Byline: Phoenix Jay

Their scientific names conjure bizarre images of otherworldly creatures from outer space: Hippocampus hippocampus, Dugong dugon, the highly improbable-sounding Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda. And indeed they are of another world, but not outer space. Rather its terrestrial equivalent: the lesser-known ‘inner space’, otherwise known as the World Ocean that covers roughly seven tenths of our blue planet.

Despite containing 97% of the world’s water, only five per cent of said ocean has thus far been probed by the prying eyes of man. This strange, sub-aqua world has long been one of great mystery to us landlubbers; source of many a seafarer’s tale of boat-eating beasts and fair maidens with fish tails. And where might one set coordinates to find the highest concentration of such underwater wonders? Avast, me hearties! They be right here!

The Koh Rong archipelago is home to a vast array of endangered marine life, from ethereal-looking seahorses (the aforementioned Hippocampus hippocampus) and mermaidesque manatees (Dugong dugon) to prehistoric horseshoe crabs (the Carcinoscorpius rotundicauda) and rare-as-hens-teeth turtles, both green and hawksbill. All are on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species; all, if you’ve been courting good karma and can snorkel or scuba dive, can be spotted merrily going about their business beneath the waves of Cambodia’s seas.

The reason they can be spotted merrily going about their business is that, for the past few years, various marine conservation agencies based on the Cambodian coastline – which, running between Thailand and Vietnam, boasts more than 69 islands – have pulled together in a convincing show of solidarity to shunt these creatures, and the watery habitat in which they live, as high up the political agenda as possible.

Song Saa Foundation. Fauna & Flora International. Conservation Cambodia. Coral Cay Conservation. The Fisheries Administration. Everyone came to the table. Among the outcomes are the country’s first Marine Fisheries Management Area, which when approved later this year will cover 340 square kilometres and surround every island in the archipelago; the creation of more than 100 artificial reefs; the first scientific surveys of Cambodia’s marine habitats, and – every step of the way – the respectful nurturing of local folk who depend on small-scale fishing to put food in their mouths (only 15% of Cambodia’s fishing is done in the sea; the rest is inland fisheries).

It wasn’t easy. Dynamite and cyanide fishing, bottom trawling, hazardous waste, boat anchors, poachers: all conspired – and, in some cases, continue to conspire – to destroy Cambodia’s coral reefs, seagrass beds and mangrove forests. Local fishermen note that their catches are becoming ever smaller. Dr Wayne McCallum, director of sustainability at Song Saa, makes reference to the terrible implications of mass tourism: “In Thailand, things have been lost.” He sighs and kicks the sand, crestfallen.

But here on the grey concrete helipad jutting into the ocean from the fishing community of Prek Svay, a jolting, five-minute skip in a long-tail from neighbouring island Song Saa, there is still much to celebrate. It’s World Oceans Day, June 8, and the helipad is crowded with local children, officials and a one-man camera crew from CTN. Almost everyone is wearing their light blue World Oceans Day T-shirt and matching baseball cap, trying not to fidget as another speech gets underway.

Our agenda for the day includes an up-close inspection of some prime sub-aqua real estate; the premiere of Coral Cay Conservation’s new documentary on marine life in the archipelago, from which the headline of this article is shamelessly stolen; the presentation of a new patrol boat to a local fisheries committee, and a video guide on how to build an artificial reef (not as easy as it sounds, as it turns out: maintenance includes divers removing algae – which prevents sponges and corals from growing – using a toothbrush).

Interestingly, it’s the Coral Cay documentary that finally silences the group. Designed with local communities in mind, the film offers a view of the Cambodian seas that few of its countrymen have ever seen: the view from the bottom up. It’s also a view that’s vital to nurturing better local understanding of Cambodia’s underwater wonders and why they should be preserved.

“Too often we’ve witnessed sacks full of garbage thrown from over the side of boats,” cautions Ben Thorne, of Coral Cay Conservation. “Likewise, there are large amounts of ‘ghost nets’ on the reef; nets which were used for fishing, but now lay dormant and neglected over healthy patches of coral reef, often enclosing fish too.  The proposed Marine Fisheries Management Area and ongoing bio-physical surveys by the Song Saa Foundation aim to reduce these pressures. It is noticeable, through events such as World Oceans Day, that locals are becoming more conservation-savvy regarding their impacts on the reef. Let the good work continue!”

Bora, a 34-year-old from Kandal province with an easy smile and near-perfect teeth, knows this. He’s Cambodia’s first native scuba diving instructor, a badge he wears with pride. Introducing himself as precisely that, with a firm handshake and lingering grin, Bora – long hair tucked up beneath his blue Oceans Day baseball cap – stretches his legs out beneath the table. Behind us, on the dressed-for-the-occasion pier, the sons and daughters of Koh Rong Saloem fishing families are racing each other on tiny rafts made of recycled materials: empty water bottles here; Styrofoam boxes there. The crowd cheers.

What does Bora think about being the first Cambodian scuba instructor? “I love it! In the beginning, I didn’t want to do it. I’d heard the instructor’s exam was very hard and my English wasn’t great. It took me a long time to finish my Dive Master (a prerequisite for the instructor’s course). I was worried about two things: physics and physiology. My boss at the Dive Shop was worried too, but in the end I got 100% in both exams!”

Such achievements are not to be underestimated in a country where, although many grow up swimming in rivers, few are bold enough to brave open water. “I wasn’t afraid; never!” says Bora. “In front of my house there’s a river, so when we were growing up we used to swim a lot. I got invited out to Koh Tang on an overnight boat trip once to go diving – my first time. I called my boss at Friends International, where I worked as a teacher, and told him: ‘I need to go. I cannot stay in Phnom Penh any more.’ I had fallen in love with being at the bottom of the sea. I love the fish! I’ve seen turtles two times here in Cambodia and I helped release one from a village, where people had caught it in a fishing trap.”

As a professional scuba diver, Bora is well versed in the importance of protecting the sea and those who dwell in it, but the message is still new to many Cambodians (his own parents don’t know what he does for a living: “They would worry too much about sharks and burst eardrums,” he says). “We found an empty turtle shell once while we were diving. I don’t know who had killed it; perhaps Vietnamese or Khmer fishermen. So we were carrying this shell and it suddenly occurred to us that there might be a bull shark watching, thinking it might eat the shell for lunch… A lot of people from Phnom Penh, they don’t like to swim in the sea. If they see a shadow behind them, it must be Jaws. But we only have two sharks here in Cambodia: the bamboo shark, which is tiny, and the whale shark, which has no teeth!” [Laughs]

“In some villages, you can still buy shark and stingray in restaurants; they’re just not openly advertised on the menu,” Bora says, noting that the only good thing is that, unlike China, where only the fins are taken and the rest of the shark is left to die in the water, here in Cambodia people eat the whole thing. “Some people here, even the younger ones, they don’t really want to learn. But when people find themselves getting better jobs with companies like Eco Sea and start working with foreigners, then they start to understand why what we’re doing here is so important.”

Important it most certainly is. No Take Zones, in which fishing is banned, allow endangered fish populations to stabilise and, left undisturbed, thrive. When that happens, some of those fish – given their newly bolstered numbers – will spill out of those protected areas as what the Science Brains call ‘exported biomass’ and into the nets of local fishermen, thus keeping catch levels up and establishing the kind of cycle that’s actually sustainable.

Sustainability, of any hue, comes of course at a cost. In the case of the coral frames being made by marine conservationists at Frontier on Koh Rong Saloem, each of which will one day house a bustling reef system, said cost amounts to $89 per year, per frame (ongoing surveys, cleaning, paying dive teams). In one particularly noble gesture, once Frontier has finished giving its World Oceans Day presentation, Fisheries Administration Director General Dr Nao Thuok – sporting a particularly splendid comb-over – reaches into his pocket and produces a crisp $100 note. “No need change,” his excellency nods, beaming. Five other fisheries officials swiftly follow suit.

The final word goes to Bora: “More Cambodians are starting to dive now and we even have a Cambodian Dive Master at the Koh Rong Dive Centre. I really want to see more Cambodians scuba diving and I want to be the one to train them. As long as there’s scuba diving here, I’m not going anywhere. I feel happier at the bottom of the sea than I do on land.”

 

The Australian feds brand them ‘outlaws’, squealing in the shrill tones of bored fish wives about illegal gambling, money laundering and drug mules. Newspapers (we’re looking at you, Australian Daily Telegraph) shriek and flap their collective hands, front pages plastered with references to ‘motorcycle gangs’ and how to spot them. Sitting here on the scalding tarmac, outside Phnom Penh’s only dedicated biker bar, the shocking truth is… you can’t bloody miss ‘em.

It’s 10am and myriad rays of Cambodian sun are bouncing, in every direction, off the hot metal of more than a dozen big-bore motorcycles. The effect, best described as ‘blinding’, is not unlike being caught in a web of lasers trying to steal a Picasso from any Museum of Modern Art (I would imagine; haven’t tried yet). Around me, the burly riders of these glinting, snarling, chromed behemoths stand, lean and sprawl in various states of morning-after-the-night-before dishevelment. Welcome to Day One of the Rebels MC’s national Cambodian run.

It was 1969, deep in the bowels of a Brisbane pub, when Australia’s largest so-called ‘outlaw bikie gang’ first fired up its ignition. Slightly right of centre on the political spectrum, a small band of biker pals chose as their insignia the Confederate flag, atop which they stitched a grinning skull sporting a Confederate cap at a rakish angle. In the near-half-century since, the Rebels have amassed more than 2,000 members and now boast chapters in 20 countries, making them – they announce with pride – the biggest big twin Harley-Davidson club in the world (take that, Hells Angels).

Unsurprisingly, given their sheer number and the amount of time that has passed since the club’s inception, a small percentage of Rebels and their associates have – GASP! – been occasionally accused of behaving in a manner unbecoming of Boy Scouts. Which may or not have something to do with the fact they never set out to be Robert Baden-Powell (that said, the law of averages dictates that at least some Rebels once wore a woggle and declared ‘Dib dib dib’).

Yes, there have been drug convictions, feuds and the occasional fire-bombing. Believe the hype and the Rebels have also been linked to Melbourne’s gangland wars, a Home and Away star’s drug bender and a Facebook photo of a baby holding a loaded gun. But, in the heavily inked flesh, just how badass are these alleged badasses, really?

Here in Cambodia, the Rebels’ national president is a short, swarthy Australian by the name of Sid. A quiet man, quick with a smile, he sports closely cropped dark reddish hair with the tiniest suggestion of a kiss curl at the nape of his neck. We’re outside Lone Bros on Street 51, waiting for the last stragglers before we gun our engines in the direction of Sihanoukville, and Sid offers me a small bottle of sunscreen. “Are you going to lube me up?” I grin suggestively, offering my shoulders. Sid blushes crimson, giggles and tosses the bottle to a long-haired biker who looks uncannily like a pirate (for the purposes of this story, ‘my’ Rebel). “Ozzy! She’s all yours…”

Being invited to ride with an MC of this stature is an honour not to be undertaken lightly, especially when nature endowed you with breasts and internal genitalia (the fact I used to be a road tester for the world’s finest motorcycle magazine is neither here nor there; this is a boys’ club, plain and simple). There are rules, after all, and as the pack swings out of the shade and onto hot tarmac I’m reminded that we must ride in strict formation and, as one of only two non-members, it’s up to me to bring up the rear (the other, a rookie male rider, fails to heed this and incurs several tuts and head shakes). All in all, not a bad spot: mine is the best vantage point from which to watch this long, reticulated mechanical python as it coils and uncoils along National Road 3.

For an event billed as a run, the pace is more akin to a crawl: the tacho needle on my black, 875cc Triumph Speedmaster barely passes the 60mph mark, a fraction of the eyeball-flattening speeds I’m more accustomed to (Ozzy laughs: “I tried to go faster, but no one would follow!”). Perhaps as a result, the ride is mostly incident-free, barring me having to dodge a flying crash helmet that’s come loose from its owner’s head, and the untimely demise of a bird that flies straight into another rider’s leg. Rob, an unfailingly charming British ex-boxer (he kisses the back of my hand) who’s a dab hand at customising bikes – is, for the rest of the trip, laughingly referred to as ‘DK’. Duck killer.

Kampot. Lunch. A restaurant called Mea Culpa. Claus, a magnificently handlebar-moustachioed German whose knuckles are encrusted with silver skull rings, is fast asleep on the lawn. Rixsta, who sports a handlebar and modest Mohawk, is curled in the foetal position on a sofa, nursing a particularly vicious chest infection/hangover combo. Glen, a silver-haired Australian riding a Honda Gold Wing the boys call ‘The Bus’, emerges from the bathroom clutching a wad of small wet towels which he proceeds to distribute among the leather-clad masses. “I found these in the bathroom so I ran them under the tap!” he beams. Mounds of soggy flesh, in various shapes and sizes, murmur in sweat-soaked appreciation. Light lunch banter turns from road tales to the trouble with ageing metabolisms.

Engines gun once more and an hour or so later, this creaking, groaning, coughing, wheezing, sneezing train finally pulls into Sihanoukville and the local chapter’s clubhouse, a palatial two-storey compound that’s more Playboy Mansion than outlaw safe house. Posters depicting vintage Indian and BSA motorcycles flap lazily in the soggy air. A vast courtyard, complete with ornamental fish pond, bleeds into a lounge where sprawling, supersized sofas squat beneath an ostentatiously proportioned TV. The pool table is in perfect condition. Even the floors are spotless. I lean both elbows on the bar. They don’t stick to it. Clean toilet paper is piled neatly in the bathroom. There isn’t a pole dancer in sight. It must be a ruse.

On the first night of what is to be a four-day bash, some 30 bikers, Wives And Girlfriends, and various other hangers-on amass in the Rebels’ clubhouse, once a bar called the Black Dog (a poster depicting an impossibly cute cartoon pitbull hangs in front, above the words ‘Warning: this dog has a gun and refuses to take his medication’). Here, among various posters testifying to the mechanical greatness of Misters Harley and Davidson, folk mill, chatting, drinking, shooting pool or watching Easy Rider on the big screen. Sorority houses aren’t this civilised.

At about 1am, the crowd having thinned ever so slightly, Ozzy pulls me to one side. As with any club, there is a hierarchy and it’s time for me to meet the main man, Sid, in his official capacity as Cambodian president of the Rebels MC. I’m ushered into the meeting room – a place usually out of bounds to women – and offered a plastic picnic chair next to a heavy wooden table. It’s the only chair, so Sid kneels at the opposite side of the table, his bulging arms crossed, giving me no choice but to peer down at him. The effect is comical and I can’t help but laugh, loud and hard. Sid smiles, reaching across the table to shake my extended hand.

When we part some time later, I offer a hug – and he graciously reciprocates. I’ve told him about my motorcycling pedigree, assured him I’m no hanger-on, congratulated him on his crew. The conversation turns to the feds. “They’ve been watching too much Sons of Anarchy!” We snicker. I point out – respectfully, of course – that I have yet to discover a meth lab hidden in the clubhouse and that the most heavily armed person here is, apparently, me (albeit only with a knuckleduster).

The following night, Friday, is The Big One. After a daylight ride en masse, the boys return to the clubhouse where the band, Psychotic Reactions, is setting up. A wall of tattooed muscle assembles before the makeshift stage, beers in hand. When we strike up, heads nod appreciatively. A man with a harmonica randomly joins in for a blues jam. A grinning Claus jams a horned helmet on my head while I’m singing. No bottles are thrown. Strippers are conspicuous in their absence. Ditto hard drugs. The most scantily clad person in the clubhouse is… me. A few joints are smoked. Again, mostly by me.

During one song, one of the burliest bikers – a strapping Dominican known as Danny – zooms up to me with his camera phone, capturing extreme close-ups of the show, much to the amusement of my fellow musicians. I bellow into the lens. Later, in the bar, he declares it his favourite song and hijacks the stereo, plugging the phone into the speaker jack. As my recorded voice screams out across the clubhouse, Danny yells the chorus, already word perfect: “PIRANHA! P-P-PIRANHA!” Guffawing with delight, he shows everyone the footage. There’s a split second towards the end when, courtesy of unfortunate lighting, my eyes flash red. Danny roars at me in mock horror before planting another kiss on my forehead: “DIABLA!” The only devil here, it seems, is me.

After the gig, Rixsta – occasionally spotted next to the bar’s framed Ned Kelly arrest warrant with a Vicks vaporub stick jammed up one nostril (the antibiotics haven’t kicked in yet) – ushers me into the ‘green room’, enveloping me in a big, pink fluffy towel and fussing over the air con. He brings me another Coke and worries quietly how the club will cover costs for the weekend (the large contingent of Rebels from elsewhere in Southeast Asia and Australia who were due to join us were scuppered by the coup in Bangkok and Queensland’s perversely draconian ‘anti-bikie’ laws, which ban MC members from being seen together in public).

By Saturday evening, the action has moved from the clubhouse to the beach and a bar called Gas & Surf, owned by a pair of Latino bikers by the names of Fernando and Diego. Both sport Mayan tattoos; both ride cafe racers; both speak with intoxicatingly exotic accents. So much so that catch them with one of the Finnish bikers and the conversation – which I’m told is mutually unintelligible but enjoyable nonetheless – sounds like an episode of Bill & Ben, The Flowerpot Men. The boys lounge in the shade of the bar, admiring the sea from a safe distance. I tease Sid for not taking his shoes off and threaten to plant him in the water. A little later, he theatrically tiptoes across the sand to say goodbye, his face a comical mask of mock terror.

The bar winds down and we move a few doors to The Dolphin Shack. Striding into a place where everyone else is sucking balloons and wearing little more than body paint, it’s hard not to feel invincible, flanked as I am by a dozen black-clad bikers. So I do precisely that, until they start dancing – which is truly a sight to behold. Arm in arm, these heaving masses of inked flesh wobble and shake across the dance floor, Ozzy going so far as to join me for a fleeting attempt at the tango. As dawn approaches, the otherv Rebels having sent us on our way with a rugby scrum of farewell embraces, this Nordic god ruffles my hair, his beard cracking into a broad grin. “Everyone says to me: ‘Your woman, she’s a badass!”

 

One by one, utterly forgettable Single White Male faces slide past the camera. Ken is a 30-something US police officer, with gelled-back hair and a vacant smile: “I know for a fact I’ll end up marrying an Asian woman. I just know that.” Gordon, in his 40s, sports a brown, shoulder-length mullet: “It really makes no difference where she’s from within the Asian subcontinent.” From behind a pair of wonky, black-rimmed spectacles beneath what can only be a perm: “It’s the hair. It’s the long, black hair that’s really eye-catching.” A younger face this time, rimmed by a chinstrap beard best described as ‘questionable’: “With Asian women, it’s just, like, BAM!” And finally, from one particularly porcine chap: “I think they give more consideration to how the man feels than sometimes themselves…”

Meet the men with ‘Yellow fever’: Caucasian males whose sexual preference excludes all but the most exotic Far Eastern belles. These Asiaphiles (‘Asian fetishists’ in polite company) owe a great deal to Confucius, the Chinese philosopher who sometime around 500BC helpfully framed relationships in which wives looked up to their husbands as being ‘in perfect harmony’ (Thanks for that, ‘Fuc – Ed). Times may have changed, but the myth that Asian women make wives who are equal parts doting and dutiful still persists. Why?

Steven is a twice-divorced car-park attendant from California. “I’m 60. I’m an old guy now. I’ve been trying to figure out: do I want a farm girl to take care of me? Do I want an intelligent businesswoman to help me grow? Back and forth: what do I want? What do I want?!” Beaming bug-eyed at the camera, with all the glee of a little boy at Christmas, the ageing American giggles: “There’s this Vietnamese movie called The Scent of Green Papaya that’s got this idyllic servant girl who cooks these beautiful meals. And you think: ‘Gee, would it be like that?’”

It was men like Steven, found here in Cambodia aplenty, who prompted Asian-American filmmaker Debbie Lum to explore ‘Yellow fever’ fetishism in Seeking Asian Female. This magnificently cringe-worthy documentary follows the eccentric love story – if it can indeed be called such a thing – between one Asian-obsessed baby boomer, Steven, and the young bride he finds online. The results are nothing short of an epic multiple-car pile-up on celluloid – and perhaps serve as one of the finest lessons Single White Men in Asia could ever learn.

“The first time I met Stephen in his own home, I had to fight the urge to turn around and leave,” says filmmaker Lum, a fourth-generation Chinese-American (married to a Caucasian and the product of what she calls “very American parents”, she visited China for the first time while she was in college) who spent months scouring Craigslist and other personals for men suffering from Yellow Fever. “I’ve been stared at, hit on and harassed by so many men like Steven,” she says during one voiceover. “They usually try to strike up conversation by saying ‘Hello’ to me in Chinese, or Japanese, or Korean. This has bothered me my whole life.”

Cultural blogger Angry Asian Man (real name: Phil Yu, a Korean-American commentator whose work has appeared in the New York Times and Washington Post) defines such men thusly: “To put it bluntly, that gross-out fetish when dudes have an unhealthy obsession with Asian women. Chances are, you’ve met or know someone like this.” It gets worse. Urbandictionary.com is even less forgiving: “Typically a fat white loser in his 50s who trolls around Southeast Asia for a slim, submissive young May Ping Pang who wants him for his money and will want to cement their relationship with a child ASAP.” And worse: “Look at that sweaty, red-faced Asiaphile. He can’t get a quality woman at home so he goes to Bangkok instead.”

And so it is that we first meet Steven – a grandfather – atop the stairs to his small San Francisco apartment, offering Lum a goofy “Hello!” from behind old-man spectacles. “Your hair looks cute!” he squeaks as she ascends. “You look very Chinese, with the bangs. You know I like that…” (more giggling). Steven has spent ten years and thousands of dollars searching for the perfect Asian “mate”, tugged along in the wake of evolving technology from mail-order bride catalogues to online dating sites. Along the way he’s amassed dozens of Oriental pen pals, an entire hard drive full of pin-ups and at least one gold-digging ex-fiancée.

Quizzed about his peccadillo when the film was first released, Steven told PBS: “There are so many problems with that phrase ‘yellow fever’. Lightheartedly I could accept it, but in reality it sounds far more strange than how I view it, like an affliction rather than a preference. I had never thought about it before until 10 years after the disastrous end of my second marriage. I avoided any romance for that period. Then I saw my son find a beautiful Japanese girlfriend he later married. They seemed so happy and looked so nice together. She was very polite and amiable but definitely not a subservient type. She was a powerful go-getter for sure, with strong opinions and high standards and a sense of purpose. I thought maybe this might be a new and better direction for my life as well. So I diligently searched for ones I might have chemistry with. Each nationality seems to have a personality of its own. Early on in my search and communications I discovered that the Chinese style of communication was what I enjoyed most.”

Enter Sandy, whose Chinese name is Jianhua and who grew up on a tea farm in the remote mountains of Huangshan. At 18 she moved to Shenzhen, China’s fourth largest city, where she worked her way up from the factory floor to become executive secretary at a fashion label. Still single at 30, making her a veritable old maid by Asian standards, she turned to the internet in her search for love, hoping for a Chinese man – and met Steven. In a voiceover, Lum wonders: “What kind of woman would move country to marry a man she met on the internet?” In Sandy, we find the answer: a brave one.

Arriving in the US on a three-month fiancée visa, Sandy immediately sets about organising Steven’s apartment – not out of a sense of duty, but rather to bring some semblance of order to her new environs. “Everyone said it doesn’t make sense,” she tells Lum. “‘You should try to find a younger guy. And why would you choose him?’ I felt like we had so many similar interests and hobbies. And he’s just so special. He’s really not like anyone else…”

Time inches excrucatingly forward. “After six days, it’s, uh, not bad. It’s pretty good. Before, when we were just chatting online, it was always happy. When we are actually living together, we may encounter some small differences, but I can tell he’s the type to make me happy.”

As the film unspools, these “small differences” conspire to create something more like a chasm. Chancing upon thousands of photos of Steven’s Chinese ex-fiancée on his hard drive, Sandy erupts in anger. Phone calls are made. Emails sent. Communications banned. Later, Sandy tells Lum: “The only reason I called her and emailed her was for this result. I had to make this woman mad at him. Then she would break it off with him. If I were forever getting mad at Stephen, he’d never end it on his own. Now that she’s out of the picture, we don’t have any more problems.”

Ultimately, this is the film’s most poignant message: a shattering of the idyllic fantasies that stereotypes about ‘powerful’ Caucasian men and ‘submissive’ Asian women tend to excite. “Some of the wives like to gossip and compare,” says Sandy of others who followed a similar path. “One said: ‘Oh, you’re so lucky. Your husband has a house. Mine doesn’t own a house.’ When Steven first contacted me, he told me his honest situation. Whether I choose to accept it is my responsibility. So anyway, all the wives asked me: ‘What’s your husband’s situation?’ I told them: my husband has no car, no house, no money. Three nothings! In China, people would laugh in my face: ‘How can you marry this type of guy? What’s the point of going to America? You should’ve stayed in China.’ But in China, it’s not like I could ever meet or marry someone wealthy. I’ve never wanted to marry for money. I think you marry the same kind of person that you are. I come from a really ordinary family. It’s better to be realistic, right?” But it’s Steven who needs Sandy, not Sandy who needs to be rescued. “If I had known marriage was so hard, I would have never gotten married,” Sandy vents at one point. Steven, meanwhile, tells the camera that he’s “dead without her”.

Beyond the subversion of stereotypes, the film enters rather more profound territory as an examination of the changing nature of East-West relations. As noted by theatlantic.com, “In Steven and Sandy’s clash of cultures, and the renegotiation of expectations and shifting balance of power that subsequently ensues, one can readily see a reflection of the larger picture of Sino-American relations. The US simultaneously sees China as an alluring and naive consumer target, waiting for the Coke-bearing white knight of corporate America to come sweep it off its feet, and as a determined and crafty rival, jostling for pre-eminence on America’s own home turf.” Says Lum: “This movie does end up, almost accidentally, saying a lot about the current state of America’s relationship with China. You realise how little the West and China really understand each other, and how much buzzwords and catchphrases and stereotypes end up shaping the dialogue, even though it’s literally the most important relationship in the world right now.”

 

WHO: Asiaphiles
WHAT: Seeking Asian Female screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 4pm May 31
WHY: Confucius didn’t know shit

 

In 1953, the sight of a young, leather-clad Marlon Brando astride a motorcycle in The Wild One sent most decent folk into a collective, self-righteous tailspin. The movie was immediately outlawed in the UK, where it stayed on the black list for the next 14 years. Too late: biker-gang leader Johnny Strabler’s soulful menace, that ultimate-for-the-time icon of restlessness and rebellion, had burned deep into the collective subconscious. And replicating that image on the streets swiftly became about something more than skin-deep. Legend has it that, in London during the 1960s, riders would select a song on a cafe’s jukebox then race off on their Triumphs, BSAs and Nortons, returning before the track finished. These greased-up rockers often clocked speeds in excess of 100 miles per hour – rare at the time, hence ‘ton-up club’ – by stripping all but the essentials from their machines, which were little more than a seat on wheels. With custom cafe racers now on Cambodia’s streets, The Advisor meets those magnificent men of Moto Cambodge and their riding machines to talk fast bikes and slow food.

How did you cafe racers find each other? 

Patrick Uong (Cambodia/US brand manager): Once upon a time I moved back to Cambodia from NY and was in search of a bike. Happened to be told about Paul Freer. The very next day I was walking down the street and saw Paul on what is now my bike. It’s an early ‘90s Yamaha SR400, all blacked out, nice and fierce. Really badass. I saw Paul on it and he has this white hair and wears spectacles and braces.

Justin Stewart (Australia, animator): My son calls him ‘That English chap’…

Patrick: He was wearing a white linen vest and spats! I contacted him, bought the bike and then met a lot of other guys who’d bought bikes from Paul. We realised there was this little contingent of us. The platform of the SR400 lends itself very easily to transformation.

Nick Chandler (New Zealand, marketing): The SR400 is like the foundation of motorcycles: it started as single-cylinder and hasn’t really changed since. Single-cylinder, big-bore, torque-out thumper, mid-size engine. You can make a tracker, you can make a racer; all the styles we’re into.

Patrick: I started riding about 14 years ago in San Francisco, old ‘80s plastic BMWs. They’re so easy to work on – none of this supercharged engine stuff, just pure animals of joy. You get to tinker with them, or someone else tinkers with it for you, and it’s not incredibly expensive.

Nick: It’s like a lawn mower! The SR really is that simple: it’s a carburettor, a fuel tank, an engine, a gearbox and a sprocket. Nothing fancy.

Patrick: And the kickstart. Don’t forget the kickstart! And the SR was modelled on the BSA – it’s a better version of the old English BSA.

Justin: There’s one newer bike in our fleet, but we prefer bikes from the ‘70s. I was massively into dirt bikes in Australia then came here and saw Paul’s bike. That was my transition into road bikes. I now have an SR400 Tracker; the CL450 ‘70s bike, stock, and the BMW K100 RS, which was just an opportunistic thing –it was really cheap and really ugly and I knew we could chop it up!

Patrick: Paul has this really distinct style; he gravitates towards these old, oily machines. Paul is a British riding gentleman. He would wear wool knickers right now if he could! When I built my bike, I hadn’t seen a single cafe racer in Phnom Penh. Ever since I started riding, I’d always wanted one.

Nick: Yours is probably one of the most distinctive SRs I’ve ever seen, Patrick. It doesn’t look like anything else. You know what people say about their pets? If you were a motorbike, you’d be your bike.

Patrick: I put a lot of sweat into it!

Nick: I come from a motocross background, so I always put straight motocross bars and knobbly tyres on my bikes. I do like cafe racers as well, though: stripped back, clip-on bars for speed, rear sets so you can lie down on the tank. It started in the UK. Guys were coming back from the war with their stipend from the army. ‘What am I going to do now? I’ll buy a bike!’ That’s how the Hell’s Angels got started in the US. In Britain, mods and rockers would race from cafe to cafe, trying to hit 100 miles per hour. The easiest way to make a bike faster is to strip weight off and that’s coming back now; the number of people talking about cafe racers is growing fast. There’s something about that simplicity that people are going back to. And being on a motorbike is the ultimate freedom.

Have you ever read Zen & The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance?

Everyone: Yes!

There’s something rather special about messing about with bikes. When it comes to customising a machine, is it a psychological exercise as much as a physical exercise?

Nick: Look around the table – we’re all dressed a certain way that’s representative of ourselves and that’s perhaps a conscious decision, but with a motorbike it’s almost like looking in a mirror without knowing that’s what you’re doing. Like I said, if Patrick was a motorbike, he’d be HIS bike. I like dirt bikes and they originated from Steve McQueen and co grabbing their Triumphs, taking them off road and racing them.

Patrick: Steve McQueen for us is an icon.

That famous scene in The Great Escape, when McQueen’s character, Hilts, jumps a border fence on a Triumph TT Special 650, was added by the director especially for McQueen, a known speed-freak and petrolhead. 

Nick: Have you seen the 1971 documentary On Any Sunday? McQueen was an absolute nut job. All he wanted to do was ride bikes. It’s an expression of self: with a motorcycle, it’s you and only you. It’s a selfish purchase. If you buy a car, you have to put up with other people. You establish a relationship with a motorbike.

Justin: Motorcycling, for me, is surfing when I can’t surf.

Being a fighter pilot when you can’t be a fighter pilot. 

Patrick: Surf culture, skate culture, motorcycle culture: they go hand in hand.

Nick: You sit down with a mate and talk about what you want to do with the bike, plan a road trip…

Patrick: That’s motorcycling: it’s you, your mates, your machine, the journey.

Nick: A lifestyle! People accept each other simply because they both ride motorbikes.

Patrick: We were talking earlier about what makes a cafe racer. It’s usually the lines: the shape, the form. It’s very straight, horizontal; cut like a bullet.

Calls to mind New Zealander Burt Munro, played by Sir Anthony Hopkins in The World’s Fastest Indian, who set the land-speed world record in 1967 on a bike he built by hand in his garden shed. 

Nick: Exactly! And that’s the point of motorcycling: anyone can do it. They’re cheap to buy, cheap to own and simple to work on – if you want them to be [Laughs]. I can’t remember the last time I went on holiday with someone else. I usually just fly to Colombia, Sri Lanka, anywhere, rent a bike and spend 14 days riding around. It’s a visceral experience; you’re exposed to everything around you, so you get to experience your environment. That’s what Moto Cambodge is about: we get together, talk about what we’re going to do to our bikes, do it, then go out and ride them. And we can do it right here, in Cambodia: create something world class in a town where the power still goes off once a day.

Tim Bruyns (South Africa, chef): For me, it’s the same as these guys and their bikes: taking all these influences and bringing them to Cambodia, using them, and putting their experiences and how they feel about bikes into a Cambodian context. At Common Tiger, just about everything is sourced from local markets, but our food isn’t ‘Cambodian’, it takes everything that I am and I’ve experienced and puts it altogether on a plate. We had one prawn dish with handmade cannelloni: it had red curry, which is Thai; it had a confit garlic and lemongrass espuma, which is modernist. So there are all of these influences, but at its core it’s a product of passion and its environment. It’s like working on a motorbike, you miss out on other things; it becomes so much a part of who you are. Working with food, it’s the same and we also tend to gravitate towards like-minded people. Between the two disciplines, there are many similarities and that’s why we’re all here, which is good!

Patrick: Tim cooks from his heart and that’s how we feel about our bikes. We’re all super-passionate about what we do and we hope that other people catch on too. When Tim comes to the table and talks about the food he’s prepared, in his voice you can hear how passionate he is about what he’s created for you – ‘This is what I made for you!’ – but being very humble about it. I would like to portray Moto Cambodge as humble, too. We’re not hot shots, we’re guys who like to ride bikes and talk about bikes and tinker with bikes and go find bits and then build and construct and fabricate, you know? It’s about substance and aesthetic, the same way a chef composes his plates. Think about how much he has thought about that. That’s what we also bring to custom bikes: we really, really think about what it’s going to look like; we envision everything. It takes months to build one – and so much planning.

Tim: That’s why taking old bikes and bringing them into the context of who you are and where you are is so awesome. When you start as a chef, you earn $200 a month for six to seven years because you’re learning about what’s gone before and learning that gives you the tools to go forward. I’m always looking through 19th century recipes; early 20th century recipes, everything, because it was awesome then and it can be awesome now, but I’m going to take it and put it into the context of Cambodia.

Nick: And make it accessible, which is what you’re both good at.

Tim: People have this idea of what fine dining is, but Common Tiger isn’t excessive; it’s nothing over the top. Chill out in a comfortable chair. Our most expensive dish is $14; we haven’t even got tablecloths! [Laughs] Food should be about sitting around and being in a position to talk about bikes, to talk about whatever and enjoy it.

Patrick: Food, like bikes, is about bringing people together.

Tim: And with these guys doing what they do, why not just put the two together and do something different and fun, put some love into it?

WHO: Cafe racers
WHAT: Fast bikes & slow food
WHERE: Common Tiger, #20 Street 294
WHEN: 6pm May 9 – 10pm May 11
WHY: “On my tombstone they will carve: ‘IT NEVER GOT FAST ENOUGH FOR ME.’” – Hunter S Thompson

 

A few decades ago, British author Douglas Adams wrote The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, a fantastical story about the world being unexpectedly demolished by hideous creatures from another planet. It was meant as a joke. Now, animal by animal, tree by tree, the world is being demolished around us – not by Vogons, but by us. After writing his book, which sold more than 14 million copies, Douglas decided it was time to think about the absurdities of life on Earth and what we’re doing to it. In 1989, he teamed up with zoologist Mark Carwardine and set off in search of weird and wonderful creatures dangling on the edge of extinction. Douglas later said of Last Chance To See: “My role, and one for which I was entirely qualified, was to be an extremely ignorant non-zoologist to whom everything that happened would come as a complete surprise.”

In 2001, the pair had been discussing the possibility of new adventures when Douglas suffered a heart attack and died. He was 49. Biologist Richard Dawkins dedicated The God Delusion to him, writing: “Science has lost a friend, literature has lost a luminary, the mountain gorilla and the black rhino have lost a gallant defender.” Celebrated comedian Stephen Fry, a close friend, had lived in Douglas’ house while he and Mark travelled the world and remembers “taking urgent phone calls to send maps and lenses to faraway places.” In 2008, 20 years after the original journey, Stephen joined Mark to find out what had become of the animals. It wasn’t just a search for creatures on the edge of extinction, but for the conservationists who risk their lives to protect them.

Southeast Asia has its own wildlife heroes – and their task is not an easy one. A week before Mark Cawardine arrived in Cambodia, five of the people he was due to work with were murdered by poachers. Inspired by the work of Douglas, Mark and Stephen, this is our tribute to some of the littlest-known-yet-most-heavily-hammered species of Southeast Asia and their equally intriguing and elusive human custodians.

King of the swingers:
Francois’ langur

The magnificently moustachioed Francois’ langur is believed by the Tay people to be children who lost their way in the forest and changed shape in order to survive. Once, more than 2,500 of them could be found scattered across 23 different countries, including China and Vietnam. Sadly, the Tay’s tradition doesn’t extend to other minority groups, who stalk langurs for the dining tables of Vietnam’s nouveau riche (their bone marrow is extracted for medicinal concoctions to feed the incessant black hole in China).

“They are easy to catch by patient hunters who seal up the entrance of sleeping caves for a couple of days after a family group has entered, then poach them in one foul swoop after the animals are in a weakened state, all withered and frail,” says Michael Dine, a technical adviser with the People Resources Conservation Foundation. “They are in effect a victim of their own habitat and ecology when it comes to human interaction.”

Hailing from Australia, Michael has been fortunate enough to encounter wild langurs – considered gods in Indonesian folklore – not just once but twice, “hearing their grunts and, on one particular occasion, watching a family group scramble across a vertical rock face towards a sleeping cave as the sun set. Watching langurs by the fading, last rays of the day: an ideal scenario for romance novelists!”

Working with communities in the remote forests of Vietnam, Dine learned that “the introduction of new ideas and technological innovation can be highly risky for people with limited livelihood strategies, that ‘seeing is believing’ is a golden rule and sitting down over a cup of green tea or drinking a skin full of wine (rice or maize, with various medicinal properties) to joke and share local hospitality are vital ingredients to developing trusting, workable relationships.” One of the most rewarding relationships is with this playful leaf monkey.

Today, about 1,500 langurs – named in honour of one Monsieur François, a French consul in China when he first observed them – can be found in small, scattered harems near the caves which serve as their sleeping quarters in weathered limestone hills. A noisy bunch, they careen through the treetops by day looking for leaves and fruits. When infants are born, they are cared for by their own mothers and unrelated babysitters or ‘aunts’.

Living fossil: kouprey

The northern plains of Cambodia were described in the 1950s by American explorer Charles Wharton as ‘one of the great gamelands of the world… second only to the African gamelands in game abundance’. The immense herds found included four species of wild cattle, of which one was the kouprey, Cambodia’s national mammal.

Discovered by science in 1937, the kouprey – Khmer for ‘forest bull’ – was described as ‘a living fossil’ and shared many characteristics with primitive oxen. Before biologists could learn more, disaster struck. “The kouprey was known to science for a quarter of a century before disappearing into the fog of war that laid waste to Indochina in the 1960s and ‘70s,” says Dr Hugo Rainey, a technical adviser with the Wildlife Conservation Society. “Very large numbers of soldiers and guerrillas armed with automatic weapons probably caused its demise. It was a majestic beast weighing nearly a ton with horns up to 80cm in length. Open deciduous forests mixed with dense evergreen forests provide ideal habitat for these species. If any kouprey remain alive, they may be found in these remote forests of northern Cambodia.”

One of the main drawbacks to being a kouprey, says Dr Rainey, is being “big and tasty”. When Wharton shot the first colour footage taken in the wild during a 1951 expedition, in areas frequently raided by armed Communists, he noted native hunters using ancient flintlocks and shooting at close range. His team estimated that about 500 remained. The following year, the adoption of a special resolution by the International Union for the Protection of Nature spurred hopes the government would establish sanctuaries for the kouprey. Sadly, hostilities within the region intensified and the plans were abandoned. The last confirmed sighting, by Wharton himself, was in 1962 – just 25 years after the kouprey was first discovered.

“Sadly, the only confirmed sighting of a kouprey in recent years has been the skull and horns offered for sale in local markets – at very high prices,” the World Wildlife Fund has said, but conservationists are reluctant to declare it extinct. Instead, they point out that such cattle are a vital part of Cambodia’s natural order. “Cattle are really, really important,” said Dr Rainey. “They do a lot of grazing; they’re food for tigers and wild dogs. They’re a core part of the ecosystem. If you don’t have those, you lose a lot of other species, including leopards.”

The exterminator: pangolin

This armour-plated pest controller looks more like a reptile than a mammal. The pangolin normally shuffles along on its knuckles, but can also climb trees like a caterpillar. Its pointed snout and long, sticky tongue fit perfectly into insect nests. As an adult, it will devour more than 70 million creepy crawlies a year, potentially saving a small fortune in extermination fees. When threatened, its only defence is to roll up into a ball (after aiming its bottom at would-be aggressors and spraying them with a foul-smelling secretion). That’s more than most people know about this shy, secretive creature. Despite being the most trafficked mammal on the planet, it remains largely a mystery to science. It is no stranger, however, to the superstitious.

“Carrying a pangolin’s tongue in your pocket, in some parts of Indonesia, will protect you from evil,” says Chris Shepherd, Traffic’s deputy director in Southeast Asia. “Really? Tell that to the pangolin.” Its luck certainly seems to be running out: populations are plummeting as the demand from Chinese apothecaries for ingredients such as scales and even unborn foetuses intensifies. The market for their so-called medicine is global, fuelled by baseless beliefs that it can aid longevity, ward off witchcraft and keep wild animals at bay. In 2007, one restaurant in Vietnam was found offering Te Te (pangolins) whole or steamed. They can even end up in bottles of wine.

“Pangolins are traded by the ton and breed very slowly,” says Shepherd. “This is the kind of situation that should be treated very urgently, but in most people’s minds it isn’t sexy and therefore few care.” It’s hard to know how many pangolins are left in the wild. Every year more and more end up in cooking pots, despite the best efforts of wildlife officials. In the space of just one week in 2008, Vietnamese authorities in Hai Phong seized 23 tons of pangolins – about 8,000 animals.

“They must be one of the easiest animals to catch, once you find them,” said Shepherd. “They have no teeth and their only real defence is to roll up into a ball – a ball that fits perfectly into a bag, unfortunately.” Undeterred, he has vowed to fight on and has even designed a pro-pangolin T-shirt, the slogan on which reads: ‘This is how we roll.’ For as poet Marianne Moore respectfully wrote in The Pangolin, ‘This near artichoke with head and legs and grit-equipped gizzard, the night miniature artist engineer is, yes, Leonardo da Vinci’s replica – impressive animal and toiler of whom we seldom hear.’

Burning bright: Sumatran tiger

At the turn of the 20th century, Dutch colonists reported that Sumatran tigers were so numerous and bold they would enter planters’ homes. Immortalised in the Indian proverb ‘Do not blame God for having created the tiger, but thank him for not having given it wings,’ this spectacular tertiary predator has long mystified man. Chinese druggists pedalling myths that their body parts have the power to cure certain ills have fuelled human greed and by 1978 the island’s tiger population had shrivelled to just 1,000, thanks to ‘traditions’ such as using eyeballs to treat epilepsy and whiskers to cure toothache.

“Who was the first person to think a tiger penis might be worth eating?” says Chris Shepherd, regional deputy director of Traffic. “Come to that, how long do people have to eat owl eyes before they realise their night vision isn’t like that of an owl? ‘Tiger genitalia will improve your sex life.’ Tigers have sex for seconds at a time: is that what people are going for? And if you want another gross example of wildlife used for magic, I once watched a ‘medicine man’ force fresh tiger crap down a mentally handicapped man’s throat in order to drive away evil. Mental pictures like that just don’t go away.”

Among the Sumatran tiger’s staunchest supporters is Debbie Martyr, who started working in Kerinci Seblat National Park in 1994 “with no background in conservation biology or zoology, thinking Habitat was a jolly useful shop and Landscape was what [English Romantic painter] Constable did”. Today, she heads the Fauna & Flora International (FFI) tiger programme she founded in Kerinci Seblat, where dwindling forests serve as a buffer against logging firms and ever-expanding human sprawl. Of the roughly 700 tigers still roaming wild, more than half are found here.

“The wild tiger, the ‘tyger, tyger, burning bright’ of myth, is a shadow of red, gold and white seen fleetingly in the forest gloom,” says Martyr. “This is an animal never in Sumatra referred to directly as a tiger by forest workers, but by names of respect for a species some believe represents ancestral spirits; described as ‘polite’, anxious to avoid contact with people. But you don’t have to see a wild tiger to feel its presence, the essence of wild nature. The forest falls silent, heavy with suspense; a dry twig snaps – the tiger’s way of saying ‘I am passing’ – and then it is gone and the cicadas and a million other insects start singing again. We are humbled, and perhaps that is the key: rather than a last chance to see, we should be looking for a last chance to make good, to be polite to tigers as an icon of wild nature, and to our planet as the tiger is polite to us.”

Corpse flower: Rafflesia Arnoldii

British botanist Joseph Arnold and statesman Sir Thomas Stamford Bingley Raffles, founder of modern Singapore, didn’t so much discover Rafflesia Arnoldii as borrow it from a Malay servant. It was Sumatra, the year 1818. Arnold died just a few days after the exchange, but ultimately won the race to scientifically identify what later became his floral namesake.

Considered by some to be an aphrodisiac, it is found only in Sumatra and Sabah and has long been a fascination of wildlife photographer Jeremy Holden. “It’s the biggest flower in the world: generally a metre, but I’ve had local people tell me one-and-a-half metres – and I believe them. It’s a parasite, a long white string that lives inside the body of a vine. It sends up marble-sized buds which burst through the vine and swell to the size of a cabbage. Almost nothing is known about the ecology of these things: how they travel, how they get into the body of the vine in the first place. Flies are the pollinators hence the corpse-like smell. It even looks like a piece of rotting meat: red and blotchy. It flowers 21 months after the first appearance of the bud. After all that effort, it takes about two days to fully open, then you have a day or two before it starts to crack, wither up and turn brown.

“There’s some idea their microscopic seeds might get caught in the feet of pigs. When they’re wandering, they might graze the bark of another vine tree and introduce the seed – that’s just a hypothesis. Because it’s a parasite, the cost to the vine is huge. Nothing that does that kind of work lives that extravagantly. I think of Rafflesia Arnoldii like a pirate: they dress up, spend loads of money and get drunk because they’re not working for it; they’re just stealing off other people. How sustainable that is, I don’t know. The forest is shrinking and no one knows what kind of area the rafflesia needs to sustain itself. You won’t find a vine which has flowers continuously for years. I can go to a vine I know has them and suddenly there’s no sign they were ever there, but there’ll be another vine I hadn’t noticed… and bang! They’re suddenly there. They could easy disappear without people knowing. Go see one now.”

Feathered dinosaur: cassowary

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, cassowaries are the most dangerous birds in the world. Part of the family that includes the now-extinct elephant bird, a three-metre monster described by Marco Polo in accounts of his journeys to the East during the 12th and 13th centuries, the cassowary – of which there are three species – is a large, flightless bird native to the tropical forests of New Guinea. The most common, the Southern Cassowary, is the third-tallest and second-heaviest living bird on Earth, outsized only by the ostrich and emu.

They look like the product of an unholy union between a turkey and a giant, and if you leave them alone they generally err on the shy side. But don’t even think about going near one brandishing a bottle of cranberry sauce: their bone-cracking, razor-clawed kicks are powerful enough to kill you. During World War II, soldiers stationed in New Guinea were warned to give them a wide berth, but despite the fact the cassowary’s call can be heard for up to five kilometres on a still night, several men fell victim to these beastly fowl.

“When they are young and ‘small’ – the size of a goose – dealers sell them as pets, usually to morons with private collections who don’t think very far ahead,” says Chris Shepherd, of Traffic. “I really wonder if any of the people who bring home their little lab-sized cassowary chick know what it’s going to turn into. Cassowaries, as you probably know, have three toes. Well, two toes and a butcher’s knife – that’s the one they use to kick you in the stomach.

“A friend of mine has a rescue centre in Indonesia with about 25 of them. They almost all have to be in separate enclosures and the enclosures constantly have to be repainted because these monsters kick the crap out of them. We’re trying to save them because they, like all the other animals no one cares about, are incredible. Look at a cassowary: feathered dinosaur! Amazing birds…”