Oprah in Cambodia

Before I even knew I loved to travel, I loved to read. I also love music. Books and music intertwine themselves with memories throughout my life. Songs draw me back into rooms or cars and onto couches, benches, seats and even treadmills of a decade gone by. As I began traveling internationally in my late teens, music and books were always along for the ride. I mostly chose haphazardly based on bestsellers or what jumped off the shelf at me. It has created some strangely charged memories. Dave Matthews' solo album, for instance, will always remind me in equal parts of my early morning jogs along the river in Warsaw, Poland and breaking-up with my college sweetheart.

One book and place keep haunting me lately, though. This time last year, I was finishing a trip in Vietnam and heading to Cambodia where I would volunteer as a teacher in Phnom Penh. Prior to volunteering, I spent a week in Siem Reap and then took a six hour trip by bus to Phnom Penh. Other than the ridiculously simplistic Cambodian soap opera blaring from the bus's tv and speakers, the trip was thankfully uneventful. We had air conditioning, the bus was a relatively modern coach, and the road was pretty smooth. A few years ago, I started listening to books on my Ipod. It was far cheaper than buying books printed in English in The Netherlands and they could easily accompany me on public transport and walks. Oprah's unauthorized biography accompanied me throughout most of my time in Cambodia. Yes, it was a bizarre choice and, as a side note, I just couldn't finish it because I found it too negative.

Nevertheless, Oprah will always remind me of Cambodia. I must have been listening to a chapter about her childhood and adolescence when we stopped three hours into our cross country bus ride in Cambodia for a lunch break. I for some reason associate that bus stop with what the deep south must have been like in the 1940s. I am probably so ridiculously far off on this analogy that it only goes to show you how alien Cambodia seemed to me. I remember taking a wide step off the bus's last step over a open sewage streaming along the high concrete curb and over the orangish brown dirt road. Dust rolled off the wide dirt boulevard as motor bikes and the occasional decades old car drove by the row of six coach buses identical except for a small hand printed sign in English stating the destination.

The dust thickened the already hot air heavy with humidity. Sweat rolled down my back and I could feel drops forming on my shins. The stink and the heat squashed any hunger pangs. I followed the other travellers, some die hard backpackers, but mostly well to do Cambodians along what must have been the local version of Main Street. A two story restaurant occupied the corner. Voices rolled out the open windows and doors and people were packed inside slurping down steaming bowls of soup and hot lunches. I, on the other hand, would have paid $10 (okay, $5) for a cold Diet Pepsi.

Wearing ear buds and listening to an Ipod in the many situations similiar to this that I would come across on my travels throughout Asia, gave me an instant albeit false sense of security. Oftentimes I would wear the earbuds while playing nothing at all. I just didn't want to seem approachable, but I also didn't want to be vulnerable to people approaching me from behind or, more likely, the tuk tuk that comes driving out of nowhere as I cross the street. I suppose just the appearance of an Ipod gave me an appearance of status in such an impoverished country, but that was far from my consciousness. I already stood out so much and was so obviously western what did it matter?

The audiobooks too helped me filtered what I was experiencing. Songs often makee me feel more and that is sometimes just too much to handle. Books have always transported me to somewhere else while music in many ways brings me home and further inside myself. I am such a sensitive and sometimes painfully empathetic person by nature that I found myself in SE Asia having to withdraw from situations just to keep myself from crying. I could only imagine a bystander thinking, "Look at the crazy white girl crying! What's she got to cry about?"

Looking as intentional as I could fake, I turned the corner in front of the busy restaurant and walked along one side of it and towards what looked to be the beginnings of a residential area. I don't remember much because I didn't get too far down the street before second guessing my decision and turning back for the bus. Eyes were following me constantly. Drivers slowed to watch me walk down the sidewalk. Thank God for sunglasses because they couldn't see my eyes struggling not to show fear or anger. There were rules, norms, expectations, ethnicities, and history here that I could not begin to understand or to even have a chance of fitting in with. It is one of those moments where I realized that it wasn't the time or my place to wonder about what was right or wrong about this culture. I wasn't even a minority. I was an outsider.

Not for one moment was I probably in any real danger, but the uncertainty of being is such a foreign place and the instant realization of being alone shot waves of fear through me just the same. Dignity seems simultaneously the most ridiculous goal and the only hope. Instinctually, I forced myself to not speed my step or swivel my head at gwacking passersby. I also made a point to walk as casual and as confident as possible in 104 degree heat. I met the gaze of men I passed and then immediately averted my glance without the faintest secret of a grin. I knew enough by then to know female smiles mean something differently and entirely more to Asian men.

I know I am from a different era and there are things like hatred and racism that I will never fully understand or come to bear. Walking those dusty, hot streets in Cambodia that day, though, I couldn't help but feel I understood the tiniest bit better what it felt like to live all those decades ago in the deep south walking to school with a fear and rage you couldn't understand shaking you to your core, but an equally natural impulse to demand dignity as sweat rolled down your back and into the waist band of your finely pressed skirt, your polished shoes collecting dust with each step.