Anne’s stories of making zines with women college students in Cambodia (“women college students in Cambodia” is a really big deal), are mixed in with Cambodian history and information about the current state of the country, and etiquette lessons for foreign travelers, e.g., don’t haggle.
Of course there is ego involved in haggling, in conquering, and then in owning. I understand that sometimes a person gets caught up in it and can’t extract themselves. In fact, that is what ego does. But I also understand that global capitalism makes the privileged feel already like something has been taken from them, from us, and this is rarely true.
Another quote I like is
I spoke, as I have in cities around the world, on my own history in the cultural underground of North America, as a young woman in a boycentric culture, as a person who engaged in media creation and criticism not to make money at it, but as an act of survival. I worked in self-publishing as an effort to see myself reflected in the culture I intended to live in, and so that accurate stories about people like me could be told. p.78
I give Anne a lot of credit for keeping it real by publishing this book with a micro press when she probably could have gone with a larger publisher. Not everyone has the integrity to do that.