Fried Vegetables and Spare Parts

I lunched today at a Vietnamese-Chinese restaurant near Psaa Thmei, the New Market. As I looked through the menu, I saw that they had finally posted prices. I always suspected that they prospered by a two-tiered pricing system (the restaurant is across the street from the bus station, so they get a lot of expatriate, back-packer, one-time traffice -- that creates incentives for a certain kind of business model), one for locals and one for foreigners, facilitated by the old menus with no prices for anything.

Of course a new menu means nothing, they can still charge locals something different, but the menus is nicely put together and provides some evidence of a more professional, "up-to-date" management.

But the rice still sucks. Third quality. I had forgotten they over-charged for a niggardly portion of rice made mostly of broken grains, cooked rice that gave off no hint of the marvelous scent that freshly cooked Cambodian rice can. (I notice that the Cambodians who eat at the restaurant are served large portions in a covered metal bowl. They take as much as they like.)

But there was an interesting gem in the menu, one that made up for the palpable gap between the quality of the food, the impression the menu produced, and the price you had to pay.

The following item caught my eye:

It took a while to stop laughing. It was the laughter of joy. And the item has provided me with a subject for this post, though that realization only came later. In that moment I was happy because I love these abrupt encounters with language. You are brought up short for a moment and you have to think: how is this possible, what makes this possible? (And what are the implications, if any, for understanding wider Khmer culture? And with due modesty, for understanding language with a capital 'L'?)

At first glance, we might think that this is a translation mistake.

Maybe it is. Maybe it isn't. We can hold that question while we investigate the Khmer phrase being translated, and then focus, in particular on the part, the part about the spare parts!

The Khmer is straight forward, Ban-ley Krup Muk Cha Krueng K'nong. Cha is stir-fried, ban-ley is vegetables, krup is many or much. Though muk can mean dish or course, as in a seven-course meal (Cambodians often ask me how many times a day I eat, and how many dishes I eat, and here they mean main dishes -- they are often interested in how I got so big),  in this context it means sort or kind. Muk can also be used, as the English counter-part 'course' can, to decsribe what a school offers: a school that offers many academic courses, offers kroup muk.

(Craen is the most common word for much or many, it follows the noun it modifies. Krup, when paired with kruon, as in krup-kruon, is normally translated as enough or sufficient.)

An interesting fact is that a homonym for muk is face (as in, a human's face).

So that's not difficult, even on a word-for-word translation, we easily get the first phrase: "stir-fried vegetables of many kinds", or stir-fried mixed vegetables.

(Though it is clear that the English phrase, which includes the word mixed, does not have the same connotation as the Khmer, which focuses on the fact of variety, perhaps the English plural, vegetables, modified by mixed, gives us the sense that there are several kinds of vegetables involved).

The source of my laughter is of course my ignorance, I thought that krueng means machine part, which of course it does. It is also used as a measure word for cars or motorcycles, as in moto bai kreung (three motorcycle machines :). Now you know why I was laughing; I did not know that an animal's internal organs might also be referred to with the same phrase used for machines or machine parts.

When paired with k'nong, which is translated as in, or within, kreung k'nong refers to what we would call variety meat, organ meat, or perhaps giblets. (Cambodians tell me that normally, kreung knong should be prefaced with the noun for meat, sac. In the menu it is not).

Switching our attention for the moment to the English, one on-line thesaurus provides the following list of synonyms for variety meat:

brains, chitlins, chitterlings, giblets, gizzard, heart, kidneys, liver, marrow, mountain oyster, pancreas, prairie oyster, stomach, sweetbread, testis, thymus, tongue, tripe

I question whether these English words are really a list of synonyms, since the synonymy is a bit stretched, presenting these words as synonyms has the same logical import as saying that apples, oranges, mangoes and bananas are synonyms to the word fruit (to put it more simply (and correctly?) this list has indicated that proper nouns can be synonymous with the common noun within whose scope they lie). These words, e.g. stomach, actually seem to be examples of the more general common noun, the more general type. Even the noun giblets does not seem broad enough in scope (or reference) to be a real synonym of variety meat, though this noun is broader, say stomach or sweetbread. In common US usage, giblets, might include turkey heart, gizzard and liver, but not turkey brain or intestines!

And I want to know: why isn't 'mystery meat' on this list? That is a synonym of variety meat certainly! And the phrase does seems broad enough in scope to cover all of the examples above, as fully as organ meat, or variety meat does. Certainly if you had asked my highschool classmates whether the above list might be components of mystery meat, they would have said: "hell yeah!"

The 'innards' of humans are referred to in Khmai using the same term: I had to ask to be sure, because Khmer often makes distinctions between words that refers to animals (like their eating) and those used exculsively for humans. This is an area in which to tread gently. If you use a verb meant for animals for a human can be beyond impolite, it is seen as a kind of verbal attack or assault, though foreigners get a pass, it is clear that their use is mistaken, and not intentionally rude or provocative!

Whether the use of 'machine part' to describe body parts has any larger implictions in the wider culture is (again) another area of investigation, but my suspicion about the historical sequence of the uses of this terms indicates that there probably isn't (more below). But it is easy to see how the translator who put the menu together decided 'spare parts' was the correct English for the Khmer, if where you begin is with a phrase whose most important, most common usage refers to inanimate, metal, machines! Whether this is a translation mistake, I leave that up to you. (If asked, I would have been stumped for a 'best translation'. I only became aware of the phrase 'variety meat' when I looked for synonyms of 'gibblets'.)

If we look at the history of the Khmer usage, it is my expectation that the phrase kreung knong was actually first used to refer to human and animal organs and later, when machines appeared on the scene, it was applied to the parts of machines in a metaphorical expansion of the semantic scope of the phrase.

And my moment of joy? It arose from the fact that when I have encountered this word (kreung)--and I have, very often--I encountered it in the context of motorcycle or car problems, or computer and handphone repair! My own ignorance of the language played its part in my surprise; the peculiar sequence of my encounters with it. If I had spent time, early on, in a butcher shop, before I bought a motorcycle, I might not have been surprised as I was.

Post-script: What was in my lunch? What spare parts were there? With the waiter's help, we found sliced pork heart, sliced liver, lung, and kidney. No intestines in my dish, though they are served (the black items are those wonderful chinese dried mushrooms).

And if you want something different from mixed vegetables, the menu had many other choices: Kreung Knong and yellow noodle soup, with Chinese white cabbage, and so on. :-) Most dishes are about two dollars; that unforgivable rice is an extra fifty cents. :)

Note: There are other words for engine or machine: yuun and the imported word, ma-sin (from the French for machine).

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