Somto, nyom obje Khmei!

No, dearest reader, I am not drunk – that is my simple phonetic transliteration of the Khmer sentence ‘Sorry, I don’t speak Khmer!’. And, oh deary  me, it is still as true as it was when I stepped off a plane a good five and a half months ago. I can say some numbers, can politely say thank you, hello and goodbye, but that is unfortunately about the limit of my linguistic endeavours. That is the curse of having a translator by my side the whole time – no, I will rephrase that, it is the tiny downside to the amazing blessing of a having a translator by my side the whole time.

When I arrive at an interviewee’s place, Duong introduces us, but sometimes there is an awkward moment when he runs back to the moto to grab a pen or something and I stand there like a lemon, smiling and wishing I could at least make a little bit of small talk. I kept promising myself I would try to improve my Khmer language skills, but I’m glad no-one held their breath – the situations in which I need it are so few and far between, and there are barely more situations in which it would even be appropriate.

During interviews I don’t understand anything but single words – I now recognise words like chlop (militia), you-tea (army) or youn (a derogatory term for Vietnamese people), but little more than that. But this is also quite freeing, it gives me time to take notes on the last batch of translation which Duong has given me, it gives me time to mull over what this means and what line of questioning could be good next.

But there are moments when this neatly segregated world of linguistic division where all things flow through Duong collapses. It happens like this: I look up from my notebook and see the interviewee peering in my direction and saying something – they do this a lot, but you can tell they are normally looking at me, but speaking to Duong, but I notice that they are talking to me. So I readjust my brain out of Khmer mode. And think English. Nope. German I don’t even bother wondering about, as who here would speak German. But no, it is la langue francaise – former French colony, remember?!

 Oui, mesdame et messieurs, I dabbled in a little French at school, and have since held the odd conversation with my former French teacher grandma or friends of my family while they lived in Toulouse, but my French is a long way from anything which one could count as competent. Yet it suffices to be able to break out of the straightjacket of linguistics which Khmer has me bound into. It has happened only three times so far, and twice the conversation stuttered and failed after ‘comment ca va’ as my brother in tongue, as it were, has forgotten even more of his pre-1970 taught French than I. But it makes us both glow with a sense of being able to talk right to each other. Needless to say if I could speak fluent Khmer, this bond would not suddenly be there but it is just the contrast to our otherwise mediated conversation.

But on one trip to Kampong Thom we met a man whose French was – while quite accented –excellent as he’d been a student in France prior to the genocide. And while he wasn’t an interviewee he showed me round a local pagoda which had doubled as a security centre during the Khmer Rouge regime, and though I couldn’t follow everything (accent plus my catastrophic vocabulary), it was a moment which was quite special.

I am undecided as yet whether I think I prefer my interviews to be translated, or whether in an ideal world I would speak Khmer fluently or they English. It is not a choice I have to make, as I don’t and they don’t, but both ways certainly have their merits. Even so, it is quite nice to break out of patterns once in a while.