Hello, all, and Happy New Year! It’s been a hot minute, hasn’t it? Nearly a year, if you can believe it! I must admit I’d about run out of content. There’s only so much shit I can write about depression and the state of the world. Do you know Taylor Swift’s song “Nothing New”? There’s a line in it that goes, “How can a person know everything at 18 and nothing at 22?” (I know, I’ve been gone 11 months trying to come up with new content only to quote Taylor Swift at you. And I’m not confident I haven’t done the same thing before!). Damn if that ain’t the truth. I’ll be about 23 when this comes out, and I think if you looked back at my first columns, when I was 16, I’d sound a lot more confident there. Perhaps that isn’t surprising. Unfortunately, as everyone keeps reminding me, an essential part of growing up seems to be realizing you haven’t the faintest clue.
I haven’t just been listening to Taylor Swift this past year. I spent the last four months studying in Cambodia. And truthfully, I hadn’t just run out of things to write about. I felt like I’d run out of things to think about. Perhaps another part of growing older is realizing you never have had, and probably never will have, an original thought. I don’t know that I had any new thoughts in Cambodia. I realized stuff about myself. I realized I’m not so open-minded and I find it difficult to connect unless it is an intense connection. I realized I could be just fine by myself. I realized that while my comfort zone is fairly small, it is elastic.
So I was driven to Cambodia by boredom. At home, everyone I speak to is the same. I hoped to meet some new people with backgrounds different from mine. But I did not anticipate how hard it would be for me to talk to Cambodians — which is silly, because speaking to new people, especially new people I can’t instantly read, has always been the hardest thing for me. Certainly, the language barrier is the biggest divide. And on the surface I have very little in common with the average Cambodian. We have such different cultural contexts and social rules. I often worried about being impolite and yet I abhor small talk. I want to jump right in. Perhaps this urge to dive in is what made me really trip to pagodas, especially those where I spoke with monks. They were not afraid to jump into the deep end immediately.
On one trip to a pagoda, we celebrated Pchum Ben, called in English “Ancestors Day,” though it’s actually a 15-day festival. It is not unlike Dia de los Muertos. This festival was perhaps the first time I’ve understood what people may pray or reflect upon. I was not raised religiously, nor do I practice any religion or spirituality independently, so I have never had a solid grasp of what might be prayed in prayers. In American pop culture, I think of The Family Circus cartoons with Billy kneeling at the side of his bed, saying his nightly prayers and, basically, wishing.
During Ancestor Day, I reflected upon my family and my gratefulness to them for persevering through genocide to allow me to live. I thought a lot about The Holocaust while in Cambodia, unsurprisingly. My grandmother tells me that when they escaped Germany, her mother cleaned houses in her furs. She was working-class in the U.S., just getting by, but back in Germany my great-grandfather had been a lawyer, a tutor to the Crown Prince’s nephew. They wouldn’t stay in the working class in the States for long.
This makes me think about how white people are allowed to bounce back after disasters, but people of color and those in the Global South are kept down. You can see it even in the muted response to Hurricane Katrina, when a predominantly Black area received little federal support. Vietnam helped Cambodia survive immediately after the Khmer Rouge, but otherwise, who has supported the country? China recently, perhaps. But where was the international outrage and rallying around here? It’s true what Anthony Bourdain said about Kissinger, so when Kissinger died in November, it was tempting to believe the remnants of fireworks from a seasonal festival were celebrating his death.
