Dipika Kohli
By Dipika Kohli
One day soon, I’m hoping to make it to Raleigh. I am bracing for culture shock, as it’s been more than a decade since I was home.
If you live there, maybe you’ll find me in your neighborhood, probably at a small local venue with a relaxing atmosphere. I like the ‘third place,’ which is neither work nor home, and where people converge semi-regularly to talk informally about what it is they’re going through, and how they’re feeling or what’s been news, and what’s going on. The first such third place I remember well was The Tsar in Skibbereen, Ireland, where I used to live. I hope to go to new third places in Raleigh. When I get there and run into regulars, maybe I’ll share what I’ve found out on these far roads.
As I was getting set to come to Southeast Asia, I’d written a short piece for this magazine called “Passport Pictures.” I still recall the trepidation of that moment, how it felt to assemble an essay, summon my best effort while also being so unsure about my choice to even go on such an adventure. That was the ‘Year of Uncertainty,’ for me, and therefore the point, but I guess it became the ‘Decade’ of it. Ordering a new passport and getting a visa. That’s what I wrote about? Yes. But committing to fees and waiting for processing wasn’t the hard part: publicly committing to the choice was. It was a decision to leave the Triangle and the people I thought I knew for something else. A life apart.
‘Where are you now, Dipika? What time zone are you in? How do you like living in Viet Nam?’ (I live in Cambodia.) ‘I wish I could travel like you.’
Less often now I still occasionally will hear, ‘When are you coming back?’ This one is the hardest. For the diaspora seeking a new life, or for the self-exiled, it comes up often.
We convene in third places here in Phnom Penh, and we discuss this, and where we are personally and banter about how it is. ‘Maybe I’ll just leave. Things aren’t working out. Well, I gave it a shot. It’s time to move on.’ But, at other times, we’re able to remember why we’re here, too.
Allow me to offer a philosophy. You have to veer away from the place where you are from and the society that you’re used to being around in order to break down things that were long-held beliefs. The ways of looking at things that were always a given need to have a way to fall apart, so that the biases you can’t see in yourself will come to light. Maybe in an alley on a side street in a city where you never would have imagined yourself, in the company of someone whose first language isn’t yours, who says, ‘Why do you think that? Why do you say that? Do you know? Did you talk to all of them?’
So much to say on this topic about stuff that maybe someone else wrote and you had to read or what they told you and you simply believed, and these were things that you never questioned. Accepting that there are multiple coexisting viewpoints at any given time can get uncomfortable, but if you can stay with it, better art will come of this new self-awareness.
What I mean by ‘art’ here isn’t writing or photography or drawing or illustration. I mean the art of human relationships. There is elegance and poise in the making, when it is well-attended to with care. We can design for it, we can play with the art of us.
I remember the days of pre-Covid travel that got me to this side of the world in the first place. Viet Nam had been the first stop, then there was Laos, Thailand, India, Nepal, back to Thailand and then a bus from Chiang Mai to a transit point, then Siem Reap.
Two people who’d intuited right had said, ‘You should check out Phnom Penh.’
It was a place so different from anywhere else I’d ever traveled, before or since, as there was an ease I felt that a phrase discovered later named perfectly: ‘negative liberty.’ It’s freedom from the kinds of headaches you might otherwise have. This was what I enjoyed here. It still is.
This year is the ‘Year of Composition.’ Shape. Studio. Society. I had left one society to nestle in a new one. Several times so far, I’ve done this exact mode of transitioning, now that I think back. Each move was complex, each adaptation would reveal jillions of co-existing viewpoints. This gave me more to draw from, more to engage with, more to choose. In the ‘third places’ of the world, I find welcoming societies. They matter. They count.
Dipika Kohli is an author who is based in Phnom Penh. Discover her books at kismuth.com and other projects at dipikakohli.com.
