AsiaLIFE

He was a provincial boy and new to Phnom Penh, so perhaps he thought that all the rich people he saw, with their sprawling villas and late-model luxury vehicles, owed their success to their cutting-edge handheld communications devices. All it might take to get into the elite of Cambodia would be a few calls to the right people from a US$1,000 handset.

Too bad he could never make those phone calls – as my wife found out when she was admiring the phone and asked if she could call a friend on it. He grinned sheepishly and shook his head, he didn't actually have any credit to make a call. He'd spent all the money on buying the phone. (The moneylender had a tough time getting the loan repaid, as the boy turned out to be a member of the gendarmes. Some people don't have to worry about having their legs broken, no matter who they borrow money from.)

Phones are an easy status symbol in Cambodia. They've spawned their own shadow industry of holsters, purses and carrying cases to make it easier to flaunt these symbols. But that doesn't mean the owners can afford to actually call anyone. The real measure of wealth in Cambodia is not the price of the phone, but the number of minutes on it.

Some Cambodians who immigrate to the United States don't quite realise that. America is the land of opportunity, and there's money to be made everywhere – but it's also a lot more expensive to live well and legally. Certain extra expenses, like car and homeowners' insurance, are required by law. Other things, like owning a car and health insurance, are nearly impossible to forgo.

But no matter how much a family of recent immigrants is struggling with minimum-wage jobs and the myriad fees the Department of Homeland Security imposes, they are under greater pressure to show their relatives back home that they are flourishing. Not surprisingly, many of them are inclined to bite at that most American of concepts, the get-rich-quick scheme.

Most such schemes are mundane and transparently phoney, but occasionally the smartest guys on Wall Street dream up a scheme that's Earth-shaking in its brilliance – the sub-prime adjustable-rate mortgage for instance. You've probably heard of it on the international news over the past year – it's a way for banks to lend hundreds of thousands of dollars to people who have bad credit, no money for a down payment, and no ability to meet the payments of a regular loan. The low teaser rate resets after a few years to a rate that might be called “usurious,” if that word still had any legal meaning in the U.S.

Most of the people who took out these ARMs apparently didn't read past the phrase “hundreds of thousands of dollars” before they signed on the dotted line. Anecdotally, many of the people caught up in these loans are immigrants. Doubtless, it made a certain amount of sense at the time. Immigrants with few resources had the opportunity to get a mortgage to buy a big house, a fancy car, cool gadgets – Cambodian-Americans love iPhones as much as anyone – cash to send back home to prove their success and maybe even pay for a few more relatives to come over.

We know a few Cambodian families that stand to lose their homes to foreclosure because of the rate reset. And there's little hope to sell at a price near the mortgage because home prices have fallen so far and fast. One Cambodian family we know has already sold their shiny new trucks, turned in their house keys and moved into a shelter. But the matron of that family still has minutes to burn – iPhones come with a two-year contract that's more difficult to get out of than a mortgage.

Will Koenig lives in Oregon with his wife and son. E-mail: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .