How Cambodians Deal With Snakes

Today was like any other day. It was late afternoon, and I was outside playing with our new puppy, who I’ve named Kobe (yes, like Bryant), even though she is a girl. The family is none the wiser and everyone who comes by now calls her Kobe in their cute Khmer accents (meaning they stress the “be” instead of the “ko”), leaving me reveling in the fact that I got to name our puppy.  I’ve never owned a puppy before and it’s probably a good thing because by “playing with her” I actually mean “fucking around with her”. For example, I’d put her up on a step knowing full well she doesn’t know how to get down and watching her whimper for awhile before kind of rolling/falling down the step. Another favorite pastime of mine is holding her mouth closed in my fist, and watching her writhe around trying to get out of my iron grip. Despite all this, though, I’m still probably her favorite because I shower her with attention and I’m the only one that can get a response when I call her.

Anyway, I was playing with Kobe outside when I noticed a snake slither by in my periphery and underneath the old car tire we have by the back door of our house. Not a big snake, maybe about a foot in length and three quarters of an inch in diameter, with a bright green and red head and a brown body. I call my 9-year-old sister over and say, “Snake!”

Actually, I said “dragon” first. When she looked at me quizzically I quickly rectified my mistake. They’re not even similar. Dragon is “niek” and snake is “puah”.

I showed her where the snake was coiled up. She took one look, screamed fucking bloody murder, and ran to get her big brother, who is actually my little brother, as he is 13, half my height, and about a quarter of my weight. My brother sees the snake, and determinedly marches into the house, his face arranged in a completely serious, Stone Cold Steve Austin manner. He comes out with a long metal rod, about 1.5 meters (yes, I know I’m mixing metric and non-metric measurements in this blog post. Get over it) with a sharpened point on one end, and tells my sister and I to “get in the house!” and “close the door!” because “it’s dangerous!”

Through the open window, I see him jab gently at the snake to coax it out of its hiding spot. Then another jab, to get it out in the open backyard. And then, looking much like Gerard Butler in the movie 300 when he hurls the harpoon directly at Xerxes’ face, my 60-pound brother raises the metal rod and jams it through the snake’s body and into the muddy earth, leaving it writhing in pain but pinned firmly to the ground. Then he pats his hands on his shorts and tells my sister and I that it’s safe to come out.

I was nothing short of amazed.

When my parents get home from work (Ma comes back from tending to the cows and Pa comes home from…whatever he does when he’s not driving the family taxi), the first thing my sister does is drag them over to marvel at my brother’s work in the backyard.

They, however, were far short of amazed.

“It’s nearly 6 o’clock. You have class right now (my brother takes private English classes with none other than my language tutor at 6 in the evening), and you’re wasting time playing around with snakes?” As if it were, you know, normal—no, even frivolous—for small boys to be spearing poisonous snakes straight through the jugular by pinning them solid to the Earth.

This is a true story.