beanie wall jumper
by mark moore
first of all, the bag of “corn flour” appears to contain cornstarch. it is white and has the texture of cornstarch. this reminds me of the time brian's wife used baking soda to make gravy instead of cornstarch, and this is not a tangent, as you shall see. in cambodia, we do not know where products on store shelves truly originate. and we do not know what's in it until we open it. and btw, there is no such thing as a “refund” in cambodia. one of the hottest skills on the job market is photoshop cs3 (this is not an anachronism, i simply do not know the current version of photoshop, and even if i look it up before this purge is complete i am not redacting the 3.) cambodian companies make products with labels, “made in china.” chinese companies market their lowest quality products in cambodia and label them, “made in japan.” cambodian people think japan makes the best products in the world. a french company manufactures pharmaceuticals in the capital city of cambodia and they label their drugs, “made in cambodia.” these are among the best quality drugs, but cambodians are afraid of them because they don't trust products made in cambodia.
most importantly, dare i repeat, we can not know what a package contains simply by reading the label. a year ago, none of this mattered to me in the least. i never bought anything at the “modern markets,” which cater specifically to tourists, who curiously pay $11 for a 10 ounce box of apple jacks (and these are not american people buying the apple jacks cereal, so they must be selling apple jacks in korea for $11 and korean temple-lookers are not surprised by the price.) only a few months ago i bought everything from local markets; every product is in a huge pile beside the seller (who is swinging in a hammock.) there are no surprises. you get what you pay for.
so today i bought a can of baked beans, no point mentioning origin or company name. i also bought a bag of corn flour. i have a gas stove, and my plan was to make some pan-fried cornbread and beans. this is as close as i have come mentally to experiencing something “from back home” during my two plus years living in cambodia. i also bought a bag of pancake mix. now this one i know. it's like “aunt jamima” bleached flour and leavening agent, etc. but i then buy a bag of whole meal at another market, mix the two together and recreate “whole wheat.” problem is, today there is no whole meal at the other market, so i am stuck with a bag of aunt jamima fiberless wheat starch and bag of aunt jamima fiberless cornstarch. so i basically just decided to make some desert pancakes. they were fluffy and delicious as you can imagine. the batter tasted like betty crocker cake mix. too smooth to be real. but it's not food, so i don't expect it to be real.
for a while in cambodia, i told myself, “food is food,” because i could not get anything like food i was used to in california. no whole wheat, no nothing. so i just made vegetable soup with fresh produce and ate it with decorticated mung beans and white rice. but since my project in the village went to hell and i moved back to the city, i have a nice rental and “facilities.” so i am exercising, putting on some muscle, and doing a lot of research on the computer. this type of lazy luxury living leads to hunger for delicious food. a year ago i just tried not to think about food. even “brown rice” is not actually “whole” like in the states. it looks like white rice that has been spray-painted. so, now that i am in the city, i shop at some of these tourist grocery stores and i am experimenting with some of these fake foods. i am still getting good produce like carrots, potatoes, etc. and the UHT milk is not at all bad, that i know anyway. kelly just sent me an article about a1 vs. a2 milk. i can't believe i am still alive. i just can't do this kind of hair splitting anymore.
but here is one kind of hair splitting that i can still do. while eating my fluffy pancakes i opened the can of baked beans with my little key-chain camping can opener and poured the beans in the skillet. i was eating the pancakes with some ice cold UHT milk. when i picked up my bamboo spatula to stir the beans i noticed something that i thought might be a dark piece of bean husk. i don't know anything about beans and i don't know if they have husks or shells or membranes. all i know is that there was a non bean in there among the bean-like objects. so i picked it out with the spoon, and put it on the chopping tile. (i use an unused floor tile as a chopping board surface thingy.)
i am out of the loop, and have been for quite a long time. i am not only out of the loop in the usa because i live in cambodia; i am also out of the cambodian loop as well. for example, i lived in cambodia for nearly a year before i realized that the man in the middle in all those blue signs with three ugly old men in western style expensive-looking diplomat or keynote speaker style suits is the prime minister himself, mr. hun nal (who changed his name to hun sen, which is is much catchyer. he was/is a member of the khmer rouge which is the khmer way of saying “redneck.” but redneck in cambodia is actually a political party and not just a bumpkin. the khmer rouge were the people from the boondocks who did the genocide here and killed about two million of their fellow cambodians, and specifically targeted educated, smart people, which the red necks called “new people,” and which is why there are so few smart people here. but there came a point when the rednecks became paranoid and started killing each other. when the current prime minister was called to pp, he figured with his little cretin brain that he was going to be killed, perhaps at tuol sleng, and so he ran away to vietnam. later, when vietnam invaded and defeated the rednecks, they installed the runaway redneck hun sen in the new government. hun is not like “hun,” a cute name for a loved one in the south, but is instead a ruthless fascist, more like attilla the hun, and has killed three hundred of his political opponents according to human rights watch. so that's the guy in the middle in all the signs! i think they have photoshopped his wonky eyeball so it looks normal.) and i say that i am out of the loop partly because i have no one to talk to, and which is why i am writing a story that it not very interesting, instead of boring a friend with it. but i will probably bore some people by sending it in the email tomorrow. i think there is a dangling or partnerless parenthesee in the above sentence, but this is how lazy i have become as a pseudo-cambodian.
the reasons that i mention that i am out of the loop are the following. i remember a product called beanie weenie from when i was a kid. i don't know if it is still manufactured, and i don't know if it is widely known or consumed. but the title of this paper is a variation on the name of that product. now, my khmer friends would not understand this type of issue, and all my other extemporaneous friends are coincidentally christian people from the siem reap Fellowship. they eat meat and chicken and fish (and the parasites that all those animals contain,) and i don't think this issue would bother them as much as it bothers me. it would not bother the khmer people at all, since they eat all kinds of bugs including a giant spider with fur. the point is that i have no one to talk to, so i am writing, which is what i often have to do.
anyway, so i put the foreign object on the piece of floor tile which i use a cutting board, got my flashlight and my magnifying glass, and verified what i feared from first glance but did not want to believe, that it was in fact a dead spider. now i had just cleaned the skillet, so i know the spider came out of the can. briefly, this spider- in-the-beans business made me feel a tiny bit queasy. so i sterilized the area and started writing this document to sort of exorcise the demon. before i started writing i knew immediately that i needed a name of a spider that rhymes with “weenie.” many of the taxonomic names of spiders end in a long “e” but they are awkward and i am not sure of the pronunciation of latin words (nor is anyone else technically, which is one reason i have always wondered why that language is used for taxonomy.) the only common spider name that somewhat rhymes with weenie is “white knee” but “beanie white knee” sounds like a perverted native american name, and i don't want to offend any native americans, (i only want to offend christians and cambodians) and this purge is not for fun. it's an exorcism.
“wall jumper” is the name of a spider that i don't know anything about. it could have been made up and added to the list by someone in cambodia or china. it was definitely made up by someone. spiders can't talk. so, “beanie wall jumper” is the story of a desperate man in cambodia with a failed or completed humanitarian aid project, depending on who you ask, trying to eat a can of beans and getting freaked out by finding a dead spider in the beans.
so many times when i open a can of food i think of the line from a u2 song “you've been liv'n on the ground, eat'n from a can, you've been run'n away from what you don't understand...” and tonight i thought how i used to like u2 but internally i was always running away from the fact that bono had the same name as an annoying little man who used to be married to a native american woman whose (possibly fake) name is “cher,” which must be the french word for “dear,” but i am too lazy to google this and find out if that's why she used it, and she could also be lying like everyone in cambodia. but my problem was that i had a hero worship problem with bono (the u2 bono) and the cher bono was a stigma for a while. and it's going to be at least a year before i am ever "eat'n from a can" again.
now i have drunk a can of “black tiger” beer, which is a fake stout beer that has chinese characters on the can, but is made in cambodia. it also appears to have a panther as the logo, but suppose it could be the silhouette of a tiger. there is no telling what's in there. it probably has some kind of spider extract because cambodian people know that chinese people use dead animal parts as medicine, and they probably think that the 2 million chinese tourists who come here to spit, yell, and gape at the angkor temples (or start a business and exploit desperate cambodian labor) will be able to taste some spider extract, and this will make them feel at home, more like it's a real chinese beer. the taste is not as bad as regular beer. i thought perhaps a slight buzz might help me through the beanie wall jumper dinner catastrophe. but when i stabbed the big block of ice, i accidentally stabbed the beer can in the cooler and beer spewed all inside the cooler and i had to take everything out to clean it, but the water is not running that night, so i had to ladle water out of my water storage bin (which is for times when the water is not running.) funny thing, i just went to pee and now the water is “working” again. it does not “flow,” but blurts, splurts, spasms, and blasts. the refilling of the toilet basin often heralds the return of the water.
i have done some weird things in cambodia, and i am not going to reveal all of them in this beanie wall jumper story. but since i mentioned that i drank the “black tiger” fake stout, i should also mention that there is a brand of rum sold in the modern market here which i really like, but the label is french, and it appears to be the real mccoy, or the real francois. i have developed something like a “white jamaican,” which is the rum version of a bogus white russian (and i wont be surprised if someone replies that there is already a drink called a “white jamaican,” since we have white rastas and white sadhus and i see them even in cambodia, where they operate bogus ngos alongside likewise corrupt khmer ngo directors.) i never claim to invent anything. with 7 billion brains working on planet earth now it is improbable that you can have an “original thought” about anything, much less “invent” something. here is the recipe for the white jamaican: you pour UHT milk over ice and wait for it to chill a bit. then you pour in some (possibly fake) rum (which could be artificial rum flavor and ethanol) and then some (definitely fake) honey. (real honey from bee colonies, like grapes, good quality rice, and everything else that is produced in cambodia that is relatively high quality is exported for money by the man in the middle with the wonkey eye that has been photoshopped for you and i.) the fake honey does not dissolve but turns gooey and has a texture like caramel (which is fake even in countries where you can get genuine merchandise if you look for it.) so you swirl around in the fake goo with a spoon and nibble on that while you sip the rum and milk. that's a pretty good third world cocktail by my current ghetto standard of living.
ok, purge over. i am hungry again, which is a sign that the spider in the beans is not interfering with my appetite anymore. thanks for listening. it's almost like you are here with me! it's almost like have a real friend. when i start talking to myself instead of writing, when i have a little man who sits on my shoulder (not the little one that hides in my pants) i will call him “beanie wall jumper,” and in this way, i will turn this ugly bean spider trauma into something happy and positive!
one last note. there is a “u”-like sound in the cambodian language which comes from very deep in the throat or maybe even from the diaphragm or the lungs, and sounds almost like a burp. if you take a normal “d” sound and add this burp-like “u” you get the cambodian word meaning obstinate. well, i met the pastor of the christian FELLOWship for coffee the other day (i feel like he must have had something more important to do, and i am still trying figure this out, since i have never had any church leader try to socialize with me.) but during this coffee pastor ivor said he was coming up with 3 impressions of me, and i am just going to tell you the second one for brevity's sake, because it is germane to this story. he said that i am a “time waster.”
i have often asked myselves and others how consumer appeal would be affected by changing the name of a product. or a movie. bourne identity must be about the best action adventure spy movie ever created. what if all action adventure spy movies had exactly the same title. would that reduce ticket sales at the “box office?” or would people eventually just be happy to not be surprised by the content of the film. what if we renamed “bourne identity” to something like, “choreographed fighting with terse confrontational manly dialog, but no nudity.” i bet a lot of people would not buy a can of “beanie wall jumper,” just because they might think you should not add caffeine to beans.
thursday, january 31, 2013, siem reap, cambodia