The Restaurant

I have stopped eating lunches with the host family. Over the course of the past year, I sometimes got the feeling that it was a nuisance for them to feed me during the day. I also wanted a little more control over what I ate. The most common lunch, as well as dinner, was a watery fish soup served over rice. I started to loathe this meal as soon as I took the first bite of it. Once the loathing started, it became a fixture of intense hatred. I calculated that I could eat fish soup approximately twenty seven times before I was forced to leave town for a few days. I think I have an essay somewhere, written on a particularly hungry night, where I claimed that this staple represented a desultory cuisine of rural Cambodia. This in turn reflected something deeply shocking within the confines of the culture’s psyche. The whole thing was utter nonsense, for Cambodian food is special in its own right. I just needed to eat something other than fish soup. In any case, I now pay the family a little less money each month for room and board. I was worried that they would object to being paid less, but I struck a deal between Peace Corps and the family that seems to make everyone happy.

I now eat lunch at a restaurant a few houses down from where I live. It is called Haing Bai Si Noohen (roughly translated “Five Star Restaurant”). On weekdays I try to get there before the 12:00 rush when the place starts to fill up with diners. Most of the people who eat there are among the professional class: bank workers, NGO workers, and government officials traveling between Varin, Angkor, and Siem Reap. They drive their sleek new Honda Dream motorcycles or big black SUV’s up to restaurant and park in the dirt beside the road. A wide thatched roof covers the wooden tables and a concrete slab out front and darkens the back corners of the restaurant. I almost always sit at the tables out front. The light there is better to read by, and I feel a little safer against mosquito attacks. When I sit down at a table, one of the waitresses comes over and tells me what the restaurant has to offer on that particular day. In addition to the usual fare that all Khmer restaurants have (fried rice, fried noodles, and boiled noodles among other things), the restaurant offers chicken soup, beef stew, pork and tofu stir-fry, fried fish with vegetables and peanut sauce, and fish soup. All of these dishes are quite delicious with exception to the latter; I have never ordered it. In addition to the waffles I buy from the restaurant in front of my house, my diet has improved dramatically from eating here.

Occasionally some of the Khmers present will want to know why there is suddenly a foreigner in their midst. More shocking is the fact that this foreigner speaks Khmer to the waitress and eats Khmer food. After a few preliminary questions, the demand to “practiss Inglesh” with me will arise (For a culture that favors indirectness over confrontation, I have always been a little put off by this question. Even if the conversation is a sincere expression of curiosity, the initial statement makes it seem artificial. To my best recollection, I have never begun a conversation in a foreign language like this. For example, the idea of me sidling up to a Frenchman somewhere in the countryside and demanding that he “pratique l’art de conversation française avec moi” sounds ridiculous [I’d probably suffer an insult or two]. How rude of me to assume that he has the time and patience to do that! Then again, it does not seem that Cambodians share this concept of time as a valuable commodity, so it may not be an issue for them at all).

However, I had an interesting experience with the other day when I sat down to lunch. A fairly large group arrived at the same time that I did and heard me speaking to the waitress. When we both settled in at our respective tables, one of the men asked me where I was from. His speech was fluent, but there was a hidden trace of an accent.

“America,” I answered, but I was too curious to say anything more. “Where are you from?” I asked.

“California,” a woman said. It is not the first time that I have met ex-pat Cambodians returning home, but it is not something that happens every day. Upon the need for more information, I gave them my prepared speech about what I was doing in Cambodia, where I learned Khmer, and how I felt about living in the countryside. They gave me their story in return, which was much more interesting than what I had to stay. Both the man and woman had lived in Angkor during the Pol Pot years, the only ones I have met so far. When speaking about it, the man took a spoon as a demonstration and scooped out barely enough rice to cover the spoon. He said that this was about as much as they had to eat on a daily basis during that time. He left Cambodia in 1981, and settled in Longbeach, California. They come back occasionally to visit family members that are still here. Despite how much I told them about the Peace Corps’ mission in Cambodia, they still could not believe why anyone would want to willingly give up a life in America for a life such as this one. They are not the only ones, for barely anyone I speak to understands why I am here. In any case, they bought me lunch and wished me good luck for the coming year.

Eating at Haing Bai Si Noohen has so far given me two things: better food and interesting conversations. Let us hope that this continues.