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I sit now in an internet cafe in the lobby of my guesthouse in Thailand, land of Muy Thai kickboxing, peanut sauce, and delicious iced tea – And fully legal and government-supported gender reassignment operations, my Lonely Planet guide informs me. No wonder the Chinese folks I know who come back from this country are always talking about “Taiguo renyao,” which is to say Thai Transsexuals. (Actually to be precise, and I know some of you care about precision in matters like these, it’s “Thai Transvestites,” but whatever the differing psychologies it seems likely to me that a culture with a history of accepting out-and-out transvestitism would have less problem with transsexuals than the norm… but anyway, here I am writing on the clock (1 hr 52 min remaining of my purchased internet time as I finish this parenthetical) and within one paragraph I’ve already got myself from an internet cafe to transsexualism. The point of all this was to establish that the title of this particular volume in the Dispatches is now somewhat erroneous, but I’m not going to change it for numbering reasons. Those of you who grew up playing Japanese video games will understand that this is somewhat similar to how Mario III showed up in the US without a Mario II, or how “Secret of Mana” the gameboy game was renamed as “Final Fantasy Adventures”… Anyway. We enter the wayback machine – Cambodia!

More scene-setting, which I neglected to do in the previous e-mail: Siem Reap, which means “Thailand (Siam, Siem) Defeated” in Khmer (the name for the people, the language, the adjective for everything connected with their culture) is a small but fast-growing tourist town about three hours away from the Thai border, which is kind of like if Augusta, Maine were named “Scourge of Canadians” or something. The roads are paved, mostly, and sand is everywhere. It’s the dry season – after rains, the vegetation regains something of its normal unearthly green but here there’s a good bit of droopy, dry tan in anything and everything, even though the real dry stretches begin to the north and west, where everything fades into dust and cows stand like Pharoh’s lean kine by the side of the road. But back to Siem Reap: close-gathered, low buildings, a few tall luxury hotels on the outskirts. More tourists – read, foreigners, farang in Thai and something I can’t even begin to pronounce in Khmer, waiguoren in Chinese (though here they really feel more like Gringos; there’s a Mexican feel to the country in a way) – than I’ve seen in a long time, wandering around and for the most part glancing at each other and away, even in a crowd. People are here to see temples, and Cambodia and Cambodians, not ungainly hordes of French or Cantonese, well-mannered as they may be.

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China Dispatch vol. 3 Cambodia Special Edition #3: You Have Gained a New Party Member!Read More »