This story was selected as a finalist in our “A Book Led Me There” competition. Inspired not by travelogues but by brutal historical accounts, a traveler meets a survivor of the Khmer Rouge genocide. When the intensity of emotions becomes too much, she’s compelled to skip tourist hotspots in favor of Cambodia’s local food joints and beer gardens.
I can hear the cheerful, acoustic chords before I’m awake, scintillating somewhere in the back of my brain, growing louder. Beaming waves of sunrise colors burn hot and turn cold, then crimson, beneath my eyelids. My neck aches from a long night over unpaved Cambodian roads, and as I shift positions in my reclined night-bus seat, the worn cover of my slim paperback digs into my spine. I squirm off the book and force my eyes open into the light and the full volume of George Harrison’s voice singing “Here Comes the Sun,” as if the sun isn’t already high in the sky, brightly shining through the faded, half-hung dusty blue curtains on this bus’s windows.
I raise my stiff neck and peer with puffy eyes over the side of my seat. I’m surprised to find I’m one of the few awake. Most of the passengers around me are either sleeping or feigning it, trying to stay in a semi-state of rest. The song is, of course, my traveling companion’s phone alarm that has woken me, the buoyant sound of the Beatles chirping out of her top-of-the-line, red LG Chocolate slider phone. She is sleeping, oblivious to the sound, and I’m mortified to be the Americans sticking out, obnoxious, again.
I reach across the aisle and turn the phone off. Soon, the bus starts to slowly come alive, as do the streets as we pass women slicking buckets of water across their front stoop, men filling motorbikes with what looks like old plastic Coca-Cola bottles filled with thin, yellow liquid, kids in uniforms lining up, elderly men and women arranging fruit as the morning’s votive offerings on the rean preah phum–រានព្រះភូមិ–shrines to the ancient spirit-guardians that almost look like they’d be elaborate mailboxes back in the States.
As we continue onward, the streets grow congested and the roofs become more ornate, and I flip open the very on-the-nose book I’m reading–the Cambodian memoir, First They Killed My Father, by Loung Ung. This isn’t the book that led me to Cambodia, but as soon as I told my friends in South Korea I was planning my requisite, rite-of-Western-passage months-long backpacking trip around Southeast Asia to honor the end of a nearly two-year teaching contract in Seoul, everyone told me I had to read it. A friend from the States who’d flown out to join me on the trip had also read it and started following demining operations and other post-war developments in Cambodia ever since Angelina Jolie had become a UNHCR ambassador and, for Western eyes, truly illuminated Southeast Asia for a new generation. First They Killed My Father is gripping. It was the first of its kind for the time, I believe, and certainly the first such memoir I’d read.
The Cambodian genocide was, at least when I was in school, a mildly brushed-over time period associated with the Vietnam War, which itself was rather glossed over as an embarrassing, conflicting waste. First They Killed My Father is a horrifying depiction of wartime, not by men in combat zones or long-dead nurses and battle heroes, but a true story told by a child who’d watched her family get brutally murdered, became a child soldier herself, and somehow survived through her own fierce resilience. I was re-reading this book while bouncing along the very roads once roamed by the Khmer Rouge, who decimated intellect and culture and families and love and, for a time, all hope. It was already incredibly surreal.
But the book that really led me here was not your typical travelogue, painting alluring photos of exotic lands and fascinating cultures. It was a book about genocide and war by a journalist who, much later, would become the U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. under President Obama. A Canadian friend in Korea had lent me his copy of A Problem from Hell by Samantha Power, and it had stuck with me, in the best and worst of ways. This was the history of genocide, of the uphill battle getting the U.N. to adopt “genocide” as a descriptor, how nobody can agree that horrific things shouldn’t happen, and all graphic details and intimate storytelling woven from global genocides, Armenia to Rwanda to Cambodia to the Holocaust. Cambodia, I realized, was an unknown, historical frontier.
Thus, I embarked on the education of a Western Imperialist, the naive white colonist born of Americana pride, educated in skewed histories and ‘90s middle-class luxuries, and sent off to a “holiday in Cambodia.” The eponymous Dead Kennedys song would later etch itself into my psyche as I wrestled with how to be a good traveler, and I listened to the tune over and over on my tiny iPod Nano, wondering how there was so much we didn’t know.
So, a curious tourist, woefully ignorant but willing to learn, I head to Cambodia, lugging my paperbacks. The bus line terminates at Soraya station, a rustic stop bustling with hordes of passengers and buses in all shapes and colors. We disembark with the rest of the passengers. A throng of taxi and tuk-tuk drivers approaches, offering rides and clamoring for clients. Instantly, everything seems disorienting and overwhelmingly confusing. After weeks in Vietnam, where the language uses recognizable Latin letters–if richly spiced in accents and diacritics–I feel lost in the Khmer script now ornamenting signs with not an English phrase in sight.
Suddenly, a cheerful face pushes his way to the front of the crowd of solicitors and introduces himself, though I feel like I already know him. His name is Borat, and his face is positively radiant, grinning ear to ear.
“You need hotel?” He queries joyfully. We do, in fact, need a hotel, this being a time of sparse internet cafes and phones without Wi-Fi. He insists on driving us to three different hotels so that we choose one, which we do, gratefully, then he offers to come back later and show us the town
In the morning, Borat’s waiting for us out front of the hotel, his brown eyes crinkled in a merry grin that looks like he’s on the verge of laughter–we later find out he always is. First, we head to a push cart where a woman is serving iced coffees, sludged in syrup and condensed milk. Borat declines to partake, and I ask for mine black, no sugar. I sip it slowly and tell Borat it’s strong enough to put hair on my chest, to which he laughs and laughs. He drives us all over downtown, a young but rapidly growing city, which he clearly loves, as he narrates to us over his shoulder, a running dialogue infused with jokes. He’s proud of the way Phnom Penh is growing. Indeed, there are cranes perched high above buildings throughout parts of the city, the clear sign of a developing metropolis. He tells us about his wife and his baby. The day flies by, and the next day we are going to do as most tourists to Phnom Penh do: visit the Killing Fields.
Borat picks us up in the morning in his requisite cheerful state, narrating the drive all the way to Choeung Ek. Choeung Ek calls itself a “genocidal center,” an orchard-turned-prison camp. En route, we ask Borat if he remembers anything about the time of Pol Pot, and without missing a beat, we learn that Borat’s parents and extended family were killed under the Khmer Rouge. His brother escaped to the United States, and Borat himself survived a work camp. He says it’s painful to talk about, and the conversation feels over. His optimistic energy surges back, and he cracks a joke. “There’s so much more to Cambodia than the genocide,” he says emphatically. That stays with me, though my faux pas of a question weighs humid and heavy.
Borat drops us off at the Killing Fields (a sentence that feels insane to even write) and relocates his tuk-tuk a few yards back to the shade, a line of trees where other tuk-tuk drivers lounge, waiting for their clients. It’s early, but already I feel like what I imagine rice in steamed banana leaves feels like, sold curbside by the brick–sticky, glutinous, dense. Inside, we watch a short documentary about Pol Pot and the genocide, and as we walk around the grounds–the entire thing’s a mass grave–you’re practically kicking up rags and bits of bones. If it doesn’t make you sick, it should. There’s an infamous collection of skulls and bones stacked floor to ceiling, bones that should be living, breathing humans still today. This happened during our parents’ lifetimes, I think. I picture Borat’s parents here and shudder. I picture Borat driving me around in his tuk-tuk to look at the horror he experienced.
Outside, blinking back tears in the bright, hot sun, beggars cluster near the entrance, most in wheelchairs, some missing legs, many missing teeth, offering to share their stories of their times in the war and the holocaust of the Khmer Rouge regime. The guidebooks have told me to be careful about giving money to beggars in Phnom Penh, but this feels different. I offer up the only bills in my pocket, and the old vets murmur blessings back.
“What now? You want to see some museums, maybe?” Borat grins. He pulls out a colorful map, laminated and clearly prized, and points out some of the local tourist hot spots: another museum about the Khmer Rouge genocide, a temple-flecked mountain, a bustling market. These are the places where tourists go, and the tuk-tuk drivers are well versed in what the tourists want. But the day feels too somber. Reading the books was bad enough, but bearing witness to what people argued over whether it was or wasn’t genocide. Being a tourist suddenly feels like a blight and an ick. Yet Borat is buoyant, ready to please.
“How would you spend a Sunday, Borat?” I ask. He looks puzzled. “Where do you eat lunch?”
Which is how we find ourselves crouching in the back of someone’s house, in a dirt driveway among other tuk-tuk drivers, eating aromatic broth from a boiling tin cauldron over rice with chicken and their feet, cumin-flavored potatoes, vegetables I don’t yet recognize, while flies flicker in and around and the cook looks on approvingly, eating. It’s how we then find ourselves at a rowdy kickboxing match, yelling just as loudly as any of the local boys, dodging fistfights that break out over controversial referee calls. It’s how we then get invited to go next door to a concert sponsored by the Cambodian Television Network. It’s how, after three hours of singing, I nudge Borat. “Let’s find a beer garden!”
We sit outside on a patio pouring pitcher after pitcher of Angkor beer. A giant pig turns on a spit nearby. Borat talks about his wife and three children, about the tuk-tuk business, and about politics in Phnom Penh. We all get tipsy and laugh and swap stories into the night.
In the morning, Borat waits for us, all smiles. “My wife say thank you for sending me home drunk with money in my pocket!” he says. We spend the next few days tooling around the city, soaking in a culture that has rebuilt itself outside the stain of war and genocide.
The night before we leave, he assures us that his friend will be waiting for us with his own tuk-tuk in Siem Reap, seven hours away. We will wave him out of sight, then settle in to watch Khmer pop music videos and make friends with the smiling passengers spilling over into the aisles.
