relationships Archives - The Cracked Door

How a Tongan Pageant Queen Reclaimed Her True Self (A Life Snippet)

(This week’s Life Snippet is about a Tongan woman who used to travel around in beauty pageants across the Pacific before having a mental health breakdown from the stress. Now, she is rebuilding her life back home with the support of her family. She explains what the world of beauty pageantry was like for her, why it led to a breakdown, and how she got out of it.)

Mele (not her real name) stopped doing beauty pageants seven months ago. She started when she was 17 and ended by the time was 21.

Being from Tonga in Polynesia, she competed in different competitions throughout the Pacific, but many would treat her differently as a Polynesian woman. For example, in a competition in Manila, Philippines, the pageantry set aside her and all other Polynesian women, treating them as second class competitors from the get-go. Filipino beauty standards tend to favor lighter-skinned women. She got so frustrated she quit the pageant early. Similarly, people in Hong Kong could be rude to her because of how she looked.

She said that she used to cry every single day and experience frequent panic attacks when she did the pageants. This culminated in a mental health breakdown, which was when she realized it wasn’t worth it anymore and she needed to get out. She quit pageantry altogether.

She decided to head back home for seven months and is staying with her family while she rebuilds her life. She is doing a lot better now. She gained back some weight, and she has been dealing with the emotional and spiritual burnout from her ordeal. She no longer has panic attacks or crying episodes nor does she feel randomly agitated by little things like she did when she performed in beauty pageants. Her family has been supportive of her during this time and given her the space to figure out who she is. At the moment, she prefers staying home and being with them relationally to working or doing any other activity.

At the same time, family pressure may be slowly creeping in. She is the eldest daughter of seven kids with many obligations to take care of her younger siblings. In particular, her youngest sister is three years-old, and she acts as a second mother to her. This can be a lot of pressure, but being the eldest taught her how to take care of things and to lead.

She also seems to be experiencing pressure to marry. She said, in Tonga, despite the fact that people cannot legally marry until they are at least 18, many (especially girls) still marry between 15 and 20. There are some changes to this, but as someone in her early twenties, she seems to face pressure to get married and through that transition to a new life. This may disrupt her current respite, and she seems hesitant to do so until she’s ready. How to juggle between her own healing while rebuilding her life and facing family pressure to marry seem to be the biggest question she faces in her life right now.

How to Talk to People in a New Culture

As I travel the world, how do I talk to people in various cultures around the world and learn about a new place? I have a slightly different approach in each place based on the culture, but this is my overall approach as I learn the specifics of the communication style when I arrive somewhere new.

Who to Talk to

First, I figure out who I can talk to. The best people may vary widely depending on the culture, and it depends on whether that person has time. Staff members of the everyday establishments I frequent (like waiters and waitresses, store clerks, hotel workers, store clerks, security guards, etc.) are a low-hanging fruit, but I have mixed feelings about talking with them. They are paid to be around, and in some cases, there can be implied pressure to interact. In others, it’s fine. I find it best to sort that one out by ear.

In some places, asking someone to take your picture can be a way to strike up a conversation. They take your picture, and then you can ask them where they are from and what it is like living here. In a culture where most people don’t speak English, it can be hard to initially approach someone with limited linguistic overlap, and this can be a good way to initiate a conversation. Gesturing that you want a photo is one of the easier things to convey; almost everyone has a photo these days and understands the concept of taking pictures with it. Once done, then you already have your phone out, and you open your translation software and start a conversation. In heavily tourist areas, this technique may lead to you talking more with tourists than visitors, but it can still work well.

Otherwise, I might be simply talking to random people on the street. I find the best way to do that is to start tangible. For example, if someone is wearing a really cool shirt, ask where they bought it. You’d be surprised at how much you can learn from a culture by learning what kinds of clothing people buy and where they shop. If you are at a restaurant and you see someone eating an interesting dish, ask them what it is called and whether they’d recommend you eat it or only think it’s okay.

What to Ask About

I generally prefer asking broad, open-ended questions about their experience living there. That said, I often start the conversation tangibly and use that to open up. Take the examples in the last paragraph: start by asking about their shirt or the food they are eating, and then if they are up for continuing to chat, pivot from that to learn about where they are from and what they think about living here. (And translation apps work wonders when you first arrive in a place; some apps like Google Translate allow you to download a language ahead of time, so you can still talk to people when you don’t have reception.)

The tangible question does a few subtle things. First, it presents a clear starting point in the conversation, especially useful for someone who does not speak the same language as me. Second, it provides me with a clear goal, humanizing me in the process. Humans tend to relate to stories, which we experience through a goal. I am at a restaurant in a new country, trying to figure out what to order, or I am considering buying some clothing. Either of these implicitly present me as a genuine human to the person I am talking to. It also demonstrates that I am interested in learning about the culture and their world here.

So, how do you pivot to broad, open-ended questions about their experience with the place? People’s answers to your specific questions often teach you things that you can then generalize into a broader conversation. For example, if they say, “I bought my shirt in China” when we are in Malaysia, I then ask if they are from China or were simply visiting China. If they are from China, I may ask where, and what it is like living there (or what it is like visiting Malaysia).

If nothing comes up to go off of, I just ask as a follow-up after they walk through the previous tangible topic we were just talking about. The two most common first questions I ask are, “What is life like here?” (or “Do you enjoy living here, or what do you think about it?” or “What are your favorite things to do here?” (or “What do you do for fun?”) The first one makes clear I want to learn about them as a person. The questions emphasize that I want to listen to their opinion or perspective.

The second emphasizes that too but can also trigger an activity-oriented conversation. Often people will go into their personal favorite activities, but some will go into listing the best tourist attractions. This can be fine, but in my follow-up questions, I usually try to keep the conversation about their personal experiences with the places: for example, “What is your favorite part about X place [that they just mentioned]”, “How often do you go where?”, “When was the last time you go there?”

Here are a few other examples of good starter questions that emphasize their personal experience. I often also use these as follow-up questions after asking what life is like:

1) What is it like working as a waitress [or whatever job they do]?

2) How long have you lived here?

If they give me a list of recommendations, I make sure those are written on my phone. Most often, I get out a new page and have them type up the names of the places. This is both because they will often say names of places faster than I can type them, especially when the place names are in a different language. This way I can record them to look up later. More importantly, however, having them write it down confirms that I am really interested in what they say and want to hear every word of it. It is a form of validation.

Being Shown Around

Also, I learn so much more being taken to neat places than going by myself, because I can listen to their take on it instead of only seeing through my own perspective. Even hearing people describe their favorite places is a window into their world. Sometimes, they will simply offer to take you to their favorite places.

Some societies are set up to navigate by yourself pretty easily (such as big cities with intricate public transit networks), but in some parts of the world, having someone drive you around is really the best or even only way to navigate it. In the latter, making friends who then show you around is the best way to approach it (or sometimes hiring a tour guide, although I do not generally do the latter). In my experience, in big cities, people are less likely to show you around themselves. The places where people will show you around tend to be rural, but not all rural areas are like that. It varies by culture.

To determine whether it is safe to go with them, I generally assess two things: 1) how well I know them, and 2) what I sense their self-interest is. On how well I know someone, the most important factor for me is knowing some of their other interpersonal connections. For example, have I met their friends or family? Do I know where they work?

If I met someone at their job, for example (say a waitress or waiter), then I know where they work. If they do something really bad like rob me (assuming I am still alive), then they are now identifiable to the police who can use that to learn their name. That helps me feel secure. But for a complete stranger I met in a big city who could in theory rob me and blend back into the crowd, I may have my guard up a little more.

Knowing their friends and family is similar (although that can be more likely to be deceptive in an extreme situation). Friends of friends are great (say one of your friends knows someone who lives in the place you are about to visit): I now have a social network and can feel much more confident.

The second way I evaluate safety is in terms of what the person’s self-interest is. Everyone has a set of self-interests or motivations. Why are they interacting with a foreigner (me)? These can range from virtuous motivations like wanting to talk with someone from another culture to learn more about the world, hospitality/graciousness, just a desire to be nice, or just enjoy explaining their world. They can also have self-interested motivations like forming connections that can help them find a job in or move to another country, or they want you to pay them to give you a tour. A given person can have a combination of motivations.

Different travelers tolerate different types of motivations. For example, I do not like the motivation of trying to get money from me that much and tend to stay away from interactions where I sense that is their primary goal. In tourist areas, people may offer rides or offer to show you places with the understanding that you’ll pay them for it, and I will generally stay away from them.

At the same time, specifically getting a sense for people’s self-interest is most useful in understanding what they may or may not do. For example, someone who is interested in connecting with you because they want an international friend are a lot less likely to rob you. They may have other interests that you have to navigate, but making sure you have a fun time connects heavily with those motivations. Knowing this provides a type of safety.

Similarly, someone who wants you to spend money for their services generally sees you as a potential buyer. They may try to upsell you or rip you off, but they are less likely to downright rob you. Like I said above, though, I tend to be more skeptical of those with this motivation. I may complete an exchange (getting a ride or buying something I need like water) from someone demonstrating this motivation, but I am less likely to have a longer interaction with them. Other travelers may have a different opinion or strategy for how to respond to people’s motivations, though.

All of this is how I learn about different people from around the world. The people I meet are the real gateways for me into understanding the world and various cultures around the world, much more than visiting the key sites, eating the food, or other things. This is both because learning about how people in a place think about their lives, their society, and their culture tells me so much more about the place than just visiting it myself, but also because they will be quick to show you the best places to visit, the best foods to eat, and the best other things to do anyways.

Freedom Found by Leaving One’s Home and Traveling the World (A Life Snippet)

(This Life Snippet is about a young adult from Barcelona, Spain, also traveling the world. For her, this journey is about leaving the “prisons” of her hometown and finding herself in the process. You can see more of my Life Snippets of different people in different parts of the world here.)

Julia is a 29-year old Spanish woman from Barcelona who is traveling the world. She has spent most of her time so far (about a year) in New Zealand on the work-travel visa program doing various odd jobs (ranging from picking fruit to hospitality jobs). I met her on a short trip to Tonga in Oceania, where she went on a couple day vacation to swim with whales.

She likes aspects of Barcelona’s culture but also felt the need to get out. One reason is the city’s recent rise in cost of living (largely due to the increasing influx of tourists). More importantly, however, she felt constrained by the community there. She wanted space from her abusive, alcoholic mother, in particular.

She likes the fact that Spanish culture is communal, but as a young adult woman, she found those relationships constraining. In her experience, people there tended to have a prescribed model for how people (especially women) should live their lives: find a job, get married, and then build a family of kids. For example, when she tells people back home that she is currently traveling the world, their most common response is, “What is wrong with you that you are not building your life?”, as if the fact that she is not settling down with a job and family is the only way to build one’s life.

One of her most valuable lessons traveling is seeing how many different ways people live their lives in various cultures around the world. She sees a freedom in this that she can’t experience in her hometown. In her experience, in New Zealand, people leave each other alone, and she also finds a freedom in this. For example, she can walk down the street without having to talk to people or implicitly explain herself like she would back home.

She really enjoys New Zealand but sees it as a place to live for a year, not long-term. She plans to head back to Spain in about three months. She will travel to Southeast Asia and/or Micronesia first, though, before heading back. She plans to get her dive master training so that as she travels throughout Southeast Asia she can pay her way working at different dive centers along various beach towns as she goes. She may work at t one for a few months before moving on. To me, this seemed like her ideal lifestyle (at this moment in her life), and even though she said she planned to head back to Spain in three months, I suspected she would end up preferring doing this for several months longer instead before heading back. She seems to gush at the possibilities, clearly excited about it.

I have talked with many Westerners who want to travel the world by working at different dive centers like this. For them, it seems like an ideal way to make enough to get by for those who want to travel and really enjoy beaches and the beauty of the ocean.

As a college student, her first international trips were to other parts of Europe (such as London and Prague). That is when she first experienced how visiting a new country can free you to be someone else: she is not tied down by others in her community and their associations with her. She can explore new parts of herself.

She studied biology with a focus on animals and in graduate school, took a more extensive trip researching how tourists feeding monkeys influenced their behavior in Bolivia. In the specific part of the Amazon she stayed, tourists frequently fed a specific species of monkeys causing them to expect food from humans and become violent when a human they encountered did not feed them.

This reflects a wider concern she has about animal-based tourism. She talked about how many tour companies do not respect the animals, instead preferring to mistreat the animals so that they can guarantee tourists will be able to witness them. For example, she saw tour companies in Indonesia feed whale sharks to encourage them to show up and then bring large groups of tourists who then swarm and frighten sharks. This influences their behavior, causing problems and potentially harming them and the ecosystem in the long-run.

In certain situations, she has mixed feelings about this, however. For example, in Kalimantan (also called Borneo), Indonesia, she went on orangutan tours. Some tour companies seemed to feed the orangutans to encourage them to come, but at the same time, the tours were a key source of income for a relatively impoverished community. If they were not able to do these tours, the people would most likely have to cut down the forest to plant farms (the next option as a viable source of income). That loss of habitat would wipe out the orangutan population anyways. Thus, in this instance, she felt like the tours were a reasonable middle ground for both the local human and orangutan communities, allowing them to best meet their needs. This reflects a tension and complexity I have also felt about animal tours while traveling the world (maybe one day I will write about this topic in more detail, after I have had time to do some more research on it).

She really loves New Zealand, but she does not like how the country seems built on the labor of immigrants, particularly those who come on a work-holiday visa like her. She gets to see New Zealand, but she is also stuck working low-pay, temporary jobs while those in New Zealand who own and manage those businesses receive all the benefits. New Zealanders don’t like to work, instead preferring to rely on immigrant workers such as the pool of young adults on work-holiday visas. Many on this visa are paid close-to break even, especially since rent in New Zealand is high. Thus, they cannot save. She could only save when she bought a camper van, deciding to live camping outside even for several months when it was cold. This allowed her to avoid the high rents, though.

Overall, she seems to enjoy her life. She is not only discovering the beauty of New Zealand but also seems to be finding herself. This experience is giving her a break from her family (especially her mercurial mother) and her confining community back in Barcelona. She seemed content just being and seeing where life takes her.

Life Snippets: Glimpses into People’s Lives

As I travel the world, I have listened to a lot of people’s stories. These “Life Snippets” are glimpses into people’s lives around the world: what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context and how they choose to navigate the challenges in life. Hearing people’s stories helps me understand the rich tapestry that is humanity, and I hope it does the same for you.

Here are the Life Snippets reverse with the most recent first:

Fail, Pivot, Feed: Lessons Learned Hustling in Baguio, Philippines

This is about a local entrepreneur I met in Baguio, Philippines. It’s part of Life Snippets Series, where as I travel the world, I compile glimpses into people’s lives around the world, what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context, and how they navigate the challenges of life. You can find more of these snippets here. If you want to read another story about a woman trying to start a restaurant business in a different part of Southeast Asia with very different prospects, see this.

She is one of eight children: four boys and four girls. She studied psychology in undergrad. One of her brothers, who was a professor I believe also in psychology, committed suicide at the age of 22. She said that she felt like the family did not ask him how he was doing enough or show him positive affection. She finished her degree but decided not to work in psychology because she associated that with her brother. She also said she has had to forgive herself and others and to heal from this, which has been a process.

She loves cooking and serving others food. She much prefers that, finding it very life giving. She currently runs a small, counter-serve restaurant. This is her fourth or fifth business. The others failed, and she finally learned how to be successful in it.

Her first business was a restaurant that she co-started with a friend. She and her friend had several disputes. In particular, her friend bought stuff without her permission, which caused the business to blow through its budget. She said the core problem was that they weren’t on the same page on who would run the business. Her friend wanted to have someone fund her to do her own business, and she wanted to be equals in the process of the business. She also said she had to learn the hard way value of first approaching the person positively instead of accusatorily.

Her friend offered to split the business 50-50 with each person controlling their portion to do their thing or cash out and cut her losses. She chose the second because the lack of an amicable partnership made continuing to work with her seem unrealistic. She said she had to learn to make sure that you and the person you are working with are on the same page before working together on a business.

She then set up an online clothes store with her sister, but she eventually gave this up because it was not generating enough revenue. She also started a food stand near Baguio’s main university, but this too failed because she was not prepared on how to run the ins and outs of making food in a cost-effective manner.

With this business, she finally has success, though. She started in February of last year. On her opening day, she made 3,000 Filipino pesos (about USD $32) and the next day 6,000 pesos (about $64). She broke even from her starting expenses 3-4 months in. She generally makes about 30,000 pesos (or $320) a month, which is good enough to get by on. She tends to sell out on her food everyday with a line of customers going around the corner of her block during peak hours, a clear sign of success.

She said she learned the lessons from her past businesses. She set this restaurant up by herself instead of getting anyone else involved. It’s next to a big grade school and gets a lot of business in weekday afternoons when the kids finish school. Her strategy is to sell significantly cheaper than other nearby restaurants so that she sells more of it, and it seems to be working.

Her restaurant is a single room that’s about a meter/yard wide and maybe 3 meters/yards long. That’s her kitchen full of her stove, cookingware, food, etc. In the front is a little wooden board facing the street where people come up and place their order. Once she makes it, she hands it to them, and they go on their way.

She works practically nonstop. She works six days a week except Sundays, her one day off. She wakes up at like 2:00 am or 3:00 am to buy her food for the day at the market. She then works until around 9:00 pm when she closes (but sometimes she closes earlier, closer to 8:00 or even 7:30 pm if she has already sold all her food).

I suggested she may need to take some time off to rest by eventually hiring an assistant to work some of the time instead of her. She said that moments during the day when she doesn’t have customers is her rest. She took a week-long vacation to go to Manila a few months ago as well.

Her plan is to save money to retire by at least 48 (she’s currently 37), even if that means hustling now. For retirement, she wants to go to the rural province where part of her family is from.

Many of her siblings work abroad, since wages are low in the Philippines. One is in Saudi Arabia; another Japan. Others have traveled to other bigger cities in the Philippines where they can make more money. She had a job offer for a white collar job in Thailand, and she refused it. She prefers staying here in Baguio with her parents. (In Filipino culture, often one daughter – generally the youngest – is expected to stay back with her parents.)

She also said she helps others. She said that when a person asking for food walks by, she gives it to them, giving them whichever dish they want. Similarly, she gives her leftovers to the street cleaning lady who comes by with a broom to sweep the street or sidewalk in the evening. She believes in karma, and that if you help others, you help make the world around you (the community, nature, etc.) a better place for yourself.

What I Learned Developing a Long-Distance Relationship with a Woman from the Other Side of the World

I wanted to reflect on the lessons I learned from dating a woman living on the other side of the world. My ex-girlfriend is a Thai woman who was living in Cambodia, and we met when I took a trip there.

One major mistake we made is that we did not give enough time being together in the same place. For context, we went on a few dates while I was in Cambodia. Then after chatting for a month and a half by text, we met together for two weeks in Vietnam, before I went back to New York where I lived at the time, and she went back to her home in Cambodia. Then three months later, she came to New York for what turned out to be a month and a half trip visiting New York and also Washington state.

After this, we decided to travel the world together, which in effect involved living together on the road. That was too soon for such a step. To be clear, I don’t think touring Vietnam, New York, and Washington state were bad trips. They were very impactful experiences that deepened our relationship. Our problem was that we did not know enough about each other to decide to live together while traveling the world.

That was too big of a jump for where we were at, and it turned out to be the wrong call. Once we traveled together, we realized all sorts of incompatibilities and tensions that eventually destroyed our relationship.

Traveling with a significant other in itself can be difficult. One of my friends quibbed that traveling together is a relationship “on hard mode” as you constantly have to make complex decisions together while also being potentially tired and removed from a stable rhythm or sense of place. But I don’t think that primarily explains why we had the tension. We did not do enough work evaluating whether we were compatible in the first place.

Compatibility is difficult to evaluate when a relationship is long-distance. That’s one of the long-distance relationship’s biggest difficulties. Living in the same city (even if they live on the other side of town) allows you to see the person in your daily routine. You can feel out how you feel with them everyday, how your lifestyles’ overlap or conflict, and what to do about the latter.

Some in my generation insist that couples should move in together before getting married to evaluate whether they are compatible. I would go that far per se, but living in the same town is important. Seeing them as you go about your day and week and doing the many little things together that make up regular life helps you understand whether you fit.

Our long-distance relationship was stuck on the honeymoon phase, where we were head over heels with each other, perhaps naively so. Psychologists who have studied this phase of relationships report that people usually notice our partner’s flaws but do not consider them a big deal. Instead, we tend to minimize potential problems in favor of the positive aspects. It’s in later stages of the relationships that we truly process these flaws and any other tensions in the relationship and actively work through them. It’s necessary to do this to evaluate whether you two really are a good fit.

When a relationship is long-distance, you often communicate on your own terms. Whether it is texting or calling, you interact with the person according to your schedules. You may speak with your partner frequently – for example, at this time, I generally spoke with her twice a day – but there’s something about only texting, chatting, and video-calling that does not help move the relationship out of the honeymoon phase.

I believe the reason is that these virtual, long-distance communications are not a major disruptions to our day-to-day lives. It’s by incorporating the other person into our day-to-day lives that tends to move the relationship out of the infatuation stage and start to show the frictions inherent in the relationship. It both allows us to experience them enough to get under our skin, but it also requires more of a shift into our lives that causes friction.

I remember a priest in my home church growing up once reflecting in a sermon about his experience counseling new couples planning to get married. One of the first questions he asks the couples is, “During your fights, how do you two fight? What do you tend to do?” Some newly dating couples will respond that they have never had a fight before, and he’ll tell them to wait until they get through a major fight and then come back to get married. For him, having had a fight is a sign that they are close and not having had a major fight demonstrates that they are not intimate enough for marriage. Genuine intimacy requires getting under each other’s skin, which necessarily produces friction and tension.

I don’t think it is a coincidence that we never fought while our relationship was long-distance. It was not intimate enough to do so. Unsurprisingly, during our trips together traveling (both in Vietnam, New York, and Washington), we did fight. The longer we were together, the more significant our fights became, precisely because we were sharing more of our regular lives together, leading to greater opportunity for connection and friction. The long-distance phases, though, felt similar to freezing fruit to prevent it from ripening: typical reactions were suppressed, preventing the relationship from moving to the next stage.

What is the alternative for someone in a long-distance relationship? I don’t know. Ideally one should close the gap and move to the same place, but in many circumstances, that is not realistic. This is still what I have noticed at least, even if it can be a hard truth for two people considering dating who do not live in the same place.

When Advancing Seems Hopeless (Life Snippet from Battambang, Cambodia)

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. It’s part of Life Snippets Series, where as I travel the world, I compile glimpses into people’s lives around the world, what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context, and how they navigate the challenges of life. You can find more of these snippets here. For another snippet also from Cambodia but from someone with a very different position in life there, see this.

(Caveat: 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.

How Best to Respond to Anger? (Part Two in Philosophy of Anger Series)

This is the second part in my series about the philosophy of anger. In this part, I will focus on how to respond to anger.

When you are angry, you should first figure out why you are angry (that may seem kind of obvious). As you sort through that, you should evaluate how you feel about the fact that you are angry (in particular, what this tells you about what your needs are in life) and how you plan to respond.

In determining why you are angry, the following questions can help:

1) What injustice do you perceive, and/or what needs do you feel like are not being met?

This can often seem like an incredibly easy question to answer, since most manifestations of anger (especially rage anger) make us vividly aware of what we are angry about and what we are lacking.

But, it can err easily, so we should take this with a form of skepticism. In the heat of the moment, something may clearly seem like the source of our anger, but if we reflect a little more deeply, we may realize more complex issues underlie our feeling, that we rushed to a conclusion about what was happening, and/or that there was something wrong with our initial expectations in the first place. Anger can mislead us away from what truly matters.

Some forms of anger (especially the passive anger discussed in Part One) often blind us from what is making us angry and why. Such anger may orients us at ourselves only to have to realize that we were not the source of the problem. Rage anger has the opposite problem: it orients us towards external problems, which means that in some situations we need to pause and realize how our own actions may be contributing to the problem.

2) Is the injustice you perceive real and legitimate?

Like I already discussed in Part 1, a person can be angry at something that is not actually happening. Our emotions react to what we perceive to be happening, not what is actually happening, so we should pause to reflect on the accuracy of the interpretation of events that is causing us to feel angry.

Take, for example, a husband who thinks his wife is cheating on when she’s not. Maybe, he interprets whatever she is doing that day as her visiting another sexual partner when she’s just going about a normal day. Anger can lock this husband into his interpretation, putting him in a type of “go” mode by orienting him to do something about it.

It’s good to take a moment to determine if our anger is clouding our judgement about what is actually happening. Do you even have enough relevant information to know what is going on in the first place? In particular, what information do we have to understand what someone else is doing, and are we jumping to conclusions about their intentions?

Furthermore, maybe we need to reflect on our underlying expectations. We most often feel angry when some implicit expectation for how something will go does not occur. Sometimes our expectations are reasonable, but sometimes they are not. It can also be useful to reflect on our underlying expectations.

3) Who is responsible for the injustice, and how responsible actually is the person who I think is responsible?

Anger often orients us to blame a certain person or group. For externally-oriented rage anger, this tends to be someone else, and for the internally-oriented passive anger, that person tends to be oneself. Either way, reflecting on whether we are jumping too quickly to blame someone is useful.

4) What should we do to address the injustice?

This is the final and arguably most important question. Anger often orients us to act to fix the injustice in some way. This is reasonable: injustices are bad, and we should live in a world without that injustice or at least have the harm of what happened repaired as much as possible. If we cannot rectify the injustice, we at least need to develop a way to live with it resiliently. At the same time, anger can push us to act quickly to do something now, and whatever action feels right in the moment may not be the best way to resolve the injustice long-term.

The question of how to best address an injustice is a tactical question and an incredibly complex tactical question at that. Anger can cause us to narrow our thinking towards whatever specific response we are thinking about in that moment, but we often should pause and think about other types of solutions that may turn out to work better in the long run. For complex societal injustices, there will likely be legitimate debate about the best way to rectify the wrong.

For example, during the Civil Rights movements, different black leaders and organizations (such as Martin Luther King, Jr and Malcolm X) proposed very different tactics for how black people should best respond to the racial injustices they encountered. Each strategy had their advantages and disadvantages, and thus probably different situations when they were appropriate. It may be better that the debate of how to respond remains open because different black individuals and communities will face different specific circumstances over time that will require them to adapt and figure out how to respond differently.

In this kind of big debate about how to respond to a major, multifaceted injustice in the world, I think the feeling of anger plays an important part in orienting us to act in the first place and helping us think through whether specific strategic responses feel like they would provide a lasting feeling of peace and justice, but we obviously also need to employ our many other mental faculties to think through what the best ways to address them.

All these questions may be answered at once or in a different order than the logical, linear order presented here. An emotion like anger may even direct us to process these matters in a nonlinear way. That’s fine, but I think these are all four important questions to think through before carrying out one’s desired response to anger. Even in an emergency situation, one can take a second or two to work through all of them. Anger tends to direct us to act quickly even potentially impulsively, so these questions form “doubt reflexes” that help reground us and think through our actions.

Now, none of this is meant to imply that anger, or any emotion for that matter is bad. I do not believe that emotions are bad or that “reason” is a better guide for making decisions than emotions. Insofar as these are separable, I think both are incredibly useful psychological tools humans have, and they work best working alongside each other.

On a practical level when making a decision, it’s helpful to think through a few different lenses or angles, including working through how one feels and what decision feels satisfying emotionally and what decisions seem best from the perspective of a rational calculation. This is both because undergoing multiple decisions making strategies slows us down and slowing down helps people make better decisions, and because these two ways of thinking seem to complement each other well, often picking up on the biases and blind spots from the other way of thinking.

A Philosophy Anger Part One: What is Anger?

How would you define anger to an alien from outer space who has never experienced the feeling. Anger is the type of thing that pretty much everyone seems to understand but is incredibly hard to define or describe, but I find thinking through what anger is to be incredibly useful in thinking about how to respond to the world around us, most specifically how to respond to injustices in the world. I think anger has far broader manifestations that the everyday understandings of the feeling don’t explore.

In this series, I will define anger, describe some of its different forms, and discuss how to best respond to anger.

Part One: So what Is Anger?

To me, anger is any emotional response to a perceived injustice. If I had to put words the most common everyday definition of anger, I would describe it as “an intense conflictive feeling against a perceived injustice that directs us to act to counteract that slight.” I think it takes many different forms far beyond this everyday definition though.

What I like about this definition is that it situates anger as a response to a slight as a way to orient us to act towards addressing that slight, but I think it limits too much the types of emotional responses people have when they experience such injustices. Humans have a variety of intertangled emotional responses to injustices that direct us towards different strategies of action, and I think in understanding this, we can think through how to approach the injustices in our world.

Defining a Few Key Words in My Definition

So, let’s first talk about what a “perceived injustice” means. First, we have “injustice.” What is just or unjust is an incredibly complex philosophical questions debated for thousands of years, so I will not venture into that discussion here. But suffice to say that every individual has a sense of what justice is that grounds our expectations for how people will interact with them on a daily level. This, often, intuitive or implicit set of expectations often seem to ground our emotional responses to the world. If I say, “Hello,” to someone, and they rob me, then this disrupts my sense of expectations of what that interaction would entail in a way that I would perceive as “unjust,” meaning I will probably feel angry. Whether robbing me in that moment was justified according to some abstract sense of justice or morality is less important for my emotional response because these implied expectations, not a rationale assessment of true justice, seem to form the basis for our emotional responses.

Next, “perceived” is important here. We get angry when we perceive an injustice. To be angry, we only need to perceive that something is unjust. That perception may or may not be true, but we could still feel angry about it. For example, if a partner believes their other is cheating on them even though their partner is not actually doing so, the emotions the first person feels is still anger, despite the fact that no injustice is not actually happening. One can be misinformed and yet still have an angry response.

Finally note that the injustice does not have to happen to the person in question. If I experience someone else receiving an injustice, then I may still become angry, even though I am not the person who experienced the injustice directly. One can even feel anger at an injustice that occurs in a fictional story where the injustice never occurred in the literal sense. The “perceived injustice” that causes one to be angry could just as easily happen to oneself as to another or a group of people.

A Broader Definition of Anger

The most important single difference between my definition and the normal definition is that the normal definition views “anger” as a specific emotion; whereas, I see anger as any emotional response to a perceived injustice. If the perceived injustice makes someone sad, then that sadness would constitute “anger” for them. Any time we perceive an injustice whatever emotions we encounter is anger, so when one experiences an emotion, the question becomes:

1) What kinds of emotional responses do we have to that injustice?
2) How do these emotions direct us to act?
3) What does all this say about us in general?

As a parallel, consider “anxiety.” Clinical psychologists will often broaden their definition of anxiety to include not just the regular definition of nervous anticipation of the future but to also include excitement, nervousness, enthusiasm, dread, and many other emotions related to the anticipation of a potential future event. They do this because on a practical level, people experience combinations of these emotions at the same time when they anticipate a potential future event, so it is useful in a clinical setting to combine them into one category.

Likewise, I consider it useful to combine the totality of our responses to a perceived injustice under the umbrella of “anger.” To me, when a person experiences an injustice, they experience a plethora of emotions, which include rage anger, frustration, fear or insecurity, sadness, disgust or repulsion, indignation, etc. Because of this, anger can look very different.

What all these different specific emotional responses have in common is that they are an emotion in response to a perceived injustice, and as such, the emotion directs the individual to act in a way to resolve that injustice. But specific elicited emotions may direct that individual towards very different (even contradictory) ways to act to resolve that injustice, but determining how to act to resolve the injustice is a core, if not the core, question in creating a healthy way to process and express our anger (something I will discuss in detail in Section Two).

A Few Different Types of Angry Responses

To show the variety of forms anger may take, here are two, opposite examples of patterns of anger, each of which fundamentally orients the given person to respond to the perceived injustice in a very different manner:

1) Rage or Active Anger: The first is the everyday understanding of anger: the person gets “mad” and starts acting, often aggressively (such as shouting or physically attacking someone), to counteract the perceived injustice. People often view this as a “hot” response since often when we are in this state, our bodies feel hot, and we feel the urge to do something. This form of anger seems to urge us to act to determine 1) who is responsible for the perceived injustice, 2) address or resolve the injustice by actively confronting/challenging what they did, 3) bringing those responsible “to justice,” and/or 4) preventing that injustice from being able to happen again.

I think there is a time for such responses, for example a time to turn over the proverbial tables and confront the “powers that be” for their injustices. Though, this form of anger can also error and/or become unhealthy when 1) it clouds other forms of judgement causing us not to use our other mental faculties to evaluate what is going on and how we should respond, 2) it only makes us aware of how others are part of the “problem” and blind to our own culpability; 3) directs us to act in an excessive, inappropriate manner, especially an excessively violent manner; and/or 4) causes us to go after someone who is not at fault, especially to “punch down,” directing our fury against those who are more vulnerable than us.

2) Passive Anger: In this angry response, we tend to perceive the injustice as a disruption or departure from tranquility. In contrast to the first form, which directs us to seek a resolution by changing the external world, this form of anger directs us inwards to do or become what is needed to restore a sense of peace and tranquility. For example, say in a conversation the other person says something offensive. The first form of anger may direct you to pushback and argue, to directly counteract the person for their statement (and if that fails, leave in a hush); whereas, the second form of anger would direct the person to say nothing and silently shrug, maybe steering conversation away from that topic without “ruffling feathers” so that the conversation can continue in “peace.”

This is a form of anger, although it contradicts the typical definition of anger. Instead of being directed externally against whatever seems to be causing the injustice, this form of anger gets directed inwards, orienting the person to act to reorient themselves to maintain stability, tranquility, or at least stasis. There are times when these kinds of actions are useful, but they tend to error and/or become unhealthy when 1) the stasis being pursued contradicts a better, more lasting resolution to the injustice, 2) when it leads to the person directing guilt or hatred onto themselves, especially for problems beyond their control, and 3) when doing what is necessary to maintain such stasis involves sacrificing essential aspects of oneself.

Conclusion

These are not the only two ways anger can manifest, but they provide a sense of the variety of what anger can mean for different people in different circumstances. Each orients the person towards a type of action in response to the perceived injustice, even if these two examples happen to orient towards partially opposite response. The first may direct one to aggressive action against an external threat and the second towards a passive, inward response

Now, just because one experiences an emotion that directs one’s action does not mean that that person necessarily performs that action; for example, maybe they become enraged, wanting to do something violent, but decide not to. Emotions seem to direct us towards certain types of actions/responses, but of course, we may also use other mental faculties beyond that emotion to ultimately decide to have a different response.

Finally, since anger is the emotional process a perceived injustice, the way in which that individual perceives the injustice will significantly shift how anger manifests in that specific circumstance, and overtime, our various emotional responses may form dispositions or habits that we subconsciously use to process the next unjust situation. In the next part of this series, I will talk about the best ways to respond to anger and the habits of anger we form over the course of our lives.

(Read Part 2 in this series here.)

Sleeping with “Bar Women” in Siem Reap, Cambodia as a Way to Meet Someone (A Conversation)

(This is part of Life Snippets Series, where as I travel the world, I compile glimpses into people’s lives around the world, what kinds of issues they face given their cultural context, and how they navigate the challenges of life. You can find more of these snippets here.)

One morning while I was getting breakfast in Siem Reap, Cambodia I had a long conversation with a white US American living there. For anyone unfamiliar, Siem Reap is a small, tourist city in Central Cambodia withu a population of around 350,000 most known for the absolutely amazing Angkor Wat ruins, one of the marvels of the world.

This account is just one perspective on complex dynamics between Western men and Southeast Asian women. It exemplifies the types of inequalities and power dynamics in these kinds of relationships and how both he and the Cambodian women he have met navigate these relationships.

The guy had lived in Siem Reap for about 7 months. He is deciding whether to settle here long-term or go back home. He says he has everything he wants in life (such as a nice home, food to eat, etc.) except for a woman.

He has gotten frustrated, though, with the transactional interactions he’s had so far with Cambodian women here. He’ll meet different women at bars, take them home, sleep with them that night, intending for them to be a one-night stand. But then the next morning, they ask for money. He says the amount of money they ask for is not much, but he finds it insulting. It makes him think, “I thought the woman was simply interested in me, but then I realize, ‘Oh that’s what kind of relationship this is.’” He also said he usually meets “bar women” or women who specifically go to bars to meet guys there, which to him are “like this.”

He said he felt frustrated in the US with having to pretend to like people’s personalities or have someone play a wingman in order to get to sleep with them. In Cambodia, he can say, “I think you look pretty; do you also think I’m attractive? Okay,” and go have sex. He also likes that women are more upfront about complimenting his body, for example strangers telling him he looks attractive.

In contrast, he got frustrated with how in the US, women are selective and would seem to judge him on things like his job and salary (he worked a blue collar job often labeled as “lower status”). Here he is comparatively more desired. He admits that Cambodian men seem to have it harder than white men such as himself, though. They often have to go through several hoops like justifying their career path if their work is considered menial.

In his opinion, Cambodians require less in life here in Siem Reap: often just wanting a place to sleep, enough food to eat, and a motorbike to get around. For him, people do not seem to know what they are lacking materially: if they lived in a Western country, they would own so much more monetary wealth and material stuff. But to him, this ignorance prevents many in rural Cambodia from seeing what they lack, lowering the material standards of what a “successful life” looks like, almost like a coping mechanism. (Note: This is his opinion. I do not agree that rural Cambodians do not know what they are “lacking” but find the reasons for these differences in cultural expectations for material things to be a bit more complicated.)

Thus, when the women he sleeps with asks him for things, he can hardly fault them for their request. They are often asking for basic needs like food, and compared to the US, what they are asking for is not that expensive. At the same time, the requests make him feel uneasy

I found it interesting talking with him. I could relate to the frustrations and hurt about having people so frequently ask you for money, but it seemed like he was in some way using his status given to white men in that community to have one-sided, short-term sexual encounters. One-night stands are okay when both sides reasonably know and agree on what to expect, yet I sensed that the women he was having sex with had very different expectations and assumptions than him, seeing the sex as a beginning of a relationship, not just something they are doing that night.

Because of his privilege, he could enforce his expectations that this was a brief sexual encounter. He obviously controlled whether he helped others financially, and he could move on to another woman if this woman had what he considered too unreasonable an expectation. That allowed him to satisfy his own desires (both for sex and to be complemented for his attractiveness). To me, this seemed like a vain and ultimately self-defeating approach for finding satisfaction emotionally, relationally, and even sexually.

I found it sad. He seemed to have some kind of insecurity, which he sought to satisfy by continually having sex with different Cambodian women and seemed either oblivious or indifferent to how that subtly positioned the women as a type of object for him. Then he got frustrated by the ways those women tried to respond within that.

These kinds of cross-cultural relationships can be complicated to navigate, though, especially given differences in power. Everyone has expectations for how to interact, which are influenced by one’s cultural context, and when in another culture, it’s definitely okay to communicate your expectations and find people who respect and abide by your expectations. At the same time, it’s important to be aware of where others are coming from and to be aware of how your power and privilege may unfairly impact the situation. I think he simply felt frustrated with how the women did not abide by his expectations, moving swiftly to get what he wanted without thinking through what their encounter must have looked like from their perspective and how his power and privilege shaped the interaction itself.

This kind of obliviousness can be common among those who are in a position of power in society: particularly white men in other cultures. It can also make one think about how positions of power could lead to similar ignorance in our own lives.