It's frustrating to me that my potential enjoyment of this piece, lauded as it is by several of the comments that are already here, was poisoned by the introduction. I imagine that
>I ran to visit my friend Yet, who lived in the village behind my parents’ house in Battambang, Cambodia.
will come off as innocuous to many, but my immediate impression was, "Wait... like a plantation?". I'm not intimately familiar with Cambodian history, but I had some understanding of it having been a French colony. With that colonization must have come a sharpening of class lines, as in many Western colonies, like Cuba, and the American South. Some quick research confirmed that. And then, after independence, a coup, with alleged but unconfirmed American backing; and then, after that, a vicious response by radicalized communist entities. Familiar trappings of the first tumultuous global century.
...I'm trying to figure out how to articulate this feeling. It's a sort of anger at the lionization of Western, Capitalist claims and ideals, at the whitewashing of the means by which they were asserted, at the implacable sneers towards anything in opposition to this story of glory. Not because I myself dislike freedom, and variety, and eating; but because the movements that rise up to challenge that status quo rise out of the muck-like detritus it generates and then plops right onto the heads of the poor and marginalized. I skim this piece and see not any sort of understanding of how the French Indochina, as a tentacle of the Western imperialism kraken, that produced the things the author lauds also sowed the seeds of its destruction; I see almost a willful and zealous blindness to this, in fact. When I talk to Castro's diaspora, same thing. When I talk to Lost Cause pushers, same thing.
All of this scares the sh*t out of me. It's yet another example of how suffering - true agony as far as the eye can see - can come from and produce the same sort of skewed priorities and world-view, over and over again, all around the world. When the world has wronged us so utterly - at least from our perspective - we're unable to see the wrongs we participated in, and how they could have contributed to the slow gestation of our despair. You see shades of it even here, today. I want us to get it right for once and this essay is stealing hope from me.