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Source: Postcards from the End
Purgatory Lost
[Phnom Penh, 3/7/23]
It’s 10AM. I’ve had my coffee but no breakfast, and yet, I’m already at my plastic table on the sidewalk, in the shade of a tuk-tuk, typing this sentence. See how much I love you? I have some thoughts to develop. If they suck, you can yell for the tuk-tuk driver to back over me. A fair deal?
When you’re in an alien environment, knowing where to buy cheese or toothpicks can be a huge challenge, so finding a congenial spot to write isn’t easy. In Belgrade, I could perch on the balcony at Dzidzi Midzi. Removed from the bar’s music and overlooking pedestrians on Zdravka Čelara, I could type. In Windhoek, I sat in my landlord’s gazebo, besieged by plants in a desert country. Not dumb, mosquitoes soon figured they could buzz there often for blood.
Hearing that high pitched sound, I would swat at my ear. Though my batting average approached zero, I kept swatting.
Again, I want to ramble about normality, because it’s so weird and wonderful. This, you see most clearly in alien environments, but every scenario everywhere is charmingly exotic, because it’s staged by the most unnatural of species. Beyond our odd solutions for everything, we’re also singly eccentric, if not raving mad. There is a dark side to this, of course, but all I’m doing is, again, praise the lazy, ho-hum aspect of existence.
Just before I left Philly for good in 2018, my friend Lisa said she wanted to meet me at Friendly, “I want to pick your brains. I want to write a book.” Though Lisa had as intriguing a life as anybody else, she never betrayed any interest in writing or reading. Plus, her conversations weren’t exactly sharp, if you know what I mean, but she had a perfectly honorable excuse. Lisa was nearly always high on pills.
Goofy moments expose us as befuddled if not frightened children. So what? It’s not like we killed anybody.
Ten feet from me sits a woman in her late 60’s pulling the trigger repeatedly on her granddaughter’s toy machine gun. Sounds a bit like a motorbike backfiring, but more feeble, thus more innocent. Why shouldn’t grandma play?
Commenting after my last article, Elizabeth Hayes says that at age 10 or 11, she came home from school to find “ten Japanese guys in business suits playing badminton in the back yard.” They were her dad’s business associates.
Beyond their Japaneseness, everything else was also weird, for there’s nothing inevitable, or natural, if you will, about wearing a business suit or playing badminton, much less ten people doing it in foreign back yard. Backyards, too, are entirely contrived. There’s nothing natural about them.
It’s noon and I still haven’t eaten. My love for you truly has no bound.
OK, let’s consider a Vietnamese writer, Hồ Biểu Chánh, whose vast oeuvre includes 64 novels. A handful of these were based on French works, with one a variation on Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment. The rest have original plots, but these, always moralistic, aren’t his strength.
Seen by the au courant as just some weird hick, Hồ Biểu Chánh has outlasted most of his more urbane contemporaries. Fluent in French and Chinese, the man was cosmopolitan enough, but he explored and wrote about his native Mekong Delta. For capturing the texture of life in a specific place and time, Hồ Biểu Chánh will forever remain relevant, if only to a Vietnamese readership, but quality can’t be measured by quantity.
I bring him up because, as a provincial from a backward country, Hồ Biểu Chánh didn’t seek to become, or at least appear, more worldly, but dig ever deeper into his native soil, something almost none of us can do in 2023. Living mostly inside a screen, we can’t even describe the room we’re in. Just last night, I realized the wall behind my bed was purple, and I had been here two weeks.
Modernity has been a progression away from rootedness and, ultimately, normality. I don’t deny its liberating seduction. It sucks to be stuck. Enticed by a seemingly endless buffet of food, sex and travel, each Joe Sixpack can become a Marco Polo cum Casanova, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way, has it?
Much more likely, he’s been turned into a dazed and quietly embittered machine performing monotonous tasks endlessly. Worse, he’s become superfluous, to make room for real machines and a greener earth, for the private jet set. As for his soul or intrinsic worth, he ain’t got none, according that creepy sage, Yuval Noah Harari. Haven’t you noticed that those who are mapping humanity’s future are bizarrely soulless and creepy? They hardly seem human, but that’s the price of corruption.
Least Jewjacked, Southeast Asia has retained much of its normalcy. Sure, there are grave problems here, but people are still patient with each other, and leisurely when they walk. Smiles and laughs erupt often. Kids are still kids, and teens aren’t belligerent.
Unlike in the US, no one punches or stabs complete strangers here. Last month in Phnom Penh, there were only two murders, with both committed by Cambodian-Americans, interestingly. A drunk Chinese also shot at a building 17 times.
Last weekend in Philadelphia, six people were shot to death. On Saturday, about 20 blacks barged into a Chinese restaurant in Queens to overturn tables and chairs, break whatever and terrify diners. Although scenes of mayhem have become so frequent, they’re mostly ignored by the national media, unless the perpetrators happen to be white and the victims black, for that’s the narrative they’re pushing.
Since it’s 2PM, I must stop now and head to a Malaysian eatery just five minutes away. There’s no menu, only a tiny buffet, but the potato in their curried chicken is a magnificent gift us assholes hardly deserve. I’ll take it, though.
Scooping rice for her own lunch, a girl of about 13 just did a little dance not four feet away. Still within sight, grandma has stopped playing with her toy gun. Tinkling his bell, an ice cream man walks by, pushing his cooler on wheels.
[knife sharpener in Phnom Penh, 3/7/23]
[ice cream vendor in Phnom Penh, 2/23/23]
[itinerant vendor of meats and vegetables on 3/8/23]
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