Phnom Penh 19.04.10

In harmony with the Tao,
the sky is clear and spacious,
the earth is solid and full,
all creatures flourish together,
content with the way they are,
endlessly reapeating themselves,
endlessly renewed.

When man interferes with the Tao,
the sky becomes filthy,
the earth becomes depleted,
the equilibrium crumbles,
creatures become extinct.

The Master views the parts with compassion,
because He understands the whole.
His constant practice is humility.
He doesn't glitter like a jewel
but lets himself be shaped by the Tao,
as rugged as common stone.

Tao te Ching, Chapter 39

You know what you’re going into when you reach for the balcony doorknob and it’s almost too hot to touch. It’s 8 am. Open the door and suck in your first breath of the oven. Below motorscooters loaded with 3,4,5 riders buzz along under the young trees on the esplanade. The river shines like a ribbon of sun, doubling the blinding glare from the east. Last night’s troubling scenes of hookers and toddlers roaming the street in the orange sodium vapour light are cicatrice memory.

I fall back into the fluorescent glare of the tiny room, get dressed and descend to seek some food that doesn’t nauseate. Thailand, Lao and Vietnam were fantastic for food. The establishments weren’t always pin-clean but the food was lightly cooked and robust in complex flavour, texture and colour. In Cambodia I have begun to grow weary of the sameness of the heavy curries and the oily cooking. For the first time in months I am contemplating Western food.

As we walk out of the hotel a mid-30s Aussie fellow is leading a not-quite-young but gamefully smiling Cambodian woman up to his room. He winks archly at me. He’s hugging a few cans of Foster’s to his chest. I will see the pair the next morning at nearly the same time. They will be leaving the hotel. She will definitely not be smiling – appearing more a captive than a lover. He looks grim and tired, impatient. Although it is morning the flesh trade is 24/7 in Phnom Penh. The johns are fiercer looking here. Lupine ex-biker types with denim vests and long stringy grey hair. They sport formerly impressive arms with sagging tattoo work. They are often seen wearing bandages and grinning with hockey-star teeth. The game must be more volatile here. A half-crazy Brit was shouting at the young woman who tends the front desk. He said he’d been beaten and robbed. He looked the part but he might have blown his bundle in a binge. He stinks of beer-sweat and he’s abusively instructing her to get him a visa for Vietnam while accusing her of ripping him off. He says he’s down to his last $200 or so. Sounds desperate.

We find an English-style buffet down the road a bit. We load up listlessly with calories – tepid eggs and decent pineapple, chaser of strong coffee and we head out for the mandatory trip to S-21 or Tuol Sleng – the Pol Pot interrogation (torture) facility – and then to the Killing Fields. Suffice to say that the trip was often fragrant. Open sewage canals run parallel to and cross the road. Houses on stilts perch like drunken Herons over the scummy brown soup. For the 10,000th time I silently pray, ‘there but for the grace of God go I’.

Tuol Sleng is a grim place with palpable ghosts. The spare, nearly empty rooms of the former school building seem to echo with screams. Each classroom has a single iron frame bed placed in the centre – an article: manacles, chains, ammunition canisters rest on the bare bed surface as testimony to the room’s purpose. Some walls have a palimpsest of graffiti – a few have planks of wood painted green bearing faint traces of chalk that whisper school lessons from a better time. Ironic that these items look down upon the torture beds – Pol Pot was trying to pound Cambodia back to the stone age by eradicating knowledge and education. The visual experience of this is numbing but what stabs the soul is a gallery of photos of the doomed inmates of Tuol Sleng. They were mostly very young adults – almost children. They stare at the camera defiantly, angrily or displaying fear, uncertainty. Some are focused inwards, perhaps contemplating a strategy for survival or worrying about their siblings or relatives they have been parted from. Of the thousands that were processed here only a handful survived. Those few had skills such as bookkeeper or photograper that made them too useful to exterminate. The faces of these people brought the reality home where the ‘set-piece’ torture rooms could not. I will post a little photo essay in Facebook.

Then out to the Killing Fields as they call it. It is a former orchard where over 2,000 bodies have been exhumed though they haven’t dug through the better part of the property. A shrine displaying thousands of skulls and bones sorted according to estimated age are piled in a dusty glass case that ascends through the centre. Perhaps more disturbing are the glass cubes of half-rotted garments, many of them children’s clothing – if they killed the parents they murdered their infants. There are reports of soldiers swinging babies against trees. It is too horrible. Over a dozen shallow craters pock the earth making it appear like an enlargement of a golf ball. Many of the pits are near a large tree where loudspeakers were hung to play music that would drown out the screams and groans of the victims as they were being buried alive or brutally murdered. It is midday and the loud electric burr of cicadas is the tension track to the otherwise silent grounds. The crime that these men, woman and children committed was being upper or middle-class or being a professional, teacher or even for wearing glasses and therefore, potentially, being learned.

There are photos here too; taken during the four years of Pol Pot’s genocidal regime. They are displayed chronologically. Each successive year shows the victims in worse and worse physical shape. They were starving even though Pot had relocated most people from the cities to rural areas for farming. Many thousands would die after his ouster due to widespread famine. We are informed that several of the key perpetrators of this genocide are still being tried – their trials having now stretched into years. Only one of them has admitted guilt and been contrite.

On the trip back we are silent – space needed for processing. The eternal question – why does this keep happening?