It’s been way too long since I’ve last blogged, but I’m hoping that I can catch up a bit this weekend and even post some pictures now that I finally loaded them onto my computer this morning.
This week was the week of the Thai invasion. Earlier, throughout September, all of my visitors came from Laos. It made me want to visit that country to see what their point of reference for seeing Cambodia was, and it was interesting to hear their impressions of Phnom Penh. Having just returned from a great visit to Elena last week during my break for Chum Ben Days, it must mean that my next trip will have to be to Thailand. Since Thailand is on a different school calendar, they are nearing the end of their month-long intersession between semesters, even if I haven’t quite yet approached first semester midterms. Anyway, the Thailand PiAers are definitely getting their travels in right now, as some of them joined us for karaoke in Laos’s capital last week and as I’ve now been lucky to have a fellow PiAer and then Alexis and Lea (Alexis’s roommate in Chang Mai) visit this past week.
It was great to spend time with such a great friend halfway around the world, to be able to exchange stories of new experiences, and to be able to walk around a city now familiar from the context of this year with someone who I spend so much time with from a very different context: at home and at school. It was nice to realize the general plans we had made back in March, before we even new what our respective cities would look like, about traveling through Asia and visiting each other. Not only did we of course have fun, it was also nice to hear some fresh opinions of the city. Although I find Phnom Penh fascinating, it can get a little tiresome after a while to hear some of the people I hang out with bemoan how Phnom Penh isn’t quite the architectural gem or vibrant cultural spot that Hanoi or Ho Chi Min are. Instead of hearing about how Phnom Penh’s buildings look monotonously the same (which I disagree about anyway), it was refreshing to hear from some people who marveled at the mix of the crumbling French colonial architecture, the Southeast Asian temples, and the mid-rise balcony-lined facades. In comparison to Thailand’s concrete squares, Phnom Penh’s diverse architecture seemed to be a stunning counterpoint, even if some of it was the result of colonial influences. Additionally, it reinvigorated my sense of how interesting the city’s identity and history really is. Although I’ve taken advantage of it throughout my time here, I realized that the city really doesn’t shut down at night and that there is a vibrant sense of activity even after dark. Walking around, there are distinctive neighborhoods in the city, which all offer their own personalities.
Though the least uplifting, perhaps our most interesting afternoon was when we visited the Toul Sleng detention and torture complex, which is now a genocide museum. I hadn’t yet been, knowing it would be an intense visit and also knowing that I would probably end up going more than once as friends and family visit throughout the year. As with the killing fields, part of the power of the site is its rawness and the ability to envision its operation less than a mere thirty years ago. Toul Sleng was a high school in a residential area of Phnom Penh that was converted to S-21, probably the Khmer Rouge’s most infamous detention and torture centers. (Although I take this as obvious knowledge, I’ve realized recently how much I’ve come to expect that everyone knows about the complicated history of the country, even if I myself didn’t know much pre-arrival).
What’s creepy about Toul Sleng is that the buildings look like many of the other 1960’s-era school buildings in the city, concrete slabs set around a grassy courtyard. They could be anywhere in the city and could have been any of those other schools. Yet the history of the place and the things that took place behind its high cement walls belie its otherwise commonplace appearance. Additionally, there is again a thriving residential neighborhood surrounding the complex, making it a surreal site that is set right in the middle of an otherwise normal feeling neighborhood again. I realized as we were touring through the site how much I’ve learned about Cambodia’s history from guidebooks, novels, history books, talking to people, and being here so far. It was nice to be able to share some of my knowledge, and when Alexis asked how S-21 existed within the city without people knowing about it, I realized that it’s not necessarily always known that the Khmer Rouge completely evacuated Phnom Penh in three days as part of their objective of eliminating the “corrupt” ideas of the city environment, of relocating everyone to rural areas, of minimizing the chance and organizational opportunities of opposition, of simply destroying everyone’s sense of self and comfort, and of destroying anything modern and progressive. So although the complex lies in the middle of a thriving Phnom Penh neighborhood, thirty years ago, it was a brutal torture center set in the middle of a built-up yet completely desolate and empty city.
It’s incredible to comprehend how the city was able to reinvigorate itself post-KR, with huge numbers of people dead, titles to property gone, homes literally emptied and open to the elements for over four years, and all possessions completely confiscated and destroyed, from cars to birth certificates to radios to pots and pans. Again, part of the power of the site is that, although the rest of the city around it has recovered life, the site remains intact, as there really hasn’t been much time between the history and remembrance of what happened. Although the museum is looking for funding for restoration, which will be important to preserve what’s there into the future, one walks through the site knowing that the dirty red and white checkered tiles are the same ones that used to lie below the feet of unknowing high school students in the 1960’s and then KR guards and the 14,000 victims (some of whom very well might have previously graduated from those classrooms) who were tortured and killed there. The ad-hoc constructed cells made of raw bricks and cement are still there, and most of the rooms have only been altered in that the bodies have been removed. It is not an experience that is mediated and buffered by time or sanitization, even if there are occasional explanatory captions scattered throughout. By the end of the Khmer Rouge’s regime, only 12 people of the 14,000 who passed through S-21 survived.