When I was younger, my father regaled me with stories of his childhood in Cambodia so vivid I felt I could touch or taste them—golden candy made of palm sugar, water buffaloes lumbering through rice paddies (and oh, the leeches that would grab onto your legs!), greens you’d pick at the edge of those same paddies for lunch, and dessert at the ready, from trees heavy with sweet mangoes, right at his front door. What captured my imagination most was the unique phenomenon that occurred every year with the arrival of the monsoon rains in the summer. When that happened, the waters of the Mekong River would swell over its banks, and the already huge Tonlé Sap Lake would double its area and triple its volume, even causing the river to reverse course. Houses in the area were built on stilts to deal with the annual flooding. When those waters slowly retreated, they left behind an abundance of food in unexpected places: You could literally pick the fish that had been making their homes in the then-submerged tree branches.
His childhood, like much of the country, was cash-poor but incredibly rich in natural resources.
