Cambodia: Up Close and Personal - A Chinese Family Reflects on Modernization in Asia

Cambodia: Up Close and Personal

A Chinese Family Reflects on Modernization in Asia

The author and her family. Wei Gu/The Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Journal | 6 Nov. 2014

Adventurous Chinese travelers have gone everywhere from Africa to Antarctica, but a volunteer-service trip to a poor country remains a novel idea. 

I signed up my family for one recently. The picture of us, all dressed in neon-green T-shirts, got 124 likes and 43 messages on my -like messaging service. But to many Chinese, the idea of going to the countryside to work brings back bad memories. “Is this an eat-bitterness camp?” one friend asked.

Growing up in China in the 1980s, I was on the receiving end of such trips by foreign students. Now living in Hong Kong, one of the wealthiest cities in the world, I wanted my kids to have the experience of seeing a poor country to better appreciate their own lives.

The opportunity arrived when my friend Susie Heinrich, a Hong Kong-based teacher, asked whether we—my husband, two sons and I—wanted to join her family and 10 others on a five-day trip to Cambodia to visit orphanages and help build homes. We jumped at the opportunity, packing a lot of mosquito spray, toilet paper and medicine.

Foreign volunteers and Cambodians worked together to build a house in Siem Reap. Rena Ho  

At first sight, Cambodia wasn’t exactly what I expected. The restaurant area in the Phnom Penh airport could be in a leafy Thai resort town, with all the familiar names like Burger King, Costa Coffee and Dairy Queen.

Looking out of the tour bus window, Cambodia looked like China did 20 or 30 years ago. People rely on motorcycles to travel around, just as we did with bicycles in China back then. I saw a family of four squeezed onto a motorcycle, which reminded me of my dad carrying my mom and me around Shanghai on a single bicycle. 

The roads in Cambodia are quite congested and it took 10 hours to make the 250-kilometer journey from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap. 

While Cambodia’s roads are bad, its electronic infrastructure is well-developed and accessible. People from monks to “moms” at the orphanage carried smartphones, and they talked on the phone all the time. The monks explained that they used cellphones for work and not entertainment, but they kept snapping pictures of us or talked on their cellphones when conducting a house blessing.

Mobile connectivity is cheap and reliable. I got a local phone card for $5, for five gigabytes of data, enough for 35 hours of surfing on the Web. This kept me abreast of the Hong Kong protests during the whole time we were in Cambodia. In fact, the connection was better on Cambodia’s muddy roads than in my Hong Kong apartment.

Cambodians are incredibly connected. A 17-year-old boy at an orphanage we visited quickly added me on Facebook after he saw the pictures I posted about the orphanage where he lived. Now I’m seeing his updates every day, and he has asked how to get in touch with one of the Hong Kong girls who went on this trip.

When American and Japanese students visited our schools in Shanghai, we exchanged snail-mail addresses. The letters would come after a month or so and stopped after one or two exchanges. It was difficult to keep in touch back then.

In some ways, Cambodians are more global and more informed than many Chinese, who are cut off from global media. YouTube, Google , Facebook and Twitter are banned in China. Even now, English is still taught mostly by Chinese teachers at schools, while in Cambodia many students learn from native speakers. Aboy from an orphanage in Siem Reap shows off his savvy of pop culture with a Psy T-shirt. Wei Gu/The Wall Street Journal The influence of Western pop culture can be felt strongly. The students at a school in a Phnom Penh slum performed a hip-hop dance. A boy at the Siem Reap orphanage wore a shirt with Korean singer Psy on it. When I asked him who that was, he replied with a how-come-you-don’t-know-this look: “Gangnam Style!”

The Cambodian kids benefit from a stream of volunteers who teach them foreign languages and cultures. Orphanages have blossomed in recent years, many serving as boarding schools for students who aren’t orphans. Not all are well-managed, but the booming tourism industry has attracted lots of warmhearted foreigners who want to make a difference there. 

Vichhai Hul, a cheerful translator at the nonprofit arts center Backstreet Academy in Phnom Penh, spoke excellent English. He grew up in an orphanage because his parents couldn’t afford his education. He learned English from his Australian teachers and is now a first-year college student in medicine.

Some even speak two foreign languages. At an orphanage in Siem Reap, I met a 14-year-old girl called Pisey who wasted no time practicing Chinese with me. She learned to speak Chinese from teachers from China and English from European and Australian teachers.

I didn’t have a native English-speaking teacher until college. I learned English from cassettes and books. To practice, we would go to the English corner at People’s Park on Sunday with other Chinese. 

‘I wanted my kids to have the experience of seeing a poor country to better appreciate their own lives.’ Rena Ho

China today is miles ahead of Cambodia in terms of its looks, with glitzy skyscrapers and the world’s longest high-speed rail network. 

Cambodia is still one of the poorest countries in Asia and far behind China by almost any measure. But the economy has grown at least 7% a year since 2012. Poor infrastructure is still a major roadblock, but it’s changing. A Chinese construction company is helping build a major highway from Phnom Penh to Siem Reap, which will cut travel time in half.

Cambodia has another advantage over China, where the one-child policy means the population is aging rapidly. In Cambodia, half the population is below 24. And they are more aware of the world around them than many Chinese.

—Ms. Gu is a Wall Street Journal editor who covers Chinese wealth from Hong Kong