This is a life snippet, a picture of a moment in someone’s life to see how different people around the world navigate the complexities of life (here are some other snippets). This woman’s story seems to be a story of doing all one can to beat the odds and rise above the cycle of poverty.
(We spoke in 2023. I decided to maintain the present tense tone in this piece, but the present refers to the end of 2023.)
Chivy (not her real name) is from Battambang, Cambodia. Her dream is to start a restaurant, since she loves cooking and hospitality. She and her cousin recently co-founded a restaurant. It’s on the first floor of the same apartment building that her family (her mother, uncle, aunt, cousins, and her) rents the second floor of. But the business has been struggling.
She worked at her restaurant from 9:00 am until 3:00 pm everyday, and to make ends meet, she had a second job working the evening shift at a local bar as a barista from 3:00 pm until midnight. Her cousin works at their restaurant during the evenings until 10:00 pm when Chivy is gone.
The rental for her restaurant business costs $200 a month (Cambodia uses the US dollar as one of its currencies, so she’s paid in dollars), and her barista job pays her about $400 a month. She uses her second job to pay the rent for the restaurant and keeps the rest to contribute to rent for her home expenses for her and her family.
Battambang has been an important tourist destination until the covid pandemic. Then tourism stopped, causing huge hardship as most people in the small city lost their jobs. People working in tourism, food and beverage, and other service sector industries were the worst hit, because there were now few customers to pay for these services. When I was there, the pandemic had ended. Tourists were starting to come back, but not to anywhere near the same numbers they were before in Battambang and Cambodia, so restaurants still struggled to find customers.
At the same time, she is exhausted. She works fifteen hours a day with only has nine hours in the day to split between relaxation, any chores she needs, and sleep. She has one day off a week on Wednesdays. She says everyday she feels exhausted. Her friends have told her that she is slowly killing herself by overworking, and she suspects she can’t sustain this forever.
At the same time, she really wants her restaurant business to succeed. Her dream is to start a restaurant. Her cousin wants to throw in the towel, saying they haven’t gotten enough business to keep them afloat much longer, but she wants to keep trying. She hopes she can make it.
Both her and her cousin have been strategizing the best way to beat the odds and rise economically from their initial position, but they have found this incredibly difficult.
Chivy would like to move to the US, where she would work for at least 10 years. The greater income in the US (even if she works a low-income job in the US where she is barely scraping by while there) would allow her to save far more money than she’ll ever earn here working as, say, a barista. She would use that money to buy a home for her mother. The family would then craft that home into a homestay where they could rent out a few rooms to tourists and through that, build wealth to allow them to advance to the middle class in Battambang. She told me that moving to the US is a dream, though, that she knows will never realistically happen.
Likewise, her cousin has been trying to find a job in South Korea. She applied for a program the Cambodian government hosts to work there. The program pairs Cambodians with companies in South Korea, where they tend to work in a few different types of low-wage blue collar or service sector industries like manufacturing, agriculture, or if their Korean is considered good enough to interact with regular customers, food and beverage.
She had to take a series of exams to demonstrate her competency. She studied Korean for three months in order to prepare for an exam. She needed a score of 110 out of 200 to pass, and she scored 125. She also had to take a dexterity test, placing blocks in holes and other physical activities, which she also passed.
She is waiting to see whether a Korean employer will choose her. She is pessimistic that she’ll get an offer, though. Korea’s program has 400 slots for Cambodians, and about 2,000-3,000 Cambodians apply for these 400 slots. She said they mostly select men in their twenties for factory work, the industry that would be most likely to hire her, so as a 33-year old woman, they may not pick her.
If she does get a job offer, most contracts are for two years, although some stay for as long as five years in total after renewing it a few times. The typical pay is $2,000 a month in Korea, which would also allow her to save to buy a home to use as a homestay. If this doesn’t work out, though, she may move to Siem Reap (a major tourist city next to the famous Angkor Wat) where tourist and food and beverage jobs are more plentiful.
Chivy’s and her cousin’s stories demonstrate the complexities of trying to advance economically in small cities and towns in Cambodia. Other residents in Battambang have told me the area can feel almost feudal with class mobility being very difficult and people becoming locked into their station in life. This shows how difficult it can be to change that.
Even the best entrepreneurial endeavors are likely to fail and options feeling limited, causing them to look to other parts of the world where they can work and save money, but these options are also limited. It’s easy to feel sad and stuck, and even working 15 hour days may not be enough to cut it to create one’s dreams.
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