If you want to be crushed and reminded of how much humanity and humans suck, go to Phnom Penh. The capital city itself is wild and crazy, a sort of older and crustier Bangkok on steroids. There are imaginary mental lines of driving lanes that people and animals seem tacitly to agree on. The amount of dust floating overhead from the dirt and pollution piling up cannot possibly be healthy. Every once in a while, you can glimpse a Starbucks or some chain that made my heart pitter-patter and momentarily think, “The city! The mothership! A language I can understand (i.e., American hegemony and all the wonderful cookie-cutter corporate commercial food and beverage predictability that entails). Somehow I managed to avoid McDonalds.
There is an omnipresent juxtaposition between modern-day Phnom Penh and its tragic history.
The Past
Southeast Asia during the 1970s is a complicated…with international, regional, local, geopolitical, and human dimensions. The Cambodian Civil War spanned 1970-1975, with the Communist Khmer Rouge and their North Vietnamese allies fighting the Cambodian government, backed by the U.S. and the South Vietnamese government. The Khmer Rouge won this war in 1975, when they took over Phnom Penh.
The revolutionary Pol Pot became the leader of Cambodia. He swiftly implemented his twisted vision of a self-sufficient agrarian nation, immediately expelling all the urban-dwellers to the forced labor camps and farms with expectations and quotas around rice production. They were not given instructions or tools. In fact, this anarchic vision for the future was predicated on not using modern technology or farming practices. The severity of the regime and the fear instilled meant the overseers would push laborers to work even longer hours and produce even more to compensate for the lack of tools and knowledge. Working 12+ hour days with barely any food meant that many people died. Anyone suspected to be a threat (e.g., wearing glasses) were immediately killed.
Over the course of the 3 years, 8 months, and 20 days that the Khmer Rouge ruled, 3 million of the 8 million people in Cambodia died.
The two main sites to visit in Phnom Penh are the killing fields, the site of mass graves, and S-21, the former high school that was converted to a prison during this period. Both destroyed me. I think it is important to know the history, but I am no longer sure if it is important to acknowledge and pay tribute to this collective history by visiting.
There are ~10,000 known killing fields in Cambodia. The one I visited is called Cheung Ek, located 15 km southwest of Phnom Penh. Roughly 17,000 people were executed there during the Khmer Rouge’s reign. The tour itself is an audio guide and loop path with the audio explaining each of the sites. Many of the buildings themselves no longer exist. Some held prisoners, others held supplies or arms, and still others were meeting rooms. There are impressions in the earth, indicators of grave sites. Apparently, there are remains of bones and teeth in the ground (I tried not to see it), and rains continue to bring up more human fragments.
There is a stupa memorial that contains skulls and bones. Each is grouped by age and then marked with a colored dot sticker that classifies them according to cause of death or other elements. Though empathetic, I am usually pretty tough (maybe even jaded) when it comes to the realities and horrors of what people have done or are capable of doing to each other. Genocide is a whole other level though. It wasn’t the facts, the stories, or my imagination that got to me though. I think it was the place itself. The energy of being somewhere so tragic makes you take responsibility for atrocities you did not personally commit but somehow cannot help but blame your own human condition for. It was rough.
The prison was even worse. The cells, the iron beds with shackles, the photos of the prisoners, paintings of the torture devices. I am not sure if we are meant to step foot into places like that. I close my eyes, and I see blood. I think reading about it and seeing photos even in that medium is sufficient. I almost felt disrespectful being there.
Back to the City
My tuk tuk ($20 for the entire day of transport) took me back via the winding roads. My mind was far away. Processing.
I arrived at my very nice hotel, The Patio, and appreciated the A/C. I went upstairs for a rooftop swim, got a massage, and ate a very nice French dinner, a bit weary, a bit pained, but not allowing suffering. (And then I ate everything in my mini-bar. I suppose it was better than drinking everything in my mini-bar.)
