Geoff Ryman's Cambodian Tales, Part 3

In celebration of award-winning novelist Geoff Ryman's latest US release The King's Last Song (Small Beer Press), we're running a series of exclusive mini-essays from the author. The novel takes place in the past and present of Cambodia, and has been highly praised in the UK and by Booklist.

Ryman's previous novel, Air, was set in Kizuldah, Karzistan. Kelly Link, author of the much-lauded Magic for Beginners and half of the husband-wife team running Small Beer Press, wrote that "Air has the texture, richness, and fantastical complications (ghosts, visions, layering of mythology and folklore and technology and history) of other slipstream Ryman novels. It's a remarkable and magical act of transformation on Ryman`s part, and it's an experience that transforms his reader as well. I fell in love with his characters, and am still carrying them around in my head."

Here's the last part of Ryman's essay on his Cambodian experiences. Check out all of Ryman's fiction available through Amazon.

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Stories. Cambodia. Later. (Part 3)
Geoff Ryman

2007. Rith's car breaks down on a country road. The soil is bright orange, the road an unpaved track along the top of a straight dyke that runs for miles between the Mekong and flooded fields.

Rith gets a lift from the owner of a small store. I sit in the shade of the store and wait. It sells candy, cold fruit, and batteries. I pass the time with the daughter of the shop, as she tells me the words for fork, lampshade, sock, and tiger in Khmer. She corrects my English transliteration of the Khmer words. The village children gather and giggle. Rith finally comes back with a tow truck that has had to back up miles along the top of the dyke. The shop owner insists we have a beer with him. He talks about the World Wrestling Federation. Are the fights fakes? I tell him yes. He doesn't believe me.

We had planned to drive all the way north to Stung Treng province. Instead we drive due east to stay with Rith's relatives in Memot, a town near the Vietnamese border. Rith tells me that the cables alongside the roadway, he tells me, are importing electricity from Vietnam. The rubber plantations along the road are Vietnamese and an experimental new crop; that's Vietnamese too. His cousin lives on the Vietnamese side on town in a house in the modern Khmer style, a huge open window for a front entrance, stone tiles on the floors and walls, tiny shrines and a well equipped kitchen with a huge burnished steel fridge. The grandmother lives next door in an older house made of wood full of Chinese furniture. In the basement, a group of five Indic looking gentlemen with busy moustaches sleep. They have cornered the local market in fertilizer which they sell from house to house. Now, even though it is still dusk, they sleep in row, their forearms across their eyes.

Later. We go back by way of Prey Vent, a pleasant town on a lake full of deserted restaurants and very poor people living in tents or less along esplanade. Driving back towards Phnom Penh from the Mekong ferry, I suddenly realize that we are driving along the road that my friend Theary Seng had to take when her family fled south from Pol Pot. The terrible trek which killed family members and landed them with relatives who did not want them is described in detail in her book Daughter of the Killing Fields. I'd just read it. Now all along the road are rows of traditional but prosperous Cambodian houses. Rith tells me all the many Khmer words for types of house types, words for home. Coming into Phnom Penh, there is another new Wat. No rainbow this time.

2002. I try to stay at my friend's farm in Siem Reap. Someone who is perhaps jealous, perhaps ill advised shouts to him that he is so lucky to have a rich tourist stay with him. Is it a set up? We are followed by a policeman on a motorcycle. He follows us all the way to the house, says he is a tourist policeman and that I can't stay there. I must go and register and stay in a hotel in town. He then arrests my friend's brother. I go to the police station with him. The policeman is an older, serious man in gold rim spectacles who is both reasonable and chillingly the right age to have survived by running a Khmer Rouge commune. I tell him that staying on the farm was my idea. Not theirs. Me paying them what I would pay a hotel was my idea, not theirs. They are not running a hotel business without anybody else knowing. I made all the suggestions; they suggested nothing except to be kind. I know the family. There is no danger, I tell him. They are respectable people whom I trust. The policeman looks slightly amused, speaks quietly and makes it clear that I have no choice, that I must now go back to my hotel and leave my friend's brother there. I am loaded on the back of a police bicycle, driven to a hotel, and made to register. I wait and wait. No phone call. Finally I can't stand it any longer and start to walk back to the police station. I see the brother walking back to me, free. He smiles sheepishly. Everything is OK, he smiles. Everything in Cambodia is OK. People do smile as if anything that goes wrong must be something embarrassing that they did. My friend comes, we all get on his bicycle, and I go and stay on the farm anyway.

My friend's story. I bought him a mobile phone. He lost it in a fight. His brother who farmed pigs and was a big hearty fellow, insulted a playboy, and the playboy's hoods beat him up so that he was off work for many months. He had a brand new motorcycle. He lost that when someone ran a red light, broke his legs and destroyed the bike. He couldn't work either. Then he got malaria. I asked about his brother's wife. She had got depressed and killed herself.

When I see him next, he still smiles. His uncle finally in middle age left the family to become a monk. He has met a Japanese philanthropist who wants to build and run a school. He wants to buy the family's land. All of Siem Reap is up for sale, except for the protected park around Angkor Wat (and in this land of bribes and favours, even some of that). So my friend wants to set himself up in real estate. I take photos of him in the newly opened Foreign Correspondent's Club in Siem Reap. Even in just a plain white t-shirt, he looks the equal of any businessman in the world.

2000. I gave Ran a phone too. He held it and looked at it and opened it and shut it again. His girlfriend had broken his first mobile phone with a hammer. She was sure he was calling other women on it. She was so pleased when the phone was magically restored that she gave me a free dinner from her restaurant. I sat on a tree stump and slurped a mix of straggly chicken, vegetables and broth. Ran stroked the phone and then said. 'It is exactly the same as the phone I lost. That's a very good sign.' When I see him a year later, the phone is gone.