This morning I took an old Chinese bicycle and pedaled it
out into the semi-dark of a Phnom Penh morning, determined to push the
boundaries of my small world of Beung Keng Kang. It’s one of those bicycles where
you sit up strait and hold the handlebars like reins while your feet pump strait
up and down. You can ride this bike in a skirt while balancing a teacup on your
head, no problem.
It comes with the standard local accoutrements of a wire
basket, a bell that goes briiing and
a rack in back for a friend or a bushel of papaya.
So off I peddled into the grey, pumping up and down past
puppies sleeping in doorways, past storefronts wearing iron grates, past large clay pots of goldfish and papyrus, past boughs of bougainvillea tumbling
over walls until behold! the Tonle
Sap River!
I rode fast along its edge and took in the soft, silvery-black
majesty of the water. Small fishing boats hovered
motionless on its surface, like spoons lying this way and that on a table
surface. I joined a pack of
bicycles and tried to blend. A bank of nimbostratus racing low over the river
announced rain by noon.
A public promenade stretches along the riverfront and in
these wee hours I passed packs of healthy citizens doing aerobics to K-pop (Korean
pop—all the rage). The old ladies in their pajamas and flip-flop swung their arms
gustily to and fro, lifted their knees to march in place, and descended in swan
dives down to touch their toes.
Besides exercisers, the other familiar faces I see in the
early morning are the city’s garbage collectors, mostly women. They wear
fluorescent lime vests and cover their heads with huge floppy hats and their faces
with surgical masks. They pull yellow bins for the rubbish and they whoosh grass
brooms to and fro.
The woman on the northbound side of Norodom has two little
children. Sometimes they help her pick up rubbish; sometimes they squat, their
10 little brown toes splayed wide as twigs, holding steady the unwieldy pieces
of cardboard so she can sweep rubbish up onto them. But mostly they loiter or
play. Today the toddler boy was sitting on the street playing with a chunk of
cement.
On my way home, I swung around the Independence Monument. The
towering, lotus-shaped stupa is usually ringed by a gridlock of SUVs
and tuk-tuks. But in the early morning, swinging around and around these wide empty lanes was
exhilarating, like a racecourse all to myself.
There is something deliciously sneaky about waking up early
and getting a head start on the world.
The city is grey and drowsy and serene. The stacked balconies of luxury
apartments look like empty shelves facing off with the receding stars. And
there I am, eagle-eyed and owl-eared, speeding forward on a tiny bicycle
dwarfed by the city, the palace, the river, my legs pumping life through pounding
heart as I peddle up empty boulevards.
Let me confess: it is
a scandal. It’s downright cheeky that I get to glimpse a particular ray of brilliant
sun leaping out of the low east and shouting colors at a patch of wispy clouds,
and nobody else is even noticing. It’s desperately unfair that no one gets to see from
my precise vantage point the dawn dribbling orange over the surface of
the river like sherbet melting around the fishing boats. It’s the sort of
secret that just me and God and the whole sky are in on. It makes me feel alive
and thrilled to try to take in this particular arrangement of water and city and atmosphere and nobody ever again (like, ever), will see it. It is an astonishing gift for just me gliding fast on my Chinese
bicycle and sucking the whole morning into my lungs.
