Siem Reap is a city based on tourism, with plenty of restaurants for tourists. Especially in the entire neighborhood near Pub Street, full of palatial fine dining restaurants and cramped fly shops, every night of foraging in Siem Reap will always be a different surprise.
Although Siem Reap is full of Chinese and Western food, grilled meat and Japanese ingredients - those commonplace dishes, but the most worthwhile to eat in Siem Reap is the local Cambodian food. One of my personal favorite dishes is green curry fish. In a pot of tender green thick soup like new willows, the white jade fish meat reveals a seductive corner. Pick up a whole piece and stuff it into your mouth, and the fragrance of the curry is slowly released in your mouth, not greasy or greasy. The flesh of the fish is separated by layers of chewing, and you only need to chew boldly with confidence, without any regard for the bones. When I swallowed this piece in my mouth, another piece appeared on the chopsticks at some point.
Visitors who come and go in a hurry may seem like they just need to indulge in delicious curries, but knowing that in a village just an hour and a half drive from Siem Reap, where elementary school children can only rely on hollow cabbage grown from a field of tens of square meters as a food source, it seems like an overly luxurious thing to eat a satisfying meal.
If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I would have always thought that "not enough to eat" is an extremely abnormal state of life, which will never happen in real life. The words "food security" written in UN documents are just a topic. But as cars jolted up and down uneven dirt roads, I saw deserted fields one after another; in that mud-brick school, the children's richest diet was only UNICEF grain and canned tuna.
A dozen of our young students who participated in volunteer activities, during the two-day short-term work at Sloane Village Primary School, had to hoe one hoe after another, and chiseled dozens of square meters of fields, ridges and ditches, into the dry and cracked land in the tropical monsoon area.
Reclamation was so hard—sweaty, dusty, iron pounding on rock-solid ground that shook the palms of your hands red. Our feet were in uneven grooves, unable to borrow strength, and could only force the tool in our hands to swing against an overdrawn muscle in our body. This seems to be a pretentious amorous after a city person occasionally returns to farm work, but it is true that only when facing the loess with its back to the sky and the neck is hot, when you see the ridges being raised inch by inch, and the ditches are inch by inch deep, you can personally realize that all the vegetables draw sunlight, moisture and oxygen from the land where they step on, and after years, they have grown into the color of green curry.
I've always had big dreams. I am familiar with the seventeen Sustainable Development Goals of the United Nations, and there are many technical cooperation frameworks for food security. But in that small field, I felt my own smallness and powerlessness for the first time--it was still difficult for me to even open a ditch, and the child in front of me could not help.
But the small people are really trying to figure it out again. Every year, hundreds of active social enterprises attract tens of thousands of people to the land. Social enterprise is a new type of enterprise that makes profits by operating on a business model and then invests profits in society. Unlike large international aid organizations, which often have an audience of a few hundred or even a few dozen people, their goals are simpler and more specific — teaching, reclamation, and so on. Being able to do something real may be what attracts me to social enterprise.
For example, the social enterprise that undertook our trip will make a profit by organizing volunteer trips for middle school students during the holidays, and then use the profits to support the construction of the school, and also let the campers participate in the process of building the school. In addition, there are wonderful acrobatic performances staged every day in Siem Reap City – it is a characteristic social enterprise that combines ordinary schools and acrobatic schools. Not only do they provide acrobat training, but they also provide full-time education to all school-age children around them, and acrobatic performances are profitable and donated to keep the school running.
As small as a bottle of Cambodian green curry powder, it can become a product of a social enterprise. They recruit apprentices, teach them to make spices, and make a profit from the finished products. Capable restaurateurs can buy a piece of land and open a chef school directly, operating as a restaurant while also providing internship opportunities for these students.
I came to Siem Reap and was originally just a tourist. Like a simple diner, I will take an adventure with my friends through the noisy crowds of bars and streets, looking for restaurants recommended by the public reviews. We rode in speedy tuk-tuks, haggled with mischievous drivers, and walked through the dark alleys of Bar Street. From time to time, I rub shoulders with a few strangers who can't understand the language, evoking the excitement and pleasure of being in a foreign country.
But I'm not just a tourist. Not only did I eat green curry fish four or five times, but I also knew the story behind green curry.
A schoolgirl who has been stationed at the Sloan Village Primary School for a few months told me that she found peace in the process of painting the school's walls. Somehow this understated sentence gave me the power to redeem me—volunteering is not so much a process of action as a precipitation. I realized that what matters is not how much to change, but to keep a heart that wants to change. In this sense, I am not in a relationship with the children who give and are given, but with each other.
I remember one afternoon we were at school fried chicken for the kids. On the large open-air stove top, the hot oil spits bubbles mischievously, and piece after piece of raw chicken is placed in it, and the golden and seductive delicacy comes out. We fried from day to night, and finally watched the vast basket of golden delicacies, divided into plates and enjoyed by the children, the purest happiness filled the whole chest.
On the last day of free time, a companion led me to visit the most famous temple in Siem Reap. As a believer, she told me that the Buddha of Hinayana Buddhism did not actually have the heavenly power to help people realize their wishes, and worshiping the Buddha only described his heart to the Buddha and strengthened his heart. I had believed in Stetson's view that if God only blessed those who worshipped him, he would not be called a Universal being or a loving God, so I never understood faith. But in that moment, I seemed to understand a little.
So I said, I'm going to come back, I'm going to come back with a more capable, more determined look.
When I finished the day of the trip, when I ate the green curry fish for the last time, I scooped up the soup and seemed to see in the reflection the hollow cabbage seedlings on the vegetable floor of Sloane Village Elementary School breaking through the soil, revealing the green of life. All food is no longer what they are cooked, but at any time the light flows backwards, into the whole process of growth, harvesting, modulation, into every step of people's small efforts.
As a diner who grew up eating Sichuan cuisine and tasted the eight major cuisines of the motherland, in fact, Cambodian food is not so amazing to me. But I knew I would be back for another bite of green curry fish.