An email sent to my friends from Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon on 10/16/99
Hi Folks, I'm sitting here once again in Saigon, at my favorite cybercafe with the peanuts and bonsai wondering just what's changed. Maybe I'll find out by setting this down in words. The short news is that our three days in Cambodia will probably prove to be among the more consequential of my three-day jaunts anywhere. I learned a lot. It was a fascinating trip, safe and salubrious, quite contrary to any expectations, and left me eager to go back.
Flying into Phnom Penh, one sees water and more water everywhere. We're at the tail end of the rainy season, and the Mekong has flooded most of the country, by design, of course. One could make out the line of the river and of roads only by the lines of trees sticking up above the shining waters--winding brown for the river, checkerboards for fields. The occasional town strung along the river or canal path, on stilts. At Phnom Penh, the Mekong backs up from silt, forcing water *up* the Tonle Sap river to fill the great Tonle Sap lake, which is dammed as a reservoir for use in the dry season. On the ground one sees the fiery green rice, rather than the water. This crop is about three months along, one more month to go. When Cambodia's canals were intact, they could get three crops a year. With all the canals cut, this will be the only crop this year, and the paddies will spend the dry season empty. The occasional abrupt hill interrupts the level horizon, or closer in, tall palms and slender Buddhist stupas. Continuous farmland all around Phnom Penh, with pretty wooden or thatched houses on stilts, giant water jars and motorbikes underneath. Lots of brahmin bulls and chickens, roads lined with food stalls and little children.
Phnom Penh was not at all the broken shell of a place I'd envisioned. They've had relative peace since the Vietnamese invasion and economic reforms of 1989, and something like a tense political stand-off for the last year. The city is pretty actually, very Thai-looking--Theravada Buddhism's tall wats and orange-clad monks with umbrellas give a distinctive look to the streetscape, quite unlike Vietnam, which is much closer to Chinese culture. Attenuated proportions, spires, gilding, carving, and nagas complete the Thai feel. The French flavor again in villas, and in the omnipresence of baguette sellers. It's a small downtown, with lunar paving on the main streets, none to the sides. The palace is a dead-ringer for the Royal Palace in Bangkok, but without the crowds or noise. But all these restaurants, fancy villas and Range Rovers? Turns out that with the UN gone, the NGO's have moved in in force, each with its own secretariat and 4WD cruiser with 'roo bars. They make quite the contrast to the rest of the traffic, almost entirely motorbikes or hand-pulled carts.
It's a little embarrassing to report that I went to Cambodia, had a wonderful time, and ate like a prince, but well yes. Who knew that Phnom Penh would be charming? That the UN and hangers-on would have brought something like prosperity to the downtown, and even a bit of tourist posh? It was a little disorienting to be staying at a four-star hotel with a luxurious pool--swimming, in Cambodia? Isn't that a Spaulding Grey routine? More: I had the privileged feeling that I was seeing what old-timers remember of Thailand, maybe Chiang Mai thirty years ago. How long will that last? And will it end in Bangkok-like anarchy, Saigon-like charming schlock, or in yet another round of scorched-earth civil war? No one seems too sure.
Holocaust: Khmer Rouge Year Zero. Well, OK, best to confront that and deal with it. It would have been unthinkable not to, since it still touches everything. We were taken to two sites: the Tuol Sleng prison museum downtown with all the grisly stuff--chains, photos, heaps of clothing, barbed wire. I'm not sure how much we needed to see this, but it was clear that our hosts needed to bear witness, pouring out their stories, so witness we did. To some extent totalitarian horrors of the 20th century kind of look alike, and there were fortunately or unfortunately no surprises here: cement, barbed wire, crude torture equipment, lists. The one local touch, and one that hit us all, was that the Khmer Rouge would convert a school, and turn the swingset into a gallows. They killed all the teachers, of course, preferring their recruits young and illiterate.(In the airport, a passport official politely observed that I was a teacher. My first reaction: "No I'm not! Peasant!").
The next stop for prisoners, all of whom confessed eventually, was the killing field outside town, and so--gulp--off we went to have a look. And there we learned what we did not know, and needed to learn: How on earth has Cambodia dealt with the horror? Is there any sort of closure? The setting, Choeung Ek, was beautiful as any rural place on earth, about ten miles out of town in the middle of rich rice fields in sight of the Mekong. Mass graves were found there--you know the grisly details, I needn't rehearse them. Rising above the site was a beautiful, really beautiful, new Buddhist stupa tower, with glass walls and incense pots. If you walked close, you realized that inside the glass were ten stories of skulls, carefully organized by age, sex and ethnicity. Normally, Buddhists cremate, and there was some controversy about this, apparently, but it was felt necessary to keep a "never forget" reminder on display. At the same time, the guide explained, "we are Buddhist, and have chosen peace over justice. Pol Pot is dead, his officers are amnestied, and the Khmer Rouge soldiers--almost all illiterate, soldiers since they were children--absorbed into society." It's not quite that simple, of course--power and politics create their own realities--but as a working explanation it gave us pause, and in context was moving. Everything in Cambodia seemed to come back to education and compassion. I thought the monument superb: the peaceful beauty of the Buddhist stupa and the horror of its contents shifted in and out of focus, all surrounded by river and rural noises. There was an elementary school nearby, full of noisy kids, and wild rice had taken over the burial pits.
Between the serenity of the killing fields memorial and the eloquent explanations of our hosts, we were able to come away with some sense of closure. I don't think anyone with a heart and head could be comfortable exploring the monuments of Cambodia today without that necessary trip out of town. The tragedies of Cambodian history were obvious everywhere we went, but so--unexpectedly--were the signs of recovery and real hope for stability. But how to avoid a repetition? Our guides--articulate, learned and craving printed information--kept stressing the importance of education. The Khmer Rouge were uneducated peasants. Now they are illiterate, and need to be taught. But there are no books and no teachers. What free education there is has just been dealt a blow by the imposition of a ten dollar annual school fee for each child, and no one in the countryside has cash. And the bright kids who get an education don't want to be teachers--they want to go to Los Angeles and get rich in business. The NGO's are pouring money into Cambodia, but will it avail if the country is stuck in a vicious circle of illiteracy?
Angkor: The beauty of the ancient Khmer monuments was what brought us here, of course. Last year one of my students in the "Silk Road" course popped off to Cambodia for Spring Break (!), and came back full of Angkor-dreams. Go now, she urged, while it's still rural! Yeah, she was right--there are signs of Tourist Hell to Come, but at this point Angkor is rustic. The airstrip at Siam Reap had cows, and the town itself was a few hundred ramshackles along a dirt road, with a couple of grand hotels rising above green lawns like old Adirondack resorts out of the jungle. And grim: there is a land-mine museum, armed guards, and amputees everywhere. The NGO's here look a lot less posh than in Phnom Penh: the UN High Commission for Refugees is surrounded by barbed wire and guards, as is the Angkor monuments depository. The civil war has given way to an armed war with smugglers, presumably with much the same cast of characters.
Yes, the monuments are breath-taking, as gorgeous as any photos, and much more so for being in use. Climb up the spires, find ancient nuns tending each Buddha statue. Incense, saffron robes, bells and chanting at little out-of-the-way shrines. On the great stone causeway of Angkor Wat itself, little groups of the limbless play sad, beautiful music on fiddles and drums. I couldn't afford to drop stuff in all the beggars' hats, though I toyed with the idea, so I compromised between my tourist sangfroid and my humanitarian urges by funding the musicians. At least I was helping to support the entertainment for the rest of the bunch. I mean, what else can you do? Cambodia keeps making you want to do something. Little kids the world over beg for money, and I'm afraid I've become deaf to it over the years. Only in Angkor, though, have I been begged, quietly and politely, to help pay a family's school fees. Please, take my money! Only in Angkor have I given my books to my tour guide. The sad music keeps running through my head.
OK, so why does someone go touristing in such a tragic region? Well, and why not? is one answer. God knows they need the money, and it's not like non-participation is going to bring back anyone's missing body parts. Another answer, for our purposes, is that it focuses our students' attention. It is one thing to drag thirty sophomores through ten temples. It is another to do so in the context of cultural genocide. It teaches the significance, the fragility and preciousness of national culture, like no museum can. We bore witness at the killing fields; we bore witness at Angkor; two sides of Cambodia's history. That night after touring Angkor Wat, I took a group to see Khmer dancing in the Siam Reap park. Anywhere else this would have been a way to kill an evening in a hick town, and even the guide dismissed it as "just for tourists." However, I explained to them what I think is the greater significace: that Khmer dancing had been targeted by the Khmer Rouge for eradication, since it was associated with temples and the palace. That only a few old women had survived the genocide to pass it on to a younger generation. That much of this revival had been incubated in the Washington, DC expat community and by the DC dance community, where it has become something of a Cause. That we were supporting something great that like so much of Cambodia had come close to the brink. So when the dancers came on--clearly one trained woman and her young students--no one complained about the price of the beer, or the heat, or the amateurish missteps. The dancing pavilion was outdoors, just like the dance platforms we'd seen at the great Angkor temples and at the royal palace. Soon our students abandoned the dinner tables and sat on the floor, right in front of the musicians and dancers as they danced the Ramayana, which we'd seen carved on the walls of Angkor Wat. Even the masks were the same. They danced the dance of the Apsaras, once reserved for the palace itself, and specially targeted for destruction by the Khmer Rouge. They little dancers looked just like the famous apsaras of the Bayon, fingers curved and faces radiant. And I think the students understood, because they were rapt, and they cheered at the end. And I don't think they'll ever forget what they learned that night.
So tomorrow we sail back down the Saigon River, then past Singapore and up through the Straits of Malacca to Penang, missing the equator by only a degree or so.
Catch y'all in Malaysia-----------------------------larry.
[Gentle readers: Cambodia touched my heart. One year later, I find I want to do more than just write about it, especially now that AIDS threatens to complete what the Khmer Rouge began. There is a crying need for rural education and appropriate rural development in Cambodia to break the cycle of tragedy. If my story touched your heart, please have a look at these two extraordinary projects, sponsored by American Assistance to Cambodia/Japan Relief for Cambodia: