The airport at Siem Reap was small. Our plane careered out of the night sky and skidded across the tarmac. When we finally rolled to a stop, there was only silence and darkness. We stepped onto the landing field and were herded toward the customs house by a row of grim soldiers. In their hands were machine guns.
We lined up solemnly to pay for our visas. I handed an American $20 bill to an “official” behind the desk and saw him slip the note into his pocket before I’d even fully turned my back.
Outside, the air was hot and thick with the musk of tropical vegetation. No birds sang; there was only the swish of palm fronds in the evening breeze. A scurry of taxi drivers besieged us, and we chose one randomly to bump across the dusty yellow road into Siem Reap. I was with an older New Zealand couple I’d met in the line, and they’d heard of a place called Sweet Dreams. That was good enough for me. The taxi driver pretended he’d never heard of Sweet Dreams. Of course, he wanted to take us to another place he knew that was “very fine, very good.” Undoubtedly, it belonged to a friend or relative, but we insisted on Sweet Dreams, so he grudgingly turned down an alley and dropped us off at a high concrete wall.
Immediately, everything changed for the better. We were met by the family that ran Sweet Dreams. They were all smiles and good cheer. A frog hopped happily across the pavement at our feet, the first relief in a tense night. Soon I found myself in a clean room for $6 a night, and I even had a whirling fan overhead. I stopped and breathed deeply. I was in Cambodia and was about to see a place I’d dreamed about for half my life.
Only a few kilometres north of Siem Reap are the temples of Angkor. Eight hundred years have come and gone since Angkor shone with magnificence. Some say Angkor was the first city on Earth to reach a population of one million. It was the capital of the ancient Khmer civilization, a kingdom that once stretched across the length of Southeast Asia. Most of it is now gone, eaten up by the jungle. The old houses and the shops were made of wood. Even the palaces of the kings were constructed of mahogany and teak, and only the temples were built of stone because of an ancient Khmer belief. The gods, it was thought, were solely worthy of such permanence, and just their dwellings could be made of stone. So today all that remains of Angkor are these temples, dotted like islands in a jungle landscape of three hundred square kilometres.
The temples, in turn, are intricately carved with inscriptions in ancient Khmer and Sanskrit. Along the bases of many temples are bas reliefs, statues embedded in the walls as if they’re emerging from the stone, and these bas reliefs recount both the great Hindu epics and the rise and fall of the civilization at Angkor, a place far removed in both time and geography from anything I had ever seen. I was looking forward to unlocking some of their secrets, if indeed I was able to understand them at all.
In the morning the birds were singing. I went down for breakfast and was quickly introduced to the young man who would be my driver. I hadn’t asked for a driver, and a guide wasn’t strictly necessary here, but at a dollar a day it was a luxury worth indulging in. Vana was twenty-three years old. He wore an old green baseball cap and smiled at me shyly. It was then that I realized nobody here was much older than twenty-five. The old people were missing. They were all dead. The Killing Fields had taken care of them.
Eighty percent of the Cambodian population was born after 1979. That’s the year the Khmer Rouge was finally ousted from Phnom Penh, the country’s capital, and when the true extent of its crimes against humanity started to become apparent. Well over two and a half million people perished out of a total population of about seven million. All the intellectuals — teachers, professionals, anyone wearing glasses — were rounded up, as was everybody who had anything to do with the West. They were tortured and murdered, and their bodies were dumped in anonymous fields. To make matters worse, the Khmer Rouge forcibly removed Cambodians from the nation’s cities and towns. These people were shunted onto farms and expected to eke out a living from the soil, though they were shopkeepers and simple businessman who had never planted seeds in their lives. Many of these relocated Cambodians starved to death. Others suffered greatly or perished when the Khmer Rouge cleared out of Phnom Penh and continued to fight a civil war against the invading Vietnamese and their Cambodian allies throughout the 1980s and early 1990s.
The Khmer Rouge was a neo-Maoist organization that took its cue from the devastating Cultural Revolution in China. It wanted to purify Cambodia of all outside influences in a misguided attempt to turn the clock back to the great age of Angkor. The Khmer Rouge attempted to create something akin to a second Khmer empire. In the end that wasn’t possible — no more so than trying to turn Europe back into the weave of absolute monarchies it had once been, or re-creating the Confederate States of America.
Vana was born in the dying days of the Khmer Rouge terror. He was a gentle soul who spoke English quite well. So for the next few days I rode behind him on his little motor scooter in the hot tropical wind.
The word khmer means “slave,” an ethnonym adopted later by Cambodia’s Thai and Vietnamese conquerors. What a telling epithet. The history of Cambodia is a story like no other right up to the present day. It’s such a long, sad tale, a saga of kings, snakes, rivers, and gods. But like any good saga, one has to start at the beginning, in this case with the fabulous city of Angkor.
Vana and I zipped up a vaguely paved road. Astride the scooter, I squinted through the dust and sunlight. There was no indication that we were about to come upon one of the wonders of the world. A snake wiggled across the road, while a monkey sat in the shade of a tree. We buzzed past them and approached a moat running beside the road. The water in it flashed sharply in the sun. And then, just on the other side, the outer walls of Angkor Wat appeared.
Angkor Wat is a temple that was built in the early years of the twelfth century. It is said to be the most perfect piece of architecture in the world. We rounded a corner and went up onto a dirt trail between some trees. Vana halted the scooter, and I hopped off. Before us was the Rainbow Bridge. It crossed the moat and went in through the outer gates. I walked under the archway and found myself in darkness for a moment. Then I emerged into a world I couldn’t believe and got my first good look at Angkor Wat. Suddenly, I was faced with one of humanity’s great accomplishments. It was gorgeous, breathtaking, an edifice that no amount of adjectives could fully capture.
Vana stood behind me, silent, allowing me to take in the view. When I finally turned, he came up beside me. “Do you see the lotus towers?” he asked. I saw them, one in each corner of the great building, and a fifth, the most massive, rising from the cenre of the temple, intricately carved, soaring darkly and majestically into the sky.
The ancient Khmer people adopted an old Hindu belief that a temple must be built to exact mathematical proportions. If the measurements of the temple were perfect, they thought, then there would also be perfection in the universe.
I was looking at perfection.
Angkor Wat is huge. It’s actually the largest religious monument in the world and is even larger in area than St. Peter’s in Rome. This temple took more than thirty years to erect and is only one of hundreds throughout the jungle in northern Cambodia. It’s a Hindu temple dedicated especially to the god Vishnu.
Three immense terraces rise above a wide plain. The Rainbow Bridge sweeps in toward them. The balustrades are long carved snakes. These are called nagas — “snake” in Sanskrit — and they’re an especially prominent symbol here. This was the stuff I was searching for — how these ancient minds thought, how they encoded their world.
Between the outer walls and the temple itself were wide fields where a few dozen villagers swung scythes. I couldn’t figure out if they were actually harvesting something or whether they were cutting the long grass around the temple. But I knew Angkor Wat was built by such people once upon a time. The scene I was witnessing wasn’t so different from what it would have been eight hundred years earlier.
I entered the temple and had it almost to myself. A few villagers were gathered around their morning meals, but there were very few tourists. Slowly, I climbed from level to level, and at the top, the third terrace, up a steep set of rock steps, I came into the inner sanctum. Only the king and his high priests were allowed here in ancient times. From this vantage point I could survey the whole complex. The lotus towers represent the five peaks of holy Mount Meru. Vana told me all this, though I had no idea what Mount Meru was supposed to be. Pointing out across the fields, he said that the outer walls represent the mountain ranges that hem in the Earth, and outside that, the deep and tranquil moat suggests the infinite seas that surround the world. So, in effect, Angkor Wat is the world, the entire universe.
This metaphor was one of the first of many I needed to understand. The temple is the world. I thought about that, remembering my studies in linguistics. Metaphors are much more than literary devices, far more than poetic tricks. A proper metaphor stands in for a whole field of meaning.
In fact, the human mind is uncannily good at constructing these metaphorical systems. Languages are infused with such metaphors, and they’re often so subtle that we have no idea we’re working under conceptual umbrellas. For example, love in English is “madness” so that we are “crazy for someone.” They drive us “out of our minds.” To understand in English is “to see.” We talk about it with such phrases as “Am I making myself clear?”, “Do you get the picture?”, and “Let me point it out to you.” Happiness is up (“I’m on top of the world,” “Things are looking up,” “That boosted my spirits”), and sadness is down (“I’m feeling down,” “My spirits sank,” “I fell into a depression”).
Metaphors pervade language. They lie beneath the surface but form the context by which we systematize our thinking. Each language has them, though they vary from language to language so much that cross-cultural misunderstanding often arises from a misreading of the underlying metaphors. Whole structures of meaning, entire ways of seeing the world, are embedded in the phrases we utter. And these are truly the foundations of our Palace of Words.
Vana led me up to the second terrace. There were Buddhist monks there, the young males in saffron robes, the old women in white. They were burning incense, and on a kind of patio, an old man I had assumed was a monk had doffed his robes. He was bare-chested and sinewy. With an old broom he swept the stones where a puddle of water had gathered from the last rainstorm. It was hard to tell how old he was, perhaps sixty or even seventy, but I stopped and watched him for a while. His thin arms pumped the broom, and the whisking of its stalks echoed throughout the stone architecture. Strangely entranced, I followed his movements until he glanced up at me. This was the first truly old person I’d seen here, and there was something powerful in that. Even Vana seemed profoundly respectful of this peasant monk, and after a few moments, he pulled me away and out onto the first terrace.
Around the outside of the lower terrace ran the legendary bas reliefs of Angkor Wat. They go on for eight hundred metres along the side of the massive building, then around a corner and onward for a total of almost three and a half kilometres of carvings. Along the western walls, aligned as they are with the blood-red sunsets, are scenes of violence, destruction, and death. Here I found battle scenes from the history of Angkor — curving and swirling armies locked in frozen stone. The soldiers of the great enemy, the Cham troops of ancient Vietnam, march across the walls, glaring out across the centuries.
In the other direction, on the eastern walls, the rising of the morning sun illuminates a set of very different carvings. These are the Hindu creation myths, and one, a set of carvings that runs almost four hundred metres, has become more famous than all the rest. It tells the story of the Churning of the Sea of Milk.
I had come here specifically to see this lengthy saga in stone as a sort of personal test, as a way to plunge myself into an utterly alien world. The Churning of the Sea of Milk is a central story in the Hindu epics. To understand it one must comprehend something about the god Vishnu. Hinduism, I must admit, is among the most confusing of religions for me. Hundreds and even thousands of gods attend the world. Some of my bewilderment rests in the fact that gods such as Vishnu can appear in different incarnations. After all, I still have problems figuring out the Holy Trinity in Catholicism, so what luck would I have with a god who appears in at least nine different forms?
Vishnu, the Preserver, descends to the rescue of the world whenever it’s threatened by catastrophe. Nine times it has happened. A tenth is still to come. Vishnu appears as different avatars, sometimes as a human (as in his incarnation as the man, Krishna), sometimes as an animal. Always, though, he guides the world to ultimate triumph over chaos.
So this set of carvings represents one of Vishnu’s nine incarnations, in this case as a turtle. What happened was that before the world existed as we know it the gods and demons battled with one another. The fighting went on for so long and grew into such violence that the very emergence of the universe was lost in a swell of anarchy.
Here, I admit, I’m already unclear about the details. I keep, of course, trying to wedge the story into my own Western conceptions, but it simply won’t fit. At any rate, Vishnu appeared to these feuding gods and demons and gave them a task in which they would seemingly work against one another but in reality would act together. Confused? Don’t worry. I was, too, until I saw the line of carvings at Angkor Wat. The task was a tug-of-war, very much like the game we know in the West.
The gods would pull on one side and the demons on the other. The rope itself was really a snake — the naga symbol again. The only difference between this cosmic match and a simple tug-of-war game was that the rope, or in this case the snake, had wrapped itself around a mountain between the two pulling sides — Mount Meru, of course, the same peak that Angkor Wat represents.
So with the gods tugging on one side and the demons on the other, they slowly began to churn this mountain, like the agitator in the centre of a washing machine. Back and forth they went until the mountain swung around one way and then the other so that it churned the cosmos. Vishnu, now in the form of a turtle, held the mountain on his back, and together the gods and demons spun the universe into being.
A strange story indeed, but it was exactly what I was looking for — something so different, so loaded with alien metaphors that I would have to struggle mightily to make any real sense of it. I wanted to find something so profoundly outside my own experience that I could see just how far the elastic band of human thought snapped.
What do these long lines of carved figures mean? They tug on a giant snake, turning a mountain, churning the Sea of Milk. I can only reach for a Western metaphor: The Sea of Milk is our own Milky Way, the deep stars of night. That made sense to me — the gods spinning the universe into existence. And with the spiral galaxies left as confirmation of this swirling and churning, the metaphor seemed appropriate.
Of course it’s not. I was nowhere near the mark.
It’s a difficult exercise, teasing out metaphors. According to the Hindu epic, the churning cast off magical elephants and exotic dancing girls called apsaras (whose beautiful images are all over Angkor). They have nothing to do with our modern Western conceptions of the universe. I’d done the best I could to figure everything out, but I was no Carl Jung, Northrop Frye, or Joseph Campbell. I couldn’t identify the archetypes that matched up with any of the myths I was familiar with. I couldn’t sort out the metaphors of this odd story. They were simply not available to my ways of thinking.
Later Vana told me there was more to the story. He explained it carefully, watching me nod when I understood, going back over it when he noticed I wasn’t getting it. The snake, the naga, was named Vasuki. This snake, being looped around the mountain and tugged back and forth by the gods and demons … well, he gradually became sick. Finally, he started to throw up. He vomited out a terrible blue poison, just as the universe was being churned into existence. Vishnu, already holding up the mountain, could do little but witness the blue vomit spreading like a mushroom cloud. Another of the great Hindu gods, Shiva, appeared and swallowed the poison even as it threatened to destroy the new world. Shiva drank down the dangerous venom, which burned him so badly that it left his throat a frightful blue. But in his sacrifice he saved the world.
Now there was something vaguely familiar. A god and a sacrifice. It fitted in with another story I’d heard.
A couple of hundred years ago, when the first real contacts were made between Cambodia and the West, a young missionary appeared in the jungle eager to preach the gospel of Christ. The man tried to introduce the idea of Jesus to the villagers. He attempted to impress upon them the importance of Christ’s sacrifice upon the cross, showing the local people his wooden crucifix and explaining everything. But they were profoundly uninterested.
An old villager, taking pity on the missionary, told the visitor about the Churning of the Sea of Milk, about the snake Vasuki and the spinning and the spewing out of his venom. The missionary, who apparently was a clever young chap, thought about everything for a long time and then painted his own little figure of Jesus a deep shade of blue. He brought it out again, and this time, slowly, comprehension lit the eyes of the villagers. The missionary held up the blue crucifix for all to see. It was the sacrifice of the god, he explained. He sacrificed himself in order to save the world. The stories were the same.
So metaphors can, with difficulty, be unfolded. Jesus, in this case, needed to be blue. That was the Khmer — actually, the Hindu — symbol for sacrifice. The villagers understood that, and so, too, did I.
Over the next few days Vana took me to temple after temple on his puttering scooter. At one temple I was followed for an hour or so by a bright young boy who must have been about seven years old. I’d seen many children put to work here. I called this little guy Cowboy because of the print of a cartoon cowpuncher on his ragged T-shirt. He told me he would be my guide, but for the most part I showed him around the place, explaining as best I could what my guidebook was telling me about the history and architecture of this particular temple. At the end I bought him a Coca-Cola, and he seemed delighted with the deal. So Cowboy, probably much as Vana had done before him, was learning English.
It’s dangerous, though. The kids can make a decent living learning a foreign tongue, but there’s a cost. Another small slice of the world becomes generic, a part of the all-consuming face of the West. Should I be feeding the children Coca-Cola? Will it turn their young throats blue?
Vana and I developed a strange relationship, as well. After spending each day tramping around Angkor, we returned in the evenings to Sweet Dreams. Usually, he would ask if I was hungry and then disappear around the back to the kitchen. One night Vana came out with a dish of food. He insisted that I sit and be served by him, as if he were a waiter or even a servant. I tried to get him to sit, too, and finally, uncomfortably, he slid beside me, unsure of his role. This action went against everything he knew. That we could be equals, that we could be friends, was alien to him.
We talked some more, and he seemed to lighten up a bit. Finally, he leaned into me and said, “Tomorrow I can take you to the Linga River. This is something you must see.”
“All right.”
“It’s far,” he warned.
“That’s okay.”
“So we go early?”
“All right.” I braced myself to get up in the dark hours before dawn.
Vana took me farther north than most people go — to the outlying ruins of the old city of Angkor. In the distance, as we scootered over the potholed road past water buffalo and rice paddies, were the sacred mountains, the Phnom, and along the way we witnessed people harvesting the land as they had for centuries. We stopped once while Vana got his bearings. We had already been travelling for more than an hour and our destination was drawing near.
Finally, we arrived at a nondescript trail, and Vana asked me if I was really up for the walk that lay ahead. It was four or five kilometres to the top, he said, and the day was scorching. I told him I did lots of hiking in Alberta in the mountains near where I lived. Of course, I knew this would be different. Here I would be slogging through the jungle. I talked of bears, Vana spoke of snakes, and we each tried to scare the other all the way up the hot, winding trail.
After a while, we came to a river and followed a red-earth path along its banks. Here and there we saw signs that the ancients had preceded us. Faces were carved into the rocks in the river, and water splashed over them eerily. Eventually, the river opened into a pool with a cascading waterfall. We scampered across the rocks like children, and I noticed that my skin had grown browner. For the first time I felt as if we were friends, as if I were justified being here.
We sat at the top of the waterfall, and Vana told me another story. Cambodia has always been famous for its folktales. They might even be older than the Hindu epics and are certainly at the heart of what it means to be Cambodian. The Hindu books came to Cambodia with the omnipresent Sanskrit. Modern Khmer is now written in this same swirling text, but ancient Khmer survives on its own, untempered by outside influences, and is most purely heard in folktales. Like Aesop’s fables, the Cambodian tales are often allegories. They have morals to be learned and are frequently thinly veiled references to real situations and human folly.
When the world was still young, Vana told me, and the palaces of Angkor were newly constructed, there was a young king on the throne. He was, of course, delighted with his magnificent new city. In fact, he thought it was the distilled essence of beauty.
Convinced that the city’s loveliness lay in its newness, the king decreed that nothing old should ever appear within its precincts. Nothing should stain the city’s beauty. So all old things were removed or hidden, and in time even old people were banned from its streets and ramparts.
There was one old man who had lived in a simple hut for as long as anyone could remember. But he, too, was forced to leave the city that had been built around him. He took up his things and fled, coming after a time to an old cave that lay on the banks of a roiling river.
The years went by, but of course all things change, all things are impermanent, and the day came when the armies of the great enemy, the Cham from far-off Vietnam, arrived at the gates of the city. They arrived with elephants and war chariots and were clearly the superior force. The young king of Angkor, in desperation, sought to negotiate with the king of the Cham before his city was laid waste.
The king cowered before the Great Cham, and the conqueror laughed and mocked him. This Great Cham was a lover of riddles and saw a chance for some fun. “You can keep your kingdom,” he told the Angkor king, “if you can answer this.”
He held out a piece of wood. It was as long as a thigh bone and just a little wider, cut as it was from a young tree not far from the palace. “Tell me,” the Great Cham said, “which way this branch has grown. Which is the bottom and which is the top? Give me the right answer, and I shall spare your city. You have one day to decide.”
Frantically, the young king went down to the swirling river to think. He sat on its bank and stared at the riddle stick the Cham had given him. Which was the bottom? It was impossible to tell.
Eventually, the old man emerged from his cave. He saw the distress on the young king’s features. Moved by the monarch’s weeping, he asked if he could help. When the king showed the branch to the old man and explained the riddle, the old man snatched it and heaved it into the water.
Near the shore was a small whirlpool, and as the piece of wood approached it, the old man told the king to watch the branch carefully. It would, he said, be pulled down on the side that was the heaviest — its bottom. That was where it had grown from. The top would bob up, and the river would tug at the bottom.
And so that was what happened. The king pulled the branch from the whirlpool and ran with the answer back to the mighty Cham. When all was done and the armies of the Cham had departed, the young king realized the truth. He saw at last that beauty was fleeting and that the wisdom that came with age was infinitely more important. The old man had saved the kingdom, so the king fell on bended knee and asked for forgiveness. The elderly, he decided, were the wise ones of the land, and thereafter at Angkor the old ones became the most honoured. It was the old ones whose souls inhabited the stones in the river. It was the old ones who remembered everything most clearly.
There is a famous saying in Khmer: Ngoey skát àon dák króap. It translates as: “The immature rice stalk stands erect, while the mature stalk, heavy with grain, bends over.” What it’s really about is bowing, humbling oneself before one’s elders. Khmer parents teach that to their children. They must show respect toward their elders by bowing to them. In Khmer the word àon is used to describe this show of respect, though it’s also used to describe the bending over of the mature rice stalk. Seen in a rice plant, it’s an indication of the bounty, richness, and maturity of the grain. In a person it indicates good character and respect and, of course, wisdom.
The Mon-Khmer language is spoken by more than seven million people in Cambodia. It belongs to a family of languages called Austro-Asiatic. Most of the other tongues in this group are quite small. They’re spoken in pockets from northeastern India all the way to Sumatra in the Indonesian archipelago. The two largest languages in the family are Khmer and Vietnamese. But unlike Vietnamese (with six tones) or Chinese (with four tones) or even Thai (with five tones), Khmer is somewhat unusual in Asia because it isn’t tonal.
Even so, I confess that I didn’t learn very much Khmer. Vana spoke English well enough to converse on almost any subject, and even when I asked him some difficult questions about Buddhism, he looked up the English words he didn’t know — he must have had a dictionary in his hut — and then gave me a better answer in the morning.
On my last day in Angkor, Vana and I visited a section of palaces and terraces called Angkor Thom in the very heart of the city, a site encircled by a massive twelve-kilometre wall. In each of the cardinal directions there were gates, and guarding the gates and lining the roads that entered them, were long columns of carved stone figures. When we puttered through the southern gate on Vana’s scooter, I saw something quite remarkable. Between the statues, strung from one stone figure to the next, was a long balustrade. Vana told me to peer closer, and when I did, I spotted a snake. It was Vasuki, the naga, and these were the gods and demons from the Churning of the Sea of Milk. The story was obvious, but this time Angkor was being spun into existence from the very fabric of the universe. The Khmer had taken the ancient Hindu epic and made it their own.
Above the gates I noticed a large carved Bodhisattva face. Many believe that this is the face of the last and greatest of the kings of Angkor, gazing down upon all who enter his city. In 1181, Jayavarman VII came to power, and it was he who built Angkor Thom.
Vana squinted at the sun and told me that Jayavarman’s royal palace was inside these walls. Little is known of this king, though one thing is certain: he broke with the Hinduism that had come before him and became a devout Buddhist. Since that time, Cambodia has been a Buddhist country.
In the centre of Angkor Thom sits an ancient Buddhist temple called Bayon. At its entrance are fortune tellers and sellers of incense, though saffron-robed monks still glide through the galleries of Bayon. Buddhism, of course, has a particular relevance here. A release from the suffering of the world is available through Buddhism, and no one can argue that Cambodians haven’t had their share of misery.
Among the Buddha’s last words to his disciples were: “If a snake lives in your room, and you wish to have a peaceful sleep, you must first chase it out. And so it is you must break the bonds of worldly passions and drive them away as you would a snake.” Here again is a transcendental idea. The snake that churned Angkor into being must now be chased away. The symbols were changing, and it was time for dissolution, time for the great collapse.
Around the lower galleries of Bayon there are more bas reliefs. As they do at Angkor Wat, the carvings encircle the temple, but here the stone gives way to something wholly different. Perhaps it’s the Buddhist influence, but for once there are no scenes of kings and their epics. Here instead are carvings of everyday people, the lives of Khmer peasants from eight hundred years ago.
The reliefs show the women of the city gathering at the market, potters producing cups and plates, and a group of wine drinkers watching a distant performance of royal dancers from a window. There are seeming legions of shopkeepers touting their wares. Farther on there are fishermen on nearby Tonlé Sap Lake. One man has mysteriously fallen overboard and a crocodile rises to meet him. The reliefs blend together so that in the next scene there are gamblers betting on a cockfight. Another huddle of men trues a wheel. It’s a kingdom of the people under the wise and gentle rule of Jayavarman the Buddhist.
After Jayavarman died in 1221, there were no more temples built at Angkor. The city began its long, inevitable decay. It was almost as if, in only a generation or two, the people left behind their desire for worldly things and all ideas of grandeur. Year after year the jungle encroached on the great city. The wooden buildings rotted and collapsed, and at last the temples themselves were lost in the undergrowth. It was the end of Angkor. The churning had been completed.
I said goodbye to Vana that night. I would be leaving early in the morning and wouldn’t see him again.
At dawn I clambered into the long boat that would take me across Tonlé Sap Lake and eventually to Phnom Penh. There had been a mighty crack of thunder the night before, heralding the advent of the rains. Tonlé Sap, the largest lake in Southeast Asia, swells wildly in the rainy season, and the river at its other end might be one of only a handful on Earth to actually reverse direction from season to season. In the dry season it flows south toward Phnom Penh, emptying into the Mekong River. In the rainy season it flows north into the lake. Bizarre.
I rode on the roof of the boat for a while, gazing at the fishing villages tucked among the reeds of the shore, but then the sun came out of the clouds and I fled into the cool shadows below the deck. For many hours we chugged along the river until finally we came to the docks at Phnom Penh.
Suddenly, things were quite different. In this sad, dusty city, not only did I see no old people, I also noticed a frightening amount of younger ones missing legs and shuffling about on makeshift crutches. Cambodia is still one of the most heavily land-mined countries in the world. Many are leftovers from the Vietnam War, and a great deal are American. The Americans bombed Cambodia heavily in the early 1970s in an attempt to break up Vietcong supply lines. These supply lines took no notice of the official borders, of course, so they penetrated deep into Cambodia.
One type of land mine is made entirely of plastic explosives and can’t be located with traditional metal detectors. The big problem is that, during the rainy season, these plastic land mines often float off. They’re now dispersed across the country and can be found almost anywhere. Sadly, it seems as if every tenth person in Cambodia has had an appendage blown off by a land mine.
Phnom Penh is a nasty, windblown hellhole. The taxis are mostly motor scooters, and when I hopped onto one, the driver first addressed me in French. He was probably thirty-five years old, one of the few people of that age around. I wondered what he had done during the Khmer Rouge years. He scowled a lot, and I imagined he might once have been a child soldier of the Khmer Rouge. His French was quite fluent, but he switched to broken English when he realized I wasn’t European.
“You want to shoot gun?” he asked.
“Excuse me?”
“Kalashnikov, M-16, you choose.”
I had heard of this sort of thing. You were taken out to a place where you did indeed have a choice of weapon at a dollar a round. “I’m not really interested.”
“You want to throw hand grenade?” The city whizzed by us.
He tipped his head back slightly so I could hear over the wind.
“What?”
“Is okay,” he said. “You throw grenade into water.”
Apparently, this was the best idea they’d come up with for tourism. Someone else had told me that for $50 I could shoot a rocket launcher at a water buffalo and watch it explode.
“Okay, okay …” My driver paused for a moment. “So you want girl?”
“Look, just take me to the market.”
The Russian market in Phnom Penh was on Ho Chi Minh Boulevard. I got a kick out of that. The market was so wide open a place that you could not only buy almost any pirated music CD or DVD movie, you could pretty much purchase any computer software you wanted, as well. Ho Chi Minh would have loved that.
It was hard to make light of Phnom Penh, though I was trying my best. One hot, dusty afternoon when I was walking back to my hotel, I saw a familiar sign — the red-and-white logo of Pizza Hut. I had a real yen for pizza, so I went in and had one. I was the only one there. Actually, it didn’t taste that great, and when I went back out to the street, I studied the sign more closely. It mimicked the Pizza Hut logo exactly, but instead of saying Pizza Hut what it really said was Pizza Hat.
Off on a side street of Phnom Penh is the city’s dirtiest little secret — the building known as S-21. Even the name sounded ominous to me. Once, in fact, it was simply a school, an L-shaped building filled with classrooms set on a small wooded hill near the centre of town. The Khmer Rouge took it over, though, and it became the most imfamous prison in Cambodia.
It’s known to the locals as Tuol Sleng. The name is a play on words. Tuol is simply the name of the small hill. Sleng, though, has a double meaning, actually, a triple one now. It’s the name of one of the indigenous trees of Cambodia. The fruit of these trees, however, is highly poisonous, and in the Khmer tongue, sleng has also become an adjective that signifies “bearing poison.”
There was that naga thing once again — the poisonous vomit of Vasuki. But in Khmer slang sleng also means “to have guilt.” Bearing poison … and guilt.
That’s pretty apt. S-21 became the very gates of hell. When the city was being cleared of people, the intellectuals were taken here. Even knowing a language besides Khmer was enough to warrant the death penalty. Individual classrooms were walled into smaller cells and fitted with bars. In effect, the former school became a torture chamber.
Even more alarming, the real shock troops of the Khmer Rouge were the orphaned children, roving gangs of heavily armed ten- and twelve-year-olds, completely brainwashed, as vicious as any mercenary. They seemed to have no consciences. Like packs of dogs, they bit and snapped and did the dirty work of the new regime.
S-21 is now a sort of museum. Much of it has been left as it was during those grim days. There are burn marks on the floors and rusty patches that might be blood.
What I found hardest to take were the photographs. After being arrested, each prisoner had his or her Polaroid picture taken. These have now been collected and are displayed on the walls in a macabre gallery of faces. Some faces stare blankly, puzzled, but a good number flinch at the camera flash. There’s clearly fear in their eyes, and their mouths are tight with anxiety.
Of the 10,499 prisoners who were brought to S-21, it’s believed that only seven survived. I was reminded of the concentration camps in Europe. Here is another black mark on humanity that will take many generations to erase.
In a squat little building in Phnom Penh is the Cambodian Institute for Human Rights. Its director is Kassie Neou. He’s responsible for the day-to-day operations of the institute, which is a thankless, almost overwhelming task. Neou is bent with age now, but he’s no ordinary person.
He was a teacher before the darkness set in, and when the Khmer Rouge came, he was imprisoned. His only crime was that he was suspected of speaking English. Neou, though, is a survivor. He was tortured and sentenced to be executed, but his guards were mostly children. The wise Neou escaped death night after night by telling stories to his keepers, by appealing to the scraps of childhood remaining in these ravaging mobs of child warriors.
Neou recounted the old Hindu myths and what he could remember of Aesop’s fables, and they sat at his feet, gazed up at him, and listened. And he told them the Cambodian folktales, as well.
Perhaps he narrated the one about the old man and the river, about the king and the stick and the riddle. It’s astonishing really. Like the old man of legend cast out of Angkor, Neou, too, was banished from his city. He also lived in hiding for months, though it wasn’t in a cave. Finally, however, he was discovered and taken away to what he thought would be certain death.
Like Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, Neou prevailed by spinning tales. Our stories are everything, of course. Built from the bricks and mortar of meaning, the stories we tell ourselves over and over become our worlds. We have come from them and we return to them.
There’s still a lot of work for Neou to do. Cambodia isn’t out of the darkness yet. There are remnants of the blue poison everywhere.
From the glory and beauty of Angkor to the very depths of hell, Cambodia has seen it all — the very best and worst humanity can muster. Slowly, the tourists are dribbling back. Neou will continue his work, though there are few others like him. The old ones are mostly gone, and the villages in Cambodia belong to children. But the country’s youth herald what will come. Slowly, like the endless cycle of lives in both Hinduism and Buddhism, the soul of this country is re-emerging, churning itself into a new and better world.