In Praise of Messy Lives by Katie Roiphe Read Free Book Online

left, we had stopped to listen to a band made up entirely of musicians with various limbs blown off.
    The American student mentioned the possibility of the embassy sending a helicopter to lift us to safety. The British couple chuckled. The Australians exchanged glances. Here was an American attitude of the type Greene satirized so elegantly in
The Quiet American
. And of course, he was right. The assumptions about movement that we generally take for granted, namely, that there will be someone we can pay to take us to where we want to go, suddenly seemed naïve and oddly irrelevant.
    If only we had flown. We had thought of flying. Most tourists, with the exception of grubby backpackers and committed bohemians, fly from Siem Reap to Phnom Penh. From the sky you can see how astonishing the landscape is: Rivers the color of chocolate milk running through grassy fields. Sugar palms sticking up from the flat earth. The rich green and gold brush of rice paddiesdivided neatly into squares. But then, in Cambodia even flying involves all of the country’s eccentricities: according to the local papers, a plane was recently delayed for hours by a stray dog wandering onto a landing strip.
    I climbed back into the cabin because I could feel my face getting burned. I took my old seat next to my husband, who was still immersed in the
Herald Tribune
. In fact his nonchalance was beginning to attract attention. The round, merry Malaysian man on my other side started calling him “Moon Man” and “Man from the Moon,” since he was the only person on board who did not seem to be alarmed by our situation, this when he wasn’t congratulating me on having such a tall husband.
    Six hours later, a rickety wooden boat with a motor tied to it with string sputtered up next to our ferry. Half of us got off and stood on the boat in the sun. There wasn’t room to sit. Water pooled at our ankles, seeping in through the gaps in the wood. The makeshift boat tugged the other boat, slowly, to deeper waters. We could see the angled silhouettes of pagodas and palm leaves against the flame-colored sky. Eleven and a half hours after we set out, we arrived in Phnom Penh.
    As we stood on the dock in the gathering dusk, I felt shaken. One of the shirtless crew members standing on top of the boat with a cigarette dangling from his lips tossed my luggage to my feet. I tried to smile at him but he didn’t smile back. And I saw that what had distressed and slightly shocked me about the boat ride was the hostility, the contempt of the crew. When a group of passengers went up to try to talk to the captain, he waved them away like an emperor dismissing the girls coming to fan him with banana leaves. In fact the crew was finding it amusing, if anything,to watch white faces turning various shades of fuchsia in the beating sun. They sat on the roof and smoked. They plumped up our luggage like pillows and sprawled across it, joking with each other in Khmer. When the resourceful British woman with the water filter tried to ask them if someone was coming to help us, they imitated her question in a shrill, mocking tone: “Excuse me, is a boat coming to help us?” Normally, when there is not a crisis, one doesn’t feel this kind of hostility; the language barrier is strong enough, the moving boat itself enough distraction, but there, stuck in the middle of the lake, in the stillness, the brilliant green of the jungle melting into the sky, it was impossible not to see. Of course, we had been experiencing this hostility, this mocking, all along: in the faces of the children hawking postcards, in the sinewy necks of the cyclo drivers who pedaled our heavy foreign bodies up hills. Of course, it’s always there in a tourist culture—when the people are poor and the tourists are rich, the power smolders and turns very easily into something ugly. It is the modern version of the rage against colonials in
A Passage to India
or
The Jewel in the Crown
. It is the contempt of the