Phnom Penh, Cambodia
In his book A Fortune-Teller Told Me: Earthbound Travels in the Far East, Tiziano Terzani recounts a scene in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, in which he is at a fortune-teller’s house, sitting in a dark room lit by an oil lamp. Over the door and written in chalk (and presumably in Khmer) is, “Carnal passion, jealously, violence, drunkenness, intransigence, ambition: if you cannot rid yourself of even one of these ills, you will never be at peace.”
A woman, accompanied by her young daughter, has come to the house seeking the fortune-teller’s advice on how to go about selling a plot of land. The fortune-teller offers his thoughts. Next, the woman asks him to say something about her daughter’s future. Terzani writes:
The [fortune-teller] said that for this they would have to return the following week: it is not easy to predict the fate of so young a girl. That struck me as fair: the less past one has, the harder it is to predict one’s future. There are no signs; the face is without any history, and the fortune-teller, who is often nothing more than an instinctive psychologist, has little to go by.
Terzani’s book is a delight in how he weaves together local culture and history with his own thoughts and wisdom. In this passage, I could picture the smooth face and bright eyes of the little girl, reflecting a future yet to be written and too vague to be guessed. We who are older may wish to help shape the future of those who are young, but we cannot predict what lies ahead. There is great mystery here.
The picture above is of a young boy, not a girl, but he too is in Phnom Penh. His face is smooth, his future uncertain. He is being formed by a place and culture that he didn’t choose — as none of us do, at least in our early years — and his face, his manner of speaking, and maybe even his gait will increasingly reflect what is around him and how he responds to it. Perhaps, like the child in the wheelchair being pushed behind him, he will lose a leg. Or perhaps, like his relative in whose bicycle rickshaw he sits, he will spend his days feverishly using his legs to make a living. All that is certain is that his face will change, and that it will increasingly tell a story. And, of course, that those around him will help shape it.
And here’s a passage from another good book, Chris Cleave’s Little Bee: A Novel. It also speaks of the yet-to-be-formed face, though in this case that of a young adult. The narrator here is a Nigerian migrant woman in England:
I stared at the policeman. He did not have a cruel face. He did not have a kind face either. He was young and he was pale and there were no lines on his face. He was nothing yet. He looked like an egg.
Phnom Penh, Cambodia
