One might be forgiven, after reading this post, for thinking that most ordinary Cambodians do not have their priorities in order.
Certainly, they would rank foremost such issues as how to make enough money for food, afford decent shelter and finance an education. There is a host of necessities for a quality of life that the populations of many other countries wouldn’t express a need to envy.
Appearing youthful hardly seems like anything that would concern Cambodians unduly, rich or poor and old as well as young. But it appears as though there is universal distaste for grey hair.
I don’t think I have seen more than handful of Asians with grey hair, even strands of grey hair, since I arrived here in December, and I am pretty sure that those belonged to visitors from other countries.
What I have witnessed is an enormous number of individuals with suspiciously jet-black hair, blacker than black. I also regularly have seen in public Cambodians peering with scientific intensity onto the head of a friend or relative in search of offending grey intruders that then are plucked mercilessly from the thicket below.
This is strange behavior when I consider how that enormous mass of those Cambodians who are not among the elite seem to care little about wearing mismatched patterns and colors, smearing on lipstick or applying cosmetics along with other, when you right down to it, superficial aspects of appearance.
As for me personally, the grey hair stays.
E-mail: malcolmncarter@gmail.com
I, on Cambodia 