CommentaryExpat LifePhnom Penh

Growing Up as a French Teenager in Phnom Penh

Here is a brief insight on my life and of my few years as a troubled teenager in Cambodia, for whoever might give a damn and be patient enough to read the cluttered product of a foggy mind.

Yes, I think you’re getting more than you bargained for, and I’d surprised if anyone actually read everything, but what the heck.

I’m more or less French (by passport, education, culture, cheese-appreciation and mother-tongue, but my family is very pan-European, mostly British / Croatian / Austrian and what not) and my mom is a photographer, which was a great thing because she always took me along on her trips throughout the world: mainly Asia.

I was fortunate enough to skip a whole school year when I was 12-13 and traveled from Paris to Saigon over-land via Russia, Mongolia, China, and then back via Cambodia / Thailand / Myanmar / India / Nepal / Tibet / Pakistan and other *stan countries.

It was during that trip that I visited Cambodia for the first time, and to be honest, I wasn’t particularly fond. After 4 months on the road in China, Vietnam seemed like a haven of civilization (they had cheese! and baguette! and beautiful architecture! and strange, white, aerial creatures on bicycles, who troubled me for reasons that I was just starting to grasp) and I was not in favor of leaving it to go to dusty, noisy, and objectively ugly Phnom Penh. Phnom Penh’s charm has to be learned, it’s invisible at first.

My first night in Cambodia was quite memorable, but that’s perhaps a story for another post.

In 2002, Angkor wasn’t flooded with bloody tourists yet, and being able to witness a sunrise in complete solitude, at Preah Kahn and other temples, was a magical experience. I remember something about my mom forbidding me to pee on the side of road because of landmines. And “Red people” who killed a large part of the population for reasons that completely escaped me. But indeed, I immediately noticed that elderly people were rare, and that this country was young in an eerie way. I also have memories of dusty red roads and hypnotizing prostitutes on the riverside. Ha.

Anyway, after a year of complete freedom in Asia, it was hard to re-adapt to Paris and its grey, stressed-out and sterile lifestyle (or so I saw it at the time) and my mom and I were longing to go back to where we felt we belonged. On the road, or at least not too far from it.

Even though I was barely old enough to take simple, everyday life-related decisions , my mom really left the decision of moving back to Asia up to me, which retrospectively seems completely insane. But after a short year of gloom and awkwardness in Venice, we picked Cambodia for Visa-related reasons, and because the French school is decent, life is cheap, etc., packed our lives into 20KG suitcases, booked a month at the Billabong Hotel to give us time to find a flat, and off we went.

I was almost 15 when I moved to Cambodia, and even though we originally planned on staying just a year, I didn’t leave until I was 18 after obtaining my French Baccalaureate (our version of the IB/A-levels or whatever). My mom stayed three more years, using Phnom Penh as a hub to travel back and forth between S.E. Asia, Pakistan, and Europe.

Compared to Parisian schools, LFRD (Lycée Français Renée Descartes) is (or was) very small, and the atmosphere was very easy-going: quite a change from the hyper-competitive factory-schools I was used to.

Everything seemed incredibly easy and simple. Wake up, have breakfast on the riverside, ride to school on a tiny Honda Wave, attend classes with surprisingly decent teachers, flirt with girls, flirt a little more, eat a ridiculously cheap lok lak for lunch, attend more classes and spend the rest of the evening at Howie’s, flirtin’ on through the night and practicing my English, a language that I knew few rudiments of, but that I was very eager to practice.

I think LFRD would not have been the same without its share of emancipated, westernized and, I must say, lethal Khmer hotties. Let’s cut to the chase, girls were obviously the most interesting thing about being a a fair-skinned teenage god in Cambodia.

I was lucky enough (or not) to date the grand-daughter of an infamous minister (who shall remain nameless, and no, it’s not him, duh) resulting in a relationship that suddenly propelled me into a world of bodyguards, villas that impressed more with their phenomenal lack of taste than their attempts at grandeur, and overnight trips to Bangkok just to buy the newest LV bag – a sort of parallel universe, completely separate from the real Cambodia that I was learning to know and love.

The girl in question became a tad too eager to embrace French culture for her parent’s comfort levels, i.e. freethinking and feminist, so they decided to send her abroad to study away from all those French perverts and crazy teachers who actually expect Khmer students to learn about French (de)colonization of Indochina, the Vietnam war, and uh.. the Khmer Rouge (she was bound to ask “grandpa, is that you in that picture?” if she ever reached page 87 of our History book).

So yes, being 16, having your mom be away most of the time, and therefore being completely free, lost and careless in the giant social maze that is Phnom Penh was quite awesome. I became very fond of rock’n’roll and was part of a band that would regularly play at Sharky’s, and boy did we make fools of ourselves – just tragic.

Perhaps there are a few polite souls still lingering around this forum who might remember us, the band that sucked, the frogs who tried to sing in English, and failed at it just enough to entertain a couple of freelancers, so it’s wasn’t all for nothing.

Drugs were so cheap and so easy to obtain that they (almost) weren’t fun nor exciting, but add your crazy-nouveau-riche-khmer-kids friends to the mix and events take strange, exciting, and sometimes slightly insane turns.

I have vague memories of being completely hammered in the back of a ginormous SUV, being chased down by another ginormous SUV on southern Monivong and onto the other side of the Vietnamese bridge and wondering if I’d be ever able to hear anything again after the two shots that were fired, inside the car, for some reason that I still prefer not to know about.

I must say going to school here was quite interesting, in retrospect, for the simple reason that there were absolutely no boundaries between barangs like I, and our Khmer counterparts who also attended the school. Be it in love or in friendship, I think we were completely free of any social, cultural, or financial differences that might have separated us outside the school.

Of course we tried to emulate social classes and political parties that were present outside the school’s walls, but in the end we were just kids who didn’t really give a fuck about anything besides sex, drugs and rock’n’roll (if you had good taste, otherwise it was bloody hip-hop) even though we were VERY different from each other. A true pot-pourri of globalized teenage hormones.

You might be curious to know what kind of students you’d find at an international school in Phnom Penh. The following are a few categories you could use to classify them, and all the anecdotes mentioned here are true, with perhaps some small details changed – caricature or not, judge for yourself. Just remember, there are exceptions to every rule, by no means do I say these profiles to be universal, nor are they very serious.

WARNING: Any resemblance to yourself, your women and daughters or your bar-buddies is probably NOT coincidental.

The Expatriate Kids: Their family gets paid a huge bonus because Cambodia is a difficult place to live in, or so an HR rep decided. Their house, car, various staff and school tuition are paid for by the NGO, embassy, or company that the parents work for.

The kids never leave their safe, sterile and germ-free AC bubble. AC in the house, AC in the car, AC at school, and so on.

They don’t live in Cambodia, they live in a ghetto called Toul Kork, and what they see through their car’s windows on the way to school just looks like one of those boring, pseudo-intellectual movies on indochina that their parents love so much – every French kid here has seen “Indochine”.

Some of them are the teacher’s kids, and nobody really trusts them because everyone knows they’re snitches. They’re usually boring and not very curious, at least not about the stuff that it’s worth being curious about. They try to organize spelling bee events and study-groups.

They’d ask you if you could fetch some those yummy spring-rolls you always eat at lunch, and then hand you a 20$ bill, sincerely asking if it’s enough.

They don’t know how to say anything else than “hello”, “thank you”, and “one coke please” in Khmer, nor do they know what BKK1 or Sihanouk Blvd are.

Most of them have lived in various other countries in Africa, South America and the Middle East, but have no stories to tell about their time there.

Their parents are members of the Cambodia Parent Network and Phnom Penh Accueil, and they think that St. 51 is a place of evil and immorality.

They are convinced that their kids will be kidnapped if they leave them alone for a split second, even in front of the American Embassy, where the French School is. So many stories about human trafficking, you know.

Their goal is to make their lives as similar as possible to the ones they lived in the west, with the added perks of good weather and obscenely cheap staff.

Stay-at-home moms will kill time by organizing cooking clubs, charities, and breastfeeding gatherings. Finding a nice piece of fabric at the Russian Market will be the highlight of their week, their pinnacle of excitement.

They read Cambodge Soir and L’Echo, and watch TV5 Monde religiously every evening, mostly for “Questions Pour Un Champion”.

The Military Kids: Their parents are in the French army and on a mission to train Khmer soldiers and officers in the scope of a cooperation effort between Cambodia and the French embassy. Most of them had never left France before, and many have trouble grasping the fact that they left their tiny inbred village behind, and that they can’t go around singing the Marseillaise and saying that France is the best fucking country on earth, and still expect people to take them seriously.

They are very surprised to learn that France is actually not that popular. Most of these kids will follow their parent’s footsteps and join the army as well, or become policemen if they can’t get into an academy after graduating. They live in a gated community in the North of Phnom Penh, which they basically use as a giant bb-gun range.

They think that if you don’t know the latest French rap song, you’re a gay pro-american, anti-army pacifist asshole. They are absolutely useless at English, and suck at pretty much everything except P.E. and math, with a few, odd exception of course, like that dude who got the best musical theory grade in the Asia-Pacific region, which blew our minds, because he acted and behaved like a primitive brute.

By the way, they’re excellent rugby players and won the Cambodian championship 5 years in a row, if I remember well. This group probably matches the caricatural ideas that many Americans have of the French, but they do remind me of the rednecks and teabaggers back in America, who happen to be the most vocal French haters I know of, quite ironically.

Anyway, for some reason, girls absolutely love those guys, which might have something to do with the fact that constantly running around one’s neighborhood, shooting at rats with BB-guns in +30º temperatures does help maintain a pretty nice body.

The Rich Khmer Kids: Their parents own the country, politically and financially. They usually come from families that are either remnants of the pre-Khmer Rouge elite who fled to Russia, America and France in 1975, or they are simply offsprings of ex-Khmer rouges that managed to cling to power through the years, sometimes thanks to marriage with the Vietnamese. One of my exes was a good example of that, being half-Khmer and half Vietnamese, she felt alienated in both countries and constantly longed for France or America.

Interestingly enough, during my time, the RKK were divided into two sub-groups; the royalists and the nationalists.

Royalists were usually from the families that fled, nationalists were from families whose history they “just don’t know anything about” between ’75 and ’79. Apparently belonging to one group or another is a big deal, and there are serious tensions. Just imagine a bunch of ignorant kids playing grown-up politics in the schoolyard with all the seriousness and bitterness that they are capable of, learning the ropes directly from their experienced parents.

Whether royalists or nationalists, they often have bodyguards who wait in SUVs parked outside the school. Blame those guys for creating jams around the international schools: they just won’t move.

The RKK typically take notes with Mont Blanc pens on Hermes planners, because they’ll learn better that way, obviously.

They are also gun-nuts. My girlfriend’s 12-year old brother would carry a 9 millimeter in his bag to school and brag about it on FB by taking pictures of 100$ stashes, car keys to an expensive SUV and a couple of hand-grenades.

Female RKKs get their hair done at London Salon on Monivong and get lunch from Fresco (which was the first place of its kind to open in PP, as far as I remember). Most of them travel first-class to France during the summer holidays and frequent 5-star hotels, but are completely happy with tiled-walls, neon-lights and the widespread tastelessness of their surroundings when they’re back home in their 15-bedroom mansion.

They think that the Barang kids at school are fucking ridiculous with their cheap bags and non-diamond-encrusted, non-Vertu, sub-$1000 phones. Fucking hippies.

The RKK don’t know who Hitler, Mao Tze Tung, Stalin, Mozart, Einstein, Neil Armstrong, Christopher Columbus, Galileo, Bismark, Darwin, Plato, Pasteur, Bach, Picasso, Shakespeare, Baudelaire, Dumas, Dickens, Freud, Nietzsche, Kant, Voltaire, Habsburg, Martin Luther King, JFK, De Gaulle, Marx, Bell, Tesla or Leonardo Da Vinci were, but they don’t care, because cheating at tests is the more efficient approach to getting decent-enough grades. And anyway, these dudes are all dead, so why waster their precious time learning who they were?

They also sometimes outright refuse to do P.E., for mysterious “cultural reasons that you can not understand because you are not part of Khmer culture”.

They think that spending 500$ in booze at Riverhouse Lounge or Rock on a Wednesday evening is no big deal. They’re drunk beyond reason after two shots and their barang-friends take advantage of the remaining $490 worth of booze in the private, stuffy “Premium Super VVIP” room filled with 80ies Karaoke music, fake leather and bored hostesses who realize they won’t get a couple of hundreds in their bra as tip, at least not from the stingy Barangs. The RKK are the future elite and leaders of the country, and they don’t give a flying fuck, which might give them some charm. I find them scary.

The Missionary Kids: Doesn’t know what the missionary position is, really. They’re mostly Korean, because Mormons would never send their kids to a French school (ew). They have impeccable marks. They’re ace in physics, math, biology and chemistry, but secretly know that the earth is 10,000 years old, that evolution is the biggest hoax in history, that the big bang theory is just a silly American show and that learning “Critique of Pure Reason” by heart (!) is more than enough to pass the Baccalaureate of philosophy.

They see Cambodia as a giant point-based game: every person they convert gets them a point, increasing their chances of earning the favors of a mysterious bearded-chap in the sky. They deeply pity those poor Khmer people who go to the pagoda every week, who are afraid of ghosts and spirits and hold other ridiculous superstitions, because you know, talking snakes, people living inside whales and virgin births make so much more sense.

They are genuinely nice people, they’re just very uninteresting and eerily similar to each other, almost like clones. They speak French perfectly and never, ever make grammatical mistakes, but just they can’t wrap their heads around the fact that they can’t just quote the bloody bible in every commentary or dissertation they write. They also speak Spanish, English, German, Mandarin, Khmer and Latin perfectly, if perfectly means knowing all the rules and grammar but never actually using the language for anything else than academics.

During classes in French (80% of all classes), they take notes in Korean, because they’re super-humans who can listen to a teacher, understand what he’s trying to explain, and translate it simultaneously before writing it down quickly enough to keep track. They sink into depression, when you, the kid who just doesn’t need to work to get good grades, gets admitted at the prestigious university and they don’t. Yes, you’ve shaken their faith! But whatever, their Hello Kitty fetish will get them through these times of troubles and make their inner peace come back, eventually.

The Bar Kids: Yep, “you can take their moms out of the bar, but you can’t take the bar out of their moms”, as they say on Khmer 440. They are seen as lesser beings by the RKK, and largely ignored by the rest, except when they are hot, and female. And trust me, my oh my, they can be surreal. Some of them involuntarily create waves of insanity and despair in large portions of the school’s male population.

Their long, dark silky hair, disarmingly innocent lips, perfect figure and glittery Eurasian eyes are just a facade hiding an impressive collection of psychological scars and some serious daddy issues – and if you wait long enough, and play your cards smartly, they will throw themselves at you, hoping for a brief moment of tabooless passion, a reassuring and protective masculine presence, and the irresistible but very utopian dream of a parent-free future, which is quite understandable, really, since they are completely aware of the fact that they are nothing more than the by-product of a financial transaction, some sort of unplanned collateral expense that both parties would have wanted to avoid at the time.

The dad is usually a fat fuck, and it really defies reason to think that this sweaty piece of barang failure created the aesthetic wonder that his daughter is. The mom is a broken shell, addicted to ice or booze, destroyed by years of unhappiness and hard, degrading physical work, whose former beauty can still be felt if the room is not too bright and if she doesn’t try to utter a few words of broken English, in a broken voice. They know what they look like, and try to hide it with heaps of golden jewelry, whitening cream and layers of makeup. They try to look “respectable”. They are the proud owners of a bar or a restaurant, their reward after a hard life of sacrifices. After you get to know them, they are by far the most genuine and down-to-earth people you’ll meet at the school, and they can be a refreshing change from the typical Ambre-clothed expat mother who holds the moral values of a 4,99$ self-help book.

Bar kids are fucked up, but they’re fun, lively, curious, and unpretentiously friendly. They don’t care about your opinions on prostitution, your social class, your wealth nor your origins, and would like you to do the same. They just want to have a bit of fun, damnit. Sometimes it goes too far and you can see a drunk 16 year-old girl starting to strip naked at Reggae Bar because she had one too many. But it’s not her fault, she’d prefer to do it indoors, but she’s banned from Howie’s for life!

A common scenario is the “my real dad is in Battambang but my mom got married with her sugar daddy and he adopted me, so now he’s my daddy too, but he did not adopt my 5 brothers and sisters, which is why they’re not in this school” situation.

That’s often weird and interesting, sometimes fascinating, and one’s curiosity increases exponentially after every 5AM pillow talk, a chat usually filled with human tragedy, darkness, and the realization that the very conversation you are having right now is an anomaly of chance, a strange combination of serendipity, globalization and absurd causality. The Bar Kids are my favorite, and they have a talent for breaking my heart.

The Others: They’re from other international schools. Of course NISC kids are arrogant and snobbish yanks while the ISPP crowd hates us because we slaughter them on the rugby field every year. They’re weird, most of them don’t speak French, and we secretly envy their annoying American accents. Some of them go on to study at Ivy-league schools, so they’re obviously too cool to talk to us. They have nice gardens, but we have a nice building. We sometimes bump into each other at yearly formals and galas, but we rarely buy each other beers when we share the attention of a hopeful Howie girl. Don’t ask me why, because I do not know. I enjoy their company, and I often wondered if I’d like to move to ISPP.

The Weirdos: They are Barangs in Cambodia, and they don’t have a reason for being here. Notice how everyone is here for a reason? Well, some people don’t really have one, or it’s so complicated and wrong that it’s not really a reason anymore, but an excuse.

No, my mom doesn’t work at an NGO. No, my dad doesn’t work at the airport. No, we don’t have a cook, two maids, a gardener and a driver. We weirdos (and yes, I guess I would fit in this group) are here, quite simply because we love it, which is something that most other kids tend to find somewhat disturbing. Who the fuck would want to be here by choice? Whoremongers, junkies, and sociopaths – true, but not only.

We are usually the only ones who have visited the country before settling down. Most of us end up learning Khmer, to some extent. We like to mix with every group and develop machiavellian strategies to take advantage of our unusual situation: be friends with the expat kids so that you can enjoy their swimming-pool, be courteous to the military kids so they leave you alone or occasionally take care of dirty business for you, suck up to the RKK because luxury, money, corruption and power don’t leave anyone indifferent, and because in Cambodia, they are addictively fascinating, in an almost scientific kind of way. Be cool with the missionary kids because you’re still a polite chap, and because they might come in handy for homework or group assignments. Just sit back and watch them work, it’s quite entertaining, really, and you’re making them happy as a bonus. Of course, give the bar kids what they want, especially if they’re hot. Take them on a midnight motorcycle ride to the other side of the bridge, to the now-defunct “Blue Bar”, a.k.a. Maxine’s, which was the last true piece of paradise in Phnom Penh, and you’d be handsomely rewarded in their preferred currency, namely broken hearts, bruised egos and sporadic bursts of mind-numbing voluptuousness. But don’t take advantage, which is often easier said than (not) done, you’d regret it.

If you’re a political freak, don’t befriend other weirdos, they are your competition after all. But if you’re just a regular dude, why the hell not. My two best friends at LFRD were brothers whose mother was an amazing, world renowned Swiss-Italian artist, who decided to settle down in Cambodia for a few years because after extensive testing, she found that the Khmer vegetation allowed her to produce a unique kind of paper, on which she drew her art. Weirdos indeed, but still interesting and diverse people, and after all it’s the people that made those few years so… intense.

Mix all these groups together, add a cloud of culture-shock, half a measure of language-barriers, a generous amount of ideological incompatibility, perhaps a hint of racism and a coating of ethnocentrism, add a bit of sex, hormones, competition, arrogance, lies, tradition, religion, History, testosterone, tragedy, over-zealous parental control, love and of course complete and utter idiocy – and there you have it. This was LFRD during my years here, a constant epicenter of drama and a breeding ground for self-absorbed, culturally-split teenagers lost in the giant village clusterfuck that is modern Phnom Penh. The key was to make sure you were in a position to enjoy the show, and perhaps preservation instincts quickly taught be to be a spectator, rather than an actor, when stuff got crazy.

At the time, this social landscape seemed natural, easy, and actually quite normal – but in hindsight I ask myself how the hell I managed to play that game, for which I was absolutely not prepared, and which I was not even aware of.

Of course, moving back to Europe to pursue higher studies was like a very cold shower for most of us. A harsh awakening from the stimulating mess that Phnom Penh was when we left it. I don’t think I’ve ever fully adapted – or wanted to adapt – to my life in France, and I had this itch that I just couldn’t scratch: I HAD to come back. (I won’t lie, there also was a girl, but whatever, there always is.) Add a depression to that, as well as health issues and a complete lack of interest in my studies, and I had enough reasons to actually justify coming back. Not to mention a bloody broken heart that just wouldn’t heal.

Of course, it wasn’t the same thing. I didn’t have to navigate the weird LFRD ecosystem. For a while I tried enjoying bars and talking to strangers, but it all seemed so dull and boring. I discovered I actually hate alcohol, which was ultimately a good thing, because it let me focus on rebuilding myself physically and emotionally. Perhaps I became too focused on work, or perhaps I sank into a daily routine that just lacked the excitement I was expecting. Not to sound like a junkie, but you could compare the feeling to building a strong tolerance to a drug and not getting the amazing effects of those first few magical hits anymore.

A former classmate, also from the “weirdo” category, moved back last year after getting a BA in Khmer studies & language. He had all the tools needed to avoid fucking up, including serious funds. Now he’s a serial-whoremonger who completely forgot what the real world is like. This place destroys people.

In the three and some years I was gone, Phnom Penh has of course changed. Buildings are a story higher. Cars are bigger an shinier. Traffic has increased by a factor of ten, and Phnom Penh is using more power than the government can supply, resulting in constant outages. A few hidious buildings have shot up from the ground on Russian Blvd, symbolizing a strong and confident government, another symptom of Cambodia’s tendency to dig totalitarian holes for itself. But you already know all that.

I now see Cambodia indulging in an optimism that I don’t really know how to justify – perhaps I’m excessively sensitive to the complete absence of education, elites, ambition, rule of law, ethics, and vision that is so apparent here. I’m certainly also aware of the fact that growing GDP numbers and the construction of a few malls is not the kind of growth that Cambodia really needs right now. Economic growth means nothing if the rich become richer and the poor don’t benefit, forgive me if I sound socialist.

I don’t think Cambodia will find satisfaction in becoming a mere Chinese suburb, ruled by corrupt and vain men who see the country as nothing more than a vast array of cogs and wheels working in unison to fill their bank accounts. Perhaps they will realize that true development and progress doesn’t mean big cars, but the lack of need for big cars, or the respect of the rule of law, or things like healthcare and a solid infrastructure rather than pretty fountains around the independence monument, or the construction of a flyover fueled by the hopes of wowing a few ASEAN leaders who probably did not even notice it. Or filling a lake, simultaneously destroying lives for, as far as I can see, absolutely nothing beneficial to the country. Or yet another bank coming to saturate Cambodia’s tiny market. And so on.

Just because “things are better than they were 20 years ago” (how many times have I heard this?) doesn’t mean they’re good enough. 20 years ago the country was recovering from a genocide, of course things are better now, it’s called the catch up effect and it’s a tool used by ruling elites to convince lower classes that “look, the numbers are changing, so we must be doing our jobs right”.

I wish Cambodia could unshackle itself from the trauma and stigma of the past century without becoming a stronghold of bureaucracy and over-regulation that now defines and paralyzes the west, but perhaps that’s unavoidable.

The Khmer Rouge aftershock is subtle, and it takes time to see it (or at least it took me time), but it’s definitely there and the whole country is acting as if it wasn’t. Khmers are addicted to shortcuts, but there are none here. I think this is where the challenge lies, and this is what makes me pessimistic about the near-and-long-term future.

Voila. Of course, there are many more anecdotes that might become K440 material, like the giant fuckfest that was the weeklong baccalaureate exam in Bangkok, where 5 French schools shared the same hotel, or the time I went to a ladybar with a teacher, where I was unfortunate enough to witness him trying to flirt with middle-aged hookers in French.

Or the time a monkey attacked our classroom and left some very visible claw scars on a friend of mine. Or the time my best friend’s face appeared on the BBC homepage because he staged a protest outside the school when the administration decided to expel the few families that had been living on the top floor of an neighboring building for twenty years, without fair compensation.

Or the time I wrote an article about Aung San Suu Kyi in the school paper, which was edited and censured without my knowledge, because Total, which is very present in Myanmar, was also the sole sponsor of scientific equipment for the school lab.

Or the time I went for a dip in the black canal of Toul Sleng (Tuk Suui) for the sake of science, and more importantly for a good grade on a research assignment. Or the year during which I was the only student in my class – literature is not very popular, for some reason – and during which I basically got one-on-one lessons from teachers, which is a real luxury in any country.

Or the time I was asked to babysit an autistic and deaf 6-year-old khmer girl, and was able to teach her how to read after

long hours of frustrating but ultimately incredibly rewarding work. Or the time I shared a few beers (at Howie’s again, duh) with a jolly-looking and talkative American grandpa, who eagerly confessed to me that he had been part of the KKK in the ’60s and that he missed the Vietnam War, during which he could indulge in “getting rid of goddamn animals”, and that he came back to Cambodia to die, because “this is where it all started after all”.

Or the time I was in Siem Reap, riding on the back of my girlfriend’s motorcycle, which she took great care of steering straight into a very slow and very visible minivan, for reasons that only bar kids will ever understand. Or the time I got absurdly intoxicated and started writing random, endless stories and bullshit of mythical proportions on Khmer440.

Before I leave you to go get my shit together, I just want to make one thing clear: I truly love this place, and even though I may sound cynical and perhaps even bitter at times, that’s just because I am disheartened by the downward spiral the country is in. Perhaps it also has something to do with me being – dare I say it – mature enough to understand that the utopia I thought I lived in during my Khmer adolescence (what a concept!) was not one at all. It was just one side of the story, the side of the privileged white kid who thought Cambodia was his playground.

Khmerized

63 thoughts on “Growing Up as a French Teenager in Phnom Penh

  • Amazing piece of writing!

    Reply
  • gavinmac

    Very interesting and well written. I had no idea that half-white children of bargirls were a distinct subclass in Phnom Penh.

    Reply
  • It started off interesting, then lost its way a bit in my opinion. Too long by half. Still, better than most.

    Reply
  • Charlie3zero

    a very interesting read.

    Thanks.

    Reply
  • DetroitMuscle

    One of the best articles I have read on here in a while! You should turn this into a movie script. Screenplay time!

    Reply
  • Excellent, informative, and humorous.
    Best thing I have read on Cambodia for years.
    Kudos Khmerized

    Reply
  • […] Just because things are better than 20 years ago doesnt mean its good enough […] *Applause*

    Reply
  • Really enjoyed. Thanks for sharing.

    Reply
  • Holden Caufield meets Alexis de Toqueville. Bravo Khmerized. Brilliant price of writing.

    Reply
  • Peter Oxley

    What an amazing story and lifetime experience. Often it takes an outsider to see things as they really are, and you have done splendidly well in recounting it all. Despite all the negatives and the shallow hedonistic pleasures of youth that you went through, I can see that you have come through it with a positive attitude and a great love, and care, for the country that was so much a part of your growing-up experience. Bravo!

    Reply
  • Great article. Never knew shit went down like that. I agree with detroitmuscle! Screenplay worthy!

    Reply
  • Hey man, I was at ISPP. Awesome article, well summed up. Do you ever think of going back?

    Reply
  • I found myself reading some parts again just to enjoy the pertinent poetry of your writing.

    “…the realization that the very conversation you are having right now is an anomaly of chance, a strange combination of serendipity, globalization and absurd causality.”
    I have felt exactly the same at times. Life is strange like that.

    Who are you? What do you do now, and more importantly, where can we read more?

    Un énorme bravo!

    Reply
  • what a wonderful assessment, Khmerized (do you read and write??), and what a wonderful privilege being offered the live that you had. You have become an expert on Cambodian city life, and well described the fractured and colorful society that inhabits this part of Indochine.

    You have a great ‘gift of gap’, but don’t feel pressurized to put it all into a small essay. There are too many vignettes that need more leisure to present to an audience.

    Anyhow, take your time to put your experiences into a more accommodating frame. As a writer and filmmaker I would be interested to talk to you, if you are still in Phnom Penh. Of course, no promise of any ‘per diem’ type of compensation, just fun talk dating back to old times.

    I wish that one of these days you would find the true nature of the country, speak rural, and find the happiness that you touch on so many times. At the same time you may put all your experience in the cities into the context of rural, quite Khmer, degradation and, at the same time, aspiration to higher moral and Khmer values.

    Reply
  • Great article. Just to comment on what you wrote:

    “… I am disheartened by the downward spiral the country is in.”

    I just moved here a few months ago, and I love this place. I didn’t notice any downward spiral. I think this is one of the best places in the world in terms of quality of life. Europe and US are the downward spirals for me since the 1970’s. I really hope Asians are smart enough not to follow the path the West is going down. You described Paris totally correctly, grey and stressed out, that’s exactly what it is, much like most of Europe.

    Reply
  • melba del bagno

    I found this article interesting and thought provoking regarding a part of the world we seldom hear about. great writing

    Reply
  • Wow. Pick the bones out of that. Amazing.

    Reply
  • I think I saw you when I was in school there! I think your ex-girlfriend’s little brother is one of my best friends :).
    Anywho, a nice piece of writing, and you clearly described the scenery of LFRD.

    Reply
  • Phrakanong Pete

    This was an outstanding article. A lot of what you experienced earily mirrored what I experienced when growing up and going to school in Bangkok in the early 1980s.

    Reply
  • Well for someone with limited English at the age of 15, you certainly improved!! Very enjoyable article.

    Reply
  • Yes, well written if you enjoy that kind of lingo. But full of clichés and no details, no portrait of one single person, almost no recount of a significant single event. There are books like “Guns and Ganja in Phnom Penh” (or so) which (i guess) feed you more of the stuff you can read above.

    Wish the author had focused on individual people and significant events instead of a generalizing ramble, and had kept his linguistic talents on the leash, and you might have gotten a nice piece.

    Reply
  • Bravo !
    Superbe article que j’ai eu beaucoup de plaisir à lire.

    Great article, thank you !

    Reply
  • very nice read “you are lucky to have experienced cambodia at that period of time ,and the girls heaven on earth.
    regards anthony capetown

    Reply
  • Been here 5 years but first visited in 2006. I greatly appreciated your amusing and yet insightful critique of present day Cambodia and its surge forward to… well that remains to be seen. Cambodia’s problems–as are most problems in the world–are God-sized problems that stem from hearts divorced from their Creator. But that is often too controversial to suggest, and so we will continue to plug the holes in the proverbial damn with our NGO fingers as best we can. In that sense outside of reconciliation with God I think we all have good reasons to be pessimistic about the prospects of Cambodia’s future. A great read from beginning to end. Thanks.

    Reply
    • Olivia Appell

      Maybe you NGO-people should let things develop their own way.Cambodia doesn’t need a western-made future, but its own home-made matching their culture future.

      Reply
      • Well said, Olivia. But Cambodia doesn’t need a Chinese-, South Korean-, or Vietnamese-made future, either.

        Reply
        • anonymous

          I agree with you David. As it is their khmer culture which originated from mostly hindu/buddhist culture is horrible already.

          Reply
    • I’m sorry Matt, but if you believe that the only way forward for this country is through inevitable unification with your own private deity, I’d suggest not getting too involved so as to avoid your impending heartbreak.

      The saddest NGOs are the ones with a religious agenda. Everyone leaves disatisfied, including the born again “angels”.

      Colonial much?

      Hey let’s all ignore the lessons of history, because we’re “special” colonizing forces, we only invade your psyche.

      Reply
  • Great article! I hope you continue to write such good stories.

    Reply
  • Spliffster

    Just a great story, and so well written too.

    Reply
  • Got to love those bar girls kids, Half Khemer Half Swedish,Danish, French , American you name it now over 18 and strumming !

    Reply
  • Charkes Wardell

    Well done, wierdo. Very well written. Interesting, amusing and sad. Thank you.

    Reply
  • I know how crazy the public schools are from my own experience and private school from a cousin.I’ve always wondered what’s going on inside International schools every time i ride my little motorcycle pass by the schools. You answered all my questions for all these years. Thanks. Nice work, Khmerized.

    Reply
  • Hello, you state that you went to high school in 2002 at the age of 15, that means your classmates were of similar age, not less than 14 probably. Yet you state there was a whole class of kids you call the “bar kids” and describe their father as a fat fuck, mother etc. Hold on a second, if these bar kids were at least 14 in 2002 they must’ve been born in of before 1988. From what I heard there was no bar scene for foreigners here before 1993-, please correct me if I’m wrong, there were UN peacekeepers here, and that was pretty much all the foreigners? So how could there have been an entire class of bar kids in your school at the time ??

    Reply
  • Bernhardow

    Andy, Florian is describing a lot in his great, nearly poetic Article. I know he is genuine … dont try to discredit him and his great article. Maybe the “Bar Kids” came some years later … I give a shit. He wasnt writing his Biography … hes to young for that, hes just telling you his Story and … its a fucking good one. RESPECT … We where reading it in once …

    Reply
  • Bernhardow, Sure, absolutely don’t mean to discredit anyone I’m just curious about the history of this place, and this didn’t fit in with what I heard. The author did state that it was very common to have a scenario where a foreigner “adopted” a previous kid of a bar girl, which makes sense.

    Reply
  • Wow. I loved this article! Wonderful writing skills if I might say. I am currently living in Phnom Penh, and I loved hearing your take and perspective of the place and the people within it. Some great stories too!

    Reply
  • Olivia Appell

    I really love your article. To my opinion you get it all right – especially your concerns about Cambodia#s future. I’m german, but as a teenager I grew up in Paris – so I know about the different groups you find in expats schools. And growing up in paris made me realize what of the french culture is left in Cambodia: baguette – unfortunately no cheese! From 2004 to 2005 my husband and I had the chance to live in Cambodia. We just love it, and its history wrenches our hearts. I have to turn all of your’s attention to a lovely true love-story between a german journalist falling in love with a khmer prostitute suffering of HIV.He wrote a book about their story called: “Same same, but different” Now they are married and have 2 children – so maybe it is a happy end. (A film has been made of this book too) Cambodia, Cambodia – we will come back for no other reason than love for this country!

    Reply
    • BaoDaiDynamite

      I like your positive comment about Cambodia and its people. You seem a nice human being. Cambodia needs more people as you. Too many outsiders only come to chastise and denigrate Cambodia and its people as this and that. In case you ever need to know about the general feeling of the Khmer towards the Germans back in the day. The Germans were extoled and glorified because the Germans kicked the French asses during WWII. The French creativities and products were always spit upon, while the German products and creations were favored beyond compare.

      Reply
  • Great article, but the bar kids part with the barang as a real father seems like fiction. If the author started school at age 15 in 2005, there could not have been 15 year old barang bar kids in his class. In 1990 the country was still at civil war, it was a couple years later in ’92 that barangs with UNTAC came here so the first batch of barang bar kids would’nt start school until 2007, As for those, I doubt that the UNTAC people who were making kids with prostitutes in 92-93 would stick around this long and become what the author describes as a barang failure, their biological father, paying for french school for them. No offense but there seems to be some contradictions there.

    Reply
    • Black Palm

      There were Soviet and other eastern bloc barangs in Cambodia in the 1980s. Western barangs trickled into Cambodia by the late 1980s and early 1990s, culminating in 1992/93 with UNTAC and the inevitable influx of mixed-race relationships, from the UN and from all other walks of life and comprising a great deal of many nations, Francophone or not, but usually not. A child born in 1992 would be a teenager by 2005, so I don’t see any inconsistencies in this story whatsoever. Let it be said that this was a great story! Bitey! Much adored, cant wait for the film, or TV series or whatever!

      Reply
  • Get real people. Thee were always enough barangs around to bang a poor lass..even though it was not in large amounts. There were definitely a few of what he described. A white face stood out in those days and was given a certain privelage. Be he a media type or a diplomat or other, there were always a few even in the late 80s. Just in small numbers but a few. And they did like to have services rendered from maids to waitresses to even bar girls at venues not for foreigners but if you had status you were practically given a girl in Asia back then.

    Reply
  • BaiTongKheav

    Thank you for writing this. I am a high school student in PP and really don’t know such a thing.

    Reply
  • the new and improved superman

    There are a lot of holes in this article. But then don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story. It seems that most of his life is built around prefabrication and fiction. From what I’ve heard (from very reliable sources) he carried this persona into the work place and failed in every job he took on. Resulting in him having to leave because he’s run out of credibility.

    Reply
  • BaoDaiDynamite

    This has got to be the most revealing personal experience and opinion of the author. I am glad to read this. There are pieces of critical evidence that must be exposed of the ruling party of Cambodia. Not long ago, the Australians exposed the disgusting elements of the children of the ruling human vultures in Cambodia, and this article clearly add yet another level of authenticity to the whole deal.

    Regarding the “bar kids”, are most of them half-breeds? I didn’t read that section too carefully. It seems according to the author that these bar kids or at least those who were born females will end up being sperm containers for the white males from abroad. It seems they are discarded and outcasts in the Khmer culture. They are considered, no doubt, the disease carriers. Just a sad thing to hear about these humans.

    Well…that is all I have to say for now. I still believe with the scientists that Asians have the biggest brains in this world.

    Reply
    • johnnyj

      thats not quite what he was saying, he was saying that generally they had some heart breaking stories, or various trauma…

      he also said that they were some of the loveliest and most down to earth people he met, as were their mothers.

      Reply
  • @Black Palm, If you’re an average looking single white male in your 20-30s you’re still practically given a girl on a daily basis here. Wish I could’ve been here during the 90’s though.

    Reply
  • Mr Natural

    it’s a fantastic bit of writing considering his age. I don’t care if it’s got “holes”, it’s not a textbook for class. I think it would be a great loss if this guy did not pursue writing as a career. God knows we have enough IT ppl, lawyers, business majors, etc. I think movies would be a bit below the mark. Bit trashy. This has a nice blend of humor, sentimentality and reality. Anyone that can shed light on the Cambodian maze of mist and fog gets thumbs up from me. It’s a great perspective for that. I’d probably not even read it had it been by some disgruntled refugee from the West. Dime a dozen.

    Reply
  • johnnyj

    fantastic article. very well written.

    maybe its the bottle of wine. but it was a stunningly visual piece.

    Reply
  • SouzanaPS

    Really enjoy reading this “fact”. Well done!

    Reply
  • KonKhmer

    As I’m one of the teenagers in Cambodia,I always wonder what brings foreigners to live over here? Why don’t they want to live in their modern country? However, it is great to see a foreigner shared his life experiences in Cambodia. I just can’t stop reading since I finished the first few paragraphs.

    Reply
  • Paolaus

    Well written fact & experience, the author is a terribly fantastic artist, it gets the khmer readers come bit closer to know the motive behind why many expatiates choose the shit to spend their weirdo life here. May be it’s how individual life choice & preference is…

    Thx for reading this pseudo anecdote!!

    Reply
  • There’s a novel in you that I’d really like to read. Have you read much in the way of autobiographical authors, like Durrell or H. Miller?

    A novel and then a film.

    Please write more.

    Sincerely,

    A non-jaded Barang.

    Reply
  • Raphael

    Salut,

    Excellent article, quelques années plus tard après votre départ du Lycée Descartes, votre description des groupes d’élèves reste vraie!

    -Raph, un des kon kat barang au Lycée descartes

    Reply
  • Just re-reading this again after a few years. I hope wherever you are that you continue to write. You have a fine gift.

    Reply

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *