Blowing bubbles / Photo: taiger808
Shannon Dunlap, expat in Cambodia, finds solace in her books, yet remains at risk of losing connection with the culture around her.
One of my earliest memories is of listening to my sister read aloud the entire series of Little House on the Prairie books, a set of texts that has, weirdly, begun to come back to me in vivid detail ever since I came to Cambodia.
(The maple candies they made in the snow, the leeches clinging to Laura’s legs in the creek bed, the way her aunt and uncle looked at each other at the Christmas dance, and even the bookmark of red and green braided yarn that Dawn placed between the pages.)
Back then, I lived for the local library, the explosion of possibility that was the children’s room—endless shelves of Encyclopedia Brown and Boxcar Children, and I would read them all, I was certain, because even at six, seven, eight, I valued intellect above all else.
For most of life, my affair with books has seemed a gift. But I regret to report that here, in Cambodia, reading is more problematic. It highlights all my eccentricities, draws out my hermit-like qualities.
Is it possible that books, my old friends, are responsible for turning me into a social misfit?
Enter The Book Snob
Before I left New York, one of my coworkers asked me which three books I would take to a desert island. This is an impossibly difficult question for any true reader, but he had developed some rules to guide me.
Book exchange / Photo: jeb ro
Rahul had spent a lot of time in Afghanistan, and he insisted that when I packed for Cambodia, at least one volume needed to be one of impressively beautiful and intricate language. “Because let’s face it,” he said. “You’re going to eventually get tired of being around people who can’t speak English very well.”
Cambodia and its pidgin English has not turned me into a book snob; I have always been one. But it is true that the list of people here who can carry on a conversation about a book is very short, resulting in the double wallop of both superiority and guilt that I feel when I am, say, reading an E.L Doctorow book on the porch while a crowd of people follow a garbage truck up the street to pick through my neighbors’ trash.
No matter how many strides Cambodia makes in the next fifty years, those people will never be reading Doctorow, and who knows how many generations will pass until they get his equal who writes novels in Khmer. That was the first ominous sign—the inevitable gap that reading puts between me and the culture I currently live in.
The Promise Of The Unknown
But there is more. The sight of our rickety rattan book shelves has begun to fill me with despair, not because of what’s there, but because of what’s not.
Let me be clear—I am nowhere close to running out of things to read. My boyfriend and I agonized over which volumes to bring, and, taking up an inordinate amount of luggage space with our choices, humped many pounds worth of books through the Bangkok airport, down the coast to Sihanoukville, north again to Phnom Penh, and then onward to their current home in Siem Reap.
It is not books that I miss. What I miss is the freedom of not knowing which book I am going to read next.
I have not made it through even half of them yet. Plus, our roommate has a taste for the classics, and I’m sure I could spend much of the remainder of my stay finally reading Don Quixote.
There are also many secondhand bookstores (though these are subject to the dubious tastes of Western backpackers—I typically avoid these shops, afraid that I will not be able to resist the urge to chuck the extensive Jodi Picoult and Robert Patterson collection into the street).
So it is not books that I miss. What I miss is the freedom of not knowing which book I am going to read next. I miss Barnes and Noble, I miss the Strand, I miss having an address that Amazon can actually find. I miss the children’s reading room of the Lexington Local Library.
The Authors Speak
So far I have been talking about things which are merely a shame or an inconvenience, but we are now about to veer into the territory of questionable mental stability, because more than ever before, it seems as though the authors of the books that I read here are speaking directly to me.
Monks / Photo: beggs
I almost wept while reading the preface (the preface, for Heaven’s sake) of Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion.
“Yes!” I wanted to tell her. “I am shy, too! I am bad at talking on the telephone, too! I, too, like drinking gin!” For the past five days, Joan has been soothing me, talking to me about my family, my failures, my neuroses, my departure from New York.
That happens to be a book of nonfiction, but fiction is even more capable of cutting to the quick. There is something about Cambodia, be it the quantity of time I spend in my own head writing or the primal fragility of the life around me, that seems to strip away artifice and make my psychological simplicity painfully obvious.
I am as transparent as a character in a novel with an omnipotent narrator. It is me that Naeem Murr is describing when Lew needs someone to hurt more than he hurts; it is me that Donna Tartt is describing when Harriet can no longer see life through the windshield, but only through the rearview mirror.
Who but John Steinbeck could understand that I have the repressed anger of Tom Joad, the wounded optimism of Rose of Sharon?
Hiding In The Pages
And all of this, you might say, is not a bad thing, simply a deeper connection to the written artifacts that have always mattered to me. The problem is that it has resulted in a revulsion at the flesh and blood, particularly that of Western origin, that surrounds me.
These authors seem so much more real to me than the hordes of volunteers and tourists I brush elbows with every day. Unlike most Khmer, they could read Wallace Stegner if they wanted to, but most opt for sudoku instead.
Any time you excel, any time you separate yourself from the rest of the pack, you are also learning to isolate yourself.
Have I always been such a snotty misanthrope? Was it just easier to hide in America? I can’t remember.
All I know is that I want and need to have more in common with Joan Didion (even if it is a version of Joan Didion that only existed thousands of miles and forty years away from the here and now) than I have in common with that German girl at the next table who is dangling a pedicured foot over the back of a chair while she eats breakfast and thumbs through a guide book.
What has my brainy bookishness earned me? E.L Doctorow doesn’t live in Siem Reap, Denis Johnson doesn’t take me out for drinks on Friday nights, not even J.K. Rowling is interested in Khmer karaoke.
No one told me in elementary school that a spot in the highest reading group would come at a price. Because any time you excel, any time you separate yourself from the rest of the pack, you are also learning to isolate yourself.
And yet all of those pages, Little House in the Big Woods to The Grapes of Wrath and everything that came between, are so much a part of me that it is hard to imagine, let alone wish for, any alternative.
Nothing I have said here changes the fact that I need books now more than ever; it is no small feat for printed letters to provide the kind of purpose and beauty that they have for me.
It’s just that it’s lonely out here on the prairie sometimes, and I wish that Laura Ingalls Wilder was around to keep me company.
What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments!
About the Author
More By This Author
- Indifference Abroad: An Expat's Battle To Keep Her Compassion (21 comments)
- Khmer Kids: Why Abstract Thought Is More Than You Think (15 comments)
Related Posts
9 Comments... join the discussion!
-
-
i feel like that too! except i live in a “civilized” place (copenhagen – the most civilized of the civilized), which makes it unbearable in a different way.
↵ -
i always have a novel going while i’m traveling, and i don’t like to put a book down much once i’ve started reading it. that has made it difficult for me to engage a culture i’m traveling in, because i always want to see what’s going to happen in my book. as a result travel has helped me develop self-discipline. i’ll set aside some time each day to be by myself, to write or read, and then put the book and journal away for the day. it’s a work in progress, but i’ve noticed it translating over to my working life at home.
↵ -
There is nothing more frustrating than reading a fabulous book…and having absolutely nobody to dissect it with. Beautifully written post.
↵ -
If you had asked me the question of which books I would bring on a trip only a few months ago, I could never have answered. I’ve recently started reading classic literature (I would say English but I’m a huge Jules Verne fan), and now I know the five or six books that I would definitely take, and three of them were written over a hundred years ago, two originally in French. The clarity is incredible.
(This is sort of unrelated, but I wanted to share it.)
↵ -
It is not just Cambodia. Everywhere we go, we find things that remind us of the books that we read, and need our books to keep us company in a world that we don’t know. In the Red Centre of Australia, we were most reminded of Jules Vernes’ Journey to the Center of the Earth. And, when we read the signs in South Australia of “Moynton Shire,” we are reminded of the Tolkien’s Shire.
And, this may be cheating but . . . we bring our books with us and our vast libraries on our Kindles. I cannot recommend anything better for an avid reader traveling. We have hundreds of books loaded on our Kindles (and though I sorely miss my Laura Ingalls Wilder, I have assuaged that desire with Frances Hodgson Burnett and Lousa May Alcott.
↵ -
I am a reader and traveler too and really enjoyed your post. It’s always gratifying to find someone who expresses one’s own thoughts so well.
Now that I am a mother traveling with kids, I learned when they were little to travel with short stories or the latest Vanity Fair. Becoming immersed in a novel was too frustrating because I was constantly being interrupted! Thankfully, they are old enough now to be reading Laura Ingalls.
We have recently moved back to the States from a year living in Spain and deciding what books to pack was one of our hardest decisions. I wish Kindle would have been around as it would have kept my voracious 10-year-old in stories. Books on tape on the iPod helped the 6-year-old. For me though, I still want to crack open a spine, smell the pages, and cuddle in a chair with Jane or Wallace.
↵ -
I think that was a great post, and I often get tempted to stay in and read when traveling…partly because I that’s the only time I get with my books!
There was one part of the post I must depart with though…
“No matter how many strides Cambodia makes in the next fifty years, those people will never be reading Doctorow, and who knows how many generations will pass until they get his equal who writes novels in Khmer.”
…maybe I’m missing some context here but that sounds extremely condescending. Do you read Khmer? Are there no well written novels now? And what does it mean that ‘those people’ will never read ‘your’ level of novels?
I would love to be corrected- maybe you were referring to a specific group of people or were just trying to emphasize how much you love Doctorow…?
↵ -
I do get frustrated when educated Westerners don’t differentiate between good writing and careless writing.
But in Cambodia right now, it’s a different story. It’s hard not to feel utter despair at the state of education near Siem Reap. The “public” schools don’t pay the teachers enough to eat, so the teachers extort bribes from the students for every paper they grade. The private schools are expensive and only for the elite or the very lucky few who get Western sponsors. There are Buddhist schools where the monks do the best they can (I taught English at one of them for a while before it was closed down) but they struggle to keep the lights on, to get any books (even English ones), to keep the students from drifting off to jobs waiting tables when they’re fifteen years old. And that’s in a major city, where there are some schools, at least. Eight-five percent of the population survives through rural subsistence farming, and though it is hard to find accurate figures on literacy in the countryside, most of them have never seen the inside of a classroom. When I said “those people,” I specifically meant the six or seven people I was watching with no choice but to pick through the garbage, but even in the nation as a whole, education is very hard-won.
The short answer to your question is, no, unfortunately, no one I know of is writing novels or poetry in Khmer right now. There was a literary tradition before the Khmer Rouge, but the KR killed the entire educated sector of the population–professors, writers, musicians, monks…hell, anyone who wore glasses. And what saddens me even more is that even the most educated of my Khmer friends today don’t read those Khmer books from before the KR–most of them were burned and Cambodia is in too bad of shape to worry about printing and distributing something as “frivolous” as a novel.
Rereading my post, I hope I turn out to be wrong about my fifty year estimate. Most Khmer people I know are far smarter and more resilient than I am, but that doesn’t translate to literary skill (or many other intellectual processes that Westerners take as a given) without education to support it, and I don’t see the government stepping in to rectify that anytime soon. As for Doctorow…I don’t even understand his novels all the time, and when there is a “Cambodian Doctorow” I most certainly won’t be reading him or her in the original Khmer. So kudos to anyone, Khmer or otherwise, who picks up The Book of Daniel.
Regards,
Shannon↵
