by John Bocskay

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Winter sucks. It’s cold and I hate it. I grew up in New York, where winter is colder on average than even the winters some of my Canadian friends know (particularly my friends from the lovely and naturally insulated city of Vancouver). Like my Canadian friends, I’ve got my trusty took (though I almost never call it that), as well as scarves, gloves, coats, and good long underwear. But unlike Canadians, I simply can’t deal with the cold. I bitch and complain and start counting the days until Spring.

The Pusan winter is not nearly as bitter as that of New York, but it’s still a winter, and as such, it sucks. There are some nice wintery things happening though, chestnuts roasting on an open pushcart, music in the air, and excessive alcohol consumption. As nice as these things can be, they still don’t exert the same kind of power over me as the old summer standbys: “beach,” “hammock,” “palm tree,” “Pina Colada.” Who can complain about these?

In winter, my thoughts inevitably turn to summer for solace, and I reminisce about lazy days spent in fairer climes. At this time last year I was in Cambodia, and I’d happily go there right now if I could. Cambodia doesn’t leap to mind as most people’s idea of a dream vacation spot, but it does have all the summer essentials in spades and then some. Okay, it does rain a hell of a lot in the monsoon season, but I never thought of reaching for a pair of wool thermals. In fact, the weather there is normally so damned warm that wearing clothes at all is primarily a means of keeping people from staring at your genitals.

Cambodia has several reputations, most of them bad. Stories of sex, drugs, and violence precede Cambodia wherever it goes. People stare at Cambodia yet try to avoid eye contact. The whole country is like the kid who after school did weird things which nobody ever really saw yet couldn’t resist talking about with perverted glee. But some people, many of them former or current problem kids themselves, dive right in for a look-see.

I knew I had to go there. Though I’m not exactly a problem child, I do have a fascination with sex, drugs, and violence. Coming from New York, which is also a place with a wild reputation, I suspected that many of those crazy stories about Cambodia were probably half-true and had perhaps gained a lot of their drama from Hollywood, sensational media reports, and overeager imaginations. I’ve met plenty of people who imagine New York to be a place where people are always running around dodging bullets and popping each other off at traffic lights as nonchalantly as they’d read the newspaper. Things like that do happen, though it is far from a feature of daily life. In some parts of New York, you are as likely to hear gunfire as you are to hear the mating call of a wildebeest. I don’t know if Cambodia has wildebeests, but I was pretty sure I could leave my NYPD flak jacket at home.

 *

I’ll never forget the exhileration of arriving in Phnom Penh. Cambodia started happening the moment I arrived at the terminal and didn’t let up until the moment I left. Outside the terminal, I was immediately thronged by guys who wanted to be my driver/guide/trusty sidekick. There were about ten of them and they were all saying more or less the same thing, “I know a good hotel, very cheap…”

I chose my guy based on a simple formula; he was the one who harassed and annoyed me the least. His name was Joon, or Jun, or Juwon—I never did manage to prononce it correctly even after spending a few days with him in Phnom Pehnh. I told him my name was John and he got very excited and exclaimed, “My name same!”

I got on his bike and we roared out of the airport lot and onto a wide boulevard. The road was paved, but there was somehow very little air in the dust I was breathing. Before us swirled the fleeting forms of hundreds of other small motorbikes, and the noise was nearly deafening—a thousand engines become one—probably like the sound that would come from Satan’s hotrod. It was instant chaos, like sticking your head into a beehive, and it turned out to be the best road in the whole damned city.

I was instantly fascinated. Sensory overload, no, sensory assault, and I fell into a bug-eyed reverie on the back of the wailing motorbike. Through the smoke and the dust Joon was screaming, “Yoo wa BA?”

“Huh?” The English language goes through some interesting twists on Cambodian tongues, and it would take me a while to get used to Joon’s English. But here he repeated himself and put his hand to his mouth, and I realized he was asking, “You want pot?”

I do smoke occasionally, and it was nice of him to ask, but I declined mainly because my head was spinning all by itself. And I was more concerned with finding a room and dropping my gear. “No thanks Joon. Not now.”

Joon was undaunted. “You want lady? Vietnamese lady five dollar lady bar. Very beautiful!” He was screaming over the din and turning to face me, which was very unnerving. On driving in the Third World, P.J. O’Rourke once wrote, “Never look where you’re going; you’ll only scare yourself.” There’s truth to that, but it doesn’t make you feel any better when your driver is blindly heading into what looks like a monster rally of Hell’s Angels on ephedrine.

In the time it took to get downtown, Joon gave me the lowdown on everything from drug orgies to blasting away at the shooting range with rocket-propelled grenades. It seemed he had a thousand contacts and he offered to arrange whatever I wanted to do. I was initially startled by his versatility, but I was later to discover that nearly every Khmer has the ability to become an instant middleman. If they don’t have what you want, they go get it. Once at a restaurant, I asked the waiter if he had Chang beer. He said yes and took off running down the street. He returned ten minutes later with my Chang. If I had known he was going to do that, I would have ordered six.

I had chosen a guesthouse arbitrarily from a travel guide, because I thought it better to give any address at all than be led to a place where I would be overcharged so my driver could collect a commission. Joon had never heard of the place I suggested, but he looked for it, or at least made a very convincing show of looking for it.

He took us down streets which quickly became thicker, narrower, dirtier, and less like anything I had ever seen—craters full of water and loose bricks, the mad traffic of motorbikes and cyclos, and chicken, children, and dogs alike screeching and shitting as we nearly ran them over. There were more “hazards” than “road”, and we were bobbing and weaving, avoiding death and maiming by feet and inches.

The driving in Phnom Penh is Darwinian, and the laws are those of the jungle. Contrary to popular belief, New Yorkers generally obey the rules of the road, because most of those rules are vigorously enforced. We watch what the other guy is doing, and unless he’s from New Jersey, we usually assume he’ll do the right thing. In Cambodia, the only thing you can safely assume is that the other guy is utterly unpredictable, and as a consequence, you become a very alert and skillful driver. Or you die. Either way, the driving gets better. Classic natural selection.

Joon was an excellent driver; that is to say, in Phnom Penh his technique made perfect sense and was the only “sane” way to drive. In most other places he would have serious problems with the law and would make few friends among his fellow motorists.

Our search for the guesthouse took us down some squalid streets, though no matter how awful the roads were, they all had names or numbers that followed a logical ascending order. Despite Phnom Penh’s Third World chaos, they actually have a First World system of named and numbered streets, which is something that World-of-its-Own Korea has not yet gotten around to. In Korea, one gives directions by means of landmarks, which works as long as the building you chose as your reference point was not torn down last week and replaced with a Pizza Hut, as sometimes happens.

Apparently, my chosen guesthouse too no longer existed, so I gave up and agreed to a place that Joon recommended. It turned out to be cheap enough (six bucks a night) and comfortable, with a veranda looking out over the madness of 51st street, a couple of blocks from the central market. I dropped my bag in the corner and read the house rules, posted on a sign on the wall. Point number two had me wondering exactly what would constitute a “wrongful use of electricity,” and point number six was downright baffling: Please leave explosives with the guesthouse owner.

I had spent a few weeks in Thailand, and I left with some scrapes and mosquito bites on my feet that would not heal in the moist climate. Because they were so small, I neglected to clean them properly and they became infected. It was hard to walk because the cuts lay in the path of my sandal straps. When I arrived in Phnom Penh, my feet were hurting, so I sat on the veranda, propped my feet on the rail, and began what was fast becoming a ritual application of antiseptic.

The cuts had been open and bleeding for so long I was beginning to wonder if they’d always be like that, some kind of tropical stigmata that would follow me for the rest of my life. And I started wondering if those people who claim to have the wounds of Christ were not just dummies with poor hygeine habits like me.

I looked out from the veranda at the city below and felt a pang of guilt. If the city had been manic before, it was starting to fire itself up even more as night approached. God knows what dark wonders were bustling in the streets below, and there I was on my first night in Phnom Penh, nursing a couple of busted-up feet and watching lizards eating flying bugs around the flourescent light in my room. Should I stay or should I go, I thought, and was still wrestling with that question when I fell into a deep sleep.

 *

Joon picked me up the next morning for a day of sightseeing. We took in most of the main sights: The Silver Pagoda, Wat Phnom, a Khmer Rouge “detention center” cryptically called S-21, and the infamous Killing Fields, which is somewhat surreally announced by a large sign which reads, “Cheong Ek genocidal Center.”

These were well worth the price of admission, but the most interesting thing to me was the whole of the city itself: the people, the energy, the madness, the filth, the gracefully crumbling French colonial buildings and the clumsily crumbling everything else. The city buzzes and rocks, and it’s impossible not to be affected by its energy. I was affected mostly positively by it, but then again, I was there only a week.

The perpetual motion of Phnom Penh does have some rather nerveracking mainfestations. All of the selling is aggressive, and the touts there are harder to shake than their counterparts in Bangkok or Saigon. They are poor after all, so it’s hard to be angry with them, especially because most of the selling is virtually indistinguishable from begging. One young kid offered me a book for sale, a guide to the temples at Angkor Wat. I came with a copy of the same book, so I told him I had it already. He wouldn’t accept that excuse, and he said, “Your book not same.”

There followed a brief “disagreement” that went something like this:

“My book is the same.”

“Not same.”

“Same.”

“Not same.”

And so on until it became clear to me that the only way to get rid of him (he was now at my side, half-trotting sideways to keep up) would be to show him. I dug the book out of my bag and held it up. They were indeed identical, and I said again, “Same.”

He looked at the book unfazed and said, “Buy one more.”

  *

On the motorbike, Joon turned to me and handed me a pack of cigarettes. I opened it and found it stuffed with pot. “How much?” I asked.

Joon turned and sang his answer, “It’s up to you.”

It seems to me now that this is the motto of Phnom Penh—it’s up to you—because nobody there is going to tell you otherwise, and if someone does, you can pay them off for a pittance. Sex, drugs, and wanton violence no longer the exclusive province of rock stars and Hollywood brats. You too can be a flagrant degenerate for the cost of…well, it’s up to you but it ain’t much. Intellectual and spiritual elevation is all quite available there too. The choice is yours, live or die. Take that step, and that’s all it is—just a step. It’s all right here in front of your eyes, whatever you want.

And it’s hard to feel shame there because there are no judges, only merchants. Buyers and sellers guided only by the logic of the market. Ethics are not evident. Where are the reproachful glances? The shame-on-you? Men negotiate sex with teenage girls and the madams are somebody’s cute little grandma. It’s up to you because grandma doesn’t care. Who is there to tell you to stop, to remind you to pause and check to see that you are not becoming a monster?

If near-anarchy can be properly called freedom, then Cambodia is the freest country I know. The freedom is exhilerating, even if it means something as simple as drinking a beer and smoking a joint on the back of a weaving motorcycle. For many, that freedom proves too much to handle. The excesses of debauched foreigners,and of the Khmers themselves, are slowly coming to light in the form of backpacker gossip, bizzaro news reports, and seamy softcover travelogues, but a lot more goes on there than anyone will ever know.

Cambodia changed my perspective on Korea too. Sometimes I complain about Korea and its rule for everything. Korea’s solution to the problem of social organization isn’t ideal, but pure freedom is more demanding than I’d ever imagined. Cambodia often obliged me to examine my beliefs, which was exhausting at times but ultimately enriching. It is also a good place to learn what proportion of your behavior is determined by legal and ethical constraints, because there aren’t any. I became grateful for some of Korea’s societal rules, because those rules, at their best, are about making people comfortable; they provide an easy way out of the awkward predicament of not knowing what to do.

And when I flew back to Korea from Cambodia, Seoul had never before seemed so damned clean and well-organized. They still hadn’t named the streets, but that’s just a matter of time. And I suddenly wished I had packed my thermal underwear.