- The Expatriate Kids: Their family gets paid a huge bonus because Cambodia is a difficult place to live in, or so an HR rep decided. Their house, car, various staff and school tuition are paid for by the NGO, embassy, or company that the parents work for. ...
- The Military Kids: Their parents are in the French army and on a mission to train Khmer soldiers and officers in the scope of a cooperation effort between Cambodia and the French embassy. ,,,
The Rich Khmer Kids: ...
Interestingly enough, during my time, the RKK were divided into two sub-groups; the royalists and the nationalists.Royalists were usually from the families that fled, nationalists were from families whose history they “just don’t know anything about” between ’75 and ’79. ...
- The Missionary Kids: Doesn’t know what the missionary position is, really. They’re mostly Korean, ...
- The Bar Kids: Yep, “you can take their moms out of the bar, but you can’t take the bar out of their moms”, as they say on Khmer 440. They are seen as lesser beings by the RKK, and largely ignored by the rest, except when they are hot, and female. And trust me, my oh my, they can be surreal. Some of them involuntarily create waves of insanity and despair in large portions of the school’s male population.Their long, dark silky hair, disarmingly innocent lips, perfect figure and glittery Eurasian eyes are just a facade hiding an impressive collection of psychological scars and some serious daddy issues – and if you wait long enough, and play your cards smartly, they will throw themselves at you, hoping for a brief moment of tabooless passion, a reassuring and protective masculine presence, and the irresistible but very utopian dream of a parent-free future, which is quite understandable, really, since they are completely aware of the fact that they are nothing more than the by-product of a financial transaction, some sort of unplanned collateral expense that both parties would have wanted to avoid at the time.The dad is usually a fat fuck, and it really defies reason to think that this sweaty piece of barang failure created the aesthetic wonder that his daughter is. The mom is a broken shell, addicted to ice or booze, destroyed by years of unhappiness and hard, degrading physical work, whose former beauty can still be felt if the room is not too bright and if she doesn’t try to utter a few words of broken English, in a broken voice. They know what they look like, and try to hide it with heaps of golden jewelry, whitening cream and layers of makeup. They try to look “respectable”. They are the proud owners of a bar or a restaurant, their reward after a hard life of sacrifices. After you get to know them, they are by far the most genuine and down-to-earth people you’ll meet at the school, and they can be a refreshing change from the typical Ambre-clothed expat mother who holds the moral values of a 4,99$ self-help book.Bar kids are fucked up, but they’re fun, lively, curious, and unpretentiously friendly. They don’t care about your opinions on prostitution, your social class, your wealth nor your origins, and would like you to do the same. They just want to have a bit of fun, damnit. Sometimes it goes too far and you can see a drunk 16 year-old girl starting to strip naked at Reggae Bar because she had one too many. But it’s not her fault, she’d prefer to do it indoors, but she’s banned from Howie’s for life!A common scenario is the “my real dad is in Battambang but my mom got married with her sugar daddy and he adopted me, so now he’s my daddy too, but he did not adopt my 5 brothers and sisters, which is why they’re not in this school” situation.That’s often weird and interesting, sometimes fascinating, and one’s curiosity increases exponentially after every 5AM pillow talk, a chat usually filled with human tragedy, darkness, and the realization that the very conversation you are having right now is an anomaly of chance, a strange combination of serendipity, globalization and absurd causality. The Bar Kids are my favorite, and they have a talent for breaking my heart.
- The Others: They’re from other international schools. ...
- The Weirdos: They are Barangs in Cambodia, and they don’t have a reason for being here. Notice how everyone is here for a reason? Well, some people don’t really have one, ...