Lost Loves

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.

Troublemaker

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:

Bonsai in Buddhist Temples in Vietnam

Monks are, naturally, somewhat restricted in the pastimes they can pursue.
Though they may play sports on temple grounds, hidden from the eyes of lay-people, and they may get enthusiastic about watching soccer on TV, generally they are forbidden from really indulging in sport as a hobby. That said, I once knew a monk in Saigon who was a keen body-builder. He eventually gave it away after a few years - he had come to the realisation that body-building was not quite in the spirit of his monastic vows.
Literature is, of course, an admirable pursuit for monks, and those who are talented enough spend their time writing or translating.
If they are wealthy, monks can turn their hand to collecting - Buddhist art, old manuscripts and antique vases are popular. I even know a monk who breeds pekingese dogs in his leisure time, though for some reason this makes me uneasy.
Monks can work on becoming artists and calligraphers, and sometimes flower arrangers - all are admirable skills in a monastery. Some turn their hand to the occult, and work on becoming expert at the I Ching, Chinese astrology and palm reading - this is all, of course, technically forbidden, but plenty of monks do it.
But there are three hobbies that monks in Vietnam excel at, and all are, in my book, exquisite and approrpiate. They are: tea connoisseurship, the growing of orchids and the cultivation of bonsai.



Bonsai are ubiquitous in the temple courtyards of Vietnam, and monks deal and trade in them.



They can be quite expensive, and sometimes a monk is appointed as temple gardener in order to attend to the bonsai.
If a monk or abbott is really keen on them common areas can become somewhat over-crowded with these potted plants.



Some are also allowed to grow to enormous size - I'm not quite sure if, in this case, they are still considered bonsai (perhaps an expert can enlighten us?), but they are still cared for and cultivated in the same manner.



Popular mythology would have it that the roots (no pun intended) of bonsai lie in the patient care and eccentric eye of the Buddhist monks of antiquity. Certainly it is a stately, gentle pursuit, and one worthy of monastic attention.

Dong Nhi

Wonderful docco on Vietnamese pop star Dong Nhi - what a cutie!

Writing Creative Nonfiction

Well, big news is that I've actually started writing, which is none-too-soon as the manuscript is due at the end of June.
This whole book project came about because of a course I took with the simply wonderful Jan Cornall on Creative Nonfiction. I wrote a long piece on my history with Buddhist monks, and a publishing friend read it and the rest is history.....
The genre of Creative Nonfiction has always been a favourite of mine - indeed, among my favourite books are In Cold Blood and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, both accepted classics of the genre. People don't normally associate travel writing with Creative Nonfiction, but of course it belongs firmly within the confines of the genre.
I have been enjoying and finding very helpful Theodore A. Rees Cheney's Writing Creative Nonfiction - surely the bible for those in the field? He has lots of interesting and helpful things to say, and at the moment I am struggling with his chapter on character. There are one or two key characters in my book (apart from myself) who are, naturally, real people to whom I am quite close. I have been finding it difficult to write about them - am I saying too much about them, or am I assuming the reader knows too much? And how do I avoid making myself sound very clever and those characters appear very simple and often silly. This is a real concern for me, because personally I hate reading authors who I perceive as arrogant or unaware of their own sublime stupidity. I always like grumpy old curmudgeons like Theroux who aren't scared of making themselves appear thoroughly stupid, or someone like Bryson who casts himself as the bumbling fool, and thereby avoids charges of arrogance.
I am also aware that I am a Western man writing about Vietnamese people, and with a head full of Edward Said I am terrified of coming across as a post-colonial dilettante and cultural plunderer oozing with condescension. I don't want to make the Vietnamese people, especially my dear friends, appear quaint.
But maybe that's a lost cause?

Monkey

While leafing through Harold Acton's exquisite Memoirs of an Aesthete I came across a passing reference to one of the Monkey stories, and I think I will include the quote in my book. I was suddenly reminded of how important the Monkey stories are in Vietnamese culture, serving much the same purpose that the Grimm Fairy Tales or the Mother Goose stories once served in Western culture. Various versions of the Monkey stories are endlessly repeated on Vietnamese television - Taiwanese, Japanese, Korean and even home-made series of greater or lesser artistry.
One frequently comes across statues of Monkey and his companions in temple gardens in Vietnam, reminding us that the stories always functioned as Buddhist propaganda, serving up fanciful moral tales in which Buddhist virtues (and Buddhist characters) always came out on top - normally trumping the foolish Taoist or folk-religion figures.
A few years ago a whole slew of books came out about the mythic Journey to the West, with people trying to re-trace the steps of the monk Hsuan Tsang and his animal companions. At the moment I am reading one of the better ones - Richard Bernstein's stately and meditative Ultimate Journey.
One of the most extraordinary things about the Monkey tales is how they made the leap to the West through the agency of the 1970s Japanese TV series that was so hilariously dubbed into English by out-of-work Royal Shakespeare players and seemed to play endlessly on the ABC throughout the 80s. A whole generation of British and Australian youngsters (myself included) became immersed in this East Asian epic, the greater philosophical and cultural significance of which went completely over our heads.