I was taken to breakfast by my supervisor to get a brief introduction to Siem Reap. It was what I was prepared to see: crowded, dusty, chaotic, and full of tourists. I have little interest in visiting what my supervisor referred to as “the infamous Pub Street” but we walked through it in the early morning as we made our way through the old colonial city center. There was a familiarity to so much of what I was seeing paired with elements utterly alien to my experience. The small shops, the slapdash signs, the people working and making their way through the streets: all of this seemed familiar to me. In all honesty, it felt like Roosevelt Ave. in Jackson Heights or Flatbush Ave. in Brooklyn. What was different was the languages, the customs, the people. The other difference is immigrants come to a new country and have to hustle. What I saw in Siem Reap was a lot of people hustling in their own home country.