The Depth of Truth in Cambodia

• A woman in rural Cambodia prepares sugar cane. Photograph by Christine Williams. •

THE WIP
http://thewip.net

July 20, 2009
by ChristineWilliams

My heart raced as we zoomed past lush green fields under the blaring noon sun. Perched precariously on a motorcycle with only a thin Cambodian kroma to cover my very sunburned thighs, I clung to the back of the driver (who spoke not a word of English) and prayed he would not crash us into a palm tree.

We passed the restaurant where we had savored the previous night’s dinner of mango fried rice, fish amok, cheap wine, and fresh coconut juice. We bounced past the open-air market where I had mastered the game of bargaining for low prices and flew through the rest of the rural village where I glimpsed flashes of bamboo huts where women prepared sugar cane. I was never meant to fly through the Cambodian countryside on an unpaved dusty “road” in a short skirt, yet here I was, sunburned and exhausted after a six-hour riverboat ride along the Mekong River to Siem Reap, now bound for a canoe ride through a flooded forest.

We reached the canoe, in the thick of heat and mosquitoes. About a mile into our journey, a rural water world emerged before us. Our canoe guide gently navigated us through silver waters, snaking through a fishing village of bamboo huts raised on stilts that towered over us. Soon we entered the much-anticipated flooded forest, a beautiful aberration of nature like none I have ever seen. Hundreds of quiet trees, slender, graceful, and out of their element in a river that swallowed their trunks, had succumbed to circumstances beyond their control, but grew tall and beautiful nonetheless.

When I got home from Cambodia I met a couple that had vacationed in Siem Reap. They too had gotten excellent massages, visited Angkor Wat, and returned with beautiful scarves, but in their experience of Cambodia, I was shocked to find they had missed the point. Although Cambodia’s beauty tugs at the heart regardless of the lens used to view it, a holistic understanding of the country is impossible without acknowledging the 1975 genocide and the resulting societal challenges it has posed to peacebuilding. The group I had traveled with studied Cambodian societal divisions through a conflict resolution perspective, learning about the country’s overwhelmingly traumatic history. For me, true sadness lies in this couple’s ability to gloss over Cambodia’s current fragility.

Theory abounds about the psychology of Cambodians, the history behind the genocide, and the prevalent social injustice in Cambodia today. However, during my stay I encountered someone who, in describing the path his life had taken, gave me far more insight into human suffering than any theory ever could.

One night our group climbed the oldest temple of Angkor Wat at sunset. Here I met a Cambodian man who seemed the paradigm of simple kindness but whose still waters ran deep. He had survived the Khmer Rouge era and told me his story, piercing the theoretical padding I had intended to use as a defense mechanism during my field research.

Born in 1958, he was 17 years old when the Khmer Rouge invaded his city and began the mass exoduses into the countryside and the forced labor that characterized the occupation. The man smiled as he described how as a boy he would periodically sneak into his neighbor’s farm with a friend. The two boys stole sugarcane from the trees and learned how to extract sugar from the plant, a skill that would later save their lives (the Khmer Rouge valued this ability and forced them to employ it during the occupation). Gradually, my friend told me, he became a “human ghost” and watched Cambodia become a “country of girls,” emaciated by forced labor and starvation. One day his father told him that he was now head of household. The Khmer Rouge then killed his father and his brothers, and my friend was left to attend to his mother. He looked at me putting his hand on his chest and said, ”She died of a broken heart.”

During the genocide, he said he forgot how to smile. Becoming emotional, I tried to remind myself that this man’s story is just one of many throughout the entire country. Watching the sun disappear behind the horizon, I asked whether he knew of the Cambodian memoir, First they Killed My Father, which I had read prior to the course. He grew pensive and said that no film or novel could convey the truth of the genocide.

My friend in Angkor Wat was right; stories fail to convey reality. Caught somewhere between tourist and student, I’m frustrated with the inability to convey the truth of my experience in Cambodia, let alone the Cambodian “experience” itself. As much as I would like to use the flooded forest as a metaphor for the “resilience” of Cambodians, human beings are not trees, and there is a limit to how beautiful and tall a person can grow in the midst of social injustice.