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CHAPTER 1

Ryna: It is Also About the War

"I have four siblings," the beautiful and confident Lorn Sosaryna started by telling me. She was different from the other girls. Louder. Happier. More confident. Growing up disaffected in the U.S. made me uncomfortable around such aggressive grace and ease of manner, but I tried to act cool. "Three sisters and one brother," she elaborated.

It is stereotypically Cambodian to introduce oneself with a recitation of one's closest family members, and the hierarchy they created. I had gotten used to it, although I begged off from providing such myself: Describing my estranged relationship to my dysfunctional, alcoholic family did not go over well in a culture that prized familial relationships above all else, nor among teen girls who once asked me to explain beer.

"We live with two of our parents, but they do not stay with each other much because they work different places. My father works in Oddar Meanchey province, next to Thai border, and my mom has to work mainly in Siem Reap and Thailand." Ryna's mother and sister ran "an agency," Ryna said, but was unspecific about what the agency did. Likely she did not have the vocabulary to describe it, but it was also possible that she had reasons to remain vague.

Sosaryna — Ryna, the girls called her — was one of the only girls at the Euglossa Dormitory for University Women who had traveled outside of Cambodia. I was trying to interview all the girls before I left the country, but scheduling an hour to chat with someone concurrently pursuing both legal and medical degrees at two universities across town from each other, with perhaps a third course of study at a different school, as many of the young women here were undertaking, made my goal seem unattainable. Ryna had time for me: She was only studying law and international relations. "Is this why you have visited Thailand — with your mother?" I asked.

Ryna flipped her long straight hair back behind her shoulder. She wore a pink polo shirt, because she had already been to school that day, so was no longer required to wear the white button-down blouse and long navy skirt combo that made up university uniforms throughout the country. In the stifling heat of January, the girls seized any excuses for costume changes. They preferred not to acknowledge that they produced sweat, but this was difficult to do when heavy poly-blend fabric clung to their thin bodies, proving for all the world that Cambodian ladies emitted odor and waste like any other animal.

It was oddly reassuring to me, when they sweated. I had slept, eaten, showered, cried, vomited, and you don't want to know what else with these thirty-two young Cambodian women for six weeks and had yet to discover what they did when they menstruated. I had also never seen a razor in the dorm, but attributed this to Cambodians having little to no body hair. At least I did, until the day I walked into my bedroom to find one of my roommates tweezing hairs out of her armpits, one by one. It looked painful.

"It is also because of the war," Ryna responded to my question about travel. "In Cambodia in about 1993, '94, '95, we have civil war and so my parents worry about my education. They have some friends in Thailand who gave us a place to live so I went there to study from kindergarten to primary school."

"What does your father do?" I asked.

"My father, before, he work as government officer but now he is retire and so he has not many things to do. He work with farming. We have some land in the forest."

"Which government was he an officer with?" In her lifetime, there had been the current democratic one; UNTAC; and, before that, the Vietnamese-backed People's Republic of Kampuchea. It was a lot, for 18 years. Many Americans Ryna's age couldn't name all the U.S. presidents they'd lived under.

I was also just curious about her father. He was an incredibly kind and intelligent man, very imposing. He was also the only man I'd met that initiated arguments about politics with young women. I thought he was great.

"Under our Prime Minister Hun Sen," Ryna explained. "He was a soldier." She was hazy on the details.

I switched tracks. "If you didn't live at Euglossa, what do you think you would be doing with your life?" This query was the impetus for the interview series I was conducting. The country was poor, and there were not many opportunities for young women besides working in the garment factories. Most, still, could not afford to go to school. I knew by then very well what life was like for the handful of female students who would receive a higher education, but what about the other four million young women in the country? Ryna knew some of them, and knew how lucky she was.

"I still continue my study and go to university," Ryna mused. "And I will work, maybe helping my mom's company, the agency, or work for other place. If I didn't come to Phnom Penh I might be just a normal girl." She became sad at that word, normal. "I have no dream, I have no thoughts, it's just ... work, earn money, and have my family. Now because I have the dorm, I study a lot and learn how to have a dream and make a dream come true. So I have a dream and I am now on a process of making my dream come true. And it made my life different because, now I am trying to help my country. Not just my family, which is only six people. I want to help the whole country."

It was a dream she shared with the other young women in the dorm, and they were aware that it would be difficult to achieve. Ryna and her sisters, the first large group of young women to go to college in Cambodia, faced harassment from classmates and faculty just for being in school. They didn't read it as such, refusing to acknowledge the tiny regular barriers consistently placed between them and their dreams, but homework assignments on whether or not girls should be educated at all, comments from fellow students about dropping out to get married and have children, lessons worked into the classroom about women's rightful place in the home and men's place in government — these mounted. They had even begun to affect me.

"Do you think there will be difficulties in achieving your dream?" I asked.

"Sure," Ryna said. "I have a really big dream. I want to be a governor. And governor is just the first step of my dream. The very big dream is being a member of National Assembly. I know that it is really big and dangerous as well, but I have a really good plan. First you have to get a very good and high education, so I am applying for a scholarship in the U.S. to improve my English. When I come back, I will apply for being the civil servant. I will work very hard, and I think that even if I don't have money to give someone to get a position, my hard working will save me."

By then I was used to the subtle acknowledgement of ubiquitous corruption. Giving someone money to get a position was bribery, and the young women in the dorm accepted it as another cobblestone in their career path, because they seemed to have no other choice. "To be a civil servant, we still need some bribery money to give to the higher officer. This has become our culture," Ryna admitted. She wasn't quite sure what to do about it. "I have no thousands, millions of dollars to give to get a position, at which I can earn only like twenty-five dollar or thirty dollar." She remained optimistic. "I think we still have a chance to get a position if we are really good. We have to show them," she said.

I asked Ryna what she meant when she said her dreams were dangerous. Futile, maybe. This was a system designed to keep poor young women from decision-making power for the foreseeable future.

"Cambodian politics now, it's dangerous because only one person lead the country for almost thirty years, and I know that they won't give up." She was referring to Hun Sen. He had been in power for twenty-three years by then, and was on his way to becoming the longest-serving prime minister in the history of prime ministers. Even before taking the title, he'd been a member of every ruling party in Cambodia since 1975. "People around him support that person because that person give them too much benefit, but only those people benefit, not the country benefit. But for me, I like trying dangerous things. I like trying things that people say it is difficult to do. And when I get over it? I think, Oh, I'm so good, I'm special." She laughed. "Really, it is what I think. It helps me get over difficult things."

"What if you were, like you said before, just a normal girl?" I asked her.

"A normal girl mean, you have no big dream, just live with your own things. Your community is just your family. I can say that now I am not a normal girl because I have big dreams. Even my friends at school they think a big dream is just earning money. They want to be lawyer. Lawyer is really good looking and can earn a lot of money, but what they do to use all of this money? I will have my family, they say to me. We can buy good cars, we can buy a good house. All of those things that they say to me are just normal things. They have normal life. I don't have normal life because I want to do something good."

I had also been talking to other women in Cambodia about their dreams. Women Ryna would probably call normal. "I met a woman that works in the garment factory yesterday," I told Ryna. I had, and three of her friends, too. They made jeans for American clothing stores you probably shop at. "She told me, Someday I would like to be a manager at the garment factory but I will never achieve my dream."

"Oh, that is the barrier," Ryna explained. "This is a very big obstacle that you have a dream, but you have think that it will never come true."

"Is that part of being a normal girl?" I asked her.

"Yes, it is," she said. Ryna had been born in a Thai border camp in 1986. I knew this because she had drawn a zine about her early life in the camp. Stick figures marked Thai police watched over other stick figures marked Cambodian, with machine guns. It was the only stable home in her early life; the zine also describes a father constantly on the run and a mother and siblings living in poverty and fear.

The border camps had always been a point of confusion for me. In movies, they were portrayed as reasonably well-organized temporary shelters with plenty of food, water, and legal assistance for all seeking asylum. Yet in the devastation of Cambodia, 1979 — and given the historically contentious relationship between Thailand and Cambodia — these spaces seemed unlikely refuges.

When the Khmer Rouge regime fell, people were broken and devastated, but the Vietnamese invasion that ousted Pol Pot and company merely kicked off a civil war that would rage for almost two more decades. Once Cambodians were finally able to walk away from the forced labor and displacement that had guided their lives for four years, many returned home or resettled somewhere new and nearby. The nation of rice farmers quickly realized: There hadn't been enough rice planted in the final days of the failing regime. More would go hungry, and soon.

It was too much for those who had watched neighbors, friends, and family members starve to death. Many left. Picked up and walked to Thailand. Only then did the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) step in and establish camps, many within just a few days. The UNHCR also attempted to coordinate food aid in a corrupt nation in the midst of a civil war with no rule of law. Small gestures toward fixing a massive and deeply embedded problem. Those who lived in the camps say the hastily installed system didn't work.

One refugee, now in the U.S., had once told me that life did not improve much in the camp, although getting there had been an enormous challenge. "Even though you're in the camp, it's still — I still had a difficult time to live in that camp," He explained. "The camp is just, like, in the middle of nowhere," he said He had laughed at the preposterousness of it, and I liked his sense of the absurd. He had been at Khao-I-Dang, a camp not too far away from the one Ryna was born in. He described life there as tenuous on good days. "All the food and water is supplied by the UNHCR — you couldn't get it from anywhere. No market, nothing. So each family was given one or two buckets of water per day. If the next day, no truck comes in, it means that you have no water." For him, living in the camp wasn't much of an improvement over his previous life under the Angkar.

Ryna, however, would have no such comparison. She didn't remember the camp she grew up in very well, and the picture of how her family had gotten there was also foggy. "Do you know what your family was doing during Khmer Rouge time?" I asked her. "Do you think that time affected your life?"

"I don't think that Khmer Rouge affect to my life," she said, shaking off the notion. She sort of meant, culturally. "At that time, if you have knowledge, if you are university student, if you are professor, you will be brought to be killed." Her family supported her studies. Ryna, like the rest of the girls in the dorm, considered the Khmer Rouge's antiintellectualism their most unforgivable crime. For this to not sound crass, you may need to keep in mind how much they Just. Loved. Learning. "Some other parents still scared about that period and have problem with education. But my family have no problem with that," she concluded.

As far as she was concerned, the challenges Ryna's family faced started in earnest after they left the refugee camp and returned to Cambodia. "My dad was a soldier at that time and he went to the, I don't know what they call it — the fighting place all the time." This was the ongoing battle for power between the Khmer Rouge and the Vietnamese. "My mom had to stay, only her, with four daughters and so it is quite scary for her and she has like a really big responsibility for the safety of all the girls, and also herself. We have to move from one place to another. Two of my sisters, one she studied to grade three and another got into grade six, and that's it. They have no chance to study anymore. But I and my sister and my brother, we got chance to study."

"Do you remember that time — moving around with your mom?"

Ryna squinted her eyes at the top bunk she sat under. We were in her dorm room, and her roommates were in class. "I remember when I was three years old, I was in a district in Banteay Meanchey province, during UNTAC. They come to help us with the election."

Ryna would have been six when UNTAC started. "I was in kindergarten class," She explained. "I remember one night there was a man came to my house. He told my mother, You cannot stay at your house tonight because there will be someone come and do something bad. And so we, my mom and all the daughters, just take everything we can hold and sleep to the house next to our house in our neighborhood. The next day, when we came to our house, everything had been destroyed. Everything was all over the place like someone tried to find us. This is what I see and understand. My mom contact to my dad and my dad want us to move. I don't know the position of my dad at that time, I just know that he is soldier and that he was not at home often, even forget his face.

"At the time, my mom has no money because we were building a house. We were staying in a really small house, I can remember, and we are on the process of building a new house and she take all of her money to that house. We have no money, and we travel by a car. It is really scary and my mom told me not to say anything." She laughed. "We went to the house of our relative in Banteay Meanchey province because my mom has no money. And that man gave us five hundred Riel, which is like twelve dollars, and so we move on by the car. And every step I remember the feeling of scary. My mom told me not to say anything, I stay still. Do not let other people know who you are."

"When we arrive in other place it is like a new village? Which we have land so my mom tried to build a small house by ourselves by helping from other people, other men in the area, and we live in a very small house. My mom, she fried the banana to sell and she asked me to sell by taking it on a tray and put it on my head and just sit on the street. I was small at the time but I feel pity myself, that I should do all of this work because when I stay at my last home we kind of in a very good position. I know that it is a very difficult period for us."

"How long did you sell bananas in the street?" I should admit I was shocked. I had grown comfortable with the idea that the young women I lived with in the dorm, although raised in poverty, weren't raised in that kind of poverty. Her voice trembled with the shame of it.

"Quite a long time. Maybe two years? We also have a small farm in the back of our house. My mom grows rice and doing all those things alone. Sometimes she sell things illegally. At that time cigarettes are not allowed to sell and also some sugars, they do not pay tax. So they have to bring it on the back of the bike and travel at night time to the market to sell because at the daytime the police will catch them."

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Excerpted from "New Girl Law"
by .
Copyright © 2013 Anne Elizabeth Moore.
Excerpted by permission of Microcosm Publishing.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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