Holiday in Cambodia

by Laura Jean McKay

  Gathered outside, the young women – most of them still teenagers – were deafening. The Vietnamese noodle vendors found them easily, but their voices were nothing compared to the sound of the machines. A few workers from the sewing line behind Sokha and Vanna chipped in and shared a plate. Sokha got a whiff of fried garlic and her stomach felt faint, but Vanna was hungry so they pooled their money. There wasn’t enough.

  ‘We ate already,’ Sokha lied to the woman who offered them a forkful of noodles from the styrofoam carton she was sharing with five others.

  ‘It’s nice to have the afternoon off anyway, right?’ said Vanna. She swung her legs from the picnic table bench and stared at the food.

  ‘It would be nice if we were getting paid,’ Sokha replied. She flicked her eyes over the throng and hissed, ‘You know I think some of those girls who “fainted” are just lazy?’ A few tables over, Rattana was laughing with a friend when only half an hour ago she’d been practically dead. Vanna stopped swinging her legs and shifted uncomfortably. Sokha felt for her friend’s hand and squeezed it remorsefully, remembering how dizzy she’d felt that morning too. Everything was yellow. Last month it was black T-shirts. Now it was yellow.

  Tivi and Channari had been over talking with another sewing line but now they shuffled in on either side of Sokha and Vanna.

  ‘It’s the water making us faint,’ announced Tivi, who worked the machine two up from Sokha’s. ‘The people from the other factory want to poison us to get the bonuses.’ They all lived for bonuses. Their hands cramped at night for bonuses – the extra yellow T-shirts they pushed out.

  ‘I saw a girl I’ve never seen before – or since – near the factory with a massive bag. Must have been the poison,’ Channari confirmed.

  ‘It might have been a sacrifice,’ said a new woman, Thida, who was standing at the edge of the group. She was from way up north and probably did know about that.

  ‘Like a spell?’ asked Vanna, dropping Sokha’s damp hand and wiping her palm on her jeans. Thida nodded. She told them about a woman who put a spell on her cheating husband so that his skin peeled off in transparent sheets and his wife used it as paper to write her appeals. Vanna’s lower lip gaped.

  ‘That’s stupid,’ said Sokha and felt Vanna squirm beside her. ‘I mean all that stuff about poisoning here. You know what I heard?’ They leaned in and formed a circle. ‘I heard the factory’s unsafe. There’s not enough air in it and that’s why we’re all falling like birds.’ The women slumped back, disappointed. ‘The union rep, Mr Polin, told me,’ Sokha insisted.

  ‘Sokha is his very favourite,’ Vanna added. ‘She’ll be Union Team Leader one day.’ Sokha shook her head and a lock of split black hair fell from her ponytail into her eyes.

  ‘Yeah but Mum says it’s too dangerous. She’s worried I’ll get shot.’ Everyone nodded: the last union leader was shot. ‘But anyway, you know what else Mr Polin said? That we’re getting a holiday soon. It’s true, for Khmer New Year, everyone in the factory is getting a Saturday.’

  ‘A Saturday? How do you know that?’ Tivi asked.

  ‘I saw Mr Polin this morning on my way in. He submitted the request. Two days ago.’

  ‘Then we’ll have Saturday and Sunday. We can go home,’ said Vanna. ‘Our parents will be so glad to see us they won’t mind about the money, right?’ The girls looked over at the silent factory. It paid five dollars more a month than some of the other ones and, apart from the heat and the fainting, conditions were good.

  Even though it wasn’t the day for it, the women who’d been at the factory a few years opened the health room. The union had organised it with some foreign organisation. It was a cupboard really, but it had been decked out with squat plastic chairs and the walls were lined with pamphlets and books, mostly cartoons, showing how to put a condom on and what to say to a boy who asked you to go eat corn. Sokha moved towards it but Vanna held her shoulder and breathed in her ear, ‘If you go in, it means you need the information.’

  The women in the room were reading and laughing but those on the outside watched each other carefully. Sokha saw another young woman from her province – their mothers shopped at the same market.

  ‘There’s nothing wrong in it. Mr Polin helped set it up,’ said Sokha. He’d waited for her at the gate and told her that she could be one of the Health Team Leaders and help the other women.

  ‘My mum would feed me to the chickens,’ she’d answered. A line of ants filed into a crack in the concrete by her feet. She couldn’t look at him while he talked about condoms. He’d changed the subject to the union and the extra day off.

  ‘Your mum’s right to warn you,’ he’d said. She’d looked up and saw how his brow divided into deep lines in the sun. He was old. It didn’t matter. ‘It can be dangerous,’ he’d said.

  ‘I’m not scared.’

  ‘Aren’t you? I am!’ He’d laughed quickly. ‘People don’t want the holiday to happen, Sokha.’

  ‘Can they stop it?’

  ‘If they kill me.’ He’d smiled. She’d watched him walk away towards the office.

  ‘We should get a few of those sex pamphlets for your cousins,’ Sokha said now and Vanna squawked with laughter.

  The trucks had come. Sokha, Vanna and Tivi managed to get a spot near each other in the back of a gutted van with thirty or so other women.

  ‘You know what I saw?’ asked Tivi. ‘I saw the price for the yellow T-shirts. Yes, I did, with my own eyes. I was in Mr Long’s office because that not very nice girl – what’s her name? With the mouth? – anyway, she was busy and he wanted me to take an order list to reception …’

  ‘He trusts you now,’ said Vanna. Tivi nodded.

  ‘… and on his desk was the retail price for the yellow T-shirts. The numbers were in English but I can read them now. Only 5000 riel!’

  ‘What? We could afford that!’ said Vanna. ‘Nice T-shirts. A bit big –’

  ‘Are you sure it was in riel?’ asked Sokha. She could see Vanna giving her the look that said don’t shoot down the dreams from the sky, but she ignored it. Tivi looked up at the roof of the van to think, then shook her head. ‘And was there a dot in the numbers?’ Tivi nodded slowly, yes, 50 dot 00. ‘That means the T-shirts are 50 US dollars, not 5000 riel. Which is one dollar.’

  ‘Each? But that’s our month’s pay …’ Tivi broke off to stare at the orange columns of dirt that whipped up behind the truck’s wheels.

  Vanna’s cousins had been in Phnom Penh a year longer. They had regular boyfriends and bought photocopied romance novels from the newsstands. They weren’t home yet and Sokha still felt sick so she and Vanna went to a stall on the near side of the market. Usually they walked all the way around the edge to a vegetable seller from Sokha’s province. She gave them a good deal in exchange for details of their lives and what they did at night.

  ‘Mum will find someone good for me, a good boy from the province,’ Sokha always told her. Both she and the vegetable seller knew that the only marriageable boy in their village was Chorn, who drank and was boring with it. But the woman smiled and brought out a pork roll for Sokha and Vanna to share. Virgin roll, they called it. It was a good walk after being crunched over the machine. The buzz from the factory entered Sokha’s fingers and rattled up her spine to her skull until her thoughts were just thread pushed through needle and woven into yellow. Other days, she would pump out more T-shirts than anyone and their sewing line would get a bonus. Then Vanna bought a whole fish and cooked it with green Kampot pepper. They sang ‘Holiday, I love you’ and wheeled around on the balcony with their fingers bent backwards over the tops of their hands like Apsara dancers.

  The morning glory was expensive at the other stall. Sokha would have argued but an older man interrupted and haggled for them. He reminded Sokha of Mr Polin, who was tall and would always take a stand for the women. The seller shoved
the morning glory into a bag while Sokha and Vanna thanked the man. He had a wonderful smile and when he walked away his back was straight as a book. The market seller snatched their money and glared at them.

  ‘Prostitutes,’ she said.

  That night, while they ate, they listened to Vanna’s cousins talk about their boyfriends. Over dinner the boyfriends were polite, good-looking, rich and loyal, though not very smart. In their beds, however, in the tiny airless room that they padlocked at night, the cousins whispered and giggled about what they’d done and where they’d gone. Sokha and Vanna heard about the field just five minutes from the factories and the new jeans stained on the long grass.

  ‘Lovers’ grass,’ the cousins whispered.

  There was a noise. Sokha woke to it and tried to listen but her heart beat too loud over the roaring silence. The sheet was twisted, soaked with sweat, and Vanna’s hot foot rested heavy on her leg. She untangled herself and felt for the key hanging on a string to open the padlock. Outside a hot wind knocked rubbish down the street and dried the wet hair plastered to her face. She thought of Mr Polin. Like a father, she thought, though she had none. Like an uncle, though she had some already. Like a brother, the way he joked with her sometimes – Sokha had two small sisters. He was like how she imagined a husband would be – tall and careful with his words. Mr Polin had a wife and two children. Her stomach lurched. She crouched to vomit between the bars of the balcony but nothing came out. If she was sick, properly sick, she couldn’t work or pay the rent and her time in Phnom Penh would be over. She’d have to go back to the province and there’d be nothing again. She and her mum and her sisters would have nothing. The dusty highway outside of Pursat where the bus stopped. Her mum waiting to flag it down in the cap and checkered scarf that she wore whether she was in the fields or not. The long shortcut into the village, then to the edge where the two-roomed wooden house near the temple still stood despite a flood – you could see the muddy watermark on the walls. The struggling vegetables in the garden. Her smallest sister in the dust. Now Sokha sent half her monthly wage home in an envelope. Her mum wrote careful letters back about buying clothes for the girls, new sleeping mats, chickens. Her characters were wonky from the grain of the rough wooden table she wrote on. The longing for it all ripped at Sokha’s insides even as she stood on the clean concrete balcony in unstained clothes, food in her guts. In one and a half months it would be New Year, the end of the dry season, and there would be a holiday. They would get to go home. No buses would run at night but there was one at dawn and Sokha would be on it and in Pursat by ten. Her sisters would be taller, she had to prepare herself for that, and her mum would be older – six months could change anyone. Even her dad, who had left before he could drink away his house and daughters, would have come back. He would tell her she didn’t have to work so hard anymore – he would take care of it.

  Sokha still felt sick in the morning.

  ‘Should we borrow some money? Go to the pharmacy at the market before work?’ asked Vanna.

  ‘We’ll need all our money for the bus. We’re going home for New Year, remember?’ Sokha could smell river-fish soup cooking over a fire and Vanna saw the holiday flash over her friend’s wan features and dreamed it, too. Southern dreams of Kampot: pepper squid, the tanned face of her brother, the thick river, ocean at its mouth.

  ‘How do you have time to go home?’ one of Vanna’s cousins asked.

  ‘Union holiday,’ Sokha told them.

  The cousin turned to the other, ‘They’re so lucky. Why don’t we get a holiday? We should get a job at their factory.’

  ‘Except our boyfriends are so dumb they wouldn’t know where to find us,’ said the other and they laughed into each other’s necks.

  The truck came and Sokha got a spot clinging to the back with the wind on her face as they rumbled towards the factory. It was still quarantined when they arrived but the metal gates were open. Half the factory workers were gathered in the lunch area again.

  ‘If the factory’s not running should we just stay on the truck? Go home?’ called Vanna.

  ‘Yeah, we’ll be stuck here all day doing nothing otherwise,’ said Tivi.

  ‘I want to see what’s going on.’ Sokha jumped off and shouted over her shoulder, ‘Mr Polin’s probably announcing the holiday.’ Vanna and Tivi scrambled out behind her. More trucks arrived and the women were pushed from behind as they piled through the gates. There was a festive feel, water festival or New Year, the smiling crowd pressed close together to hear a long speech. Tivi fell behind. They could hear her laughing, calling out that she’d find them afterwards. Closer to the front the mood shifted and the faces around them were grim. They stopped near the women who ran the health room, unable to move any further. The Health Leader wiped one eye and then the other with the heel of her hand.

  ‘Are they closing the factory?’ Vanna asked no one. Mr Long emerged from his office and stood on the concrete landing outside. He was a lean man, perpetually bent, perpetually tired. But now he looked alert – a street cat ready to leap out of the path of a truck. He gazed for a moment through low lids at the thousand-strong crowd of women, then cleared his throat. It grew quieter and Sokha and Vanna could hear the conversations around them.

  ‘Right outside his house,’ said a woman next to Vanna, ‘in front of his wife and two children.’

  ‘I heard it was in an alley, and he was totally alone,’ said another.

  Ants came up through the cracks in the concrete and crawled up Sokha’s legs, darting across her skin like needles, up her back, over her eyes.

  ‘A robbery?’ asked the woman as Sokha hit the cement.

  ‘They didn’t take anything. It was about a holiday. Something about a holiday.’

  THE EXPATRIATE

  I hail a motodop.

  He’s like, ‘Four dollars.’

  And I say, ‘No, I live here, it’s two and a half.’

  And he asks, ‘There and back?’

  I’m supposed to smile so I do. I say, ‘Yes, bong, I do this all the time.’

  And I walk away. He calls me back, of course. It’s a Thursday; who else is he going to take to the airport? And he says, ‘Three dollars.’

  And I say, ‘No, two and a half, that’s fair.’

  And he starts going on and on about petrol and his whole family till I’m just about to lose it and finally he says, ‘Okay, two and a half.’

  It’s almost peak hour and everything looks like bushfire, like nicotine. The motodop starts up. His motorbike breathes a cloud and the sun disappears behind it. Everything’s noisy and yellow. It’s like being at a bar but without the mojitos. Just tyre to tyre with a thousand motorbikes. Makes me sick. The whole thing.

  I spent the entire morning at the travel agency. It’s an airless box with faded old pictures on the walls of places you wouldn’t even want to fly to: Bali, Hawaii, Koh Samui … And some song wailing tonelessly in Khmer on the TV. People are supposed to have no money here but there’s always a TV.

  I said to the travel agent, ‘Don’t even bother. I’ll just go there. I’ll go all the way out to the Lucky Air office at the airport because it’ll be quicker than this.’

  I’m meeting Tully and everyone at Bar Long Time tonight and need time to get ready. The travel agent smiled at me like she meant it. You’re angry and they smile at you. I got up to leave and the plastic chair I’d been stuck to left welts on the backs of my legs. Up on the mezzanine an old man was stripping off behind a screen. Struggling to pull his white singlet over his gut. You spend your entire life trying to cover up here and then you go to the travel agent and have to watch an old man stumbling around above your head in nothing but a pair of undersized jocks.

  It’s so frigging hot. I’m even happy it’s one of those old motos with the seats on the back, so at least I don’t have to press against the driver. They don’t s
weat. Even my nose is sweating under my fakey Pradas. I could die right here from sweating. This Swedish girl died the other day because someone tried to steal her backpack while she was on a moto. Wasn’t wearing a helmet. After she came off they went back to get her bag and left her there, dead.

  I said to Tully, ‘Look, I’m not promising to wear a helmet now but I’ll totally forgo the backpack and just use my tote bag if I have to.’

  I told work I was too sick to come in. The land-rights report can wait. I wanted to get a Brazilian then book this ticket because Mum’s going on and on about how she’s alone and it won’t be Easter without me. But Rom wasn’t at the waxing salon, even though I expressly asked for her, and I got this other girl. She took the hair off alright but half the wax is still on there. It’s the most uncomfortable thing possible. We start passing people three and four to a motorbike and then I see a family of six: Dad driving, son between his legs, oldest daughter, Mum holding a baby, then behind her a tiny kid with her little kid legs dangling, her tiny bum hanging over the back. The only thing keeping her on is that she’s got a good grip on Mum’s shirt. They’re all smiling. I get my phone out. They stare at me like I’m crazy. I start taking a photo for Tully but the motodop is apologising over his shoulder (I ignore him), then he turns off the highway and I’m yelling, ‘No, go that way, the airport’s that way.’

  And he’s saying, ‘Sorry, sorry.’

  He’s probably one of those hicks who come up from Kampong Cham or wherever for Khmer New Year, their heads full of vampires and voodoo, and decide to be motodops for the day. They don’t know shit about the Penh. He stops at a shed selling petrol from glass Coke bottles and asks me to get off while he fills up.

  I say, ‘Maybe you could have told me this before I got on. I’m in a hurry, you know.’