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- Contents Category: Fiction
- Custom Article Title: Alice Bishop reviews 'Holiday in Cambodia'
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- Article Title: Holiday in Cambodia
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Seamlessly extending from the French occupation of Cambodia to the horrors of the Khmer Rouge and the current tourism industry, Laura Jean McKay’s début short story collection, Holiday in Cambodia, is a powerful portrait of a country long-affected by war and poverty. McKay’s knowledge of the Cambodian landscape underpins the collection. She evokes peak-hour from a motorbike, where ‘everything looks like bushfire, like nicotine’, and notes the forgotten landmines of neighbouring paddocks, which ‘travel like worms’ through loosening earth. In one of the shortest and most affecting pieces, ‘A Thousand Cobs of Corn’, a Cambodian woman looks down at her husband’s hands in the night, ‘which have shaken since he was a boy soldier’.
- Book 1 Title: Holiday in Cambodia
- Book 1 Biblio: Black Inc., $24.99 pb, 224pp, 9781863956062
Holiday in Cambodia is laced with such images. Cambodian men ‘walk their baby sons through the streets, their songs like dust on the air’ and, in 1969, female French expats eat breakfast in a semi-abandoned hotel, to the sound of bombs falling across the Vietnamese border. Decidedly blind to the approaching conflict, one woman’s face is thick with makeup, ‘garish in the lemon-butter morning light’.
McKay’s sharpest focus, however, is on the hedonism of expatriates in Cambodia – male Australian tourists in particular. Her use of imagery becomes sparser, her prose simpler, reflecting the characters’ apathy. In ‘Taxi’, a large group of Australian men purchase sex from young Cambodian women, under the guise of charity. ‘It’s a good bit of money for them,’ one drunk convinces another at a brothel. ‘Better than [working in] a T-shirt factory.’
McKay encourages readers to acknowledge the prevalence of race-based misogyny, as well as perceptions of wealth, privilege, war, and Western tourism. McKay’s artful balancing of strong themes with perceptive detail, even humour, allows Holiday in Cambodia to explore what many of its characters are only half-heartedly searching for: the real Cambodia, a country still trying to recover.
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