leaves.  Two large earthenware pots are full of water and lotus flowers.  Enclosing the pool (beyond the trees) are the white-and-wooden walls of the boutique hotel we are staying in; with their orange roof tiles and dark wooden balconies, these buildings manage to exude an aura both cozy and sleek.  Black and orangey-cream tiles line the floor of the bar to my left in a checkerboard pattern.  A red Chinese lantern hangs from one of the taller trees, and in the pool, a medium-sized rubber yellow deer floats exhaustedly, happily, incongruously, on its side.

Today, I turned down what will probably be my only chance to see Angkor Wat.  On what will probably be my last day ever in Siem Reap (my aunt and I take the boat to Phnom Penh tomorrow), I spent most of the day inside, asleep.

Let me explain.

Three days ago, we arrived in Cambodia, exhausted.  The Siem Reap airport was a dream after Beijing: short lines, friendly faces, and an understanding that you do not need to take a horrible bus from the airplane to the airport if the tarmac distance between the two is less than 100 meters.  My aunt and I were driven through tropical darkness to our hotel and began to wander once we'd checked in, eventually ending up at a French sidewalk café across from a Khmer-Mexican restaurant drinking Angkor beer.  (Well, I drank Angkor beer.  My aunt was classy and drank wine.)

The next few days were a blur of dazed and giddy sightseeing.  We did some hardcore templing on Sunday, exploring Beng Mealea, where the jungle refuses to completely give up the old structure, and I climbed happily over ancient, mossy rubble etched with carvings and wreathed with vines and trees.  It was easy enough to scale the walls that were still standing, and doing so brought awesome vistas:  the temple is still recognizably a (large) (complicated) temple, but wilderness has asserted its dominance, and so you walk around the inside on raised wooden platforms and a series of stairs, laid out like an Indiana Jones-obsessed child's dream of a jungle gym.

(It is also possible that the wooden walkways are there because of landmines.  Sorry, Mom.)

We went to Banteay Srei, the ladies' temple, which prompted me to repeat the word "laaaaaaaadies" over and over in a Mrs. Doubtfire-esque voice, which could probably have been construed as annoying.  This is where I learned that for me, temples are like art museums:  I have about an hour an a half in me, tops, before I turn into a sullen nine year-old.

Banteay Srei was beautiful, though, and I'm glad we went.  The carvings are crazily intricate, full of fine detail -- so fine, in fact, that it's thought that the carvers must have been women (laaaaaaaadies), because men's hands could never be capable of such delicate work (...right).  (Also, laaaaaaaaaaadies!)

Honestly, the carvings were ethereal.  And perched in the inner sanctum, where tourists were unable to go, we could see a solid, ridiculously prosaic looking orange cat, taking advantage of the shade in the heat of midday.  A group of Cambodians and tourists gathered around, meowing with varying degrees of realism, trying to get its attention, proving that just as James Hearndon said, for some people? Living is always more interesting than dead.  (Obviously I am one of them.)

We lolled, we swam, we ate Fish Amok, I drank more beer.  We went to Aki Ra's Landmine Museum, and as we zipped around in our tuk-tuk, we thought about the role of tourism in a place like this.  On the one hand, as our driver told us, if there were no tourists, many people wouldn't have jobs (including, he said, himself).  On the other...

There's something I love about the landscape here.  It's flat, like Ohio, and that leads me to relax automatically.  Tall palm trees dot the horizon, their leaves in tight little spheres at the tops of their trunks.  Haystacks are heaped in front yards, skinny cows and water buffalos wander across the roads, and people in big hats work the rice paddies.  It is simultaneously everywhere I have every loved, and while it is obviously not home, existing here feels comfortable, unclaustrophobic.

And yet.  There is still not much electricity here (in the city, the streetlamps are aesthetically pleasing but practically inadequate, and there are none that I noticed lining the roads in the country) and I don't know if it's because I know the history of this place, but there is an eeriness to the tropical dark.  As our tuk-tuk whips along the country road from the Landmine Museum, it's impossible not to stare at this landscape without thinking about about killing fields, about families that have literally been decimated, and about the disastrous elections of only last year.

(Side note:  I'm still next to the swimming pool, and dusk has fallen.  A lizard zips across the patio right next to me.  Bali Hai is playing in the bar.  This is delightfully weird.)

I can sit in the Foreign Correspondents' Club and have a Pimm's Cup on the balcony and feel romantically colonial, but I only have the liberty of that romantic feeling because I come from a race of colonizers.  Even as my aunt and I banter about how civilized it all feels, we know that historically (and maybe not-so-historically), that feeling of "civilization" only comes from the brutal subjugation of other civilizations -- so, not that civilized after all.

I think about this a lot as a white person in Beijing.  I know that I'm far from the wealthiest person there, and that there are Chinese Beijingers who have money on a scale that I'm not sure I can really realize.  I also know, though, that I can get away with things that most Chinese people can't, and that while I am often the only white face in the crowd, that sense of otherness still carries with it an undeniable reality of privilege.  Sure, there are things Chinese people can do in Beijing that I can't, but if they were living in the USA, they would be called immigrants and people would yell at them to speak English.  I am called expat, and no one expects me to speak Chinese.

So, how do you travel in a country that yours once carpet bombed, a country where you can easily afford a five-star meal for two people because it's only twenty-seven dollars, a country where "only" 185 (I think) people had limbs blown off by landmines last year?  And how do you do it in a way that's not kind of evil and full of white guilt and paternalistic?

Maybe part of it is realizing that you really essentially can't.  My privilege is not going away, and patronizing Cambodian establishments is absolutely the least I can do.  Not haggling with a tuk-tuk driver down to the last dollar is another way.  But mostly, I've just been listening while the Cambodians to whom I speak drive the conversations.  We've talked about weather, temples, the economy, Obama ("eh, he's fine"), and last year's elections.  I'm trying to learn without demanding to learn.

I really don't have this figured out.  I don't know if I ever will.

And all this brings us to Angkor Wat.  That's how I started this, right?

I've had a lot of feelings.  I've eaten a lot of food.  There's been some beer.  My Scottish-Irish-English-Ashkenazic sweat glands have gone into overdrive.  I'm going to get my period tomorrow.  And, in true Rebecca fashion, I forgot to drink water yesterday.

Today, my body staged a revolution.  I woke up shaky and nauseous, with shooting pains in my stomach.  I did try, and I went to Bayon, with its towering Magic Eye-style faces and beautiful elephant carvings, and after ten minutes of clambering, I had to sit, pale and sweating, on a block of stone while my aunt explored.  When she went to Angkor Wat, I took a tuk-tuk back to the hotel and slept for most of the day.

And here we are again, in front of the pool.  (It's full dark now, and the bar is hopping.  My aunt is making friends.  That poor deer -- or is it a giraffe? -- is still bobbing around.)  I'm mostly feeling better, though I'll probably restrict myself to rice at dinner.

And so what if the landmark moment in my life today was not seeing the largest religious building in the world, but rather taking Pepto Bismal for the first time?  (Too much information?  Whatever, it's my blog.)  I saw Beng Mealea and Banteay Srei.  I stared at giant Buddha faces at Bayon.  I've done some good templing.

And let's be real:  the land, the people, and the animals are what I'm really in it for: the five hours I spent reading in a café and the tuk-tuk driver I joked with as we came to a friendly agreement on price.

It's every ninth grade history teacher's biggest battle (particularly those ninth grade history teachers who've had dogs wander into their classrooms during seventh period):  the living are always more interesting than the dead.  And in a country where the living and the dead mingle, and where history is ominously, terrifyingly alive, all you can do is learn.