Last night, Shannon and I had the privilege of co-hosting a Brooklyn Book Fest Bookends event with Debut Lit, an organization that showcases writers whose first books have just been published.  Pacific Standard bar hosted, so beer and food were the themes.  Consequently, we broke out the following tale of our first makeshift Thanksgiving in Cambodia.

Special thanks to Rebekah Anderson, the energy behind Debut Lit, as well as the other readers: Greg Gerke, Austin LaGrone, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, Laren McClung, Ralph Sassone, and Hugh Sheehy.  It was a pleasure to hear what everyone brought to the table.

Suzie Homemaker

Shannon

I’ve never been particularly fond of Thanksgiving, and so it is Jason who begins inviting people over to give them a taste of the quintessentially American ritual. Some Khmer friends, some lonely American expats…who am I to complain? It isn’t until he comes home one day listing people I’ve never heard of (“The Norwegian girl just looked so sad,” he explains) that I do some tallying and realize that we’ve committed to cook for over twenty people with a two-burner stove and a single toaster oven.

In a panic, we hitch a ride to Psah Leu and while Jason scours the market for matching forks, I attempt to convey to the proprietors of a kitchen supply stall that I need a potato masher. Unfortunately, I have not yet learned the Khmer word for potato, but I try to compensate by making a series of vigorous mashing motions. The entire family (confused patriarch, earnest daughters, delighted baby) gathers around, wide-eyed, and we continue this game of charades until the eldest daughter gives me a pad of paper. When she looks at my sketch on the pad, her face clears with understanding, and she runs to the messy tower of supplies stuffed into the back of the stall. “At last!” I think, and then she comes back with a toilet plunger.

Jason

There are no potato mashers in Siem Reap, nor are there Durkee French Fried Onion Rings for string bean casserole or frozen turkeys. On Thursday morning, I jump onto our dinky yellow bicycle and peddle furiously into town, weaving around the rubble in the streets and across the slashed pavement of Sivatha Road toward Psah Chah where we have seen chickens for sale.

Though we’ve lived in Cambodia for only a few weeks, we have already started to decipher the rhythms of the food day here: at dawn, men and women bike up and down the streets hawking overly-sweet versions of baguettes for twenty-five cents, the sound of their calls more like the quacking of ducks than the French word for bread: “Pain! Pain!!” During twilight, after a day of waffles and lusciously fattening crepes, certain parts of the market are opened to sell meat, row upon row of wooden carts with dead birds basted whole, pork heads, pork faces, severed tongues, bits of brain, steam rising in the murky light so that the whole scene is both deeply creepy and close-to-Earth in a homey sort of way.

Only after the butcher woman lays out the first three birds do I realize that they are ducks, not chickens.  But, well, she’s gripping a massive cleaver, her face expressionless in the steam and yellow incandescent bulb dangling above us.  She’s like a cross between an iron chef and a battering ram, hacking the skull and beak and meat into a pile that she dumps into a plastic bag before furnishing me with limes, chili sauce, and a smile.

When I lay the spread out at home, I make sure to tuck the tiny bits of chopped-up eyeball back into the lettuce we’ve laid out on the plate to lend it a festive, classy air.

Shannon

While Jason procures the poultry, I borrow another toaster oven from an expat in our neighborhood and stagger back down the muddy red dirt road with it, performing some feeble kicking gestures for the half-wild dogs that have begun to circle and growl. Back at home, I fire up the toaster ovens and began to bake endless E-Z-Bake-Oven-sized pans of stuffing and green bean casserole, while simultaneously mashing a mountain of potatoes with a dinner fork. I barely have time to react when I notice Jason hiding a duck eyeball under a piece of lettuce, because the guests are already beginning to arrive.

Jason

Elizabeth, a fashion industry big wig who has fled New York and a train-wreck marriage, arrives holding a pumpkin pie aloft like a beacon and trailing a posse of the known and unknown: Serguei, a twenty-one year old Russian aristocrat working with a start-up NGO in town, Sheree, a former child model who is now a parole officer in Newcastle (which is, we learn, a bit like being a parole officer in Newark), and a string bean-skinny, six-foot-something Texan in a pink motorcycle helmet who introduces himself as Mr. Magoo.

Hak, a teenage manager at the Khmer boarding lodge where we lived until finding our house, pulls into the yard on a crotch-rocket motorcycle in a tight, blue, glimmery T-shirt that is obviously reserved for dressy occasions, Jasmine, his young aunt and co-owner of the lodge, perched on back and shy.  Serguei passes around the tequila, his smile wide around an omnipresent cigarette, and tells us that the end of his contract with the NGO will be a blessing.  “Any longer in Siem Reap,” he says cheerfully, “and I will have lung cancer and liver disease.”  He laughs like a little boy, then  notices a fantastical centipede, a four-inch kaleidoscope of color covered in long white hairs, and lays down on the ground to take pictures.  The sad Norwegian girl is there, as is Elizabeth’s right-hand man, Dine, and Europeans whom we’ve never met and will never see again.  Mr. Magoo tells us all about using a suitcase full of underwear and a bottle of chocolate syrup to sneak narcotics past Egyptian border security.

Shannon

The food situation is, frankly, a little awkward at first. Hak is the only person eating the duck, and we quickly run out of forks, plates, and chairs.  But everyone is polite and cheerful, seemingly touched at their inclusion in this weird occasion even if they do have to sit on the floor. The Khmer guests all take second helpings of the green bean and mushroom soup casserole, which we have topped with crushed Ritz crackers in lieu of French fried onions.  “This is now on my list of favorite breakfast foods!” Dine announces, taking a third helping.

So we sit on the porch, eat, and drink Angkor Beer, watch Serguei photograph nature and Jasmine nurse a Coke, listen to Mr. Magoo play his guitar and explain the safe amount of morphine to inject recreationally.  He sings ‘Carmelita’ in the reedy, sympathetic drawl of his native state, and it is strangely perfect for this night, the simple eerie melody stitching together the ideas of loneliness and home and gratitude for human contact.

Our guests, friends and strangers, stay until the wee hours of the morning. We raise our cans of beer and toast them with the Cambodian word that means “together”—Chia-moy.