Khmer New Year

On New Year’s Day a Kampot guesthouse mother in blue cotton teddy bear pajamas decorates the family altar with cans and bottles of soft drinks, coconuts, durian, perfume, two crystal glasses of milk, candles, candy, bread, rice, oranges, apples, water, incense, photos of dead relatives, cockroaches, howling vicious canines, baboons, balloons, clouds, clones and clowns.

She has a terrible temper. Genetic truth. She is one of a million plain sad angry women. She turns on the TV. LOUD. Her daughters, 4, 6, are entranced and captivated by the visual circus. They never read books.

This is weird because their father was a bookseller in the capital for six years. What happened to literature, what happened to paper, books and education?

Now he sleeps alone having performed his sexual duty, rents out rooms and roars around the forgotten river town on a soaped up 125cc noise machine to alleviate his boredom, spinning his intellectual wheels, pretending to be important making noise, stirring up dust.

Survivors read empty streets on swivel necks. Survivors read food. Survivors read money. Survivors read blank faces in rear view mirrors. Survivors fall in love with their reflection pretending it is real. Hello Beauty. Survivors read the sky for rain.

Survivors read mad dogs yapping, growling, fighting and fucking in the middle of empty black streets without electricity. Screaming survivors read kick boxers killing each other on television. Survivors read their face squeezing pores in a bike mirror Waiting For Godot.

A guesthouse idiot box and cell phones allow the kids, servants, tuk-tuk drivers, families and foreign rats their big chance to give up their consciousness. Another distraction, another day on new years day.

April fools is a new day, replete with new diversions and new superficial heart breaking distractions of immense random chance as people pretend to be busy. Pretending to be busy is a full time job with no social security benefits.

People sing we are pretending to be exactly who we are because we have no initiative or incentive or ambition. We are the offspring of genocide survivors in a fairy tale. Tra-la-la.

On new year TV scream day Angkor Wat Hindu dancers in gold lame silk dresses with towering headdresses perform ancient rituals. Apsara fingers, delicate hand and finger food movements. They celebrate 1,000 tears and years of seasons, fertility, rice, fish, nature, courtship and joy. They are dancing storytellers.

Year of the Bore

The Chinese locusts have invaded big time.

All of SEA is feeling the effect of their economic power, leverage and appetite for development and profit good, bad or indifferent. They promote and develop the “new” Silk Road. They need ports, railroads, electricity and access to markets while creating monster debt diplomacy.

The Chinese are here to stay with currency exchanges, grocery stores, hotels, tour agencies and casinos.

Many need a refresher course in polite public manners. It’s like Big Brother the zookeeper forgot to lock their cages one day and they all escaped to wreak havoc on unsuspecting citizens in other countries.

When I see them wearing cheap farmer straw hats, talking louder than an exploding volcano, browbeating shopkeepers to lower the price on cheap souvenirs and following the leader down the street like good communist party members I remember sitting with Bozo, an English major at Poetry University in Fujian in 2007.

We’d share noodles on “old” student street. Hundreds of students passed by going or coming from cheap eats.

She turned to me. “See all these people? They are all peasants.”

Confident with marketing and language skills she found work with a multi-national in Beijing or Shanghai joining the rising middle class.

Happy new year!
 

Fresh street food

Draw the dead

How did I get here?

Khmer new year april 14-16

On Khmer New Year’s day, a bitter mother at a guesthouse wearing blue cotton floral teddy bear pajamas decorates the family altar with cans and bottles of soft drinks, coconuts, durian, perfume, two crystal glasses of milk, yellow candles, red candy, bread, rice, oranges, apples, water, incense, photos of dead relatives, cockroaches, howling vicious fucking canines, balloons, clouds, condoms, clones and clowns. She has a terrible temper.       

“Wake up idiot!” she yells at her infantile hubby.

She is one among millions of sad angry neglected women.

She turns on the Idiot Box. LOUD. Her daughters, 4, and 6, are entranced by the visual Apsara circus. They never read books. This is weird because their father was a bookseller in the capital for six years. What happened to literature, what happened to paper, books, education, and critical thinking wonders Ice Girl.

Now he sleeps alone with Boring, having performed his sexual duty, rents out rooms and roars around the forgotten river town on a souped up 125cc noise machine alleviating suffering, spinning his loss, his intellectual wheels, pretending to be important, stirring up dust.

It’s rare to see anyone in Cambodia reading anything on paper, unless it’s a directive from unaccountable government command and control centers sustaining their economic dominance perpetuating 20 years of passive hopelessness. Or forged land paper deals screwing illiterate peasants. So it goes.

Survivors read empty streets on swivel necks. Survivors read rice. Survivors read (empty) bowls. Survivors read money. Survivors read blank faces in rear view bike mirrors. Survivors fall in love with their reflection pretending it is real. Hello Beauty.

Beauty is the mother of Death.

Leo and Ice Girl turned a page away from morning, away from scattered grains of rice in a broken bamboo basket feeding wild crows.

They are blacker than shadowed faces hiding inside deep dark structures watching the road. Always watching. They stare with hard eyes, said Ice Girl. Their eyes live in the present dancing over flat countryside covering lost forgotten patient rice paddies waiting for a drop of water nourishing green rice, or watching palm groves, coconut, banana trees surrounding thatched bamboo stilt homes as naked children harvest dream kites.

They watch. They never close blind eyes. They watch for invaders from Thailand, America, Vietnam. They wait watching for wives, husbands, children, strangers, soldiers, amputees, and Apsara dancers. Their blind eyes are always switched ON always ready to observe minute cosmic details and subtle movement across miles of land mined flat horizon country penetrating thick green sweet foliage.

Their eyes dance with waiting. Waiting caresses eyes as lovers do: close, feeling fluttering lids, retinas trembling with visual sensory information, data, sensing rational coherent mysteries. Eyes cultivate patience, an essential visual nutrient.

Watching without seeing is their Zen. Living in perpetual darkness they have a small immense critical survival responsibility. They stare far away with telescopic floodlight acuity. This consistent hard eyed vision burns up 85% of their daily energy. The remaining 15% is used for procreation, eating, and speaking.

Eyes practice the eternal art of being silent. They watch past another person during a conversation. They watch each other’s back. They face watching beyond wild where everything unknown matters infinitely. Everything here happens simultaneously.

One anxious dreaded moment in their short sweet life recognizes fear.

Fear is disguised as indecision and loss and ignorance. 

Ice Girl in Banlung

khmer new year

14-16 April

Wiki data.

Maha Songkran 

Maha Songkran, derived from Sanskrit Maha Sankranti, is the name of the first day of the new year celebration. It is the ending of the year and the beginning of a new one. People dress up and light candles and burn incense sticks at shrines, where the members of each family pay homage to offer thanks for the Buddha's teachings by bowing, kneeling and prostrating themselves three times before his image. For good luck people wash their face with holy water in the morning, their chests at noon, and their feet in the evening before they go to bed.

Virak Wanabat

Virak Wanabat is the name of the second day of the new year celebration. People contribute charity to the less fortunate by helping the poor, servants, homeless, and low-income families. Families attend a dedication ceremony to their ancestors at the monastery.

Tngay Leang Saka

Tngay Leang Saka is the name of the third day of the new year celebration. Buddhists cleanse the Buddha statues and their elders with perfumed water. Bathing the Buddha images is the symbol that water will be needed for all kinds of plants and lives. It is also thought to be a kind deed that will bring longevity, good luck, happiness and prosperity in life. By bathing their grandparents and parents, children can obtain from them best wishes and good advice for the future.

A Cambodian woman waits for alms in a market.

new year boredom

Greetings,

It's the new year here.

People get together, celebrate, travel home for three days to their village if they have cash and places get cleaned up. Everything increases in cost; food, transportation, quietly depressed bar girls, medicine, education, laziness and boredom. Boredom was cheaper last week in a free market economy. 

In front of the ornate French colonial court house teams of boys chew up old soil removing dead tree trunk roots with crude effective Paleolithic stone tools slabbing the area with miles of bland red tiles. The amount of stone work is tremendous. Across the street at a government building boys slap a fresh coat of white paint on pillars. Women weed a grassy plaza featuring a huge seagull. It needs a coat of paint.

White shirted men supervise garden teams and completion of tall heroic patriotic statues at an intersection. 

Boys rapidly pave a huge swath of land in front of a new grocery store with red tiles. The owners brought in outdoor fern planters and steel shelving for consumer goods no one will want.

Frantic men salvage gutter weeds and wild grasses for their livestock before someone chases them away. A young girl tries to focus on copying texts under the watchful eye of a private tutor while adults with a lack of focus and direction distract them with meaningless chatter.

Countless people with nothing to do practice the endless art of milling around. They practice the timeless art of pretending to be busy. They pay more attention to see if anyone is watching them than to what they are actually doing. This is an unpleasant fact.

Across the street from a small place where I enjoy noodles, carrots, spuds, eggs and fine green tea, boys in straw hats protecting them from a blistering sun create four new rooms with high brick walls at a primary school. No windows. Window dressing. A new year, a new wall. 

Metta.

Vietnam

Turkey

Shaman - Vietnam