Truthout

For some reason, Ryna, Amoun and the rest of the girls who live in a Phnom Penh dorm filled with one of their country's first generations of college-going women think the 19th century Chbap Srei - that's "Girl Law" in English - leaves something to be desired. (To be fair, the text is more folk statute than tiger metaphor: "A woman who walks too loudly will become disorganized and lose her property. A woman who sleeps with her back to her husband is like a bad snake who shouldn't be let into the house." And so on.) Busy chasing degrees in law, accounting and medicine, they also set out to rewrite this code of passivity and domestic violence. Their scribe is American writer Anne Elizabeth Moore, who shared their dorm for four months in 2008. The resulting Chbap Srei Tmein ("New Girl Law") is something more just and uniquely theirs, where laws such as "Be brave enough to make eye contact with and speak to boys" coexist with others on imports and wage standards.