Campuccino #98

Sou Sdei and welcome to Campuccino, your soon-to-be former dispatch of key headlines in Cambodia with a dash of opinion.

To new subscribers, welcome and possibly goodbye (bear with me, it will all make sense very soon). I am Darathtey, an author, researcher, and communication consultant.

To my other subscribers, I’ve missed you.

This issue is going to be different from the usual format of Campuccino because it will be the last one, the last one of Campuccino as you know it.

Hear me out.

I fell off the newsletter radar because it felt better that way. The news cycle has become, to me, an unobtainable, inconclusive story, a marathon without a finish line. I couldn’t keep up. I was tired.
In the world flooded with overwhelming amount of content, I just couldn’t let myself contribute to the mountain of content we are all dealing with, not especially if it was something I would have half heartedly and unconvincingly put out. My absence was one part a way to humanly, slowly, and mindfully digest news about this country and the world, and another part my way of not contributing more words to the already incredibly crowded online space and your overflowing inboxes. So, I paused to reassess what would be the next better step.

During these months of my radio silence, I spent my time pondering my next professional move, learning how to paint and most importantly, working on my next book. On the news front, I distilled headlines to the most important ones as not to be totally in the dark to what is happening around me. It was nice to consume the news at my own phase without feeling the pressure to fit them in a newsletter. I was waiting to see if it was a phase that would pass, if I would miss writing this newsletter.

I didn’t.

Campuccino has had a good run of five wonderful years. It has served a purpose for me and for my audience through these times it’s been running. Right now, there are new actors to fill in this space that we know as a very narrow Cambodia’s independent media. And they are doing it better than me in terms of news reporting. I’m not a journalist and it’s never in me to chase headlines. Over the past half a decade of running this newsletter, I am grateful for all the journalists whose work I could pull together to paint many cohesive pictures of this country. Now, it is time for me to move on to paint more pictures through my own writing.

Announcing Campuccino 2.0, your snail email from Cambodia. Yes, I am not going anywhere. Just reframing and reprioritising what matters to me most as a writer.

In this new stage of newsletter writing, I want to be more mindful, to write longer, and slower. That’s the kind of writer that I am. That is why chasing the news cycle was not for me and it was unsustainable. In the world of fast moving content and artificial intelligence, I seek refuge in a slower way of observing, seeing, thinking, and eventually pulling together those strings of thoughts into words on pages.

As a Cambodian writer who writes mostly in English, I navigate a long and bumpy road to define what that one part of my identity means to me and my work, and how does that influence those around me. For many years now, I see things differently depending on which lens I use — the Khmer language lens, or the English one. The Khmer lens is more gentle, yet more fearful. This lens comes with many strings attached. The strings are strong and tightly secured, thanks to dark pasts, intergenerational traumas, traditions, and norms. The English lens, on the other hand, is direct, plentiful in terms of vocabulary, and most importantly, no string attached. I can be stoic using this language because it didn’t come to me with the nuance of my ancestors’ past and my parents’ and grandparents’ trauma. It allows me a freer space to express free of certain emotions, cultural expectation, and free of many ways I was raised.
I’ve been switching between these two lens most of my life and sometimes, I fear that this switch can make me lose sight of who I was, am, and muddy who I want to be. I’m not sure how I feel about being put in a certain confined box of being Cambodian. Does it even matter to have one defined set of identify dealt to you by the default of nationality if that means it will limit ways of seeing things? I am greedy, I want more lens to see more things, so I can write about more things, no matter how complicated or mundane. On this journey as a writer, I am figuring this out one sentence at a time. I think better when I write. I do not know where this will lead, this journey of self-rediscovering along with the love and the hate I have for my motherland and this crazy city I call home, but I want to try embarking on this trip of pondering on my identity, my relationship with this place, and my relationship with my elders’ past. I would like to invite you to come along this journey with me.

Campuccino 2.0 will be an essay format newsletter consisting of fragments of my thoughts and experience of rediscovering what being Cambodian in Cambodia means to me. It is going to be an experiment and I don’t know how long I can keep it up, and I am okay with that. This new stage gets me excited again, and I hope at least some of you feel the same.

Now, on to logistic.

In terms of frequency, I’m still figure that out. I want to start testing with once a month first and adjust accordingly. If you have read this far down, I would love to hear from you what you think in terms of how often I should publish with the new format.

Campuccino 2.0 will use the same domain as the former one because I already have an existing audience base. For those who think the switch up no longer serves you, you are very welcome to unsubscribe, I won’t take it personally :) I thank you for the journey you’ve come along with me so far. For my three regular members on BuyMeaCoffee, I have paused the recurring charge for now so you have time to decide on what to do with your subscription.

Many months ago, I asked you what you would prefer to read, while some of you said you would read anything I write (I’m very flattered), many of you said you want to keep receiving the news. Don’t fret! Our newsletter friend Kouprey has been doing an incredible job in the news- from- Cambodia department. Please go subscribe to them.

For Southeast Asia news that covers Cambodia from time to time, you can check out Mekong Independent and Dari Mulut ke Mulut by Erin Cook. There are more obviously but these are just the sources I read regularly.

Alright, I think that’s everything.

I might risk repeating myself but once again, thank you to all of you for being with me through all this year of Campuccino’s first chapter. For now, I bid adieu to some, and I say see you soon to others.

Orkun and take care.

See you in the next Chapter!

— Darathtey