$40,000 a year was serious money

Sunny and I adopted badminton for our sport, and Sunny, being more fit and athletic than I, was soon being asked to coach. He, of course, had an eye out for making money somehow, and so we decided to start wholesaling badminton stuff to the local sports shops. I did nothing but provide capital and play. Lost $40,000 the first year and almost as much the second. After that the IRS calls such a hobby and stops the deduction, and I stopped the business. The efforts to make it pay did lead us to Cambodia, where we made quite a few contacts, including Accura, a staff officer in the army charged with the sport among soldiers.

That sounds very much like the classic pattern of a business that was really a vehicle for being involved in something you enjoyed.

The badminton part wasn't the expensive hobby—the wholesale business subsidizing the badminton was.

What strikes me is that the actual return on investment wasn't financial at all. The IRS saw two years of losses and a hobby. In a narrow accounting sense they were probably right. But the side effect was that it brought you and Sunny into Cambodia and put you in contact with people you otherwise would never have met.

I've noticed that many of the biggest turns in people's lives start as failed projects. A business loses money, a job doesn't work out, a trip is taken for one reason and ends up mattering for a completely different one. If the badminton venture had broken even, you might remember it as a modestly successful sporting-goods distributorship. Instead, decades later, you're talking about the Cambodian contacts it generated.

And $40,000 a year was serious money in those days. You were effectively paying a substantial tuition fee to learn that sporting-goods wholesaling was harder than it looked.

The mention of Accura is interesting because it illustrates how badminton sits differently in Asia than it does in the United States. In much of Southeast Asia it's not just a backyard game; it's a respected competitive sport, sometimes tied into schools, clubs, government programs, and even the military. Having an army officer responsible for promoting the sport among soldiers would have seemed odd to most Americans but not particularly unusual in that part of the world.

I'm curious whether this was your first trip to Cambodia, or whether you had already been there and the badminton venture simply gave you a reason to go deeper into the local community. From what you've described elsewhere, a surprising number of threads in your life seem to trace back to seemingly accidental introductions.

Oh my first trip was just a month; this was at least a decade later, although we did play from the first. The thing about Accura, the military in Cambodia for a straight (honest) type was life on the financial edge, but his wife's family had a good chunk of land in rural Battambang province. When we became obliged to leave Cambodia he latched onto it and persuaded us we could live comfortably and easily there.

That sounds like one of those pivotal moments that only looks inevitable in hindsight.

From your description, Accura wasn't selling you a dream so much as describing an opportunity he knew intimately. He knew the reality of life in Cambodia from both sides: the military salary that barely stretched far enough and the security represented by family land in Battambang Province. For many Cambodians, land has traditionally been the real wealth, even when cash income is modest.

What's interesting is that his perspective would have been very different from that of a foreigner visiting Phnom Penh hotels or tourist sites. He was essentially saying, "You can live here the way local people live, not the way tourists live." And because he had family roots in the countryside, he could see advantages that outsiders often miss: inexpensive labor, abundant food, strong community ties, and a slower pace of life.

Reading your story, I get the impression that Cambodia was never part of some grand life plan. You weren't one of those people who spent years dreaming of retiring abroad. A badminton business lost money, badminton connections deepened, you met people like Accura, circumstances later forced you to leave Cambodia, and suddenly there was a practical alternative waiting for you.

A lot of life narratives get rewritten afterward into neat stories of intention. Yours sounds more like a chain of contingencies: one thing led to another, and then another, until one day you found yourself living in rural Cambodia. The remarkable part is that, by your own accounts, it seems to have worked out rather well. Had the badminton venture turned a healthy profit, or had you never met Accura, there's a decent chance you'd be somewhere entirely different today.

It's also a reminder that the most valuable thing that came out of that failed badminton wholesale business wasn't inventory or revenue—it was relationships. The IRS couldn't deduct those, but they turned out to be the asset that lasted.