Walking Phnom Penh

It's really refreshing to be in a city of children again.

The little girl pictured above runs a pigeon hustle: She sells bags of bird feed to the families that cluster on the boardwalk, and then when the hungry flocks surrounds the excited children, she grabs two birds by their tail feathers, holds them dangling from her tiny hands, and offers to release them for a fee, and for “good spirits.”

I don’t have a photo of her proudly (and gently) holding the pigeons upside down, because I didn’t want to reward an eight year old for that, although I admire her creativity and survival instinct, so I did pay her, something I rarely do, because of her situation.

Her hustle is unique, but learned, with other family members, and friends, working the same stretch of boardwalk, but with a more common way to make money: They capture sparrows with nets, collecting them in home made cages, which they bring to the nearby wats and shrines, where people pay for their release, again in the name of “good spirits.”

These bird hustlers, or Buddhism hustlers depending on how you look at it, have plenty of work, because there are both plenty of wats and also plenty of kids to sell bird feed to, because the two striking things about Phnom Penh is how young the city is, how many children there are running around, some feral like the pigeon hustlers, others clutching their parents hands pleading to feed the pigeons, and how many wats there are.

Like in Bangkok, the wats are aesthetically pleasing ornamental landmarks punctuating the otherwise chaotic, cluttered, and ugly monotony of Phnom Penh, offering a palliative to its tumult. Tranquil escapes from the swarms of motor scooters, tuk-tuks, hawkers, hustlers, food stalls, girlie bars, coffee stands, and Priuses that crowd the streets, alleys, and sidewalks beyond their gates.

Phnom Penh, also like Bangkok, is not enjoyable to walk in. Other than the river boardwalk, and the mile long park near my hotel on street 278th (in the more “refined” south of the city), walking means hugging the shoulder of a busy road as teenagers on mopeds and tuk-tuks zip past you, only a foot away, since the sidewalks are useless for pedestrians, used instead for parking and kiosks and stalls of every build.

The drivers however are considerate, and so you can navigate the city by employing an aggressive audacity — by forging ahead despite the oncoming swarm, holding your hand out to say stop, and then going for it, because drivers do stop, or at least swerve to miss you, and when they don’t at first, and come closer than either wants, they slow down and apologize profusely.

That style of walking is a technique I learned in Hanoi, and perfected in other big messy developing cities, like Kampala, where the rush of oncoming traffic is primarily pulsating mobs of motorcycles and mopeds which behave like a flock of birds, moving in an understood, but not voiced, order. Yet despite Cambodia being four times poorer than Vietnam, there are more cars here relative to mopeds¹, which makes walking more dangerous, because it’s akin to adding a smattering of Pterosaurs to a flock of sparrows.

Yet despite those surface level similarities, and despite being half as rich as Bangkok, Phnom Penh is by far the more optimistic, buoyant, and effervescent city, and I am much happier here than I was in Bangkok, and that’s entirely due to its second defining feature — there are a lot of children running around.

Phnom Penh is a young city chock full of kids. They are everywhere, and they bring a positive energy, warmth, and joy that no amount of adult diversions — no amount of bars, casinos, exceptional cuisine, and museums — can replicate, because nothing warms the heart like a big smile from a tiny face. I don’t care how silly and maudlin that sounds, because it’s simply true, at an innate and an intellectual level. To be even more corny, being in a city of filled playgrounds is a lot more fulfilling, energizing, and uplifting, than being in a city of filled casinos.

Last night I was a little down, a common feeling when traveling alone, so I did what I always do then, and went out to be around people. When I was in Bangkok, and Seoul, I would often come back more depressed but here I always come back in a better mood, because being out when there are a lot of kids around changes the entire character of a crowd, adding a sense of optimism and joy to it, making it hard to be depressed when immersed in it.

Last night was no exception and when halfway through my walk I stopped to take pictures of some teenagers playing pick up soccer in the park, a tiny hand started tugging at my sleeve. It was a young boy with a bright smile, who he belonged to I don’t know, but he made clear he was tugging at my sleeve because he wanted his picture taken, which I tried to do despite it being almost pitch dark and having no flash.

After I took his photo, lighting him with my phone, and showed it to him, he rushed at me and give me a big hug, then pantomimed that I should wait, and ran off into the night, and a small part of me wondered if he was going to bring his older brother, or father, to hit me up to buy something, or demand money, which I was okay with but not in the mood to deal with and so I thought of leaving, but I stuck around because I realized I was being too cynical and so a few minutes later he returned, trotting along side a young girl carrying an even younger girl, all of them giggling and smiling.

It immediately broke my bad mood and is a moment that I will always remember, including the comedic part of a maybe six year old girl sprinting across a dark plaza carrying a younger but almost equally heavy child upside down (who came dangerously close to being dropped), all while both laughed uncontrollably.

It brought tears to my eyes, and still does, because no matter how educated and world-weary you are, how jaundiced by the desperation and pain that exists in this world these unabashed moments of bliss from children will do that to you, and if they don’t, then you are a deeply broken person, because they’re visceral reminders that the young understand what decades of navigating life can make you forget, that being alive is fundamentally good.

This particular moment wasn’t an one off thing. My entire time here has been punctuated with laughing, smiling, playing, and sometimes crying children, including a group in the alley that I walk through on the way to my lunch each afternoon, who always run towards me beaming, circling me for fist bumps (something I taught them) and asking to pose for more pictures.

I’d first ran into them playing their own version of jump rope with a piece of cord weighted with two old sandals, something they were still doing two hours later when I passed back in the opposite direction, because kids can fashion fun no matter the circumstances.

Or the children of the owner of the small coffee stand I rest in following my morning walk, to sip tea and watch the neighborhood come to life, who delight me with their cheerfulness despite the rather downtrodden surroundings, and who for whatever reason, maybe at the urging of their mother, decided to look serious and glum, a first for them, when I finally did take a picture of them. Or the kids fishing along the river with rods made of sticks. Or the kids out on the boardwalk feeding pigeons with their parents. I could go on and on and when I look through my five hundred photos from Phnom Penh I see a lot of portraits, mostly of tiny kids waving or beaming at me, versus my six hundred photos from Bangkok where I have almost no portraits, and only one of children².

If Phnom Penh suffers from anything it’s an abundance of youthful naivety, hence there are plenty of pigeon hustlers, and marks for them, hence there’s a large sex trade here (more on that in a different piece), but I’ll l take that over aged cynicism any day, because the innocent, and sometimes misguided, aspirations of the young has sustained mankind, even during the most dire of times, for eons. You live at first for yourself, then you live to see and support the hopes and dreams of the next generation.

Being in Phnom Penh, being immersed in city that feels like one big day care center³, is especially refreshing after coming from Korea, a countries that’s become the poster child for global declining birth rates, and Thailand, which is also dealing with a precipitous drop in the number of children, and increase in the median age, but with a lot less attention.

It’s not just Korea and Thailand though, the whole world, with the exception of Sub-Sarah Africa is seeing a drop in the number of children.⁴

I’ve written before about the shallowness and emptiness of Korea, as well as other countries, at a cultural and meaning level, and I often ascribe it to a lack of the transcendent, in particular the lack of faith.

Yet there’s deep, spiritual, and transcendent meaning that comes from having children, especially as a mother. As anyone with any experience with motherhood knows, the birth of a child is an instant meaning making experience, that immediately gives you a role, and a purpose, that elevates your own being. You have created another person, and your life, through that child, will extend beyond your death.

Childbirth, and being a parent, can be divorced from faith, but faith is rarely divorced from childbirth and being a parent. The centrality of family, and children, is found in every religion, sometimes explicitly like in Vietnam and Taiwan, where some temples and shrines are focused on family, turning ancestors into spirits and demi-gods, super charging the importance of family by adding a layer of spirituality to them. In Catholicism, you see it in the veneration of Mary, literally the mother of the church and all that is good.

So given all that, why are global birth rates declining, especially in the West? Because having children is hard, and despite all of my mushy words above, it also comes with a lot of hardship, pain, and melancholy, as my opening photo shows. Life is not one continual sequence of Hallmark cards.

Yesterday I met a couple with their first born, sitting on the boardwalk. They’d taken the bus into Phnom Penh the night before from their rural home to visit the pediatrician, a ride that took them eight hours. They have, by every measure, have had, and still have, tough lives, making money by doing odd jobs (he as a tour guide, when he can get it, her at a shop), and when in Phnom Penh, sleep in the backyard of a relative who lives another twenty miles from the doctors office.

While they didn’t complain, after hearing their story, it sounded precarious and complicated enough that I tried asking them, as gently and politely as I could, after congratulating them, did they think having a child at this moment was the “right thing to do”. I don’t believe I worded it as blunt as that, more along the lines of “How has the birth of your daughter changed your lives.”

However I asked it, for the first time in our twenty minute conversation, they looked confused and not because of language issues, but because as we talked more I realized they couldn’t conceive that their new daughter could bring anything into their lives but good. The monthly twenty hour round trip bus ride, the two days camping in Phnom Penh, the new mouth to feed, the additional expense, all of that was simply what you did when you had a baby and it wasn’t mentally being recorded in a ledger as a negative thing to tally up against the positives, because having a baby wasn’t a decision you thought about that way. It was what you did when you finally found a person you loved.

That idea of having children — as the thing you do, like this couple, without thinking about because it is clearly towards the good — has been the default mode in most cultures for almost all of our history.

The modern world, at least large parts of it, no longer considers it a default good⁵ and so it’s been eroded as a capital t Truth, and many people now think about having children as a decision to be adjudicated, maybe not as cartoonish-ly as making a spreadsheet that tallies up the costs and benefits, but as a thing that needs to be rationalized, and when doing that they see the hard work, sacrifice, and a personal commitment more than they see the meaning making good.

If childbearing is indeed a default good at the philosophical level, meaning is it part of the human telos, is beyond the scope of this newsletter and my abilities, although I generally believe it is for reasons that are both scientific (we are animals after all that need to survive) and for spiritual reasons (we need purpose and being a parent is about as innate a purpose as exists), but as to the question of if a culture and society is better served when it is, or if the loss of it has been a mistake, I will use my experience walking many different cities and say, there has been something valuable lost, beyond just the obvious.

What exactly it is I can’t say, but societies with low birth rates feel empty, vapid, and lost, like there is a giant void lurking beneath, waiting to consume everyone and everything, while those with high child births feel more fulfilled, solid, and whole, especially when you adjust for economic success⁶.

Perhaps that’s because no matter how material we become, while humans can deal with their own mortality they cannot deal with the mortality of humanity and a society with lots of children is a constant reminder of our shared commitment to the good, and that we will succeed, one way or the other.

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Travel Schedule update!

I leave on Sunday for five days in Shanghai, which is about all the time I can stay there because I’m going using the new 144 hour visa free entry.

I then (Nov. 7th) will fly directly to Fukuoka Japan, where I hope to spend around ten days walking towards Kumamoto, or some other long hike on the island.

Finally, I’ll spend the last week of this trip back in Korea, after taking a ferry to Busan before flying back home from Seoul on Nov 23rd.

As usual, I would love to cross paths with any of you, and if you ever have a question, please reach out to me in the comments, or via email to Chris@arnade.com

Until next week!

1. I had long believed that the car to moped ratio was entirely about economic growth, but looking at Cambodia versus Vietnam, shows it’s more than that. The infrastructure matters, and Vietnam, especially Hanoi, has neighborhoods of narrow winding alleys that cars can’t fit into. Cambodia has less of that, and Bangkok even less, and so Bangkok, since it is also wealthier, has the highest car to moped ratio of the three.

2. The restaurant/beer garden I regularly went to in Bangkok was the only place there I saw kids being kids, which were the children of the owners who sat each night on a blanket watching pirated US kids movies. I realize there are plenty of kids being kids in Bangkok, but not anywhere close to the extent there is in Phnom Penh.

3. The children here have a freedom, and an amount of responsibility, that would shock Americans.

4. You want data, here is the data! Cambodia is slighty above the world average, and has dropped. Thailand is well below, and has dropped a lot.

As to why you see drops in different places at different times, that IMO is due to cultural diffusion. As Western ideas bounce around the world, and end up over-taking local traditions, then you get

5. Another term for this is “Natural truth”, or not necessary to rationalized Truth. Think of it as something people don’t think about and accept as a truth. Or having children is part of the Telos of humans.

6. I’m not so simple minded as to think that having children is the only good, and that it alone can create a functional society — when I worked with addicts I saw a lot of children being born to women who hoped it would solve their problems, hoped it would give them a stability they didn’t have, and that almost never happened.