After arriving in Siem Reap, Cambodia, the first dinner was eaten in the courtyard of the hotel.
The waiter lit a candle. Mosquitoes fluttered around the candle flame and fluttered the flame with transparent wings. Seeing that they were about to be burned, they fled away lightly.
There is a sultry and humid air everywhere. The rain hides in the sky, quietly drumming the huge curtain of the night, trying to set off a storm and wrap the whole world in it. In the corner of the dining table, an old-fashioned floor fan, shaking its huge head, slowly brought warm wind. This allows the lingering damp heat in the body when walking in the small garden to slowly dissipate, sink, and then make a whirlpool and hide into a water lily by the pool.
The rain rushes all the way from the distant horizon, passing through hills, mountains, passing basins, plains, sweeping heat waves, steaming heat, and whistling forward. I sat in the corner of the exquisite courtyard, and faintly heard its rumbling momentum.
After dinner, I walked out of the courtyard and stood on the side of the dusty road at the door. I saw someone holding a microphone and roaring an old Chinese pop song in the humble food stall opposite. Most of the hotels in this area are Chinese tourists, and even the signboards of roadside food stalls have their names marked in Cambodian, Chinese and English at the same time.
There are few pedestrians in the night. Motorcycles and tricycles passing through the street, tables, chairs, benches, and rusty billboards under dim street lights, these lonely daily lives always give people the illusion of time travel, as if they suddenly arrived at a certain place from a prosperous city. Secluded town. As for where Siem Reap’s famous seventh wonder of the world, Angkor Wat, is located, where is the eternal Khmer smile hidden, and what kind of heavy breath of history floats on this land, I can’t see clearly. Only the tumultuous noise in the silent night, and the flickering fragments of life like lights, floated in front of me like a dream.
After standing and watching for a while, I turned around and walked towards the hotel along the shadow of the plantain leaves. On the dark bench by the side of the road, at some point, a dark-faced dwarf sat, looking up at me silently. His feet swayed constantly, so two “ghosts” standing side by side were reflected on the concrete floor, floating strangely. The thunder was louder, and it seemed to envelop the entire world. In the distant horizon, lightning is splitting thick dark clouds again and again and falling on the boundless wilderness.
Back at the residence, I saw the poetry collection “Nails” by the Cambodian poet Pollan. The design of the cover is simple and simple. There are nails everywhere on an abandoned wooden board. They use their twisted bodies to show the world the wind and rain they have experienced before and the sadness of the abandoned roadside. In the preface, the poet described the reason why the collection of poems was named “Nails”. When I was 12 years old, my family demolished the dilapidated house because of relocation. Then, his father asked him to carefully pull out the nails on the board one by one. Pollan asked his father curiously why it was so laborious, when a fire burned a plank, or split it with an axe, and you could get a nail. His father patiently told him that by doing this, one could reuse the nails, two would allow the carpenter to recycle the discarded boards, and three would prevent passers-by from stepping on the nails and getting hurt. One day in 2007, the poet saw a beggar in Phnom Penh without his right leg and in a military uniform crawling towards him, and begged him: Sir, give me some money to buy something to eat, if it weren’t for the war, I wouldn’t change. As it is now… The poet suddenly remembered that when he was young, his brother stepped on a nail. He cursed at the nail in pain, but his father told him that you should not blame the nail, but the owner of the nail.
The poet starts from the subtle life and reflects on the social reality in which he lives. He writes about the pen in the hand of a secretary, about the owner of a luxury car, about an old car, about the cry of a public toilet, about the writer’s survival dilemma, about the envy of human nature, about the place of man in the torrent of history, and about the human race. Destruction of forests, and even writing a fart elicited different reactions from the poor and the rich. His eyes are like gods, always looking down on the suffering of the world, and smashing nail-like verses into a society full of gaps between the rich and the poor and injustice, but at the same time, he gives the land he loves with infinite compassion.
Outside the window, the heavy rain finally broke through the sky and poured down. Recalling that the poet said in his collection of poems that all poets should jump out of a certain area and cast a broader vision to the troubled human society. I began to understand the vast land outside my window from the loud sound of thousands of raindrops falling in the wilderness.
