What other purpose does this forum have than to engage in useless discussion?rubberbaron wrote:Why engage in such useless discussion?
Everything is a big joke
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- No Joke Howard is my Hero
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air stone wrote:Of course I can speak Khmer otherwise I wouldn't live here.
That doesn't exactly square with what you say in the first post of your 'Perils of Dating' thread. By the way, the phrase is pidgin English, not pigeon you fool.
Background: I'm a 30-something American guy, relatively fit and attractive, have a basic grasp on Khmer that gets me through daily life without resorting to using pigeon English or reaching for Google translate on my phone.
I know I'm unloveable. You don't have to tell me. I don't have much in my life, but take it - it's yours.
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- I've got nothing better to do
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I'm cambodian. Cambodians smile when they are nervous, uncertain of a situation, being subservient, scared or ashamed. Smiles do not always have the same meaning as in the west and have multiple meanings depending on the situation, and to expect so would be rather naive. To the OP, Westerners also commit culturally in appropriate actions that are deemed taboo here like shouting at people and acting aggressively , don't see us crying like little girls even though its in our own country.
and kudos to chuang2u great knowledge and understanding of khmer culture !!!
and kudos to chuang2u great knowledge and understanding of khmer culture !!!
- Barang_doa_slae
- cannonballer
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I did a Cambodian smile in a France suburb project entry hall when uncertain how to react to a totally unexpected weed gift. Situation went berserk in a sec, the gift giver wanting to smash my face.cambodianredneck wrote:I'm cambodian. Cambodians smile when they are nervous, uncertain of a situation, being subservient, scared or ashamed. Smiles do not always have the same meaning as in the west and have multiple meanings depending on the situation, and to expect so would be rather naive. To the OP, Westerners also commit culturally in appropriate actions that are deemed taboo here like shouting at people and acting aggressively , don't see us crying like little girls even though its in our own country.
and kudos to chuang2u great knowledge and understanding of khmer culture !!!
Airstone, you need to interpret the context and other social cues of the situation to understand what the smile means.
If you smile at me I will understand, cause that is something everybody everywhere does in the same language.
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Gavin Mac? What happened? Was someone trying to collect that $400 bounty that was placed by the GGC on him? Does that offer still stand?Barang_doa_slae wrote: I ended diffusing it, otherwise one of today's top PP foreign lawyer wouldn't be alive
That's like, your opinion, man.
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Is it really a Khmer or Asian thing or is that just a result of far too many young internal migrant guys with access to cheap alcohol? I blame a lack of truly village based policing and no mental health treatment at all for the provincial murders and the aforementioned migrant situation for city ones.Chuangt2u wrote:That smile thing?
They do that to defuse a situation.
Shit happens, and it can happen more often than not, here. The Khmer smile, to me, shows well that part of their mindset that looks for a compromise, a meeting half-way, an agreement, a way to settle things between parties before problems become too big.
They do that because there really are no brakes on a situation once it's out of hand - things turn into red mist and body parts around here in the blink of an eye when folks get serious.
So they smile at the most insane shit, because, unlike us, they're aware of what can and will happen if things are taken seriously - and that smile is a coping mechanism amidst the chaos of life here.
As for the most of us westerners, we're still in the mindset of our home countries, where unless you're some kind of prison butcher, bikie hitman, or GI Joe, you're never likely to come across that level of violence. So we get threads like this that say "Why do they smile at such insane sh1t?"
Look to the recent thread about the axe attack to see what I mean. Most of us have never had to deal with inescapably being a part of that type of society.
And Cambodia is far from the worst offender in the region, some Filipinos cheered when the mayor in Davao was having street children summarily executed in broad daylight by death squads.