My final dose of Cambodia before the Holidays

                               

It took me eight months living in Phnom Penh to visit S-21, the high school turned Khmer Rouge security prison turned today's genocide museum. Granted, I was really waiting for someone to come  visit so I wouldn't have to go by myself, but as my flight home drew close I knew I would need something to talk about when I got back. Not that I wanted to talk about the Cambodian genocide, but more so I could understand better what Cambodia's went through from 1975-79 under Pol Pot's Kingdom of Death. AND maybe legitimize my standing as a Phnom Penhite.

Walking up the concerete stairs of Tuol Sleng and into the room where they show the documentary, "Bophana" every day at 10am and 3pm, I tried to picture what it would be like to have seen this place as an actual high school, filled with students dressed in white shirts and blue pants or skirts. It wasn't hard. My flat happens to be next to one of the many Newton Tlay grade schools so every morning I'm used to hearing the school bell ring, repetitions of "A, B, C...", laughter and occasionally little waves from students as I walk down and out of the apartment gate.   But this place... The cracked yellow, red and white tiles, barbed wire, and cell blocks left as the Vietnamese found makes you picture blood stains instead. Maybe I'm being too morbid, then again, as the documentary showed, torture and death did happen here. It happened ironically under the "Democratic Kampuchea," under Pol Pot, Ieng Sary, Nun Chea, and other leaders frustrated by US bombings, eager to see a revolutionary era of a classless, productive, agricultural-based society. They emptied Phnom Penh and drew millions into the rice paddies, killing intellectuals and destroying the moral and social fabric of Cambodian society. 2 million died, including (I think) 8 foreigners, and many did so at S-21, at the time under the wardenship of Duch, currently under trial by the International Criminal Court and the ECCC. 

I watch the documentary about a young girl sent to work in a rice field while her husband worked with the KR in Phnom Penh. Separated by distance and increasingly by the controlling mind of "Angka", the two sent love letters only to be discovered by the Regime later and accused of being CIA spies.  Crazy.

   

I then tour the rooms, expecting to come across all the scenes I've seen portrayed in tourist books and magazines.  I find the room with the prisoner's photographs, the prison cell with the bed, and the tiny cell-blocks.  I've never been to Auschwitz, but I imagine it is much the same... An eerie stillness in the air, probably imagined... Japanese tourists with super-zoom cameras hording around an "English-speaking" guide mixing history with prisoner stories... Encased human skulls &  bones, gathering dust.  I really didn't expect to see a burly Italian transvestite walk by in high heels.  

Oddly enough, what struck me was the graffiti.  It seemed to me, that in various languages, though primarily in English, visitors had managed to find spaces on walls and corridors to write their own thoughts (i.e."Never Again") and spray paint images. I guess I wouldn't really consider it vandalism.  In a way, it added a little humanity to the place.

Upstairs I come across a photo exhibition of the Swedish delegation that came to legitimize the workings of the regime at the time.  Each photo has a comment underneath it, relating what the photographer saw and thought at the time (occasionally questioning if some scenes like running hospitals and schools were staged) and then what really was probably going.  Things are never what they seem, must be that harsh lesson learnt. In a public letter posted and enlarged next to the exhibition, the photographer apologizes profusely to the global community for not having realized the Khmer Rouge was actually evil. 

I look out of one of the window's at the neighboring houses. Some are bright new and painted, Chinese-style gold and silver banisters glimmering in the mid-day sun.  Others have that sad standard aluminum roofing.  After all that destruction, this is what has risen... A traumatized society quickly building to catch up with modernity, trying to forget the past and move on (sometimes without regard to humanity again), with a wider economic gap between the rich and the poor, but hopefully with a sense that what their parents suffered can never happen. (Words often echoed and ignored by political, religious, and community leaders).

Angkor Wat 1/2 Marathon

One week later and I find myself back in Central Market, negotiating for a private taxi.  A beat-up Toyota Camry (what other car could it possibly be?) pulls up and Karel (Congo-Belgian, Willis (German-American), Mervi (Finish), and Katie (American), and I squish into the corduroy seats. 2 minutes later, the car stalls. $60 for a stalling car. You never know what you pay for in Asia. Oye Vey. You also never know how many stops you'll make, even though you paid for the car and technically, you can tell the driver when to stop. I think we made a total of 4 unscheduled stops on way to Siem Reap that Saturday. 

1. Stop to pull out the kitty-cat "canin" shades and place over the windows.

2. Snack time: Spiders or sticky rice anyone?

3. Petrol Stop- $10 advance to driver. 

4. Men's roadside natural toilet stop. The women were offered Karama's to cover themselves. We politely declined. 

By 2pm we finally rolled into the Golden Banana and walked over to the Blue Pumpkin for some carb-loading and Mango/Banana Shakes. Then it was on to Angkor City Hotel, to finish registering for the 21K some of us would be running in the next day. Having successfully managed to get the boys registered, despite the "CLOSED" sign ("We just want to give you money and get a bib number...") and after running into half of Phnom Penh in the hotel lobby, we made our way back to the town centre for some evening Angkor Drafts and pre-run foot massages.

 

I love how in Cambodia one foot massage for $7 also includes a head, shoulder and hand massage. Not sure what the foot & shoulder massage includes.   As we reclined back in our chairs, our masseuse girls giggled as they kneeded, slapped, and pounded are cold muscles in unison. All of a sudden a girl squeals and Karel exclaims, "I don't think they've ever seen this much hair on a person's arms and legs before!"  We laugh, ignoring quiet foot-massage time.   An hour later we head over for our second round of carb-loading. By 10pm we're ready to pass out and I do a walk-by the Blue Pumpkin for my morning 5am coffee wake up call (to go).

5AM Wake up call. I dreamed I slept in. So scary. 

5:50AM Katie & I join the boys and head off in a tuk tuk towards the Angkor temples complex with the other 3,487 participants for the day's races.  I'm very much awake and slightly, no wait... Very jittery. 

Karel/Willis:  "Uuh  we can tell you've had coffee this morning... you're eyes are huge!" Hmm... didn't know that was a personal side-effect.

This is the 14th annual Angkor Wat 1/2 Marathon  and by 6:30am my feet cross the Starting line. I press play on my trusty silver ipod shuffle carrying my adjusted new running mix. 

5KM... 10KM...13 KM... 17KM... I feel good as the sun peeks up above the temples that just a week later I had been climbing and exploring. Bayon's faces, the elephant terrace, in front of Banteay Kdei and so on I run, on the forested path at times lined by Cambodian faces, staring and smiling.  Sometimes the kids run up to the side and wait for you to slap their hand's with a sideways hi-five.  A lot of the younger ones run along the edge, picking up and emptying plastic water bottles they can cash in at the local recycling centre. 

The cool morning is perfect for the long run and the country and temples scenes make this one of the most perfect places to be in the running zone.  By 17KMs I can feel it. My braced left knee begins to twinge with pain and I have to adjust the brace every so often to control my leg's movement. By 18KM I'm wincing in pain. Uuuuuggggh. No. no. no.... and a series of profanities run through my brain. I take it slower. Oh well. It's been hurting since Monday even though I've tried to keep off of it. Guess two months of training wasn't enough time.  UUUHH DID THAT GRANDMA JUST PASS ME? No way.  Grrrrrrr....

I finish in a little over 2 hours, having pushed back tears and cheering up a bit after I hear my name called out by a fellow Pehnite near the Finish.   

I find Karel (at 6'3 with shoulder-blond hair, he's the easiest to find) and we get some ripe mini bananas and find Willis before heading over to the free physiotherapy massages provided by the Cambodian Olympic Committee & other donors (including the Japanese Aid Agency because I keep hearing "Arigato Gotziama" on the speaker).   Downing bottles of water, we stand in line, recounting KM stories and I concentrate on moving my feet and not fainting. 

One free massage, 4 bananas, 2 bottles of water, and 1 can of Anchor Beer later, the boys and I drag ourselves over to a tuk tuk to take us to the guesthouse, thoughts of cool showers and food running through our minds. 

At lunch some young street vendors come over to our table. Since most people are touring the temples during the day, we are prime target for these tiny workers. One befriends Karel and challenges him to a game of tic-tac-toe for a pack of postcards.   

By 2pm, we are once again alive, though very sore and are informed by the guesthouse that we are "Soooo Lucky" because the owner of the Golden Banana (a very very very flamboyant Cambodian man with a diamond-studded pink phone) will be driving us back in his bright-red Mitsubishi luxury truck car thing to Phnom Penh. We zoom back to the city, listening to five rounds of "Celebrate!" Cher, and your array of 80s Rock Pop and staring at bobbling penguins and piggies seated on the dashboard. Karel and I count bird species found in Cambodia (which is more exciting than him explaining mosquito body parts). 8 species only?  I swear I saw a flying squirrel. Does that count?  

For the record, my running mix is definitely way better than the owner's.  Also for the record, I have IBS or what one would call, training too hard too fast. Oye Vey... Guess I'll be swimming indoors next month in Chicago. 

When we give, we get back, but what we get back we won’t know until it is given…

Thursday at lunchtime I found myself in the cool artsy clothing shop on St. 240. Keok’jay, meaning “fresh” or “bright green” like the rice paddies strewn across Cambodia, is owned and operated by Rachel Faller. I was doing a piece called “Shop Talk” for Asia LIFE and was surprised to be interviewing a 23-year-old American from Boston. As Rachel took me through the shop, showing me the upstairs sewing area and sharing the story of how her little shop on one of Phnom Penh’s most coveted rental-space streets came to be, I found myself in awe at this girl, barely a year younger than me. Having studied conceptual art (focus on textiles) in college, Rachel dreamed of becoming a community artist, but found herself in Cambodia after graduation, with a Fulbright to do market research and start a project in which women living with HIV/AIDS could benefit from her training in environmentally friendly clothesmaking. With little funding to actually pay the salaries of the women, Rachel found a way to make it all work—fundraising back in the States and coming across a series of events to which she remarked, “I believe when you give out, it comes back to you… You can call it Karma or God, or whatever.” The store opened in July, and here we are in December, with Keok’jay seeing profits grow slowly, but more importantly, with Rachel feeling like she’s actually doing something productive with her life. Her designs are cool and the material is recycled. She’s not selling local handicrafts, but is inspired by the collision of country and city life that Cambodian offers on the day to day. Again, she’s only 23.

 

As mentioned before, I’ve learned a lot from the people I’ve come across in Cambodia. What Rachel & my current documentary-film producer boss have unknowingly taught me is this:  If you have a gift, use it to do good… And if you haven’t figured out what you’re good at yet, then follow your guts to do what you think is right.

 

When we give, we get back, but what we get back we won’t know until it is given…

Fact or Fiction? Escaping to Siem Reap for the Weekend

Last weekend I traveled to Siem Reap with a friend. The last-minute trip was a great exercise in how to secure a shared (or private) taxi from a fixer-type at Central Market. “You want taxi with Cambodians or No Cambodians?”  “Cambodians!” “Okay, you wait maybe two hour.” Uhhh… “No Cambodians!” “Okay five minutes.” And it was five Western minutes too.  So Ben and I hopped into the backseat of a black Camry and rode up to Siem Reap. Four hours later we found ourselves dropped off at the Golden Banana Bed & Breakfast, sipping a welcome drink. You have to love Asian service sometimes. After a drawn-out lazy lunch at the Blue Pumpkin, and a tour around the city with a motodop that could not find a travel agency (he took us to a painted advertisement for Angkor Air after first attempting to take us to the airport), we finally made it to Angkor Wat for the (free) sunset. We walked upstream as hoards of myocardial infarction-prone fat white tourists made there way out of the temple and snuck in as far as we could before the night set in.  After pizza, beer, and having secured the taxi services of one tuk-tuk, Mr. Mee  for the next day, we turned in for the night.

 

4:30am, the alarm rings and we sleepily tumble out into the darkness of Siem Reap. Wearing his cool headlamp (I asked for one for Christmas),Ben’s drunk a bottle of Royal-D (lots of vitamins and sugar) so he’s less jet-lagged, and the cool air folds around us as we travel through SR towards the temples. Veering away from all the other early morning risers, Mr. Mee takes us on the forested path to Bantey Kdei— another good spot for viewing the sunrise. “Pretty-girl, you buy?” Nope.  No more than five seconds after we are dropped off are we hounded by the young temple children selling bracelets, books, and offering cool drinks for our driver. Guess the sunrise spot was not as quiet as we’d thought it would be.

 

Once the sun rose over the man-made retention pool, we embarked on our fast-track expedition over many-a-temples. Surely Mr. Mee had never seen tourists work at this speed. As Ben pointed out, Mr. Mee was probably offended by our lack of cultural umm… observance of the temples built by people of his land. What can I say? We were just a couple of Speedy Gonzalezes eager to see as much as we could before it got hot. We also forgot our guidebook. Never mind. History works best when it relies on the imagination. With self-given PhDs in history and anthropology, we toured ourselves around the churning sea of milk murals (they made brie duh!), the dancing bridge (before the concubines were thrown to the crocodiles), the Kindergarten (short doorways) and the keepers of the temples (children with banana-leaf crowns signing for alms).

 

 

Like I said, it was my second time seeing the Angkor Temples, but I saw everything in a different light. Corners where I had once passed through were now deemed “danger areas” and vice versa. New scaffolding had creeped up stones, and disappeared against others; the history I’d read before (and forgotten) wittily replaced by imaginative stories and descriptions.

 

So here we ask a question facing contemporary storywriters: Are facts better than fiction? All I know is we may learn from history, but we also live from our imaginations. It’s a shame there aren’t Ancient Khmer Empire fiction novels out there, because with the tough issues facing this society, sometimes we just need to laugh.

 

That night I jet set across Cambodia back to Phnom Penh via air travel (I apologize for my moment of eco-unfriendliness). Forty-five minutes of airtime  shared with a nice Chinese-man wearing a light pink shirt with the black graphic outline of Angkor Wat printed across. As I angled my camera at the plane window attempting to catch the sunset, he made a point to smile at me and state, “Sunset. Romantic. Happy to share with you.”  Like I’d never heard that one before… “Xie-Xie,” I replied with a smile. We shook hands and the stewardess brought over “free” water and a slice of banana pound cake. Good times.