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The Un-Bittersweet of Leaving Phnom Penh

Published April 11, 2011 Cambodia , Phnom Penh , Places , Southeast Asia 13 Comments
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It’s not as bittersweet as I’d expected.

It’s been six weeks in Phnom Penh. That’s the longest I’ve sat still anywhere—the longest I’ve spent consecutively in any city other than Oakland.

I’m embarrassed to admit that; I feel like I should have lived abroad, should have studied abroad, should have spent a summer somewhere, should have should have should have. But the truth is, I’m still a relative newcomer to the travel game, and for the first few years I was stuck in the going-going-going of it all: ticking off lists, counting countries and cramming in as many destinations as possible. It seemed like a waste of time to stay anywhere any longer than necessary.

Sure, I’d entertained elaborate fantasies about moving abroad. But really, if I couldn’t sit still in another city for more than 10 days, how could I really know if I could be happy, could have a life, abroad? Or, hell, even out of Oakland?

Part of the reason I got an apartment in Phnom Penh is that I wanted to feel like I lived there, that I wasn’t just passing through. I wanted a little glimpse into what that life would be like. I wanted keys; I wanted to shop for toilet paper; I wanted to “Sua s’dei” the neighbors and have a cafe where they knew my order. I wanted to feel little roots sprouting—the beginnings of being grounded, like the wind could blow and I wouldn’t fall over, be blown over with it.

When my bus arrived last week, bringing me back from my three-day visa run/refugee camp search, I hustled down the steps. I booked it past the cluster of tuk-tuk drivers, crossed the street without looking (the Cambodian way), dove between the tents of the night market, walked directly to my favorite food stall, kicked off my shoes and slurped down a Khmer soup under the night’s haze, the warm breeze from the river. I felt like I’d come home.

So I was expecting to be sad to leave. I was expecting to go around doing my silent rounds of “last times” with twinges of melancholy, that little lonely longing that you can almost fall in love with, more than the thing itself.

But it wasn’t as bittersweet as I’d expected.

Sometimes it comes to this: Nescafe from a plastic mug. And plastic flowers. Classy as shit.

Saying good-bye to the people was sad. I’d made some rad friends, had gotten close to a few cool girls. People tend to be on a three- to six-month rotation in Phnom Penh, and in a few months, almost everyone I know here will have moved on. And it was definitely sad to leave my apartment, with its metal table and one chair, its thin mattress and fuzzy TV, the plastic kitchenware I’d purchased at the market down the street—where I’d go to eat soup and the women would squat down and stare at me, giggling. I’d giggle back, and I’ll miss that too.

But still, it wasn’t as bittersweet as I’d expected.

I’ve taken to comparing cities to people. Boys, to be specific. Because cities have personalities the same way people do, and you have relationships with cities the same way you (I) have relationships to boys with (well, no, they’re actually much healthier).

So Rome is a really sophisticated, well-groomed and worldly guy that I like to keep track of, that I like to get lunch with from time to time, and talk about art and culture and history, but who I could never actually be with—we’re just too different. Tirana is the fun one, the one I met one crazy night at a crazy dance party, who I connected with under the lights—the one I felt like was made for me, as though anyone could ever really be made for anyone else, as though you could ever really know anyone after a week, or a month or even a year, years.

Buenos Aires is the one who got away, the eyes exchanged between subway cars, or maybe the one whose number you got and lost and still catch yourself thinking of, years later, looking for some scribbled scrap of paper in old jeans pockets without even realizing it. San Francisco is the neighbor boy you grew up with, who you know is really attractive and cool and who you really get along with, but you just couldn’t ever date.

And Phnom Penh?

Phnom Penh’s not terribly handsome or debonair, not the stuff of little-girl dress-up fantasies. He’s not super cultured and he’s got some obvious flaws. He’s a little beat-up; he’s been through shit. And there are things about him that drive you nuts. If you were to write a list of the perfect mate, there’s a lot of things Phnom Penh wouldn’t have. But the big ones, the ones that are really important and that really fucking count, when you’re up against the wall and the wind is blowing and you need something firm, some kind of roots to hold you down—he’s got them.

He fits. He’s not perfect, and neither are you.

And so it wasn’t so bittersweet to leave him. The same as when you leave for a trip and you just know the person you’re leaving behind, that you’re coming back to eventually, isn’t going to cheat on you or be shady. You don’t even have to think about it, worry about it. It doesn’t occur to you to worry; you’ve just got that confidence, you know? That you’ve got them and they’ve got you, whether you like it or not—like you were picked for each other, matched to each other, though you’re not sure by who.

But does it matter?

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.

Border Crossing: Searching the Landscape for Clues

Published March 31, 2011 Cambodia , Dirty Tricks , Places , Southeast Asia , Thailand , Transit 2 Comments
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I’m staring through a bus window, scanning for clues.

A month in Phnom Penh and I’m finally leaving the city. I need a new visa, and I was planning to come to the Thai border anyway, to search for the remains of a refugee camp—as though the land could hold stories, or bits of stories; as though it could tell them and I’d be able to hear it.

I look out at the rumbly pavement, the lumbering trucks, the dusty shoulder and the green, green beyond. I don’t see any traces. I see thatched roofs and hammocks between the trees; I see bone-white cows laying in the dirt and houses perched on stilts like skinny legs. I see roadside petrol stands and carts of rubble with young boys sitting atop the heap, staring back through the window at me. I see palms reflected in still water.

Where did the people walk? Somewhere, once, there were paths, and this land saw it, was it. I’m along the Southeast of Cambodia, heading into the Thailand’s Trat Province. It wasn’t one of the main avenues for escape to Thailand—those were in the north—but enough people came this way for there to have been two refugee camps, from what I’ve been able to learn. And I see no traces of their journey.

How quickly, I think, the land swallows human traces. I think of the images of saw I Phnom Penh after the fall of the Khmer Rouge, a little less than four years after having been evacuated: it was rubble, crumble, weeds growing tall and stoplights swinging silent. It was surprising how quickly the earth could undo things.

I think of the accounts of refugees I’ve read. The danger was immense, especially for people already physically weakened by years of starvation and overwork. I think of Vietnamese soldiers, fake Khmer Rouge soldiers, Thai bandits, sleeping landmines—all that people risked to walk through this place that I’m gliding through, plexiglass and air-conditioning. And isn’t that the truth of it?—all I can know of it the warp in the window, the transparent reflection of my own face obscuring the landscape that once held answers, that maybe still does, maybe has its own recurrent dreams, of footsteps marching.

I think this as we climb through the Cardamom Mountains, bus heavy and wheezing. We arrive at the Thai border, our gaggle of Westerners clucking at the Immigration window. (Isn’t this the truth of it?) I buy a coffee; we pile into a different mini-bus and move away from Cambodia and deeper into Thailand.

And it’s different, very different, in a way that surprises me. Borders are usually blurry to me, cultures overlapping like a Venn Diagram. But this one, the contrasts seems stark.

It’s not just that everyone’s driving on the British side of the road, not just that the cars are all newer and shinier. The green is greener in Thailand, I think. There’s no trash on the sides of the road. The electrical wires extend in an orderly fashion, don’t tangle like dreadlocks. There’s more road signs, and they’re crisper, brighter, perkier.

After a month in Cambodia’s capital and five hours chugging through its countryside, Thailand strikes me as wealthy, lavishly wealthy—but something else too. Calm? Peaceful? Something emanates through the lushness, which seems unexplainably lusher than Cambodia. It reminds me of rich kid’s skin, how it seems to glow—how when I was young I learned to spot rich kids by their skin, and I remembering asking my Dad once, “Why do rich kids’ skin glow like that?” and he said, “Access to good health care.” And that made sense, logically, but still didn’t explain all of the glow, or why me and my friends didn’t have it.

And to me, Thailand glows in that way—gleams, even. I stare out at it, the ease and grace it permeates. I want to call it an innocence, but I don’t think it’s that. It’s a stability, I think, perhaps the result of having not been at war, wars. Is this the landscape of peace, of a place that’s managed to never be under the hold of imperialism, that’s maintained a precious degree (or illusion, depending on who you ask) of neutrality?

In comparison to Thailand, I begin to wonder if Cambodia’s landscape does bear wounds, bear a kind of witness—dulled and muted and hard to notice once your eyes have become adjusted to it, like a silhouette of mountains against the night’s sky. Will I be able to see it better when I cross back, the other direction?—what I have easily, automatically normalized.

I stare out the window, searching.

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

A Silence Created By A Mighty Sound Is Still A Sound

Published March 24, 2011 Cambodia , Phnom Penh , Photography , Places , Southeast Asia , Subculture 4 Comments
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Bomb Ponds, Sa Sa Bassac

This is it, I thought. I’ve hit the wall of my own silence.

When I started my trip, on through when I first got to Phnom Penh, I was on fire. I couldn’t stop writing. It came like a flood, from some damp corner of my brain, out my fingers; it came menstrually, ravenously. I couldn’t turn it off. I felt like, for every hour spent outside, I needed three hours to write everything I saw. I was exhausted, and I was in the zone.

And then, and then… Something in me closed the door.

Other doors have closed too. Or haven’t opened to begin with. I had a crap morning. I’d made an appointment to meet with the Acting Director of PADV, a leading domestic violence NGO. Domestic violence is central to the story I have to tell, though I haven’t wanted to look at it. Or rather, I’ve only been able to look at it sideways, head cocked askew, the way my brother watches TV. I’ve stolen a glance at its countenance, its cruel shadow, and I’ve quickly glanced away.

But I wrote the organization, and someone actually wrote me back and was willing to meet. And that’s pretty much what I’ve been doing here in Phnom Penh—standing in a hallway (a skinny dim hallway with a full-length mirror at the end, where I see myself and also something else, a shadow moving perhaps, though I don’t know of what), knocking on doors and waiting to see which ones open.

I woke up with a knot in my stomach and full of nervous energy. I was uptight about the meeting, self-conscious and stressed. I was dreading talking about what we were going to be talking about, something I haven’t been able to find much qualitative information on—the reality of domestic violence in Cambodia.

I never made it to the meeting.

In classic Phnom Penh fashion, I got lost. I tried to look up the address the night before, but Google Maps has proven useless for this city. I got a motobike 40 minutes before the appointment, a confused old man with deep wrinkles and busted plastic sandals.

We eventually found Street 271, but the building numbers didn’t make sense. They stuttered, jumped from 5 to 36 to 300, back to 60. Evens and odds hop-scotched across the sides of the road. Up and down the hot, dusty road, sweating in my tattoo-covering cardigan, scanning the storefronts for addresses, searching for some kind of sense, a logic, a meaning and order, finding none. Sometimes there isn’t one.

We finally found #269, but it was not an NGO. It was a dress shop. I showed the woman, sitting in her pajamas amidst the sequin-studded manequins, the name of the organization. She frowned, waved her hands in the air. I felt forlorn, a kind of panic rising up in me—but why? What for? I felt like I was going to cry.

I handed the motobike driver $2.5, far more than the ride was worth, and thanked him. I tried to call PADV; my phone died. I wove through the traffic to a call center; I got through to PADV, but then the line cut out. I used the internet, wrote them an email, idled while I waited for a reply.

I never heard back from them. I missed my appointment. I felt like I’d hit a wall, alone in the hall with only the echo of my knocking. It was an awful sound, a rhythm like a feeble heartbeat. There was a curious feeling welling up in me, a kind of black hysteria. What was this? I didn’t know; all I was sure of was that I needed to go back to my apartment.

Maybe this is it, I thought. Maybe I’ve gone as far as I can go with this project. Maybe I’m not ready, maybe it’s too much, maybe the doors are locked too tightly, maybe the silence too deafening, maybe it’s that way for a reason.

I went out later for food. I ended up wandering further than I’d meant to. I was close to the Royal Palace, decided to stop in an art gallery I’d been meaning to check out, the only independent art gallery in Cambodia, started up last year by a collective of “new generation” photographers.

The slim doorway led to a dusty stairwell. I squeezed up the narrow passage into Sa Sa Bassac‘s gallery space. The nine photographs on the wall constituted Vandy Rattana‘s The Bomb Ponds, photographic documentation of the craters left behind from American B-52 bombings.

(“In my province,” the downstairs neighbor, who translates conversations between my landlady and I, said, “many people still hate the Americans for the bombings.” He smiled sheepishly, boyishly and looked away.

“You know,” I told him, “most Americans didn’t know about the bombings then. It was kept a secret.” I paused. “And most Americans still don’t know about them.”)

In a back room, sweaty and lit by sunlight, was a table laid out with maps from Rattana’s expeditions to the bomb ponds—black-and-white line drawings circled with highlighters, neon halos and Khmer scribblings. A single typed half-sheet of paper told a story, held a key, a small sound of knocking, knocking…

From primary school to high school and even through university, the history of Cambodia has been put into silent mode for the next generation. Yet a silence created by a mighty sound is still a sound. It is a sound that has been muted.

When I was young I never knew that this sound already existed in my head and body, that gradually it would amplify if I didn’t find understanding. Perhaps others have had the same experience. I don’t know.

My parents told me that this sound stays with us forever once we are affected. They told me as long as we enjoy the sunrise and the bird’s song in the glorious early morning whilst celebrating our noble humility and forgiveness, then this sound would fade away, receeding back to where it came from.

But still I do not understand why this sound exists.

I stood in the heat, in the echoes of street, and nodded. Thank you Vandy, I thought. Thank you.


Fuck you, I love this song. And orange turtlenecks.

Old Films, New Stories and Sifting For Clues

Published March 23, 2011 Cambodia , Film , Phnom Penh , Places , Southeast Asia , Subculture Closed
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I got another clue the other day.

That’s what I feel like I’m doing: sifting around this city for clues. I’m working on my Glimpse project, which is really a personal project, a mammoth undertaking of which the writing is only the very end result, a small part of the process.

What I’m trying to do is reconstruct a story—a story of the past, that was only ever told in fragments, and now those scraps are all that’s left. I’m trying to string them together, make some sort of linear, coherent narrative, though I’m not sure why or what it’ll accomplish or change or relieve.

Because there’s not a linear, coherent narrative. There was once, perhaps, but it’s gone now; the chance to know it is gone too. And the silence and the blank spots, the unknowing—they tell a story too. They tell a story I know much better than the scraps themselves. It’s a story I’ve locked away, in my own kind of silence—a story as foreign to me as the dust and traffic of this city, the microbes in the water, floating in an unseeable dance.

And here’s the other thing I’ve been thinking: what the fuck for? Aside from the huge, glaring fact that it isn’t my story, or is only tangentially my story—my own story is still too dim to know, to touch or hold or let alone tell—aside from that, there’s the Why. Why do we seek out the past, feel a need to understand it, or at least know it—a past we didn’t even live? What does it accomplish or change or relieve?

I went to Bophana yesterday, sat on a straw mat in a corner of a dim room with no fan, and watched New Year Baby. It’s a documentary by a Khmer-American woman about her search to learn about her family’s history and war experience, what was always kept a secret from her. There seem to be more and more foreign-born Khmers doing this—traveling back to Cambodia, seeking out answers, trying to find the full story, the reel from which they’ve only ever seen clipped stills.

It was an excellent film. But the question that kept ringing through my head was Why? What’s this need in us, drive in us, all of us, to know where we come from? And what does it mean for the generations growing up in silence?

In any event, 500 words later, here’s the clue I got. I met with Sithen Sum, director of Kon Khmer Koun Khmer. It’s a collective of young Cambodian filmmakers—the “next generation,” as they’re called here. I’d met him at the opening of the Vintage shop, where repaintings of Cambodian Golden Era film posters intrigued me.

We met at a Western cafe. I was dry-mouthed and bleary-eyed from an all-night bout of traveler’s stomach, but I refused to miss our appointment. We sat in the air-conditioning and talked about the organization’s work: the short films they’d made, the way they’re all volunteer-run, doing all the projects in their off time from other jobs, full-time, money-earning jobs.

The organization grew out of a 2009 exhibition curated by French-Khmer film maker Davy Chou focused on reviving 60s and 70s Cambodian films and bringing them to the public.


Trailer for Chou’s upcoming documentary about Cambodian film revival

Chou led workshops and classes in film making, and inspired the formation of Kon Khmer Koun Khmer. The group has gone on to make a few of their own films, with another to be released in May.

“It started as a revival,” Sithen told me. “We see the old cinema as a bridge to make something new, to create something of our own.”


Trailer of Kon Khmer Koun Khmer’s first film, Twin Diamonds

It was so simple, so succinct: to make something new, they have to know what came before them. To know who you are, you have to know where you come from. Artistically, I’ve always known this is true—where would I be without the works of all those writers I’ve adored that came before me? You need to lineage to build on, whether its a family tree or a film reel.

This was the clue, staring me in the face, living inside me—that took someone else’s words to realize.

“We love the old films like realitives,” he said. “But we’re also critical of them.” They especially don’t like the universal practice of voice dubbing used in the old films. The group is more influenced by foreign methods, Sithen admits; they want to apply foregin knowledge to make new films. “We don’t want to go back to the past,” he told me. “We want to learn from both the successes and mistakes of the old films.”

They want to know where they come from.

Sleepless in Sadness

Published March 20, 2011 Cambodia , Phnom Penh , Places , Southeast Asia 9 Comments
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“How was your week? What did you do?”

We greeted each other, kissed both cheeks in a way that doesn’t feel so awkward anymore. I hadn’t seen Mathilde since last Sunday, and she sat down, a smile and thin arms, ready to catch up.

But I didn’t know what to say. What had I done? Something, things, I remember doing things, walking. But where? It was like trying to recall a very old and dim dream. The week had passed, and I didn’t have much to show for it, other than a vagueness, a tiredness—something like an ache but further away, in a further-away muscle I couldn’t quite name.

Travel can be hard on the body, disrupting our rhythms and throwing us out of whack. But I’m not traveling right now—I’m sitting still, living. Even still, I haven’t had a period since before I left. I’ve been having insomnia. I never have insomnia. I don’t even get jet-lag, in the traditional sleepless sense. But I’ve had nights of laying on the thin worn mattress, staring into the numb dark, waiting, waiting. I wake up thirsty and bleary-eyed, confused about something I can’t quite name.

Another sickness came. It was worse than the last: a searing, lightning-white pain that rose in waves, some earthquake in my gut, cresting out through my limbs. It made me writhe and wince and groan and finally cry out: “Fuuuuck!” After about three hours I finally threw up and staggered back through the fluorescent-haunted apartment, into a ragged sleep.

But on paper, I should be doing fine; by daylight, I feel okay. Good, even. I don’t feel stressed or emotional. I’m taking good care of myself. I’m giving myself down-time and yoga-time and meeting-time. I’m making friends and calling them, not isolating. My project is moving along well—not at a phenomenal lightning speed, but a nice steady clip. I’m learning and asking questions and knocking on doors and writing a lot.

So… what the hell?

I sat reading a book, waiting to meet Rachel for dinner and a ridiculous K-Pop group dance class (yeah, you heard me), to be followed by Cambodia’s only drag show (yeah, again). I was flipping through Lucky Child by Loung Ung. I sipped my coffee and skimmed her descriptions of being a little girl, a child survivor of the Khmer Rouge resettled in the US.

There was a funny feeling inside me. I felt it rumble, the way a stomach rumbles before a sickness comes, sounding like bombs in the distance—a distance inside of you. It wasn’t what she wrote, it was the way she wrote it; it brought up a deep feeling, something like sadness. Something about trying to be little girl and do all your little girl things—cartoons and dolls and minding your manners—amidst a terrible darkness, a thing you were carrying inside you. And being shy and making friends with other little girls and doing all your little girl things, in a darkness that you maybe shared—different shades but the same basic color—though you didn’t know it then, and maybe you don’t even know it now.

But it was 6pm. Time to put the book back and walk down the street, for papaya salad and dancing and drag queens.

It took me hours to fall asleep that night.

I felt hit by a truck when I finally got out of bed. Yoga didn’t help. I didn’t bring my book to the street stall where I drink coffee, just sat staring into the numbness. I went to my meeting. A junkie street kid with bleached hair and dark skin followed me down the street when I left. He touched my arm and when I turned to snatch it back, I looked into his eyes. There was nothing there.

He laughed and screamed, his body shaking as I walked away.

I walked through the city for hours. Where was I going? To find cleaner for hard contact lenses (doesn’t exist in Cambodia, btw), to find an art gallery that’s moved—but where was I really going? I didn’t know. I walked in the heat and shadelessness, dust kicking up and covering my shoes and ankles and swollen red bites freckling my legs.

I felt an old, ancient loneliness. I felt lost, not in Phnom Penh, but in a city inside myself, a landscape I don’t know, without street markers or maybe even names—a layout as foreign to me as to the tuk-tuk drivers that circle this city, searching for familiar landmarks, finding none, lost in a secret map they can’t read and aren’t even sure exists. And I thought of a poem I wrote as a teenager, which wan’t that good but had an ending that proved enigmatically prophetic: “as though I were a tourist / in my own thin body and this own thin body”.

I was just sad. Not for Cambodia or for the past or for the secret past or for the junkies on the street or for my project or any of it. Just fucking sad. And exhausted. There was no contact lens cleaner, and I couldn’t find the gallery again.

In the past, this would have been my cue to Pushed Harder, Work More, Buck Up Solider. But fuck it. Be gentle with yourself, I heard Tracy say.

I went back to my apartment and scrapped together an hour of sleep.

Fragmentary Thoughts at the Killing Fields

Published March 17, 2011 Cambodia , Phnom Penh , Places , Poetry , Southeast Asia , Subculture 9 Comments
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Late afternoon sun through the trees, dusty lot and birds singing, the stillness of a temple. I slide off my shoes and the tiles are hot on my feet as I walk slowly around the pagoda, a tower of skulls.

And it isn’t the skulls that get me—sorted by age and gender, piles that are missing jaws and teeth, holes where the smashing happened, the jagged line were the cranium stitched itself together—lines that were hidden, kept under hair and skin, kept a secret from them, themselves for as long as they lived—and laid bare here now, with nothing to disguise it anymore: This is how you were sewn together, and this is where the wound occurred, and this is what is left.

But the skulls aren’t what gets me, because the skulls don’t seem real. It’s the piles of clothes on the bottom shelf. Shirts and shorts, dusty and tattered and vacant now, a limp pile—this is what is left.

We walk through the field, where the earth dips down into ditches (it’s not rain or erosion that made these), trees that stand stoicly, silently by. We come to stand beside an exhumed grave (but “grave” is too good a word—there’s no word for what this was). A sign says that teeth and bits of bones and scraps of clothes continue to come up, out of the earth, after it rains or floods.

Sometimes the earth write the metaphors for you, I think. Sometimes the ground itself is a poem—this place a poem you couldn’t possibly ever write, no one could write, just walk through—the stillness; the birds; the smell of incense and smoke; someone burning off wild grasses somewhere, behind the fence; schoolkids singing somewhere in the wind. Two monks walking, orange robes, reading the signs with impassive faces, round faces, young young faces.

There’s scraps of clothes everywhere. “Are these…?” we begin to ask each other, but don’t finish the question. (There is no question for what this was.) Surely someone would have gathered these scraps, dusted them off, “deordorized” them as the sign said, added them to the pile of All That Is Left.

But we keep walking and I realize there’s too many, too much—scraps of clothes existing like ghosts, or souls that haven’t quite made it up out of the earth, out of what there aren’t words for, poems for—this.

The trees all saw this, I think. These same trees, noble and twisted and standing here still. Some were forced to take part, and I imagine something in them weeping, their trunks dulled and bloodied. These same trees, bearing witness, the same way they bear witness now—silent, petrified in their places, the way parts of our brains are, the way parts of our brains bear witness (secret stitching, secret from ourselves)—roots tangling and rising out of the earth, with the teeth and bones and scraps of clothing and all the things there aren’t metaphors for: a dusty field in the afternoon sun.

WTF Moment of the Day: Street Monkey

Published March 15, 2011 Blunders , Cambodia , Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Phnom Penh , Places , Southeast Asia 4 Comments
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So about once a day here in Phnom Penh I have a massive WTF moment. I’ve been catalouging them: a boy stabbing birds, Western beggars, my guesthouse posting a sign about not offering “the sex services,” and pretty much any occasion I open the Phnom Penh Post. Strange things, bizarre things that my Western brain can’t compartmentalize—where all there is to do is shrug, shake your head and say “What the fuck…”

Today’s WTF moment came as I was walking home. It was a mellow day, filled with writing and street food, and I was retiring early, walking down a dusty road lined with corrugated metal fences, behind which the humming of machinery had ceased for the day. Men still wearing their hardhats bicycled past; teenagers in school uniforms clustered at the street corners, eating grilled meats from street stalls.

Then I saw this fellow:

Now, I’m familiar with street dogs and street cats and rats and mice and raccoons and squirrels—but WTF?! A street monkey? Phnom Penh isn’t the fucking jungle; it’s a city.

Where did the little guy comes from? Why wasn’t he in a zoo? Why was he just chilling there, riffling through a bag, trying to fish out a little food, sticking his red ass in the air as he repositioned? Why was no one doing anything? Why were they all going about their business like it was no big deal, perfectly normal for a hairy primate cousin to be out and about on a humid late afternoon?

I stood and watched him. I took a picture. A security guard down the road looked at me curiously—What’s this crazy white girl taking a picture of a monkey for?

The monkey tired of the plastic bag, threw it aside. He stretched his limbs and turned, looking into the traffic. He began to cross the street slowly, the same way I do, sensing out the rhythm of the road. He knew what he was doing. He was better at crossing the street than most tourists. The motobikes and tuk-tuks and cars slowed and swerved seamlessly around him—just another monkey cruising across the street.

Then he spotted me.

I still had my camera in my hands; maybe he was offended that I was taking pictures, objectifying him like an animal in a zoo. He gave me a real menacing look, bared his teeth slightly. He walked towards me.

Here I should clarify that I am 100% a city kid. I used to be afraid to swim in water I couldn’t see the bottom of. I’m easily impressed by the appearance of any stars whatsoever. Wildlife freaks me out about as much as uber urbanity freaks other people out. And everything is wildlife: from the geckos on the wall to the squeaks of bats. If it’s not a cat or dog, it’s probably got rabies and wants to eat you.

I thought of Greg, who I met bicycling breathlessly down a dirt road in Southern Italy. Greg was straight outta Queens, his speech peppered with more “yo”s than my own “hella”s. He’d just run into a herd of sheep in the road. He’d freaked—what were they doing? (“Probably grazing,” I offered.) Wildlife, fuck that. He hadn’t wasted any time in pedaling the other direction, and I immediately understood his panic.

And so the gangsta street monkey swaggered towards me. I moved slowly (“keep it cool, don’t ask scared, he can smell your fear”), stepping carefully, one foot at a time, in the opposite direction. When he disappeared between two parked cars, I walked briskly away, shaking my head and thinking, “What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck.”

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.

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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