Amost Got Me Shot. Happened Just the Other Day

I always liked the line from the David Crosby song. "Almost cut my hair, happened just the other day."

It's not just the sense of time and place that it evokes, but the phrasing of it, and the hard edge of Crosby's voice. The song is in your face: "I almost gave in to your standards, but I didn't. I stayed true to myself."

At least that is how I always read it.

It came to mind two weeks ago when someone pulled a gun on me. That hasn't happened in years, for more than a decade, and I hadn't thought of the song in about that length of time. Though the mess I found myself in was completely, totally my fault, maybe I too was "letting my freak flag fly"?

(I should say the fact that it happened at all was a complete anomaly here, again my fault, but talking about it gives me a good excuse to talk about communicative gestures in Cambodia, in order to reinforce ideas in previous posts about communicative intent, and the connection between intention and the larger culture.)

I shot this guy the bird. I was on a 'moto-dup,' a motorcycle taxi headed to the house. Our narrow street can get filled with parked cars during the day, and it is not that late at all, still daylight with lots of kids and oldsters out; patients are entering and exiting the private hospital nearby. As we turn up the street a hundred yards short of my front gate (on the left), I see a car come down the street toward us slipping and dipping, jinking and accelerating, moving like a half-back through defensive backs seeking that goal line. One of those heavy Mercedes-Benz-like limos made by Toyota or someone. Heavy enough to remind me of the armored-up passenger cars I saw in Iraq trying to get from the Green Zone to the airport without drawing anyone's attention. (The next two pictures are: first, in front of my house, and second, in front of the private hospital nearby).

The car was coming fast, whipping around the parked cars left and right. I tell my moto-dup driver to pull off to the right to let him go by. Which he does. And as the car brawls by I fling him a bird with my left hand. Sort of instinctively. I don't think much of it, but I do remember the face of the driver staring up at me as he passes. Through his car window, a freeze-frame kind of thing.

I have encountered only one Khmer hand gesture of any moment in the sixteen years I have been in and out of Cambodia. If someone points their index finger straight at you, arm fully outstretched, you are in trouble. As best I can tell, in Cambodia, among men (I have never, ever seen a woman do this) it is tantamount to saying: "I am ready to kill you, I am ready to shoot you, you better watch out or stop whatever it is that you are doing." It is an assertion of strength, of power, the aim: dominating the situation. It portends lots more to come and aims to communicate that. It has a power dimension, the more powerful will do it toward the less, never the reverse.

If you ever see the gesture, you will recognize that it has a similar weight and heft to a gun pointed at your head. Like you see it done in the movies. Arm fully outstretched, the gun an extension of the hand, they are one and the same. Often, the gun will be turned on its side, giving the gesture an impudence or frightening carelessness, as if the lack of professionalism in handling the gun is intentionally layered on to and enhances the threat that the gun already so clearly represents, while the head is cocked back as if to anticipate the coming blast. The Cambodian gesture has that kind of weight, without needing any vulgar street culture-Hollywood add-on.

Cambodians do not have profane gestures that aim to communicate anger or disrespect. I have seen covert hand signals that are in some sense jokingly rude, signaled between men, like the opening and closing of a vagina mimicked by sliding a finger over the index finger, but the sign has no utility in denigrating or confronting someone. It cannot be used that way and no one would understand it that way. Tellingly, the gesture is always offered from below the waist where it is less easy to see; a smile and a swing of the eyes is used to draw attention to it. Again, if a gesture is not understood (in the wider culture) as aiming to confront in some way, any intention to confront in that way is very likely to fail.

In any case, confrontation is something that Cambodians, and as the telling goes, most Asians, avoid. They don't  confront each other about bad public behavior, even dangerous behavior. Simplistically, one might say that they leave it to Karma to take care of. Maybe. Buddhist belief does play a role, large or small, in lots of behavior, and while it can be over-emphasized it should never be over-looked. Bad public behavior that does not affect one immediately or directly is bad public behavior that is best ignored. When pressed on this principle, Cambodians will say: "What benefit is it to me to call someone to account for their behavior?" Even if they have just narrowly missed being run over.

More central is the question of power. Lots of people here have power, and there are uncertain signals of it: large houses, expensive cars. Many Cambodians have the power to act and achieve impunity for their actions based largely on who their backers are or what their official government position is (which is where their money comes from also), but with the real estate bubble of the past few years there are a lot of rich people, with no authority, and who might not have political power at all, but unless you know them personally, you cannot discriminate. Rich people with few connections tend to act like well-connected people. And rich private citizens might also be very well connected.

I have had many people tell me that you simply do not know who is connected to whom. Often those who behave worst are the best connected, they do what they do because they can get away with it; confront them, you also by definition confront the person behind them, and the one behind them. (In actuality, that could go all the way to the Prime Minister, if for example you ran into one of his nephews.) Of course there are a lot of really poor people who commit crimes, but we will not talk about that here, but focus instead on dangerous behavior like driving recklessly.

So why do I toss him that bird? (As I choose that word, I remember as a kid, one of my siblings complaining: "Mama, John threw a shoe at me!" And I would say: "No I didn't. I tossed it!" You learn early that language is important; that language use has consequences. If I were still that child, I might want to claim that I tossed him a bird; I did not shoot him one!)

I do it because I viscerally hate thoughtless, reckless driving. Fundamentally, I don't believe that anyone has the right to increase the dangers others face for any reason (emergencies perhaps excepted), but no one will enforce that here, not the police and not other drivers. I let my middle finger do the talking. Why do I do it? Maybe I do it because "I had the flu for Christmas and I'm not feeling up to par." Nah, I do it because that is the way I am built.

The thing is, most Cambodians don't understand it all. Though it might be getting more and more public awareness, because you can see it in American movies shown on TV here, the weight of the gesture, what it might mean, what uses it has, and more importantly what it might or might not portend escapes them, their culture has nothing comparable.

I remember once years ago, flipping off someone along a street in Phnom Penh. They just stared at me and then answered with two fingers (not the British version either): One. Two. I laughed. And then they laughed.

There are apparently pictures of the crew of the USS Pueblo giving their captors the finger. When the North Korean guards asked for an explanation, they were told it was a Hawaiian good luck gesture. Apparently, that worked. In ancient times, the digitus impudicus was used to ward off the evil eye. There are many different gestures that don't involve the middle figure that have the same communicative intention. (Wikipedia, "Finger (gesture)").

In America it portends nothing; shooting someone the bird does not predict future behavior. It might provoke a response like "F**k You!" Or a bird in return. I don't know that it starts many fights (but that certainly depends on context, and one can imagine certain contexts where it could provoke a fight, but a killing?). Generally, it is taken as a statement of frustration, dismissal, it means something like "F**k Off! Or, "Up Yours!"

So, I can do it in anger or consternation, but if I flip someone the bird, they have no reason to think that the gesture is a prelude to anything else, for example that I am getting ready to kill them, or that I now present a danger to them that they have to deal with or there will be trouble down the road.

OK. So we cross the street, stop in front of the house and I dig out my wallet. I look up the street where the car has gone and I see that it stopped in the middle of the major road our street crosses and then make a huge U-Turn against traffic to accelerate back up the street toward us. I think, "Okay, here he comes."

This fat, heavy limo-looking car, painted black and styled to look like a Benz pulls up on our side of the road. I haven't had time to pay the driver yet but now I am trying to tell him to take off for the time being. He doesn't understand, is focused on the money which he hasn't gotten yet.

The guy rolls down his window and starts shouting at me. My first thought is: his English was pretty good and he was not acting like a Cambodian, but he appears to be Khmer, perhaps Sino-Khmer. Afterward I suspect that he might have spent some time overseas. Who knows. What is clear is that he has taken my gesture a lot more seriously than I intended him to.

I really don't remember much of the conversation. I did not get angry at all. I smiled a lot, admittedly, sometimes derisively (could he tell? I don't know). But I do not deny that I had shot him the bird. I could have lied, but do not think to. He gets out of the car. I had walked over and am immediately aware that he is careful not to hit me with the door. As he stands up, it is clear how much shorter and smaller he is than I. Pudgy and small; younger, maybe early thirties.

He gets back in the car and says that he has a gun. I start laughing. Don't ask me why. Maybe I was inferring from the fact that he was unwilling to touch me with his car door. Not even to bump me slightly. I said something stupid about how interested the FBI would be if an American citizen got shot overseas. I have no idea if he even knew who the FBI is.

Nothing is going his way. But neither is it going mine, because I do not know how to end this, do not know how it will end. I remain pleasant and don't stop smiling. He pulls out a small hand gun and points it at me. It is cradled in his hand near his lap. The working end of it peeks out over the window sill. It looks about the size of a .22, but I don't know if they make handguns in that caliber. But it is no BB-gun either. Likely illegal, whatever it is. It might not even be loaded. But you would never know by looking at it, just like you would have no idea who this guy is connected to just by looking him in the face.

I don't move. I just laugh and say: "So you are going to shoot me?"

"Yes, I can shoot you," he says. Which isn't what I asked.

I bend down to look inside the car. He has a friend sitting beside him in the front passenger seat. That guy is saying nothing, won't look at me, just stares ahead, down the road.

I could have asked him if he could see all the kids and old ladies that they missed hitting, but I don't. I turn and walk to the gate and unlock it. I don't look at him, thinking, yeah, he can shoot me, but he won't. Maybe. I pick up my computer and book bag from where I had set them down when he drove up and walk inside. When I come back out, they are gone. My moto-dup driver sits there staring at me.

"Ch'guit," I say. "Crazy."

He doesn't say anything and his face tells me nothing. But I bet he thinks that I am the one who is ch'guit.

"But I'm not giving in an inch to fear
Cos I promised myself this year

.....

"When I finally get myself together
I'm gonna get down in some of that sweet summer weather
I'm going to find a space inside to laugh
Separate the wheat from the chaff"

POSTSCRIPT: I have failed to answer the central question any reader might have. If this guy was not acting like a Khmer, but might have been one, why did he get so angry?

Angry enough to do what Khmer people almost never do: shout at someone in public, show their anger in public, confront someone publicly?

Of course I don't know. Part of the story that I did not tell, because I could not remember how it fit in with what I did remember, might help. At one point in the confrontation, he shoots me the bird. The thing I remember so clearly, even if I have forgotten the sequence, is that he showed it to me exactly as he did the pistol. His hand was held low and the point of the finger barely made it over the sill of his window. My impression then was that the look on his face was as if he was holding a grenade.

Later I would think that the way he held his finger was so very similar to how he pointed the gun at me. Could he have felt that he was engaged in an action of similar weight. I just looked at it and laughed. He withdrew it. Later he would pull out the gun. My over-all thought is that if he was not drunk (Khmer lose all kinds of culturally engrained inhibitions when the are drunk, though that may play in some complex mix with status: many Khmer who do this are  policemen, soldiers, sons of high-ranking officials -- but not always), he had some kind of extreme interpretation of what it meant to be shot a bird. Could he have thought that it was the same as someone pulling a gun on him, revelatory of the same intent? No way to know.

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