Cheung Eck [Happy Merry Christmas]

You may or may not realize that in fact I am a professional writer, which oddly is one reason this blog occasionally goes inexplicably dark for a few days. OK: it’s partially because of the Internet, which is not in fact universally available people so write that down for later, and partially because of illness, which for fuck’s sake keeps recurring goddammit, but also it’s because sometimes I am working on something that will likely end up somewhere that, like, won’t want you-all to have read it before their paid subscribers do.

But this has kept you-all from a great many interesting experiences of mine, the most recent being Cheung Eck. Tuol Sleng also got short shrift here, and I haven’t even mentioned Monn Sokchea, who started an organization in his home village to improve education—which itself doesn’t even start to explain that, umm, teachers make so little and are paid so late that they usually, OFTEN, bribe students for a couple hundred riel every day, which, you know, what value does that place on your job? I mean really, how screwed up is that? And so Sokchea gives them a little bit more money and then asks them to, like, work more. Longer hours, actually work construction on the school. You know, intensive stuff. And they do it. And they love it. So I think, I had better tell you about going to Cheung Eck.

So Christmas Day I got up early and made the girls pancakes even though I’d been up all night puking because they love pancakes and it was Christmas and also because I would have just killed myself if I hadn’t done something. Although the night before I said the same thing which was how I ended up eating half a pound of malted milk balls with the girls watching Tum Teav, a very important Khmer movie, which was probably the reason I ended up puking all night. As it turns out, chocolate is hard for the body to process when you don’t eat it for a month. I never believed people when they told me that. Umm, and then I went shopping. Specifically, I went to buy all the Christmas presents for all the people I probably should have gotten them for before I left town, and I also went to pick up my handmade Apsara skirt, and while I was there some cute shopkeeper foisted some handmade green silk on me so I asked my tailor to make me a dress. I’m not going to tell you what this costs. The US residents will cry with jealousy and the girls will tell me I am stupid for spending so much, unless, as Kalyan says, the dress is VERY beautiful, in which case it does not matter how much you spend.

So, my consumerist duties fulfilled—and, honestly, after spending three days in bed, and musing on the role of the American in Phnom Penh today, I felt like a leech, also kind of a bad friend—the only thing I could think to do with the rest of my day was go to the Killing Fields.

Here is the thing that stays with me, that, I think, will haunt me: that the clothes that littered the site when the Khmer Rouge were killing people there in great droves of 20 or 30 per day—later, 300, when they could manage it (remember, they had to work at night so the neighbors wouldn’t hear, and you know what? They’re still living there, a short distance away, in fact about those between Starbucks in most US downtowns), the clothes that were stripped of victims, or fell off through more natural means, I don’t know: the clothes are still there. Not memorialized (although I guess some are, washed in 1980 because the smell in the stupa was overwhelming), but scattered throughout the grounds, mashed into the dirt, still peeking up near more recently excavated spots. Bones, too, but the clothes somehow are more jarring. They look normal, as if the grounds had been used as a schoolyard for several years and the ripped t-shirts and socks of playing kids had just been left in the dirt to amass, a natural aspect of the utilization of such an environment.

It’s true that people believe that the whole memorial is a bad idea, that it really would be best to chuck it, move on, close it. It is in the best interests of the Khmer people, they say, not to dwell on this. One of the documentaries I mentioned [HERE] here interviewed several Pol Pot regime survivors who still lived in the area who argued quite eloquently for the site’s closure.

And they might be right. There’s not much really to be gained from a genocide museum that can’t be gleaned from an after school special: people can do great evil for very little reason. We know this instinctually, and no amount of further learning, it seems, will compel us to find a way to stop it. At least, so far it hasn’t.

But there are so many things you can’t realize, that you can’t possibly understand about life under the Pol Pot regime and after it that they don’t think to explain. Things that offer small lessons in humane treatment, in decency, in how others stack their agendas. That the watery rice the lucky survivors who did get fed ate is in fact rice porridge, and it’s quite good. I’m eating it right now. But eating it without utensils of any kind? Eating it by the handful? Not an easy way to consume a thick soup, or a bowl of oatmeal. Even this small indignity, though, a lucky option. That the neighbors of Cheung Eck could be heard singing quite clearly, a few meters away, and that going undetected by them for several years considering the volume of work undertaken here is an astonishing feat. And what we learn from this is: to people who do harm to others, appearances matter more than human rights. And: small things hurt too.

Which is why Cheung Eck is valuable. But the urge to profit from the destruction, from the horrible fuck-ups of others who have greatly wronged you and everyone you know—this must be irresistible. I watch few bother to resist: the tuk-tuk drivers who gleefully offer a visit to the memorial as an option to golf, the young boy begging by first impressing you with his English and then asking you for money (How old are you? 12, he says. Where are your parents? I ask. We don’t have. Where are they? Killed by Pol Pot. Ummm, you’re a little young for that), the Japanese corporation JC Royal Co. Ltd that manages the site, extracting two dollars each per international visitor (few, if any, Cambodians visit. When I get home, I discover one of the girls in the dormitory has never even heard of it). And in the last year, visitors to the site have doubled, more a sign of increased tourism in the country than the supposed renewed fascination with the Khmer Rouge the Tribunal has supposedly elicited.

So. Someone profits here. Some merely survive, sure, but others, few, amass wealth and power from the suffering and destruction of many. Again.