Cambodia Stories: The Marriage Tourist of Pursat Province

While even the sleepiest provincial capital is a bricks and mortar affair, the areas between them are what we call ‘shack territory.’ Recently, I found myself deep in the shack territory between Pursat and Battambang, where the only signs of life are a few ramshackle huts, overrun with mangy dogs, naked children, and leathery old farmers. It is the last place you would expect to find a foreigner.

As the day heated up, I began to scan the sides of the road for one of the ubiquitous little drink shops set up by old women with bright orange coolers. Passing though a small village, there was a collection of coolers set up on mouldy wooden platforms at the bottom of a muddy slope. I veered to the side of the road, dropped the kickstand, and scrambled down.

I got a strange feeling as I approached the vendors. There was a small crowd of people gathered by the road, and as soon as they saw me they began chattering in Khmer. They weren’t just surprised to see a foreigner. Something unusual was happening. But I could only catch snatches of their conversation. Some of the kids raced off, and soon many more began to arrive, and before I?d even ordered a bottle of water, I was surrounded by a throng of gawking villagers.

When Khmers in the countryside see a foreigner, they often expect to hear an unfamiliar language. So when you speak Khmer, they wave their arms as though they don’t understand or listen closely without realising that you’re speaking their language. Such was my problem when I asked for a bottle of water. The girl behind the cooler stared nervously at me. I repeated the request a second and a third time. And, finally, an old man sitting nearby shouted exactly what I’d said, ‘Tuk sot muoy.’

Just then, I heard another voice behind me say, ‘I can help you communicate if you?d like,’ and for a moment I was as confused as the girl. Turning my head, I saw a young foreigner standing to my left and realised why the villagers had been acting so strangely since my appearance. I thanked him for the offer and held up the bottle to show him that I already had what I wanted.

But this was such an unlikely place to meet another foreigner that I felt obligated to make conversation. The boy looked like he was in his early twenties. He had pale, smooth skin and sandy, tousled hair. He was dressed in a green T-shirt with dark sweat stains around the armpits. I looked around the village. There were no bikes or cars or busses. I couldn?t guess how he?d got there.

‘What are you doing out here?’ I asked. ‘This is an unlikely place to bump into another foreigner.’

He seemed shy and awkward.

‘I live here,’ he said. ‘With my wife.’

So he’d met a girl in one of the capital’s bars and come out here in order to deliver a donation to help satisfy papa’s thirst for beer and mama’s hunger for gold.

At least, that was my suspicion. But being too tactful to put the question to him directly, I went about probing him with less obvious questions.

The boy wiped his misty glasses on the front of his shirt. He tended to avert his eyes from my gaze. He was from Canada. He belonged to a church group there. They’d introduced him to his wife.

”They showed me a picture of a Khmer girl one day,” he said. ”They asked me what I thought. I said she was really pretty.”

So they told him he could go to Cambodia to meet her, and if he liked her, he could marry her and take her to live with him in Canada.

”So you just met her?” I asked.

He told me he’d been here once before. That’s when he first met her. It was more than two years ago. He’d spent a month in the village, decided she was as pretty as her picture, and married her.

”So you’re just back here on holiday with her?”

He’d returned to Canada alone. The paperwork required to get her a visa took time and money. He had to sort out problems that he could never really explain. The reason he was here now, he said, was that he’d just lost his job. He owned a house, which he was trying to sell, and he was planning on importing her in the near future.

As I listened to him, I felt that, despite being the only two foreigners in this isolated place, I had little more in common with him than I did with the locals. What struck me most was the simplicity with which he expressed his opinions. I asked him what he thought of being married to a Khmer girl.

”They’re good,” he said. ”They’re never bad. They don’t always listen to you. But they never do anything bad.”

I wasn’t used to people thinking in such simple terms. But everything he said was similarly uncomplicated. He had a view of the world. He never said anything to suggest he’d reflected about it. And so he seemed unable to see anything that might complicate this happy picture of his life.

I’d only spoken to him for a few minutes. So I didn’t know him well enough to pass judgement. But there was something so foreign in his way of thinking that I didn’t quite know what to make of him.

He may have been a genuinely kind and generous person. But he only left me with an impression of striking superficiality. He saw her picture. She was pretty. And that was all. And there was something in this simplicity that I found offensive.

I wondered that he never seemed to consider her point of view. How much did he know about her culture? Did he realise how likely it was her parents who decided she should marry the foreigner? Would he approve if he knew they just saw him as a way to get an endless supply of beer and a dazzling array of gold trinkets from the dutiful daughter in the land of plenty?

I wouldn’t say marriage should be based on something as intangible as ‘love.’ But I couldn’t believe personal compatibility didn’t even come into the equation. He based his decision on a photograph. And that made him seem, for me, simply bizarre.

To make sense of him, I had to imagine him back in Toronto. That’s where I grew up, but he wasn’t like anyone I knew before, and I could only conceive of him as a social retard, teased every day at school, whose membership in the Christian cult had deprived him of contact with the opposite sex.

The church group was acting as a sort of social club, the secular equivalent of which would be an online dating service or the personals pages of the local newspaper, that set up its members with poor, uneducated, peasants from undeveloped and war-ravaged countries.

He didn’t think he was exploiting anyone. But he didn’t really marry to help anyone either. He was certainly making her a Christian. And that was certainly a condition of the marriage. In fact, I couldn’t think of any other reason for the group to set this boy up with a girl from Cambodia.

You could say that both the boy and his girl were happy. So why should anyone feel offended? He got a pretty wife, who never did anything bad, and a convert to offer up to his God, while she got a ticket out of shack territory, a foreign donor for her family, and an opportunity to experience much more than she’d ever do as a farmer’s daughter in rural Pursat.

What I think bothered me was the mendacity of the whole situation. In typically Christian fashion, the boy’s cult had disguised selfishness as kindness, compassion, and generosity and then smothered all reflection with dogmatic simplicity and superficiality. With these people, ignorance really is bliss.

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