Mr. Huoy

If I were to describe Mr. Huoy to you briefly, I would choose the adjectives of “short” and “friendly” as ones best suited to someone of his description. His height is indeed of limited stature, being about 5’1,’’ but his smile is one that is perfectly radiant against his dark skin. Mr. Huoy carries himself with his head held high, but for some reason his eyes are always focused on the ground. When he greets me, I continually have the sense that he is thinking about something else. I have never known him to bear any look on his face other than the flat, expressionless one that most Cambodians make, or that famous smile.

Mr. Huoy is the person who I primarily teach with; my “counterpart” if you will. He was born to a family in the town of Pourk during the same year that I was. He has lived in that town for much of his young life, having only visited one province other than his own. He visited Phnom Penh once for a Peace Corps conference lasting several days last month, and I took it upon myself to show him everything that the capitol city had to offer in our free time. We went to the expansive New Market, the Sorya Mall, Independence Monument, and Lucky Market one evening while we both were in town. I laughed when I put him on an escalator in Sorya and his eyes went wide as saucers. He seemed to like the hamburgers and ice cream we had for dinner, but did say that it was very filling. “It’s a good feeling,” I said, knowing how little I feel like that on a regular basis. For some reason, Mr. Huoy was very preoccupied by all of the cell phone stores in Phnom Penh. For a man who had lived in one small town all of his life, it must have been his comfort zone.

After graduating from high school, he went to a teacher training school in Battambang in order to become an English teacher. His family sold some of their land so that he could afford to buy a new motorcycle, making it easier to go back and forth between his home and school. Upon completion of teacher training school, he faced a problem that many young teachers face when they come out of the RTTC. He could have either accepted an assignment in a remote, rural high school far away from his family, or he could bribe someone in the ministry of education to get a better posting. As he did not have the money to do the former, he decided to take a teaching position in Angkor High School at the beginning of this school year. It is there that we met.

It must be hard for Mr. Huoy to live in the town of Anchor. When we teach, he continually complains that he feels tired, hungry, or not motivated enough to go and teach classes. He lives in a dormitory with the other teachers who come from far away, and he goes back to his home every other weekend. He tells me that he misses his family very much, and that he cannot understand why I would want to travel to the other side of the world if it meant that I could not see my family for two years. I tell him that our situations are indeed very hard, but that we both must dao soo (overcome, carry on). I know that the Cambodian government pays Mr. Huoy very little, but I have to wonder whether a general pay increase would increase the motivation of teachers. If they were still put in these kinds of situations, would more money simply erase their misfortune?

Whenever I teach with Mr. Huoy, I never know what exactly is going to happen. I usually come up with a lesson plan and present it to him during the spare minutes we have before class. Even though we have a general plan as to what we are going to do, it does not always go that way. Sometimes little changes happen during the lesson, and I have to improvise off of what he says or does. I have taught with him enough times to anticipate some of these changes, but occasionally I am caught off guard. Even when this happens, I have a pretty good sense of what to do.

Mr. Huoy also plays the troh-ooh, a Cambodian instrument that is a relative of a Chinese one. It is a "spike fiddle," and he plays with a certain degree of skill. Every so often, I go to the school or his house in Pourk to play music with him. I read off of what Cambodian music has been transcribed into western notation, and he plays everything he knows by memory. Lately, I have been keen to play the kim, a sort of dulcimer like instrument, and he thinks that he can find me a teacher.

I do not know how long Mr. Huoy will stay in this town because he will eventually have to find a wife. Once at a teacher’s party, we were discussing the differences between American and Cambodian marriages. When I asked him if he was looking for a wife in Pourk, he replied, “No, I think it is better to find a wife in Anchor. Maybe less expensive.” One has to remember that when two people in Cambodia decide to get married, it is tradition that the family of the groom pays the family of the bride what is known as a bride price. This is essentially a dowry in reverse. While this may seem as a delightful role reversal at first, it has the negative effect of reducing women to products of commerce. This in turn directly affects how marriages are formed, as Mr. Huoy pointed out.

While on the subject of marriages, I should write that Mr. Huoy revealed to me recently that he is rather enamored with a certain student. In America this would be quite disgraceful and unacceptable, but relationships between students and teachers here are more or less accepted. I have been careful to hold my tongue while discussing the matter with him, but I would not feel so uncomfortable if the student didn’t sit in the front row of a class we both teach.

He first told me about this when we were at the aforementioned teacher’s party. The red pungent wine that the local people make from fermented rice was flowing freely, being consumed in a rapacious manner by nearly everyone there, and the musky substance had loosened his tongue. He began in a slurred speech after checking his cell phone for messages. “I think this student is interested in me,” he said. I asked him why, and he said that the student had been sending him messages with questions about the English language. The messages were becoming more and more friendly, which led him to believe that the student was interested in him. I asked him if he was, perchance, interested in the student himself. He said he was. “You know her. She is in 10D,” he said. I asked him if she was the particularly bright one in that class, and he said that she was. “Oh no…” I thought to myself (The affection Mr. Huoy bears for the girl has not affected things in class, but if it does I will have to say something).

Later that month, after we had both returned from Phnom Penh, he told me that he had bought a gold necklace for her in the Sorya Mall. “I feel love for first time,” he told me. No matter how hard I tried to put that phrase into a Cambodian cultural context, I was still perturbed by it. The age difference between the two is not too bad (she is sixteen and he is twenty three), but it still violates that teacher/student separation that I have always known. I have told Mr. Huoy on many occasions that if he were serious about pursuing something with her, he would have to marry her. Given Cambodian custom, this would mean that he would have to move to Anchor permanently, and move into the house of her and her parents. “You would have to live in Anchor for most of your life,” I said to him. Given that he does not particularly like living here, it is something that he will have to think about at some point. To be honest, I cannot truly see him living here with his teenage bride. However, this is for him to decide.

No matter what Mr. Huoy does, I do hope that someday he moves out of that awful dormitory on the edge of the school either because he has found a wife or because he is going home. It will be good for him.