Those who violate the law will never prevail.
—BILLBOARD OUTSIDE SIEM REAP POLICE HEADQUARTERS
“I think if you can understand these men you will know why your man comes here.” Senator Khieu San, vice chairman of the Cambodian Senate Legislative Committee, said this to me sotto voce, his eyes on the long table to our left. There sat Hun Sen, flanked by his generals, ministers, and senior policemen.
“You know what I am saying?” asked Khieu, whom I’d known a bare 12 hours.
“Yes, of course.”
“In CPP, most of them are corrupt,” he whispered. “Murder, corruption. But we will change. By the law, we will change the regime of Hun Sen.”
It was millennial eve and Hun Sen was hosting a private dinner for his regime in Siem Reap’s Kulen Restaurant, across the street from King Sihanouk’s mansion and down the road from Angkor Wat. The Kulen fit the elite occasion. It was an open-air palace, with magnificently engraved pillars holding up golden roofs topped by naga serpents. At the east end of the restaurant was a brick courtyard and then a stage made to look like a classic Khmer temple. Five female apsaras, costumed in sequined lamé and stupa-like headgear, were dancing barefoot to an ancient Angkorian tune played by musicians on three-stringed fiddle, wooden xylophone, and leather drum. The heavenly nymphs moved to the eerie music with their supplicating palms bent backward, their eyes dreamily focused on the stars, turning and arching their bodies in angles that replicated the bas-reliefs on the hundreds of wats that graced the Kingdom.
I was observing this gorgeous performance from a table reserved for senior Funcinpec party members, headed by Khieu, who’d audaciously invited me to the dinner in the face of an understanding that no Western journalists were to be allowed in. In an hour we were all to leave in a motorcade to attend the New Year’s celebrations, organized on the temple grounds by Sum Manit.
“Oh my God, why don’t you eat your fish?!” Khieu shouted, less to get me to chow down than to mask any sign we were colluding in antigovernment sedition. He was an energetic short man of 60, with a high, crackly voice that could be heard for blocks when he raised it. “Have more fish, fresh from Tonle Sap Lake, what’sa’matta wit you?” he asked, sounding exactly like my grandmother. Then he leaned forward and resumed his conspiratorial tone. “You take the photograph of him and Bun Rany?” he asked, referring to Hun Sen and his wife, whose chalked and polished face reminded me of Michael Jackson’s.
“Yes.”
“Good. Hok Lundy?” he asked, meaning the meaty Cambodian director of police, whom I’d photographed before the dinner.
“Yes.”
He patted my hand, and nodded with satisfaction. “This is what I am saying. Okay? Your man come here do business—no problem. Army, police—all corruption, all time. Sam Rainsy, he can run with his mouth, but he can’t run with the ball. He think he the savior, but his mouth eats his brain. He brave but he change nothing. We will change, by the law!”
I’d met the delightful Khieu that blasting hot morning on the west portico to Angkor’s main temple. It was 7 A.M., an hour before Cambodia’s chief monks were scheduled to give a millennial blessing of peace to Sihanouk, Ranariddh, Hun Sen, and Senate President Chea Sim, a former committee secretary for the Khmer Rouge who was now chairman of the CPP. The ceremony was to be held up ahead at the Western Gopura, the pillared entrance to the passage that leads to the Vishnu Shrine under the 20-story main tower, symbol of Mount Meru, abode of the gods. I’d dearly wanted to be there for the historic occasion, but I had a problem, as I explained to the soldiers at the portico checkpoint. Someone at the Phnom Penh press office must have taken my money and pocketed it, because my press identity card hadn’t arrived at the Siem Reap press office, as promised. “Let me just go in and find Sum Manit,” I said, pointing to the three famous stupas standing against the morning sun a kilometer east. “He’ll give you something official for me.”
I edged forward, smiling, but the guard, not smiling, gave me a shove backward. I landed against Senator Khieu, who happened to be standing behind me.
“You want to go in, come with me,” he announced, then turned to the guards. “This man my guest!” he commanded in English, at which point the guards lowered the rope and stood to attention as we passed.
Serious man, I thought. Stay with him.
“I hear you problem,” Khieu said, striding the causeway across the moat and introducing me to his wife, Neang Chhayana, a pharmacist. “You a reporter, so you know already the problem with our country: everybody take, take, take—then no give what you pay for. Corruption everywhere.”
“Well, I’ve actually been here long enough to find a couple’a bright spots—”
“Ay baby, where you from, man?” he boomed incongruously, in a pseu-do African-American accent. When I looked at him totally bewildered and said “Brooklyn,” he shouted, “I t’ought so!! I hear way you talk, man—sound like old time to me.”
It turned out the senator had lived a year in my hometown as Ranariddh’s foreign emissary and, as we strolled towards the stupas, he began reflecting on the old days, reciting all the high-crime stops on the Brooklyn IRT, mentioning names I hadn’t heard in years, such as Utica Avenue and Nevins Street. He knew the black gangs who lurked above-ground, too. And he was thoroughly familiar with the Asian organized crime situation—tongs, Triads, and the psychotic Vietnamese groups. All in all he thought New York was far more dangerous than Phnom Penh—at least if you discounted the last quarter century.
“How the hell did you get from Cambodia to commuting for Ranariddh on the subway?” I asked, liking him more each moment.
“Crazy, man! K-A-ray-zy!” he exclaimed, and in the 20 minutes it took us to dawdle the kilometer to the Cruciform Terrace, the extremely loquacious politician gave me a précis of his life during the traumatic years. A graduate of both medical school and law school, he was arrested by the Khmer Rouge on the Glorious Seventeenth of April and put in a concentration camp called Bétail Mountain, surviving the first mass executions because he’d convinced his peasant jailers he was a barber. For four years he worked 18 hours a day cutting hair, digging irrigation trenches, and planting rice, until the Vietnamese conquered the country and drafted him as a translator. Because he was one of the few surviving professionals in Cambodia, the Communists made him the general secretary of the medical and pharmacy schools. In 1982, hating the “liberators” and their brutal puppet Hun Sen, he joined Funcinpec and went to the Thai border to fight with Ranariddh, returning 10 years later to run for office in the 1993 elections. He won a seat in the split government, then fled for his life during the 1997 coup, whereupon Ranariddh assigned him to tour the world to enlist support against the CPP. Basing himself in New York, he addressed the United Nations and founded fund-raising centers for the liberation of his homeland across the U.S. and Canada, then returned to Cambodia for the 1998 election and won a seat in the Senate and appointment as vice chairman of the legislative committee. Today, he said, each piece of legislation had to pass under his eyes before it could be voted on. At the moment he was trying to stop passage of a bill awarding lucrative pensions for 8,000 CPP veteran soldiers, not because he was a fiscal skinflint but because he’d discovered the soldiers were all dead. “It is a ghost army. The CPP will distribute the money to themselves,” he told me. “Eight t’ousand dead soldiers will have good retirements.”
As we mounted the steps to the Cruciform Gate he declared, “Come come, I will get you close to Hun Sen and Ranariddh, stand right beside them, look into Hun Sen’s one eye and take the picture.”
“How about the king?” I asked.
“No come today, too sick, many things wrong with him, you know this.” He was referring to the fact that the 77-year-old king had had two strokes, suffered from diabetes, and on this day (I learned) was receiving a chemo treatment for his colon cancer.
Thanks to Khieu’s pushy manipulations—“Out of way, this man wit me! Teddy, what you wait for? Go, go!”—by the time the ceremonies started I stood directly behind the four head monks in their ochre robes, taking pictures over their shaven heads of the chiefs they’d come to bless. The party leaders faced me on cheap-looking folding chairs: the round, bullet-headed Chea Sim in a military shirt and khaki pants; Hun Sen in a silver-gray sharkskin jacket and open-collared white shirt; and the middle-aged but still collegiately handsome prince, wearing a high-fashion navy blue shirt and matching slacks. Up close like this, Ranariddh appeared too refined and gentle to have led troops in jungle warfare. Indeed, his body language spoke volumes about his present vanquished state, and I felt a surge of sympathy for him. The thuggish leaders of the CPP leaned his way, chatting in pushy but friendly tones, while Ranariddh, perhaps with the thorny memories of his information minister’s tongue torn out and his interior minister tortured and shot, leaned away from Hun Sen as if he had dragon breath. Both hands clasping his knees, the 56-year-old prince looked like a frightened bankruptcy case being railroaded into a sale by loutish businessmen.
To be sure, I had no way of knowing what kind of a leader Ranariddh would have made had he won the war. Khieu San notwithstanding, there were certainly enough instances of corruption in Ranariddh’s own ranks to make Funcinpec run a close second to the CPP in scandals. Sam Rainsy’s call for a plague on both their houses might be a feckless one, but it didn’t seem over the top in this Marquezian land. Hun Sen had won, Ranariddh had lost, Rainsy was nowhere. Someday the law might prevail, but for the next decade the best Cambodia could hope for was that with unchallenged power the ever more secure strongman, his one good eye on history, would begin to take his own liberal pronouncements to heart. Fat chance, but in Cambodia one could argue that a corrupt peace was better than what had gone on before.
The priests intoned their throaty blessings over the three leaders, who now bowed their heads in prayer. In the cavernous minute of silence that followed I too tried to pray—but I couldn’t concentrate for trying to guess what the big shots in front of me were asking of Vishnu. Hun Sen had claimed he couldn’t have had an affair with the murdered Piseth Pelika; he was “incapable of such actions” because he’d had an appendix operation a month before Pelika’s diary said they’d first had sex. (This was some admission coming from the Strongman of a Kingdom where previous god kings had claimed the power of eternal erections.) Now that he was back in vigorous health, was he fantasizing spending New Year’s with some other starlet? And Chea Sim, the Khmer Rouge brute: at Hun Sen’s forum on corruption, Chea’s alleged personal bagman, Customs Director Pen Siman, had been singled out show-trial style by the prime minister as an official whose avaricious days were numbered. Was Chea now scheming a replacement that would keep his pipeline to the riches of the nation open? As for Ranariddh—all he seemed to want these days was for Hun Sen to anoint him king upon the death of his ailing father. Unfortunately, according to Phelim Kyne, the prime minister was not anxious to have his old enemy placed in a position where he could nix senior CPP appointments. Instead, he was said to be planning to install Ranariddh’s half-Italian mother, Queen Monineath, as a temporary “symbol” of the crown, gradually doing away with the monarchy entirely. Was the prince praying for guidance on how to handle Mom if the Hun tapped her?
Ranariddh lifted his hangdog face first, pronammed to the priests, then to Hun Sen and Chea Sim. They returned the honor. The men shook hands all around, looking as if each were taking turns at wishing the other goodwill. I asked one of the PM’s bodyguards beside me what they were saying. “Forgive past, make promise work for future,” he summed up their millennial conversation. Then he clamped my elbow with a tight claw. “No go closer!”
The triumvirate stood and moved to the south side of the Cruciform. Thousands of Cambodians on the lawn below us—a lot of whom were legless and most of whom didn’t have two riels to rub together—let up a cheer. Under a gold silk tent, Ranariddh and Hun Sen joined their wives. They lit joss sticks and raised them above their heads in another silent prayer. As they did so, the minister of culture and fine arts gave a short speech thanking the gods that the ancient heritage of the nation had been revived in peace after years of repression in war. When he was done, a quartet of musicians began to play on the other side of the terrace. That was the cue for the first of 1,500 orange-robed monks to begin filing out of the Gopura. Helped by their wives, Ranariddh and Hun Sen began ladling rice and offering gold-wrapped care packages to the monks. When the monks were all fed, Chea Sim (unaccompanied by any wife that I could see), the PM and Bun Rany, and the prince and his wife Marie, were handed doves. The politicians released the birds above their heads and the crowd gave another cheer. And then, the millennial peace pact blessed and sealed, prosperity for the future sworn, the leaders paraded away.
“Meet me tonight, six-thirty at Kulen Restaurant,” Khieu told me as he hurried to a Funcinpec meeting. “Make like you are friend from New York. I have lots to tell you.”
I grabbed a moto and returned to my hotel to catch up on typing two days’ worth of notes. The Ta Som Guest House was actually a flophouse for Cambodian laborers—all I could get on this hectic weekend when 10,000 visitors were fighting over 1,000 hotel rooms. Uncollected bags of food garbage littered the halls, which crawled with giant roaches and geckos hunting them. My “room” was the kind you stood in the middle of with your arms folded for fear of touching anything. It was broiling hot; the fan didn’t work, there was no soap, no toilet paper, no toilet seat, no hot water, and the blanket on the straw mattress was a threadbare towel that stank of mold. Later that night, when Khieu San returned me to the Ta Som, he remarked: “My God! How you stay here? When the Khmer Rouge retreat they destroy everything except this place—leave for example how people should live.”
The Ta Som matched my apocalyptic mood as I hunched over my laptop on the straw bed. I’d arrived from Phnom Penh after passing through yet another travesty of Cambodian corruption, this one revealed to me on the five-hour ferry that made its way up the Tonle Sap River and then the length of the 2,000-square-mile Tonle Sap Lake. The lake and the river were the historic and ecological heart of Cambodia, owing to a natural phenomenon that was a near miracle. For eight months of the year the lake flowed into the river and the river flowed into the Mekong just south of the Foreign Correspondents Club. But in June something magical happened. With the coming of the monsoon rains the Mekong overflowed and flooded north, reversing the direction of the Tonle Sap for four months, almost doubling the size of the source lake and filling it with tons of nutrients picked up along the Mekong’s 2,200-mile run from its headwaters in Tibet. The result: Tonle Sap Lake was the richest freshwater fishing ground in Asia, and the annually replenished mud-bed around it among Asia’s best rice-growing regions. Twelve hundred years ago this abundance had led to the founding of Angkor on high ground 10 miles north of the lake, which became the capital of the greatest empire of Southeast Asia—the Angkor Kingdom—whose wealth produced the grandiose temples that were the backdrop for the Millennial Celebration.
Now, however, the CPP regime’s greed and corruption were destroying the fishery in the cradle of Cambodian civilization. A British NGO worker on the roof of the fast ferry had explained the situation as we entered the freshwater sea—so large that the shore receded out of sight as we traveled down the lake’s middle. The Brit’s name was Matt Wheeler, an official with Wetlands International, whose office in Phnom Penh was then fighting ecological disaster in the nation.
Cambodia’s lakes and rivers were divided into fishery sectors, Matt had told me. In theory, about two-thirds of the sectors were held by Cambodia’s two million fishermen, and a third by a few private companies that bid in public auction for the exclusive right to fish for two years in designated lots. In reality, the bidding process was anything but open: corrupt fisheries officials took up to 10 times the bid price in tea money for the fishing lots, then accepted regular payoffs for ignoring the practices of the lot owners. To reap the massive harvests necessary to recover their investment and turn handsome profits, the lot owners used illegal fishing technology condemned around the world, including dynamite fishing, electrocution, the use of “catch-all” mosquito netting rather than legal gill nets, and the dyking and draining of segregated ponds—all of which effectively swept fish clean from the private lots, as well as from public lots for miles around.
Having fished out their own areas, the private leaseholders then turned to the public areas: with the help of fisheries officials, they terrorized locals who tried to fish these lots, confiscating their equipment, booby-trapping their nets with hand grenades, regularly beating up fishermen and arresting them on trumped-up charges of illegal fishing. Even if the corruption were to be cleaned up tomorrow, Wheeler told me, the Tonle Sap faced another impending disaster. China had plans to build 15 dams along the Mekong, and Laos and Cambodia had plans for another 11, which would vastly decrease, or perhaps even eliminate, the reversal of the river during the rainy season. Combine all of this with the increasing pollution of the shallow lake, and, Wheeler said, the most productive freshwater fishery in Southeast Asia—supplying more than 60 percent of Cambodia’s protein intake—was on its way to being destroyed.*
Sum Manit was now at a podium that had been rolled into the Kulen Restaurant’s courtyard. There, in a barely audible monotone, he welcomed the men at the head table, then read a speech recounting the genesis and planning behind the celebrations we were to witness tonight at Angkor Wat.
Khieu San leaned around me, his crinkly eyes squished together as he tapped a colleague of his named Chhanrith Sok Cham, Ranriddh’s personal assistant, who was representing the prince at the dinner. “Mr. Chhanrith, tell him what you find out ’bout Sum Manit trouble!”
Chhanrith, a handsome fellow in his 30s with a modern brush cut and a thoroughly Westernized mien, leaned nonchalantly sideways and spoke to his dessert. “Sum Manit ran out of money even for portable toilets,” he said. “Now we are proving why. Hun Sen’s men took the money to buy buildings that will go to the CPP after the celebration.”
“That is why they have only forty toilets for t’irty t’ousand people,” Khieu cracked, laughing so hard it seemed like he was not even trying to hide the joke. “Have to hire two hundred people clean up. So watch where you step tonight! Like minefield—we walk in single row!”
Sum Manit finished his speech with an expression of gratitude to the good company and a confident wish that the new century would hold great hope for the Kingdom. And then it was Hun Sen’s turn.
“Quick, quick, go up, take anudder picture, take the picture,” Khieu said to me. “Use it in your book.”
“But I want you to translate what he says,” I told him.
“It will be bullshit, take your picture and come back.”
But I moved too quickly, and got too close. There’d been a couple of attempts on the PM’s life in the last year and so Hun Sen’s phalanx of guards were understandably hair-triggered for action. They were pretty subtle, though. As I was moving forward to the podium, my eye in the viewfinder, a palm went into my belly and another gripped my shoulder, spinning me around like a top, my momentum smoothly conserved and, with a shove, redirected back from whence I came.
“Never mind, never mind,” Khieu said, “take from here, take from here.”
Over the mike Hun Sen’s twisted, frozen mouth gave the consonantal clacking of Khmer an even harsher edge to my Western ears. He picked up where Sum Manit left off, referring, Khieu whispered to me, to the future, the bright future, “the end of the past, the beginning of the new.” Reconciliation. Human Rights. Democracy. The Rule of Law.
“He talk bullshit,” Khieu mumbled. “Mean not’ing.”
Probably that was true, I thought, looking over at Hun Sen’s round smiling wife. There wasn’t a person in the room who didn’t know the scandal surrounding the murdered movie star, Piseth Pelika. There wasn’t a person who didn’t know the sad fate of the 18-year-old karaoke star Tan Samarina, now lying in a hospital without a face—a case of acid mutilation that Hok Lundy’s police had still made no progress in solving.
“You know story ’bout Hok Lundy and Ho Sok?” Khieu asked me. “Ninety-seven coup, Ho Sok run to Australians, Canadians, no sanctuary?”
“Yeah, I know that story. And you?” I asked. “Aren’t you afraid for yourself?”
“Wait, I show you.”
As we left the Kulen Restaurant, Khieu San introduced me to his bodyguard, So Peap, a captain in the national army who was still loyal to Funcinpec. He was armed to the teeth, with bayonet, sidearm, and an auto mini-rifle in a holster by his seat, clips of extra ammo at his feet. If Captain So survived the first salvo, I thought, he could stand off a platoon.
We drove through the throngs of civilians marching from the town to the temples, with Khieu reflecting how silly it was for a Buddhist country to be celebrating the turn of a millennium based upon the birth of a Christian god. I told him the explanation was easy: I’d passed a sign on Pochentong Road hanging outside an English language school that said, “English Never Dies.”
“So you’re just joining globalization—”
He interrupted, “No, no, no, country-wester’ never dies!” He leaned forward from the back seat, took out a tape from the console beside me and told Captain Peap to put it on. It was a recording of a two-day-old broadcast by a Florida country-western radio station. Was I surprised to discover that Khieu was a fanatical country-music fan and that his friends in the States sent him radio tapes every week via FedEx? No, I wasn’t. “The time now is four twenty-nine and here’s LeAnn Rimes but don’t quote me on the rhyme, mama! Eeeee-HAAAAA!! Love this gal when she’s blue lemme tell ya—mmmmm-HMMMM!”
The government had constructed a VIP grandstand near the temple’s East Gate, and the misappropriation of the country’s resources hit home when we took our life in our hands and mounted the platform, built with what little money had trickled down through the grasping hands of CPP officials. The rough wooden steps were so narrow and sagging the silken-gowned women in their heels could hardly get a footing. The floor of the grandstand, with inch spaces between slats, was even more dangerous for heels. However, at least the lines of light from below gave a clue where to set your feet, for the grandstand itself sat on thin crooked poles and was completely open underneath and lit by bare bulbs, which, for safety’s sake, was both reassuring and terrifying. On the one hand, it looked like it could collapse 30 feet to the ground, taking the crowd with it; on the other, it could be easily surveilled for bombs.
About 500 hard Formica seats were arrayed on several sloping levels conveniently sectioned by thousand-year-old stone walls. We walked down to the Funcinpec section and sat six rows back from the stage and just across the aisle from the CPP, as if this were a session of the National Assembly. On the floodlit stage was an armless statue of Suryavaram II; in the distance, illuminated green against the black sky, were the awesome spires of Angkor Wat, which the god king had built. General Hok Lundy came down the aisle with his retinue of officers and took a seat just across the aisle from us. “Take the picture,” Khieu ordered.
While we waited for the grand entrance of Hun Sen and Ranariddh, Khieu San took my notebook and drew four overlapping circles of Cambodian power. Watching the diagram develop, I thought that if there was a break to be had, Hun Sen and his backers wouldn’t get it from Khieu, whose friends had been tortured and shot in the 1997 coup. He wrote “H.S.” in the center of the innermost circle. In the second circle, which he numbered “1,” he block printed “EDUCATED MAFIA.” In the next circle, which he labeled “2,” he printed “GENERAL/ARMY/POLICE: NO MUCH EDUCATED—FROM K.R., MURDER.” In the next circle, he wrote “3.–V.N. UNDERCOVER, MILITARY ATTACHÉ”.
“Okay, I explain you what go on,” Khieu said. “Hun Sen center. He’s uneducated, no completed more than high school, a farmer from Kompong Cham, but Khmer Rouge! Then, number one circle, Hun Sen’s entourage, who are making corruption. Everything in corruption, they do.”
“Drugs?” I asked.
“Everything—you know that. Number two circle: all the generals who commit murder, all taught by the Khmer Rouge, you know that. All the generals they pay to Hun Sen, that’s why he millionaire.”
“Do they pay Hun Sen directly?”
“No, pay their own party, and own party pay. No pay, no favors. And number three, V.N.—the Vietnamese—all undercover military attachés, all three-star generals. They the ones put him in power, they the ones still here, all undercover, hiding. During coup, it was fifty-fifty did it, V.N. and CPP.”
“Teng Boonma funded it too.”
“Yes, he’s a big mafia, but he just a poor guy before. They have monopoly now. Timber, cut everything. Fish, take everything. The human rights groups, NGOs, they know everything. What they know: Hun Sen he need them all. Number one, all educated doctors, engineers, architects, businessmen. Mostly corrupt. No one clean.”
“Do you really think you can you stop it?” I asked. “I mean, really, do you think there’s a chance?”
He let his breath out heavily, handed me back my pad. “By the law! We fight by the law! By the law we will win! Audit! The government must be audited!! But oy, I’m telling you!” he lamented, again sounding like my Gramma Rose.
Over the PA a voice intoned in Khmer: “Victory to Cambodia, Victory to the King!”
The arrival of the guests of honor—Hun Sen and Ranariddh—was timed five minutes apart, each coming down the main aisle to applause and pronams, with Khieu pushing me into the aisle (and their faces) for more pictures. They took seats up front, silhouetted against the stage in rattan chairs. We all stood for the playing of the national anthem. The governor of Siem Reap Province gave a welcoming speech, and then the performance commenced.
According to my program it was to be a two-hour spectacle, a play and three ballets involving 750 artists in all, the first three segments performed by troupes from the provinces, the last by the King’s Royal Dance Troupe. For all his pessimism, Khieu San said that more than almost anything else, the resurrection of dance and acting across Cambodia gave him hope. It had been at the center of Khmer culture for 1,200 years, celebrating the Angkorian glory and the founding religions of Hinduism and Buddhism that had merged about the time of the building of the temples before us. Then, in four years, the Khmer Rouge had attempted to eradicate the past, and had almost succeeded in murdering every dancer and actor in the land—with only one old woman who knew how to make the elaborate costumes of the apsara surviving. The KR’s goal was to annihilate all memory of the apsara, who danced in the temples in worship of Vishnu and Shiva, and their embodiment on earth, the god king.
“Now you see,” Khieu said, “they come back, thanks God! Okay, watch, watch.”
The first act was a colorful comedy of manners about an old guru and his two warrior disciples. Despite its intended lightheartedness, it was a particularly appropriate morality tale, for it centered around the conflict of the two disciples over an apsara, dressed in glittering red and gold satin, who appealed to the guru in a heartrending falsetto voice to prevent her two suitors from killing each other. The guru lectured the two disciples on their foolishness, then called down from the heavens another apsara in green and gold. Now both men had brides. The play concluded with the guru’s admonishment that there should always be peace between men, for the heavens provided enough for all. (I did note that during the applause Ranariddh and Hun Sen leaned their heads towards each other and seemed to converse amiably.)
This was followed by a pastoral dance in celebration of the bounty of the land, with about 50 farmers and their wives partnering in lively gambado with the gorgeously personified winds and rain. The number of performers on stage doubled for the third act, a reverent ballet in honor of the spirits who dwelled along the southern coast, which included, to my delight, a cameo appearance by Ya-mao, borne across the stage on a divan held aloft by red phalluses. And then, close to 11:00, came the finale, the performance of the Hindu epic Churning of the Ocean Milk by several hundred from the Royal Dance Troupe. If the Royal Troupe ever manages to get the funding to go on the road with this piece, and they show up in your town, drop everything and go see it.
It is an enactment of one of the most prominent bas-reliefs on the East Gallery of Angkor Wat, the most famous of all Khmer myths, inherited from the ancient Indian traders who called at the southern ports. For almost an hour on stage, in an explosion of blinding primary colors and gleaming flashes of silver and gold, 88 asura, or devils, battle with 92 devas, or gods, churning up the metal-blue sea to extract the white elixir of immortality, coveted by the lords of heaven and the lords of hell. It is a vast tug-of-war, a psychic, and psychedelic, battle that explodes in frenetic drumbeats, screaming strings, and impassioned jujitsu dance—with no letup from the moment the lights go up. It is, in fact, a parable of humanity’s catharsis at the beginning of time, when consciousness first emerged and death was understood and anticipated—the dreaded knowledge imparted by a naga serpent in the ocean, who tantalized humanity with his jealously guarded antidote to death—a milk that must be released from within a watery solution. In a literal and symbolic life-or-death battle, the scarlet asura demons hold on to the head of the naga; the yellow deva gods hold on to its tail. Reluctant to yield to either, the serpent coils itself around a fire-spewing volcano, Mount Mandala, in the center of the blue roiling sea. Vishnu joins the battle on the side of the devas. He is incarnated as a huge turtle and settles his shell atop Mount Mandala as a fulcrum for the devas. Losing his balance, Vishnu calls out for help, and Brahma, Shiva, the monkey god Hanuman, and Lakshmi, the goddess of beauty, join the fray. In the heavens above—that is, in a kaleidoscopic gallery above the stage—a chorus of rainbow apsara shout, sing, and dance encouragement to the devas. In the course of battle the desperate tug-of-war churns the water, until the pure foamy milk of eternal life rises to the surface. In a final titanic clash the devils are defeated, and in Wagnerian triumph heaven celebrates. The milk of immortality is now heaven’s gift to offer man.
Churning of the Ocean Milk ended a few minutes over schedule—five to midnight. Ranariddh, in a white Nehru jacket with gold buttons, mounted the stage, joined behind by 200 robed monks. Glancing at his watch he hurried through a speech, emphatic in English that there must be “peace, progress, prosperity for our future, born from our reconciliation.” The crowd, on its feet, applauded as he gestured to Hun Sen, who didn’t quite make it to the stage before the cannon blast signaled the changeover to the new millennium.
While the fireworks rent the night (somewhat unsettling in this land) I hugged Khieu San, kissed his wife on the cheek, shook hands with Chhanrith Sok Cham, and took another picture of them all. “Happy New Year! Good luck to you!” I said. “And good luck to Cambodia!” For now, the smell of ocean milk in my nostrils, I was off to raise up Steve and bless him with mortal life. As in Macau, I’d found no new leads on his identity here, but I was certain I would have better luck on my next stop. I was off to the Philippines—whose devils would shortly make Cambodia seem like a paragon of honesty and rectitude.
*The rape of Tonle Sap Lake would not be addressed by Hun Sen until almost a year later, when it had reached a point past all denial. Hun Sen publicly declared he would end the graft and greed of fisheries officers and fishing-lot owners. “Fisheries officers are leeches that suck the people’s blood and they are the dogs that guard the fishing concessions,” he announced in a televised speech in Siem Reap. He dismissed his Fisheries Department director, but, as usual, the old ways continued. A month later, fisheries officials went on a vengeful rampage, arresting fishermen and confiscating their equipment. When the Phnom Penh Post contacted the newly installed Fisheries Department director, Nao Thouk, he told them he knew almost nothing about Cambodia’s fisheries sector, and hadn’t heard about the urgent calls for reform.