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Photo Essay: Kep’s Abandoned Mansions

Published April 24, 2011 Abandoned Places , Cambodia , Independent , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Sola , Southeast Asia , Subculture 1 Comment
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Before the war, beach-side Kep was a fashionable get-away for Phnom Penh’s well-heeled. Opulent homes were built into the cicada-buzzing green slopes, washed in the smell of salt and seafood. They were all abandoned, of course, in 1975; as the war reached on into the 90s, the facades crumbled and the green grew up in the cracks. It’s pretty much stayed that way since.

Kep is on track to regain its by-gone glory. For better or worse, bulldozers lumber across construction lots where crisp new buildings arch up behind shotty scaffolding. For now, Kep is a mellow mix of vacationing Cambodian families and independent Western travelers. Fishermen reel their nets, women season crab in fresh Kampot pepper and their adolescent children serve you at beach-side shack restaurants. You can hop on a boat and cruise out to Rabbit Island, where hammocks and coconuts and ramshackle bungalows will lure you away from any noble ambitions to trek to the top of the jungle-y island.

And of course, you can traipse through the remains of Kep’s past.

Makes my heart flutter

The squat toilet shall never die

The tile survives

View from the former second-story balcony

Peeking out: view from the street

Looking up

Looking out

Between the trees

Rising up

The walls of some of the buildings were covered, not in traditional graffiti, but children’s scribbles: faces, indiscernible Khmer, dirty drawings of women. It somehow made it sweeter, lent an innocence to the rubble that made you think of it, not as a relic of war and the country’s painstakingly slow march towards recovery, but instead as a child’s play place, a fantasy land, safe and hidden.

It’s hard to know what to say about Kep. The urban explorer in me was pretty stoked to traipse through abandoned building after abandoned building, surveying what was left and what was gone and what was growing up amid the crumble. But you couldn’t help but feel a sadness, adventuring around in this way you love, because you knew the reason for it was so heart-breaking.

It’s also hard to know what to say about the new development, the sure wave of resort tourism it will bring. It won’t be the same, that’s for sure, but will it actually go back to being something more similar to what it once was, before the war?

There’s no way to know right now. But I will say it’s a damn good place to hole of for a few days, eating crab and swimming in the ocean and climbing through ruins.

Battambang, Abandoned City

Published April 21, 2011 Abandoned Places , Cambodia , Independent , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia , Subculture 2 Comments
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Battambang is a dingy balcony over a deserted street. Battambang is a tangle of electrical wires sagging in the heat, is a patch of sand between busted-up sidewalk, is discarded amusement-park bumper cars fading in the sun.

Cambodia’s fourth largest tourist attraction felt post-apocalyptic when we arrived, mid-afternoon during the biggest day of Khmer New Year. We wandered through nameless, signless streets, past shutters and padlocks and beach umbrellas with no one under them, looking for a guesthouse. We ventured out for coffee, through the wilted market, strewn stalks of sugar cane and vegetables rotting in the heat. The open lot across from the evening carnival, sleeping in the mid-day sun, reminded me of an old Freddy Kueger movie, dogs sniffing around the menacing clown smiles on the front of bumper cars.

While this impression isn’t entirely accurate—it would be like coming into any US city on Christmas Day—it did prove an apt opening to two days of wandering around the city and its surroundings. Battambang was, I’d learned, a major hub for people making the journey to Thailand in the post-Khmer-Rouge days, where they’d trade gold and hire shady guides to lead them through forests and mountains, landmines and bandits, that only some would survive. It’s probable that my friends’ parents passed through Battambang, and my friend, in a sense—in utero, sleeping inside the warmth of his mother.

It was hard with the holiday to get a sense for the city as it is today. And the coolest stuff we found wasn’t the temples, where monks chanted into megaphones, and it wasn’t the bamboo norry trains that have now turned into a shameless tourist trap—a police man with a crooked smile and a limp handshake, “$5 per person.” The coolest places in Battambang were the abandoned ones.

We walked down to the abandoned train station, a sweltering sidewalk lined with New Years decorations that look like tinsel pentagrams. During colonialism, the French built a train system in Cambodia, and it was still used through the 70s. I’ve read accounts of people who, early on in the Khmer Rouge reign, were transported to various work sites by train. At some point the system disintegrated, and the Battambang train station is proof of it, the clock out front permanently frozen at 8:02—a time that comes twice a day, like a train passing, but a year and date that remain silent, that will never pass by again.

Like everything old in Cambodia, there’s nothing to stop you from poking around the lot of rusted engines, boxcar carcasses, tracks obscured by long grass and cow dung. People live there now, poor folks in thatched huts, where once the wind of the train might have blown them down, but now they only have to worry about the ghost trains passing—the wind, I suppose, doesn’t blow so hard from those. One man had set up a home in an old warehouse; I glimpsed him, through a crumble in the wall, bathing in his sarong.

You’d feel funny walking through a place like that in any other country. In the US, it’d be dripping with graffiti and crackheads. But in Cambodia it was people just living their lives, sitting on bamboo platforms with their families, small children exclaiming, “Hello!” and giggling joyiously when we responded. You couldn’t help but feel welcome, though you weren’t sure why you were welcome, why they all greeted you so goddamn graciously. Something in me felt I didn’t deserve it. I smiled anyway.

The next day I went out solo to explore the abandoned Pepsi factory. It’d been shut down, I read, when the Khmer Rouge came to power in 1975—frozen like that, like the clock at the train station. I grabbed a tuk-tuk, a man who insisted I pity him for having to work on New Years. We rattled out there, dirt roads lined with kids throwing small plastic bags of water, a New Year tradition. They smiled at me, waved, but none of them threw a bag at me. I wondered why.

The Pepsi factory was a faded concrete building with a well-tended garden. It struck me as a curious juxtaposition—the crates of bottles I could spy through the windows, waiting for a delivery that never came; the burned-out remains of a warehouse further back, where a fire had once raged, fixtures hanging from holes in the ceiling; the barefoot children that wandered around, peeling back strips of corrugated tin and disappearing inside the blackness. All that, next to trimmed grass and perky flowers, a yard free of rubbish, where a couple of families picnicked in the shade of a tree.

My tuk-tuk driver wandered over to me, as I balanced up on a ledge, beside shorn hedges, trying to get a photo of the inside of the factory. “All the machines are gone,” he told me in surprisingly fluent English. “They went to Vietnam.”

The factory, he said, had sat empty during the Khmer Rouge regime. When the Vietnamese came in 79, they’d dismantled all the machines and took the parts back to Vietnam. Now it was just crates of empty bottles, a silent loudspeaker with its wires disconnected, exposed.

“Why is the garden so nice?” I asked him.

“Oh, it’s a man who lives here. He’s very old, 80, I think. He used to work at the factory before the war. After, he had no family, nowhere to go, so he came back. The government let him keep the grounds. He lives back there.” He waved his hand back towards the burned-out warehouse, where I’d seen laundry lines and pieces of cooked rice sitting in the sun.

“That’s him,” the tuk-tuk driver said casually, gesturing towards an old man who walked slowly with his hands clasped behind his back. He wore an Angkor Wat t-shirt and a krama scarf loosely over his shoulders. You could tell by the way he sucked his mouth that there weren’t hardly any teeth left. The lines in his face were a fine webbing, like wrinkled laundry.

I smiled and bowed for our awkward introduction. What do you say to a man like that?—a man who’d seen all those abandoned places alive, who’d lived it himself, who’d set up a home amid the ruin and spent his days tidying what was left, memories green as grass?

“The garden is beautiful.” The tuk-tuk driver translated and the old man smiled a sunken smile, no teeth to stretch it taut. I bowed again.

Battambang is a dirt road and a child waving, an old man nodding to himself as he walks away.

A Walk Through The Ruins: Temples and Bomb Ponds

Published April 6, 2011 Abandoned Places , Cambodia , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia , Subculture 6 Comments
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The three little girls followed us like flies. They circled as we walked through the dirt and dry grass, holding out scarves for us to buy.

We approached the rubble of temples, bricks strangled by a varicose of vines. Beside where we stood, busted stone sat in a pile. One of the girls pointed. “American. B-52.”

It was my first trip out to the provinces. That’s what expats call the rest of country, everything that’s not Phnom Penh, and it’s a fairly accurate distinction: it’s like there’s two Cambodias, not just the surface and the underbelly that I wrote about before, but the urban and rural.

The division goes a long way back. Before the Khmer Rouge, during the Lon Nol regime and the American bombings, the countryside suffered greatly—some million people are estimated to have died—while Phnom Penh remained a relative island of safety. When the Khmer Rouge took over, they targeted urbanites, the so-called “New People.” A mutual distrust between city- and country-dwellers lingers.

Still today, people in the countryside tend to be darker skin, pure Khmer, and largely uneducated, often living without electricity and running water. And while Phnom Penh is rapidly developing, construction cranes and billboards and the gleaming new riverside, the provinces remain fairly the same: dirt roads, thatch-roofed houses on stilts, naked children and water buffalo and chickens in the road. And a lot more of the scars of war.

We’d headed out to the Kompong Thom province, 170 km along the “highway” to Siem Reap. We were going to look at two things: the Sambor Prei Kuk pre-Angkorian temples, and bomb ponds. We found both, beside each other.

I’d contacted Rattana Vandy about his exhibit Bomb Ponds, wanting to learn more. Although he lives in Paris now, he just so happened to be back in Phnom Penh, and invited me to come along with his wife and friend on an adventure to the countryside.

The drive was long, filled with stops for cashews and pomelo and tarantulas (which are surprisingly delicious). Three hours on the road and we arrived at the temple site. It was nearly empty, aside from a straggle of locals and the few huts they’d set up, selling bottles of water and chips. The little girls were on us; even after it was obvious we weren’t going to buy anything, they followed us, poking and playing with each other. There probably wasn’t much else to do.

The temples were scattered around the shady dirt grounds. They’re pre-Angkorian, which means they were built between the 5th and 7th centuries, constructed of brick, with carvings in Sanskrit, odes to Hinduism rather than Buddhism. I hadn’t seen any temples yet, so I was easily impressed by the age, by the trees growing up and along them, like the vines were strangling the remains, trying to pull them back down into the earth.

There’d once been some 200 temples at the site; only 40ish remained. I thought of the incredible luck that any of them had survived: the years, the monsoons, the looting, the gold diggings—and the bombings.

Photographing a bomb pond/crater

Rattana had taught us how to spot bomb ponds. Unlike natural ditches, they’re perfectly circular. Because of the linear bomb-dropping pattern, they usually occur in a row, in certain intervals; you can count them out: “one, two, three…” The big ones are along the Vietnam border; the smaller ones, like these, were dropped from fighter jets and can be found all over the country. During the rainy season, they fill with water that even still, after 30+ years, has a lingering toxicity that makes it undrinkable. As it’s the end of the dry season, the bomb ponds now are just craters, sunken and waiting. They reminded me of pockmarks, the skin of a hard life—I thought back to Thailand, to its green, its rich-kid skin.

A local man lingered around us, like the little girls but with less exuberance. He began chatting with Rattana in Khmer, and wound up being our guide. He was knowledgeable, walked slowly, chiseled cheeks and a lean smile, salt-and-pepper hair swept into a comb-over, though he wasn’t balding. The lines around his eyes and mouth were thin, precise, deep and uncountable; they framed his mouth when he smiled, so that they seemed like smile lines.

He was missing an arm. There was a nub somewhere inside his worn shirt, and he tucked things under it: his cap, his cigarettes. Sometimes when he walked, a slow and pensive walk, he held onto the empty sleeve as though he were clasping his hands. There was a tenderness to the gesture so palpable you wondered if it was his phantom limb he was holding—a dead hand, ghost hand, from another life that he was still clinging to, intertwined with, in the moments when no one was looking.

He pointed out carvings and statues and explained their meaning, which then went through rounds of French and English translations. At one point, as we walked between temples, he pointed to a crater in the earth with his one arm. “American,” he said. “B-52.”

How do you be American in this? “I wasn’t born yet” doesn’t seem good enough. “My parents were against the war” doesn’t either. Because these may be ruins, but it’s still happening, in other places; it’s still happening in this place too, the echo of it. You know, intellectually, that this echo lasts a long time, but knowing it and seeing it are two different things: You can hear something a thousand times and not know it, yet if you see it with your eyes just once, you know. It’s a Khmer proverb, and it seems to be written for this place, the experience of being in this place.

I thought, briefly, of bombs falling from the sky like small black parcels; I tried to imagine the blast and the sound, the rumble and heat. I couldn’t, not really—just project what I’d seen on old newsreels, aerial footage of impersonal explosions, reverse fireworks against dense green. I thought of how much was lost—lives and limbs and ancient temples, vacant of their gods—and how much remained, that any of it remained, even as scars, on the earth and in the bodies. I thought of what still stood, what still walked, and wondered how to be American amidst all this.

On The Road to Nowhere: Finding an Anti-Place, Part 3

Published April 6, 2011 Abandoned Places , Independent , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia , Subculture , Thailand 1 Comment
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Mai Rut. Mai Rood. You couldn’t even be sure of the name, and you sure as hell couldn’t be sure of the history. But it existed, that was the important part, and I was going to find it.

I sat on the back of a motorbike and scanned the landscape. The town of Mai Rut was 5km from the main highway, and there’d actually been a motorbike driver, waiting on the platform in the shade for someone like me to set off a blue pick-up truck. Thailand was otherwise devoid of motorbike drivers; although a break from the constant barrage of “La-dee, moto-bike!” was refreshing, I kept finding myself needing a motorbike and finding none. But one appeared just when I needed it, and I suppose that’s how Thailand worked for me, how I’ll come to think of those three days spent along the border.

I’d seen footage of Mai Rut, at the Bophana Audiovisual Center, from an old French newsreel. I could piece together bits and pieces, stray words, but mostly it was a study in the visual, squinting at the screen and trying to memorize every little bit of earth. I knew I’d later try and find the place, what was left of the place, and this was the best clue I was going to get. (It was silly, but I kept scanning the faces too, as though I’d happen to see the two people I knew in the crowd, as though that would be a clue too.)

And now I was there, or whizzing through there, and there was nothing but trees and grass and the odd clearing. We moved too fast; I didn’t know how to tell the motorbike driver what I was looking for, or even to slow down, so I just let him drive, let us move through the landscape of lost stories.

He left me off at the end of the road, where earth gave way to water and boats bobbed and nets hung, flies buzzing over sheets of fish and the smell of fish, fish, drying in the sun. Houses stood on stilts and streets of cement had been made. This was the town, not the remains of the camp, which must have been somewhere outside of the town, fenced off by barbed wire the camera kept focusing on and off of, a beat-you-over-the-head kind of metaphor but a metaphor nonetheless, in a newsreel, which I could appreciate. This was not it, but it was the closest I was going to get.

Mai Rood was a quiet little fishing town with not a lot going on. People sat in doorways. Children ran naked, grinned and disappeared. Women sat cutting fish, and men reeled in the nets from painted wooden boats. Dogs sniffed at the sand, littered and muddy; a man picked at the wounds that covered his body, little scabs that spoke of disease and something else, a language I didn’t understand.

I looked at the faces—many of them were Khmer, obviously Khmer. There’s a brown to pure Khmer skin, while Thai has more of a yellow glow. I thought of what the man at the guesthouse in Trat had told me, how a lot of the Cambodian refugees had stayed once their camps had closed, resettled in Thailand.

Like him, there were stories trapped in these people—or rather, trapped in the incommunicable space between me and them. They held answers, and if I could have sat with them, listened to them, I could have pieced together an approximation of another story, trapped in a different incommunicable space, the one between live and death—the story I had come to understand.

In the picture my friends have from Mai Rut, there’s my friend, a newborn in his mother’s arms. His mother looks like the woman I knew, strong and sturdy and alive, and his father like the man I knew, small and frail and dark. Beside them were two little girls who looked nothing like my friends’ parents—different features, much too dark-skinned.

“Who are these girls?”

“Some girls that came over with us. They were orphans. Or their parents said they were orphans. so they could come to the US. Or maybe my parents said they were their kids too.”

“But they look nothing like you guys.”

He shrugged. “So what happened to them?” I ask.

Shrugged again. “They probably had family here already, and met up with them once we got here.”

“Have you ever tried to find them?”

“No,” he answered kind of far-away, as though the thought had never occurred to him.

And I thought of that picture and wondered if I had it, if I could show it to these people, even without a common language, and if anyone would have known or remembered. I wondered what the hell that would accomplish anyway, other than confirming that it had all actually happened. I wondered what the hell I was even doing there, what I was looking for, what any of it was, let alone what it meant.

I wandered.

Closest thing to a remnant I found: Red Cross symbol on a lamppost back along the main highway

On The Road to Nowhere: Finding an Anti-Place, Part 2

Published April 5, 2011 Abandoned Places , Independent , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia , Subculture , Thailand 2 Comments
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Our pick-up truck bounded down the smooth pavement, creating a muggy breeze. We moved down a strip of the coast, a highway and a shade of green I think I’ll forever associate with Thailand, and that’s the place the people came through. It was 30 years ago and there’s not a lot left—unless you know where to look.

I didn’t. I kept craning my neck through the grating of the covered truck bed, trying to catch a sign for Khao Lan. I was lucky, I discovered, in that a giggly group of five teenage girls with straw mats and beach towels were getting off at Khao Lan as well. They’d spend the entire 40-minute ride squealing and chatting and texting. When we glided to an easy stop, they pointed and exclaimed to me, “Khao Lan!”

We trundled off, stood on the swampy roadside of a military checkpoint. “Beach?” one of the girls asked me shyly.

“Museum,” I replied.

“Museum,” she repeated softly. The word caused a buzz among her friends. “Museum!” one of them exclaimed assuredly, and pointed to a white structure obscured by the green.

I thanked them with a small bow of my head—I hadn’t learned “thank you” in Thai—and watched them disappear down the road.

The museum was modern, diagonal columns and a glass skylight structure that didn’t at all seem to fit the landscape. The adjoining parking lot was empty and the museum gates locked.

The guard at the military checkpoint back on the road made an eating motion. He pointed to his watch, held up one finger. I nodded and wandered back down towards the museum grounds, thinking how strangely simple it was, how much you could communicate without words, without a common language, just signs and gestures and hints, a smile and a bow.

Green signs were stuck amid the grasses, and those communicated a lot less. Were they marking something related to the camp that had once stood there? I couldn’t be sure, but photographed them just in case.

I walked deeper into the grounds. A buzz grew from the trees like a living thing, like it weren’t the product of a living thing, a million unseen insects, but an animal in and of itself. It whined and hissed and followed me down the road.

There were beaten bits of earth, what had once been a road. Chunks of cement remained, with earth growing back up around it, like a scab before it peels. There were clearings in the grass, and I tried to figure out if they were remains or something used for farming, the stray huts I could spot off between the trees.

But I walked further and found translated markers—something, not in a common language, but my language, a scribble I could understand. I held my breath and tried to imagine tents and roads and some 90,000 people.

I couldn’t. It was just wind and rubble, stairs to nowhere and the earth growing back up around.

The museum was open by the time I got back, and I slid off my shoes and stepped inside. A lone female attendant smiled at me and went back to sweeping the floor.

The museum was strange. It was mostly a tribute to the Queen, a tribute to her goodwill as evidenced by her selfless saving of Cambodian refugees. Everything was framed in that context—photographs of a glamorous white-skinned woman walking through a city of tents in a white suit, a floppy sun hat and Jackie-O sunglasses. She crouched beside the thin and sick, bellies swollen and eyes dulled, a look of practiced concern. She sat before a group of children, an opened book in her hands: The children listened rapt, the words of the Queen forever imprinted in their minds.

Subtext: Thailand is the only country in SE Asia to have never officially fallen under imperalist control.

But still, she’d done a good thing, a damn good thing. The museum included three life-size scenes that reminded me of wildlife dioramas, the kind my best friend meticulously restores, repainting eyes and gluing on fake fur.

Wax Cambodian figures, their bodies worn and their faces contorted by grief, stood in varying poses of despair, before a painting of thick jungle, more faces and bodies coming through the trees. Other scenes depicted varying elements of camp life: cooking pots of rice, a white woman holding a stethoscope to the chest of a small wax infant. The dark Cambodian bodies grew plumper, more solid.

I wondered if that’s what it’d looked like—the emergence from the woods and the camp life. I thought of the newsreel footage of camps I’d seen, the faces in the camps, and decided it was worse.

(“You’ve seen The Killing Fields?” Lisa asked my mom once. My mom said yes. Lisa nodded. “It was much worse.”)

For its oddity and drama, I wondered, if there were any other museums like this, that documented this particular snippet, this part of journey, this freeze-frame from the film reel of a movie you’ve never managed to see all of, keep catching out of sequence or coming in half-way through.

I stood barefoot in an empty museum of transience, while the earth outside slowly swallowed the remains of what was left, which wasn’t much at all. I tucked some crumbled bills into the donation box, slid my shoes back on, and stepped out into the heat.

The Anti-Irony of Cambodian Fashion: The English-Language T-Shirt Edition

Published March 26, 2011 Being American , Cambodia , Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Offbeat , Phnom Penh , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia 5 Comments
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“I like how cheesy it is, you know?” Mathilde said this morning, ashing her anorexic cigarette and looking across the street, at the teenagers hanging out at the Best Friend Cafe. Fake acid-wash skinny jeans, emo sideswiped hair-dos, bedazzled trucker hats positioned atop boys’ heads in a perch reminiscent of Abe Lincoln—the styles donned so earnestly by Cambodian youth would be only be seen on the most ironic of Western hipsters. And even then…

“It’s not so serious as in Europe,” she continued. “We would think this was so cheesy, but why not? If they like it, if they think it looks good, why not?”

One of the things I love most about Cambodian fashion—and it isn’t the stripper shoes or cutesy pajama prints or polka-dot pants—is the utter sincerity with which ridiculous clothing is worn. Ridiculous to Western eyes, I should say. And tonight this was exemplified by the t-shirts for sale at Phnom Penh’s Night Market.

On Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights, along the riverside, tents are erected and a fair-style stage put up; vendors set up booths, teenagers with mediocre voices and sleep-walk-y dance moves perform on stage, mobile phone companies set up opposing stands with megaphones blasting promotions at one another, food stalls sell skewers of myserious deep-fried meat products, and diners take off their shoes and sit on straw mats, eating off thin wooden sticks. It’s nice. It’s a good mix of foreigners and Khmers, the riverside breeze is sweet, and until the mosquitoes drive you away, it’s pretty fucking luxurious to sit out and enjoy the night.

So we’ve been making a habit of grabbing some food and sitting out under the stars—or what would be the stars, might be the stars, behind the haze of city lights and smog. You can’t really be sure anymore. You don’t really go there to buy things—some tourist trinkets, fake floral arrangements (okay, I bought one of those for my apartment), and clothing. Clothing for local teenagers, I should say.

Tonight I took to photographing some of the t-shirts I felt best exemplified the Cambodian fashion spirit within the particular sub-category of Putting English Words On A Shirt Immediately Makes It Cool.

Rule #1: It doesn’t really matter if what’s on a shirt makes sense or not—as long as there are English letters, you’re half-way there.

Rule #2: It really doesn’t matter.

Rule #3: Product placement is a key component of English-language t-shirt fashion. It doesn’t matter if it’s the actual logo of a product, as long as it refers a Western, and preferably American, product.

Hey Apple marketing masterminds: you should really think about doing a Cambodian edition of those PC vs Apple guys ads. Do you see any PC t-shirts out here? I don’t think so…

Rule (?) #4: It also doesn’t seem to matter if the senseless phrases evoke repulsive imagery of, say, spoiled food products.

“Punk Rock Tonight Love Me”: I almost bought this one. It was too small.

“Power Over Pimples”: Fuck yeah! As someone who endured 12 years of acne, I wanted to high-five this t-shirt and jump joyously in the air like… the people on this t-shirt. The text was also English, singing the praises of an acne-fighting cleansing solution.

So, um, in a country where a shitton of kids get strung out on glue sniffing and paint huffing, I didn’t know what to make of this. Was it supposed to be funny? One thing’s for sure: I don’t think the affected demographic is perusing for new shirts at the Night Market though…

Rule #5: Content Over Accuracy

“Joy, Look For It Evert Day”: This shirt says it all. There’s a certain sweetness to it all, what would be convenient to call an innocence, but I think it’s something other than that, less simple or more simple or in any case different.

“Cambodia’s not a post-modern culture,” someone was explaining to me. “So there’s not a lot of irony. There’s a playfulness for sure—but more of a sincerity to the work.”

She was talking about contemporary art, but I thought about her comment looking at the shirts tonight. And I think it’s true for the fashion as well. And I agree with Mathilde—I like it. Coming from a world of ironic everything—ironic moustaches, ironic wolf-howling-at-the-moon shirts, ironic gangsta rap listening and ghetto blasting, ironic malt liquor drinking and crack smoking (yes, really)—it’s pretty fucking refreshing to enter a world of sweetness and anti-irony. It’s not any less self-conscious, it’s just self-conscious in a different way. It makes you feel like we’ve missed something in the Western world, that we’ve lost something, gotten away from something, something I can’t quite name but that makes me horribly sad, in the smallest way, heavy like a pebble.

But I’m Western. And I can’t switch worlds, switch roles, ease myself into a different way of thinking. The t-shirts are, to me, ironic.

Yawning teenager working the teddy bear stand

Vintage Sounds: The Revival of Cambodia’s Golden Era

Published March 14, 2011 Cambodia , Independent , Inspiration , Lonely Girl Loves , Music , Offbeat , Phnom Penh , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia , Subculture 10 Comments
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The 1960s were a bad-ass time in Phnom Penh.

You might not have known that. I certainly didn’t, not until a work friend happened to put Cambodian Cassette Archives on my iPod. Even then, I didn’t know the extent of the dopeness, just that the psychodelic, garage sounds coming through the little white earpieces were unusual, different, haunting—an echo of another era, most of the songs flashing with an “Unknown/Unknown” track title and band name. What the hell was this, how did it survive, why was it so effing good?


My intro to Cambodian rock

Well, it’s nice to know I’m not alone. People have been digging in, excavating through the darkness, trying to revive the Golden Era of 60s Cambodian pop culture: rock, films, thick lines of black eyeliner and bouffants the color of ink. It’s an exercise in lost histories, untold stories, missing pieces, what-could-have-beens, what-shouldn’t-have-beens. It’s an exercise in facing just exactly how much was lost. And ultimately, it’s an exercise in love.

So when I saw the flyer for a vintage shop, simply named Vintage, opening in Phnom Penh’s Russian Market yesterday—um, yes, count me in.

We waded through the sweaty stalls of the market—Western clothes and traditional trinkets, vegetables and raw meat, housewares and fruit stands. Tucked beside the nucleus of food stalls, it was easy to spot Vintage: sleek, boutique design, a crowd of hob-nobbing Westerners, and insanely good music coming out of the speakers.


Bad-ass original

The shop was selling remastered CDs, tshirts of contemporary Khmer hip-hop groups, some refurbished 80s ghettoblasters (dubbed as such), a new vinyl record by the revivalist band Cambodian Space Project. It’s the first vinyl, the enthusiastic Frenchman wearing a killer pair of glasses told me, to be pressed in Cambodia since the war. (Composed of an eclectic group of Westerners and fronted by a working-class Cambodian woman, the band is actually out of town for SXSW, so I’ll have to wait til April to catch them. For a super interesting interview, check out this link.)


Cambodian Space Project’s cover

One of the most interesting things for sale at the shop—and what had attracted me to the flyer for the opening in the first place—were the “reprints” of Cambodian film posters from the 60s. All the originals of these posters had been destroyed, not to mention the films themselves. But Sithen Sum, from the Kon Khmer Koun Khmer (Khmer Film Khmer Generation) repainted versions of the lost posters. We chatted, I got his business card, yes, yes, there’ll be an interview.

I’m forming an image in my head. It’s of Phnom Penh in the 60s. It’s aided by photography books I’ve browsed at the posh English-language bookstore. It’s populated with the people I’ve seen on grainy black-and-white videos at the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center, where I’ve spent hours clicking through the archives, where the people don’t look so different from how they do today, where the markets look the same and cyclos look the same and you could almost imagine none of it had ever happened.

The image has a sound. Behind the spotlights and sequins of it, it echoes of guitar riffs and mystery.

I’m sure this image is grossly inaccurate and veiled in layers of romanticized mystique, but right now I don’t really care. Sometimes you need a fantasy, a vision, a place in your head you can go to where everything is safe—just the glowing lights and the dancing limbs of some other time, that doesn’t seem so dead or so far away—that you let yourself pretend isn’t.

Not Your Normal Expat Scene: Khmer Kids Coming Back to Cambodia

Published March 3, 2011 Being American , Cambodia , Dance , Dirty Tricks , Independent , Music , Offbeat , Phnom Penh , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia , Subculture 5 Comments
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“This not your normal expat scene.”

That’s all I kept thinking last night, as I stood sweating and stomach-sore in the crowd. I’d dragged myself out to a show, what was described to me as an all-girl indie rock band that sang in Khmer. Killer. No traveler’s flu would make me miss this.

It was a funny mix—local men in dress shirts and slacks, women in those super foofy sparkly dresses; kids, some just in the crowd, others wearing matching shirts for some organization I couldn’t quite make out.

And there were your typical expats—Western, mostly white. Some of them were extremely well-groomed, reeking of cologne and hair spray and kissing their friends on both cheeks. Some of them wore that aren’t-I-so-cool-for-being-here look. Some tried to dance along or move to the beat, and it was sad and cute in the way it’s always sad and cute. And others just seemed to be there, watching, enjoying the show, because that’s what there was to do that night.

But the kids putting on the show—the kids on stage and holding the cameras and checking the sound—they were not your normal expats.

Your typical expat does not drop their “to be” verb (“She crazy”), doesn’t say “y’all” or “aight.” They don’t wear baggy jeans and puffy sneakers. They don’t start NGOs called Tiny Toones or hip-hop groups called Klap Ya Handz, written in Godfather font. They don’t breakdance or freestyle or bust—and they don’t do it in the language native to their new homes.

I’d heard about the show from Bel, a girl I’d found on Couchsurfing. We had plans to meet up for coffee and even though my stomach was already getting wonky, something told me not to flake.

She was a cool girl and we talked for awhile. Her boyfriend was a Khmer-American who’d moved back to Cambodia, with no intention of ever leaving again. “He’s the most patriotic Khmer you’ll ever meet,” she said, and later he showed me the tattoo of a famous Wat across his back.

“There’s a lot of foreign-born Khmers moving back,” Bel told me. “Lots of artists and young people. And they’re really motivated to do something here.”

I wanted to see this; I wanted to glimpse what this was. Sure, I knew of people going back to their parents’ countries for a visit, but to live? To give up everything they know to fight for something better in a country they hadn’t grown up in? This was something different.

And it was. The show place was buried deep inside the maze of a mall, shuttered shops and a blinking arcade, bowling alley and bumper cars. I got there earlyish, paid a $10 cover—normal for the US, but exorbitant for here.

On stage was a DJ, two turntables and a MacBook glowing. Two artists were on stage, doing ad hoc graffiti art on a make-shift wall. “Empire State of Mind” came on. It was like being at any hip-hop show at home—except a hell of a lot hotter.

The first act was a hip-hop group called Klap Ya Handz. They spoke in a working-class English, like kids that grow up in Oakland. But in the songs, they flowed in Khmer. For one song, they brought out traditional Khmer drummers that were, well, bad-ass. During another song, the lead girl did what she later called “Khmer hands,” a hip-hop take-off on the hand movements of traditional Khmer dancers.

Cambodia lost a whole generation of artists during the Khmer Rouge. Traditional dance was virtually erased and, after Pol Pot, there wasn’t anyone left to pass it on. I’d read accounts of the few survivors left trying to teach the next generation, and it being hard—they were more interested, as teenagers usually are, in contemporary things. Like hip-hop.

The headliner was Laura Mam and the Like Me’s. They’re a bluesy, all-girl rock band from San Jose, California (local love). They’re Khmer-American and sing in Khmer. The crowd obviously loved them, singing along and snapping photos and waving their arms. I was told that they came to play in Cambodia relatively often. Either way, they showed the same kind of passionate pride in their Khmer culture that the kids in Klap Ya Handz did.

They played a song called “Diaspora”: “for all the refugees living in diaspora around the world—and missing Cambodia.” The crowd went crazy.

No, this wasn’t your normal expat scene.

Your typical expat is someone of relative priviledge; they have, say, a university degree and the social mobility to pick up and move around the world. Maybe they studied abroad, or spent time backpacking around. In any event, it occurred to them to leave their home countries in the first place and they had the means, however meager, to do it. The ones I encounter are largely middle-class; the uber wealthy ones exist on another plane, and I only see them in passing—the immaculate girls on the streets of Hong Kong.

These kids were categorically Not That. They’re the kind of kids, in the kind of scene, that I miss when I leave the US; when I think about moving abroad, I think, “Man, there’s so much shit I’d be missing” and this is part of what I mean.

And they bring their Americanness—their very, very Americanness—back here. But they’re making something new with it; there’s that frenetic energy, that spark you feel when cultures collide and you see people that are so intensely passionate about what they’re doing, you can’t help but feel it too.

Of course, not all of them are coming back by choice. The US opted to deport foreign-born convicts, regardless of whether they’d served their time, and nearly 200 people who were, for all intents and purposes, American were sent “back” to Cambodia. They brought their culture, a street culture, and they brought their art. And they’re doing shit; they’re bringing this to the kids of Cambodia, the next generation (ie: Tiny Toones).

So basically, watch the fuck out for these kids.

There was a shirt I kept seeing in the crowd, tons of kids wearing it. Its design was a take-off on the Star Wars logo, and it read: “The Khmer Empire Strikes Back.”

This was my first glimpse into this, my looking-through-the-peep-hole into this. I fully intend on investigating this more during my time here. But last night, sickness was calling, and I had to head back to the hotel.

A Tale of Two Tours: Part II, Khmer Village

Published March 1, 2011 Independent , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia , Vietnam 4 Comments
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White girl comes to town. Crowd gathers.

Duc had a prison-style dragon tattoo and a speech impediment, and he gave me the best goddamn tour I went on in Vietnam.

I kept seeing him around town. My first morning, groggy-eyed drinking coffee at a corner cafe, I saw him sitting at a neighboring table. He was selling his tour services to another sola Westerner, and it appeared to be working. He was younger than the other motorbike drivers, wearing a sleeveless shirt, something beat-up, kind of tough about him. He’s working it, I’d thought.

He looked over at me and we exchanged brief nods.

I saw him again that afternoon atop Sam Mountain, two skimpily clad female backpackers hopping off the back of his motorbike. Yup, I thought. Woooorkin it.

He asked me about my tattoos, peeled his shirt back and showed me a jagged dragon across his chest. The lines of it were half-blown out.

“You tattoo? You use neddle?” he asked me. I shook my head, “No way, a gun, man!”

He grinned a soggy-toothed grin. “Me, no gun.” I could tell, though I didn’t say it.

And again outside my hotel that night. He talked up his tour services, an English at once clear and garbled, that snagged and stuttered on certain words. I’d already booked a Delta tour with my hotel; I politely refused.

The next day’s tour was my third one in Vietnam with barely-to-no English spoken. We motored the Delta’s brown waters, through a “village” of tattered boats—faded wood, clutters of laungry, children flying kites from somewhere on the decks—and to a Cham ethnic minority village on dryland. It was fascinating, beautiful, but I had no context for it, no way to learn, to understand what I was seeing. I wanted to know more, felt it building up in me, bottling up, nowhere to go—an asphyxiation of unasked questions.

I was over it. Over the seeing-and-not-knowing tours.

Which I guess is how Duc sold himself to me. I sat later drinking coffee on a plastic stool in the shade. He pedaled his motorbike up, said hello. He asked how my tour had gone. I told him not great.

“You go with someone who speak English, it better.”

“Yeah, you’re right about that.”

He must have sized me up pretty well. He told me about a Khmer village about 15km away, very remote and isolated, “no one else take you there.” He kept talking and talking, and I thought, It’d be nice to see something with someone who can explain it. I also thought, If his tour guide skills are anything like his sales skills, it’ll be pretty good. I’d already spent too much that day, but said fuck it.

“Okay, okay,” I smiled. Then added, “You’re a good salesman.”

We drove through the Delta, its murky beauty: corrugated tin shacks perched on bamboo stilts like skinny legs, a Dali painting; ladders to reedy docks, leading precipitously down the muddy banks, into the muddy water (love, love, love that dirty water). My brain was on fire with images; I kept trying to scribble them down. Writing poetry on the back of a motorbike, it turns out, is very hard.

Duc kept pulling over along the way, to show me things, rice and seeds, things laid out on tarps to dry in the sun. He didn’t have to do that. He explained how the rice patties were harvested, how the people worked long hours, “very hard work.” He didn’t have to do that either.

Every now and then a vagrant stutter would lurk through his speech. But he’d work through it—drag his speech and himself through the snare of it—and something about it struck me as sad and somehow tender, like a bird with a broken wing.

I pretended not to notice.

We made a few other stops, finally pulled off and bumped slowly down a dirt road. The landscape changed—more cows, bone white and skinny-ribbed, flowering trees I hadn’t seen elsewhere. The houses were suddenly different too—thatching for walls as well as roofs, so the structures looked furry, like animals.

We crawled out of a cloud of dust as the bike came to a stop.

We begin to walk the town’s road slowly. He explained: a town of about 400, ethnically Khmer. There were a few towns like that along this strip of the Delta, a ribbon of land that had once been part of Cambodia. They stayed pretty isolated, stayed to themselves; residents rarely left. So traditional ways, instead of blurring with those of the Vietnamese, stayed pretty intact. And I could feel it, could feel the immediate difference.

Curious brown faces began to appear. “Hello!” one of them shouted, then hid behind the back of another. “My name is—” then a chorus of giggling. I answered back hello, and they laughed more. We went on like that, as I kept walking.

Every face I passed seemed to smile. I was an outsider, an oddity, but they seemed pleased by me. I passed a baby in a hammock, being rocked by a rope that was tied to it, a mother tugging, tugging. She smiled too.

The crowd of children grew, big grins on small faces. Most were barefoot, their clothes thin and worn. They held their hands to their mouths, the girls chewed their hair, they smiled and smiled.

We passed a woman making these omelet/crepe things I’d had before, filled with sprouts and meat. I was hungry. I motioned for one and sat down.

This is when the real delight began to grow. And the crowd.

I’ve heard other travelers’ tales like these: being surrounded in some small village somewhere, stared at. But I’d never had to happen to me. I kept stopping eating, looking around—an entire circle of faces, just watching, watching, and smiling too.

I laughed—what else could I do? I searched for Duc’s face, hidden behind the crowd; his was smiling too.

A very small, very hunched and wrinkled old woman, tapped my shoulder. She handed me a short tin cup filled with water, and I thought I might cry. They were all so welcoming, so sincere; the children giggled and the adults watched and they all kept smiling. It struck me as about the sweetest thing I’d ever experienced.

Duc and I began to walk slowly back towards the motorbike, the village’s kids trailing behind us—a shadow of children. I turned around and waved. “Good-bye.” And a chorus of “good-byes” erupted and a flurry of waves, and we drove off, away: a precious little place I’d never be again.

And it struck me, there, on the back of that bike, that Ba Chuc must have been a lot like that town before the Khmer Rouge came. Only bigger.

We cruised back into town. I hopped off in front of my hotel, handed Duc $10 instead of the $9 we’d agreed on.

“Oh, you tip me? You happy?”

“Yes. I’m very, very happy.”

Saturday Night Fevered

Published February 27, 2011 Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Independent , Offbeat , Places , Sola , Southeast Asia , Vietnam Closed
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Long stalks of flowers and twisted plumes of incense burning. Nodding, bowing, chanting with their eyes closed. Trays of food—peeled fruit, shrink-wrapped cookie packages, an entire plucked chicken—held atop people’s heads as they murmur. Candles and coconuts, red glowing altars (to what, to what?).

Children and hunched-up old people, a constant bumping, bustling, brushing against—the Asian conception of personal space, or lack thereof, exemplified. Announcements on a loudspeaker (what, what?).

Smoking a cigarette while he prays. Sweeping rubbish out from under the feet of the worshippers—playing cards with footprints on the floor.

Photocopied money in buckets being carried, to be burned—tossed into a pit outside that shoots scraps of burnt paper all over, raining ash in the night wind. Smoke rising (to where, to where?). Calling to children—“Em oi! Em oi!” Some kind of urgency, some kind of plead—nothing Christian about this piety. Nothing solemn; everything sacred.

Security guard siddles up to me, glances at the furious scribbling in my notebook (for what, for what?).

A Buddha-looking diety looking down on it all—a halo of neon, flashing in technicolor.

——–

This was perhaps one of the biggest What The Fuck moments of my travels. I had no idea where I was, what was going on, what any of it was for—just that I was suddenly immersed in it, plunged into a cloud of incense smoke and chanting and riotous fervor. These were the notes I made in the middle of the madness.

The motorbike driver didn’t speak any English. We were coming back from another site outside of Chau Doc, a town along the Cambodian border in the Mekong Delta. The roads became cluttered, lined with food stalls and carts and bodies, bodies. They filled like a clogged pipe until they choked and he had to pedal the bike through the crowd.

He stopped in front of a temple adorned with blinking Christmas lights. He pointed. I went in.

It was a funny thing, to be wrapped up in the zeal and fervor of it all without having the slightest clue what any of it was—an entirely sensory experience, a ritual out of context, a girl out of context, cultured-shocked.

When I got back to the hotel, I asked the English-speaking desk clerk, “I just went to some temple, up the road and—”

“You saw thousands of people,” she finished me, nodding.

“Yeah! What was that?”

She told me that they’re city-folk; they come to Lady Temple after the new year to ask for good luck. On weekends in February, March, even up through April, the otherwise sleepy town of Chau Doc swells with these Vietnamese travelers.

“Pilgrims, pilgrims,” the other clerk told me the next day. He’s younger than the girl, I thought, but he only seems it—he later told me that he’s almost 40. I wondered where the years went, behind his boyish smile.

“Other times, not so many people in Chau Doc. It very good for the business.” He looked out the glass lobby windows onto the town’s main market, overflowing into the street with tourists—not so many of them Western.

Snapped a couple of jostled photos before I saw the "No Camera" signs...

Lauren Quinn is a writer and traveler currently living in Hanoi. Lonely Girl Travels was a blog of her sola travels and expat living from 2009 to 2012. She resides elsewhere on the internet now.

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