Women Are Diamonds: A Brilliant Future for Cambodia Means Creating Female Employment Now

(Photo Illustration: Jared Rodriguez / t r u t h o u t; Adapted From: Adam Jones, Ph.D./ flickr)

Tuesday 20 October 2009
Op-Ed by Anne Elizabeth Moore
truthout.org

Women, according to the Cambodian maxim, are rice. Men, however, are diamonds. In a country in which 75 percent of residents farm rice for subsistence, this would seem a positive sign. Rice is central to Cambodian culture - and the Khmer language. The staple is consumed in such quantities, it forms the root syllable in the term for "kitchen": phtas bie. Translated directly: home for rice. And nyam bie or "to eat" literally means to eat rice. Early last year, rice production was so high that Cambodia exported the surplus to Africa and the Middle East, giving the poverty-stricken nation an economic distinction in a year of downturns. Rice is so central to Cambodian life it sometimes seems invisible. Foreigners gulping down a bowl of unadorned grains are likely to be asked: but where's the food?

On the other hand, diamonds are rare, valuable, and (this being the origin of the maxim) don't lose their value if dropped in water - or their sparkle if dropped in shit.

Yet the 36 young Cambodians of the Harpswell Foundation Dormitory and Leadership Center for University Women, the majority of whom are getting ready to graduate in the spring, aren't anything so common as rice. The first all-female dormitory in the country will open a second building in January to house an additional 48 young women students during a time when job opportunities for women are disappearing: garment factories are closing rapidly and hostess and karaoke bars - spaces for prostitution - open to replace them.

"The [Harpswell residents] are bright and they represent a precious, highly concentrated resource for Cambodia," founder Alan Lightman explains. "I began calling them 'diamonds' about three years ago, and the name stuck."

It's a potent reversal of the traditional maxim's metaphors, where "soiling" and "ruination" refer to the damage premarital sex can bring to a young woman's reputation (although not a young man's). But when sex work is a growing industry in a field of dwindling possibilities, it's going to take more than a change of slogan to forge a future for a new generation of women in Cambodia.

Physicist and novelist Alan Lightman is a seeker of creative solutions to real-world problems. He started the Harpswell Foundation in 1999 after a visit to Cambodia in this same spirit.

"The inspiration for the dorm came from a Cambodian woman named Veasna Chea, now in her late thirties," he says. Chea, the fourth woman in Cambodia to receive a law degree, lived underneath the law school building for four years in the mid-1990's with some other female students because no housing had been provided for young women.

It's an unusual story only in that Chea was able to resolve the housing problem at all. While university admissions policies do not technically discriminate on the basis of gender, girls in Cambodia cannot live in monasteries, where some boys reside while they attend school, and are prohibited by strong cultural mores and often their own families from renting apartments in the big city. Unless they have family nearby, then, most are left with no housing options and thus no university education. It's an impossible bind - even if the family can raise the cost of tuition and is willing to buck the tradition that keeps girl children home from school to tend for the home.

"When I heard Veasna's story, I made a commitment to raise funds to build a dormitory for women attending college," Lightman explains. The Harpswell Foundation has also initiated community-focused development, educational and agricultural projects in the Muslim, or Cham, village of Tramung Chrum, in the central Kampong Chhnang province.

The Harpswell Foundation Dormitory and Leadership Center for University Women, built in 2006 - a free-standing, three-floor shelter, officially unaffiliated with any of the nearby Phnom Penh universities - provides leadership skills, computer lessons and English language education to a select group of intelligent, ambitious girls from all over the country entering college for the first time. It also offers assistance in placing the young women in internships with NGO's, a significant advantage in a frustrating job market. In recognition of humanitarian service, the Cambodian government gave the Harpswell Foundation a Gold Medal in May 2008.

Accolades, however, don't create economic opportunities.

"As a law student, the job market is quite tiny for us," one Harpswell dormitory resident who wished to remain anonymous writes via e-mail. "Only getting your BA degree is never enough. Law students need to get further education, at least an MA."

"The amount of students who are chosen [to fill open positions] is quite small," she continues. Only around 30 can expect to find jobs in the field of law. It's a small percentage of the total annual number of graduates.

"The number of jobs is far less than the number of students who are graduated," adds ChanTevy Khourn, a sociology student also preparing to graduate in the spring. "Thousands of students finish BA per year while hundreds of jobs are available."

To make matters far worse for the job hopefuls, payola, bribery and corruption in Cambodia mean merit doesn't always play a role in selecting candidates. Corruption-tracking NGO Global Integrity gave the country a mere 46 of 100 points in last year's Global Integrity Index, partially because the well-written anti-corruption law has failed to pass into legislation in the 15 years since it was put down on paper. "Thieves can't catch thieves," opposition party leader Sam Rainsy told the organization a few years ago. "They cannot approve the corruption law. They will lose their income and their opportunities."

Young female law students, in this environment, are particularly worried.

Internships help. "Most people get jobs after doing voluntary work for six months or more," the anonymous law student describes. But education is still key: "As the employment market is small, it takes effort and hard study."

While education may be a way to move the country forward, and volunteerism an excellent means to bolster education with hands-on skills, the fact remains that Cambodia's job opportunities are few and far between. A full 40 percent of the country is in poverty, and most Cambodians survive on only a dollar a day. In recent years, Cambodian industry - most natural resources save rice were destroyed under the Khmer Rouge regime - had begun to edge away from agriculture toward garment export. Women's long association with textiles made them the go-to labor force in the emerging market. (A variation on the forementioned Cambodian maxim equates women with cloth and men with gold.) This sudden increase in women's economic opportunities had begun to shift, however slightly, the assumption that women were valueless.

But change was slow to come. Recent statistics indicate that 83 percent of Cambodian women are either unpaid or self-employed, as in marketplace shopkeepers. Of employed women in the country, 1.4 percent worked in the garment industry in 1998 and 5.5 percent in 2004. (Cambodia's first full year without civil war was 1999.) Ninety percent of the garment factory workers are women, and most are untrained (only in the last few years have significant improvements brought about greater educational opportunities and higher literacy rates for women). Advancement opportunities, however, are nil, even for the 10 percent of male laborers - most management positions are held by foreigners.

Still, the sector has brought some much-needed capital to one of the poorest countries in the world. Nationally, some estimate, approximately one million people (of the total population of fourteen million) rely on the income of garment factory laborers. According to research done by the Cambodian Institute of Development Studies, textile and clothing accounts for over 15 percent of the country's Gross Domestic Product, bringing in around $2 billion per year.

Most of this capital is coming from one of the richest countries in the world: 70 percent of the goods produced in Cambodian garment factories are for US companies. Since they opened their doors, Cambodia's clothing manufacturers worked under something called the Multi-Fibre Agreement, essentially a global quota system forcing a market for Cambodia's relatively spendy wares. This allowed the emerging market to operate in an environment not of sweatshop economics, but based on regulated wages, high-end fabrics and relatively decent labor practices. The impoverished nation essentially created a niche market in premium goods - turning, some said at the time, the usually negative affects of globalism on its ear.

The hidden upside to this risky approach was the profound effect on women's roles. Suddenly responsible for a huge segment of the national - not to mention their own families' - income, the women of Cambodia began to see their social status change. Anecdotal reports circulated that former sufferers of domestic abuse had left violent relationships, even as official statistics on domestic abuse steadied or, in some cases, increased: women reporting domestic abuse represents a possible sign of a developing sense of empowerment, and not, as most would assume, an increase in the number of incidents of abuse. More women in the country's most vital labor force meant more women in decision-making roles in the home - and, in some cases, more support for daughters interested in attending school.

The final days of 2004, however, saw the end of the Multi-Fibre Agreement. Once gone, it meant that Cambodia was forced to compete with cheaper, larger, and faster rivals like China and Vietnam. Some factories decreased production immediately.

Shut-downs intensified when the US economic crisis hit in September of 2008, decreasing orders and shuttering distributors almost immediately. By April 2009, almost 30 garment factories had closed, dropping an estimated 20,000 jobs in the process. (The country's two other trailing but major industries, tourism and real estate development, are also losing ground, forcing a combined job loss so far this year of around 45,000.)

Left in the place of these high-status jobs for women, however, are other opportunities. This year saw a rise of women entering the sex trade "as a result of the financial crisis," UN Inter-Agency Project on Human Trafficking announced in a July 20 report. The report tracked increases in the number of sex workers working in brothels, as well as those earning a living in the informal sex industry, or the metaphorically named "entertainment" sector, where women work at hostess or karaoke bars (commonly known as "beer girls") or at massage parlors.

Hostess bars began appearing in Phnom Penh around five years ago, corollary to the rise in tourism in the city. More recently, employees have been drawn to work in them after losing factory jobs rather than face the alternative - returning to the provinces to farm rice with their families. The Phnom Penh Post estimated in a story in July that 20 percent of hostess bar employees had lost jobs in the garment sector.

Unfortunately, the status lost by moving from the garment industry to the sex trade isn't as easy to reacquire. The derivation of the Cambodian maxims that equate women with rice, or with cloth, refer to her ability to be "soiled." Once dropped in shit - a metaphor for women's participation in a premarital sex act - neither rice nor cloth will ever be useful again. Sy Define, however, secretary of state at the Women's Affairs Ministry, has called the rise of women working in the informal sex industry due to garment factory closures "not serious."

Royal University of Phnom Penh Senior ChanTevy Khourn, 21, is concerned about the possibilities for women's employment in the future too, and has spoken to her friends in the garment industry about the factory closures. Some of her friends, she says, will continue working, "until the garment factory finish. Others said they will save their money and after they get married they will come back home or go somewhere else or live in Phnom Penh but stop working in the factory. They will start their own small business or become a tailor," she describes.

"Oh, and one friend said she is going to continue her study," Khourn adds.

Even the educated young women privileged - and relieved - to enjoy the support of the Harpswell Foundation are worried, and their own employment possibilities weigh equally heavily on the young women's hearts. "Talking about job market is the hottest issue in Cambodia nowadays," Khourn describes. "I think it will be more challenging and difficult to get a job due to the narrowing job market."

Khourn - Tevy is her nickname - is among the brightest of the Harpswell diamonds (a name the women have hesitantly accepted). The youngest of six children, she grew up farming rice alongside her family. One of her sisters left school in the eighth grade to earn money and is now employed in the garment factory; she sends their mother $10 per month to help out. Tevy, an avid learner, has used this experience to become an advocate for women's education. She has returned to her home province to give talks on the importance of girls in school. At the top of her graduating class, she works occasionally as a translator for NGO's and the radio station Voice of Democracy, and takes her leadership role at Harpswell seriously. She is only half kidding when she says she would like someday to be the first female prime minister of Cambodia.

Despite the economic concerns in the impoverished and corrupt nation, Tevy says, "I still believe that I can get a full-time job working with a[n] NGO as a researcher after I am graduated."

Tevy is about to join the first large group of women university graduates in the history of Cambodia in entering a dwindling job market. The Harpswell Foundation Dormitory and Leadership Center for University Women will then add an even larger group of students to their ranks. Other all-women's dormitories have opened in recent years as well. The decrepit job market will soon be flooded with eager and well-educated young women who won't be content with positions in hostess bars.

But how will they bring about the necessary change to their economy? Tevy has already devised a plan. "For the first five years I would like to work with a[n] NGO," she says. "I don't mind what kind of organization it is. What I mind are its missions and goals. I want to work with local and vulnerable people."

"Then," she adds, "I would like to work with the government. I want to help change Cambodia into a new face. I don't know that I can change Cambodia or not but what I am sure is that I am ready to help my community and my country."

Anne Elizabeth Moore, author of "Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity" (New Press, 2007) will be returning to Cambodia this winter to report more closely on the new dorm and changing job market. Learn more about her reader-supported fundraising campaign here.

The beauty of a bright smile

Dr. David Wyman and his family donated a year’s worth of dental supplies to the Harpswell Foundation Dormitory for University Women in Cambodia.

Wed May 07, 2008
Wicked Local (Arlington, Massachusetts, USA)

Arlington, Mass. - During a recent family vacation, Dr. David Wyman found a way to give back a smile. Friends and patients of Wyman know that he loves to travel and go on adventures with his family. And if there is a way that he can help or do a little something out of the ordinary to make it more exciting, he always finds a way.

Why Cambodia? Well, it is far away — always a first priority — and has one of the wonders of the world (Angkor Wat) — another priority. As well, it’s a chance to experience, with his wife, Maryellen, and sons, Micah, Ethan and Luke, how blessed they are here in the States and tohow war and poverty can affect people and places. The country was left devastated by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s.

“We want to teach our family about giving back, helping, little or big,” said Wyman. “In fact, the experiences during this trip were, by far, some of the most humbling that we have ever had.”

A few months before leaving for Cambodia, Wyman read the article “Lightman’s Dream” in the Living Section of the Boston Globe, which appeared Monday, November 19, 2007. Alan Lightman who is an MIT physicist and author, is the founder and chief supporter of a new three-story dormitory in Cambodia for university girls called the Harpswell Foundation Dormitory for University Women. This housing gives women the chance to pursue an education. After reading the article, Wyman called Lightman to express an interest in contributing dental supplies to the students. Lightman was very helpful and encouraged the family to visit.

After a few days of sightseeing in Phnom Penh, the Wyman family ventured off to find the dormitory. They spent an entire morning traveling down narrow dirt roads covered in trash and full of potholes, making U-turns and wrong turns, sitting on a trailer being pulled by a moped until they finally found it.

The house manager, Peou Vanna, generously welcomed the family, saying she had been expecting them. Vanna gave the family a tour of the facilities. The family found the dorm rooms neat and tidy with two bunk beds. The students, who range in age from 18 to 22 and study law, accounting and nursing, each had a desk covered with books and study materials.

On a weekly basis, the girls rotate duties such as cooking, cleaning and hand-washing clothing. The second floor had a small TV room with two computers for Internet usage. None have ever been anywhere beyond the province they were born and Phnom Penh where they study. To call home, they call the one or two individuals in their villages who have a phone and arrange a time when they can call back and have a phone shared with their parent. Each girl receives a monthly allowance of $16, which is carefully managed and can last the month.

The Wyman family had the opportunity to meet each girl and sit in a classroom talking with them. David enjoyed telling them a little about Harpswell, Maine (their school’s namesake town) since he is from Maine himself. The girls, who spoke a fair amount of English, used every formal greetings, bowing to acknowledge each person separately before they spoke to us as a whole. Having spent an hour or more with them answering their questions, the Wyman family took group photos and provided them with a year’s worth of dental supplies. The students told the family that they will be smiling very brightly when the Wyman family comes back for a visit!

The family called it one of the highlights of the trip but felt their contribution was a drop in the bucket compared to what Lightman has done.

“Putting aside the toothbrushes, paste and floss,” said Wyman, “we touched them and they certainly touched us. It was a wonderful lesson about how much you get from giving.”

My Believe - by Peou Vanna, Dormitory Manager

“I believe that in the near future Cambodian women could do a great deal with self confidence and freedom.

I think it is important to promote young women who have a great idea and motivation to become the heads of big organizations.

I also want to see women who have had families, who have to deal with real life, I want them to apply their life practice and their experiences to change Cambodia in gender equality!!”

A dream come true: Lightman lights up future for Cambodians

Adjunct Professor of the Humanities in the Program in Writing Alan Lightman sits in the mosque built by his and his wife's Harpswell Foundation with villagers, Muslim Chams (of the San Cham sect). Photo / Elyse Lightman
Alan Lightman, at right, shares a meal with Cambodian students. The Harpswell Foundation, which he and his wife founded, built a dormitory for the women so they could attend college in Phnom Penh. Photo / Elyse Lightman
This mosque, built by Alan and Elyse Lightman's Harpswell Foundation, was completed in December 2007 and will be inaugurated this week in Tramung Chrum, Cambodia. Photo / Elyse Lightman

May 7, 2008
Donna Coveney, News Office
MIT News (Massachusetts Institute of Technology, USA)

The inauguration this week of a new mosque in the Cambodian village of Tramung Chrum will represent a dream come true for residents of the Muslim enclave in the overwhelmingly Buddhist country.

That dream was brought to life by Alan Lightman, MIT physicist and writer who a decade or so ago, with his wife, Jeanne, made a pact to turn their energies toward humanitarian pursuits. Without a firm direction or funding, they formed the nonprofit Harpswell Foundation in 1999.

Within a few years, Lightman, Jeanne and their daughter, Elyse, would attend the opening of a school built in an impoverished village 50 miles from Phnom Penh, build and manage a women's dorm and leadership center in Phnom Penh and, finally, build the new mosque in Tramung Chrum.

Lightman has been entranced by science and the arts from an early age. Appointed professor of science and writing and senior lecturer in physics at MIT in 1989, he went on to head the Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies from 1991 to 1997 and helped found the Catalyst Collaborative, a collaboration between MIT and the Underground Railway Theatre of Boston in 2004. His novel, "Einstein's Dreams," published in 1993, was an international bestseller and has been translated into 30 languages.

Professor Lightman first heard of Tramung Chrum, a tiny Muslim village in Cambodia, in 2003 from the Rev. Fred Lipp. Lipp, who had been working to keep young girls in school in Cambodia with his own foundation, told Alan of a village whose only school had a roof of palm fronds. Lightman's imagination was kindled and in December of that year he and daughter Elyse accompanied Lipp to Cambodia.

What they found was a village of about 500 people--mostly Muslim Chams, one of Cambodia's ethnic minorities. With neither running water nor electricity, the local economy was based on subsistence farming and menial labor.

"We were overwhelmed with emotion," Lightman says softly, his eyes lighting at the memory. "These people had gone through tremendous suffering since the mid-1970s and the genocide perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge, and in spite of that they had hope and resilience. "The best expression of that hope for the future," he says, "was when we arrived, mothers holding babies came up and asked for our help to build a school.

They had nothing, lived in abject poverty, but wanted a school, a future. We were so moved."

Funded by donations from family and friends, the school was finished in the summer of 2005. Where a roof of palm fronds had been now stands a concrete-and-steel-girder school.

The impetus for his next project came from Veasna Chea, a native of Tramung Chrum who had made it through law school in Phnom Penh by living with three female classmates in the space on the mud floor beneath the school for four years. Male students could live in the Buddhist temples, but in the gritty capital, there were few, if any, safe places for women to stay, so few women attended college.

Once again, he took on the challenge, found contractors and built the dormitory and leadership center.

But that was only the beginning. Lightman reckons, "One-third of my waking hours I spend on Cambodia daily." From sleeping security guards to the students' need for medical procedures, funds for upkeep, teachers, food and all life's issues, Lightman is the go-to guy. His daily electronic communications with the dorm represent the sole exception to Lightman's personal ban on using e-mail.

He is presently trying to raise a $500,000 endowment to keep the dorm and all it offers up and running in the future.

As he busied himself managing the dorm and leadership center, the villagers of Tramung Chrum, thrilled with their school, asked him to build a mosque. To Lightman, health care seemed a more compelling need, but he understood that it had to be what the entire village wanted. So he asked the men and women of the village to choose five representatives each, and he met with the two groups separately. The men wanted a mosque, the women wanted health care.

A meeting was convened to give the 10 representatives the opportunity to address the whole village and then vote on which project to take forward. After a civil discussion, all the men and three women voted for the mosque. The reason? The mosque represented their spiritual health, which they considered more important than their physical health. Lightman recognized that the cultural value and tradition was different than his own and that the social fabric of the community depended on the mosque.

"They are so proud," he says, "so deeply happy with this mosque."

Back in the girls’ dorm at 37

Room in the Hapswell Foundation dormitory in Phnom Penh
(Photo: http://harpswellfoundation.org)

Phnom Penh Post, Issue 17 / 05, March 7 - 20, 2008

Alternative-media guru Anne Elizabeth Moore, 37, has just spent two months living in the Harpswell dormitory in Phnom Penh. The Harpswell foundation, established in 1999 by author and physicist Alan Lightman and his wife Jean provides educational opportunities to academically gifted young Cambodians. Most colleges here do not provide housing for students. So in 2007 the Harpswell foundation completed its first three-story dormitory for female college students in Phnom Penh. Now 36 female students, who have all been admitted on the basis of their potential to be “future leaders” in Cambodia, have moved in. Invited to live at the dormitory as part of the Foundation’s new “Leadership Residency” program, Moore found herself sharing a room with three of Cambodia’s female future leaders – all currently 18 years old. “I’m on the bottom of a bunk bed,” Moore said. “Did you put the part where I’m 37?” Moore has written more than 30 “fanzines” – publications by fans of various cultural phenomena – on topics as significant as pie and as meaningless as international coffee-shop chains. Her work has appeared in The Onion, the Chicago Reader and Punk Planet, which she helped to found. Originally from South Dakota, Moore headed back to the US in February to promote her new offering Unmarketable: Brandalism, Copyfighting, Mocketing, and the Erosion of Integrity. Before leaving, she spoke to the Post’s Cat Barton about poisonous frogs, toilet paper feminism and the Cambodian media.

So how’s the all-girl dormitory been?
I walked into the dorm and I was subsumed. Thirty-two girls on me like a tidal wave. I feel I didn’t emerge from that for three weeks. I didn’t know what to think. Oh my god, I’m 37 and I’m moving into a college dorm. I didn’t even live in a dorm at college – I’d not immersed myself in that environment deliberately, it terrifies me.

What have you been doing?
Media has become and seems monolithic and unapproachable and untouchable for the vast majority on earth – it is true in the US and in Cambodia. So everything I do is about giving people more access over the tools they need to create it, options to create their own media, a way to approach it critically, not negatively, but with an awareness, especially of what goes into making it.

What do you think of the media here?
I can’t address the Khmer-language magazines. I can’t read Khmer and I can only understand some conversations about food and baby animals. But the system doesn’t provide much access. For example, ten of the girls in the dormitory told me they wanted to be journalists but their parents said, “No, it’s too dangerous.” I think the system of development that is being sought after in Cambodia promotes an opportunism in media that is not about retaining genuine historic interest or genuine political beliefs, or reflecting the day-to-day life of Cambodia, or Cambodians. All this stuff – as true as it is for regular people in any class, of any race, in any system – is especially true for young girls. They never feel represented in the news media and that’s why magazines like Seventeen proliferate; because they are the only thing that in any way represents them. But things like that do not promote education, just things you can buy.

What’s day-to-day life like at the dorm?
I wake up at dawn, the dorm is three floors and it is a self-governing, girl-run organization. In this mode of creating women leaders, they are great – they definitely run their own community. They do all the cooking and cleaning. A different room cooks and cleans each day. We cook and eat on the floor. It’s always rice and something on it – “food,” as they say. If I have a stomach problem and I’m just eating rice they will ask me “Where’s the food?” and I tell them that in the US we call rice food, it’s not just something to put food on.

Is it easy to talk to the girls?
What they lack in vocabulary they make up for in earnestness. Like, once, there was a frog in the toilet. I was in there taking pictures, getting up close, like “Wow! Look at this, girls!” And then Melia, one of my roommates, saw the photos and she didn’t know how to say “That is a very dangerous, poisonous frog, leave it alone.” But she said very carefully, “Oh. No. That frog. If spit on you big problem.” I’ve been learning about other ways of communicating.

What did they think of you when you arrived?
When I came one girl said, “I hear you’re a writer and you write about what the government does wrong.” I think there were two kinds of writers for them – good ones, like Alan Lightman, and ones like me who write about what the government does wrong. I have tried to explain to them that I feel sometimes, when you write about what happens, you end up writing about what the government has done wrong. But I also write – much more importantly – about allowing people to do what they want. It took a couple of days to sink in.

Have they been inspired to make their own media?
It is a normal approach when you start thinking about making your own media that anything you’ve done or experienced appears normal because you have been through it. Not newsworthy. Then there is also desire for approval – whether from the government to ensure safety or from your peers and social group. All of these things combine to not give these girls in particular much impetus to express things they find difficult or weird. This happens not just in media – here there is this culture of make do with what you’ve got. For example, if you have run out of toilet paper, don’t just buy it; wait, think about it. I say, “No! You need toilet paper. It is a precondition of being a feminist.” Well, it’s not, it doesn’t matter, but I wanted them to have it all and not be stressed out if they run out of toilet paper.

How has your teaching them to make zines gone?
At first it was average teenage girl stuff – which is great, there is room for that. But these girls are different, so there has been a second wave of engaging with the ideas, thinking about what they can do with them. There has been a second round of results too. Every project has levels of engagement, time of disengagement when no one is paying attention. I came in one day and Savy, one of my girls, said, “I’ve finished my first zine, I’ve transcribed the history of Phnom Penh from Khmer to English and drawn illustrations and I was in a hurry to publish it so I snuck out and made photocopies myself. Here’s your copy.” Then it was like, “Wow, I’m here for two more weeks and I have nothing to teach you.”

Is there space for people to express themselves in Cambodia?
For me, it’s interesting being here and trying to suss out what the lines are. That’s how you are able to change them. It’s not that I’m dedicated to changing it or coming back even, but as a cultural critic that’s how I work. Mia Farrow comes to town and we ban her from laying flowers and close all genocide sites near the city. To deny it? What’s the message here? This incident drew that line a little more clearly.