The Beautiful Anthology (20 page)

I declined her offer. It was not the students’ duty to be beautiful like me, clean like me. Was it fair to ask them to be cleaner when they showered with a cold hose they shared with twenty-nine others and lived off ten dollars of spending money a month? Thirty teenage girls with no toilet paper or tampons, who would do anything for the chance to go to school, could keep their hands dirty if they wanted, I thought. Who was I to call this backward? Time doesn’t go that way.

This is politics to me: when a wise, old Cambodian woman asks me why white people are so clean and Cambodians are so dirty.

It is politics to me when a belief such as this penetrates a civilization and makes people feel lesser.

It is politics to me when I see that cost-of-living discrepancies are somewhat of a myth, when I see that a bottle of Pantene Pro-V shampoo costs $4.25, or about four to five days’ worth of food for the average Cambodian living in Siem Reap. It is politics when I see that the only cheap shampoos have whitening agents in them, when even the cheapest products cost too much for people who live on less than a dollar a day. Over half the people in Siem Reap province live below the poverty line. Almost all houses and stores have no doors or window screens, just openings dust and dirt can easily fly through.

Are Cambodian people dirty, as the older women suggested, or do they, as I think, merely live outside, in houses constructed with minimally processed materials such as sticks and straw?

According to Betsy, a woman from England I met during my stay, the people of Cambodia don’t know the meaning of being clean. Betsy started a hygiene program in a rural school next to Cambodia’s landmine museum, claiming it was high time that children learn to take off the dirt that is “tattooed on them.”

Betsy, according to her friends, “has more money than God,” but she didn’t ask any Cambodians whether a hand-washing station at a rural school would be a desirable use of her money. She didn’t ask the teachers or the principal where they’d like to see cash spent. Rather, she hired Cambodian men to install a sink and then yelled at them in English for doing it wrong, telling them they were using no logic, although her knowledge of plumbing amounts to zero. The sink went near the bathrooms, near latrine holes in the ground that are flushed with a small bucket of water.

What makes a person beautiful and right looking? Does it require wealth, or an English benefactor who installs sinks? If it had been only their access to soap Betsy worried about, I might have saluted her efforts. Hand-washing reduces disease, and washing one’s hands after using a bathroom with no toilet paper is a good idea. But it wasn’t only their health Betsy worried about; it was their brains.

Her case in point: Most brooms are only hip-length tall in the region. One day, when the children were cleaning the classrooms (something they and the teachers do every week, as “janitors” are unaffordable), she grabbed a hip-length broom from a student’s hand and gave him what she called a “proper broom,” the pole handle of which reached to the shoulder. The floor was not any cleaner for it.

“No logic at all,” she repeated, and called Cambodian people stupid. How could they possibly think a hip-length broom would do the trick?

This is politics to me: when a wealthy woman from far away can tell a child the systems of his country are stupid and useless. Cambodians don’t use ovens to cook. Is this incorrect, too?

I don’t understand what drives these people. What drives Paul to make leaders out of girls he considers impressionable blank pieces of paper? What drives Jenna to de-legitimize skin color as a real body-image issue? What drives some American women to consider all Cambodian men would-be rapists? What drives Betsy to make an “illogical” country cleaner?

Was it innate stupidity that made my sixth-grade students present me with these gifts for Christmas: two toothbrushes, two tubes of toothpaste, three individual-use packets of shampoo, two bars of soap, and many rubber bands to hold my hair back? Was it true that they don’t know the meaning of being clean, as Betsy would say? Or is it true that they cherish cleanliness because it is unaffordable to them? Did they gift me these things because they thought Western people valued cleanliness above all, and they wanted to give me something special to me and my culture, rather than special to them and their culture?

If the tables were turned, if Cambodians came to America or England to help, would they arrive with ancient pots and pans, toss the plug-in rice cookers from everyone’s homes, and hack the doors from the walls to make life look proper again? Thanks to politics, and a global economy, we don’t have to imagine such a scenario. But I know where I stand on the question.

Where is the real beauty to be found in Cambodia? Is it in being white and clean? Is it in starving kids with distended bellies who are finally able to hold their pencils with scrubbed, clean hands? Or that there are small children in this world with dirty faces and fingernails who, as they walk through rice fields and look after their cows, wonder how best to say thank you to their teacher?

Rice paddies require floods of fresh water, and yet the people who work them become wet and dirty, the roads to their fields often a quicksand of animal dung.

What is it that the Cambodians cherish? Would it have been better for Betsy to give the Cambodians something they held dear? Or does she figure that if people scrub hard enough, they can wash off their brown color, or wash money into their pores, making Cambodia a better, richer country? A more Western place to live?

I will never forget some sentences my student Tida wrote in her notebook. She wrote, “My teacher is prettier than me,” and “My teacher is smarter than me.” I told her that she was wrong, so she erased both sentences and tried again, believing I was scolding her for incorrect English form. Tida was eleven years old and looked to be only seven, her growth stunted long before I’d met her. Her clothes were always unclean, her legs filthy, and I found her remarkably beautiful. For her appearance, yes, as all people I care about look beautiful to me, but also for her gifts and notes of thanks, her concern about making sure I had a good Christmas because I was so far away from home.

Days before I left the country, I gave Tida and the other girls in my class small hairbrushes with mirrors. I gave the boys the Cambodian version of hacky sack, called a
sei
. The girls were jealous of the boys, and it was then I realized how wrong everyone had been about Cambodian girls, about what they needed and what they wanted.

The next day, I brought all the girls a
sei
, and a chance to play with the boys. I saw that they didn’t want to be beautiful or clean, like me. Tida may have believed that I was “beautiful,” that “beauty” in the physical sense was important to me, but I knew that she didn’t envy me my differences. She was Cambodian and comfortable that way, with a little dirt on her legs and arms, with messy hair.

I wish I had given more to the people of Cambodia. I taught English lessons; I helped two homeless high school girls find a home; I bought a volleyball for the boys and girls at a nearby orphanage. I wish I had given more, but I’m proud at least of what I gave the girls at the dorm: the right to be dirty, the right to be like men, the non-raping kind.

Near the river that runs through Siem Reap, there are several volleyball courts where men play shirtless. We arrived with my friend Denny, who bought a court for us and coached the girls through their first public game. Soon everybody was watching us,
the bad women
.

Good women stay at home. Good women don’t play sports. Good women remain clean. Is it possible that there is a younger generation of Cambodian men who aren’t buying it, either? Who wants liberation for the women of their country as badly as

the women want it? Who wants to give their sisters and their wives the chance to have choice? Perhaps the seeds of change are hard to see from a Western eye because so often liberated women look like our women. Liberated women look like me and wear shorts above the knee as if clothes were the meaning of independence.

Does liberation have to be politically motivated? Does it have to look the same across two distinctly different cultures? Does cleanliness make a good woman, a better person, a freer country?

Later that week, Denny took the girls fishing with his brothers, just opposite the volleyball courts. The girls wrapped a heavy, wet fishing net around their arms and let it fly, pulling it back to shore along with several tiny silver sea creatures. They all returned home filthy and smelling of fish, wearing long pants as is expected in Cambodia. Smiles were painted on all of their faces.

“They’re never allowed outside,” Denny told me. Together, he and I broke the rules, and it had nothing to do with the way anyone dressed.

In the end, I guess I was a good leadership example, despite defy ing Paul’s regulations. I hope the girls saw me the way they saw themselves. Like them, I wore no makeup or jewelry. I ate at local places, lived with a local family, and accepted the impossibility of remaining clean in Cambodia, even in the cool season. You’ll drip with sweat every minute and, unless encased in plastic (as every product from every store is) you’ll be covered in dust from the red dirt paths.

Life in Cambodia exists outside. I suggested to the older woman who complained of a dirty kitchen that it wasn’t necessarily dirty; it was merely
outside
.

If you want to live a full life, sometimes you have to go outside and get dirt between your toes. And life should be beautiful – beautiful and ultimately free, meaning that in a perfect world, Cambodians would get to decide for themselves what is right, what is clean, what is beautiful, and what is feminism.

In a perfect world, Paul and Betsy would remain their own keepers, and no one else’s. Of course, we don’t live in a perfect world. We live in a political one, rife with food shortages and honor killings and “leaders” who want to maintain power over a world of suffering. So suddenly, looks, fashion, and hand-washing all seem to fall in importance, don’t they?

To survive, we must find other kinds of beauty, to take our minds off all the darkness.

RACHEL POLLON

CHANGE FOR A TEN

His name was John. Not actually. But in an effort to protect the innocent – could be him, could be me – that’s what we’ll call him. So his name was John, and I met him when, let’s say, I was eighteen and he was nineteen. I was working at a record store that might have been in the San Fernando Valley. He worked at a vintage clothing store just down the block. We were young, and we met, and we fell for each other.

He was the most beautiful boy I’d ever dated. Beautiful boys weren’t necessarily my thing. I mostly went for rough ones. Ones I couldn’t quite get to. Who seemed like something was wrong and that if I did just the right thing maybe they’d become happy and could love me the way I yearned to be loved. Wholly. I found them beautiful in their own way. Sadness, theirs and mine, seemed like beauty to me then.

But John was different. He was actually physically beautiful. Reminiscent of Gael García Bernal. He was also sweet, thoughtful, and present. He paid attention. For some reason, he liked me.

I was reminiscent of myself, and maybe early Molly Ringwald. Some people surely thought I was pretty, or cute, but I didn’t. I didn’t feel very pretty on the outside or the inside. But I had recently found a place where I felt right. At the record store. School wasn’t speaking to me and I thought I wanted to be out in the working world. After one year of junior college, I followed my love of music east on Ventura Boulevard and got to be surrounded by it.

I’ll be honest: I don’t remember our first encounter. I wasn’t shot in the heart and birds didn’t suddenly appear. It was probably something along the lines of my working an evening shift and needing change for the cash register. Maybe I went down the block to his place of work to see if they could spare a roll of quarters in exchange for a ten. Some of us at the record store knew some of the people that worked at the vintage store. We were of the same ilk: Uncomfortable misfits who liked music and dressing unconventionally. We were, at our core, “un.”

John and I started dating. He probably came to the record store and asked me out. He wasn’t one of those annoyingly vague sorts. He’d let you know he was interested, and sweetly took you in his hand and led you along with him. He was romantic and passionate and light. He could kiss. Not sloppily. Attentively. We kissed for long stretches of time. He looked unflinchingly into my eyes.

Soon after we started dating, I got sick. Some kind of head-cold sick. Runny nose, pinhole-size pupils cushioned by red baggy eyelids sick. Pretty.

I stayed home from work and holed up in my house. I still lived at home with my father and younger brother. My father was aroundish. Like me, he also worked, and since he was in between wives and not tied down to anyone, he had a social life. So I was left to my own devices, but I wasn’t entirely alone.

Anyway, after a day or two of being sick and at home, a cold sore appeared on my lip. Violent and humongous, with topography very similar to that of the city of Los Angeles. If one looked closely enough, and I’ll admit not many did, so I’ve no one to corroborate, I swear you could see palm trees and a trail of cars on what seemed to be the 405. The cold sore planted itself in the corner of my mouth, which, in the ensuing days, started to crack and bleed whenever I laughed or smiled or ate or breathed.