My Khmer teacher, San, invited Stephen and me to join him and his family at their pagoda for the start of the holiday, which lasted three days between April 14 and April 16. Stephen and I awoke at 5:30 a.m. and discovered an abandoned city. Whereas Phnom Penh usually awakes with the sun every morning and is boisterous, dusty, and crowded every morning by 6 a.m., this morning it remained dormant. For holidays, Cambodians pour out of the capitol and return to their homelands in the countryside, clogging highways out of town but leaving the city itself blissfully tranquil for an entire week.
We convened at San’s house, where we met his sister Raksmeay, his brother Sang, and a few neighbors who accompanied us on the trip. We loaded up a tuk tuk with water, beer, and tins filled with tasty Khmer food, climbed in, and began the slow chug out of town. When we arrived at the pagoda, we encountered something that looked like a cross between Easter Sunday and a county fair.
Hundreds of people crowded into the main temple, which is a massive, bare cement building still under construction. Others wandered around the grounds outside, buying snacks from food vendors and plastic toys from peddlers. Inside the pagoda, people ran around completing what seemed like an endless list of ritual tasks distributing all the money and food they brought with them. First, they poured bags of uncooked rice onto a pile of rice—an offering to the monks.
Then, they walked around spooning cooked rice into individual bowls of rice—another offering. Then there was the series of slots through which you insert riel (Cambodian money) or if you’re generous, USD. Raksmeay taught me how to conduct the rituals, and I by participated by placing a bouquet of lotus blossoms into an urn before a giant Buddha statue. Then a monk gave me a bracelet made of hot pink braided string as a blessing. I donated a few thousand riel in return (about 50 cents). One of the monks-in-training there, praying over small children from a mat near the Big Buddha, was San’s father. After working 30 years as a taxi driver, he became sick and was forced to retire. He prayed and promised Buddha he would become a monk if he was healed.
He recovered, and now he lives in a tiny wooden shack behind the pagoda. In a year or so, he’ll be able to move into the main monk’s quarters once he’s officially ordained. The family seemed distant from their dad and Raksmeay explained that soon, he will call his children “brother” and “sister” instead of “son” and “daughter” and, though they will remain family, he will no longer officially be considered their dad. He will be something higher, she said. After visiting the pagoda, we headed out to the bustling, carnival-like grounds outside and enjoyed ice-cold bottles of Coca Cola. It was time for San and his siblings to pray to their dead grandfather, the pagoda’s head monk 50 years ago. San tells an odd story about how pineapple killed his grandfather. He ate it, began vomiting blood and immediately died. As a result, their entire family shuns the fruit. Khmer culture is filled with this kind of half-believable folklore. San’s grandfather’s remains rest in a monument just outside the pagoda, and the family gathered together to pray for him, offering his spirit some snacks and a handwritten note.
At lunchtime, we gathered under a shelter, sitting cross-legged on the tile floor, and feasted on dishes brought by San's family, as well as uneaten leftovers of dishes given to the monks, and crispy but scrawny chickens fried in pots along the dirt entrance to the temple.
Later, we visited a hilltop temple, looking out over the country’s flat, dry rice fields. Then we stopped at another carnival-like pagoda, this one a mini replica of Angkor Wat. We played carnival games where popping balloons with darts wins you wholly practical prizes—-clothes hangers, washing basins. We joined a group of kids dancing (incredibly self-consciously) to blaring pop music under a tent.
A circle formed around my standout tall, pale body like some kind of ostracized genetic defect in an animal litter. Children and teenagers stared at this odd foreign specimen. I danced like the awkward white girl I am. At the end of the day, we sputtered home on our tuk tuk, with a carnival prize--a bottle of dish soap.
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