[Contains information about the genocide and violence in Cambodia which may be disturbing to survivors]
I’m writing this mostly as a challenge, part grieving ritual, part wouldn’t it be weird if this were the post I restarted blogging with?
And so here we are. I don’t take a lot of pictures. When I do I often end up not finding anything compelling in them, or I find that I failed to capture the feeling or impression I was trying to capture. I just never got around to learning how to take a good photo (since I don’t have the sixth sense talented photographers seem to have about composition). When I do they are happy accidents.
These are all I remember.
An overnight bus, similar to Philippine buses but different, dirty from wear but not vandalism. We are five Filipino friends, bringing our own bubble of comfort made up of private jokes and predictable behavior into this unfamiliar yet somewhat familiar territory.
Something was wrong but I can’t tell what. A variety of scenarios forked and stacked up in my RAM. Thoughts, like if we die here how will our family know, or are we being taken hostage, or was the entire bus ride a scam to get us into Cambodia and then kill us?
Someone makes a joke, it could have been me. Instantly I am brave again.
We pull over. Mechanics approach the bus. It appears the bus broke down. We empty the bus, all forty, fifty of us, maybe. Behind the repair shop was a wooded area, trees and dirt and darkness.
Someone needs to pee.
We dare each other to pee in the woods. A dog, not a friendly, follows the smallest bladder. The rest of us stand in a circle because there was nowhere to sit. Mosquitoes come for us. We talk about our plans for Nood.ph, a Pinoy movie review site. I am here but not here. There was no immediate reason to panic now. We watch as mechanics jack the bus’s front tire up. There was no way to inform the hotel that we would be arriving very very late.
I don’t remember how we got out of there, only that once we reached our home base for the night we had to lug our bags up four flights of stairs.
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Phnom Penh. There is so much dust. The roads are wide, often unpaved. We ride a tuktuk, a tricycle on steroids. My face stings whenever we go really fast into the mini-dust storms.
The trees say I am in Southeast Asia—the same plants back home that I’ve never learned the names of. The faces, too, in fact. A rich spectrum of brown, coffees and peanuts and chocolates and cinnamons. We have all that back home but there was something, something different. It couldn’t be any specific facial feature, I’ve seen that nose, those eyes, those lips on people back home but it’s there, a subliminal something, like how you know at the root of your brain your amygdala is lighting up, not sure whether the unfamiliarity means danger or novelty.
I know that guy, I think, but not him specifically, more of a ‘that guy’ as in a profile: world-weary pahenante, bored shop owner, expressionless tuktuk driver.
It’s a specific experience, realizing you’re in a foreign land which is as close to home as it can get but as far away from home as it can be. Across the hemisphere you know without a doubt that you are not home, but here, here in Cambodia, where people look like me but not really, the imagined alienation is much more subtle, almost insidious, a two-degrees-off-from-true-north, high-fiving-your-best-friendohwait-it’s-the-twin, same-recipe-except-secret-spice, taking-Waze’s-reco-leave-the-main-road-hard-right-sudden-shift-smack-into-the-slums kind of different.
The strangeness feels like an assault.
And then out of nowhere, there it is. A random smile from a local. Ah, there now, we’re going to be okay.
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It was the same sun, essentially, but it battered Cambodia’s dusty streets with an extra five degrees of severity.
We take the Killing Fields audio tour at Choeung Ek because that is the thing to do. We follow the story of the man on the tape, a true-to-life survivor story. We walk in his steps. The rounding up of intellectuals, the pillaging of people’s homes, the interrogations, the schools-turned-camps, the systematic killing, mass graves.
The fields are light brown and barren except for some young and old trees here and there. Wherever we walk there are pieces of bone. Small, weathered, almost unrecognizable scraps of clothing.
It really did happen here, where we are walking. People’s lives and dreams ended here. The young, the idealistic, the entrepreneurs, the lawyers, the doctors, the artists.
Skulls upon skulls stacked one on top of another, more than five thousand of them, now mute testimonies to the lengths some people will go to pursue an ideology.
There was a tree from which a megaphone would blast patriotic songs to cover the sound of people screaming. The magic tree.
Another large tree, now covered in visitors’ colored offerings, was where executioners would beat the children and babies of the accused.
A space in my head opens wide, unable to grasp a historical fact that was staring me in the face since I stepped here. This happened in the 70’s. There are people we are looking at now who have either lived through this horror or knew someone who did or knew someone who died. This was not an old memory.
We are siblings by geography, sure, but now I know why I feel estranged from them somehow, like a best friend you have not seen for years but when you do you realize they’ve just come out of something that’s changed them so fundamentally and you were just a familiar face now, and you must walk along the paths the tourists take, because that’s the polite thing to do.
Later in the tour I learn that Pol Pot went on to live until I was seven years old. And that he died of a heart attack while under house arrest.
At age 73.
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At their best, the Angkor Wat, the 162-hectare temple complex from the early 12th century. I only have two very clear memories.
One is of me running my hands against an elaborate and intricate bas relief gallery of someone going somewhere hellish and apocalyptic. I remember because I imagined the specific person who worked on this. Was he a slave? An artisan? Was she someone who dreamed of a better life? Did she imagine a time when people would make effigies of her or did she take care not to spoil any detail about the afterlife because she was convinced that all this were true?
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There was something to be said for the scale of these artworks, they ran the length of the temple at 1,200 square meters—I don’t know how long that is, in truth, because there was also something to be said for the smallness of these details, the replicated perfection of every god’s crown, every warrior’s uniform, every single tree leaf.
Another memory is of seeing the sun rise behind the great towers of the Angkor Wat. I am in the middle of a large throng of people, quiet considering how many there were, huddled in the twilight darkness of a slowly rising sun.
It was the same sun. It was red and round and beautiful and perfect and picturesque and I remember that I don’t get to see sunrise that often because of my waking habits and I wonder what I did to deserve a sunrise worth waking up for.
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We took groupfies everywhere.
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But also this: back home, my father is dying of cancer. A great guilt smacks my face whenever I forget. Distance does that, both the forgetting and the smack in the face. The trip had been booked several several months back. I almost forgot it was going to happen until it was about to. Not sure if I made the right decision since my father would die two months after the trip.
The week after I came back from Cambodia, it was my aunt, who was living with us and had suffered a heart attack, who passed away. Sometimes I imagine that my aunt waited for me to get home before dying—as she had done almost every day of my life.
These are most of what I remember.
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