by Judy Jones
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MEET YOUR DATE’S PARENTS: If your date happens to be the scion of one of Argentina’s fine old ranching families, who once owned the pampa, were rich as sheiks, and fancied themselves European aristocracy, pack a copy of Emily Post, not necessarily a recent edition. Your date’s parents, broke now and possibly a little loco from twenty-five years of military brutality, government corruption, and financial catastrophe, will still judge you by your manners—the more Old World the better. Otherwise, your date’s parents may be activists; in fact, if your date’s mom disappears for a couple of hours every Sunday afternoon, she’s probably one of the former Mothers, now Grandmothers, of the Plaza de Mayo, who still march weekly to commemorate the 9,000–15,000 original desaparecidos tossed into mass graves during the government’s “dirty war” of the 1970s. Those old wounds were not exactly healed by the immunity laws that protected former junta members from prosecution until they were finally repealed in 2003. Nor does it help that mass graves are still being uncovered throughout the country three decades later. You might want to prepare some kind of statement regarding the release of documents purportedly showing that Henry Kissinger gave his blessing to the junta’s tactics. On second thought, better not to go there at all. Instead, try to keep the conversation focused on soccer, Argentina’s national passion, avoiding any mention of drug use by Diego Maradona, the country’s legendary soccer hero. Or reminisce about your college backpacking trips through Spain and Italy—whence much of the country’s population emigrated a century ago. It’s also possible, however, that your date’s parents will greet you with thick German accents, and you’ll have to spend the rest of your visit wondering if they were among the thousands of Nazi war criminals who were warmly welcomed by the Argentine government after World War II; in this case, you’ll definitely want to stick to soccer. CAMBODIA
THE LAYOUT: A heart-shaped rice paddy the size of Missouri, surrounded by mountains and tropical forests, watered by monsoons and the Mekong River, just right for nurturing a peaceful farming nation. But location is everything, and the neighbors here are a nightmare: The Vietnamese, on one side, and the Thais, on the other, have been sneaking into the backyard to steal vegetables, dump trash, and poison the family pets for centuries. (Laos, to the north, tends its own rice paddies and doesn’t bother the Cambodians or anyone else.) Meanwhile, tourism is on the upswing in the seaside resort of Sihanoukville, and Phnom Penh, the country’s charming, corrupt, French-built capital, parties on, apparently oblivious to the starved and ravaged countryside over which it is supposed to preside.
THE SYSTEM: Since 1993, Cambodia has officially been “a multiparty democracy under a constitutional monarchy”—which translates roughly as “a nest of vipers.” There’s a legislative branch that doesn’t matter and a judicial branch that doesn’t function. Power rests with the executive branch, and more specifically, with the prime minister, Hun Sen, and his political cronies in the ruling Cambodian People’s Party (CPP). Hun Sen is a former Khmer Rouge who prudently defected to the resistance when his radical-Maoist/homicidal-maniac comrades-in-arms began purging their own ranks with the same gusto they had previously brought to the slaughter of their countrymen. Despised by many Cambodians as a Vietnamese lackey, he has, over the past couple of decades, proven himself quite capable of masterminding his own foul deeds, thank you. After losing the UN-sponsored elections of 1993, he refused to leave office, and since the CPP controls the police and the military, he ended up in a power-sharing deal with the rival National United Front for a Neutral, Peaceful, Cooperative, and Independent Cambodia (FUNCINPEC), the royalist party headed by King Sihanouk’s son, Prince Ranariddh—who, title notwithstanding, is no prince of a fellow himself. Four years later, Hun Sen ousted Ranariddh in a bloody coup, earning frowns from the Western powers until, a year later, he negotiated the surrender of several thousand die-hard Khmer Rouge, thus allowing Cambodia its first peace in thirty years. Ever since Hun Sen won—sort of—the 2001 elections but failed to win the two-thirds majority needed to run the country, he has remained in power while the government has remained in deadlock. Meanwhile, Cambodia is perennially clucked and fretted over—these days, in absentia—by former King Norodom Sihanouk, the eccentric, unpredictable octogenarian who finally abdicated the throne in 2004 in favor of one of his sons, Sihamoni, who, in accordance with the new constitution, “reigns but does not rule.”
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO READ THE NEWSPAPERS: Don’t believe anything you read, including body counts. Cambodian policy and politics are so Byzantine that few Westerners would be crafty enough to discern the truth even if they actually cared what happens to Cambodia, which they’ve shown little evidence of doing thus far. Certainly, Cambodia’s highest officials know enough to appear inscrutable to the United States, whose aid and UN vote they need and whose intentions they deeply mistrust, and to neighboring Thailand and Vietnam, with whom there’s always been bad blood despite the current trend of smiling and handshaking. Islamic extremists kicking up a fuss in southern Thailand aren’t likely to improve relations with the overwhelmingly Buddhist Cambodia, either. In fact, Cambodia’s only “friend” to date has been China, which sends vast amounts of aid and encouragement—this, despite the fact that the hated Khmer Rouge were, after all, Maoists funded largely by China.
But then, all alliances (including the WTO, which Cambodia joined in 2004) are likely to be unholy in a country where anyone who owns much more than a few chickens is liable to have skeletons hidden not only in the closet but out in the yard and under the floorboards as well. It’s been thirty years since the Khmer Rouge executed, starved, and worked to death upward of a million and a half of their countrymen, yet the government is in no hurry to launch war-crime trials that will be at best embarrassing for those who allied themselves with the Khmer Rouge (including not only Hun Sen but the Sihanouks pére et fils) and at worst incendiary among the many remaining Khmer Rouge who, after turning themselves in to the government in 1998, are now raising families and shooting up saloons in the wild western region of the country.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW IF YOU’RE DATING A CAMBODIAN: If your date looks awfully young for eighteen, shame on you. Now that sex tourism is a main attraction in Phnom Penh, forced child prostitution is epidemic. Don’t come whining to us if you get more than you bargained for; it’s no secret that Cambodia has the highest rate of HIV infection in Southeast Asia. Anyway, there’s plenty of sightseeing you could be doing, from the temples of Angkor Wat, currently being restored by the French and Japanese governments, to the killing fields of Sien Reap and, we hear, the jungle camp where the infamous Pol Pot is said to have died, which has been turned into a tourist attraction. As a rich foreigner, you’ll also have access to fancy restaurants, nightclubs, and taxi-dance halls, and to every variety of luxury goods, from silk scarves to AK-47s. Want to lease a sumptuous villa or a former ministry building? You should have no problem finding helpful officials who will be only too happy to evict the current residents and pocket the rent themselves. No one will get into trouble for it, either, because any private-property records that escaped destruction by the Khmer Rouge were voided by the succeeding Vietnamese-backed government, so nobody can prove ownership of anything anymore.
If your date lives out in the countryside, however, it’s strictly BYOE, bring your own everything, because the peasants have nothing, many of them not even a full set of limbs. Thirty years of overwhelming mayhem have left the country utterly devoid of infrastructure but rich in amputees, thanks to the millions of buried land mines and tons of unexploded ordnance that pepper the entire country. If you should get a part blown off, forget about finding a doctor, nearly all of whom were murdered or driven out of the country by the Khmer Rouge; you’re better off cutting a deal with some local official willing to sell you a bottle of antibiotics or a bag of blood plasma from the tons of supplies donated by the International Red Cross.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MEET YOUR DATE’S PARENTS: Brush up on your high-
school French. True, the Cambodians were only too happy to break away from the French Union half a century ago, but they’d barely waved good-bye to the last boatload of Brie-eating bureaucrats when all these hostile neighbors started marching into the country. At least the French, who were around for a century, had shown some appreciation for Cambodia’s rich heritage—in fact, it was French scholars who began the restoration of Angkor Wat. The Vietnamese occupiers, on the other hand, who got their ideas of civilization from China, acted as though Cambodia’s culture were some kind of embarrassment, which was pretty much how Cambodians felt about Vietnamese culture, too. Your date’s parents may get nostalgic about former King Sihanouk, whom many older Cambodians still view as a god-king, or, at the very least, as a reminder of the good old days when Cambodia belonged, more or less, to Cambodians. Your date probably won’t share their nostalgia; the younger generation, outraged by repression and the government’s shameless corruption, have no great love for the Sihanouks, whom they see as only slightly less loathsome than Hun Sen. None of this really matters. Ex-king Norodom Sihanouk, who has been kicking around—often in exile or under house arrest—since the French installed him on the throne in 1943, has proven himself to be both a patriot and a slippery character. Purportedly dying for at least the last decade, he spends most of his time being treated for cancer at his palaces in Pyongyang and Beijing, where he posts daily blogs on his Web site, www.norodomsihanouk.info, lamenting the poisonous atmosphere pervading his homeland. CANADA
THE LAYOUT: The second-biggest country in the world (after Russia, Canada’s other larger-than-life neighbor), but with fewer people than California. Indeed, space, sheer space, is the salient feature here, with cold a close second: The latter, not better television reception, explains why three-quarters of the population huddles within a hundred miles of the U.S. border. Ontario is the most populous, most prosperous, most powerful, most urban, and most industrialized (also, most resented) of the ten provinces and three Arctic territories that make up the country; it also has the capital, Ottawa, and the biggest, most cosmopolitan city, Toronto. Quebec is the largest and second most populous province, with what used to be the biggest, most cosmopolitan city, Montreal, plus the bulk of the 23 percent French-Canadian minority. The concept of the Pacific Rim has been a real shot in the arm for British Columbia (and Vancouver is clearly aiming for the “Most Cosmopolitan” title). Neighboring Alberta has most of the world’s second-largest oil reserve (after Saudi Arabia) and therefore all the money, and is the province that winds up providing big subsidies—equalization payments, they call them—to all but one of the other provinces, grudgingly. Very grudgingly. Saskatchewan and Manitoba are the prairie. The Maritimes, northeast of New England, cast their nets and work their mines, and hope that today’s the day the equalization-payment check arrives.
THE SYSTEM: A federal union, a very loose federal union, in which the prime minister tries to convince his countrymen that Canada’s future is as a strong, united nation rather than a confederation of shopping centers and smallmouth-bass fishermen, while the ten provincial premiers plump for priorities—and identities—that are, in a word, provincial, and tell the prime minister to keep his goldarned hands off their oil, uranium, nickel, asbestos, natural gas, and/or newsprint. Also in the picture: a governor-general who represents Queen Elizabeth II, the official head of state, but she—and, for that matter, the queen—is purely a figurehead. Plenty of political parties up here, though no one knows quite what to make of them since until recently politics was dominated by the moderately liberal Liberals and the moderately conservative Progressive Democrats. The irrepressible Pierre Trudeau was a Liberal, as is the current prime minister. The Progressive Democrats (or “red Tories,” as they’re known up there) virtually self-destructed back in the 1993 elections; they are currently being replaced by the Canadian Alliance, formed by a merger between the right-wing populist Reform Party and an assortment of former Progressive Democrats. Left of the Liberals is the New Democratic Party, popular in the provinces but never quite a national contender, and the Bloc Québécois, now busy not declaring independence, though still nursing its resentments. There’s a two-house legislature, modeled on Britain’s Parliament, of which the important half is the elected House of Commons; the Senate is merely appointed, and by the governor-general, at that.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO READ THE NEWSPAPERS: That a lot of the action is in the provinces-vs.-Ottawa tension. It’s the goad (also the high) in Canadian politics and it helps to explain why Quebec got to hold referenda on whether or not to secede from the rest of the country and why Alberta gets to claim that not only her oil but her oil revenues, oil-development program, and oil-marketing strategy are her own business. In general, resource-rich western Canada feels exploited by the slick and populous east—a perception that’s only been strengthened by the ongoing political scandals that have rocked the Liberal Party. A lot of the problem is that modern Canada was created in the mid-1860s not from within, by pigheaded patriots, but from without, by a jittery Britain, worried about containing the volatile United States, and that there’s never been a revolution or a civil war—or even an after-school project—to help forge a Canadian identity. The other part of the problem is that Canada’s federal government possesses only those powers not already accorded the provinces (the reverse of the states’-rights setup in effect south of the border); as a result, the provinces are in control of health, education (a big deal in a bicultural country), natural resources, interprovince commerce, etc. As for the long-standing ethnic hostility between Anglophones and Francophones, which for decades was the one thing you could count on to generate sparks around a Canadian dinner table, it hasn’t gone away, exactly (47 percent of Québécois still say they want their own state), but bicultural animosities are beginning to seem a bit passé now that Canada—good old white-bread Canada, which, to its credit, just wants to be nice to everybody and take them in and hand them a lager, and which has some of the most liberal immigration laws this side of Australia—has been transformed into an unlikely-looking nation of Ukrainian women in brightly colored babushkas hanging out the wash, Hong Kong–born execs in sapphire cufflinks trading whole blocks of Vancouver, and ramrod-straight Canadian Mounties wearing turbans. Anyway, there are more pressing matters to deal with at the moment—health care, for instance. That universal coverage of which Canadians have long been proud and Yankees envious has begun to buckle under the weight of an aging population. These days, your average sick Canadian—whether Anglophone or Francophone—can expect to wait about eighteen weeks just to get a referral to see a specialist.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO DATE A CANADIAN: A joke should break the ice— and it is mighty cold up this way, eh? Sorry. The joke every journalist works into his Canada piece: How Canada could have had French culture, British government, and American know-how but for some reason wound up with … we think you can take it from here. And how about the time Maclean’s, Canada’s Time, ran a contest and invited its readers to complete the phrase “As Canadian as …,” and the winning entry was “As Canadian as possible under the circumstances.” OK, OK, no, really, thanks, well, all right, one more. “How do you get sixty Canadians out of a swimming pool on the hottest day of the summer?” Answer (this is actually what Canadians call a riddle): “Yell, ‘Everybody out of the pool.’” Actually, real-life Canadians truly are obedient, glum, shy, repressed, and painfully decent, with an unflagging go-for-the-bronze streak. Largely, that’s the result of living in a country where the government does almost everything for everybody just as, over a century ago, it built the transcontinental railroad—no whip-cracking robber barons racing for the Pacific here—and treated all settlers equitably, thereby avoiding land rushes, Indian massacres, people shouting “Dance!” at each other, and all other forms of survival-of-the-fittest, Wild West–style bravado. Do let your date know that you know that all the cultural currents don’t flow from south to north; say thanks to him/her for John Kenneth Galbraith, t
he late Marshall McLuhan, ditto Northrop Frye and Saul Bellow, Joni Mitchell, Dan Aykroyd, Mike Myers, Martin Short, Jim Carrey, Morley Safer, Peter Jennings (but not Diane Sawyer, who just seems Canadian), and of course both Pamela Anderson and Wayne Gretzky.
WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW TO MEET YOUR DATE’S PARENTS: First, that although you may still get tea and biscuits when you visit them, Canada is inching closer and closer to coffee and apple pie, and, in our opinion, everybody’s the loser. Nevertheless, Elizabeth is definitely still head of state, Canada is definitely still in the Commonwealth, and people still celebrate Queen Victoria’s birthday every May, which even the English have stopped bothering with. It’s all about a healthy respect for the past (and an educational system that hasn’t broken down yet), and don’t be surprised, either, if the parents remind you how it was Wolfe’s defeat of Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham in 1759 that first got things moving, establishing the—appropriately condescending facial expression on your part, please—natural superiority of the English, on the battlefield as off, or, let’s try to see both points of view here, s’il vous plaît, the braying, bullying ways of the English, maintenant et pour toujours. That English-speaking Canada and French-speaking Canada never really got along should come as no surprise, even though the English had made, in 1774, one of the all-time most enlightened decisions in the history of colonial administration—at least that’s what Henry Steele Commager says—with regard to their French neighbors: Let ’em speak French and let ’em be Catholics. (Later, unfortunately, it would lead to what the English see as a lot of endless whining about “special rights,” although the French would argue it’s the only way to keep the Limeys from rolling over them completely.) Anyway, in 1867 Parliament passed the British North America Act, which made Canada a self-governing dominion and served as a makeshift first constitution, kept in some file cabinet over in the mother country, who alone had the right to amend it. Canada didn’t become independent until 1931, and it wasn’t until 1982 that she became completely independent—unbelievable, isn’t it?—when Trudeau “brought home” that constitution, presumably in a perfectly normal-looking briefcase. Careful/en garde: Acid rain and NAFTA may not be quite the sore points they were ten years ago (although NAFTA still isn’t much more popular than acid rain, despite the boost it’s given to the local economy), but there are a few new topics you’ll want to approach delicately and with—dare we say?—a modicum of humility. Take, for starters, the U.S. invasion of Iraq, in which Canada refused to participate (although that hasn’t stopped the Canadians from pouring tons of money into Iraq’s reconstruction), its support for the UN-sponsored International Criminal Court for war crimes (which the United States opposes), and its strong support for the Mine Ban Treaty (which the United States refuses to sign). As for its willingness to consider legalizing both gay marriage and marijuana use, don’t expect your date’s parents to beat their breast in horror. Social liberalism is nothing new in Canada, even if it does stand out in greater relief (and we do mean relief) now that the United States is up to its eyeballs in every kind of conservatism. Besides, tourism is big business up here, and when last we checked, even Yankee gays and dopers were still allowed to take vacations. CONGO, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE
