The Pull

I've been reading a lot of Paul Theroux's The Great Railway Bazaar.
He's the kind of travel writer that I would like to be; he describes everything so thoroughly that my surroundings fall away. I am the one in the train, on my way to Madras, Vientiane, Bangkok, Teheran, Bombay, etc. The only difference is that I bring my own experiences to this vision. I imagine, for example, that the smells in Madras are similar to the smells in Cambodia simply because that is all I know.
Or, I imagine that the beggars on the side of the railroad tracks, the ones that Theroux describes throughout India, are the same beggars that I saw in Phnom Penh; the child cradling his emaciated sister in his arms or the paraplegic begging for money outside of Psar Orussei.
This sort of thinking happens everyday. When my grandmother describes her back pain, I immediately feel the pain I once had when I fell from an apple tree. Or, when I hear that my sister is yelling at my baby nephew, I am once again huddled in a corner, squinting at her fist.
The experience isn't wholly cerebral, either. My head itches at the thought of lice, or my mouth sours at the sight of a man biting into a lemon. I can smell the jasmine as Theroux mentions it.
Reading, perhaps, is a practice in empathy. The only way in which I become Theroux is by drawing on my own experiences. Like matter, no thought is created. Snapshots from life are merely reassembled so that we may fit ourselves into other people's lives. How ironic that something that seems megalomaniacal is a source of connection to others.
Travel writing, then, must also be a practice in empathy.  How can one describe the "other" without wearing a different perspective? Like Theroux, good travel writers describe, ruminate, but only occasionally confess. The goal is not to talk about oneself. The writing should be outside of the body, encompassing the experiences of all others.
But my only tool is the life that I have led.
So, when pen points to paper, a paradox takes place; a journey away via a journey within.

Cambodia Street

I had a choice the other night: To The Lighthouse or The Death and Life of Dith Pran. Many people describe me as an indecisive person, and these choices represented two important facets of my life: my current passions and the obligation for continual exploration . On the one hand, I am an angkorphile, obsessed with everything Cambodia. But I do not always pine for the world of Southeast Asia. Perhaps, I thought, it's important to indulge other spheres, like the mystery of Virginia Woolf.
Last night I pondered whether I was becoming too engrossed with Cambodia. Surely I am stunting my other intellectual development by being too focused on one thing. But, I rationalized, everyone has to be an expert in something and maybe I'm becoming an expert in Cambodia. After all, my generation needs people who are concerned with up-and-coming Cambodia, a nation that will gain international prominence in the coming decades. Plus, when one has a passion they must seize every opportunity to pursue that passion. Such a pursuit can only provide joy and fulfillment for the person.
But what about the big, wide world?
Perhaps, if I read Jane Austen or Thomas Mann, I would become obsessed with these authors, read all of their work, and subsequently become an expert. Or, maybe if I spent some time watching film noir, that would set off a wave of enthusiasm for this particular aspect of cinema. Then, I would watch everything associated with film noir and, like Austen or Mann, and become an expert in this field.
Life is a series of streets. Most of these streets will never be pursued. Some are boring, some are pleasurable, and some are downright fascinating.
I wandered down Cambodia Street.  There was, among others, Picasso Street, England Street, Ballet Street, or Golf Street. But Cambodia Street lengthens as I walk down its center. The others are merely dead ends, while an intangible magnet that pulls me down Angkor's jungled avenue.
Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse would remain between the dusty guidebooks and encyclopedias.
I would spend the night with Dith Pran, making my way further down Cambodia Street.

Which Direction Shall I Head?

Adulthood approaches as independence is gained.
This thought, in some form or other, threads through my mind at certain moments in the day. It illuminates my future, like a light, dimming or brightening, becoming more or less apparent.
I always feel lost. A multitude of questions form in front of me:
What if my plane arrives  late?
What if I get lost in the city and there's no one to help me?
What if there's nowhere to sleep, and I'm condemned to the sidewalk?
What if........what if I'm not grown-up enough to handle the challenges of a world without structure, a world in which I must rely on my own instincts and knowledge to get by?
It's in these moments of despair that I realize the absurdity and utter necessity of my journey to Cambodia.
Absurd--I'm an 18 year old who's confronting a world in which no English is spoken, a world in which I could cry "Help! Fire!" on a crowded street and not one person would understand me, a world in which I could get malaria in my sleep, a world in which one step off the nice, country path could result in my limbs being blasted on the rice paddies.
Necessary--I'm an 18 year old who needs to bite into the amorphous world--full force--because I still have these fears of inadequacy. I'm jumping out of a plane with nothing but a parachute. The only difference is that this parachute is made up of intangible material--a hard work ethic, a sense of adventure and, most importantly, my god-given common sense.
My parents made the paint. Now I must paint the picture.

The Passport That Fled

My passport is officially lost. Or stolen. Or lost. Or stolen.
These two options circulate through my mind like a ticking metronome. Well, I think, if its lost then it must be somewhere familiar. As a child, I used to think that, when things were lost, they were actually transported to someplace else. This belief sounds an awful lot like the book The Borrowers, but I truly believed it. So what little creatures borrowed my passport? More importantly, why should they borrow my passport?
The other option--that it was stolen--gives me some odd comfort. Perhaps it was out of my control that someone took it. I was, in other words, the innocent bystander, a victim of a knifing thief who is probably selling my passport on the black market as I type this passage up.
The moment I realized that I lost my passport was earlier today. My father, stepmother, and I were driving to Logan airport and my father (or was it my stepmother?) casually asked me if I had my passport.

Oh shit, I thought. Do you ever  have those moments when you just know that something is missing, as if you can feel the absence of those few kilograms in your bag?  That was my feeling.

When we walked inside the airport, I opened up my bag and searched. After security, I told my stepmother that I didn't think I had my passport. Every item of clothing was ripped out of my suitcase as I dreaded breaking the news to my father (he was a few safe feet away at the airport Au Bon Pan).
I finally told him (my stepmother insists that I never lie), and he was surprisingly cool about the whole thing. We're still searching--well, my mother searched in my room after I woke her up at 5:16, and my second cousin Susan also searched through all of my boxes stowed away at my grandmother's house--and nothing has turned up.
Perhaps my passport is halfway to Bombay, in the clutches of some raja, about to be sold on the mysterious black market that lines the old silk road.

Sinn Sisamouth

It's strange how certain music can take you back to a place or time. Sinn Sisamouth is a classic example of this phenomenon.

Sophee Oeur, the nice Cambodian lady who works at my school, gave me a CD of Sisamouth's music. Whenever his high-pitched voice blasts through the computer speaker, I'm immediately transported to the village of Prek Pdao, or I'm stepping off a bus into the street of Phnom Penh, the smell of incense wrapping itself around me.

It's fair to say that the act of traveling creates a space in the traveler's mind that is open to new culture (i.e., music, art, dance, theater, or whatever else makes a culture hardly exciting). I have discovered Ros Sereysothea. This amazing Cambodian singer--who unfortunately died during the Khmer Rouge regime--sounds heavenly as she accompanies Sinn Sisamouth in their duet of the song "New Year's Eve."

This song evokes images of what it must have been like to be a Cambodian living in Phnom Penh during the 1960s--the glitz, the glamour, the fashion--and yet, a sense of untainted culture. 

Music has this strange effect, of transporting a person through time. It's as if music itself were the time machine. A person can listen to J-Lo's "Waiting for Tonight" or the Backstreet Boys' "I Want it That Way" and be transported to a totally different time and place. It's strange--as an eighteen year old, I'm considered young. But I feel that my experiences are as vast as Marco Polo!

Waiting

I see Cambodia now: the palm trees, the tuk-tuks, the kramas, the iced-coffee. The smell permeates the New England atmosphere, taking over everything that is familiar. I want to go back to my other home, the home in which I felt free, the home in which everything was new.
But I sit here, in my dorm room. There are papers to be done, math problems to be figured out, friends to text and email, and windows to be shut from the cold. In Cambodia, there is no cold; only a perpetual heat that is hardly noticeable after the first couple weeks. One stops sweating as the skin pores become used to the humidity.
Adventure awaits! It little profits an idle student to be stuck in one place. There are mountains to be climbed, temples to be explored, people to meet, smells to be smelled, food to be tasted, roads to be run on, drinks to be drunken, jungles to be blazed through!
But these images fade away as the present moment appears full force.

In these moments, these lonely moments at night, Cambodia returns with full splendor, like a symphony that quickly reaches its crescendo.
It disappears just as quickly, awaiting the return.