Whenever I said hello to him, he would instantly reply and pull up a plastic chair for me to sit down in. He would pepper me with questions about where I come from, what kind of work I was doing in the school, and why on earth I gave up a comfortable life in the US for one of hardship in Cambodia. In return, he told me about how he had come to live and work in the tiny town nearly twenty years ago as math teacher at the secondary school. I listened to the rich tapestry of stories about his that he told me, which revealed the history of Cambodia itself over the last thirty years. He told me his childhood memories of life under Pol Pot, the Vietnamese occupation, the war between the government and the few remaining Khmer Rouge forces, and his discovery of Christianity in 2003. These days, I go to Mr. Pon’s house on the edge of the market every Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday afternoon. We have an agreement that he will teach me Khmer for an hour, and that I will teach him English for an hour. It is a good system because otherwise I would have to pay for a language tutor, and introducing money into this kind of relationship would simply ruin the element of having a linguistic exchange.
Mr. Pon is a religious man. He told me the story once during a rainy afternoon of how he discovered Christianity. “Before I love Jesus,” he said, “I was a Buddhist. I did very bad things! I drink, I play cards, I go to the bars with the girls. But I was very unhappy.” The path to Christianity was first laid out before him through the medium of the radio. Sometime during the 1990’s, A Korean missionary started broadcasting sermons from the capitol in Phnom Penh. On Sunday nights, Mr. Pon would listen. He was intrigued by what the missionary had to say, and became resolved to find out more about this new and strange religion that promised salvation and absolution from a prurient past.
The history irony of this situation has not escaped me. For nearly four hundred years, missionaries from Europe have been trying to convert the indifferent Buddhist populations of Indochina with limited success. Spanish and Portugese missionaries arrived from the newly established colonies in the East Indies during the 1600’s failed to gain abundant followers, and the same can be said of the French when Cambodia was a protectorate of France. Monsignor Miche, a missionary bishop, wrote in 1861, “It is certain for anyone who has lived for some years in Cambodia that one can never obtain much success with Cambodians, unless it is through buying the freedom of debt slaves; but that method is long and costly (Osborne, 65). The fact that Korean missionaries in Cambodia have had some success in attracting converts in modern day Cambodia is somewhat ironic. However, there could be other reasons behind this. It is well known in Cambodia that South Korea is a very rich country due to the amount of water filters, televisions, cooking-ware, and television soap operas that the country produces. It would be reasonable to consider that someone drawn to a Korean missionary would be attracted to the wealth that that person represents. However, I could not say for certain that this is the case with Mr. Pon.
As time went on, my English-speaking friend began to think that becoming a Christian would resolve his unhappy state. “When I first joined my church in Siem Reap,” he says, “I said to myself ‘Wow’! I’m so happy!” The summer after he joined the church in Siem Reap, he returned to the town of Anchor to teach math and share his newfound faith. He built a small church next door to his house, and started encouraging students to follow him. However, the school director got word of it and was very angry. He removed him from his teaching position, and moved him to a position in the school office. He says that he wants to go back to teaching, but that he is afraid of the school director. I can understand that perfectly, because I myself am afraid of the school director. Mr. Pon believes that Christianity is the key to ending Cambodia’s long history of corruption in Cambodian society. He has told me that if more people were Christians in Cambodia, then there would be no corruption. I want to tell him that Christians are capable of being corrupted, but I do not want to shatter this dream of his. I would rather him discover this on his own.
When we learn English together, the choice of reading material is the New Testament of the Bible. Admittedly I am not very religious, but I did attend an Episcopalian school for some six years of my life. This means that while I may not believe in everything that the Bible says, I did sit through enough chapel services, sermons, and mandatory religion classes to at least pretend to know what I am talking about. The choice of reading is not a problem, and usually I can discuss passages in the Bible without giving myself away as an utter pontoon. To some degree, I actually enjoy it. Most ESL books are incredibly boring, so the fact that I can read and talk about devils, Romans, betrayal, and the apocalypse is actually pretty exciting. The scene itself is actually quite amusing. Picture in your mind two men sitting in the back corner of a concrete cell phone shop reading the Bible together. One is a young white foreigner, and the other is a middle aged Cambodian man. The words of the text come slowly out of my mouth as if the reading were any other text, and my pupil follows along very carefully.
Mr. Pon is a clever man, for Socrates himself would be proud of him. When we come to a phrase or a word that he does not understand, he tells me. He asks me regular questions about the grammar of the reading, with particular attention to the use of tenses, but sometimes he is curious about the meaning of the text. During a reading of the gospel of Matthew one afternoon, something in the text struck him as being rather odd. In one particular section, one reads that John the Baptist is imprisoned and that Jesus is occupied with other affairs. Upon discovering this, Mr. Pon stopped reading and asked me why Jesus did not want to help his friend. The answers that came to my head such as Jesus was busy or that God wanted Jesus elsewhere, seemed like a very poor answer to his query. I stalled for time with a great big “Uhhh,” and masked my inability to give spiritual guidance by telling him, “Well…maybe Jesus was going to go and help his friend, but then he got a sudden call on his cell phone for him to do other things.” Mr. Pon always appreciates a joke, and he laughed while squinting and clapping me on the back. I smiled as well, albeit not at the flimsiness of the joke or the slight awkwardness of the situation. What I was pleased with was Mr. Pon’s ability to question. Here was a man who had given up a large part of his culture, which has alienated him somewhat from the community, for something he believes in strongly. Yet, he was still willing to suspect any small piece of his new faith as being circumspect. I admire him for that.
Mr. Pon is my Khmer teacher. I currently use Cambodian for Beginners by Richard Gilbert to study with him for a number of reasons. For the most part, it has very good sections devoted to the grammar and proper usage of the language, which I am lacking in. Our language training sessions in Kampong were so heavily devoted to learning huge lists of vocabulary words that I found myself blurting out words without knowing how to put them together. Imagine going into a bookshop and finding a person at the checkout saying several times, “Buy book me!” That would be the English equivalent of my inchoate language skills. With Mr. Pon, I practice putting these words together so that I can use them later.
Sometimes these sessions spark cultural hints into what I should and should not be saying. I heard someone say once, “Okoon thom thom” (Thank you big big) as a kind of humorous substitute for, “Okoon chur ahhn (Thank you very much). I started saying this, and I used it once during a Khmer lesson with Mr. Pon. He laughed upon hearing me say this, and said that all the Vietnamese soldiers used to say this during the occupation. He then proceeded to tell me this story:
Once when I was a boy, a Vietnamese soldier killed himself in our town. He missed his family a lot when he came to Cambodia. One night he took his gun and went like this (Mr. Pon uses gestures and motion. He indicates that the soldier propped his rifle up with the butt on the ground and the barrel in his mouth, and used his toe to press down on the trigger. He pats his head to show where the massive hole in the top of his head would have been). My friend and I discovered him on the way to school the next day.
I have stopped using okoon thom thom completely.
Mr. Pon and I are friends, one of the few that I have in this town. Our curious friendship has grown from simply sharing the common interests of language and history, to one of debate, cultural exchange, and trust. We tell each other things that we cannot tell other people in Anchor. “I can tell you these things because you are a foreigner,” he says to me. “If I tell the people in Anchor, I am in trouble.” I take his trust very seriously. You may take this brief entry as an introduction to Mr. Pon, dear reader, but I only tell you so much. I tell my views on Cambodian society, and what it is like to be abroad and so far very far from a world of the familiar and the comfortable. I treasure even being able to have a basic conversation like this in English during the long weeks that I spend at site.
We enjoy each other’s company, and I will miss Mr. Pon when I leave the town of Anchor in a year and a half.
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