Friday, August 7, 2009

Mistaken identity

Have you ever been mistaken for someone else? It's happened once or twice to me in my lifetime and then it happened again today, by email. I think anyone who has an interest in Cambodia will have seen the film, The Killing Fields, which highlighted Cambodia's recent past so vividly in the mid-80s. In one scene, when the western journalists are holed-up in the French Embassy and desperately trying to save the skin of their fixer, Dith Pran, they hatch a plan to use an expired passport of Jon Swain. His two middle names are Anketell Brewer and the idea was to substitute a photo of Pran and scrub out the first and last names, Jon Swain. The plan failed but it remains a tear-jerking moment in the film. So back to today. I received an email that stated the following:
Next, I found your name and saw your website, and remembered : Andy Brouwer - Dith Pran - Sidney Schanberg.
So, I understood that it's certainly you, the owner of the passport, the name repeated by the actor Haing S. Ngor (Dith Pran) in the famous film of Roland Joffe.
I had to write back to the correspondent and set the record straight. That I am Andy Brouwer, but I am not Anketell Brewer. More's the pity.

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