I wish you could see us.
Three not-small westerners on a motorbike – me sandwiched in the middle, my feet pressing into the tops of David’s while he tries to make himself comfortable on the few inches of seat we’ve left him at the rear.  “You just have to push your way through!” My sister Ashley is saying – singing, really, she sounds so at ease. We’re making a left hand turn at a busy intersection and she’s just cut off (or that’s what it seems to me) three quickly approaching motorbikes.  I’m trying not to watch what she’s doing or where she’s going.  It’s better this way.  David asks if I can adjust my feet and I tell him I cannot.

As we weave through the streets of Phnom Penh, Cambodia’s capital, Ashley points out the significant landmarks.  A memorial to the recently deceased king.  The National Heritage Museum.  The Royal Palace.  When we cruise past a strip of cafes facing the dawdling Mekong River she eschews it as “for the tourists,” which reminds me that I am one of those…

And she is not.

Then

Now

We were the stereotype.
As the older sister I was inherently better than Ashley at everything that matters when you’re young.  I was faster.  Stronger.  More conniving.  With reckless abandon I capitalized on such disparities, thus making our childhood an era in which everything went exactly as I wanted it to.  It was brilliant, or at least I thought I was.  And Ashley – ever benevolent – declined to argue the point.

But somewhere along the way, when I wasn’t paying attention, my little sister took the lead.  Before I’d even left the North American continent, she packed two enormous hard-shelled suitcases and moved to Morocco.  While I sat in an air temperature controlled office building in San Francisco’s SoMa district, she stood in a classroom in Casablanca and performed uncomfortable parent-teacher conferences with impossibly wealthy and irrational Moroccan parents.  While I bounced from wine bar to restaurant she learned how to efficiently navigate the chaos of her neighborhood’s open-air market, befriending the butcher so that he might procure for her a Thanksgiving turkey when the time came.  If you ever have the pleasure of meeting my sister, ask her about that Thanksgiving.  Ask her about the turkey.  The one that took until the next morning to cook in her fickle oven while her roomful of guests jovially dined on side dishes.

I think we all assumed this teaching abroad thing was a phase for Ashley – not unlike her childhood obsession with dalmatians.  Surely she’d come straight home after Morocco and take up a life that we could comprehend.  But a year and a half ago our mother called to tell me that Ashley was moving to Phnom Penh.  While I consulted Google for the exact location of said city (Southeast Asia?) my mother conveyed more details in that chirpy voice she reserves for topics pertaining to my sister, her clear favorite (she’s never been able to deny it with a straight face).  Ashley would continue to inhabit the relative equivalent to the moon and yet to hear my mother talk you’d have thought she was delivering excellent news.

Motherhood cannot possibly be for the faint of heart.

For going on four years now I’ve carried a poorly veiled skepticism of my sister’s choices.  In part because I envied her unforeseen climb to familial fame and in part because I genuinely couldn’t imagine that she was actually happy living a life that differed so widely from my own.

Naturally, I’ve been keen to get to the bottom of this and so as our bus rolls through the parched outskirts of Cambodia’s capital city I struggle to contain myself.

Ashley has informed us that a tuk tuk driver will under no circumstances be able to find her apartment, as I naively suggested, so we’ve agreed to meet at a cafe near the international school where she works.  While en route I take in the city, whose streets are clogged with motorbikes and tuk tuks and full-sized automobiles all creeping through intersections with a collective patience that feels on the verge of cracking.  It is five pm and the sun is low but there remains a weight to the air which is the temperature of an oven that has only recently begun to cool.

That I’m more impressed by Phnom Penh’s paved sidewalks and traffic lights than I am by the man pushing a cart of unidentifiable food is testament to the amount of time I’ve now spent in Asia.   I can’t begin to understand all of the reasons these countries perpetually lag, and so instead I look for the signs of progress – of things working as they ‘should.’  I swell with hope at the mere site of a flock of children in blue and white school uniforms, telling myself they’ll help improve this country that mutilated itself only thirty five years ago.

Ashley is sipping a mojito when we arrive.  She is joined by two other teachers from her school and as we make small talk about travel destinations (David and I immediately upstaged by these women) I’m struck by how at home my sister looks.  Mojito induced?  But this state of obvious ease persists through her brief, smiling, negotiation with our tuk tuk driver outside of the cafe.  Through the way she casually suggests we hold our breath as we approach the ‘stinky river,’ an open sewer made especially pungent thanks to a sanitation union strike.  And then into the next day while we flit about the city beneath an unrelenting sun – David and I following her like the blind, so grateful to for once not be consulting a map.

With the help of a tuk tuk driver whose number she has on speed-dial we run errands, gathering last-minute ingredients for dinner and retrieving a pie from a bakery run by an NGO supporting women rescued from the sex trade.  On the way home we swing by a pharmacy for some pills that will eradicate the parasites Ashley is certain have set up camp somewhere in my intestinal tract.

Me: “I don’t feel right.”
Her: “It’s probably parasites”
Me: “I eat barely anything and I feel full.”
Her: “That sounds like parasites.”
Me: “It’s a constant low-grade nausea.”
Her: “Definitely parasites.”

Back in her kitchen I watch skeptically while she explains how she’s going to cook a meal of Thanksgiving proportions using two stove top burners and a free-standing oven the size of a microwave.  I’m so desperate for a home cooked meal that I drop any sisterly competitiveness and hope to god she’ll be a smashing success.

And she is.

When David and I set out on this aimless venture, this ‘travel ’til we’re tired of it’ thing, I’d carelessly thrown around the idea that we might just settle down somewhere.  Dare me.  A hut in Thailand, perhaps.  How alternative, right?  But if there’s anything I can say for sure after these months of travel it’s that I want to live in America.  Land of tidy streets and sidewalks in excellent repair.  Sparkling, fluoride-enriched tap water.  Grocery store aisles bursting with attractively packaged food.  Endless systems and policies designed to maintain a perpetual state of ease…

And ever since acknowledging this, I’ve held a fascination with those who make their lives beyond America’s pearly gates.  Because as far as I can tell, it takes a unique combination of independence, imagination, immense patience and good old fashioned guts to live out here.  Ashley’s got it.  I, frankly, do not.

Five days in Phnom Penh and I’m ready to move it along.  It’s a fabulous city, as Southeast Asia goes, but that’s the thing: it’s Southeast Asia.  It’s hot and it’s disheveled and to ask for a glass of water in a restaurant can sometimes feel more complicated than it’s worth.

My sister’s talking about staying on for another year after next.  “Or else South Korea,” she tells me.  “Maybe Thailand.  There’s a good school in Bangkok.”

You win this one, Ash.  You win.