Into the rice bowl

* Note: Some English conversations are translated from Khmer.

When you think of Cambodia, do you think of rice? No? Well, think again. It may lack the substance of heartier grains, but rice is the world’s second most-produced grain, and Cambodia’s most important crop.

Cambodians eat rice with every meal. Even noodles, an alternative to rice, are eaten on top of rice.

“Have you eaten rice yet?” is probably the country’s most common phrase. And no, it doesn’t mean “Have you ever eaten rice?” it means, depending on the time of day, “Have you eaten breakfast, lunch or dinner?”   

Eating rice was my biggest fear about living in Cambodia. I ate my curries and stir-fries riceless, leaving gooey mountains of the stuff on my plate at restaurants or friends’ houses. I couldn’t imagine having to eat those mountains in Cambodia — not only occasionally – but three times a day.

I’ve now conquered my rice fear, and I’m often the one to ask, “Where’s the rice?” on those rare occasions when it’s not brought to the table at restaurants. But until recently, I hadn’t seen where Cambodia’s rice comes from.

I’ve seen rice fields, of course. Drive down (almost) any Cambodian road and you see the oceans of bright green grass flanking either side of the blacktop, gravel or dirt. It doesn’t look like rice, but it is.

The Peace Corps doctor told us not to go to the rice fields. We’d get malaria and dengue, she said. Or parasites. Or a thousand other diseases that bring festering sores and death.

Her warnings kept me away from the rice. So did the heat and the thought of work. For a year, I’ve watched the orphanage’s children (and adults) traipse to and from the fields, planting and harvesting the rice I eat three times a day.

I didn’t join them until recently. Three French visitors staying at the orphanage wanted to get a closer look at Cambodia’s rice. So, finally, did I. 

 

The orphanage’s older girls tried to dissuade me.

“Will you go to the rice field?” I asked the pack of high-school females lounging outside their dorm. 

“No!” They chorused. “We want to watch TV.”

(In this context, watching TV means watching discs of Khmer music videos.)

“I will go the rice field,” I tell the girls.

They look shocked. “Why?”

“Because I have never been, so I want to go,” I say.

“But so hot!” they say. “Your skin will look like hers,” they add, holding up the dark brown arm of one of the girls.

“That’s OK,” I say, and shrug.

“Wear a long-sleeved shirt so you won’t be so hot,” they say.

I follow their advice. I wouldn’t have a year ago. Wear more clothes to be less hot? How can that be? I dismissed this advice when I heard it from a volunteer before I came to Cambodia, and I dismissed it when I heard it countless times from Khmers who are practicing long-sleeve shirt (and pants) wearers. 

But I converted to the fashion after finally trying it for myself. Long sleeves absorb some of the sun’s heat, and prevent skin from deep-frying, thus keeping the body cooler. Life’s great mystery solved.   

I’m wearing a long-sleeved shirt when I say goodbye to the girls, but they still say, “Oh, Emily, hot.”

I smile and say goodbye.

About 20 of us pile in the truck, a big, military-looking rig that often carries 50 or more. Packed in are a motley of little boys, one little girl, a couple high-school boys, the orphanage’s Khmer director, the French supervisor, three French visitors, and me.

Rolling around the truck with us are a couple liter-size Coke bottles that are now partially filled with water, an enormous metal watering can, and a white plastic water tank with shoulder straps. Not much working gear.

We bump out of our village and through town. On our way out, we pass speed limit signs, rare sights in Cambodia, and even more rarely obeyed. The signs are white circles ringed in red. “40, 60, 25,” they read, in that order, within a distance of 100 feet or so.

“HAPPY NEW YEAR 2010” declares one of the final road signs. This permanent-looking sign hangs above a couple green signs hinting at big cities to come.

We pull over on the right side of the road, but no one gets out. Maybe we’re lost? Nope, just going the wrong direction. A short turnaround later — but one that almost results in a moto casualty — and we are parked at an angle so steep it’s like we’re a ship about to flip.

Down the highway and into the fields we march, outside a small house occupied by a middle-aged woman and some older boys.

I munch on a turnip given to me by one of the orphanage’s boys and watch as he and the other high schoolers prepare for the fields, stripping off their pants to reveal cartoon-print boxer shorts.

Meanwhile, the Frenchies and the Khmer director have disappeared. No problem, I think. We’re all going to the same place, right? Wrong. I follow the boys to a pond on the edge of the rice fields, but they tell me to go back the other way, down the road the Frenchies have presumably followed.

I go that way, but all I see is tall grass. I don’t see any people, and I have no idea where we are supposed to be going.

So I go back. I tell the boys that I don’t know where the road is, but no one offers to show me the way. They’re too busy scrambling aboard a flimsy wooden raft.

So I start down another “road,” across a bridge made of bloated plastic bags, and into the rice fields.

I walk the only way possible, by slurping my feet in and out of the mud and water. 

The rice field is trying to eat me. My feet are strapped into sandals and aren’t going to escape, but the field doesn’t know that. It’s hungry. With each step it sucks at my feet, trying to drag them into its belly. Only by using the rice as handrails do I stay upright.

I slurp for a while, trying to focus on how new and fascinating an experience this is and not how tedious the slurping is. Flecks of fish flit in the cloudy brown water. The sky is bright blue with bulbous white clouds that look incapable of producing rain.

I’m focusing on these bright details like a Zen master when I hear my name. I’m being called back. I’m a barang. I’m not supposed to go this way. So I turn around and walk back to the house. I’m nearly there when a voice tells me to stop.

A couple of unknown boys are paddling toward me in a canoe. They want me to get in. The canoe is shallow and short, not one of those American-Indian numbers with a row of men singing and grunting while they row. This is a three-seater, and I’m the third.

The boat looks like it’s barely balancing atop the murky water, but the boys tell me that me and my backpack (containing my camera and cell phone) are safe aboard. I clamber atop the middle seat, and we’re off, with a paddle and bamboo pole to guide us.

Now I don’t need to pretend to Zen. The scene is beautiful. I tell the boys this, but they don’t reply. The blue, blue sky, green, green grasses and white clouds reflected in the water are nothing new for these rice-field dwellers.

But they are visual bliss for me. I face back toward the house and watch the captain paddle us through the water, laced with weeds and grasses that hiss like snakes as we glide over them. 

We cross a big pond and then slip through narrow passages armed with branches that claw my arms. The captain then rows us to what must be shore. He tells me to get out. He and his boatmate are returning home.

Walk straight, the boys tell me. Straight into the green expanse that is everywhere. Why straight? I can’t see anyone. But they can.

“Boo! Boo!” the boys yell toward a white baseball hat rising above the green. (Boo is the polite way to address a man who is a lot older than you.) They tell me that the wearer of the white hat is Taingho, a guy who lives and works at the orphanage. They tell me he is returning to the house. I feel better knowing I won’t be completely alone in this mass of grass, and start slurping again.

Traversing the rice fields is not unlike tackling the mud coating the road to my house. Especially the other night, when the mud was so ravenous that I had to take off my sandals and walk barefoot to my house. I wish I was barefoot now, but don’t want to carry my heavy sandals.

But the rice fields contain a lot more water than the dirt road. In sections, the water rises past my knees and into thigh territory, thinking nothing of soaking my rolled-up pants. The water is hot, too. Each step is like liquid sunburn. Fortunately, the heat is tempered by a breeze from above.

I finally reach Taingho. He’s shouting to me, pointing to the orphanage’s rice field. Suddenly I’m confused and think he’s no longer Taingho. I think he’s a stranger who’s telling me to walk into the orphanage’s rice field. I’ve been given too many orders to “Go this way,” and “Go that way,” and my brain is confused.

“But where are the others?” I ask.

They went back already, he tells me.

I ask him to take a picture of me in the rice field. Then I ask his name.

“Taingho,” he says.

Oops! I try to explain why I don’t know that as we head back to the house. No work in the rice field today.

But more slurping. I slowly follow Taingho’s shoeless (and therefore faster) lead. “OK?” he asks me. “OK.” I answer. We repeat this one word conversation several times before reaching the house.

On the way, Taingho detours to a rice island. He returns shouldering what looks like a huge, angular dirt clod.

“Food for the kitchen,” he says.

“Chicken,” he corrects himself. (Khmers are constantly confusing kitchen and chicken.)

Taingho tells me to continue walking straight, but I can see the car and house to the right.

“Straight, or right?” I ask him, pointing both ways. I think he says right, but I don’t know anything anymore, so I just wait and plod in his footsteps.

There are some dry patches now, which make it easier to move my feet in a forward motion, but in the place of water are grass and brambles that slice my feet and legs.

Finally I reach the homestretch. I hear kids in the car saying my name, then people near the house say it, too.

“Where you go?” they ask.

“We heard you rode a boat,” a Frenchie man says.

He and his country mates took a straight course in and out of the rice field while I unintentionally slurped in a big muddy circle.

“I was really confused,” I say. “I thought we were going to work.” I pretend to shovel, which probably doesn’t happen much in rice fields.

“No,” a Frenchie girl says. “We were just tourists.”