In today's Cambodia, the number one topic of conversation is not about politics, who is sleeping with whom and getting what in return (that's the one of the top topics, though). It is about how much the speaker's land holdings are worth now and where so and so bought and sold recently and for how much.
For the past two years, land prices have skyrocketed, fueled by frenzied speculation, money-laundering, "investment" by foreigners and overseas Khmers.
Many rice farmers have seized the opportunity to sell their rice fields for what they considered to be a fortune and most have spent this money on bigger houses, motorbikes for themselves and their children. A few have reinvested the proceeds of the sale by purchasing land in more promising locations or used part of the money to start a business.
When the money runs out, after selling the material goods, many rice farmers have no land to grow rice and fall on hard times.
In the meantime, this new "sub-middle class" behaves exactly like the nouveau rich Oknhas and Angkareaks who are the self-appointed "masters of the land" and lord over non-cashed up neighbors and other penniless people around them.
I regret to say that a few of my distant relatives have exhibited this trait and I have witnessed it first-hand all around me, i.e. in markets, restaurants, even at the Cambodian Cultural Village in Siem Reap.
In November 2007, to encourage foreign investors to come to Cambodia, Hun Sen boasted about the fact that, in many areas of Cambodia, land prices were as high as in Hong Kong and some areas cost as much as New York. He implied that Cambodia was economically developed since land prices were comparable to Hong Kong's or New York's. I would have thought that high land prices were a disincentive, not an incentive, for investors.
Earlier this year, the so subtle communicator Hun Sen said in public that , if he was no longer Prime Minister, there was no guarantee that land prices would keep on rising and that, if anything, they were likely to fall.
My relatives who have most recently joined the ranks of the moneyed class did not take long to express the same thought that Hun Sen was the key to Cambodia's stability and have been uncharacteristically silent about the shortcomings of the Cambodian government.
Their obsession with land prices, money, wealth has turned them into social bores among other relatives and friends but so far, no one has had the courage (or rudeness, according to Cambodians) to tell them diplomatically that they have changed and not for the better.
Friends have told me that they have noticed the same change.
Do you have friends and relatives who have also changed along the same lines?
Does money change people, irrespective of race, religion, educational level?
With so many corrupt politicians and slutty female entertainers as their idols and role models, have many Khmers embraced a culture of greed, money worship that pretends to follow the rites of Buddhism but violates some of the most basic precepts of Buddhism?
