Mikes Thoughts

slowly Saturday

Today I signed my part of the lease for the house we live in. It’s not some accomplishment or desire of mine. It just what was done to make my wife happy. Make sure she keeps the people in her life close. This is very important here for Khmer people. It’s the ties and the communal and social bonds. I would think a moto ride away is not a barrier. To her it might as well be this walk to Phnom Penh.

So what I figured was the reason we stay in the house is not the house. I’d probably never pay $220 a month for the place. Of course, I’d be renting it for the house itself. So what the reason is comes down to people. How much is it worth to have my wife be happy with her social networks. I don’t know. Those networks are not important to me. Those people are just people to me. Similar or perhaps better people would live close to some other house to me. I just don’t care. To my wife it’s everything. It’s her ramp to life. Mornings to nights. Her tea and talk time. Her evening to find the small group she enjoys and to hold forth with family and friends chats.

It’s the culture

Yeah it is. We barang people will never truly know. We cannot become what Khmer people are. We only have a vision to the inside. Not a path. Not a way in.

I realized this coming back here to live years ago. The difference does make a difference. It’s only when my wife and I got together. Both of us waiting a decade or more for a person. Then I saw. It’s more than just us and them. I became convinced we can live alongside them but never like one of them. We just come from different worlds.

What I figured was the best I could do is move a bit toward her world by living in a place she needs. Needs for the people. I don’t have people there. So my reasons are not social. They are more my wife’s happiness and desire to enjoy.

This slowly became apparent the last days in my writing. The lease thing got closer. We argued and disagreed a few times. It became apparent that we live in cultural opposites. Even after decades of doing anthropology and archeology and reading the fabled ethnographic accounts and listening to my mentor talk it came down to what a statistics professor in graduate school posited about something else.

Does the difference make a difference

I realize now in this one thing I had to know. And I wrote and overthought it. And it does. What my wife sees looking at a picture might be different. Or she comes away with differences. Color, tone, feeling.

So slowly this Saturday I also realized I had to get away. Had to find some personal measure of my difference. So what I do in times like this is head downtown. Head for coffee and later beer and food. We all have our coping things. I just do a thing which brings some relief and release.

It’s a two blog Saturday. And it’s a slow and unfolding thing that I’ll carry with me to dinner down the street.