My cousin Ted has been messing with me all week long about the gift he got for me, "Oh, you're just going to love it! I can't wait to see your face when you open the gift," and so on. Last night, while we were all sitting around the Christmas tree opening gifts, I came across THE gift, Teddy's gift for me. I tore into that thing like I hadn't done to a Christmas present since I was a kid. I couldn't believe it when I saw it. It was a Barbie doll.....wait for it.....not just any Barbie doll. It was a "Barbie's of the World" Barbie. What's really great about this is that I had seen an exhibition of "World" Barbies at the airport in Singapore last summer on the way to India. That had always stuck in my mind...all those Barbie's in the glass case looking so glamorous and elegant. For once, Barbie dolls made sense as a kind of cultural toy (instead of just this skinny, little blond girl with big boobs giving little girls complexes about what a "girl" looked like). And there it was: my Cambodian Princess doll dressed up in traditional Khmer garb and posing like a regular Cambodian Apsara dancer. How beautiful. What a wonderful gift! I couldn't believe my cousin had gotten me such a wonderful present. It made me feel like he understood how important that trip was for me. It was exactly the gift I didn't know I wanted to receive. It was perfect.
