Phnom Penh: It’s All About The River
January 6, 2013
Phnom Penh is no gigantic metropolis, no sprawling mega-city, no endless urban expanse. Yet still it manages to be an incomprehensible orderly riot of humanity: ugly surprises, elegant demises, fitting fates for all sizes. No easy answers, no succinct demography, just a weird collage – slowly creeping out from the city center, to the edges of all sanity.
Phnom Penh is (is it?) the Midwest to the West Coast called Thailand to the East Coast called Vietnam, but then Phnom Penh is not fucking Chicago. Not metaphorically, topographically, or symbolically. Chicago is just an ugly new fact; barely two centuries old and squatting on the Mississippi; getting sick from drinking the blood of cattle and spitting up Jameson every March.
The River runs green for that parade but in 2012 over two-thirds of the town hails black or hispanic, the former denied a history and the latter granted the solitary date of May the 5th. All the Polacks and Bohunks can dress like Leprechauns and order a Guinness, but even a bastard son of the Emerald Isle four or more generations pissed down can tell you and tell you true, Carl Sandburg’s city pukes itself to sleep, laid to rest amongst muddy waters, the River that gave life to it all – all colors, no colors, but not Kelly Green. Never ever. Phnom Penh is ancient and old, fossils and bones and pottery shards; been here since before we knew about there, pretty much. Right?
Small town? Sort of. River town? Definitely. I was raised along the Mississippi, where the steep banks are abutted by railroad tracks and empty lots that, in decades past, stood crowded and fed the stockyards. The slaughterhouses. My Grandfather, knee-deep in blood. He loved being a mail carrier. A postman, after World War II. You would too, you’d love the fresh air and the freedom of walking, if you’d spent a decade frostbitten and hungry and rattling from riding the rails, homeless, doing odd jobs, selling fucking apples, ARMY translating to OPPORTUNITY, and actually mostly enjoying it … because he’d just spent a few years, prior to all that wandering, gainfully employed: down along the River, doing endless overtime on the killing floor, wearing waders to slog through the gore, every step accompanied by the POP of the bolt gun and dark red splashes.
Putting more food on more tables. Near enough unique amongst my relations, he never asked me why I was a vegetarian.
Phnom Penh is a River Town, very definitely. Mark Twain would sniff the air and offer wise utterances. Perhaps a novel about a young barang and his motodop companion, something suitably sermonesque, spelling out the controversy for the ages; still banned in the more puritan libraries and still boring on its own merits.
We orient ourselves by it, the River, the flowing waters, Our Tonle Sap. We lay a mental grid that reaches out from where it meets the Mekong, and thus reality, at an angle. Riverside itself is incidental; tourist central, plenty to eat and hordes of marching feet; the pretty gems and notorious turds.
All of it, for me, is relative to the River. I spent New Year’s Eve out on the River, with a dozen or two dozen friends, or known people (at least?), who I insisted on attempting to make miserable just because I was not in a good mood when we disembarked… But once out and away from shore, the most I could muster to protest the night was a piss poor whimper, because the waters we were rolling up and over and on and along were deep and dark and primal past petty reckoning, past my pathetic upsets or the POP of the firecrackers echoing wide, bank to bank. Bright red sparks.
Go look at the River. It is the reason the city sits here. The ancient fact of fresh water is why you’re drinking Anchor in that spot at 4am or arguing with a tuk-tuk at 3pm or anything.
If you love your life here, thank the River. If you love the River, get nervous when they talk about their plans, for Southeast Asian Hoover Dams, just upstream. It won’t stop any of it or change their machinations, your trembling nerves, your worries, your fretting. Still, at least somebody, somewhere, for the record, even briefly, gave a damn.
About the River.
Ned Kelly
Ned can also be found on Twitter.
Top image courtesy of Darren Wilch. More of Darren’s work can be seen at Cambodia Images.
I wrote once in my short story:
“Under the sun, crossed by the river Mekong and full of the beautiful girls, Phnom Penh is a paradise on the earth.”
As Khmer proverb says: water in the river always changes, except its name. I feel the same to you more or less, I am attached to the river.
Hey thanks Mr. Khmerbird, and my compliments on the quote and your site. Tonle Sap & Mekong definitely remind me of life back home on the Mississippi in some ways, though they’re very different looking rivers… Tonle, for instance, is wide and flat with shallow banks (in town anyways) whereas the Mississippi cuts through a river valley with limestone cliffs in places … Mississippi has some pleasure boaters, no commercial fishing, but you’ll mostly see barges and tug boats moving commodities downriver, you can hear their horns echo across the valley at night sometimes.
Minnesota has the river’s headwaters up North, I’ve been there (a long time ago), just a little stream with a suuuuuuuper powerful current, it empties out into a wetlands looking area and just gets wider and deeper as it goes. The whole river is within America’s lower 48, but other river’s have become sources of controversy or conflicts between states in the courts and so forth already.
When fresh water and related resources grow scarce, whoever holds position furthest upstream is going to have a lot of power of their neighbors.
Kinda like the bit about how when I read Ned’s writing, I read it aloud ‘cos this kid knows his way around alliteration, though (thankfully) not to a stifling extent. Dig the way this piece meanders and flows and tells a couple of stories along the way. Dig.
Nice piece.
Hey Ned,
I dug your article but gotta mention yer whacked geography. Chicago is nowhere near the Mississippi River. The Mississippi forms the Western border of Illinois, whereas Chicago is in the upper Northeastern corner of Illinois on the banks of Lake Michigan.
The Chicago River is dyed puke green every St. Pat.’s.
Other than that, a good read. The Mississippi is also a big part of my past.
Haha, yeah, obviously correct there. I’m talking about the Chicago River that links the Mississippi Valley waterways to Chicago and then the Lake Michigan. That’s what cuts through the city and gets died green. I conflate the two without thinking about it the same way I do all of the tributaries of the Mississippi in Minnesota, one becomes another if you’re driving along it and if you weren’t looking for where it splits it feels like it’s the same river.
The tributaries go (and don’t take my word for it, I’m obviously not a massive geography nut, but I’m glancing at a map) … Illinois River feeds into the Mississippi and it is formed where the Des Plaines meets the Kanakee. Des Plaines River connects to the Chicago River or basically becomes it at some point when the man made Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal begins. Heads straight into the city and then onto Lake Michigan.
So, good call. It isn’t quite as disconnected (at least in my mind) from the Mississippi as how you describe it though. You could, theoretically and bearing in mind that there are all kinds of man made obstacles to freely traversing any waterway now, shove off from a dock on the Mississippi in Minneapolis and land at a dock on the Chicago in Chicago without ever having to pull your boat from the water and drag it. So, I think it’s somewhere directly connected to the Mississippi as opposed to nowhere near it, but the error is still mine.
This was a rough draft that was posted – there are several other errors (less egregious ones) that I’d have fixed had I done a final, but I doubt this would have been one of them because I was glossing it all into one big river in my head I guess. Thanks for the compliments and good catch.
Ned,
No problem. Not trying to split hairs or act the geography nazi.
Your article gave me pause and I had to revisit a map to get my bearings.
It’s been awhile, but I lived in Chicago for 17 years and reckoned I would’ve noticed the Miss. somewhere in the vicinity.
When I recall Mississippi River towns I’ve lived in/visited…it brings to mind places like St.Cloud MN, Mpls/St. Paul MN, Red Wing MN, Wabasha MN, LaCrosse WI, Davenport IA, St.Louis MO, Memphis TN, Baton Rouge & New Orleans LA and so on.
-Roscoe
Oh I hear you, you’re absolutely correct with the geography, I was just trying to explain how my fuzzy view of the landscape had more to do with the whole huge mass of the Mississippi river valley than flat out ignorance. I just had it all puffed up into one thing in my head. I used to drive across country a lot (lived in the Twin Cities my whole life, but I’ve seen most of the lower 48 via driving around in vans with bands on tour etcetera) and it’s sort of like you lose sight of one river and then a few hundred miles later you hit another similarly impressive flow of water and it doesn’t register as being separate even when it is.
The Mississippi isn’t literally in the vicinity of Chicago, not saying that, but the rivers that are there are part of the Mississippi Valley waterways – the tributaries that feed into it. It all becomes a kind of maze of rivers as you travel along in a way.
So I guess if I were to refine the piece in that sense I’d make clear that the Big River that I grew up next to sort of dominates my mind when looking at the smaller branches of it, especially if I’m traveling out of the state south down 61 and then turn off at some point.
The Chicago connection is mainly due to the fact that so much of the river traffic entering both the Twin Cities and Chicago were related to stockyards and packing plants (see Upton Sinclair etc) and at one point my hometown of South St. Paul had the largest stockyards in the world sitting there… Rivers of food / rivers of death. That kind of crap. I never lived in Chicago, but I used to spend a lot of time there, sometimes for weeks, so I *sort* of know it and *sort* of love it and hate it at the same time (thus my St. Paul Irishman’s take on their St. Patrick’s day festivities.)
Anyways, thanks for the thoughtful responses and your mentioning of places like Red Wing etc certainly brings back massive nostalgia / homesickness for me.
Funnily enough I have just finished reading Jon Swain’s River of Time which is centred on his love affair with the Mekong and his feeling of lost at the fall of Phnom Penh.