Let the dogs out!

SATURDAY 28 | The Underdogs all met at Music Arts School, a non-profit grassroots institution on Street 370. “We started about a year ago, trying a mix of different styles: some Khmer songs, some English songs,” explains leader and singer Sammie. “Then we decided we should specialise in bringing back the old songs from the 1960s. Everyone knows Chnam Aun Dop Pram Moi (‘I’m 16’) and Svar Rom (‘Monkey Dance’), but there are many more songs that we play that are less well known. We want to introduce the young people to more obscure songs that are just as good… We search in YouTube, listen to old cassettes and we talk to the old people who remember the times.” The band members describe their mission as reconnecting their peers with the music of their heritage. “The new songs copy too much; they sound just like K-Pop. We want to make a real Cambodian sound.” The Underdogs have a more traditional wedding-band form with rotation singers: two girls and a boy. “This way we can give the singers a rest, each time they can come on fresh,” says Sammie. Also, it means a wider range of songs. The songs of Ros Sereysothea and Pen Ron are now widely known, but the band can also play tunes by the Elvis/Dylan/Sinatra of Cambodia, Sinn Sisamouth, as well as the wilder singers such as Yol Auralong, famous for Jih Cyclo and also responsible for the drunken raving blues of Syrah Syrah, and the funky soul of Voa Saroun. Long may the dogs run free!

WHO: The Underdogs
WHAT: Energetic Golden Era rock ‘n’ roll
WHERE: Equinox, Street 278
WHEN: 9pm December 28
WHY: Look to the youth to drive the future

 

Guilty Pleasures

She: Oh thank god. I finally found the only other lesbian in Cambodia besides me.
Me: I’m not a lesbian.
She: Well, you fucken’ look like one.
Me: …
She: And don’t think I’m trying to chat you up or anything!
Right you are, sister. And while you’re out, single and staggering – stillies in hand – down life’s walk of shame, I’m the one snug as a bug in the arms of my doting, top-hot rootrat better half. So go fuck yourself. Said no one ever – and especially not me.

Instead, later on that evening, I found myself hunched over my handbag in a tuk tuk, parked inexplicably in the Caltex Bokor forecourt, mewling pitifully into a moist towelette and scaring the poor driver into smoking 300 cigarettes well out of sobshot.

For long after my happy hand-dancing half hour (Dusk till Dawn), well past the apocalyptic shot-quaffing phase (Nova), and languishing deep in the repetitive but inevitable post 3am shambaholic mawk (on the footpath outside Pontoon), I had foolishly remembered this encounter. My enfeebled self esteem, perpetually sickly since the time my sister got a pony and I didn’t, had now collapsed in a moribund heap and was shallow-breathing its terminal gasps. It wasn’t the sapphic taunt that bothered me. I’m as heteroflexible as the next person. I accept that with my half-arsed home cut mullhawk and penchant for tasteful sneakers I could just pass for Ellen in the right light. It wasn’t even that my crapulous rejectress wine-burped in my face a little bit as she said it. It was that she wasn’t even trying to hit on me. Nothing says you’re a hideous, unbonkworthy crone, straight and/or LGBT, like a blousy, shit-faced, middle-aged dyke who wouldn’t touch you with a ten-foot pole.

Or does it? My current hot, youthful husband accepts my ample silhouette, my kumbayah-meets-Harry-Styles wardrobe and my self-inflicted Howard Jonesian hair with admirable forbearance. And classic, candid Khmerness. ‘You were fat when I met you. Still fat now. Love you all the time.’ Bless. He’s never drawn into the old: ‘Is my arse bigger than Nikki Minaj’s?’ or ‘Do you think I should go to Bangkok to get my fat sucked out from my <insert body part here>?’ He may not know who Nikki Minaj is, but he’s not fucking stupid. I’m heartened by his forthright vote of confidence. But Cambodian straight talk works both ways.

I was rummaging deep inside Psah Chas the other week when a tiny, wizened prune with betel-inked lips and two random teethpegs grabbed my admittedly stupendous tits harder than strictly necessary and cackled: ‘Thom! Thom!’ The fortune teller next to us nearly pissed her pants. Hilaire. I felt like a couple of mangoes at Lucky or a Nat Geo special on a lost Papuan tribe.

I laughed anyway, as one must. It’s The Way of The Bodes. Everyone I know gets the: ‘Are you pregnant?/Wow so hairy/ Very, very fat!’ and sometimes all in the same sentence. Khmers aren’t spared, either. A young monk in my colleague’s history lecture told her she looked like a monkey. He wasn’t being mean. She really does.

As the StarMart fluoros illuminated my tears and the tiny fairy of my fading self-worth squeezed my hand and fell back into a swoon, I started coming round. Like, it took me a few goes, but I have a small, loving group of sexy, funny and smart friends who make me feel sexy, funny and smart. I have a husband. Ditto. I considered that my loudmouth nemesis probably left the house sober and hoping for fun, flirtation and an Earth-moving bang. Don’t we all? If she’d been a bit more of a gentleman we could have had a laugh and a quick cottage out the back. But manners, dear. I don’t give a shit how many chardonnays you’ve had. Unminced words or not, everyone in our Charming Ville is just trying to get along, discover a new friend and maybe even snag a mate. It’s never easy. So darlings, please play nice.

 

Friend or pho?

Pho is the de facto national dish of Vietnam, as iconic as pointy hats and Revolution Red t-shirts with the gold star. Cambodia — being a close, friendly neighbour of Vietnam – is, by geography, one of the best places in the world outside Vietnam to discover the dish. Fortune Pho on Street 51, and now in a new location on Street 288 in BKK, serves the soup Southern-style with slightly thinner noodles and just a hint of sweetness in the broth. The menu lists a dozen variations and just as many interpretations of the word ‘beef’. Try the No 2: raw beef and meat balls. It’s foreigner friendly (no intestines or other unrecognisable bits) and a bowl costs just $2.50.

Fortune Pho, #128 Street 51 and #45 Street 288.

 

Sweet dreams

FRIDAY 27 | Dengue Fever, the Los Angeles-based sextet who take ’60s Cambodian psyche rock and stuff it through a blender, is chiefly responsible for introducing global audiences to a lesser-known Cambodia; the Cambodia long obscured from international eyes by the pall of murderous Maoists. As Mark Jenkins writes in The Washington Post: “Imagine relaxing in a dive in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, circa 1965, brushing elbows with off-duty soldiers, local gangsters and Western diplomats as a hip band plays a mix of rock, soul, jazz, surf music, traditional Cambodian tunes and Henry Mancini and John Barry spy-movie motifs.” Powerful stuff, not just on the global stage but where it all began – as evidenced in the documentary Sleepwalking Through The Mekong, which charts Dengue Fever’s first visit to Cambodia as a band back in 2005. During one sequence, filmed in The White Building where the band jammed with residents, a music teacher turns to the camera and says in Khmer: “When I saw them performing with my students I was just in awe. Nothing could compare to it. I knew they were foreigners, but when they played all these Khmer songs there was no class difference. We were all equal.”

WHO: Dengue Fever
WHAT: Sleepwalking Through The Mekong screening
WHERE: Meta House, #37 Sothearos Blvd.
WHEN: 4pm December 27
WHY: “Underground people are getting hip to world music, and the world music side is getting hip to how you don’t have to have a dreadlock wig and Guatemalan pants to be cool” – Senon Williams (bass), Dengue Fever

 

The voice

FRIDAY 27 | Born in Barbados to English parents and having spent her formative years in Kenya before graduating from London’s much-admired Central St Martins University of the Arts, this elegant chanteuse cuts quite the dash on the runway. But it’s what’s underneath – namely, her vocal chords – that really quickens the pulse. “Music in Barbados is a big deal,” says Rhiannon Johnson. “In the Caribbean, it’s a huge part of their culture. Once a year, we’d have this big festival to celebrate the end of the crops and sugar cane; it’s called Crop Over. Listening to the radio and singing was always a huge part of my life, but it wasn’t until I got to school in Kenya that I got the chance to focus on it. It felt great: it was me coming out of myself. I’d only ever sung by myself in the shower.” From singing in the shower to fronting Cambodia’s rowdiest funk band, tonight she takes centre stage at Doors.

WHO: Rhiannon Johnson Quartet
WHAT: Jazz and soul
WHERE: Doors, #18 Street 84 & 47
WHEN: 8:45pm December 27
WHY: She’s one of the city’s most silken crooners

 

Exploring inner space

When artist Khiang Hei performed Space Within at the Bophana Centre on December 19, almost 50 people found themselves tied up in his experimental, mostly improvised installation. Greg Bem reports on the ensuing twists and turns.

It’s the end of the performance. Borey, a friend, collects metres and metres of the pink, yellow, orange, purple, blue and green ribbon and slowly approaches me, wielding it en masse. He wears a grin like a scythe ready to cut me open. The main performers have already taken their bows and are filtering into the audience for necessary post-event socialising. And so the cameras refocus on Borey and me, waiting to see what will happen. Everything is dragging, slow motion, etiquette and style and purpose, and then Borey acts: with great effort, he wraps me in a cocoon of filthy ribbon fouled by water and dirt. In an act of retaliation, I reposition half of the chromatic snare around Borey’s torso, thus ensuring we’ll both look like fools or geniuses in unison. The chaos of ribbon, soaked by water, is slick and disgusting, rubbing liquid against our skin, ruining our clothes. I look off in the distance and notice Khiang Hei’s nod of approval.

I’ve known Khiang Hei for a couple of months, having first been introduced on a late-night rooftop above Street 63’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams. Khiang used to live in Manhattan and I remember his loud NYC expressions driving my original attraction to him. Across the room I listened to his conversations on Washington Heights and an American urban landscape I’ve come to love and hate and know over the past five years: racial divides, geographical decay, gritty artist struggles. This realm of chatter was quite the typical exchange for a party of cheap booze, homely Singaporean cooking and constant blood extractions from ankle-frenzied mosquitos. White meat.

A few coffee meetings and an established friendship later, I wound up at Bophana Centre. Aside from a handful of photograph prints and a variety of explicit sculptures in his apartment, I hadn’t encountered Khiang’s art before and certainly didn’t know much about what he planned for Space Within. While we did toss ideas for this event around at a restaurant on Pasteur a few times, I was still in the dark. New updates were made to the Facebook event nearly every day. A video from October 2012 surfaced and I watched Cambodian dancers (and Khiang himself) spontaneously throwing objects and each other around the central space on the ground floor at Bophana. I was reminded of Merce Cunningham.

And now it’s 2013. The audience, made up of around 50 expats and Cambodians, sits in chairs pointing toward the central space of Bophana’s ground floor. Khiang is circling the room, passing out wafer-like cookies and what he calls “worms”, a Chinese New Year treat made of flour and coconut milk. They look like worms and they are delicious, almost melting inside your mouth. After his first circuit he makes a second round, distributing unused coils of pink, yellow, orange, purple, blue and green ribbon to each person in the space.

The performance, if it hasn’t already begun, is definitely in full swing now that the audience has been equipped. There is beautiful, hesitant Ouk Channita half-dancing across the room: there is exploration, grace and intelligence. There is Ali Ben with some manner of hand drum easily bringing up a beat and then discarding it at a moment’s notice. Trumpeter Steffen slowly blasts out notes and garbles of sound, just loud enough to keep the audience alert without damaging or distracting.

I’m fumbling with my camera and then look up to see Khiang standing right in front of me. “Start it off,” he says, and then motions for me to use my ribbon. I do, as Borey, sitting next to me, would do, and as everyone in the audience will soon do as well: I tie my blue ribbon to Khiang’s and slowly unwind the coil as he proceeds to move away, onward.

The rainbow of ribbon, a madness of string, goes from strands to waves cascading behind an enraged Khiang. There is purer and purer motion, energy, force, breakage. The audience stares sitting, gaping, googly-eyed as he moves around the room, lines get crossed and tangled and the installed material becomes one beautiful, impeding mess. Previously open and passable, the space becomes more and more impassable with each step Khiang takes. The musicians struggle to stand in security along the periphery of the centrum. Khiang’s bound            appendages and torso create a constraint on the movement in and out of the room’s centre. What is the Space Within? What is apparent the moment the audience realises their contribution to the performance isn’t just a beautiful form of ribbon, but a locking down of a sentient being?

Khiang is so overwhelmed by ribbon he is unable to move. He becomes the puppet, with the entire audience a puppeteer collective. Ribbon is to be pulled by everyone. I yank on my ribbon and watch Khiang try to yank back, yank back on mine, but grab hold of bundles of ribbon belonging to groups of ten other hands from within the crowd. There is ribbon in the corners. There is ribbon under feet. There is a large basin of water in the centre of the room and ribbon dangles into it, slides through it, causing the room to become slippery. Khiang tries to control his movement, but gets caught by the currents of power from many wrists. The people of the room, from the audience to the other performers and even including some of the photographers, want to pull Khiang toward them.

In an ejaculatory fury, Khiang manages to rip free from his bonds and exhaust himself in the ‘space without’. Members of the audience laugh. Or look disturbed. Or confused. Or all of the above. The focus of the audience gently transitions to other performers, who engage subtly with the now deadened material lingering like litter throughout the space. The energy dims. Several women are invited into the crowd to dance. I am motioned by one of the performers to join in the dance, a conga line sans torso clutch, and everything is slightly more absurd, the giant water container in the room’s centre, dead ribbon scattered everywhere. Prematurely, the performance is called to an end. It feels too soon, but then I notice Borey. He’s walking toward me and the mass of ribbon he has collected is firmly between his hands…

The pace of an italian opera

If you are looking for a fast bite to eat, go somewhere else. The Opera Cafe is a place to imbibe the atmosphere – along with the wine – and enjoy the dining experience. Calm down, relax and let them take care of you. An enlarged Piano Shop card – complete with a keyboard, of course – strategically placed behind the fish tank is a strong indication that this space attracts artistic types. Once a month, local and international photographers descend on the venue for a brainstorming session. Daniel, the manager, is writing a book. The 15 videos that run include Cirque du Soleil. All very European, dahhhhhling. Terribly Italian, to be exact.

But what about the food? To give it a fast sum-up, the pasta is phenomenal and the service is impeccable. The made-on-the-premises gnocchi and ravioli are comfort food on a rainy night. Also perfect for a carb-loading before a Hash House Harriers marathon is the Bucatini all Amatriciana. Complete with tubular spaghetti, smoked bacon, onion, tomato sauce and pecorino cheese ($6.50), it provides the necessary energy to walk, jog or run across the finish line.

Check out the Picasso platter ($6) with two eggplant cakes, two potato croquettes and rice with supplli. And then there is the Carmen salad with lettuce, cherry tomatoes, blue cheese, bacon and croutons ($5).  Another healthy choice is the No Kill Burger. This vegetarian option is made with eggplant rather than beef ($5). Those longing for a taste of jolly old England can opt for the Baritono fish & chips ($6.50), but will need to bring their own copy of The Advisor to wrap it in. Khmer food fans can tuck into the Angkor fried noodles with beef or chicken ($4.50).  My recommendation, however, is to stick to the spectacular pasta.

As for drinks, a glass of Grappa Nonino ($5) is practically mandatory for a truly Italian experience. Those wanting something refreshing should try the Aperol Spritz ($6) to titillate the taste buds. There are, of course, the usual offerings of soft drinks, coffee, spirits and beer. The house red is Sangiovese and the white is Trebbiano ($3.50 a glass), both very Italian, but would we expect anything less?

Cocktail aficionados can check out the Opera, a combination of Triple Sec, orange and lime juice ($4), or the My Darling – hot milk, Nutella and Baileys ($5) – concocted by Daniel the book-writing manager for those with a sweet tooth. While we were at Opera Cafe, the sky opened up and a monsoon poured down. There was only one logical course of action: order another glass of wine and continue on.
Opera Café, corner of Streets 13 and 178 (opposite National Museum)

 

Hell or Rehab?

Since 1958, tens of thousands of speed freaks, pill poppers, crack addicts, junkies, glue-sniffers and alcoholics have arrived at Thailand’s Wat Thamkrabok to undergo the world’s most extreme drugs detox regime. Set against an idyllic Oriental landscape, this stark Buddhist monastery is a far cry from the usual celebrity-friendly rehab haunts. Every day, patients line up to swallow a bitter herbal brew made from 108 local seeds, leaves and tree barks which leaves them retching and spewing in the gutters as their ‘drug demons’ are exorcised (to this day, only two monks know the recipe – a closely guarded family secret). Known as ‘Junkie Monastery’, it’s considered the world’s toughest rehab: here there are no toilets, air con, telecoms, hot water or private rooms. Wat Thamkrabok, which translates as ‘Cave of the teaching,’ is a lofty temple complex 130km north of Bangkok which was founded in 1957 by Thai nun Luang Paw Yaai. There, perched atop a mountain and in response to then-Prime Minister Sarit Tanat’s campaign against drug addiction, Luang Paw Yaai developed what is today the world’s most notorious detox programme. In 2004, her brutal vomit cure proved too much for self-destructive Libertines’ front man Pete Doherty and the heroin-addicted British musician bolted on day three of what should have been a ten-day purge. Here, one of only a handful of Western women ever to pass through the world’s toughest rehab describes – on condition of anonymity – her own experience as a heroin addict within the walls of Junkie Monastery.

How did you first hear about Wat Thamkrabok?
I’d seen it on the TV show, Taboo: ‘insane remedies’, this was one of the places featured. It looked bad, but it didn’t look horrific. The whole thing was about throwing up to rid yourself of toxins and the whole ritual thing to cleanse your energy. It sounded bizarre to me. The story was about two heroin addicts from England, but all you got to see were the rituals – and you know the standards aren’t like a Western rehab.

There were 45 Thai men, mostly brought in wearing shackles on the police paddy wagon. A lot of them were busted for selling or distributing drugs in Bangkok, a lot of gangsters. Some were as young as 14, but they were already in gangs. Then there were 13 Western men… and me.

You can’t run away. It’s about an hour-and-a-half from Bangkok, but once you’re there it’s like a huge village. There are these big gates with two huge elephants holding the globe, that’s Thamkrabok’s symbol. When you go in it’s like a community: there are houses, roads and cars. Once you’ve done your first five days of vomiting, you’re allowed outside to do chores. We had to wear red nurse’s scrubs – at least, that’s what they looked like – and apparently on the back, in Thai, it says: ‘Winner.’ [Laughs]

Charlie Sheen would appreciate that.
You didn’t feel as if you were a winner; not at least until day ten! Inside the temple, the area for inmates is called The Hey and you’re locked in. As a girl, I was locked in from the outside – padlock on my door and bars at the windows – at 8pm and unlocked at 5am. The Western guys weren’t locked in at all, nor were the Thais.

For your own safety, presumably?
Yeah, but why not lock the guys in and let me out?! What am I going to do? For one, to go through any experience like that alone, knowing you’re not actually alone, is one of the most horrible feelings. Even though you had the safety of knowing everyone there was going through similar things to you, as a female you’re locked away and so you don’t get the time to talk to anyone unless it’s during daylight. For the first five days, because you’re coming off things, you’re so sick you’re not trying to talk to people. At night, you can’t sleep: I didn’t sleep at all, not one minute, in nine days – and that was very common. People would go 14 days without sleep and get delirious. I could feel that I was losing my shit, but I just couldn’t sleep.

At five in the morning the bell rings, this huge fire alarm, and then you get out and grab a broom and start sweeping the compound. The Westerners were all in one building, guys and girls. There were ten steel or wooden cots with little shelves – no drawers – where you could keep snacks and soap. They provide you with a basic sheet, but they advise you to bring your own bed linen. When you’re detoxing, you get really restless and sweaty and you have a fever and it’s hot and there are fans, but you’re freezing. You have all these mixed feelings and you can’t get your body to regulate. There were three other Thai women in there while I was there. One was probably only in her fifties but looked like she was in her seventies: she’d been drinking since she was 11 or 12 years old, daily. She would have seizures: she’d be sitting up, brushing her hair, then she’d look at the light and all of a sudden her neck would spin around like The Exorcist and she’d fall on the ground and have this massive seizure. I knew what to do, luckily, but the other two women were terrified; they thought she was possessed. Imagine you’re locked in and this woman’s having a seizure and these other two women are screaming and you have to wait for somebody to come with the key and unlock you. They’d run in and start sticking things down her throat, trying to stop her from swallowing her tongue. They didn’t know what to do, but this happens a lot – especially with methadone and alcohol. You’re advised to stay clean for two days before you arrive at the temple because those are the most common times for seizures to occur and you can get properly treated for it, because once you’re at the temple, if you’re having a seizure, you’re having it at the temple. Bangkok is an hour-and-a-half away, if you’re lucky, and the monks aren’t going to take you. They actually tell you: ‘We’re not taking you to a hospital. This IS the hospital.’ Then they pointed to this cell – the hospital was the same as the jail. If you went mad while you were in there, they would shackle you up in that room and lock you in from the outside. It was a dark room in a corner with one ceiling fan and a mat, littered with mosquitoes.

You were allowed to bring in reading material, like books, but nothing electronic. I brought 15 pairs of underwear because I wasn’t planning on doing laundry while I was there. When you get there and check in, they give you three bags of soap and your starter uniform. The nun who let me in said: ‘Have you never washed your clothes before? Do you really need this much underwear? Pick your favourite five.’ [Laughs] I think part of it is that they don’t want it to become a trading situation. You can’t bring in your own clothes and you’re not allowed to change out of the uniform at any point. It’s red, it’s oversized: there’s no sex appeal. You’re in a temple at the end of the day and coming off certain drugs, like opiates, the female sex drive is supposed to increase. They don’t want that to play a role in anything that happens at the temple: someone goes to detox and comes back pregnant? Not a good review. That’s the gist of the welcome you get and what you walk into.

What brought you to the point where checking into ‘the world’s toughest rehab’ was something you felt you needed to do?
Watching Taboo and seeing these two junkies, who’d been doing it to themselves their entire life, have to wait for a TV show to straighten them out. I’d been doing drugs for a long, long time. I’m 29 now and would say I’d been doing them daily since I was 13, in some form or other. I’d constantly been on something. I knew it had gotten out of control several times, but I’d just move countries – usually to somewhere with harsher drug laws, because I wanted something to stop that temptation. I’d try not to be in places like Cambodia again, because that’s where it got really bad. I thought: enough’s enough. Just go and do it and if this isn’t going to work – it’s the world’s toughest rehab, plus I mentally want it to work – then nothing is going to work. You don’t go through something like this because you ‘want the experience’. I realised that if I kept going like I was, in six months I’d be dead. Sometimes it takes more than willpower; it takes being in a really disgusting place and having a really bad experience that you can associate with all the things that previously made you feel good about bad things. It’s like you eat something and, even if it’s your favourite food, if you find half a cockroach in it you’re probably never going to eat it again. Negative associations, that’s what I wanted. Here was something that was going to make me feel horrible and I hoped to god I would remember how I felt when I came out of it.

So that was it: I wrote to the monastery and gave them my background. Normally they say seven days is the minimum, but 14 days is the suggested stay. To stay longer than 28 days, you need written permission from the monastery. They said to me: ‘We recommend you stay three months.’ There are blogs by people who’ve been there, but I’d never read anything about anyone being asked by the monks to stay three months. They asked because of the length of time I’d been using drugs and how functional of a person I was when I was on them; I think they understood it was more than just a ‘weekend warrior’ problem. I’m really good at using drugs and living my life ‘normally’, because that’s the only way I had ever lived my adult life. Being sober isn’t an option, because I don’t know how to live that way. They realised what my position was – and, at that time, I was the principal of a school. You become so good at being a regular person, with no visible financial or personal problems; everything seems to be under control, so when does it become a problem? When you wake up and you can’t get to brushing your teeth because all of these other things come first. That’s when I decided I needed to go. I was 28.

How long did you stay at the temple?
Fourteen days, during a national holiday. Two weeks was the longest possible time I could take off school. Three months probably would have been better for my rehabilitation and if I was sitting on a yacht with piles of cash I’d probably have stayed on at the monastery for six months. At day three, I’d taken a walk around the wat and worked out escape plans. The only thing is they keep your passport and your real money. To operate on the inside, once you get registered they take your passport and all of your belongings and they lock them up. The head abbot is the only one who has keys and you’re not going to rob this 90-year-old man. It’s very clever. Nobody’s going to rob this sweet little old man because he’s all the way up a fucking mountain and you’re not climbing up there. They count your money and log it then they give you the same amount in Monopoly money: temple money. They recommend you take 200 baht a day, which is more than enough. On my last night I bought everybody dinner, because I had all this leftover money, and it was less than 400 baht.

Did you make friends while you were there? Was that even possible?
Yes, it was. Being the only female, I think it was good for the guys, too. Being around so much testosterone when people are going through withdrawal – and they don’t see any other women, when probably the people who managed to get them into this clinic were women: aunts, sisters, mothers – and then they’re thrown into this pit, essentially a prison, where you’re sharing a toilet with god knows how many men. Up to 30 can fit in a room; luckily there were only 14 or so foreign men while I was there.

Did it help, having other foreigners with you while you were there?
Because I was the only girl, they would look after me. In the steam baths, you’re all wearing your robes and you exit the prison area and walk out onto a road down to where they have ceramic-tiled steam baths. At the back, they stick wood and a whole bunch of herbs – stuff like cloves, which smelt like it would make a good barbecue – and spices. All of the tea is made from this potion thing that you drink, so everything reminds you of this horror and you have to drink it. Some of the guys told me to surreptitiously pour it away. You have to drink it at least three times a day, but they give it to you six times a day and it’s there, out, the whole day, so you can drink as much as you want. In theory, if you want to get better as fast as possible, you do what they tell you to do when they tell you to do it, but there are so many other things going on in your head than drinking that fucking tea! Drinking tea to get better isn’t something that seems logical at this stage. You’re already going through Hell and you’re, like, ‘What’s another hour?’ Everything merges: you haven’t slept, you haven’t eaten. All you do is you have diarrhoea, you’re shitting yourself, you’re puking all over the place; it’s just a horrible, horrible experience.

How horrible can herbal tea be, really?
When you walk into The Hey, the first thing you see is this door and then behind that is a trough. Behind that is a tree where people stand watching you and banging drums. You have to kneel – you want to get as low as possible. When I got there the first time, one of the monks came over and gave me an elastic band. I thought it was for my hair. ‘No, it’s for your shirt,’ because you’re wearing this oversized jump suit and you’re leaning down. I was wearing a bra but you’re not allowed to wear tank tops or anything else like that, so I guess it was just boobs and these poor 90-year-old monks are going to walk past, banging their drums, and they’re going to see these boobs out. [Laughs] So the monk gives this elastic band to me to tie up my shirt and I’m holding my hair back, thinking: ‘Don’t you have another elastic band?!’

The first day I walked in coming down off heavy drugs. The last time I had taken heavy drugs was two hours before getting on that plane. ‘I know it’s not OK to get to Bangkok high, but at least I’m not doing it in Bangkok,’ so I did my last little hit. When I checked into the temple, I still wasn’t feeling great. The nun gave me a schedule: ‘You’re up from 5am to 8pm and there are a few mandatory things you have to do; puking is at this time; sweeping happens five times a day; in between puking and sweeping, there’s a steam bath…’ Three times a week there’s chanting and you have to go up to the temple with the monks who chant for an hour and you have to kneel again. And this is a broken knee, so I don’t kneel very well; it’s really painful. As if that wasn’t bad enough, there’s meditation, only you can’t meditate because everything hurts and your head’s a mess. You can’t be one with fucking anything! You’re trying not to shit yourself; you’re trying not to vomit; you’re trying not to wipe the sweat that’s running down your face; you’re trying not to scratch the mosquito bite on your face or slap the mosquito that’s buzzing around your ear. This is you ‘meditating’. As a drug addict, coming off all of those things, just being alive for the first day is really, really rough. Being alive and then being told you have to do things, when basically you’ve lived your life in a world where you do all the things you know you’re not supposed to do already… and now you’re being told you don’t have that option.

In the morning, at 5am, you come out and you drink this tea that’s supposed to be good for your kidneys. You have to sweep – and if you can’t walk, you have to use the broom as a walking stick and you lean on it, but you have to go outside and you have to take part in the sweeping. That’s pretty difficult to do at 5am for someone who’s sober and alert and not hungover. Can’t you do anything else? Can’t there be a bell and we can go paint?! Or a bell and we can go dance or write or read or listen to music, anything other than sweep and puke?!

Having seen the documentary, the reality of Wat Thamkrabok still came as a shock?
They don’t show you all this in the documentary. In the documentary, these people get up; they puke; they sit around; they feel like shit; they talk to some people; they go to sleep; they wake up five days later feeling fine; they leave and they’re cured. But when you get there, that’s not what it’s like at all. I didn’t feel as though anything in that documentary was real, apart from the vomiting. Let me tell you about the vomiting.

 Please, do tell us about the vomiting… [Grimaces]    
The first day I walk in, the nun says: ‘Go into your room and get settled. In half an hour, you have to vomit.’ Can I wait until tomorrow? I just got here! ‘No, that’s why we tell you to arrive before this time because that’s the intake and then you vomit right away. Because if you’ve taken something today – and I bet you have…’ [Laughs]

She had you sussed already? 
Yeah! She was kind of like you in that sense. She was a very smart lady and she knew what she was talking about because she’d experienced it all herself. She wasn’t a ‘holy woman’, she was an ex-heroin addict who’d had a boyfriend in a motorcycle gang; spent years on the Rainbow Warrior with Greenpeace; drove her kids through Spain for months at a time and, all this time, was a heroin addict – for 18 years – and no one knew. She originally went to spend two weeks at the monastery but, by the time I met her, she was in her eighth or ninth year there, shaved head and everything. ‘You think we’re just going to let you be high your whole first day? Like the other inmates aren’t going to want to kill you? It’s best if you just do this…’ All the other guys were saying: ‘Ooooh, it’s the new girl! Are you ready to puke?’ And they tried to be funny, but don’t be funny; now’s not good. Be funny in 10 days. So she takes me to this trough, where the monk has a two-litre bottle filled with this sludgy brown liquid. You hear that and think Jagermeister, but it’s not: it’s like vomiting granular bits of herbal tea. There are 108 herbs in this remedy, picked by the first ever nun – the woman who started it all. She’s gone off into the hills and had this vision of all these things she needed to pick to cure the world.

Eye of toad, tongue of newt…  
[Laughs] Pretty much! ‘I’m going to take 108 of the most disgusting things in the world, put them in a bottle and we’ll make them drink THIS!’ This recipe has only been passed down through her family: she had two nephews and taught them how to make it. One of them was the monk looking after me. They bring this potion to you; they walk in and they’re already playing the drums. He does this thing to get all the sludge off the sides and then they give you a shot glass and two litres of tea. All the people who’ve finished the puking, who’ve been there more than five days, are standing opposite, cheering you on. On the first day, the nun said: ‘Pretend it’s a shot of alcohol. Swallow it completely, get it down. Just open your mouth and get as much of it into you as possible as fast as you can because that will make you puke.’ So you drink this tea and you hope it comes back up, otherwise you have to keep guzzling it down until it makes you retch. She said: ‘Don’t stick your two fingers down your throat; you’re not bulimic and trying to puke in the privacy of your bathroom. Take your four fingers and stick them in there; get your fist in the back of your throat. If you don’t make yourself vomit, you’re going to be ill and you’re going to taste it all day.’ I took one shot glass and it tasted horrible, but it’s not the worst thing ever at that point. My eyes were tearing because I was coming down off all these drugs, because I was vomiting and because I was horrified: all these guys weren’t looking at the other guys, there were all looking at the new girl, me. By day two, you know just how horrible it was and what it would be like having to puke it up. It becomes a lot more difficult every time. On day two I went to the front, but they said: ‘No, you’re not new any more.’ Huh? What do you mean? I just got here! ‘No, at this point there are already other new people and they get to go at the top of the trough.’ I had to go to the end of the trough – and there’s a difference being at the end. There’s this guy who walks around with a garden hose to wash stuff down the dry, concrete trough, because when you’re at the end you’re behind 25 other people and all of their vomit. There are some big, massive Thai guys, who right before vomiting would eat as much as they could possibly eat: two, three, four bowls of rice and stuff, so that when they had this liquid all they had to do was stick one dainty finger down their throat and all of this stuff would come up. They just need to puke once or twice and then they’re good to go. It’s much harder on an empty stomach, when you’re relying on just the tea. At the end of the trough, where you can smell and see and hear everyone else, it’s absolutely horrific. Then they start to pull newbie tricks, like they’re the veterans: ‘New girl, you’ve not eaten for four days. Eat water melon!’ It is really good for you – it has sugar in it and it will rehydrate you. What they don’t tell you is that when you eat water melon and then puke, it comes up all stringy, like Silly String. Sometimes it gets stuck in your throat and you have to pull it out. And they’re all watching – because they’ve all told each other you’ve just eaten water melon – like something funny’s going to happen. Is the monk going to not make us puke today? ‘No, the monk’s coming.’ Then you puke and they’re all yelling: ‘Ohhhh, there’s the water melon!’ You arseholes! It doesn’t matter that you’re in a place of worship; you put a bunch of boys together with one girl and they’re going to be boys.

And this is them looking after you?!
They did, like in the steam bath. Each has 30 people and it’s not very big: maybe six feet long and three-and-a-half feet wide, so you’re sitting on each other. Everybody makes themselves the smallest they can be. The guys get to take off their clothes and wear sarongs, but you’re a girl so you have to keep your scrubs on. You’re pouring water on you and it outlines your boobs and some of them men in there haven’t seen a woman in months, but I would go in and some of the big guys would sit around me, so I always felt protected. They were good about that kind of stuff. Even the Thai guys were respectful: I think, above everything, they knew they were in a temple and that’s something they’d grown up with. No matter how bad a guy he was on the outside, they respected that they were in a temple surrounded by holy men and they needed to behave, although you never know what could happen and I suppose something might have happened a long time ago that led to the women being kept in cages.

Some of these women stay on as nuns.
The nun who looked after me swore all the time: ‘If you think you’re going to get out, you’re not going to fucking escape.’ Are you allowed to speak like that? Isn’t there some rule against nuns using the F word in every other sentence?

This is the second week we’ve had a swearing nun in our cover story.
[Laughs] I saw that! She said: ‘Well, I wasn’t fucking born a nun!’ She told me all about her life. Her daughter is going to come see her this summer for the first time in nine years; she was 14 last time her mother saw her.

Did she regret her decision to stay on?
I asked her that and you could see in her eyes that she was sad on a lot of levels, but she was happy on a lot of levels as well. She wasn’t tormented by her decision; she knew that she’d made the right one for herself and her kids. She wanted to be there for her kids, to be sober and healthy for them, but she doesn’t trust herself yet to go back and not fuck it up. Maybe she’ll never be comfortable with that. She said: ‘Maybe, but I’m not ready now.’ Jesus! The monks do this long walk thing, this meditation retreat, and at first she’d thought it was this Woodstock-type party. This one guy said to her: ‘No, it’s not like that. The music is chanting and you can’t dance to it and we’re out here for days. It’s going to be a lot of silence and a lot of praying and that’s it.’ She felt pretty stupid because she’d come in as this wild child thing. She later watched this same guy leave and stay sober – he comes back now, ten years later, to lead meditations – but she knew that couldn’t be her. She knew she couldn’t leave and come back ten years later and still be sober. On my last day, I said: ‘It’s weird. I hate this place, but I don’t know that I’m ready to leave.’ She said: ‘Stay! You could be like me.’ I don’t think I could stay for nine years, but she’s still not at that stage where she’s ready to leave.

What stage are you at?
I’m at the stage where I go back and forth. I managed to do this and come out of it and I was OK for a while, staying away from anything that might tempt me, but then I got to the stage where I had been sober for more than a month and I still wasn’t feeling like myself. They say it takes 21 days to change habits, but by 22, 23, 30, 32, I still felt the exact same. I was waiting for enlightenment to come, but it didn’t. The monks had said that, realistically, it takes three months for your brain to build up serotonin and dopamine and start releasing it normally. I’d got to the stage where now I was this sober person, but I wasn’t able to do the things I was good at before: I didn’t want to be around people; I didn’t want to socialise. I wanted to work, go home, turn on the TV and tune the world out. I’d expected life to become easier and I suppose it would have if I’d stuck it out for a lot longer. I felt as though I didn’t know this sober person, because the last time I’d been sober I was a teenager. I didn’t realise how much of an impact drugs had had on my life; I didn’t know who to be without them. I read somewhere that alcohol is the worst drug for others because it brings out the arsehole in you, but sobriety is the worst drug for you because it brings out the arsehole in your friends. Sober, I realised I didn’t really like these people and the world was a pretty depressing place.

I made a conscious decision to go out and do drugs again. I remember getting them and being really disappointed and then doing the drugs and feeling really disgusted with myself and then I got really sick and threw up all over the place. Straight away, I could smell the temple and that stuff again and it made me feel really bad, which was good. When that first sickness came, all of these associations came with it and then I didn’t do it again for another month. After slipping up that first time, I felt so much better because I knew the drugs were within reach and I’d done them and I didn’t want them any more. That’s kind of where I am now. Never before have I been able to consciously look at it and say: ‘I’m done.’ I make sure I’m not doing it all the time and that it doesn’t become a problem again. Some people are able to stay at the temple for two weeks and be fine. Some people fight with it for the rest of their lives and that’s probably where I’ll be, but it doesn’t feel like a fight right now. It’s me being conscious and knowing what decisions are right for me: knowing what I need, when I need it and when I need to stop.

Having survived two weeks in the world’s toughest rehab – the one Pete Doherty famously quit after just a few days – was it worth it?
Yeah, it was definitely worth it. You can only go once in your life; they won’t allow you back. You take your vow when you arrive, your sajja, promising that you’re not going to use these things again. At the end of your time at the temple you eat this vow, which is on rice paper, and it’s supposed to stay with you; by passing through your body it’s accepted by all of you. Pete Doherty was there for three days then he escaped: he jumped over the fence and had his manager waiting up the road, with a car full of smack. He’d asked online for his fans to donate money so that he could get out and he got an emergency passport somehow. Believe me, I looked for ways out! Even now, in some of his latest interviews, Doherty has said he wants to try again, but you can’t go back to The Hey, no matter what: the monks won’t let you. Sometimes I wish I could have stayed longer because I would have understood more about how my brain works. Because you can’t go back – and you’re not going to make yourself vomit – what you do is try to put your mind back there and remember what it was like, all those negative associations that got you through. A lot of people overdose in Bangkok within hours of leaving the temple because their bodies have been through such a hard detox and when foreigners die, their bodies are brought straight back to the temple and placed at the top of the mountain, where it’s supposed to be super haunted. I knew that was a very real possibility.

A night at the opera

THURSDAY 26 | It may be some time before Phnom Penh is in a position to host an opera in its entirety, which would involve a cast of hundreds, but good news: Gabi Faja, he of The Piano Shop and, separately, GTS Jazz, is hosting an aural appetiser of sorts along with very modern mezzo-soprano Ai Iwasaki, a professional opera singer since 2004. Now living in Phnom Penh, Ai cautions that opera isn’t for the faint of heart. “As a teenager in Japan I had always liked to sing, but then I went to an opera performance and was staggered by the power and intensity of this amazing thing,” she says. “Opera isn’t just singing. It’s history, it’s psychology, it’s love. One of my favourite composers is [Claudio] Monteverdi, which means ‘Mount Green’. Monteverdi belongs to an Italian school from three to four hundred years ago, when opera was barely developed. The music is so simple because it was early days, so the singing becomes the most important. Also they had gods who were all having sex with each other and killing each other. It was really full of drama – even more so then because of the shock value at the time.” And what of this aural appetiser? Says Gabi: “Because we can’t do a fully fledged opera, we take some of the most famous and the most beautiful arias and we do a melange, a collage of arias from different operas. It can be anything from Mozart to Puccini and beyond, so you get the best of the best in a nutshell. Opera can be done in a modern, popular way. You can do it in the streets; you can do Stomp and Puccini, there’s no stopping you!” [Bursts into a jazz rendition of Un Bel Di from Madame Butterfly]

WHO: Ai Iwasaki (mezzo-soprano), Gabi Faja (piano) and Bong Somnang (clarinet)
WHAT: A night at the opera (almost)
WHERE: Doors, Street 84 & 47
WHEN: 8:45pm December 26
WHY: Opera is the most misunderstood of art forms

 

Catharsis through torrent

Laura Mam’s debut solo EP, Meet Me In The Rain, is catchy and uncontrived

Laura Mam. You’ve probably seen one of her clever videos or heard her band, The Like Mes. Her Youtube channel has verged on virality and she maintains a homely appeal by merging intimate live recordings with higher-budget productions. Through her inviting music and inspirational outlook, Mam has found the eye of the masses and yet also cultivated a community among Cambodians, Cambodian-Americans and expats.

Her excellent and relieving first solo EP, Meet Me In The Rain, is now poised for release at the perfect moment in her career. The five tracks meet the power of polished production with innovation in language and local Cambodian culture. Mam’s music successfully pulls off what many have been waiting to see: new Khmer music that’s fresh and progressive, retaining its integrity by capturing part of the spirit making up modern Cambodia.

Mam is on her way to producing tracks that fuse old and new, Cambodian and international. The five songs, including the title track, feel distinctly American in their structure, but the lyrics are Khmer and the music features traditional Cambodian instrumentation, including gongs and the roneat (similar to the xylophone). Being a diaspora artist, it makes sense that Mam’s light-hearted love songs resemble a space away from Cambodia – and yet they are distinctly Cambodian.

The EP opens like a scene from a movie. Part hopeful-sexy, part longing-reflection intro track Soben Sni (‘Little Black Polka Dot’) moves us through lyrical repetition, layered ripples and the urge of layered vocal tracks. Mun Tuk Pleang (‘Meet Me In The Rain’) melts Mam’s vocals into the soft tweaks of fanciful electric guitar, a crying that will wrench your heart as Mam calls out: “Kiss me in the rain, kiss me in the rain. Love me in the rain, love me in the rain.” Light and fluffy these songs are not, but they are also not overblown. Their pain, transformation, love and redemption are tolerable. Perhaps because you’ve never heard love songs quite like these.

After an upbeat Sin Chngai (‘The Distance Is No Fair’) and a soothing Kou Preang Veasna (‘Four Of Hearts’), we reach Chenchean Boncham Chat (‘Take This Leap’). A Khmer-lyric profession running parallel to many songs played during your favourite college open mic, but it’s unlike the countless stream of Western singer-songwriters churning out the same songs: Mam’s song is catchy and uncontrived.

Each of the tracks on Meet Me In The Rain present degrees of complacency, contemplation and longing. Love has never felt better through post-rainy-season listening sessions. As mellow as it is enthralling, hardly imposing or pretentious, Mam’s music feels right at home here in Phnom Penh.

But the EP is an EP and, thus, feels short. Five songs leaves you wanting more, wanting epic instrumentals and lengthy lyric confessionals, pronounced collaborations and experimental flirtations. Fortunately, Mam starts work on her next album in the New Year – a release worth waiting for, and for now we wait in the rain.
Meet Me In The Rain, by Laura Mam, is available now on iTunes and Amazon.