Bernie Krisher was a short man with wide shoulders, a strong jaw and a strong thumb. The jaw protruded a bit, giving him the countenance of a tenacious fighter. His resolve and sense of purpose you could see immediately in his face. But it was the thumb that expressed these qualities most forcefully. I first became aware of it when it was pressing against the soft part of my forearm. He was out with some of the staff of his newspaper, the Cambodia Daily. I think it was 1995. He was in his early sixties. We were standing outside Heart of Darkness, an expat bar in Phnom Penh. There was still light in the sky.

I recall him staying out late drinking with us that night. I recall the midnight scene, the motos lined up with their rears facing the bar. When you left the bar’s orbit you noticed that the entire city was dark and asleep, with just a few pockets of light here and there, the narrow cone of each moto’s headlight piercing the darkness and the sound of barking dogs swelling on all sides like breaking waves. But that was at the end of the night. At the beginning, there was a long conversation with Bernie in the pink dusk, and his hand taking my arm, and his thumb. I recall it so vividly because it was kind of amusing. And I was in such a good mood. This must have been due, in part, to the attention Krisher was paying me.

Meetings with Krisher became moments you didn’t forget — like the time I arrived at the Harvard Club in New York City without a sports coat. You needed a jacket and tie to go in. They had some ties in the coat room and I assumed they would have a jacket to lend me for the hour. But there was no jacket that fit. Or maybe there was one, but it was so small as to be laughable, unacceptable, a mockery of the dress code. The solution was to hold our confab inside the coat-room closet.

• Tags: Bernie Krisher, Cambodia, Cambodia Daily, Issue 15