Plant and Relinquish

We have just finished the harvest of cassava on our land in Ratanakiri Province, near the town of Ban Lung. The land has been burned and plowed and all of the cassava stems have been collected and stored for the June planting (when rains start again; cassava is re-planted by stem segments). So our land is at rest. For me it was nice to see the lake-side plot quietly recovering after being under agriculture for the past eighteen months!

A neighbor wants to sell us a plot across the road on the brow of the hill that slowly rises from the lake and that constitutes the land that we had planted eighteen months ago and have now harvested. About fifteen acres, it would take us to fifty total. Fire sale price.

A very nice guy, I have known him since early 2007. I was fresh out of Iraq and first looking for some land to buy. Unfortunately (for his family), he has proven to be a completely incompetent farmer, losing money each of the last two years.

What he does is called by Khmer, dam jowl. Dam means to plant, jowl most importantly means to discard or to throw away. What the phrase implies is that a farmer plants something and then lets nature take over, take its own course (so the word actually does the semantic work that is needed, if we focus on the narrower (or over-lapping?) sense of relinquishing, rather than discarding).

He hoped, apparently, in a gamble, that with no additional effort (like weeding) he could turn a profit. He has also never fenced the property. The local free range cows and water buffalo were very happy about that. Before we harvested, I would see groups of brown cows, like love-sick teenagers, standing quietly along the road fronting our property, staring longingly over our barbed-wire fence at the cassava beyond. Three strands keep them out! And behind them slumped the ravaged plants of our neighbor.

(I will admit, with no embarrassment that I am fascinated by their tiny udders, they look sad to me. Having partly grown up on a farm with milk cows, I can't help staring at them, they seen ... inadequate. Or are the udders of our western cows monstrous, for the fact is, these small Cambodian cow udders, while not appropriate for any dairy industry, have certainly been successful in raising innumerable generations of calves!)

Water buffalo are a different matter, barbed wire often is no deterrent to them (and they have even smaller udders than these cows!). They are very strong, stubborn and resistant to pain, though no where near as dangerous as they can look.

Their nightly raids sought ingress to our land from the lake itself. They would nose up under the barbed wire there, trying to get at the plants in the low-lying area where typhoon-created flood waters reached last fall. But we have wonderful, territorial dogs who immediately raise the alarm, and my land manager's nephews from Phnom Penh would, according to him, rush down to the lakeside with their flash lights and sling shots to run the water buffalo, backs bleeding from the barbed wire, back into the water and away from our land.

Twice our neighbor has (committed?) dam jowl, first with soy beans and then with cassava. He lost money each time, even though in each of these two years he chose the crop that attained the highest prices. And that is the real gamble, the gamble no one can escape, trying to choose between the two main annual crops the one crop, soybeans or cassava, that in the end will make the most money.

If most farmers choose one over the other, prices will reflect that. (Of course external factors will have something to say about price also. Last year the world-wide fall in commodity prices hit everyone hard.)

This year almost no one had planted new cassava, because prices were such a disaster last year, and so those who did, or who had, like us, not harvested last year, but waited, made significant profits. Moreover, many people who harvested at low prices last year did not replant this year and left their land to weeds.

This year our neighbor burned off his cassava planted land, not even bothering to dig up what roots might be there, but spent his time in the early dry season cutting down some of the remaining cashew trees on his land. Later, the price of cashews went through the roof (not that you would have known or been able to predict that at the beginning of the season, as you cannot know whether cassava or soybeans will give the best return).

If he could have waited two months, they would have flowered and produced for good money. I have not dared to ask him what exactly he was up to. Now he wants to sell out completely, the land previously planted in cassava and soybeans and now burned over, as if to eliminate evidence of his mistakes, land still littered with cashew nut tree stumps, and, on the back side of the hill, the three acres of trees that remain on the steep rise there.

Anyway, we are considering his offer. Big question: Can we get it cleaned up, remove the tree stumps that remain from the trees that he cut, and put a fence around it to protect the crops, in time to plant along with ours. Certainly we have enough cassava stems to plant it. For if we can get it planted in time, we will be able to pay for the fence and all the improvements, with money left over.

It is probably obvious that we too are "rolling the die". We are planting cassava again, even though we know that historically when cassava prices are high one year, everyone plants the next, and that prices always fall. But we have all these stems, stems we won't have to buy this year as we did last year. And when we plant, we will incorporate all we learned over the past eighteen months about how to make cassava prosper, and how to minimize our costs: though we will definitely not employ that most extreme of cost minimization strategies, dam jowl!

BUT we know more people will plant. There will be downward pressure on cassava prices next year. Yes, we will have lower costs. We will be more efficient. But in order to make money next year, the world economy has to recover more that it has and international demand must increase. And we cannot predict whether that will happen. We too, like our friend and neighbor across the road, are rolling the dice.

But I feel sorry for this guy. We know that he bought the land at somewhat inflated prices at the very end of the real estate bubble here, just before prices fell. In part it was our fault, it I can put it that way. He bought the land because he knew that this foreigner (me) had come in and bought the adjoining land. Someone convinced him that he could buy at what was even then a high price and make money. I would hate to ask him what the seller claimed that I was going to do with my land (Build a hotel? A casino?) False claims are rampant in real estate dealings here. And now he is throwing the property away, relinquishing it in a sense that we would all understand, not having the money to throw good after bad, tying to get out from under this investment on which he cannot seem to make a profit.

That back slope of his, one you could never plant with soybeans or cassava because the soil's nutrients so easily leach out during the long rainy season, which runs down to a seasonal stream, and is still full of cashew trees?

We would definitely not cut them down, no matter what happens to the price of cashews. :)

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Finger Pointing Back in the Angkor Era

In an older post, Almost Got Me Shot, Happened Just the Other Day, I wrote about the 'finger of death', the use of the rigidly pointed finger (at the end of a fully extended arm) in Cambodia to indicate extreme, perhaps even dangerous levels of frustration. Seen between males, usually someone really, really ticked off by another, it indicates that the confrontation is moving to a dangerous phase, unless the person pointed at backs down in some public fashion. But sometimes, at that point, maybe it is too late.

On a trip to Angkor Thom recently, I saw two elephant mahouts carved into the stone facade of the Elephant Terrace. Their raised and rigid arms were pointing at each other in a very unfriendly looking encounter. But the entire procession of elephants is hard to read. Aesthethic considerations may have dictated that the elephants be presented in pairs, facing each other, so really it is no procession at all but pairs of elephants confronting each other, two by two, all of them with raised trunks.  This can easily be read in more than one way. The mahouts pictured below are the only ones who are pointing at each other, however.

Most sources say that the Mahouts are all Khmer, and that the terrace was built by King Jayavarman VII to celebrate a military victory, so it is hard to make the argument that these two guys are enemies. If one had been Cham and the other Khmer, it would be easy to imagine them shouting at each other: "I am going to kill you!"

There are wall carvings at the Bayon, the central temple at Angkor Thom, which include bas-relief of a naval battle between Cham invaders and the Khmer, but also (peaceful) military processions which include both Cham and Khmer soldiers, and then a scene where groups of Khmer are arguing and fighting with each other!

So that gives us some space in which to ask: what are these two Khmer mahouts up to, did they have a falling out of some sort? Is one trying to say: "Hey, don't I know you? Weren't you that guy hitting on my sister last year? Didn't I tell you then I don't want to see your face again?" We will never know. (Of course, trying to read the past by projecting back a thousand years from the present is a highly suspect activity!)

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Fish Seed Production

I saw this sign at a Cambodian Government Fisheries Facility in Prey Veng Province. Very nice sign. Somehow, even though I was cruising by on my motorcycle, I noticed that their work focused on "Fish Seeds".

Well, maybe not so surprising since these were the first two English words and my eyes had just blown by the Khmer -- so much for my work to read the language!

My first thought, after I stopped and as I took a picture was: "maybe they produce some sort of fish food?" But the Khmer is clear, it refers to eggs, not seeds, and not to food. So of course the question is: was this a mistake? In US English usage we distinguish clearly between eggs and seeds. Fish lay eggs, never seeds. But that is not what this sign seems to say.

That doesn't mean that you or I would not know what the sign meant. Any English-speaker (at least from North America) with the slightest generosity of spirit would have said, "yeah, okay, got it", after the initial small shock of this encounter with translated Khmer wore off. But was it a mistake? It seemed so at the outset. But I was partly wrong.

My suspicion that this might be a mistaken translation was strengthened by the fact that the Khmer usage is very clear: eggs, not seeds are used in the Khmai.

Poang (trei), the Khmer noun is used to refer to what we in English call (fish) eggs; it is also used when referring to chicken or duck eggs. If the Khmer had used the word we translate as seed, it would have used kruop, the noun that is used to talk about plant seeds in the same way we do in English.

Of course both words have other uses. Poang (egg) can mean testicle, as the English can, and kruop (seed) is used as a measure word for stones. Kruop (seed, stone) is never used to refer to testicles in Khmer, though in US English, stones can be so used: "that guy's got some stones!" A more common synonym for testicles in English is the informal "nuts" a kind of seed.

Of course the word "seed" has been used in some English contexts to refer to sperm (also 'oats', a type of seed), but also to the result of human reproduction, children might be referred to as "his seed". But most often, the word poang, like the English word egg, refers to those things which are the result of animal reproductive activities and which have been fertilized already (after which the egg remains an egg, but a fertilized one) and which in turn grows into animals.

In any case, the bottom line is: the Khmai noun poang is easily and readily translated into the English word 'egg' in spite of some variation in its other usages. Instead the sign-makers chose kruop or 'seed'. This was either a considered choice, or a mistake. In the US, children do not confuse these two nouns. They encounter them at an early age and are taught the distinction, an important one, in their science classes. They don't cross the line that this sign does.

I found a lesson plan by an American teacher on the WWW who said that her first-grade "students agree that seeds become plants and that eggs become some kind of animal" after testing this out with samples of each. Their eggs became brine shrimp and their seeds became clover (the first "wiggled" and the clover did not :).

First grade. How early we are socialized in the proper use of these two words. And the larger, unspoken lesson is how wonderful language is. How it so readily and unambigously maps onto a world cut up for it into distinguishable objects!(The funding for the development of this lesson plan came from the US National Science Foundation, it is worth noting :).

These kids would have shouted gleefully: "Fish seeds? No! Eggs!"

But translation mistake? Well, apparently not.

In Indian English usage, fish eggs are called "seeds". If you Google "fish seeds India", you will find a ton of documents which use the phrase "fish seeds" to refer to what we call eggs!

The only question that remains is why the Cambodian Ministry of Fisheries would have adopted Indian English in this regard. Maybe the Indian government provided foreign assistance in this area. Nice thought. Both economies are rice-based and fish play a very important role in both economies and diets. It would make perfect sense.

While fish seed does not appear in American or British English (as far as I can find), it is used in Malaysian and Singapore English. On the WWW I also found this usage in documents from the UN organization FAO. It may thus be a technical usage (regional?).

But I am starting to worry for Mrs. Schwartz' and her students in Missouri.

This could really mess them up, not to mention her lesson plan. And the repercussions could go all the way up to the National Science Foundation! We have major parts of the English-speaking world where 'fish seeds' is the accepted usage for what we call 'fish eggs'!

For the moment, I think it best we not even tell these folks, while not as devastating as the first encounter with a furry, egg-laying platypus, it could have far reaching implications. Apparently, teaching kids that young requires air-tight lexical categories, and succeeds to the extent you can avoid granting the lacunae, contradictions, paradoxes, cracks, fissures and over-laps of language as it is really used!

They are first-graders! Letting them see how complex, if not irrational, language can be would be as cruel as telling them there is no Santa Claus. :)

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