On being Barang (Life as an expat in international communities)

“I’m good at Khmer (language). I can speak better than my dad.” A girl at Sunday School said this, her mum is Khmer and her dad is Aussie. I was glad to hear this as I was teaching an international (English language) Sunday School class and there was a Khmer girl who didn’t understand English.

Also in the class I was teaching last month there were kids from Sri Lanka, Singapore, a Canadian/Khmer and the UK. And the teacher in the next room is from Nigeria.

There are so many expats in Phnom Penh, from so many different countries. Where I lived in China there weren’t many foreigners (or foreign bookshops, food shops).

“You don’t look like a foreigner now,” a Chinese friend said to me one day. I was a bit confused- was I starting to look Chinese? I think what she meant was she could recognise my face, as she could recognise Chinese peoples faces. Whereas, other white people all look the same to her, as she is not used to seeing them.

Whenever I left my house people stared at me, asked me if they could take a photo with me, came to ask me to teach English to them/their child/at the Uncle’s school/ in their cousin’s company etc etc.

“Hello, yes, no, one, two, three” a man in the street said to me once, then kept walking along. I guess he wanted to practise his English.

I bought food from the nearest market. When I was there I could hear the other customers asking the veggie seller about me. “Where is she from?” What does she do?” “How old is she?” The sellers I went to regularly knew all the answers as they had asked me before.

It could be quite stressful being “famous”, sometimes I had to psych myself up just to go out, even if it was just a walk across the road to the shop.

If I ever saw a “weiguoren” (person from an outside country) I didn’t know I would go and say hi, and find out what they were doing in China. I think that happened about twice.

So when I first got to Phnom Penh, I felt excited one day as I was going along on a motorbike taxi- I saw a person with brown hair and a pointy nose walking along the street! If I had been walking too, I would have said hello to them. I thought it was strange the expats showing me around weren’t that excited.

But after a few weeks I realised that there are sooo many people here who are “barang” (literally French, but has come to mean white people in general) and other nationalities. The random white person I see walking down the street wouldn’t expect me to talk to them.

Another thing about living in the capital city with lots of expats is that the English language level is much higher. More people know some English and they know English better.

In China the market was a good place to learn Chinese language. Many people in the town I lived in wanted to practise their English, so didn’t want to speak Chinese when they had the rare chance to speak to an English speaker. But the sellers in the market didn’t know any English so if I wanted to communicate with them I had to learn some Chinese.

So I was very surprised when a Cambodian fruit sellers held up a some fruit and asked me in English “What is this?”

Although I now live in a city with more expats than my previous Asian city, I actually have less to do with other foreigners. I guess when there are less of a group you get to know each other better. In Phnom Penh there are international schools, international churches, shops, restaurants, lots of options for expats.