Our Taxi Driver's Marriage

We were fortunate to have (the improbably named) Kevin decide he should be our taxi driver to the Killing Field today. We couldn’t leave until 10:30 though, because he was watching his 10 month old son (adorable) while his wife attended English language classes.

We asked him how long he’d been married, and he said 3 years. He told us that he didn’t want to do marriage Cambodian style, where the parents choose, but European style, where he got to choose. He claimed he did the latter, but in fact, his cousin suggested several girls from a town about 60 kilometers from his home village. There was one that he’d seen once before, and so he “chose” that one. His cousin made the advances, and it was agreed that marriage could work. Over the next 4 months, he spent, he said, a lot of money (nearly $400) talking on the phone with his future wife, trying to get to know each other before fully committing to the marriage (otherwise we might have gotten divorced, he said).

Once they were both committed, he had to give several thousand dollars to his wife, so she could plan the wedding. The wedding was very big, with over 1000 guests, and cost nearly $10,000. He quickly said though, that he didn’t bear the full cost. It’s understood at weddings that guests make monetary gifts which cover the costs of food and drink for the event.

I asked if his wife had chosen him, or her parents. He fudged this a little, saying that of course they’d had to agree, but that he and his wife had made their own choice based upon the four months they’d spent talking on the phone.

As an aside, Kevin’s English was remarkably good. He said he only studied it for one year in school, when he was 32 (he’s now 37) but that he practiced a lot. We figured out that he was 5 years old when Pol Pot began his reign here, and 9 when the Vietnamese ousted Pol Pot. His house, he said, was 800 meters from their village killing field one way, and 500 meters the other way from the prison. Four of his uncles and his grandmother were killed. The killing field in their village was the well at the local Buddhist temple. During Pol Pot’s time, he did go to school, but all they were allowed to study was the Khmer alphabet, one or two letters a day. He said he didn’t get to go to any meaningful school until he was 13. He seemed so matter of fact about it all, but I can’t help wondering what someone with his capacity for language (he’s also picked up a decent supply of French) could have done with real schooling during his childhood.