"Below these bruised and battered countenances...stands a causeway. On either side of it are seated fifty-four stone giants, twenty feet tall as they squat, restraining or, as though taking part in a tug-of-war, pulling at, the long stone serpent with a multiple fan-shaped head, which forms the balustrade. The two opposing teams are recruited, one from the gods, the other from devils, whose sullen, ferocious expressions contrast with the benevolent, calm-eyed determination of their antagonists."
My Cambodia book now stands at a ridiculous number of words, but is still entirely unpolished and nowhere near finished. My publisher is going to hate me. Here is some Cambodia-related info from the web this past week:
Just before I left for Cambodia, earlier this year, I read an article about a British television producer, one of the people behind the iconic show Eastenders, who had moved to Cambodia and was now producing soap operas there.
Once I was in Cambodia, I began to watch some local television, and my favourite was an historical soap opera set during Angkorean times, which caused many arguments between me and my Cambodian friends. They tended to prefer Indian soaps and the endless Chinese version of Monkey that is on five nights a week and can be watched, dubbed, in almost any country in Asia.
While there I also received a call from a young Australian documentary maker called Walter McIntosh, who had come to Cambodia to make a documentary about the very man I had found out about months before - Matthew Robinson, the "Pope of Soap." For various reasons Walter and I never got to meet, which was sad because I very rarely get to meet another Walter under the age of 80.
I was excited to see, however, the fantastic teaser he has put together for the docco. Have a look at it for yourself:
I am anxiously awaiting the forthcoming release of the anthology Phnom Penh Noir, which features a chilling story from my dear friend Suong Mak. It will be in stores at the end of November, so keep an eye out for it. Until then, here are some interesting Cambodia-related items from the www:
The Independent reports on exactly how Cambodia mourns the death of Father King Norodom Sihanouk. And a report on the memorial services in Siem Reap from the Phnom Penh Post
This video just grows and grows on me - I love the song and the mood. Equal parts William Burroughs, Tom Waits and Bob Dylan, this song evokes a mythic side of Phnom Penh, a noir-ish aspect that is becoming an increasingly powerful cultural meme (and will only continue, with the release of the book Phnom Penh Noir in November 2012, featuring a story by my dear friend Suong Mak).
Take a look at it and let the whole mood just wash over you.
I often get approached by people who want to write and publish their own travel book.
More and more I am inclined to tell people that before they consider anything they should spend a period of time honing their skills, learning about the book industry and seeing what their options might be.
So I thought I would share some of my wisdom, and hopefully help any of you out there who want to write a long-form travel narrative:
Since you are wanting to write travel, of course you should read my own travel memoir, Destination Saigon.
Seriously, if you are going to ask an author for advice, make the effort to read their book first. It might answer a lot of the questions you have, and it will certainly give you an insight into what they write and what they are trying to say. It's a courtesy, and authors like and expect it. The sooner you learn this the better. You will make a lot more friends and allies in the writing industry if you buy people's books and read them. It seems obvious, I know, but you'd be surprised at how rarely people do this. Normally I hear: "I haven't read your book yet, but I'd like to pick your brains about..."
You should also set about reading as much travel memoir that you possibly can. I have created a list of classic travel books elsewhere. At a minimum you need to read:
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert (no matter what you have heard
about it, it is the biggest selling travel book of the past decade, and
needs to be read).
Of course, I would hope you read a lot of other things besides, but these four represent the minimum required.
And if you don't have time to read all of these books, or have no interest, then you really have no business writing.
You also need to join your nearest Writers' Centre or writers' group and sign up for
a creative writing course asap - while you are still enthusiastic. Yes, writers' groups and writing courses can be enormous wastes of time, but they can also be invaluable sources of help and support. Use your time with them wisely and you will reap many benefits.
Attend your closest writers' festival. And go and hear everything you possibly can. This is not so much about learning technique but more about finding out trends and the realities of writers' lives.
Journal, blog and enter writing competitions. These will all help you hone your craft and think of yourself as a writer.
I read the following passage, and it prompted me to share some of the favourite photographs I have taken in Cambodia at temples:
"Withing the urban and rural landscape, the Buddhist monastery, referred to as a wat, has traditionally occupied a dominant place in Cambodia. The monasteries are sites where Cambodians have perpetuated ancient rites and traditions for centuries. Historically they have served to structure and sacralise the village space, creating the centre around which the population was installed."
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
My Teasers:
"For despite European contacts with both Cambodia and Laos during the sixteenth and and particularly the seventeenth centuries, including travel on large sections of the Mekong itself, it was not until the nineteenth century that anything like a detailed map of the Mekong was finally produced. This state of affairs at first seems puzzling, until one remembers that the Europeans who were the first to see the Mekong and travel on its waters were interested in other things than cartography. They sought souls, trade and power. Provided they survived, charting the river, however essential it was to providing a means for their travel, was a secondary concern."
PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT with either the link to your own Teaser Tuesdays post, or share your ‘teasers’ in a comment here (if you don’t have a blog). Thanks!
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
My Teasers:
"For, until the arrival of the French in the second half of the ninetenth century, Cambodians whether royalty or commoners knew virtually nothing of the distant past. Angkor, it is true, had remained a site for Buddhist pilgrimage and the distinctive towers of its most famous temple, Angkor Wat, had appeared on a coin struck during King Ang Duang's reign in the middle of the nineteenth century. But no-one in the kingdom had known why the temples of Angkor had been built nor who had ruled there."
PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT with either the link to your own Teaser Tuesdays post, or share your ‘teasers’ in a comment here (if you don’t have a blog). Thanks!
Cambodia has been much on my mind these past days. My dear friend, the artist Chhai Kakkada, opened his brand new exhibition last night at Siem Reap's hippest venue, The 1961. Here is some other interesting news from Cambodia over the past week:
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
My Teasers:
"Buddhism has had an active presence in Cambodia for over 1,500 years, enjoying alternate fortunes of acceptance and rejection by the ruling elite and the wider population. The history of Buddhism in Cambodia is pregnant with assumptions and theories that have gradually been taken as truths, making it very difficult to construct a reliable account of its development."
I am currently working on 3 or 4 very exciting projects, all of them keeping on my toes. Here is a collection of links that will interest Cambodia watchers:
Some fabulous popular Cambodian art from languagecorpsasia.blogspot.com.au
Teaser Tuesdays is a weekly bookish meme, hosted by MizB of Should Be Reading. Anyone can play along! Just do the following:
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like your teasers!
My Teasers:
"If you smile at, listen to and are generous with family, employees and the public, you will be rewarded with many friends. If you are courteous, you will be welcomed anywhere. This is a short road to a notable accomplishment."
~ p. 66, "100 Action Principles" by Chum Sam Veasna
100 Action Principles is a self-help book popular in Cambodia that is available in both English and Khmer. I found it at the Peace Book Center in Phnom Penh, and have given many copies of it to my Cambodian friends, who all love it.
PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT with either the link to your own Teaser Tuesdays post, or share your ‘teasers’ in a comment here (if you don’t have a blog). Thanks!
One day my friend Kakkada came and picked me up on his motorcycle and took me on the ferry across the river at Phnom Penh. The captain turned out to be kind of a hunk.
The other side was mostly Vietnamese, and had a Vietnamese Catholic church. I convinced Kakkada to come in - it was his first time on the grounds of a Catholic church and he was fascinated.
We also visited the local temple, where we met the most adorable monk.
I was interested to find a statue of Ganesha on the temple grounds - this is still reasonably rare in Cambodia.
Kakkada, a trained artist, was amused by the murals inside the temples. He was bothered by the fact that the hands were too big.
• Grab your current read
• Open to a random page
• Share two (2) “teaser” sentences from somewhere on that page
• BE CAREFUL NOT TO INCLUDE SPOILERS! (make sure
that what you share doesn’t give too much away! You don’t want to ruin
the book for others!)
• Share the title & author, too, so that
other TT participants can add the book to their TBR Lists if they like
your teasers!
My Teasers:
"Phnom Penh has only attained its fixed status as a capital city recently. This is true despite the fact that it was Cambodia's capital for about thirty years in the fifteenth century, and for short periods in succeeding centuries."
PLEASE LEAVE A COMMENT with either the link to your own Teaser Tuesdays post, or share your ‘teasers’ in a comment here (if you don’t have a blog). Thanks!
While reading Stay Alive My Son, the brilliant and chilling memoir of Pol Pot times by Pin Yathay (and absolutely essential reading for anyone interested in Cambodia), I came across this casual reference to the Cambodian understanding of Dana, the Buddhist concept of generosity. In this passage he is discussing the forced exodus from Phnom Penh in the days immediately following the Khmer Rouge takeover, as people became gradually hungrier and more desperate:
"Even though Buddhists would normally give generously, we refused them all, except an old lady with her grandchild, to whom I gave a handful of rice. It could have been my own mother out there, and my heart went out to her. But as she went on down the line of people and vehicles, my mother said from the back seat, 'Don't do that again, Thay. Think of your own family first.'"
Apart from brilliantly evoking the mood of those horrendous days, this passage also helps us see the natural association Buddhists make between the practice of their religion and the practice of generosity, known in Pali as Dana. It means not just giving, but finding joy in giving, in seeing generosity as an expression of one's own humanity. It is indeed a beautiful idea.
This word Dana has become well-known in Western Buddhist circles because many Buddhist associations host what they call "Dana Days" in which the community collects together to assist the temple materially and financially.
The British Buddhist teacher Sangharakshita says that Dana is the fundamental Buddhist virue - without giving no other cultivation is possible. Giving, and delighting in that giving, is the first evidence of a higher thought, of a more moral intention. It is the action of a Bodhisattva. Those who are unwise and immoral are easily identified by their selfishness. Interestingly, being called "stingy" is a gross insult across Buddhist Asia - obviously connected to the Buddhist moral imperative towards Dana.
The Recollection of Generosity is one of the Paths to Purification suggested in the Visuddhimagga, one of the most influential commentary texts in Theravada Buddhism. In that text the scholar-monk Buddhagosa suggests that the Buddhist cultivate extreme generosity by vowing: "From now on, when there is anyone present to receive, I shall not eat even a single mouthful without having given a gift."
People far away often ask me what are the major differences between Vietnam and Cambodia.
Now, to answer that question would require several hefty volumes, but to me, a regular habitue of Buddhist monastic spaces, one of the most significant differences is that between Buddhist statuary in each of the countries.
This is my special interest area, you see, though I have zero training in Buddhist art and iconography. I am merely a keen amateur.
I have long been in love with Khmer Buddhist art, particularly if it is popular or modern.
Of course, it is easy to wax lyrical about the exquisite transcendence of the Buddhist statuary of the Angkorean period. It is without equal.
But I am talking about the everyday stuff, the statues rendered in cement and plaster, gaudily painted and often left open to the elements in small temples across Cambodia.
These are the images that interest me most, and I think they are possessed of their own special beauty.
You should really take the time to read this free e-version of young Cambodian writer Sok Chanphal's chilling little story 'The Buried Treasure'.
It's in English, and so offers a unique opportunity to look at the kind of style, content and subject being dealt with by contemporary Cambodian writers.
It also happens to be very good.
Chanphal's is one of the most recognisable names in contemporary Cambodian writing. He is a novelist and contributes to magazines as well as blogging and e-publishing, an increasing area of literary exploration in Cambodia. But, perhaps most influentially he is a popular song writer with one of Cambodia's biggest star-making studios, and his songs have entered the popular imagination of contemporary Phnom Penh.
I finally got around to seeing Lost Loves, a by-now legendary Cambodian film detailing the horrors of the Pol Pot years, directed by Chhay Bora.
There were only a few of us in the cinema, most others having opted to go and see John Carter in 3D instead. I guess that says someting about taste and the collective memory in 21st century Cambodia.
It is a dramatised account of one woman's experiences during the Khmer Rouge years, and it was quite a gripping and emotional film. I knew I was in for trouble when I started to get teary in the first two minutes.
It is well-made and the subtitles are mostly excellent, and it is a fantastic film to watch if you don't know much about this period in Cambodian history. Of course, for those who know and love Cambodia there can sometimes be a bit of "Pol Pot Years" fatigue, as most of what is presented to foreigners about Cambodia is about this period. There seems to be a concerted effort to keep this film before the public eye, as it is subtitled in English (none of the Cambodian romantic comedies or horror films I go to see are) and it continues to be shown at the major cinemas, despite the less-than-impressive audiences. I saw it at the Sorya Mall, and there fewer than 8 of us in the audience - more on that later.
Stylistically, the film obviously owes a debt to the Indian soap operas that are enormously popular in Cambodia right now. The dramatic panning in on faces twisted by emotion, the slow-mo replays of painful events, the pans across sad family members' faces - all of these things are instantly recognisable from my evening TV viewing with friends. That is not to say that it is in any way an unsophisticated film - on the contrary, I was impresed by its emotional restraint and its simplicity. The script is very well done, and it doesn't seem to run a moment too long.
The film is based on the director's mother-in-law's real-life story, and it is this premise in real life which renders it all the more emotionally engaging. I am not going to indulge in spoilers here, but let me just say that the present-day resolution at the end of the film is beautifully handled and quite effectively emotional.
The performances are also impressive. Sophisticated, reserved and ultimately highly representative of the moods and emotions I witness among the Cambodian people around me every day, each was thoroughly believable. My only gripe was that, over the four year period the film covers, the children never age. I know this is small thing, and that I need to suspend some disbelief, but it began to nag at me by the end of the film.
And a word on Cambodian cinema audiences. Despite a little public-service announcement at the begining of each and every film asking people to refrain from texting, talking and telephoning during a film, people talk, text and telephone from the moment they walk in. More than that, they get up and walk around the cinema, often shouting to friends in the back row. You cannot allow this to get to you - any attempt at remonstration will be met with bewilderment. People have come to the movies for a good time, and a good time for them entails the freedom to engage with all modern forms of communication at all times. So, the team of young women who were the only other people present in the cinema with me had a grand old time, shouting, laughing, making and taking calls, leaving to buy snacks and coming back for a quick meander around the auditorium to see if anything had changed in their absence. Resistance is futile.
Even more strangely, at key moments in the film (there is a particularly long sequence of a child dying), these young women wept loudly and heavily, when not 30 seconds before they had been shrieking comments at each other and texting their boyfriends. The cinema is a communal experience in Cambodia, so public expressions of emotion only contribute to the experience.
One of the wonderful contradictions that I love in Cambodia is the twin devotions people display to tradition and to modernity.
So young people are likely to know about old music and traditional Cambodian arts in a way that I have never experienced in Vietnam, but they are also hugely enthusiastic about nightclubbing, hip-hop and all the forms of K-Pop. Cambodians are the biggest K-Pop fans I know, and you can stay abreast of all the latest Korean music just by wondering around some of Phnom Penh's shops and cafes.
The K-Pop song that I am loving the most at the moment is Trouble Maker. It is insanely catchy, with its hokey whistled refrain. Someone at the cafe I am stting in at the moment has set that whistle as their text message alert on their phone, and each time it goes off I get excited.
See for yourself how fabulous it is :-) Be prepared for a strangely violent, and quite sexy, video clip:
This blog was first established way back in 2009 as a collection point for my thoughts and experiences about Vietnam, containing many things that would eventually go into my first book, Destination Saigon.
That book has, for a long time now, had its own website, which you can see here, and where you can continue to read all sorts of interesting stuff about Vietnamese religion and culture, Vietnam travel advice, the Vietnamese community in Australia and my own interactions with things, people and matters Vietnamese.
I am about to embark on a long trip to Cambodia to finish my second book, which will, as you might already have guessed, be about my love for that country and my many wonderful journeys and connections there.
So please join me as I begin to explore more publicly my travels in Cambodia and my engagement in, and fascination with, Cambodian culture in all of its incredible complexity and wonder.
Welcome to my new blog, which is now called A Book About Cambodia.
I don't know why I go to big, crowded public events anynore.
I am invariably disappointed.
I feel bored and tired before an hour is up, and in this instance my partner was part of the VIP party, so was trapped listening to interminable speeches for two hours or more while I paced around in the mud, increasingly bored.
The once great Cho Tet, the big festival to celebrate the Lunar New Year for the Vietnamese community, has become something of a shambles. The food is ghastly and it's always held too late to be of any truly festive significance. I mean, we know when the Lunar New Year is going to fall for the next 100 years or so. Can the organisers not book ahead to ensure they get the venue at the desired time?
I don't mean to grumble.
The dragon and lion dances were spectacular, really wonderful. They seemed to be the only properly organised parts of the whole event.
Here's some free advice to bring some heart back to this important event:
- Get some good food. Take a look at the much smaller Thai New Year celebrations at Wat Pa Buddharangsee in Minto. They manage to attract an array of truly fantastic food vendors, many of them representatives of iconic restaurants.
- Provide more seating. For some reason the entire under-cover area of the showground was roped off, including the toilet. This could have been hired as an area for people to sit and eat, with tables and chairs. And by the way, the five sad portaloos provided were a disgrace - they were already full at 6.30pm. There are many older people present who would hang around longer and spend more money if they could relax. As it is they couldn't get away quickly enough - the whole thing is dreadfully uncomfortable and physically taxing.
- Bring the community back. Allow the festival to reflect some of the colour and diversity of the Vietnamese community. The Buddhist temples, the Cao Dai groups - all should have some sort of presence there. Perhaps a tent for talks, lectures and cultural displays? People come for this sort of thing, not kiosks promoting the local clubs. In fact, why don't the local clubs sponsor such a tent rather than just handing out balloons and cardboard visors?
- Do something about the ghastly opening ceremony. Two hours + of speeches by dubious VIPs is simply unforgiveable in the 21st century. A neat half-hour of ceremonies is ample (indeed, generous), and then bring on the singing and dancing that people really enjoy. NO MORE SPEECHES.
With a bit of imagination and energy this yearly event has enormous potential to become a truly important part of the Australian cultural calendar. As it is, it's a disaster.
