night & day

phnom penh, cambodia

last night i partied with one dozen barely-twentysomethings in the small courtyard of a backpackers hostel. today i saw roughly 9000 human skulls.

i found the guest house by controlled whim. following a six-hour bus ride that felt like a six-hour bus ride, i drove a hard bargain with a tuk tuk to take me to a cheap place with a good vibe. the first such place was not so cheap, the second one belonged to alex. picture a thin, cambodian liberace who is a really big fan of cypress hill's 1993 chart-topper "black sunday"and you have the basic idea. i dropped off my bags upstairs and went out back to grab a beer before heading out to aimlessly search the city. alex was challenging all comers to a game of pool for a can of beer, so i took him up on it. i lost. but by then there were a dozen lodgers and we each had a comfortable chair from which we could view alex parading around and shouting with his groucho marx mask and it just didn't seem like a good time to leave....

the first stop of the day was choeung ek, more commonly known as the killing fields. it was here that men, women, and children were sent with the dubious charge of being spies for the cia or kgb during pol pot's terrible three-year reign (1976-79.) the ground looks like an egg carton with a number of small bunkers pocked around a small pond. with the song of the birds, the bright sun, and the teeming palms, one would never guess that the 9000 human skulls encased in the fifteen-meter tall stuppa had been unearthed from these large divots. but they had. there was also a sign indicating which tree was used by guards and their grips on the ankles of infants to end young life. it was said that bullets were really expensive.

....and there was also a birthday. by my guess, the young man was turning twenty-three and he really was a nice guy. he and his two friends are somewhat early in their year-long travels away from their home in jolly ol'. while the birthday boy made good conversation, his two mates were a bit reticent. they had the look of young men who have definitely punched other young men in the face, but the english version. they smoked cigarettes and drank beer and carried on like an intimidating boy band. they hit the same stops that i hit today, but claimed to have covered the ground in five days. the rest of the time? they said they've been "chilling out"....

my tuk tuk took me from the killing fields back to central phnom penh and the tuol sleng genocide museum, basically the opposite order of how a prisoner would have experienced it back in the day. tuol sleng, formerly a school, was converted into a torture chamber to serve the ends of the pol pot regime. the whole thing was eerie from the rusty bed frames (to which people were chained and beaten) to the former classrooms partitioned into small cells. perhaps more than anything else were the chalkboards. some of them still have writing, which may be from its school days (i didn't see any mention of them.) if such is the case, this implies that the top echelon of a very cruel regime went through what must have been thousands of man-hours to convert a school into a torture chamber and they wouldn't remove the chalkboards, let alone erase them. for all the stark photographs and written accounts i saw today, somehow this little detail brought it all home.

....he is a big aussi. just graduated university, killing a little time before entering the "real world." so he's sitting there, rolling spliff number god-knows for the evening, telling me he wants to "take it easy"because he's had a "big couple nights." how big? well, apparently, local girls "love white guys"and so he's been taking advantage of this basic disequilibrium. i really don't have many follow-up questions. he goes on. and on. and at one point it comes out, just a casual mention, really, that he paid us$20 for the one the night before and "something like $40" the night before that. again, no real follow-up questions. he further notes that "it's like an experience for them"....

maybe not the chalkboards, after all. that was the detail. without question, the thousands of faces today will be the ones that stare back if i close my eyes and take myself there. the khmer rouge were ruthless in their enforcement of justice and meticulous in its documentation. on display, throughout tuol sleng, are thousands of prisoners' mug shots taken at various stages in their captivity. they have numbers hanging from their necks. a few have noticeable scars, others some grosser deformity, but it's mostly the expressions. some stare in fear, there are a couple with wry smiles on their faces, but more than any other emotion is a cold resignation. they don't know what's going to happen to them after that photograph, but they do. while other twentieth century barbarisms have numbers of survivors, the number of people who got out of tuol sleng or choeung ek are numbered in the dozens.

....i stand up at a certain point to, you know, stand, and am grateful that there's a pool table. i'm putting beers back like the rest of them, but i seem a bit more interested in things like "doing stuff" and "talking." i start off a bit slow, but find a bit of a groove and end up dominating the table for four straight games. good thing too. we were playing partners and the wager was getting up to four cans per game, plus something had to offer a distraction from the terrible euro-trance and australian hip-hop that was alternating on the stereo. it was universally agreed that it was nice to have a place where for once we could all "just chill"....

i'd read the figures before and even after spending so many hours with pictures, images, and places today, it's hard to make sense of it all. obviously, in the how-could-this-happen sense, but the most visceral seems more like how-could-that-have-happened-in-this-place no more than forty years ago. because, if you haven't been here, you wouldn't know that the cambodian national flower might as well be a cheek-to-cheek smile. these people are so nice. and their laughs! you would never pinpoint this race as being the one where more than 3 million (out of a population of 8 million) were exterminated. you would never guess that this bustling capital city was entirely vacant the day the vietnamese invaded/liberated it in 1979 (pol pot cleared all the cities under the theory that only through growing rice could the kingdom reach its former glory.) i feel like when i see someone over the age of forty-five i can only look at them, shake my head and say, "man, just, man, just, wow"

....i politely declined the opportunity to go out with my fellow lodgers, content to get a decent night's sleep. some time in the evening, or, at least, some time and place that i was not a part of, it seems that many in the larger body decided to pool together resources and transportation so that they could make one collective excursion instead of in the three smaller ones, as had been originally planned. i had already made my own arrangements and was not going to cancel, not that i was asked. so a few of us bid goodbye for the day after breakfast, when my own tuk tuk swept me away. they were going to wait for their own driver to bring them to the shooting range where they could fire a rocket launcher for us$40. it's safe to say that they all had a great time.