Posts Tagged 'phnom penh'

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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?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gJqPOIfKa0&feature=related
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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_fkNEuX-qw&feature=related
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.

Two Cambodias

Published March 12, 2011 Cambodia , Culture Shock , Dirty Tricks , Phnom Penh , Places , Southeast Asia 6 Comments
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“The Cambodian people are just so lovely.”

You’re apt to hear this from other Westerners as you travel throughout Southeast Asia; you arrive in Phnom Penh and you’re apt to agree. A friendly, welcoming, almost shy demeanor, so vastly different from the brashness of their Vietnamese neighbors—it’s entracing, in a way, and a part of you falls in love with it, with the endlessly smiling faces, the hands pressed together and the small bow, say, when you pay your tab at a restaurant.

“How could they have possibly killed each other?” you hear people ask. “It’s amazing to think the Khmer Rouge could have occurred in a place like this, where the people are just so nice.” And as you graze the surface—stroll along the riverside, say, or stop for a coffee at a shady little street stall—it’s easy to wonder the same thing.

But you stay here a little while and you begin to see things—shadows that move like stray dogs, so that you think they’re stray dogs, until you look closer and realize: no, no, that’s something else. And it’s like there’s two Cambodias—the one you see on the surface, during daylight hours, and the other, some strange Other, of darkness and violence and short skirts sitting outside neon nightclubs, and weird, weird shit you couldn’t possibly ever understand.

“It’s out there,” Rachel said, nodding. “And all you need to do is scratch the surface—” she flicked her finger in the air “—and you see it.”

Flipping through the two English-language newspapers, you catch glimpses, between the black newsprint that smudges onto your fingertips in the heat. Western pedafiles, human traffikers, drug busts. You read a story about a local military captain being punished for using his gun “anarchically”, shooting it recklessly into a crowd of people. Because no one died, he doesn’t face any criminal charges. Instead, his head is shaved and he’s forced to go a military detention center, what sounds like a work camp, where he scrubs toilets and collects rubbish. He’ll be forced to work until “his attitude changes, then he’ll be set free.”

You read another article, about the murder/rape of a 25-year-old girl in a village in the Cham province. She’d been scratched, maimed, her vagina set ablaze. And yet it’s what the article mentions in passing, without further explaination, as though it were a given, that you find most disturbing. “Even in a time when every week brings fresh news of a horrific assault on a woman or child, the brutality of Lim Kim’s death stands out.” It’s determined that the attacker must be married, because otherwise he would have just married the victim after raping her and wouldn’t have had to kill her. “Something made him unable to be responsible for his actions,” the local police had determined. The reporter had gone on to interview villagers; they reported being “scared of the ghost of the body, but most of all the attacker”—as though it were perfectly normal to be scared of the murderer girl’s ghost, but not of an attacker.

Tim’s telling you the lead-in to some story, some hapless night. It took place at the first Western nightclub in Phnom Penh, where prostitution isn’t the worst of the city’s nightclubs, but certainly still present. “It’s called Heart of Darkness—”

“Wait,” you stop him. “Are you fucking serious? The first Western nightclub in the city is called ‘Heart of Darkness’?”

He nods and you laugh, because what is there else to do in the face of such a blatant metaphor—if you wrote in a book, you say, it’d be over-the-top symbolism. But here it is, in real life, staring you in the face, and there’s nothing to do but shake your head and laugh.

“You should always take a taxi at night,” Patricia tells you at the club, giving you the number of a taxi service. “The police clock off at 9. So sometimes, the moto or tuk-tuk driver will call a friend, and there’ll be someone waiting at your apartment with a gun to rob you. The taxi costs more, but it’s better.”

You program the taxi number into your phone.

You’re having dinner with Susan and she mentions in passing that the number of mob killings are down. “Mob killings?” you ask. “Oh, yes,” and she tells you about the phenomenon of mobs of people spontaneously beating and stoning accused theives to death. “It was really bad seven or so years ago, several a month. They came under pressure from the UN to get a handle on it. It’s pretty rare in Phnom Penh now, but it still happens in the provinces.”

“A girl was double raped earlier this week,” Tom tells you, “and her attackers only had to pay a $125 restitution. The case didn’t even go to court.”

“We’ve secured scholarships for several kids to go back to school,” Romi tells you when you visit Tiny Toones.

“Are the school fees very high?” you ask.

“No,” she sighs, “it’s the bribes that really add up.”

“Bribes?”

“Yes, the teacher bribes. They don’t always call it that, but it’s like this: the teacher photocopies a lesson. They say, ‘I paid for this photocopy, so you must pay me.’ If you don’t, you don’t get the lesson, you can’t take the test, you can’t pass the class. So it’s like this. But,” she shurgs and looks out at the shaded lot of squealing children, “this is Cambodia, and this is how it is.”

You nod. You’ve given up trying to wrap your head around it, trying to fit it into some compartment of Western understanding.

But it doesn’t feel bipolar; it doesn’t feel like a contradiction, or like it’s at odds with itself. You feel, on an intuitive, unnameable level, that it’s two sides of the same coin—that it’s born from the same place, the beauty and grace and warmth, and the violence and corruption and darkness—born from the same mystery down there at the center, and not so far from the surface.

You think of Elliott Smith. Which is embarrassing and ridiculous, but you think of him anyway—of the beautiful ballads, the immense tenderness, the way you cried across the Atlantic when his song came on your iPod and the news of the death was fresh, an another lifetime that’s not so long ago sometimes, not as far as you’d like to think. And you think of people asking, “Man, how could he write such beautiful songs and fucking stab himself in the chest?”

And you’d always thought, “That’s how.” And you think of it now, though you’re not sure why, though it’s not at all the same thing—though you laugh at your silly, silly gut for telling you it is.

A Morsel of Americanness, Here in Cambodia

Published March 10, 2011 Being American , Cambodia , Dirty Tricks , Food , Lonely Girl Loves , Phnom Penh , Places , Southeast Asia 3 Comments
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If you look deep, deep into my center of my American soul, you will find that it’s not composed of car owning or monolingualism or even rock n roll.

It’s filled with peanut butter.

Australians have their Vegemite and the Swedes have their Muesli and the whole of Europe has their Nutella. But I am American, and my heart pumps, not red blood like yours but thick, chunky, light-brown swirls of peanut butter.

In previous posts, I’ve claimed that this love of the ground peanut is my number one American qualifier. I’ve gone so far as to consider a peanut butter tattoo, which I envision coming complete with a traditional-style banner that reads: “From my cold dead hands.” I effing love the stuff, and I miss it dearly when I travel. Usually, when homesickness and the craving for healthy fat gets the better of me, I search and search for a jar to no avail.

So imagine my sheer delight when I found this little gem of patriotism staring out from the shelf at me:

Not only is it delicious and nutritious, it comes with a prominent display of national pride. Now that’s what I call proper marketing.

A Room of One’s Own, Phnom Penh

Published March 10, 2011 Cambodia , Home , Lonely Girl Loves , Phnom Penh , Places , Sola , Sola , Southeast Asia 4 Comments
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My mind is a land of contrasts. (How’s that for cliche?)

I love travel. I love the bag-and-purse of it, of having everything you need fit in a 18 kg bundle on your back. I love the not knowing, the pick-up-and-go of it, love arriving in a city dazed and cramp-legged, and I love walking new streets—the landscape of the unfamiliar. I even love the train-and-bus of it, the bump-of-the-road of it, looking out of a window at alien earth that sometimes seems a mirror to the alien earth inside myself, and thinking my nothing thoughts.

But I also love the notion of home—not a notion, really, but a feeling. I love running into people I know at the market. I love my favorite table at my favorite cafe. I love the comfort of routines, little rituals, the prayer inside the doing of everyday tasks. And I love the sense of having an anchor, somewhere deep inside you—that no matter where you go, there’s a place to go back to.

Which might be why I’ve never moved out of the US, or hell, even out of Oakland—some kind of magnetism that always pulls me back to my hometown, no matter how far I wander. Oh sure, I fantasize and I’ve plotted and planned, but when it’s come right down to it, I’ve never actually left.

I didn’t want to feel transient in Phnom Penh. I’ll be here for around six weeks of my 2+ months in Cambodia, and it’d be easy enough to just stay in a hotel. You can get a decent one for $10-13, with wifi and air-con and someone that comes to clean it everyday (an endlessly thrilling novelty for a budget traveler such as a myself). It would have been easier—everything pre-arranged, crisp corners and clean counters. It also would have been sterile.

I didn’t want to have to leave a key at reception every morning. I didn’t want the posse of motorbike drivers posted outside the door, waiting for Western customers. I didn’t really, when it came down to it, want someone else cleaning up after me everyday.

I wanted a room of my own.

I asked around about people looking to sublet, but didn’t come up with anything. So I just started walking around, looking for “For Rent” signs. I wanted to stay in the neighborhood my Couchsurfing host was in, slightly north of Center and a little mellower, where the pace is that of local folks living local life.

I found a place on Street 84. It’s not the nicest apartment—quite threadbare, actually, and it doesn’t have wifi. It’s not the cheapest either—not expensive, but if I’d spent longer searching, I’m sure I could have found a decent room for less. Once I pay for a month’s worth of electricity, it’ll end up only being slightly less than a midrange hotel.

But I have a room of my own.

I have a little vanity in the bedroom. It’s got small shelves and a mirror and a little drawer with a lock, a stool with a floral-patterned cushion that rolls out. I tenderly unpacked all my lady things—make-up and headbands and jewlery—arranged them on the shelves. I put my passport in the drawer. In the mornings I roll out the stool and open my jar of face powder and see my face in the mirror, looking back.

I have a small kitchen with a metal tub of a sink and a small tiled counter; I have a bathroom where the showderhead is beside the toilet and there’s no curtain to separate the two spaces, but it’s just enough room for one. Yesterday I went to the central market and bought toilet paper and dish soap and a sponge and a couple plastic plates and bowls, and I’ve placed them next to the handtowel the landlady supplied me with, which I folded into a neat rectangle.

There’s a fan in the other room that takes awhile to get going—I’ve got to pull the string cord four, five, six times to awaken it to its buzzing. There’s a metal table and a single chair and a TV set that I’ve left unplugged. There’s a refrigerator that must have come from some convenience store, a small, three-shelf thing covered in Pepsi logos. I’ve placed a container of Laughing Cow cheese inside, some yogurts, a mango the landlady gave me when I moved in. At night it beams like a fluorescent night-light, casting a glow throughout the apartment, and I hear it humming when I roll over in my sleep.

There’s big metal doors that I have to heave open and tug shut. Red contact paper has been placed over the thick glass, to make it opaque, and the light that shines through in the daytime makes the room look lurid. It’s got a big padlock that slides through the metal rings, and an old-fashioned skeleton-type key that was given to me on a shoestring and I keep it my purse, I carry it with me, all over this city—the key to my own room.

I love it. It’s barely furnished and virtually without windows and only mine for a month—but for that month it’s mine. My own room, my own sense of home, in Phnom Penh.

The Lone Black Dance: Tiny Toones Record Release

Published March 7, 2011 Cambodia , Dance , Inspiration , Lonely Girl Loves , Music , Phnom Penh , Places , Southeast Asia , Subculture Closed
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I knew, I knew, I knew there was something there.

You hear about an organization: Tiny Toones. Founded by a deported Khmer-American, it works to improve the lives and futures of Phnom Penh’s street kids—through, primarily, breakdance. You don’t breakdance. You’re not Cambodian and you don’t even really listen to hip-hop anymore. But there’s something about it, something about it…

I’ve recently figured this out about myself: that things I should, by all logic, experience as intense emotions, vivid memories and blazing-eyed convictions, I experience instead as far-away feelings, a vague awareness, a dim hunch in the sunlight of my consciousness (oh silhouette, oh silhouette). And so it was with Tiny Toones.

I went to their album release party last Saturday. In their four years of existence, Tiny Toones has grown to encompass additional programs: computer literacy, Khmer and English literacy, harm reduction and music. The release of their first full-length hip-hop album was the end result of that new program.

The event was held on the rooftop of the Meta House, the minimalist white German cultural center. Like the show I’d gone to two nights prior, the crowd was a healthy mix of ages and locals/expats. And like the previous show, the kids behind the mike and turnatables all looked totally hip-hop American. It reminded me of being at a Youth Speaks event.

And so there were speeches and raffles and auctions and performances. They also showed some videos, including a recording of the performace that had won the organization a recent TED Award. Participants had developed narrative breakdances that depicted defining elements of their life stories (oh undimness, oh spotlight).

A girl depicted being abused, two boys violent robbery. They’d be in black for these, at the end of each, they’d shed their black shirts, under which there were white shirts, and they’d join each other, a representation of Tiny Toones.

They do one for addiction. Boys crouched around a make-shift pipe (oh soda bottle, oh tin foil). The kids in white pass by, and every time they take another boy in black with them. Finally there is one boy, in one spotlight, alone on the stage.

He does a strange dance, beautiful dance. His shoulder arch up like he’s attached to strings (oh puppet child, oh puppet child)—he rises, chest first and lungs full—and then drops back down, as though whatever held those strings (oh God-like fingers, oh typewriter of fate) had dropped him suddenly—and he crashes to the floor, the bottom, or what appears to be the bottom—in real life there’s always further you can go, downer and downer and maybe even death isn’t the basement (oh elevator of addiction, oh wobble of the cablewires)—maybe the dance continues on after that, into that, souls arching and crashing endlessly, winglessly.

Anyway, he carries on like that—spotlight and a bare stage, rising and falling around the homemade pipe—and I think: Well, isn’t that just it? Isn’t that the dance of it?

And it surprises me how much I relate to it. Though it shouldn’t. Because even though it would outwardly appear that I have even less in common with this kid dancing, a Cambodian streetkid, than oh, say, Charlies Sheen—you strip away the details, the circumstances—you strip away the lights and setting and the props—and isn’t that all you’re ever left with? Isn’t that all we (oh puppet children, oh puppet children) ever really do?—a lone black dance on a barren stage?

I smiled and thought: Of course, of course, of course.

O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
How can we know the dancer from the dance?
—William Butler Yeats

Dance, Dance, Evolution: Aerobic Dancing at the Olympic Stadium

Published March 6, 2011 Cambodia , Dance , Phnom Penh , Places , Southeast Asia , Subculture 1 Comment
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It’s dusk at the Olympic Stadium, and it feels like a festival. Vendors have set up stalls selling snack foods, beverages, trinkets. People in sweat clothes swarm. Cliche club dance music beats out of stereosystems and, lined up along the cement ring of the stadium’s top tier, little old ladies dance.

It’s called Aerobic Dancing, and it’s about the goddamn most endearing thing I’ve ever seen.

I saw it my first night in Phnom Penh, along the riverside. A few sets of stereospeakers had been set up, and young men were leading groups in dance moves. I thought it was something for tourists, some sort of street performance. I looked for baskets of money and didn’t see any. Then I scanned the expressions of the dancers’ faces, and they were all totally in earnest, concentrated of getting the moves right. Now this, I thought, is something different.

It was recommended to me later that I go to the city’s Olympic Stadium at dawn (um, no) or dusk (um, yes!) to see some real aerobic dancing. Well, you didn’t have to tell me twice.

It’s bustling leading up the steep slope of the stadium’s entrance. People swing their arms and legs, warming up. Children run around. I get to the top, and it’s a buzzing beehive of fitness. People run the stairs. Down at the bottom, a crew of joggers circle the dirt track. But the overwhelming majority of people at the stadium are late-middle-aged women. And they are there to dance.

Now, I’m quite familiar with old ladies doing Tai Chi in the parks at dawn. And I’m even used to random young Western dude who thanks to Ghost Dog has aspirations of becoming an urban samurai and practices along. But this is something entirely different.

About a dozen different stations are set up along the stadium’s ring, where a cool dusk breeze passes. Their music and moves are all slight variations of each other: twists and kicks and stretches and arm raises, a little fancy footwork from time to time. The people in the front rows sweat, focus intently. Most of the others vaguely step along, moving this way and that, sometimes getting the moves right, sometimes not. It doesn’t really seem to be about that.

The leaders of all of these groups are young men, teenagers in some cases. Hair swept across the face, pink shirts, dedazzled jean pockets: they are boys that by American standards would be categorically, 100% flaming gay. But they’re doing their thing here. And a crew of older ladies are doing it with them.

I sit and watch for awhile: the various sets of raised arms, the shakes and twists, the echoes of club music. Before the Khmer Rouge, dance was one of the most important art forms in the culture. Most of the country’s dancers, along with other artists, were killed.

Well, this might not be a revival of a lost traditional art form, but it might be an evolution of that. It might be a new manifestation of a cultural predisposition to dance. Or it could just be exercise, set to a melting sky and sweet as fucking hell.

Voices of the Khmer Rouge: The Exhibition and the Mystery

Published March 4, 2011 Cambodia , Phnom Penh , Places , Southeast Asia 12 Comments
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I never heard the term “Khmer Rouge” growing up. We didn’t learn about Cambodia in school, didn’t hear about it in TV or the movies. I must have been a teenager when I first heard those specific words, and I remember it sounding terribly exotic and glamorous: “Khmer,” smooth, black, still as glass; “Rouge,” like lipstick, like burlesque, Paris in the 20s. (Cambodia, Cambodia—where even the genocides have beautiful names.)

I did hear about Pol Pot. Not all the time—quite rarely, actually, and only in passing, but in a way that made in stand out in your mind, that made it tuck into some cramped little corner of your brain where nothing much else goes. How did you learn to make fire from two sticks? “I learn during Pol Pot.” Why were you running, pregnant, through waist-deep water in the middle of a monsoon? “To escape Pol Pot.” Who hung you upside down for days when you were caught stealing food? “Pol Pot.”

It was never the Khmer Rouge, but instead always this person, this invisible man, a dark silhouette that you could perhaps see passing, passing, passing through the house at night—like a ghost or a phantom or something even realer than that: Pol Pot.

So it was a type of linguistic division—responsibility placed not on a mass of people, a movement (ie: Nazis), but on a single person. Not a war, a genocide, but a man.

I kept thinking about that last night. I chanced upon—as I’ve been “chancing” upon everything in this project, so that you can’t really call it chance at all—the exhibition “Voices of the Khmer Rouge.” A massive audiovideo installation, “Voices of the Khmer Rouge” features 30 interviews with former low-ranking Khmer Rouge soliders, displayed with multi-lingual subtitles on some dozen computer monitors/headsets. It’s being shown at the Bophana Audiovisual Resource Center, an historical archive center with free, open access to the public. The exhibition opening happened to be last night. So I went.

It was sweltering hot in Bophana’s main floor, a space that was meant to have air-conditioning but didn’t. There were well-dressed Westerners and well-dressed Cambodians—lots of younger Cambodians, too: teens and twenties, what’s referred to as “the next generation,” all wearing the same type of short-leeve button-up top and slacks, conservative skirts. At a certain point, a herd of younger children filtered through, chattering softly; they were thin and dark and put on the headphones and stared.

The opening speeches were being translated into 3 languages—Khmer, English and French—and proceeded at a painstaking pace. I stood in the breeze of a fan and read the subtitles flashing on the screen.

All of the interviewees were poor villagers from a Northern province. Many of them had been young when they joined the Khmer Rouge—teenagers or even children. I’d read about that, accounts of that: the Khmer Rouge’s use of child soliders. Some had been arrested and forced to join, others felt they’d had no choice, and still others joined voluntarily, zealously.

So they’d mostly all been extremely vulnerable. They all spoke of experiencing hardship during Lon Nol’s regime and the American B-52 bombings: hunger, death, loss. They were angry, young, uneducated and desperate. These are dangerous conditions.

Their thoughts about the Khmer Rouge now ran the gamut. One man lauded Pol Pot as a hero who’d fought imperalism. He thought of him as a teacher and kept repeating that he couldn’t say Pol Pot is bad because, “If the student says the teacher is bad, then the student is bad too”—a logic steeped in the Cambodian brand of Buddhism.

There was a marked clarity when it came to the US’s involvement in the development of the war. One woman summed up: “Americans paid Khmers to fight other Khmer, and that’s what we were fighting: Khmer puppets.” Another man, with piercing eyes and deep wrinkles, spoke of how the power of the Khmer Rouge was set up by the “greater powers” of the world. He cited the US, China, Vietnam, Cuba, the Soviet Union—how they supplied money, guns, mines. “It was the greater powers that incited war. How could they have afforded it otherwise?”

He said that he was for the trying for former Khmer Rouge leaders, but that it wouldn’t be a proper trial if it was only trying them. “America must pay compensation too,” he said.

When I was at Tuol Sleng, my tour guide had said something about the Khmer Rouge that stood out to me. He said that they had “the trauma” just like the victims. Some of them killed, but they had to; if they didn’t, they’d be killed. “So they are victims too,” he said. “Indirect victims, but victims too.” That sense of division echoed in me: Pol Pot vs. the Khmer Rouge.

One woman, old and thin now, spoke of how she’d felt sorry for the people in the camps, but how there was nothing she could do. “That is war.” Mostly, she felt sorry for her Khmer Rouge comrades. She said how, when one would die, they would mourn them like a sibling. And I imagined an army of children in black pajamas, in the jungle with their semi-automatic weapons, stripped of their families, with nothing but each other.

Another man had been sent to be a solider as a child. During the fighting, he said, he’d lost his thumb, an eye, had a leg cut off; he didn’t even mention his missing front teeth. “I became a disabled person,” and he said it with a smile, a well-what’re-you-gonna-do smile—a battered little shell of a man.

Another man had a broad smile and smooth dark skin. He spoke of being afraid. “Maybe they will see this and come arrest me and execute me.” I thought of what my tour guide had said, how he’s still easily frightened, all these years later. “This would be very unfortunate for me,” said the man on the screen, and he smiled still, laughed. “It may sound like I’m joking, but I’m not.”

The project’s producers were on hand to discuss the work—two Danish dudes. They insisted that this was an art installation, because it wasn’t attempting to answer questions, only raise them. They refused to tell viewers what to think of the interviews; they wanted you to look at them and make your own conclusions.

“There are no conclusions,” I thought.

I waited around to speak with one of them. I was curious about a point he’d made—that he felt there were different levels of Khmer Rouge, the “really bad guys,” as it was convenient to phrase, and the other people, who existed in shades of grey—so many shades of grey, I’d thought, that you hadn’t knew existed before, like looking at one of those charts of the light spectrum in science class and realizing that all you’d ever seen was this small sliver of what was out there.

Another American girl had him cornered; I eavesdropped and they seemed to be talking about the same thing. She was debating that point fiercely, the kind guilty-by-compliance logic that had always made sense to me, before this. She was young, unwrinkled skin and braces, and kept shaking her head.

I finally got my chance to ask him. I told him my linguistic childhood ancedote. He spoke about the shades of grey, how he didn’t think it was as simple as just Pol Pot or all the Khmer Rouge. He again urged me to find my own answers.

“I think maybe there aren’t answers,” I said.

Which I think didn’t sound the way I’d intended. It wasn’t to say that the search was futile—because, after all, what the hell am I doing? (What the hell am I doing?)

No, I think the search is one of the most worthwhile things we can do. But I keep feeling like every layer I peel back, the further I look into it, the more complex it gets; it only opens the door to new questions. So we can look at it and we can tease it apart and try to know it, but I feel that at the center of it all is a great mystery, an un-understandability—the same mystery that’s at the center of everything, only maybe a little darker.

It’s a fact I feel I keep coming back to and keep coming back to, that all of seems to orbit around: the impenetrable mystery—smooth, black, still as glass.

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.

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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