Rosemary Berkeley

Just what does one wear to a Nepalese dinner party, I wondered. It was my first social event in Asia, and I was anxious to make a good impression. I’d arrived in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, only two days before, and I stood before my narrow wooden closet still in the evil clutches of jet lag. The closet was not quite big enough to hold a 5-year-old on a time-out, otherwise I would have ordered my tired, grumpy self inside for a while.

The sensory overload of the last few days had begun when I got off the plane at Onchentong Airport and had my passport scrutinized by a soldier with a pinky nail so long I thought of asking the guy if he’d ever heard from the folks at “Ripley’s Believe It or Not.” The nail curved around and around on itself, a giant mollusk that I’m sure made ocean sounds if you got close to it.

Once I got outside the airport, the crowds of the city — hurrying to catch up with the rest of the Asian tigers — left me frazzled. And with my first outing, a walk across the street to buy a loaf of bread, came the realization that living in this city would require getting acclimated to life in a sauna. It reminded me, too, of one of the cardinal rules of the developing world: If being gawked at like an American Indian shipped to England to entertain the court for the winter season tends to unhinge you, perhaps you really should be living in Dayton.

My boyfriend’s arrival in Phnom Penh had preceded mine by three months. During that time, he’d become friendly with his Nepalese boss, Nabindrah. Nabindrah and his wife Lilah lived nearby, and they would brook no excuses — we were expected at their place for dinner tonight at 7. No matter that the party was going to be about the 16th new experience I’d had in three days. No matter that I felt up for nothing more strenuous than sipping a Tsingtao beer on the rattan sofa we’d just bought that afternoon. No matter that most of my things were being shipped from the States, leaving me at present with a wardrobe as limited as a Shaker’s.

Chris appeared at the bedroom door and said, “casual.” I glanced back at the clothes and grabbed jeans and a white T-shirt. After all, I figured, I’m an American — might as well go in native costume.

While we were en route to the Nepalese dinner party, the lights in the city went out. There are frequent brownouts in Phnom Penh during the day, and nightly blackouts — unannounced, to help Phnom Penh live up to its reputation as the Wild West of Asia — are not unusual. Because of the lights being out, I never did actually get a look at the inside of Nabindrah and Lilah’s apartment that night. Like a contestant in an unending game of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey, I spent the evening feeling my way around.

It began with groping our way up three flights of steep concrete stairs. Nabindrah, who had spied us from the balcony, stood with other guests and shouted encouragement to us. “Come on. We’re up here on the top of the mountain,” he sang out. When we reached the summit, we were joyously received by about 10 Nepalese adults and at least twice as many children. There were in fact so many children that my first confused thought was that Nabindrah and Lilah were running some sort of a high-altitude day-care center out of their home. Every adult woman had a baby on her hip. I waited to be assigned mine — would the child like me? — but it never happened, which was a bit of good luck in that I’d already begun the infernal sweating that was to occupy my thoughts for much of the evening.

Deciding to wear the jeans was the dumbest fashion decision I’d made since buying a shirt made out of a flour sack at a market in Costa Rica. I glanced around at the Nepalese women in their gauzy outfits and felt a severe case of sari-envy coming on.

Chris was saying, “This is Rosemary,” and I began shaking hands, sure that everyone there had figured that “Rosemary” loosely translated meant “tall sweaty woman.” The sweat was so profuse as to be alarming. It slid down both sides of my neck, joined up at my throat for the mad rush through the ravine between my breasts, then made its ticklish way down to my abdomen. Before the introductions were completed, my shirt — that foolishly chosen white shirt — and jeans were suctioned to my body. My clothing felt exactly like it had the time I’d fallen through the ice while skating on Chandlers Pond two decades earlier.

I set about learning names, names that didn’t exactly trip off my tongue. I remember being immensely grateful to a guy named Krishna simply because his was a name I could easily commit to memory. I was polite about the children, grabbing their little fists and exclaiming, “Aren’t you cute!” The children stared back at me, then turned away or looked at the adult holding them as if to say, “What’s up with this one? Why is she dressed for a wet T-shirt contest?”

The candlelight that stood between us and total darkness dominated the conversation at first. A breeze came in from the open sliding glass door, ineffectual but enough to extinguish the brave little collection of candles with one especially energetic gust. We stood in the dark and made nervous jokes while Nabindrah relit them. In the meantime, Lilah and a small army of women, all apparently equipped with some sort of night vision, transported tray after tray of food to a table in a corner of the room.

Food seemed like a terrible idea to me at that moment. I’d have preferred a fan. Yes, that was it. I wanted to lie on a bed with a fan blowing my hair around, Cosmopolitan magazine style, and I wanted to sip some temperature-lowering potion, preferably on the rocks. Instead I smiled as I took the warm beer that Nabindrah handed me, saying as he did so, “I hope you do not have a problem with warm beer, Roseann. This is the third world, and Frigidaires are reserved for the elites.”

“Oh, no,” I assured him, electing not to tell him my name wasn’t Roseann because I wanted some leniency with all the Nepalese names in the room. “Warm beer is fine. Really, I prefer warm beer.” To myself I thought that it was unlikely we’d be having ice cream for dessert.

Lilah stood in the middle of the room and flicked a Bic lighter off and on to get our attention. “Dinner is served. It is to be buffet style,” she announced. “Please follow me.” She then stationed herself at the corner of the serving table, where she supervised the food distribution with the fierce attention of a U.N. relief worker handing out care packages. She let each guest ladle out their own dinner before leaning over and doubling whatever amount was on the plate. To me she said, “Oh, Rosebud, you are too thin.”

I stood obediently and watched as Lilah plopped a scoop of something with a name like “Poker Gal” onto my plate. I fumbled my way to a sofa and sat next to Chris. “I know this is hard,” Chris whispered, nodding at the wedding cake-sized mound of food on my lap.

“Oh no, honey, it’s not hard, but my body is too busy producing sweat to digest anything.”

“Well, don’t feel like you have to eat all that,” Chris said, just as Nabindrah came over and squatted down next to me.

“How is everything?” he asked.

“Wonderful,” I said.

“I will tell Lilah you like it,” he said.

“It’s delicious,” I said, opening my mouth and sticking in a forkful of the mystery meal.

It was at that moment that the beast was unleashed.

Because I never did get a look at exactly what it was I was eating, the fire that leapt onto my tongue came with the surprise of a shark attack. I’d always prided myself on my ability to enjoy hot foods. Bring on the jalapeños! Pass some of that gringo killer my way! Make those hot wings nuclear, thank you!

What a fool I had been. I now had one of the fires of hell in my maw in the form of some Asian pepper that made all of those cocky South American habañeros seem like something fit to put atop a baby’s porridge.

My instinct was to try to swallow, figuring that would be tantamount to suffocating a fire by throwing a blanket on it. Alas, that only made the blaze spread. I could feel the fireball burning its way through my system. My eyes watered, the sweat on my chest sizzled and judging from the way a little girl on the floor nearby stared, I worried that whatever was passing through my body — and at that point I was pretty sure it was a hot coal — was glowing right through my shirt as it ricocheted around my intestinal tract.

It was the all-seeing Lilah who finally took note of my condition. “Oh, look,” she said, pointing at me. All the Nepalese men, women and children turned their beautiful almond eyes on me, gazing in that immobilized way you might if you saw someone choking in a restaurant. Then Nabindrah sprang into action. He handed me a glass of water and said, “Roseann, you must drink as much as you possibly can.” While I slugged down glass after glass, Nabindrah said, “That pepper was not meant to be eaten.”

After an uncomfortable minute when everyone seemed content to stare at me drinking water, Krishna said, “New cuisines are an adventure,” and went on to confess that he’d tried to eat the decorative banana leaf his chicken came wrapped in at a restaurant just last week.

Someone else talked about the roasted cockroaches that were served at a Khmer wedding reception the week before. The crowd had found common ground, and the heat, so to speak, was off me.

On the walk home, Chris and I made several dumb fire-related jokes. He told me the evening had been a trial by fire. I imitated Nabindrah saying, “That pepper was not meant to be eaten.”

And yet, maybe that pepper was meant to be eaten. In addition to evacuating my entire system within an hour, it burned the barriers to relaxed conversation to the ground. By the end of the evening, my picking of the pepper had become not only a joke but also the foundation for friendships with some of the people we met that night. After all, what is friendship if not knowing someone well enough to mercilessly kid them about a near-death experience?

“When did the bossy boys seize control of U.S. carriers?” I ask my husband at the start of our flight. The flight attendant stands at the front of the steerage class section, hands on hips, and shouts, “People, we’re not going anywhere until you take your seats.” He then brushes by a pregnant woman holding an infant and a diaper bag, struggling to put one of them in the overhead bin. “Suck it in, honey,” he says as he wiggles his way past her.

“I know I’m going to be suicidal by the end of this,” I mutter.

“Calm down,” my new husband, Chris, says. “It’s not that bad.”

We are en route to our honeymoon. No, wait. What’s more ghastly is that I guess we are now officially on our honeymoon. And if we’re on our honeymoon, shouldn’t things be a lot more romantic?

I daresay that anyone who has flown more than a handful of times has probably been on a flight like the one that took us to our honeymoon destination — a flight where everything goes wrong. A flight where you almost want the plane to crash in order to end the misery. Maybe you were one of my seatmates. Or maybe you were the guy in front of me, the one who somehow managed to recline his seat during takeoff without getting caught, the one who kept it reclined for the entire 10-hour flight. The one who got up looking rested — which is surprising, given the volume of your snoring — and ready to meet the challenges of the day.

“No, I mean it,” I say. “What’s that Dorothy Parker poem I love? The one about all the different ways to kill yourself. It starts out with razors — ‘Razors pain you. Rivers are damp. Acids stain you’ — I forget what’s next.”

“Airline seats cause cramp,” Chris says.

“No, drugs cause cramp,” I say. “Do you have any drugs, by chance?”

“Oh, sure. I’ve got a bag of heroin duct-taped to my belly,” Chris says.

Sarcasm is never a good thing on a honeymoon, especially when it occurs at the start of a 10-hour flight.

If you want to get to know someone — really know them — you simply must fly together. Never mind dating. Time spent thigh-to-thigh in a dark movie theater isn’t going to reveal the nitty-gritty about a person. Nor will breaking some naan together in that adorable Indian restaurant around the corner from his apartment. Nor will meeting each other’s families when everyone is on their best Cleaver family behavior.

In fact, I think the government should do away with marriage licenses and blood tests. Henceforth, all people intending to trot down the aisle together should be required to first stagger down a jetway, bent under the weight of their carry-on items. If they still want to get married when the flight is over — if they’ve become allies, rather than turning on each other like a couple of frenzied dingoes snarling over possession of a sheep’s head, then OK. They can do it. They can get married.

Having recently lived in Asia (and I don’t like to brag, but I’ve also seen “Seven Years in Tibet” twice), I try, as much as possible, to live in the moment. But minutes into this flight, I realize that — Dalai Lama be damned — getting out of the moment, ignoring the moment, is key to survival.

I decide to block out the presence of all human life other than Chris. I pretend that the head of the guy seated in front of me, the head now in my lap, is a cute furry animal that I love very much. I smile at the young couple next to me when I notice they have lowered their tray tables and placed their infant son on them. I elbow Chris as they undress the baby and whisk off his diaper. I feign fascination in my book while the baby and all of his baby parts lay on the little tray table, exposed for all to see. (Just what is one to do in such a situation? Say something like, “My, what a well-hung little boy you’ve got there!”)

Then something — a water mark, thin but undeniably there — rat-a-tat-tats its way across the pages of my book, ending with a firm, steady stream as it finds my hand. “Whoops,” the baby’s father says. “Sorry about that. Is that your first golden shower?”

“Oh boy. I guess my wedding ring is christened now,” I chuckle. I wonder if the baby’s parents would be offended if I get up to wash my hands. Then I wonder how I have become the kind of person who worries about the feelings of people who seem unconcerned when their progeny pisses on you, an unsuspecting stranger.

“Chris,” I say, “let me out.” Chris is laughing so hard he is unable to lift his legs to let me out of my seat. I put my dry hand on his head and fight my way past. I make it to the aisle, and look to see where the restrooms are. But the queen of the skies is a mere six feet away, and in front of him is the most unwieldy transport device known to man: the airline food cart. I look at him, he looks at me, and then he says, “Look out, sweetheart, or I’m going to rrrrun you over.”

“Can I get by you?” I ask.

“Honey, you’re a big girl,” he says. “Can’t you hold it?”

I wipe my hand on my jeans and sit back down. I suppose it’s only right that the passing out of peanuts and four ounces of soda takes precedence over one passenger’s squeamish need to get baby pee off her hand.

While waiting for my book to dry, I try to sleep on Chris’ shoulder. Being a bride, committing oneself to loving, honoring and cherishing another, giving up a single life well lived is a traumatic, tiring business. I haven’t slept well in days. I bury my face in Chris’ shoulder. “God, I never realized your shoulder was so bony,” I say.

“Listen, baby. Don’t pick on me,” my beloved says. Then he bends over and extracts something from his backpack. It’s a bottle of brandy. My favorite, Calvados.

“Happy honeymoon, girl,” he says.

“I knew I married you for a reason,” I say.

“Might as well live it up,” Chris says as he fills our plastic cups.

“That’s the last line of the poem.” I say. “You might as well live.”

“Good, my sweet wife,” Chris says, draining his glass. “Try to keep
that in mind.”

“Razors pain you. Rivers are damp. Acids stain you. Drugs cause cramp. Guns aren’t lawful. Nooses give,” I say.

Chris lifts his shoulder twice in invitation and says, “Why don’t you try and sleep.”

And — all praise unto brandy — I do sleep. For 20 minutes. Then I wake up because the baby is crying. I must here insert the predictable disclaimer that I don’t dislike children. But there’s a difference between understanding that it’s almost inevitable that a baby is going to cry on a long flight and staying cheerful while it’s happening. I’m about to offer the baby some Calvados when the little fellow’s parents get him settled yet again. We hold our collective breaths while the baby drifts off. I’m so happy — for the parents, for the baby and for the possibility of quiet.

Our little row sleeps for a while; I know the baby’s father is asleep, too, because his head falls on my shoulder. I dream that I’m being forced to walk up and down in a badly lit mall. The only song playing is “What If God Was One of Us.” Singing along is a gang of teenage girls who are looking in store windows at striped sweaters and tiny corduroy miniskirts, the same kind I wore in 1974. (Get your own generation!) I move along in the mall. The smell of the guava-scented bath products coming out of the Body Shop is making me dizzy. I’m about to kick the guy whose job it is to stand in the doorway of Banana Republic, greeting everyone (“Hey, how you doin’ today?”), when I wake up, having been kicked by the baby.

“I’m sorry,” the baby’s dad says. And I’m able to say, “Really, I understand,” because by now I do. I feel for the parents. Not the baby; I’m not so fond of the baby. But I really do feel for the parents.

I put on the headset and try to become engrossed in the movie. It’s yet another National Lampoon vacation movie starring Chevy Chase. Is Chevy Chase on the Elvis diet or what? Why is his face so swollen? Has he been flying recently? I myself am bloating even as we make our way to our destination, the place where I am supposed to slip into the black lingerie that fit me a mere three hours ago. Is it the peanuts? The cabin pressure? My ankles have disappeared to the point where my legs look like my Polish grandmother’s.

The crackling of the intercom interrupts the movie. It is our flight attendant: “People, if I could have your attention, please. One of the bathrooms in the rear of the aircraft is out of service. We believe someone tried to flush a” — and here there is a lengthy pause — “a paper towel,” he says. Then he looks up and down the cabin, as if expecting someone to step forward and confess to the commission of this high crime. As if any of us could spring out of seats after five hours of sitting with cramped limbs. He clicks the mike back on and says, “I repeat, the bathroom in the left rear is out of service.” He emphasizes “is” in that way that flight attendants have of emphasizing unlikely words. As if one of us had argued with him and said, “No, it isn’t out of service. I just went in there to smoke a cigarette and everything flushed beautifully.”

The movie resumes, but even that is no longer a pleasant diversion when Wayne Newton’s face appears on the screen. Chris, seeing me stiffen, pats my arm and whispers, “It’s OK. It’s probably just a cameo. He’ll be gone soon.” But he’s wrong. Wayne Newton has a part in this movie. He’s got lines to say, more than just “Welcome to Vegas.” I take off the earphones and shut my eyes, but there’s Wayne, in my head. He’s singing, “I want some red roses for a blue lady.”

Going to sleep is now out of the question. We are sitting in the rear of the aircraft, and the line of bedraggled passengers waiting to use the single working bathroom on our side of the aircraft resembles a wartime queue for butter. I amuse myself by noting that, when approaching the last person in line, three out of four people utter the words, “Is this the line?”

I finally nod off, snapping my head this way and that as I doze, not waking up until I hear the flight attendant say, “Excuse me! Wake up, honey! Chicken or beef?”

“Chicken, please.”

“OK.” There is a pause while the chicken is searched out. Then he says, “Oops, we’re out of chicken. Beef OK?”

And I think to myself, Beef? Beef? Yes, beef would be just fine. Give me a great big hunk of something, anything to gnaw on for a while. I’m being treated like a dog, might as well throw me a big old bone and then hustle back to that little curtained-off area where you’ve hung out for most of this flight and eat the chicken — the one you saved for yourself — while I wrestle with the gristle on the damned beef.

“Beef’s fine,” is what I actually say.

By the end of the flight, we’ve finished the brandy, and I’ve got the poem down:

Razors pain you;

Rivers are damp;

Acids stain you;

And drugs cause cramp.

Guns aren’t lawful;

Nooses give;

Gas smells awful;

You might as well live.
And I might add, Calvados kills — but way too slowly.

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Timing in life is everything. I first heard that in high school, from Patty MacVicar, who was giving me the lowdown on the art of kissing. No one had tried to kiss me yet, but I was hoping someone — specifically Danny Fitzgibbons — soon would. Patty, who’d gone well beyond kissing, considered herself impossibly sophisticated compared to me. She concluded her instructions with, “And for God’s sake, open your mouth when he’s kissing you.”

“How do I know when to open it?” I asked.

She shot me a you-are-never-going-to-be-a-popular-girl look, but it seemed like a good question to me. Do I open my mouth as he heads towards me (open wide, here comes the plane)? Do I spring it open as soon as I feel his lips? Do I wait until his tongue gives me a sign of some sort?

My timing was off then, and it’s not much better now that I’ve grown up and figured out how to kiss boys. Last July, my timing was so off that I was caught up in a coup d’itat. It wasn’t my fault, really. Up until the night before the coup, the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia, where I was living, was reassuring U.S. citizens that, while they should avoid crowds, political gatherings and certain streets, there was no real danger, despite growing acrimony between Cambodia’s two prime ministers. Word within the expatriate community in Phnom Penh was that Cambodia had been through enough in the recent past and that foreign investment in the country had brought with it some assurance of stability.

My boyfriend, Chris, and I were living in Phnom Penh and we really, really needed to get away. Phnom Penh in July is like Paris in August or Buffalo in January — that is to say, not the place to be. We wanted to get to a coast, to put our backs to the country for a while and stare out at an ocean. It was the weekend, a long one at that since American organizations were closed on Monday to observe the Fourth of July. After learning from security organizations that the road to the coast was clear, we decided on Friday night to take a bus the next day to a little town called Kompong Som, about four hours away.

That night, Chris put on his favorite new CD, a compilation of surf classics purchased from the local market bootlegger. I sang along with the Beach Boys while I packed. Let’s go surfin’ now. I pulled my overnight bag out from under the bed. Everybody’s learnin’ how. Threw it across the room to let the bugs inside know that their lease had expired. Come on a safari with me. Put in a couple of bathing suits and a pair of cutoffs. I took a big swig from my let-the-weekend-begin gin and tonic and added a short dress from Bali, a couple of T-shirts and a black skirt. On top went my so-called makeup bag, which is about as streamlined as it can be and still be a girl’s: shampoo, contact lens stuff, toothbrush and paste, sunblock and a brush. I discovered that I had a Power Bar in there from my last trip back to the States several months before. I decided I didn’t want the extra weight and took it out.

“I’m packed,” I yelled to Chris. He came into the room with some shorts and T-shirts and threw them into my bag.

“Bringin’ the board?” I asked. Chris is a mondo surfer.

“Yeah, baby.”

We then did a little happy dance — twisting to the theme music from “Hawaii Five-O” (by the Ventures, in case you’re trying to figure it out) because we were kind of young and very in love and we were going to the beach.

Think back to movies or old newsreels you’ve seen of people fleeing. That’s what Phnom Penh looks like from about 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day: people heading for the city limits, having just received orders to evacuate. Buffeted by world events for the last three decades and abused by leaders ranging from the merely crooked to the truly mad, Cambodians are no strangers to waking up and finding that their world has once again been turned upside down. In 1975, when Pol Pot came to power, he ordered his army, the Khmer Rouge, to evacuate all of Phnom Penh. Every family was forced from its home, every hospital emptied, every school and place of business shut down. Everyone — monks and teachers and guys who worked on cars and women who sold bread — was sent marching to the countryside so that forced labor and the destruction of all things Western could begin.

Life in Phnom Penh takes place on the streets, not in living rooms. If a Cambodian is not out on the street — gossiping or working or eating or selling — he or she is walking purposefully, or riding a Chinese-made bicycle, or cruising along on a Honda motorbike, or pedaling a cyclo. So it seemed strange on Saturday morning that the streets weren’t quite as insanely bustling as usual. Oh, a stranger to the city would still stand paralyzed with fear at the prospect of trying to traverse Mao Tse Tung Boulevard, but I remember thinking that the usual hustle that makes an Asian city an Asian city was missing.

What was odder still was that our bus was not full. The driver even let Chris bring his surfboard on without argument. What’s more, we and a handful of other passengers set off on schedule. If you’ve spent even a day in the third world, you know that it’s practically a law of nature that buses do not leave on time. We should have known then that something was very, very wrong. But as I say, my timing was off. Unaware of the impending calamity, I was in a festive mood. “Let’s just sing beach songs all weekend, ” I said to Chris, feeling very light, very Zelda Fitzgerald — crazy and amusing. “You know we’re goin’ to Surf City, gonna have some fun,” Chris responded.

I leaned back and gazed out at the Cambodian countryside, an emerald sea of beauty dotted with rice paddies, yoked oxen, people snoozing in hammocks and naked kids playing in streams. It was a peaceful scene, one that I knew was deceiving. If countries got together in Vegas and gambled the way people do, Cambodia would be among the losers. Many Cambodians attribute their country’s recent bloody history to bad luck. It’s as good an explanation as any. The country was carpet-bombed by the U.S. during the Vietnam War, starved and worked to death by Pol Pot during the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror and then invaded by the Vietnamese. In the early ’90s, the United Nations stepped in and spent an estimated $3 billion to $4 billion — yes, billion — in Cambodia to ensure free and fair elections.

A new prime minister, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, was elected. At which point one of his opponents, a former Khmer Rouge soldier named Hun Sen, threatened civil war if he was kept out of government. King Sihanouk, Cambodia’s monarch, responded by making Hun Sen a co-prime minister, thus subverting the will of the people and ensuring that the government would be nothing more than a two-headed monster, perpetually at war with itself.

Normal life continued for about six hours after the bus ride. We got to
Kompong Som and checked into what passes for a luxury hotel. We strolled
across the street to the beach, which one shares with white cows and child
vendors. The kids come running at you as soon as your foot hits the sand,
hellbent on charming you or harassing you into buying some of the boiled
quail eggs they balance on trays on their heads. (Why, yes, being on a beach
always sets up a craving in me for boiled eggs.) Anyway, the waves weren’t
great, but the water was a tonic and the air was clear and I became happily
engrossed in a three-pound autobiography of Georgia O’Keefe for a couple of
hours. It was for Georgia that I’d forsaken the Power Bar, my running
shoes and a pair of jeans when packing.

After we’d eaten our share of eggs and damaged our skin a bit, we returned
to the hotel. Chris got into the shower and I availed myself of one of the
perks in our $35/night room: the television. I switched through a couple
of unspeakably bad Japanese soap operas, then came to CNN. At first I didn’t realize it was CNN, because the camera was showing a street in Phnom Penh,
a street right near our house. Then the reporter’s voice said, “This is the
scene from a hotel room here in Cambodia’s capital. Once known as the Pearl
of the Orient, today this city is under siege. There’s fighting on the
streets and many residents have fled the city. At the moment, the situation
is such that we are unable to leave our hotel.”

“Chris, we’re on TV,” I yelled, wondering as I heard the sound of my voice
how it was that it came out sounding like a shark had me by the leg. Chris
came racing from the shower, lathered up thoroughly enough to star in a
commercial for some new bath product: Lather a Go Go or something. The
reporter was explaining that Hun Sen’s troops had attacked those of the prince, and
that the situation was grave. He was predicting an all-out fight for power.

Though friends in the States think me adventurous by virtue of the fact that
I’ve lived abroad for long periods of time, I am by no means a brave person.
I’m just an American woman with a liberal arts degree best used outside of
the United States, a person who enjoys living in cultures where afternoon naps are
the norm. Not only am I not brave, I’m the giggly-when-nervous type, the
kind of person who needs to be slapped across the face in order to bring me
back to my senses. Chris got to see that at least a dozen times over the
next several days. I was nervous, I was giggly and we were trapped.

And I am ashamed to say this, but from almost the first moment that we
realized that we were in a serious situation, I became obsessed with clothing. More specifically, with the clothing I hadn’t brought. “These poor people
are screwed,” Chris said, looking at the screen.

“Chris,” I said, “the only thing I brought for shoes is one pair of
sandals.”

“How could the embassies have been so wrong?” Chris wondered.

“What if we have to run? Chris, I can’t run in these sandals.”

“I wonder if the market is still open. We need to get some food,” Chris
said.

I placed my hands on his shoulders and said, “Do you think I could get a
pair of sneakers in my size there?”

The news from the market vendors was as grim as their faces. A doctor friend
in Phnom Penh had told me that any Cambodian over the age of 25 — that is,
anyone old enough to remember Pol Pot times — probably suffers from at least
a mild form of post-traumatic stress syndrome. I wondered how the Cambodian
people could stand this latest tear in the gossamer-thin fabric of peace.
They relayed the news to us in short, resigned sentences. The only road
back to Phnom Penh, they said, was closed. The fighting would spread, they
told us. Stay inside, one woman said.

As we bought crackers and peanut butter, I thought about how I never eat
peanut butter in my everyday life, but how it now seemed like the thing to
have. Despite being an asthmatic, I seriously considered buying cigarettes.
What if I had to go before a firing squad, or face hours of being
interrogated? Wouldn’t I want a cigarette for that? Didn’t cigarettes become an accepted currency during times of political unrest?

We met up with two friends from Phnom Penh, Barbara, an American, and Emily, a
Filipina. Both had lived in Cambodia for a long time. I looked into
their bag: peanut butter and crackers. Cigarettes for Emily. I joked with
them about wishing I had sneakers. Emily said, “Well, you never know with
this place. It’s a crazy country. Bad karma.” I handed Chris a carton of
Marlboros and headed off to look at the men’s shoes.

I’m not really a group person, but even I know that, in a crisis, it’s best
not to hole up in one’s room with a lot of peanut butter and a carton of
cigarettes. There were about 30 expatriates now marooned in Kompong Som.
While the Cambodians closed up the market and hurried home, we found each
other and organized a meeting. A Frenchman from the United Nations took charge, asking
us to write down our names, nationalities and addresses on a clipboard — the
universal symbol of authority — that he’d brought with him. He promised to
pass our names on to his superiors. I looked at the clipboard when it
reached me and was touched at the sight of the names, the thought of the
families — in Korea, France, Australia, Poland, Austria — that
would now be full of worry for their crazy loved ones in Cambodia.

Discussions centered on what our options were. Try to convoy back to Phnom
Penh once the road was re-opened? Wait for rescue helicopters that were
rumored to be a possibility? Investigate the idea of chartering a Thai
fishing boat to take us to Thailand?

The Frenchman, Jean-Pierre was his name, suggested we continue to meet a
couple of times a day. I thought he made a lot of sense for a man wearing
teeny-tiny white corduroy shorts.

That night, several of us ate at a neighborhood restaurant, where my
thoughts again turned to fashion. Next time I’m in a coup, I thought, I’m
bringing a belt, and maybe even elasticized waist shorts. Edgy as I was, I
felt like I was burning calories faster than an adolescent boy in need of
Ritalin. Food was already becoming harder to get. Our Vietnamese fish soup
was a gray pool of stray fish parts. I longed for my Power Bar.

Talk turned to books, and Emily and I discovered that we’d both recently
read the same one. It had gone into disturbing detail about the treatment
Vietnamese boat people received in the hands of Thai pirates. “I’m not
getting on a Thai fishing boat,” Emily said.

“Why not?” Chris asked.

“Listen, I read the book, too,” I said. “Thai pirates are the worst.”

Chris looked like he’d sell me for a bottle of rum. “When did you become an
expert on pirates? You’ve never even met a pirate.”

Emily and I looked at each other. The book had detailed robberies, rapes
and possible cannibalism. We were in silent agreement: no Thai fishing
boat for us.

The next morning, Jean-Pierre, his shorts whiter than ever, had news. The
prince had left the country and was on his way to Paris. Then he said, “Eet
iz finis. He will lose.” Someone pointed out that the prince’s troops were
still fighting. The Frenchman shook his head. “Eet iz like Gen. George
Patton said.” He then looked at us, the Americans, as if expecting that we
could quote Patton on command. We shrugged our shoulders, so
Jean-Pierre went on. “An army iz like a strand of spaghetti. Eet cannot
be pushed. Eet must be pulled.” Everyone seemed to consider that for a
moment. Then one of the Australian kids in the group, a leather-skinned,
heavily pierced backpacker who I thought was too stoned to know what was
actually going on around him, said, “Well, mate, that’s either really
profound or really stupid.”

The meeting ended on that ambiguous note. I walked across the street to the
beach with Barbara. We tried to ignore the egg-pushing kids and looked at
the water. “Wanna go for a swim?” I asked her.

“You know, it’s funny, but I have no desire to put my bathing suit on,” she
said.

I knew what she meant. Truckloads of soldiers were arriving in town, and my
instinct was to stay as clothed as possible. It seemed dumb to be
displaying cleavage or a little thigh when there were lots of power-drunk
armed men around. We agreed that our situation felt a little like “Gilligan’s Island,” and that the best look for a coup was the down-to-earth practicality of,
say, Mary Ann, rather than the womanly glamour of Ginger.

It turned out that Jean-Pierre was right. The prince’s army, minus its
leader/spaghetti puller, retreated. By Tuesday, Hun Sen’s forces were in
control of the capital. On Wednesday, word came that the road to Phnom
Penh was re-opened. Those expatriates with cars made plans to convoy back.
The rest of us would take the first bus out.

The Cambodians who ran the hotel where we’d been staying were adamant in
maintaining that we were making a mistake. They insisted we not get on the
bus, telling us that there were bandit soldiers along the route back to the
city, that we were sure to be robbed, or worse.

But we’d been marooned for five days, we were almost out of money and
definitely low on nerve. Thailand and Australia had ordered all of their
citizens evacuated from Cambodia. If there was to be an evacuation of
Americans, we certainly didn’t want to miss it.

The heat the morning of our departure was, as usual, brutal. When Raymond
Chandler wrote, “The heat rolled in like a fat lady into the sauna,” he
could have been describing Cambodia. Imagine you’re wedged into a bus seat
made for compact Asian bodies with said fat lady perched on your knees.
Make it a steamy July day and add the smell of your own sweaty fear into the
mix. Pass the beer, indeed.

I sat across from Anna, a large Austrian woman with hair a Kool-Aid shade of
red. She owned an antique shop in Vienna and had been touring the Cambodian
countryside in search of things to ship back to Austria when the coup took
place. I was impressed by her calm throughout the last several days. When
I’d commented on that to her, she’d opened the purse that never left her
side and taken out a silver flask. “Whiskey,” she’d smiled.

“Got your passport?” I asked her.

She nodded and patted her ample breast.

“Where’s your money?” I asked.

Again, the patting of the breasts.

I’d been thinking along the same lines myself. As we packed that morning, I’d slid my cash into one bra cup, my passport into the other. But then the
thought came: If the need arose, could I easily extract the passport? I
imagined nothing would quite equal the embarrassment of having to fumble
around in my bra while a teenage boy carrying an AK-47 looked on. And I
certainly didn’t want some soldier boy — however Calvin Klein slim and
appealing — to decide to help me with such a task. So I’d spent five
minutes sitting on the bed, practicing a quick withdrawal of the passport.
I now felt pretty confident, knowing I could grab the corner of the passport
and bring it out into the open air with the smooth quickness of a
gunslinger.

The Korean woman in our group had her hair tucked up in a baseball cap. There
hadn’t been any water that morning, and I was longing for that product that
sprays powder into your hair and then would have you believe it’s clean.
From now on, I vowed, if there’s even a chance of getting caught up in
political unrest, I’m bringing along a baseball cap. I thought back to the
times when my mother told me to bring a dime on a date in case things
started to go badly and I had to call her and ask her to get into the
Valiant with her hair in pin curls, house dress with the third button from the
top missing, and come and get me because some boy wanted to go to third base
while I preferred to go bowling. Mom, I thought, things are really going
badly.

I hated the idea of dying on a bus with Pringles scattered around me, a
half-eaten loaf of bread on my lap. Still, we loaded our backpacks with
food because we didn’t know how long the trip would take.

We’d brought along bottles of beer, too. Because we were scared and wanted
to steady our nerves. Because we welcomed the diversion of passing a bottle
around from hand to hand, mouth to mouth, cold sores be damned. I should
live so long to get a cold sore, I remember thinking.

The villagers I’d seen a few days before were hiding inside their houses.
The roads were deserted. Before we were out of town, we passed trucks full
of soldiers, some boyish and innocent, some old and ravaged, all of them
heavily armed and poker-faced.
A man with the build of a sumo wrestler sat next to our driver. At every
roadblock — and there were many — the driver kept the motor running as our
oversized emissary lumbered off the bus. He handed soldiers stacks of money
large enough to be someone’s Monopoly winnings. Then he hustled back on
board, and we’d be off to the next roadblock.

Twice, the bribes didn’t work. Twice, soldiers boarded the bus and walked
up and down the aisle and looked into our faces. I looked back at
skinny boys who carried guns that seemed too big for them. “Don’t look,”
the Korean man next to me whispered.

One soldier patted down bags. Another asked to see our passports. One,
slender and shirtless, cigarette hanging from his mouth, pointed at the
Korean woman and said something in Khmer. There was some nervous rustling
while someone translated. Then the woman handed the soldier her baseball
cap. The soldier took it and smiled. Good Lord, I thought, I hope he doesn’t like my shirt.

As we got closer to the city, we looked out the windows at the damage. The
term “war-torn” suddenly made sense to me: Plate glass in buildings was
shattered, metal gates in front of homes were full of rat-a-tat-tat bullet
holes, street lights were leveled, market stalls emptied.

When the bus finally arrived at the station in Phnom Penh, distraught
Cambodian co-workers were waiting for us. “This is the end of our
democracy,” one of them said. I could not think of a comforting response.

A week later, American aid workers were evacuated from Cambodia. We waited
for hours at the heavily shelled airport in lines that seemed never to move.
At last we were redirected to a gate and told to have our passports ready.
I held my magical navy-blue charm aloft as if wielding a crucifix in the
face of a vampire. “To Bangkok,” the gate attendant yelled as he motioned us
forward. Yes, to Bangkok, I thought. I’m wearing my running shoes, and I’m
ready to go.

Continue Reading Close

Timing in life is everything. I first heard that in high school, from Patty
MacVicar, who was giving me the lowdown on the art of kissing. No one had
tried to kiss me yet, but I was hoping someone — specifically Danny
Fitzgibbons — soon would. Patty, who’d gone well beyond kissing, considered
herself impossibly sophisticated compared to me. She concluded her
instructions with, “And for God’s sake, open your mouth when he’s kissing
you.”

“How do I know when to open it?” I asked.

She shot me a you-are-never-going-to-be-a-popular-girl look, but it seemed
like a good question to me. Do I open my mouth as he heads towards me
(open wide, here comes the plane)? Do I spring it open as soon as I feel
his lips? Do I wait until his tongue gives me a sign of some sort?

My timing was off then, and it’s not much better now that I’ve grown up and
figured out how to kiss boys. Last July, my timing was so off that I was
caught up in a coup d’état. It wasn’t my fault, really. Up until the night
before the coup, the U.S. Embassy in Cambodia, where I was living, was
reassuring U.S. citizens that, while they should avoid crowds, political
gatherings and certain streets, there was no real danger, despite growing
acrimony between Cambodia’s two prime ministers. Word within the expatriate
community in Phnom Penh was that Cambodia had been through enough in the
recent past and that foreign investment in the country had brought with it
some assurance of stability.

My boyfriend, Chris, and I were living in Phnom Penh and we really, really
needed to get away. Phnom Penh in July is like Paris in August or Buffalo
in January — that is to say, not the place to be. We wanted to get to a
coast, to put our backs to the country for a while and stare out at an
ocean. It was the weekend, a long one at that since American organizations
were closed on Monday to observe the Fourth of July. After learning from
security organizations that the road to the coast was clear, we decided on
Friday night to take a bus the next day to a little town called Kompong Som,
about four hours away.

That night, Chris put on his favorite new CD, a compilation of surf classics
purchased from the local market bootlegger. I sang along with the Beach
Boys while I packed. Let’s go surfin’ now. I pulled my overnight bag out
from under the bed. Everybody’s learnin’ how. Threw it across the room to
let the bugs inside know that their lease had expired. Come on a safari with
me. Put in a couple of bathing suits and a pair of cutoffs. I took a big
swig from my let-the-weekend-begin gin and tonic and added a short dress
from Bali, a couple of T-shirts and a black skirt. On top went my
so-called makeup bag, which is about as streamlined as it can be and still
be a girl’s: shampoo, contact lens stuff, toothbrush and paste, sunblock
and a brush. I discovered that I had a Power Bar in there from my last trip
back to the States several months before. I decided I didn’t want the extra
weight and took it out.

“I’m packed,” I yelled to Chris. He came into the room with some shorts and
T-shirts and threw them into my bag.

“Bringin’ the board?” I asked. Chris is a mondo surfer.

“Yeah, baby.”

We then did a little happy dance — twisting to the theme music from “Hawaii Five-O” (by the Ventures, in case you’re trying to figure it out) because we were kind of young and very in love and we were going to the beach.

Think back to movies or old newsreels you’ve seen of people fleeing. That’s
what Phnom Penh looks like from about 7 a.m. to 9 p.m. every day:
people heading for the city limits, having just received orders to evacuate.
Buffeted by world events for the last three decades and abused by
leaders ranging from the merely crooked to the truly mad, Cambodians are no strangers to waking up and finding that their world has once again been
turned upside down. In 1975, when Pol Pot came to power, he ordered his
army, the Khmer Rouge, to evacuate all of Phnom Penh. Every family was
forced from its home, every hospital emptied, every school and place of
business shut down. Everyone — monks and teachers and guys who worked on
cars and women who sold bread — was sent marching to the countryside so
that forced labor and the destruction of all things Western could begin.

Life in Phnom Penh takes place on the streets, not in living rooms. If a
Cambodian is not out on the street — gossiping or working or eating or
selling — he or she is walking purposefully, or riding a Chinese-made
bicycle, or cruising along on a Honda motorbike, or pedaling a cyclo. So
it seemed strange on Saturday morning that the streets weren’t quite as
insanely bustling as usual. Oh, a stranger to the city would still stand
paralyzed with fear at the prospect of trying to traverse Mao Tse Tung
Boulevard, but I remember thinking that the usual hustle that makes an Asian city an Asian city was missing.

What was odder still was that our bus was
not full. The driver even let Chris bring his surfboard on without
argument. What’s more, we and a handful of other passengers set off on
schedule. If you’ve spent even a day in the third world, you know that it’s
practically a law of nature that buses do not leave on time. We should
have known then that something was very, very wrong. But as I say, my
timing was off. Unaware of the impending calamity, I was in a festive mood.
“Let’s just sing beach songs all weekend, ” I said to Chris, feeling very
light, very Zelda Fitzgerald — crazy and amusing. “You know we’re goin’ to
Surf City, gonna have some fun,” Chris responded.

I leaned back and gazed out at the Cambodian countryside, an emerald sea of
beauty dotted with rice paddies, yoked oxen, people snoozing in hammocks
and naked kids playing in streams. It was a peaceful scene, one that I knew
was deceiving.
If countries got together in Vegas and gambled the way people do, Cambodia
would be among the losers. Many Cambodians attribute their country’s recent
bloody history to bad luck. It’s as good an explanation as any. The country
was carpet-bombed by the U.S. during the Vietnam War, starved and worked to
death by Pol Pot during the Khmer Rouge’s reign of terror and then invaded
by the Vietnamese. In the early ’90s, the United Nations stepped in and
spent an estimated $3 billion to $4 billion — yes, billion — in
Cambodia to ensure free and fair elections.

A new prime minister, Prince Norodom Ranariddh, was elected. At which point
one of his opponents, a former Khmer Rouge
soldier named Hun Sen, threatened civil war if he was kept out of
government. King Sihanouk, Cambodia’s monarch, responded by making Hun Sen
a co-prime minister, thus subverting the will of the people and ensuring
that the government would be nothing more than a two-headed monster,
perpetually at war with itself.