Thursday, January 30, 2014

Sidewalk Enterprise


Every morning at 6:00, a boy who can't be older than 14 arrives to the sidewalk across from our apartment with a large bag and a bike pump.  For the next half hour, he inflates about thirty penguins.  Then, he sits.  A few times an hour, he'll adjust the penguins that moved from their orderly columns and turn them so they face the street.  If one is dirty, he'll replace it with a clean one that he wiped down earlier.

His busiest times are before and after school.  Over the last four days, I've seen him get six sales.  Two to a moto drivers who had a small children, one to a man in a Lexus who wouldn't open his door all the way to inspect the penguin (he even yelled at the boy to back off), two to me, and one to a teenager who arrived to the penguin site immediately after me.

It's almost like a lemonade stand, but the money goes to his family (who, I think, are positioned around Sihanoukville selling the same penguins) and he sits behind the collection all day, 6 am until sunset.  I was prepared to pay a dollar for the penguin.  It was 5000 Riel ($1.25) so I shelled out the extra cash in support of small business, then noticed the penguins all say "dolphin" in stock script on their sides.

I used to think he attended school during the afternoons because I looked over one day and saw an older man there.  Alas, the boy was behind the man's moto, inflating a brand new penguin for the man's son.  When I spoke to him, I asked him if he spoke any English.  He said, "aht," which means no.  It's safe to assume he just works.

Sunday, January 26, 2014

In Defense of Mothers

My first priority when I became a mother (besides, you know, my child), was making sure that motherhood wasn't the only thing that defined me.  I still wanted to read long-form journalism, take pictures of exotic sunsets, and peruse fashion look books.  I rely very heavily on mommy bloggers, but I was determined to never become one.  I made a deal with a friend that I wouldn't plaster my Facebook wall with pictures of a baby who, to everyone else, looked like every other baby (but cuter, obviously).

In fact, I promised I would never give my son an entire blog post.  Then an article showed up on my newsfeed.  I read it, and I was livid.

I knew that being a stay-at-home mom, I was going to be faced with a lot of up-turned noses.  One of my friends, after a solo day-drinking session, told me that I "don't do dick."  If you're not down with our lingo, that means I don't do anything productive with my time. 

A good rule I try to live by (and sometimes fail miserably) is to not get offended by something that isn't true.  If I have a volatile reaction to something, it's probably because there's a seed of doubt in my mind.  When my drunk friend told me that I don't do dick, I simply said, "Sure, except be on call 24 hours a day to feed, change, and entertain an infant."  I've offered everyone I know the opportunity to trade, and no one has taken me up on it.  Except Tom at Monkey Island because she's awesome and loves kids.

Then that article popped up and I had a visceral reaction. It's really short, so I'll just copy and paste it so you don't give the author the satisfaction of having web traffic:

Every time I hear someone say that feminism is about validating every choice a woman makes I have to fight back vomit.

Do people really think that a stay at home mom is really on equal footing with a woman who works and takes care of herself? There’s no way those two things are the same. It’s hard for me to believe it’s not just verbally placating these people so they don’t get in trouble with the mommy bloggers.Having kids and getting married are considered life milestones. We have baby showers and wedding parties as if it’s a huge accomplishment and cause for celebration to be able to get knocked up or find someone to walk down the aisle with. These aren’t accomplishments, they are actually super easy tasks, literally anyone can do them. They are the most common thing, ever, in the history of the world. They are, by definition, average. And here’s the thing, why on earth are we settling for average?If women can do anything, why are we still content with applauding them for doing nothing?I want to have a shower for a woman when she backpacks on her own through Asia, gets a promotion, or lands a dream job not when she stays inside the box and does the house and kids thing which is the path of least resistance. The dominate cultural voice will tell you these are things you can do with a husband and kids, but as I’ve written before, that’s a lie. It’s just not reality.You will never have the time, energy, freedom or mobility to be exceptional if you have a husband and kids.I hear women talk about how “hard” it is to raise kids and manage a household all the time. I never hear men talk about this. It’s because women secretly like to talk about how hard managing a household is so they don’t have to explain their lack of real accomplishments. Men don’t care to “manage a household.” They aren’t conditioned to think stupid things like that are “important.”Women will be equal with men when we stop demanding that it be considered equally important to do housework and real work. They are not equal. Doing laundry will never be as important as being a doctor or an engineer or building a business. This word play is holding us back.

First, I just have to get this one thing off my chest.  Women who go backpacking across the world do get  "showers."  They're called a going away parties.  I had one, my sister had one, my friends Torie and Georgie had them.  It's common practice.  Also, to aspiring writers: please don't use the word "stupid" in your writing.  You have entire languages at your disposal.  Use them.

What really made me angry was calling moms average.  Saying taking care of the house and children isn't exceptional, and that we're applauding women for doing nothing.  Finally, she thinks getting married and having children is anti-feminist and the path of least resistance.  

The writer misunderstands feminism.  Feminism isn't about navigating the hierarchy of employment which venerates doctors, engineers, and entrepreneurs.  Feminism is about getting a choice.  A hundred years ago, women didn't have a choice about what we wanted to do. They were expected to marry young, pop out a few kids, and spend the rest of their lives caring for them.  When the kids have flown the coop, they might take up quilting.  The women who didn't want that lifestyle worked tooth and nail to avoid it, and are now considered icons of women's rights.

Now, women can choose to be doctors, engineers, fashion designers, writers, plumbers, PR executives or mothers.  Men can be stay-at-home dads.  There isn't a sacred text carved into stone that gives us finite answers to what is exceptional in the universe.  We choose what makes our own lives exceptional, and we're lucky that we're living in a time when that choice is available. It's a first world privilege that's to our advantage.

Tuesday, January 7, 2014

A Reasonable Man

There's one story that perfectly describes my father.  My sister's boyfriend, Hayes, told it to me in New York, and ever since, I've used it to explain what Dad is like to people who have never met him.

Dad was at my Aunt Sue's house with a few people, talking about sitting in traffic.  No one likes sitting in traffic.  That's a given.  It's on par with having your flight delayed or sitting at the DMV anxiously waiting for your number to be called.

Dad, however, has a different perspective.  He said that it's not so bad.  You have your air conditioning, the radio, and a comfortable chair.  It's really not that bad.  Sometimes, he even enjoys it.  Because he's the most reasonable person alive.

This photo is from 6 years ago, but it's the only one I have on hand.

While I was [ahem] between jobs, I worked in his law office doing tedious paperwork and screening calls from potential clients.  Attorney's offices are where indignant Americans go to get revenge on any Tom, Dick, or Harry who swindled them out of a few dollars or said something they think is defamation of character. My main purpose was to tell them they didn't have a case without using profanity.

When there was an especially persistent and difficult caller, Dad would take the call and explain in his even tone why not only he, but no lawyer worth their dime would take the case.  He said he's been hung-up on a few times, probably to make me feel a better about my first yell-and-hand-up-call.  But as far as I could tell, every person ended the call thinking Doug Meier was the most logical person in the world.

In addition, he's one of only a handful of lawyers who will answer inmate letters.  That was another one of my duties.  Every single letter goes answered, usually with a piece of legal advice, even if there's nothing he can do to help them.  When word got out there's a lawyer who answers letters, prison mail started coming to his office in droves.  All of them get a reply.  He said that most inmates just want to know someone is listening.

I've always thought he'd make a great judge.  If he were to teach, he'd be every law student's favorite lecturer.  But he chooses to work hundred hour weeks, suing insurance companies and other lawyers whose incompetence ruined someone's life.  His profession has been so ingrained in our lives, that as children, we'd play a game called Judge for Yourself.  You read real court cases and have to figure out how the jury or judge voted.  I never knew that was strange until my friends said they mostly played Candyland.

His success as a lawyer comes from two philosophies that he repeats to me several times a month:

  • It's not about what you say, but how you say it.
  • It's easier to put out a fire with water than gasoline.

Dad credits his level head to a few things.  One is his upbringing. I don't know what my grandparents were like in the 60's, but Dad's side of the family (two parents and six children) is probably the only one in the modern world that doesn't fight with each other.  No one ever gets mad and holds a grudge or displays passive aggressive tendencies.  I'm not saying they're saints, but the ruffled feathers come from those who married in.

His other reason is that he lived in developing countries for the better part of his twenties -- Thailand, Bangladesh, and Somalia.  He worked for NGOs that were positioned in refugee camps (which is how I was eventually born).

It's those experiences that gave him wisdom and insight into my frustration with Cambodia.  He's talked me down from countless ledges because working here is grinding.  It's that insane degree of difficulty that gave him the patience to own a business in the United States.  When you have to bribe a government official, drive around all day to find stuff that's neatly consolidated in a Target or Walmart, or use Google as a trusted pediatrician, all the things you thought were difficult at home are put into perspective.

Dad would never try to make his life sound poetic.  He would probably just say he gets paid to do his job and his kids made it to adulthood without any major injuries. To me, he couldn't handle his day-to-day without knowing another life.  A life where everything is much worse than an extra hour in traffic.

Sunday, January 5, 2014

Runaway Imagination

I've only written about my mother once.  It was for a class at the Lighthouse Writers Workshop in Denver, called "Intro to the Personal Narrative." When I wrote the essay, I wasn't thinking about Mom.  It was supposed to be about me and the beginning of a long journey that ended where I was at the point in my life. Mom was a character I had created to help the narrative.

Yesterday, we were at lunch and Mom told us a story about her little brother's death that I wasn't prepared for.  She said it nonchalantly as part of our conversation. Throughout my life, I've gotten small details of what happened to her family during the Khmer Rouge, but I hadn't heard any graphic details since I was six.

When I read my essay again, I saw that it wasn't about my millennial need to give myself some validation for my personal and academic meandering, but rather about Mom.  It's about her sacrifices and everything she went through that ended with raising my sister and me.

I'm not ready to talk about that lunch conversation, but I wanted to share this essay, which I found among hundreds of forgotten documents on my Google Drive account. Consider it an introduction to a deeply personal subject that will take me a lifetime to understand.



I woke up because my throat hurt and I was sweating. Mom always worried Amanda and I would get cold at night so she'd sneak a few extra blankets on our beds. In her mind, death by dehydration took a backseat to hypothermia. In the morning, she would wake us up for school and assume I had a fever because I was always soaked in sweat. My thirst may have saved me from the ten extra minutes it took for her to take my temperature and decide not to make me stay home.

The blurry light creeping through the mini blinds was bright enough that I didn't need to grope around for my glasses. By now, I could expertly navigate the trails that Mom plowed through our mountains of Barbies. I pushed the covers to the end of the bed, and tiptoed to the bathroom so I didn't wake Amanda. Then, out of nowhere, I stepped on a rogue Barbie shoe. I jumped up and down, muffling my cries of pain, knowing that Amanda would throw something at me in a drowsy stupor if I woke her up. After gathering my composure, I limped the rest of the way to the bathroom and closed the door behind me.

I turned on the light. Big mistake. I immediately turned it off. Once that big white flash went away, I grabbed a Dixie cup from the dispenser next to the sink and turned on the faucet. I held my hand underneath the running water until it was ice cold, dipped the cup under the water, lifted it to my lips, and gulped it down in one breath. I repeated this action until I replaced all of the fluids that were now soaked into my flannel bed sheets.

After a dramatic, satisfying sigh of relief, I opened the medicine cabinet and reached for a pair of tiny scissors. I cut into the side of the Dixie cup. I was carefully edging around the bottom of the cup when the hallway light turned on and Mom opened the door.

"TAVE! AGAIN?! You're not thirsty, you're just wasting our cups!" Her eyes were tired, and I knew that she had just finished a long night of sewing doctors’ scrubs in our basement. I knew that it had to be at least midnight.

"No, Mom, I'm really thirsty!" I was still working on pronouncing my R's.

Even though the wear of working for sixteen hours was visible on her face and body, Mom noticed I had been sweating and put her hand on my forehead. Her frustrated scowl quickly turned into one of panic. She took me back to bed and pulled the covers back over me. Very quietly, she trekked through our room, stepping on the same Barbie shoe I had earlier. Unlike me, however, she gave a small wince and carried on to her bedroom, carefully closing the door.

I threw off the covers and opened the top drawer of my nightstand. I had been clutching the bottom circle of the Dixie cup and excitedly threw it into the drawer. There was the distinct sound of plastic shuffling around. I slowly and silently closed the drawer, turned over, and fell asleep.

The next morning I woke up to a dull blow to my thigh. I could barely open my eyes, but saw Amanda’s blurry figure sitting upright in her bed. As I made a move to find my glasses, the bean bag she threw at me fell off the bed.

“Manda! Why?” I sat up then fell forward on my bed, causing my glasses to fall off the bed and get lost among the Barbie dolls. A moment passed and I almost fell back asleep until THUD. “WHAT WAS THAT?!”

She had thrown her favorite doll at me. It was ragged pieces of cloth with stuffing poking out of the stitches that has been constantly replaced by Mom. It’s name was Amanda. Our father had given it to her when she was too young to know there were more names in the world besides Amanda. After it hit me in the head, there was a weak tinkering sound from the wind-up music box inside – the only part of that doll that still functioned as it did on day one.

“GET UP!” Even as a ten-year-old, Amanda was uptight about being early for school. I didn’t care as much, so I sat there for a few more seconds, then pushed my feet to the ground and dragged them to the bathroom. I brushed my teeth and gulped down a few Dixie cups of water, then proceeded to cut up both my and Amanda’s cups and taking the bottoms to my top nightstand drawer. Amanda raised her eyebrow, but didn’t stop to ask me what I was doing. Her curiosity about my new hobby faded over the weeks and became nothing more than a way to waste precious moments that could be spent getting ready for school.

Each morning, Amanda would be downstairs, already on the couch watching Power Rangers, when I finally clamored down the stairs fully dressed. Our backpacks were in the exact same corner of the entryway from the day before. Mine was pink, hers was purple. Together, we’d take them to the kitchen where mom had our lunches packed in brown bags with our names scrolled in her curly handwriting, with a small heart underneath them. She used to draw a pair of lips as a “kiss,” but stopped after we told her it was embarrassing. Amanda’s lunch always had a peanut butter sandwich, an orange, and a Snicker’s bar. Mine had a jelly sandwich, an apple, and a Milky Way bar. Once, Mom switched our names and we ended up going hungry that day. Now, we’re ready for school.

Colorow Elementary had recently implemented a “reading block.” Someone in a suit decided that pretending to stare at a page of a book was more productive than the teacher teaching, so we always had to have reading material in our desk. I bent the rules and brought National Geographic. Mom had a subscription and would keep all of the volumes in a magazine rack by “my” loveseat. No one else sat in that loveseat, so I had constant access to these magazines and would flip through the pages thousands of times until I memorized all of the pictures. I couldn’t read most of them, but I refused to get a subscription to National Geographic Kids.

Before we left for school, I grabbed an issue that had a long article about Pompeii. It was old and after months of sounding out words and memorizing pictures, I had finally finished the article, with a lot of help from Mom. Even though she was fluent in English, she still wasn’t a native speaker and there were some words that would stump both of us. Sometimes, she would have to pause for a few minutes because the images of the skeletons – the people -- who died embracing each other made her cry.

So I sat there in class, with my National Geographic open. My teacher, Ms. Whitworth, had stopped questioning whether I was actually reading the material or just looking at pictures. She learned her lesson one day when she took it away from me, asked me what Pompeii was, and listened to my three-minute summary of the article. Now she was focused on getting me to read something new, but something about this dead city was very much alive to me.

Weeks before this article came out, there was a Discovery Channel documentary about Pompeii. At first, I walked into our small living room and wondered what happened to Nickelodeon. I sat on my loveseat, scowling, until the talking head disappeared and the camera slowly crawled in and out of these buildings that were once homes, but now graves. Like, a frozen moment in time, these people were entombed with their rings still on their fingers, with their bread still in the oven, and with their children crouching near them, probably frightened. Briefly pulling my attention from the TV, I looked at Mom who had a tissue in her hand, wiping her eyes. Then she went to the basement and I could hear the familiar buzz of the sewing machine.

Though we weren’t doing it as often, Amanda and I would get sick of TV and follow Mom to the basement. She kept a black garbage bag of scrap fabric for us to play with. We learned to use these industrial machines at an early age, but Amanda was scared of them and would leave most of the sewing to me. Even now, her ironing skills greatly surpass mine, but asks me to make things like aprons or bedspreads. This was one side of the basement. The other side was a different world that Mom had created just for us.
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