Living With Your Khmer Girlfriend
So there you are, an ex-pat boy, you have been here a while and you are either; a) not interested in, or, b) bored of, the girl scene here. However, you are not quite committed enough for a long-term, permanent, relationship with a pure white Khmer girl.
Somewhere along the line you have stumbled sideways into a grey girl, or two; and have decided to take the plunge, yup, you tell her to stop work and you move her into your apartment.
The harmonious joining of two such disparate cultures is not an easy or automatic thing; furthermore, let nobody persuade you that Asian women are subservient pushovers that kowtow to the master of the house without regard for themselves. This is a myth in part, I suspect, perpetuated by Western males having had the majority of their social contact with Khmer girls in some of the dodgy bars or karaoke parlours around Phnom Penh.
Despite all of this, the strategic goal of an affable living environment can be achieved with a little understanding and kindness, as well as the tactical co-application of cash and alcohol.
Let us breakdown the main areas of discord and assess them individually – in no particular order, or relevance, we have:
Television
One of the hardest things for your freshly obtained grey girl to grasp will be the fact that it is possible to watch a single television channel for longer than 15 seconds – give me that damn remote!
She will also be perplexed to discover that karaoke does not need to be played constantly at full volume whenever one is in the house.
However, once broken of these Khmer habits, and once she has worked out how to use the DVD player, it will be difficult to get her off the sofa of an evening.
By way of a cultural compromise, you should also be prepared to watch a lot of very, very, bad Thai and Philippine soap operas, as well as some iffy Chinese action movies
Cooking and Cleaning
A tricky area this one. Having moved your grey girl in, she will instantly want to start changing things and top of the list will be you getting rid of your cook and cleaner. She will start listing the faults of your current employees as well as casting doubts and suspicions about their honesty. The main reason behind this is not that she dreams of washing your dirty underwear herself, it is the fact that if she does all of this, you will have an extra US$xxx each month to spend on her/her friends/her family/ et cetera.
With the cleaning, it is best to just not get involved at all. Any Khmer female – hell, any female – will have a much better grasp of cleanliness than your average male ex-pat.
The cooking is an area that will vary from man to man. Personally I can not cope with rice three times a day for more than 3 days running. Your girl will consider this strange, but you have to be tough on this from the start. Fortunately I happen to a rather accomplished chef, and teaching several basic non-rice dishes was easy. Also, D”s Books on St. 240 currently have a rather large selection of Cookery Books. For the truly desperate, I believe that The Garden Centre Cafe runs a cooking course.
Telephone etiquette
Depending on where you collected your grey girl from, along with the exact shade of grey that she is, will affect the volume of phone calls that she will receive – and at what hour of the day or night she will receive them.
I know of people who have been plagued day and night by former customers of various bars phoning and wanting the girl to meet them for a drink, or dinner. Obviously they were the rejected ones during your greys search for a barang boyfriend. However, she will not want to sever all of those ties during the initial few months of the relationship, just in case?
If you are serious [or at least semi-serious] about your girl a big display, using a subtle combination of anger and jealousy, will; a) put a stop to these calls, and, b) help convince her that you are serious about making a go of things. Khmers believe that jealousy is a great display of affection; although be warned that that works both ways.
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