[Back] In Phnom Penh

(From whatever day September 27th was. Written in Saigon/HCM, Vietnam on 2/10/10 until * and that's from 3/10/10)
I'm nervous, but I feel like it's important to go to the Killing Fields tomorrow. I couldn't go the first time I was in Phnom Penh, and I was sitting in my windowless room the first night trying to think of why. S-21 (Tuol Sleng) a Security Prison in Phnom Penh was the most awful thing I have ever seen.

It's both amazing and horrifying the things people are capable of.

I just came from Tuol Sleng Museum which used to be a big prison during the Khmer Rouge's reign. S-21. A place for intellectuals (long-haired, glasses wearing) subversives, and spies (read: innocent men, women and children).

Blood is still splattered on the ceilings of the once school turned prison's torture rooms. Torture and death by common tools or farm equipment was preferred to wasting the Khmer Rouge's "precious" bullets.

Photos of the solid soldiers didn't vary that much from photos of the prisoners in that they both had seen terrible things. The prisoners were different in that their stares were fearful, blank, pleading, shocked into the terrible realization that this is the last image they will leave behind on this planet. If there was a smile on a victim's face, then it was because a guard ordered a smile or forced a tickle (you could see a finger poking into a man). *Their faces wore fear, resignation, pride, disgust, betrayal, exhaustion, hunger, disappointment and anger. 


Admission was $2. I paid a tour guide $6 and all the while wondered what role she played during this horrific time in her people's life. At the end, she explained to me; forced out of Phnom Peng with her parents in 1975, along with everyone else, sent to work in the fields, orphaned at age 14. Praying day after day to stay alive. Hungry, being told she was lazy and that Angkar first, and then Pol Pot, has no use for lazy people. She broke down into tears.

"Lazy girl! Lazy girl! But me so tired. Always me so hungry and tired. Two hours to sleep only. Work so hard. Never fast enough. Always say 'lazy girl' and then hit." She showed me the scars on her calf as she wiped away her tears. "1983 I go back to Phnom Penh. Alone. No family to take care of me."I can't imagine living through that and having to be the sole survivor of your family, and then to see the faces of the lost day after day. It must be so painful, especially with so many of the Khmer Rouge in high position with Cambodia's People Party. Reading First They Killed My Father gave me some insight, but it's still hard to face the place and the people first-hand. I can't imagine Phnom Penh evacuated in a day. Khmer Rouge greeted with cheers, then fled from in tears. This hustling bustling city with its streets full of cars, trucks, motos, cyclos, tuk tuks and smiling faces - gone. Deserted. Destroyed. By Cambodia's own.

I forgot to say, on my way crossing the street to S-21 I was accosted by a man with no face (like Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao)... okay, so not really... he just wanted help, and he did have a face, it had just been severely disfigured. It looked like he was wearing a no-nosed mask with acid burns and a milky white right eye. He laughed as I caught my breath and refused him. It surprised me, and as frightened as I was, I felt terrible for reacting in such a shocked manner.

October 3, 2010
I made it to the Killing Fields at Choeung Ek today (that's the one where they took most of the prisoners from S-21 to execute them)... a few hassles, and not thinking resulted in me having to pay $25 for a second Cambodian visa. I should've taken the bus from BKK to Siem Reap after taking the 12-hour long ferry from Koh Phangan, but then I wouldn't have seen the Portuguese pair from Pai on the way to the airport, or seen the dudes from Dubai again in the terminal. I wouldn't have stayed in a rose-covered ceilined tomb-like room, I wouldn't have met my friend's doppelgangers (yeah, two replicas!) in Vietnam, and you just can't regret the life you didn't lead. It comes down to that (more Oscar Wao stuff for you). It was good, and so I digress and get back to the topic at hand.

In the Democratic Kampuchea days (reign of terror that lasted from 1975-1979, officially), there were 189 prisons, 380 killing fields, and 19,403 mass graves.

The fields at Choeung Ek were found shortly after Cambodia was liberated on January 7, 1979. It was a Buddhist belief that remains needed to be preserved in a place of memorial and therefore a small wooden hut stored the remains of the victims at Choeung Ek until 1988 when major construction for a permanent memorial took place. The concrete stupa (mausoleum) was finished in 1989 and 8,000 victims' remains were moved to their final resting place. Each type of bone on a different level.

Duch, former KR chief of S-21 broke down while confessing to having ordered soldiers to kill babies and small children by holding their legs and swinging their heads into the trunks.

It's raining which seems fitting for this place. These fields aren't really what I imagined. A scene similar to death with bare land scarcely spotted with palm trees would feel more real than this beautiful place, lush with life. In the rainy season the fields and the graves flood; little pools everywhere with a sign Please don't walk through the mass graves!

Willows and lily pads, ferns and leaves.

As we were approaching with the storm clouds matching our speed on the horizon, a cool breeze felt like the souls rushing out.

(Some type of carnival Spanish-like music is playing in the distance with hooting and hollering. ) The music playing is a bit distracting with the "Hello... Hello... Hello. Hello. ... Hello." mic checks. (But at the same time it was the celebration of life, that music. And it served as a reminder that although there is death in a place, life can fill the sorrow with joy over time.) I hope it wasn't customary to have music play... there was a tree - Magic Tree - that was used as a place to hang a loud speaker to "make sound louder" over the victims' moans. Awful. I wonder if the sound covered up the splash of a fall during the rainy season. 300 people massacred in one day?! It doesn't make sense! Inhumane! Brutal. How did they do it - how could they? Day after day. Did they take shifts? Did they ever know the people they were killing? Did they become haunted first at night then all the time, or were they all completely numb and heartless, acting as a machine. No more, no less.

Duch (the baby killer) apologized and became a Christian; crying at his trial. Is he to be forgiven?

Well, what's done is done, but there shall be no more "eye for an eye." God, how I wish we could live in a world of peace, leaving violence in the past. Let us evolve. Coexist. Let's put the past of our parents in their past and act anew. Doesn't seem like it would really be that hard...