Cambodia & Laos: How I FIRST Got Interested/Involved.

hey guys it's been a long long time to
put in this caveat if one of my videos I used to say all the time start my videos if I look exhausted it's because I am exhausted that was back when I was recording a lot of videos in between my my Chinese classes or my Japanese classes University of Victoria though I often do make more videos when I'm sick or tired I can't use my mind for other things that might be a bit more strenuous for me and right now is no exception I look great and I feel great but it's an illusion I've actually been homesick I'm on antibiotics right now and because I was on his buttocks I actually lifted weights for several hours today lifting weights not to mentally strenuous and activity I'm back to bench pressing about 200 pounds at the moment it's in kilograms so 90 kilograms is almost 200 pounds 198 pounds out of that but can't see it in this shirt but hey we listed a lot of weight went to the office put in a few hours at work had a good day on the whole but actually actually I am sick and exhausted so that's when my mind turned making this video so it's been a long time since I'd that but it's true in most of my videos I look a lot more tired and rundown than I am if you catch me at my best not a good day alright uh it's not cross my mind to make a short video reflecting on how I first got interested in Cambodia what was the first time ever even really heard the word Cambodia and for me it is a very distinctive memory that is linked to my father who is recently deceased so for some of you this might be an interesting story to hear and for me and might be an interesting story to tell I read a comic book a mainstream DC Comics comic book you know a superhero comic book and I didn't get the whole plot I only read one issue of this particular comic so I didn't see what happened next in the storyline but in this comic one of the characters apparently a villain but I don't know what unfold a shadowy figure who could have been a villain later or maybe he was a hero in disguise we don't know but a shadowy figure said something along the lines of this has nothing to do with justice this is about Cambodia and it's about revenge and from the context of that moment in the dramatic storyline of this mainstream comic book I could simply see that the word Cambodia was synonymous with some kind of disaster and it was a disaster that somehow the United States military was responsible for so I was a child I do not know if I had to guess maybe I was eight years old or nine years old I could be a little bit off I actually I do have very very distinctive memories of my childhood but normally I remember how tall I was and now I look back in the memory and I guess I guess from the angle I was seeing the world at how old that was I don't tend to remember things in terms of numbers but I do I do have very very share of members my childhood which is in some ways a blessing and in some ways a curse because some of the terrible memories are my childhood really haunted me for years but I went to my father and I asked him I didn't ask him what is Cambodia you know Chuck Bass I went to my father and I asked him what was it that the American army did in Cambodia was it something similar to Vietnam or Nicaragua so I was growing up in a left-wing household in Toronto Canada but you have AI parents very much inculcated left-wing attitudes into me as the kid and had to unravel them figure out what was true than what was fiction and all the things that parents taught me but coming up as I did in that in that social context you know I completely expected that my father was going to tell me that Cambodia was another example in the history of the world on that same pattern where my parents would blame all the evils on the American side and give me a very one-sided version of the history you know I didn't grow up with a rounded well-balanced memory of the Vietnam War I was taught to these things were great evils and I was taught that the Soviet Union was entirely on the side of good and human progress of these complex I grew out of it that kind of argument is a lot more convincing when you're maybe six years old at six years old it's hard to unravel cold war propaganda but let me tell you even by like age 11 I was harder Darda to convince but um I was really surprised and I couldn't show my surprise openly I just looked at my father with disbelief and scrutiny and skepticism as my father told me with complete conviction that no Cambodia was an example of the exact opposite my father taught me that in Vietnam the Americans had been great villains but in Cambodia they had been great heroes the words he used at the time my father taught me that in Cambodia the Americans were defending the legitimate government of Cambodia against the imperialist aggression of the Vietnamese and that therefore in Vietnam the Americans were the villains because the Americans were imperialists try to control Vietnam but in Cambodia the Americans were defending the Cambodians against someone else's imperialism and therefore they were they were great heroes and I said they're looking at him and at that moment the only thing I knew about Cambodia the first thing I ever heard in my life go Cambodia was this moment in the storyline of a comic book which was itself mysterious and unresolved I never read the next issue in that comic book I never fight out with a story wet or who the shadowy figure was or what was this traumatic memory of Cambodia that was intersecting with the superheroes plotline I knew that my father wasn't just lying to me I knew that my father was repeating a lie that he wanted to believe but couldn't quite believe himself even though he did so from his perspective with complete conviction in many ways the family religion was built on lies of exactly this kind many many many years later as an adult when I was researching the political history of Cambodia what I would learn was that what my father had just taught me was believed by absolutely nobody except for the official party line of the government of China and those who had to repeat it well my father was teaching me was not the official propaganda coming to the United States was not the official propaganda coming from the Soviet Union that was specifically the Maoist line and the line continued for many years after the death of Mao Zedong in China in justifying both the United States intervention in Cambodia and Chinese intervention Cambodia as a result of what's called the strategic triangle in geopolitics one of the strangest Arrangements in the history of international diplomacy emerged where the United States and all of the US allies simultaneously and jointly in cooperation with China and all of China's allies were supporting the Khmer Rouge Pol Pot the most notorious most violent communists in history communism to simplify perhaps the most violent one of the most violent and certainly the most notorious and both sides struggled to come up with propaganda that could make sense of this to an incredulous public a public who up to the early 1970s had assumed that the United States and China were enemies as once I was communist in as I was Eddy communist but to make a long story short in geopolitics the enemy of my enemy is my friend not all the time but often enough and a man named Richard Nixon sat down with a man named Mao Zedong and they fashioned of an agreement because at that time China and the Soviet Union were on the verge of war and the United States basically had their pick they could have backed the Soviet side against China or they could have backed the Chinese side against Russia and there were several genuine hotspots it was not a cold war that really was a hot war including the fact that for example both the Soviet Union and China want to to control Mongolia it's not the only example another example keep it short of course both the Soviet Union and China wanted to control Cambodia or from China's perspective they wanted to preserve the independence of Cambodia they wanted to prevent Cambodia from becoming a Vietnamese colony or becoming a Soviet pawn so that was the first ayah for heard of Cambodia and to be honest to you it's not something that fascinated me it's not something that then took over my imagination as a boy or as a young man many years later I had the really bizarre experience of remembering something from my own future that's some that's only have to be twice in my life and I do not believe in the supernatural in any way I don't even believe in the natural I'm a nihilist I neither believe in the supernatural no the natural but twice in my life I've had the very strange experience of seeming to remember something that happened in the future as if I had a memory out of place not a prognostication not a prediction not a daydream I remember while I was in university I had a memory of myself in the future living in Laos and at Laos was going to be a really important part of my life and at that time I had no interest in Laos I thought that was ridiculous and they know come on you know there were other places in Asia I could imagine living but why Laos of anywhere to live why laughs yeah well out of them was of no interest to me in that time I've never taken books in the Lao language history of politics of the library why would I possibly end up living and working in Laos and again that didn't fascinate me but many years later after that memory of course there's many many years after I was a child in my bed comic book I was living in Bangkok Thailand with my Canadian girlfriend my blond Canadian girlfriend who was not well-suited to the hardships of life in Southeast Asia and at that time what I said to her was well look I'm looking at either getting involved in humanitarian work and research in Myanmar and the border of Myanmar were then they were refugee camps and civil war or Cambodia where the Civil War had already wrapped up at that time but still very much country and transition and my girlfriend said to me basically she didn't think she could hack it she didn't think she could survive in Myanmar or in refugee camps for cooking fire and she the fish could survive in in Cambodia so her and I said Laos if there's one third world war torn country devastated by bombing or maybe you can hack it and I started making the first of several trips from Bangkok to Laos and back again and I always remember how thrilled that was one of the banks in Mekong River I did where were the time honestly I had not thought about it again until that moment with that conversation with my girlfriend I really I never followed up on it years in between there was just no reason for me to take an interest in Laos but at that time I thought oh yeah right Laos and you know Lao said a few more decades of peace of post-war recovery still very much a war-torn country I mean I always remember a really really short anecdote once I was up in a small village in the Northeast and I stepped off a dirt path to pick a flower from an incredibly beautiful tree in the tropics you know flowering if you haven't grown up in the tropics once in only see a tree like that just covered in brightly colored blossoms and it's it's awesome of course local people they've grown up seeing it they're used to it but I walked off the path and the young woman standing next to me looked at me with shock and horror it was didn't say anything which is the expression in her face I could really see she was horrified and I apologize I was reaching up to pick a flower from the tree and turn to enhance I'm sorry is this tree of some special religious significance you know I'm sorry like in Buddhism this is this particular tree off-limits to take a flower as I am yeah I just had no idea why she's our and she said to me no you could have been killed in that area of Laos where I'd stepped off the path there were so many bombs so much unexploded ordnance just in the earth that from her perspective stepping off that path in that area just walking a few steps off the well-trodden path you could be you could be blown up on the spot so was a war-torn country and uh there were some risks beautiful area what's the while you got that kind of chilling reminder of the long shot of the war but they did already have decades of stability and recovery and at that time I only chose to go to Laos because the girlfriend I had couldn't hack it couldn't hack it in Cambodia Connect and Myanmar under under more rugged frontiers and the whole first year I was in Laos I was still really doubting it and I broke up with that girlfriend eventually but I'd say to the other people in my life including the girlfriend at first then she went back to Canada but I said if you like you know I just don't know if I should really be here or if I should be in Cambodia or Myanmar you know this gotta be another way ahead Laos seems sort of like a small backwater where as Cambodia seems huge in my imagination just a bigger war bigger war crimes bigger genocide you know a more ancient continuous written tradition to language even the modern literature in Cambodia there was more poetry and more political publications in terms of the Free Press you know what you find in a bookstore so a lot more going on and a Cambodia course both countries were struggling to have some semblance of democracy but the reality for free speech very very different in Laos as opposed to Cambodia it seemed like Cambodia was always the bigger deeper more challenging frontier and that Laos was something I was just settling for you know for the sake of that girl friends creature conference for the whole first year I thought that but I stayed in Laos for two and a half years and had a breaking point with that to where one day I was taken in and interrogated by the police corrupt police who were just trying to extort money out of me and you know speaking English and speaking a little bit of Lao of lotion the Lao language I had to negotiate my way out of this difficult situation and I did I completely see in the police themselves were delighted they remember they were smiling laughs they couldn't believe I did it but I sort of legally negotiated the situation said okay so if I can provide this document this document then you have to let me go without my paying a fine right and I managed to get those documents oh you know it was a really really kind of funny process but of course I was speaking little isolated words of Lao and very difficult and when I came back from that we have exploit police were nice guys but I said I said to my roommate I guess at the time this guy I knew there he lived upstairs in the same building not really my roommate but this guy who lived upstairs I said to a while you know those cops there are the nicest guys who ever tried to extort me yep retract to uh ever tried to threaten me and steal my money what are the bloody Facebook's could be weird eights about it and I did win in the end I didn't pay a dime but remember when that happened I said to myself ok it was about a year into it I thought to stop dreaming about Cambodia either I'm going to commit a hundred percent to learning Lao I was still learning Pali so it's learning two languages simultaneously or I pack up and leave today and then go to Cambodia and I work on that language I deal with the corrupt cops there so that was when I made the change and I really poured on learning modern law because I said look that's that that's the standard after me I have to speak Lao well enough that I can talk my way out of being held at gunpoint being held at knife point being the situation with soldiers or cops I've got to be able to go to the frontier and do this and I decided to do it they're not me and Martin on Cambodia etc and then for about a year and a half I was in that mode still studying poly still studying Buddhism still studying ancient history and modern etc etc and so ironically I only ended up going back to Cambodia and fulfilling that side of my mandate or dream or whatever II want to say after the authorities and Laos threatened to kill me threatened sent me to a gulag tortured me kicked me out of the country you know that was story so Cambodia ended up being like my second choice but it's true it all started with that comic book and that frankly surreal reminder of the long shadow of the Cold War of communist misinformation shall we say the personal emotional reality of international geopolitics even within my own family even within my father's own life and in unraveling the political history of the United States the war in Vietnam the war in Laos the war in Cambodia it's true I always was also unraveling in some ways the mythology that I was raised with the ideology my father believed in and finding my way from belief to disbelief from ideology to nihilism