Andrew Lam

• Even after the most costly U.N. peacekeeping mission ever mounted, Cambodia is in desperate need of capital for rebuilding. But it lacks all the basic infrastructure — roads, an educated work force, investment law, electricity — needed to draw foreign investment or tourism.

• After more than three decades of war, two of three Cambodians are female, a disastrous ratio in a country where 90 percent of the population depends on labor-intensive agriculture to survive.

• Partners in the country’s coalition government, set up by the U.N.-sponsored election four years ago, continue to bicker among themselves, and some observers say this may lead the country once again into civil war.

• In the meantime, government officials vie for the right to cut down Cambodia’s forests and sell them cheap to neighboring Thailand and Vietnam. The depletion of forest lands contributes to landslides and floods, and to the loss of topsoil.

Although the war with the Khmer Rouge may be over, Cambodia is a nation armed to the teeth. Almost every family owns a gun or a rifle for defense against demobilized soldiers who have turned to banditry.

The worst problem of all is the presence of land mines. Cambodia has more mines per square mile, and more amputees per capita, than any country in the world. Every month, on average, some 400 Cambodians are maimed or killed by mines. The task of removing the remaining mines will take half a century.

In East Asia, a region experiencing unprecedented growth, Cambodia has become a kind of embarrassment. “We don’t really include Cambodia when we talk about economic miracle and investment,” a Bangkok businessman remarks. “Cambodia depresses us. Cambodia belongs to a different Asia.”

As it is now, a tourist brave enough to visit Cambodia goes not simply to gawk at the magnificent ancient ruins of Angkor Wat, but to ogle the aftermath of a holocaust. The maimed and wounded and distraught survivors, the fields piled high with skulls, the bombed-out buildings and the Tuol Sleng museum — a high school turned prison now filled with photographs of the varieties of torture committed by the Khmer Rouge — all serve as a reminder of what human beings are capable of doing to one another.

For many in Cambodia, and elsewhere, Pol Pot is horror incarnate. And if his trial eases the Cambodian psyche, then it might be a small, good thing. But after the media limelight moves on from this wretched nation, Cambodia might once again be left to fend for itself. In the dark.
June 26, 1997

Andrew Lam is a Vietnam-born short story writer and an editor at the Pacific News Service in San Francisco. He has traveled in and written extensively about Cambodia over the last decade.

) Pacific News Service

JUNE 24, SIX DAYS TO HANDOVER:

last night Hong Kong was looking brighter, far brighter than usual. The tiny territory can always be seen from afar when you are flying in, whether you are droning across the blackness of China or the blackness of the western Pacific — it appears as a brilliant orange glow on the horizon a couple of hundred miles ahead, an illuminated statement of its own success. But last night its brightness seemed to have been compounded a hundred-fold: As the plane turned and banked into its familiar-yet-always-alarming landing turn at Kai Tak airport, it positively sparkled and glistened, with a superabundance of light. It looked almost as though the place was on fire.

It is all to do with the handover, of course, now less than a week away. It turns out that every office building worth its patriotic salt, and every blank wall without a cigarette hoarding, has now been festooned with decorative trails of neon that have been shaped into the chosen emblems of what, come next Tuesday, will be Chinese sovereign territory once again.

But the unintended symbolism of it all has caused some puzzled amusement. The two devices that have been chosen to depict the glorious moment of the handover are a five-petaled flower known as Blake’s bauhinia and an overly cheerful looking sea creature known as a Chinese white dolphin. Biologists have pointed out — and hence the amusement — that the particular bauhinia is actually a rare hybrid, and one that is rare for the simple reason that it is terminally sterile; and the white dolphin is of a species that is currently being killed at such a ferocious rate by Chinese fishermen that it will be extinct in five years.

Why the new regime has chosen its symbols so maladroitly is anyone’s guess. But it is giving the departing Britons opportunities for sardonic commentary on how they expect the territory to flourish — or not — once the Communists get their hands on it. A sterile weed and a dying fish, they chortle, with fine inaccuracy: What can that possibly mean?

The royal yacht, the Britannia, is now lying in the harbor, waiting to take the best and brightest of those Britons away, just after midnight strikes at the end of next Monday. She came in yesterday, and there was not a dry eye among those who saw her. She is such a lovely craft — her rake perfect, her midnight-blue hull impeccable, her sailors all at attention in their tropical whites — and she came in behind scores of fireboats spraying cannonades of foam.

Prince Charles flies in on Saturday to preside over the Monday ceremonial; some unkind sorts say that Camilla, his consort, is already secreted away in Britannia’s bilges, and will be on hand to comfort him once the handover is done, and he and the colonial governor sail away for the Philippines and a few days of tropical rest.

There are other important ships around too. HMS Chatham, an anti-submarine destroyer bristling with missiles and guns, has fetched up to provide a floating headquarters for the British forces during their last week in command. And another big supply ship, the Sir Percivale, is busily loading all the ammunition that the British kept in the colony’s rocky bunkers until the very end, just in case. Both vessels will be sailing out, beyond the territorial boundary line, by the time the Chinese midnight sounds. There will be just a few British soldiers left on the Tuesday morning, tidying up, switching off the lights, rolling up the bunting. They have been given formal permission to stay until 3:30 a.m. — without their guns, though — because of the press of work, but once their jet has roared off into the night, the British colonial presence will formally, and absolutely, be over.

The Chinese army is already here, in small numbers. There are about 100 soldiers, all unarmed and in civilian clothes. But at 9 on the evening before the handover 500 more will be coming across the frontier — a major concession by the outgoing British that was announced yesterday. And they will be in uniforms, and they will have their weapons. It will be a chilling moment, something to cause a shiver in anyone with any recollections of the Tiananmen Square tragedy of eight years ago.

The contrast of all the sounds to be heard that night seems to carry a symbolism all of its own: the tramp of boots and the rumble of heavy armor coming in, the soft sigh of the boats and the whispering roar of the planes going out. The tough men and the tough times are coming, the sounds seem to say; the gentler days are now over.

The lights that we see today, and the curious flower and dolphin patterns they have been made into, may have an amusing symbolic meaning. But the sounds that we will surely hear a week from now seem to speak of an altogether graver affair. People may not be laughing so much one week from now, sardonically or otherwise.

But if taking down an old icon is uneventful in Vietnam, putting it up turned out to be a much messier affair across the Pacific. In Little Saigon in Orange County, Calif., a Vietnamese immigrant named Tran Van Truong, once a refugee himself, put up a poster of Ho Chi Minh in his video store and inflamed an entire Vietnamese community. Protest raged on every day for six weeks and an enormous South Vietnamese flag — yellow with three red horizontal stripes — now flies in the parking lot across from Truong’s store.

From an outsider’s point of view, the whole episode might seem absurd. The war of attrition between two archaic icons — the poster of a long dead Communist leader and the flag of a country that no longer exists — is as jarring as, say, waiters dressing up as Mao Tse-Tung and serving nouvelle cuisine dim sum in a posh joint on Santa Monica Boulevard.

Yet ask any Vietnamese protester outside Truong’s store and he or she will recite stories of incredible suffering and unbearable loss. An uncle killed by the Viet Cong during the war; a brother lost at sea trying to flee oppression at home; a father sent to a reeducation camp; a best friend killed in the decade-long war of occupation in Cambodia; cousins suffering for years in the malaria-infected New Economic Zone.

None of these personal histories registers on the American imagination these days, let alone plays out in the American media, whose radar homes in first and foremost on the issue of free speech. Historically, it’s been a curious curse of the South Vietnamese to lack the talent to play to the American media (think of the famous black-and-white photo of Gen. Loan executing a Viet Cong soldier in front of the camera during the 1968 Tet — never mind that the same Viet Cong had killed an entire family an hour earlier, off-camera). The media portrayal of Vietnamese refugees and immigrants in Little Saigon is reduced to that of a rabidly anti-communist community, once persecuted by communism, now intent on persecuting a solitary man standing up for what he believes in.

But does the American media expect the Vietnamese community not to react? Does it not remember how the Vietnam War itself nearly tore America apart in the late ’60s and ’70s? Why should America expect any less passion from those who actually endured that bloody conflict?

Besides, the Vietnamese protest is tame compared to other possibilities. Imagine what would happen to a Cuban in Miami who put up a poster of Fidel Castro!

Yet, having said all this, I must admit that I, who fled Vietnam when the
war ended at the age of 11, also have mixed feelings. Of course I believe
that Truong has every right to speak his mind. But I cannot help but
think that this man, who went out of his way to fax various Vietnamese
organizations in Little Saigon about what he was doing, is a kind of
narcissistic ass. Although he got what he wanted — the media limelight,
the underdog image — Truong remains incoherent at best and inane at
worst. On TV he lights incense and bows to the Communist flag and the Ho
Chi Minh poster, but he betrays no sense of irony over the larger picture
– that he fled to America to gain the right to free speech so that he
could eventually bow to the Communist flag of Vietnam.

For their part, the protesters are so mired in their anger and lust for
revenge that many can only view Vietnamese identities through the myopic
ideological lens of pro- or anti-communism. There’s no room for
discussion. The oppressed have become the oppressors — yielding the
moral high ground to Truong.

The truth is that many Vietnamese both in Vietnam and abroad have gone
far beyond the old “us” vs. “them” mentality. We are aware of the
injustice Vietnamese refugees suffered after the Communist victory, and
of the atrocities that followed Vietnam’s reunification. But we are also
now too individualistic and too circumspect to allow a defunct flag and
the fading photograph of a dead man to frame the complex meanings of our
lives.

A young Vietnamese-American friend of mine from Los Angeles whose sister
was killed by Thai pirates while escaping Vietnam recently returned to
Saigon, where he is now a thriving entrepreneur. The son of a colonel who
spent 14 years in reeducation spent his honeymoon in Vietnam, despite
his dislike of the Hanoi regime. Having lost the war, these people have
emerged as the victors of the peace. They’ve learned to remake themselves
and go on with their lives, refusing to let the politics of the homeland
dictate how they live.

Some 60 percent of Vietnam’s population today is under 30 years of age –
born long after Ho Chi Minh died. They have no personal memories of the
war nor any personal attachment with the bloated body of the long-dead
Uncle lying in the mausoleum in Hanoi. Ask them if they are working for a
communist paradise and they will probably snicker that they want what you
want — a good job, the freedom to travel, schooling for their kids. They
want a VCR, a TV, a computer with access to e-mail and the Internet. And
if possible, they want a nice car.

The irony is that with the exception of San Jose and Orange County and
perhaps Dallas, nowhere in the world would an image of Ho Chi Minh
provoke such a potent reaction — including in Vietnam.

On TV I heard a young man protesting outside Truong’s store declare to
the camera that he “would die for the South Vietnamese flag.” I winced.
The time to die bravely has passed, I wanted to tell him. Live bravely
instead. Spend that same passion to build a memorial for the dead, write
a book about your life, tell your children about your past, lobby for
Vietnamese rights in America, in Vietnam.

And watch how the old picture of the Uncle with his white beard in the
old woman’s house in Hanoi is fading with age, waiting to crumble into
dust.

“So many ghosts here, you know,” one woman remarked in a matter-of-fact way, “their souls have not gone to heaven. They are still very angry.”

It is risky for a journalist to talk about ghosts — it has taken me almost five years to tell this story. But ghosts and spirits and myths provide a crucial window to the Cambodian psyche, especially as it seeks to fathom the cause of the country’s immense suffering at the hands of the Khmer Rouge during what one woman called “Cambodia’s Punishment Time.”

From notebooks I wrote while traveling the Cambodian countryside:

• An old woman named Srong said this about the Khmer Rouge. “The old monks used to say, ‘One day there will be a war where the demons come and blood will rise to the elephant’s stomach,’ and it came true.” Srong is blind. Her face is strangely serene as she explains how she had witnessed the Khmer Rouge murdering her own children and then found she could no longer see.

• A man named Hott Nguong explained it this way. “The Khmer Rouge soldiers are possessed by demons who came from hell. They have no souls. You can tell by looking in their eyes. If you are a human being, how can you torture children to death?”

• Bonn Srey, a woman who cannot read or write, explains Cambodia’s tragedy by saying the country is cursed. “A long time ago, the Cambodian king was powerful and cruel to neighboring countries and those people curse Cambodia. Now Cambodia is full of demons and ghosts.”

Maybe this is just normal superstition in a country where nine out of 10 people live in the countryside, without electricity, and where seven out of 10 are essentially illiterate. Yet intellectuals are not immune. Reasay Poch, a Cambodian-American with a graduate degree in Asian Studies from Cornell, was doing research at Tuol Sleng, the infamous Khmer Rouge prison where some 20,000 people were incarcerated, tortured, then systematically killed. Poch was working on the second floor of the building, reading and photocopying written confessions left behind by Khmer Rouge victims, when he heard screaming and the sound of clanking metal. He rushed out to the balcony overlooking the torture chambers on the first floor, but saw nothing. “I had to tell myself, even if there were ghosts, they wouldn’t harm me,” he said. “After all, I am here to help tell their stories.”

The past — both the mythic and the immediate — has a strong grip on Cambodian life. One sees it in contemporary Cambodian politics. All warring factions during the early 1990s had the image of the ancient capital, Angkor Wat, imprinted on their flags. Paintings of these stone ruins hang on the walls of every government office, every restaurant and every classroom. They are a testament to an ancient empire that once stretched westward across Thailand to Burma and eastward to include much of the Mekong Delta and South Vietnam. “Bangkok” and “Saigon” are both Cambodian words.

It was an empire that understood intimately the power of war and destruction. Cambodia was once a Hindu nation that worshiped Shiva, the Destroyer God. When he danced, it is said, he set in motion both the creative and destructive forces in the world.

Those who know the story say Shiva remains a potent and angry God. One Cambodian guide at Angkor Wat explained, “We failed to worship Shiva and he punished us by sending his Monkey Army” — the Khmer Rouge. “Shiva promised to protect those who worshiped him and destroy all unbelievers. And we were punished because we failed to worship him.”

Shiva’s four faces with their eerie half smiles can be seen all over the stone ruins. Each represents a different aspect: Creation, Preservation, Incarnation, Destruction. As I write, I can still see in my mind’s eye those stone faces, smiling their mysterious smiles.

And I think of Kall Kann, a doe-eyed teenager who stared at the stone faces, trying to decipher the past: “The stone faces belong to a king, maybe a God, but it’s too long ago,” he said. “I don’t remember the name. My father knows the name for sure but, you know, my father is dead.”
Aug. 8, 1997

) Pacific News Service