Cambodia

Cambodia II

AVillagers1

In Phnom Penh, a pedestrain prominade stretches for nearly twelve blocks along the Tonle Sap riverfront. Depending on the season, the water will be higher or lower, but all through the year, people are here to watch the river. Thankfully, the cement embankment that runs the length of the prominade is also a comfortable bench. Those who must beg for living sit here. Sellers of peanuts, coconuts and roasted insects sit here. Land-mine amputees sit in front of dilapidated scales, offering tourists a chance to get weighed. German, Australian and Japanese tourist come, the only people with knapsacks, the only ones carrying something they are not trying to sell. Owners of black Lexus SUVS, come here, as do students, shop-owners, street-vendors and everyone else.

Phnom Penh lies on the confluence of the Basaac and Meyong Rivers. Arriving separately from the north, the rivers join for approximately ten kilometers, then part again, heading in parallel courses for Vietnam and soon after that, the South China Sea. The rivers join to make what Cambodian’s call buon muk, the four faces – a place where the widened rivers begin to look like a sea. People have lived here for many centuries, but surprisingly, the city of Phnom Penh was never developed by the Khmer empire and remained not much more than a village until 1843, when the French, after assuming Cambodia as a protectorate, chose it to become the country’s capital.

During just over a hundred-year period, the French constructed a number of buildings – schools, government facilities, polices stations and hospitals - in their chosen colonial style. Unpretentious but lovely, most of the building remain standing but long-unpainted; mildewed, smoke stained, run down. As the afternoon sun wanes, they glow in a warm ochre light as children raise dust in courtyards kicking half-inflated soccer balls. They are the oldest building here and linger tenuously as Phnom Penh remains largely outside the sweep of globalization. To be sure, cells phones, SUVs and gated mansions abound, but it is as if the city remains collectively whacked on the head, outside of the speed and growth that has overtaken so many neighboring cites.

My first sight of Cambodia came from window of a Russion Y-9, a propeller driven plane with a spare tire occupying two passenger seats and filling the cabin with the smell of rubber. Through the round window I saw Cambodia and felt a kind of urgency that said, “Look, I’m seeing this for the first time!” Below us, the country in the dry season: hills, patches of trees, here and there a cluster of houses or a village. The land appeared little impacted by human activity, yet at the same time worn-down, perhaps worn-out. It looked dry and dusty. No water.

We landed in Phnom Penh and I spent my first night in one of a crowded cluster of pack-packer guesthouses near Boeng Kok Lake (the entire area has subsequently been bulldozed, making room of new development). The night haunted me with the strange significance of Cambodia, as personal and intimate as a departed parent appearing in a dream. Each new city registers its sounds upon you at night. In the buzz of intermittent mosquitoes, roosters crowing at light bulbs, and the clatter of my room fan I felt I had been here before. I felt Cambodia had shaped me. That I was returning, somehow, to my own history. I thought of the people I’d met during the day. Singularly curious and open-faced, not afraid to look me in the eye. I couldn’t wait to see them again.

The evening before, I’d taken a short walk and found myself where Monivong (Phnomm Penh’s busiest street) meets a traffic circle that feeds into the Chrouy Changvar Bridge. I didn’t realize then how much the view I witnessed was like the lives of the Cambodians I was meeting. I saw a six lane road and most of the vehicles were motorbikes. Five people riding on a 90cc engine, whole families precariously held by two wheels in a city with only a handful of signal lights. It seemed a kind of choreographed madness, a ballet in the evening breeze without mufflers. It was the logic of fish navigating a streambed, a miraculous Ferris wheel turned on it side, the human gene pool moving forward. I stood there and stared, unabashed, without anxiety, grinning.

In the center of the traffic a small park, grass very green and in the center of that a statue, a monument: a cement cast of a huge revolver. A gigantic pistol pointed at the sky. How bizarre, but as I approached closer I understood: the barrel of the gun was tied in a knot.

I met Choen the next day. He began to enter into my intangible feelings of knowing this country. He began to enter into my history. He began to provoke it. Born in Svay Reing Province in 1981, is outgoing, speaks English well and knows a bit of Japanese (which, as with English, he taught himself). His face is dark, slightly ackne scarred and his grin wide. It doesn’t take long to realize he is street-savvy about Phnom Penh, honest and with the warm heart of a monk, which he was for three years. Choen served meals in the guesthouse during the evening and had plenty of time during the day to offer his services as a driver. He offered the usual trips for a tourist’s first visit, the Royal Palace, the Tuel sleng Khmer Rouge interregation and torture center, the Chœung Ek killing fields fifteen kilometers outside the city. He was available, of course, for tours of his client’s invention – I wanted to see the “worst parts” of Phnom Penh - and those of his own suggestion, including the municipal dump, a place we visited upon my return a year later.

“The rubbish,” as Choen called it, is Phnom Penh's highest point of land, "people live there, you know." He navigated his motorbike up a rain-soaked glop of muddy road that gradually became the garbage itself. A tremendous ever growing mound that one could see the beginning but not the end of. Tarp houses were built on top of it. Still in the rainy season, the wet palate of man-made debris was ash-dusted with flies at it. A handful of sparrows flitted about. "The birds are scared," Charlie explained, “the people will catch and eat them." We stood there while maybe two-hundred men, women and children worked, industriously. They glanced at us infrequently, furtively in some cases, but mostly with polite discression or with indifference. There was dull breeze and the air was quiet, mechanized sounds, except for the trucks, far away. "Cover your mouth and nose," Charlie said, "you will get sick."

The stench in the air was more biting with my nose covered. The task of each person was to probe about, sort through, collect. All the labor was manual, done either with bare hands or feeble tools, a stick or flimsy hoe. For everyone here, this was their job. For many, this was their home, cooking occurred, water was brought from somewhere. Several young woman passed in front of me, with lovely complexions and dark eyes, beautiful. They could have been among blooming frangipani. Some flirted and teased the boys around them. Older women dark, severe, scarf-wrapped worked with concentration in this rice-field of abandoned matter, the emptied out garbage cans of 1.5 million people, plus everything torn-down, swept from the street or recently dead. The rain making it into soup.

"How do you end up here?" Charlie repeated my question. "In Cambodia we pay for our own medical care. If you, or a close relative, is sick or injured you might have to sell everything. That could be one way." Every person here had a story. I wanted to know them. I wanted to know even one of them.

Long before I visited the municipal dump, I had my first Phnom Penh lunch - in a typical restaurant, served street side in a place no health department could ever certify. The restaurant was not different in kind from one in, say, Bangkok or Mexico City but it was different by enough degrees that made it singular - as if I’d never seen such a thing in my life. A young woman in a stripped blouse tended a cart on the sidewalk, a tarp above her, the house specialties in pots on the cart, a handful of tables filled the room behind her. She found my approach and everything I said a cause for glee, amusement, and giggled comments to her companions. She lifted the lids and I selected: something of vegetable, something of beef, a plate of rice. While she prepared my plate I went to urinate and saw the rest of the kitchen; a woman sawing chickens apart on a cement slab near her bare feet. Dishes washed in a bucket. No refrigeration and the latrine a hole in the floor of a closet. The restaurant floor was strewn with leaves, bottle caps and toilet paper (the dinner napkin). It looked as if no one tended it, cleaned it, perhaps waiting for the monsoons to come.

I enjoyed one of the best meals I’ve ever eaten. That the beef had hunks of fat, gristle and meat so meager it seemed to come from the far limbs and neglected joints of the beast only added to the rarity of the sublime sauce it was floating in; a sweetness and delicacy, a mixture of spices and slow simmering, an oral tradition never committed to paper. An entire star anise adorning it. I could not believe how good it was! I had no idea what vegetable I was eating but its taste dismantled my opinions and I wanted more. It was a pleasure to pay for my meal, to tell the young woman how good it was, to giggle with her. Though I later saw a man riding an elephant down the street, smelled the flowers of a cannonball tree and watched two monkeys and their baby eat dinner of the roof outside my window (they stopped now and then to enjoy the view of the sunset), nothing else I did that approached the twenty-five minutes I spent there. My dénouement came early, began to fade as I walked away, looking back at the disappearing restaurant.

There are countless restaurants throughout Phnom Penh like this, throughout Cambodia. The do not differ fundamentally from the kitchens found in someone’s home (some are someone’ home) and, life most homes, few of them haven o refridgerator, stove, sink or even running. water This is true in the case of Cheun, but that he has a kitchen at all is a measurement of his life since I have met him. In these two years Choen became engaged, worried how he could obtain the thousand dollars needed to fund the wedding, had the wedding and married Han. Shortly after that he contracted adult chicken pox and was fired from his job for missing work. It was a time of despair, but events coalesced themselves favorably and he found a new job as a driver is now making enough money even to be able to save some. Choen and Han have rented two eight-by-eight foot rooms and a porch of similar size on the second story of a cluster of houses. The “kitchen” is one of these room and consists of a portable gas stove with a single burner, a handful of pots and pans and some dishes, all of which sit on the floor. The food they cook there is delicious and I have been fortunate enough to share in it with every Sunday, including last night when we eat ate octopus soup.

We ate on their porch. There was a moon up there but difficult to find - in the lights, hidden by the buildings, distracted from it by the motorcycle horns and the demands of survival. A stove burned, kept the wok boiling, gave ample heat to turn the octopus from translucent to white. When people sit in a circle each is joined and everyone joins in. Eventually. The pull of the circle brought us together, even as our stories simultaneously living themselves out with the steaming cabbage, chile peppers and beer pulled in so many directions. I said the octopus was “chewy,” a word impossible to translate except through body language, pantomime, jaw-bone histrionics. When Choen’s sister, sixteen years old, who left school a year ago, said it was “easy” working in a garment factory, Another guest, a man my age corrected me, pointed out that naturally she would say that, since I asked her if it was “difficult” – “You have to realize,” he went on, “what people here are up against”. Two of the women were pregnant, holding invisibly to us additional mouths at the table. The man had soldiered for the Khmer Rouge, nearly starved through Pol Pot, who killed his father and three of his siblings. He returned to Phnom Penh to find his house already taken. Twenty-seven years later has a son on a Fulbright scholarship. As if he had a foot in three centuries.

Why do we store certain events inside us? Choose one history over another? Become touched while someone else remains indifferent? Thirty years ago the residents of Phnom Penh were driven from the city, forced into the countryside, into labor camps, into execution grounds. This was only a few years after the secret carpet bombings of Cambodia. What part did the Americans play in driving a country insane, into the darkest genocide? How does a people recover from this? What do they look now? These are the events, the questions, the history I have carried with me; a violence I only read about, thought about, wondered about. I experienced no pain, no terror, lost no relative, yet the memories are not just abstract, they must be part of me, a small part of my body: in my ankle, behind my kneecap, cells of my liver. I can taste them.

One lotus was blue, the other white. In a delicate origami, the woman I bought them from had folded their outer petals into a kind of skirt. The flowers looked well-dressed and well-behaved, ready to present themselves. I offered them, along with three incense sticks, to a platform of skulls, two-hundred or more. They were labeled: “Skulls of young women, age fifteen to twenty five.” I held the flowers between my palms and gazed beyond them to the skulls. The skulls were like the surface of the moon, the color of the moon. They looked like planets that each held a single life. A solar system of life, every planet the color of salt, of snow, of cinders, of cement walls at dusk.

Some were the color of the white lotus.

I gave the woman a dollar for the flowers. It seemed much more than she expected. She seemed surprised I had bought them at all. She was selling flowers in the former Extermination Camp Chœung Ek. She worked at the entrance to the Commemorative Stupa. The Stupa had been erected to the dead, those found in the mass graves all around us. The skulls were counted, catalogued, organized by age and gender. Someone counting them had noticed where a skull had been fractured, where a bullet entered or the blade of an axe broke through. The skulls were stacked fifteen platforms high, up to the ceiling of the Stupa.

Beyond the Stupa, the excavated graves looked like a series of anthills, a soft, rolling geometry of holes and dirt mounts surrounded by trees. One of the trees was right in the center of it, its trunk branching out into hundreds of roots, almost human, like the fingers of an old man I saw cleaning chickens. The tree must have been hundreds of years old; just a few of its rings occurred during the atrocities. Witnessed them. What did the tree see? What did it feel? Someone had given it a name which was painted in crude letters on plank before it: The Magic Tree.

I walked down to the river and was soon overrun by a pack of children wanting me to take their photograph, begging for money, curious and relentless and disheveled. They assured me that they would share everything I gave them, that they went to school, that they were good. They were shrewd and practiced and fabulous company for the few minutes we had together. I know they would not be satisfied whatever I gave them (much of what was in my pocket).

The river was really a pond, thick with reeds, greenery and a blooming lotus. I stared at it after the children left. The memories and history books and news clippings of 1976 retreated in the face of the elements, the trees, the sun, the sky. In the heat and the collision of impressions my recollections sorted itself into a triptych: the skulls, the children, the lotus. In this juxtaposition, life is indifferent to history, has rules we refuse to acknowledge, emanates a horrible but beautiful and precarious love.

I walked around for a few more minutes. Then Choen found me and asked if it was time to go.

Part II

In Kandal provence I visited a second killing field memorial, this one very remote… Soon after we began our walk we found ourselves at the river and, as is turned out, near a ferry crossing. Our group had grown to ten and two of the boys went back for motorbikes. When they returned we boarded the ferry. A wooden plank of a boat, with an old Evanrude motor at the stern. The pilot was sick – not enough sleep – and taciturn. The boy in the Brittany Spears tee-shirt grinned back whenever I smiled at him. Piseth joked exuberantly. Young woman at the front end of the boat glanced at us, at me. The engine performed. One crank of the manual started handle fired the pistons and expelled the stream of diesel smoke that would continue until across the river.

The other side of the river had houses where there appeared to be none. The whole country thick with population, though the farther you get from major roads (if any can be called that) the more elemental the houses becomes. Thatched rather than hammered. We motored through a kilometer or more of them. Finally, we arrived at what the boys had called a “killing field” – and we were indeed at one of hundreds throughout Cambodia; largely unmarked, far from the tourist route, this one was a commemorative stupa and mounds of earth behind it, the fields of summary execution.

The door of the stupa was locked, but as one peered through the glass and bars of its window, platforms stretching from the floor to high above one’s head could be seen, all filled with human skulls. Dusty, locked away, yet being well preserved, the skulls and the skulls alone told the story. Otherwise there were no signs, so placards, no sources of written information, no real history beside the stark and undeniable evidence of the skulls. This is how the Khmer Rouge era is remembered here; without documentation, without museums (which Tuel Sleng cannot adequately be called), without an evolving history or interpretation, kept in memory through these meager monuments and storage bins. Everything else, most of all the Khmer Rouge soldiers – like the infamous Mok, who recently died and was credited with killing many in this very region – had faded back into the countryside, into the homes of Phnom Penh and the villages throughout the country. These boys and young men described the stupa as they might any other natural feature or historical building of the land: simply a citation of something that is, without other appreciable facts to offer.

Piseth had been a monk for three years. That is part of how we got know each other, how he has told me of this a number of times. Piseth has long held a desire to teach monks, many of whom are orphans, like himself (in Cambodia, if the father, say, leaves the family – as in Piseth’s case – the children may consider themselves orphans). Six days a week, for an hour each afternoon, Piseth now teaches English at the temple near his house.

It was Piseth who accompanied me as we explored the grounds of Wat Tadong. Here was blessed quiet, a breeze and magnificent trees shade. This wat had the semblance of a ghost town: a desertedness, buildings uncompleted; magnificent shade trees, and a handful of young monks, the oldest fourteen years old but most of them only ten. These boys stood straight in their orange robes and did not smile. Their heads shaved they seemed serious, even astute, but also forlorn and uncertain. As if their childhood had been snatched.

The boys, at Piseth’s request, led us into the shine hall. The high cement walls had not yet received the frescoes that illustrate the life of the Buddha and adorn all temples in Southeast Asia, but their gray expanse only added to the gilded group of arhats and Buddhas who made up the shrine, itself lit by candles as tall as the boys and put in their charge to keep burning day and night. The shrine emitted an unsensed fragrance of the invisible world, a palpable essence of the suchness we usually keep so far away, primarily though busyness and talk itself. I wanted Piseth to stop talking, even as his questions and eventually my own got the boys to begin smiling, finally very widely, to become boys. The group recited their names and ages and said, “Yes, we do sleep here in this room together.” Asked if they were all friends, without hesitation, one replied, “Between some but not all.”

This group of the youngest possible monks lived in what must surely be one of the least-supported temples in the area, remote, close to the rice fields but no doubt meager itself of rice. We went to the back of the temple to meet the thirty-two-year old monk whose charge they were under, who ran this orphanage. We found him smoking cigarettes and holding forth with four local men. One half expected to see a desk of cards and opened beer. The monk received us from a chair and behind a small desk that displayed only his cigarette pack. The rest of us sat on the floor. The monk had eyes and offered questions that examined us, tested us, displayed humor but not real warmth, only caution and a certain shrewdness. He did not seem like a father figure or one who might inculcate discipline, but more like a slightly charismatic and vaguely delinquent older brother. But then, who can tell? He told of the problems they faced, the lack of funds to finish the buildings, the poverty of the area, the lack of jobs.

To call something “squalid” is the say it is very distant in terms of human comfort and health – the opposite shore, one of discomfort and potential disease. But this distance has been greatly exaggerated. In the first world, much of our meat is dyed to make it red, irradiated to keep it red, and was previously injected with so many antibiotics and growth hormones that traces of the chemicals can be found in our rivers and wells. In Cambodia I do not know if I have seen a squalid market yet, or not.

At a small, Kandal Province market we bought “mouse.” But these were far too large to be mice: skinned and splayed open, they looked like frogs, though far bigger. These carcass sat on pans which sat on the dirt of the marketplace, far from any ice and selling fast. Whether called mice or rats, this food is a delicacy in Kandal Province, a tradition. That evening we ate the rats at a table that also held bottles of rice wine, palm wine and cans of beer. The house – indeed the town – has been electrified for only two months: above us a single light bulb. As I ate rat I noted still living rats running the planks overhead, scurrying, sniffing and sometime knawing. The rats we ate - fried until well-done - tasted, of course, like chicken. Though the second course, soup, went unprepared for a long time, eating them was not tiresome, at least until they were cold. The sauce the rats were served with was truly delicious, a kind of sweet chutney. In India, Hindu’s do not eat cow, Muslim’s swine. There is a swirling relativity to the stupendous daily slaughter that human beings inflict upon animals in order to eat them, though in the order of things, eating rat – like, say, eating pigeons – has a reciprocal logic. I will add that while we ate, cattle slept nearby, under the neighbors house. Six white, humped cattle with huge and dark eyes, very expressive and knowing. They had decent lives, even elegant ones, or at least timeless ones. It was not a factory farm and the cattle seemed to know it.

The dinner that included rat also included a delicious soup and three types of alcohol - rice wine, palm wine and beer. Only men sat at this table. The younger boys and the women and girls stood or sat around a nearby table and served us, watched us, remained largely silent. It was if we were there to be served, to joke and to laugh and the women were there only to serve and to remain unseen. I asked Sitha why the woman – who consisted of Piseth’s sixty-year old mother and his two sisters, one of them married and with a child of her own - did not join us. “The women here do not generally drink and they do not joke around in this way,” he told me, “This is what the men do.” It was an obvious answer to what was already obvious: that tradition dictated the custom and, as with so many traditions governing men and women it was far from intelligent or necessary, far from the expression of a complete humanity but continued under its own unexamined momentum. I almost always dislike long gathering of men, the unabated joking and upper hand of masculinity. If I had been younger I might not have declined the glass after glass of palm and rice wine the other men drank and if I had crossed a certain threshold of the blood-alcohol line it might have been different. But at a certain point I just got up and left the table, saying nothing, as if I was only going to the bathroom.

I don’t think there is any easy or really appropriate way to leave a gathering of people enjoying food. One is, after all, either a guest or a host. But with uninterrupted talk of almost any kind, my back begins to ache and more so, my psyche begins to ache. I loose my affection for humanity. I become miserable. So I have learned to simply walk away. I once saw the famous ecologist Arne Nass do this: just get up, walk away from the table and finally the room, step outside and join again with fresh air and the night stars.

Sitha and I slept in Manet’s house. Manet, who had drank large volumes of rice, palm wine and then beer seemed increasing happy for our company, for his wife worked in a Phnom Penh garment factory, and his mother and two children lived with his wife. Thus his family could visit him only rarely. His job, it seemed, was to be largely unemployed and watch over their house. He had worked for five years on a Thai fishing boat – no doubt where the money to build the house came from. Manet was warm, dark, stocky and rather quiet until drunk. He was the kind of person whose affection began as a shy one, then gradually overtook if not overwhelmed you, but his affection was quite real.

Near the end of dinner, Manet showed me my bed: a thin reed mat laid down on the very hard hardwood floor of his house. I went to bed earlier than the rest and, to my surprise fell asleep rather quickly. Before I dozed I experimented with a variety of sleeping positions, knowing I would have to shift among them frequently. I also felt a variety of minute insects, real and imagined, exploring me, leaping onto my cheeks, tasting me, even being inhaled. Shortly after nine pm I was awakened by Sitha, who took the other side of the mat I had originally assumed was my own. Then, a bit later, Manet arrived and, though he had a large mattress in his bedroom, lay on my other side, directly on the hardwood floor. In this way, the three of us lived through the night, inches from each other’s shoulders. This is communal life in Cambodia. This is the customary rural Cambodian warmth and how it is extended. Even though Sitha and Manet drank far more than I did, like a dog I once owned who had a cast-iron bladder, neither of them were up during the night, whereas I went outside three times. Still, though I had to turn over a lot, I slept very well (in fact, when I discussed it with Sitha the next morning, it turned out I slept better than he did). I slept very singularly, and with great pleasure.

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