Memory and Healing in Cambodia

  I tell myself it’s a trick of the light, but I still can’t help marvelling when plane banks and the muddy water fills with the reflection of the blue sky, and for a fleeting moment it is a glittering, sapphire jewel set deep in an emerald jungle.

Then it is gone, already somewhere far behind us, and there are the miles of rice paddies and the villages spread out across the flood plains of the Mekong.   The plane is bouncing on the monsoon thermals and suddenly we’re down on the ground at Pochentong airport, in Phnom Penh.

Hong Kheang is at the airport to meet us.  He is a handsome man in his early forties who says little, but is welcoming.   He helps us back our bags into his car.   We drive out onto the main road into town, and the splendor of Indo-China overwhelms us.  The spacious boulevards are lined with trees dripping in red and white blossoms.   The giant, ornate stupas are gold against the wide sky.  The crumbling French buildings with bougainvillaea climbing the yellow walls and their rusting corrugated iron roofs are as exquisite as the ornate Buddhist and ancient Hindu statues that are hidden in the gardens and museums.  The rubbish-strewn alleyways lined with shanties contrast with the neatly-trimmed lawns of the public squares.  Everywhere in war-shattered Phnom Penh, the buildings are being repaired.  Despite the destruction caused by mortars and rocket-grenades, it remains a beautiful city with its barefoot children running along the red dust edges of the roads, the grandfathers on their motor-scooters, the women in their colourful wraps balancing enormous plates of tropical fruit on their heads.  Everybody is busy, everybody has somewhere to go, but everybody, just like Hong, takes the time to smile and be friendly . . .

I have to stop myself for a moment.  Hong is one of the generation who spent the best years of his life existing under the genocidal rule of the Khmer Rouge.  They forced the entire population of the cities into the countryside to work in their slave camps.  Hundreds of thousands of people were killed or died of starvation for the crime of being middle-class or even just educated.   I look around.  The city is filled with businessmen talking on cell phones, people selling cigarettes, trishaw drivers, policemen, mothers with young children crossing the road.  I have to remember that everybody here over thirty lived through the Khmer Rouge; everybody over the age of three has lived through the Vietnamese occupation and the civil war that followed it.

Hong can never forget how it was.  ‘That time was very bad,’ he tells us quietly.  ‘Everyone was forced out of town.  Phnom Penh was like a ghost town.  I was in the countryside working in the rice fields, no school, nothing, for three years, eight months and twenty days.’

‘You kept an exact count? I ask.

He nods.  ‘Of course.’

Hong takes us to see the sights of the city: Wat Phnom, with its tame elephant and fortune tellers who divine your future from the flight of songbirds that you pay to set free.  It is the most ancient temple in the city, built on the hill where legend says that four Buddha images were washed up by the river.  The phantasmagorical Royal Palace with its golden spires and pinnacles reaching up to the heavens.  The Pagoda of the Emerald Buddha with its 5000 floor tiles of pure silver.   The Chan Chaya Pavilion where the elegant Cambodian ballet was once staged.

Down the potholed back streets of the city we enter the real centre of Hong’s life: Tuol Sleng prison.  A high school converted into a crude jail and interrogation centre by the Khmer Rouge.  We wander through the ghastly corridors, peering into classrooms with their grisly bars and rusting beds where prisoners were chained and tortured.  The trunks of the palm trees outside still bear the scars of machete cuts and bullet holes.

‘Cambodians,’ Hong says, shaking his head.  ‘We are the worst, I think.  We killed our own people.  It is unbelievable.’

Dusk on the Tonle Sap river which runs through the heart of Phnom Penh is one of the most beautiful sights in the world.   The air begins to cool, and the city slows down as the horizon turns mauve and silver under the rain clouds.  One by one, the streetlamps and the neon signs on Sisowath Quay flicker on in the growing darkness of the humid Asian night.  The new millionaires cruise by in their Mercedes-Benzes; and the young, optimistic men and women who have found a place in this new society sit at the street cafes while they laugh and pour another cold beer.  But under the shallow glitter, crime is an ever-present reality.  AK-47s or even hand-grenades are easy to buy, and it only costs a few hundred dollars to pay an ex-soldier to assassinate someone for you.

As the delicate beauty of the sunset fades and night falls on the streets you can feel the edge of fear and violence that haunts the not-so-lucky: the ragged street children who beg; the trishaw drivers who will peddle and wait all night for a dollar; and the saddest of all, the hordes of prostitutes filling the bars, young girls from the countryside who will never go home again.

Jade paddy fields, tall palms against a blue sky.  White oxen pulling wooden carts.  Children splashing and swimming and catching tiny fish in the clear water of the canals.  Outside Phnom Penh is a way of life that hasn’t changed for 1000 years, since the grandeur of the ancient Khmer empire.  Its capital, Angkor Thom, is the glory of Cambodia.  The huge stone temples and palaces are surrounded by thick jungle, filled with parrots and monkeys.  Many of the ruins are still half-hidden in the deep vegetation, their stonework choked and crumbled by enormous tree roots.

‘We’ve got nothing like this in Europe,’ a young British tourist whispers as the clouds part and a rainbow arches over the dark stone spires of Angkor Wat.  We cross the moat filled with lotus and water-lilies.  Saffron-robed monks are framed in the ancient stone doorways.  Incense smoke curls around the headless stone Buddhas.  The Heavenly Apsaras still dance between the bullet scars on the stonework.  Shafts of sunlight fall through the broken roof onto the bas-reliefs of the Churning of the Sea of Milk, of the Battle of the Gods and Demons.

Outside, beyond the cool, shaded vaults of the Elephant Gate, the beggars advance on us.  Tiny, dirty children; haggard old men; middle-aged women trying to smile.  One of them stands out for me: a young man in a wheelchair, both his legs blown off by a landmine.  He has a gentle face.  I have seen damage in my life: people on Second Avenue in Manhattan carelessly stepping past the body of a man with a dark red hole in the middle of his forehead; AK-47s spitting death in the dusty streets of Thokoza and Katlehong; and the rotting corpses piled up in the beautiful green valleys of Rwanda – there is the collective human memory of all that and more buried in the expression of this young man.  The tragic calmness in his eyes somehow speaks for all the ghosts of Cambodia, for all the broken lives that lie underneath the smiles of its people.  I give him some money.  He accepts it gracefully, but of course it is not enough – with his legs gone no money can ever be enough now.

Later, in the moonlit darkness of our hotel room, with the liquid chorus of frogs filling the night air, I find myself thinking of the gentle wonders of this country: the bright yellow canna lilies against the rippling green of the rice fields; the peasant families laughing softly in the cool shade under their houses on stilts; the fishermen and fruit-sellers in their long thin boats that drift on the silver currents of the Mekong in the last ochre rays of the sun; the scent of smoke and food grilling on charcoal and the endless flow of people in the city night . . .

I can’t help remembering Hong’s sad words, and wishing I had said it to him then. No, you’re not the worst.  Not by a long way.  It’s just that you’ve seen the worst, and yet, you’ve survived.