Reading: Half the Sky

When I was in Cambodia traveling with my dad, his wife and my then 18-month old son, we took a floating village tour near the small town of Siam Reap. It was our last day; we had spent most our time there at the Anghor Wat temple, but now wanted to see something else. We asked the tut-tut driver we had hired for our stay, how should we spend the last day in Cambodia? The Kampong Phluk floating village was his recommendation.

The first stop of our floating village tour was the village gift shop, full of the same things you see in every other gift shop in Siam Reap, but with the addition of books about Cambodia, and hand woven scarfs and fabrics made by women and girls in the village. On our way to the gift shop, a young boy hopped on board the back of our boat to sell us water and bananas; we didn’t buy any, as we had already bought water. Then, not long after a woman rowed her narrow canoe up to our boat. Laid across her lap was her sleeping newborn. Sitting next to her was her older daughter holding up a bunch of bananas, and next to her was her brother, shirtless - wearing only a snake around his neck. The boy held the snake head up to us; the mother held out her hand.
I looked at her and her baby, as I held my still nursing and napping toddler in his carrier. I gave her a five-dollar bill.

When we arrive at the gift shop, we are helped off our boat by a greeter, who points up the plank connecting to the rest of the boat. We walked past cages of snakes on the ground. Farther ahead is a deck where you can look over the edge and see the crocodiles they keep on the lower level of the boat.
The things made by the local villagers in the gift shop are gorgeous. I pick up a hand woven scarf. As a knitter, I recognize the craftsmanship (crafts(wo)manship?); it is outstanding. A woman comes over and asks me to buy it. I say, but I don’t need it, it’s wool, and I live in Singapore.

Please, she says.

There are two. I love them both and try to think whom I could give them to that doesn’t already own a dozen scarves I have knitted and given to them.

Five dollars, she says.

Five dollars? I ask. Usually, when I say the price back in a question in a tone of utter disbelief, it’s because I think they are trying to charge me the outrageous white girl price. But this time I say it back in the disbelief of how cheap the labor and craftsmanship sells for. I could find the same scarf in the States at Anthropologie or other hip design-y boutique/small business for close to seventy.
I bought one. I’m still sorry I didn’t buy both.

While we were in the gift shop, declining offers of coconuts and the tricks their caged (barely) crocodiles could perform, I lost count of the numbers of boats of children that came up begging. I battled my own inner conflict, that I don’t mind being generous and helping, but I don’t like being constantly asked. I also don’t like the feeling that it’s my dollar they depend on, even as I know it beats the alternative. But this is a tricky line many countries in the third world face, that as their local populations earn a living selling tourists their traditional crafts and preserving some aspect of their local heritage, it also has them put all their eggs in one basket. If tourism stops – much like it did in Bali after the bombings- then the locals are again desperate. Also, Cambodia faces much of what Eastern Europe faced in the fall of communism, that when communism fell, it left economic distress in its wake, which, as history has taught us more than once, is the perfect conditions for the birth of gangs. Capitalism grants the opportunity to make a dollar, but also the opportunity to make a dollar at someone else’s expense, especially in a country, so traditionally sexist a wife is considered defiant if she dares to look at her husband in the face.

The next stop on our floating village tour was supposed to be a school, where you could see the school kids and buy them school supplies, but I didn’t want to see the school kids. I felt like they needed all the education they could get; they didn’t need distractions by tourists. My dad gave the guide money and told him to give it to the school for whatever they needed, but we didn’t want to stop. The guide said the final stop was at the village orphanage. My dad looked at me. I am known for falling in love with random children. And Cambodian children I find gorgeous. They have black eyes, rich skin, black hair. And I know what kind of life await many of the baby girls in the orphanage.

“Dad,” I said. “I can’t go there. If we go to that orphanage, we’ll be spending the next few days at the American Embassy getting my new baby a birth certificate and passport.”
My dad looked at the guide. “Skip it. Please take us home.” He used my son as an excuse, that it had already been a long day.

That night I couldn’t sleep. I thought about the mother with her baby sleeping in her lap, the same way I used to lay my son across my own lap while I read or ate. I thought about the boy and his snake around his neck. My dad thought it was cruel of poverty to put parents into the position of using their children as wage earners. I thought they didn’t consider it cruel at all, but just part of survival and giving them the skills for survival. I thought it was cruel of the floating village to offer to take you to the orphanage. I spent most my night tossing and turning, wondering if I should have gone ahead and adopted a second child without consulting my husband still in Singapore. I wondered if he would have been really mad, or if he would have taken one look at the baby girl and melted – his usual response to when he sees baby girls. I rationalized that I was still breastfeeding so I could have breastfed the new baby-I assumed-girl, I just couldn’t wrap my head around how it could all work. I couldn’t even wrap my head around how I would travel by myself back to Singapore with a newly adopted baby and an active toddling son.
I came home and told my husband about the children I did see, how beautiful they were, but there viewed as unlucky or as ugly because their skin is dark, while white or fair skin is prized. Like in Bangkok, and sections of Singapore, Fyo turned heads and inspired (literally) parades of photographers and admirers. People wanted to touch his head and legs. Waiters in restaurants picked him up and carried him around to show him off to the rest of the staff. He was white. He was a boy, even the first son. He was lucky.

When I told my husband about our trip, the children, the floating village, the poverty, the orphanage, the baby I would have adopted if I had gone. He agreed, saying it was like going to the pound without the intention of adopting a kitten. I said I still felt conflicted, that I only wanted two children, and that because I loved being pregnant, I wanted to be pregnant again, but now I wanted to adopt our third child, a daughter from Cambodia. He laughed at me when I said I no longer judged Angelina Jolie so harshly, that I now saw exactly what moved her and what she fell in love with.

Cambodia is a magical place. It’s an easy country to fall in love with and have your heart broken again and again. There’s beauty in the people and scenery that breaks your heart and there’s hurt and pain and wounds on in the people and literally carved into the landscape that breaks your heart. It’s a country that is just intensely human, in that it continues to deal with the best and worst of humanity; in Cambodia, you are never far from the best or worst of what the human spirit is capable of.

After my trip to Cambodia, I spent some time reading up on the country, the culture, the war, and the history. Sadly, most of the literature on Cambodia is based in the country’s negative experiences, either the Khmer Rouge or the sex trade. However, books such as Louise Ung’s Lucky Child and First They Killed My Father and Somaly Mam’s The Road to Lost Innocence leave one awed by the strength of spirit, that such women not only survived such horrors, but then dealt with them head on to write and tell their stories.

Because of my short time in Cambodia, I immediately fell into Nicholas Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn’s Half the Sky: Turning Oppression into Opportunity for Women Worldwide. The first two chapters begin with Sex trafficking and slavery in Cambodia, but Kristof and WuDunn lead you on a tour through a good chunk of the world, through Asia, India, Afghanistan, Iran. They tell the personal stories of women who have battled oppression in healthcare and education, some of their stories have heartbreaking endings, including girls killed by their own family members or women who were in a hospital, but didn’t have the money to pay and essentially left to suffer. But their stories aren’t just anecdotal; they have the startling statistics to support why it is these stories they are relaying. One of the most quoted statistics is that more girls have been killed in the last fifty years, precisely because they were girls, than men were killed in all the wars of the twentieth century.

I think it is this statistic (but it is hard to choose one that startles me the most) that gets me, not just in the sheer amount of girls, but how until reading this book, most people would have no idea. Yet, thanks to holidays like Veteran’s Day and Memorial Day, there’s not much of a chance of anyone forgetting about the men who died in wars, or that these men are often cited as having died defending democracy (even though democracy wasn’t at much risk for falling out of existence). I don’t want to devalue the lives of men lost in war, but the girls who have died in the last fifty years – when the greatest strides have been made in health care, sanitation and refrigeration (all improvements which should theoretically improve their chances for survival, let alone a healthy one) – they have no holiday. They have no plaque or eternal flame and they have no burial ground included on a list of National Monuments and tourist sites. As Kristof and WuDunn illustrate over and over, the inequality is multilayered and intricate: it is a knot that begs to be teased apart.

It can be easy to get overwhelmed and depressed reading the horrors of what half the earth’s population goes through on a daily basis, but Kristoff and WuDunn include more stories with happy, and even triumphant endings. While they may infer that a society wide overhaul may be beneficial in some cases, they repeatedly find the research that supports an unexpected simple solution that makes the greatest impact. Often, the solutions with the most success are ones you’d never suspect, programs that essentially bribe or pay families to keep their daughters in school, or providing school uniforms for girls. They more often than not point to small things that make a huge difference; what they note over and over again is that focusing on the details is much like adjusting the launch of a rocket a few degrees and completely changing the arc of the trajectory.

They also delve into the complexities of aid work, that while US or European aid agencies mean well, it often complicates situations or makes things worse because of the lack of anticipation of cultural, social, religious differences. The motivations of Western aid agencies do occasionally sound more like those of their 19th century imperialist ancestors instead of the well-meant-intentions of Westerners who do just want to help.

Yet, this is one of the complexities of aid work, in that while it is well meant, it can be demeaning. Much like in face-to-face conversations, when one person just starts offering suggestions or how-to guides, it kind of assumes the other can’t do something. My step-mother often quotes AA in these situations as she says, “Unsolicited advice sounds like criticism.” Some Africans argue that more aid isn’t what Africa needs. Kristof cites, “Andrew Mwenda, a Ugandan, complained about the calamitous consequences of ‘the international cocktail of good inentions.” And “James Shikwati of Kenya has pleaded with Western donors: ‘For God’s sake, please just stop.” They repeatedly say that the best solutions don’t come from Westerners, or UN peacekeepers parachuting in with canned goods when there’s not a can opener to be found in whatever country they landed in. (It is funny, Westerners so desperately cling to the fairy-tale-superhero-comic-book narrative arc: there must be somebody we can rescue or save and who will be forever grateful to us for saving them…). The best solutions have come from people within the countries or ex-pats who have spent considerable time in the country and done their homework and who work with the locals. Novelty of novelty, it is partnership – it is the cooperative efforts that so often gets talked about on my son’s Sesame Street DVD that yields the best results, and sometimes, as Kristof and WuDunn say, there are girls they can’t save.

This is the kind of book I do want to read all in one sitting and if I didn’t have a toddler to chase after in the day and if I wasn’t already getting up at 4am to squeeze my writing in, then I’d stay up all night finishing it (I just recently stayed up until 3am finishing The Girl With Dragon Tattoo and paid for it desperately the next day). It’s the kind of book that makes me love reading and has me remember why I love reading. It’s the kind of book that sent me to the library for another stack of books piled high up to my chin between my arms. (In my stack for next up: Greg Mortenson's Stones for Schools and Three Cups of Tea!)

And it’s the kind of book that since I started reading, I haven’t stopped talking about or citing stories or statistics from or bits of perspective or insights. It’s the kind of book I don’t want to stop talking about, an important book that needs to be talked about, much like Betty Freidan’s The Feminine Mystique, that sobers and startles and surprises all while simply pointing to what is there beneath our noses, but failed to see, or that we did see, but felt that it was so overwhelming or all encompassing that you don’t know where to begin in grappling with it.

Which is essentially how I felt in Cambodia, falling in love with the country and people, having my heart broken, wanting to adopt baby girls I had never even met, knowing that many of the women there had survived things that no one should and mostly as a repercussion of poverty. I left that country feeling moved in ways I never had before, but also reeling from the intricate-ness of the knot of issues that the country faces. I didn’t know how one would even know where to begin. So I am thankful to Kristof and WuDunn for beginning to tease it apart.