K10 PST: Week 5

Where can one go from this point? How does one navigate once the veil of normality feels irreparably drawn?

My host mother (mai) is a tough nut to crack. She is stern with a steely resolve about her with tan hands that feed dozens of mouths every day before they feed her own. Her smile is rare but when it crinkles up around her eyes, they twinkle. I have struggled to form a relationship with her that compares to those with my sisters, nieces, and nephews. She is the wisest, most industrious, and impatient of the crew at home and it makes talking with her intimidating. But that smile. It makes me keep pushing on.

Things got heavy this week when mai joined us at the dinner table. Usually only Christy, banhg srey, and I eat together while mai rests at her house across the way. When I asked why she wasn’t eating, she gave a surprising response. Though she spoke all in Khmer, her story was clear. She wasn’t hungry. During the four years under the rule of Pol Pot, she hardly ever ate. All of her brothers and sisters, her parents and friends, were lost or killed. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge, she walked all the way to Siem Reap from Battambang province. She would have been about 15 years old. We listened eagerly, wanting to ask more questions but lacking the language and confidence that we could do so with decorum. Mai laughed and cracked a smile. No worries, girls, go and take a shower. Her revelation was pertinent to our scheduled field trip for the week, if one can call it much of a field trip. We would be visiting Tuol Sleng Prison and the Choeung Ek Genocide Museum, the most well-known of the many Khmer Rouge killing fields.

Before the rise of the Khmer Rouge (KR), Tuol Sleng Prison was a high school. After the KR enacted a mass exodus from the cities, they created nearly 100 security prisons throughout the country. Tuol Sleng, also known as S-21, has become the most notorious. An estimated 20,000 prisoners were tortured there and ultimately killed either at the prison or taken to Choeung Ek. Methods of torture and death were the most inhuman and crude, largely performed with farm implements for the sake of sparing bullets.

We arrived in our Peace Corps vans and gathered into tour groups wherein a young woman in her 20s acted as our tour guide. She gave us an oral history of the rise of the KR and the prison, all with a striking, polite directness. She led us through the cells – former classrooms divided crudely into tiny cells, some of which still show spots of blood on the tile – to the exhibited instruments of torture, and through the endless rooms of prisoners’ photographs. Prisoners, she explained, were brought to Tuol Sleng and forced to give an oral autobiography after having their picture taken. Torture ensued until they confessed to dissension from the KR doctrine and implicated their family and/or friends who would later be arrested and imprisoned. All of this she told us with the same factual delivery I might implore when relating that my grandmother passed away a few years ago or my parents divorced. A family’s history – it is what it is. We met with two of only 12 known survivors of the prison, both men of advanced age with somehow winning smiles, spared by their captors for their valuable skills in machinery and artwork. They were selling their biographies. I felt so numb. Priya put it best. “I feel like everything I am doing is really insincere and I’m just annoying myself.”

At Choeung Ek, we were each given a headset and embarked on individual audio tours of the Killing Fields. We drifted like ships in the night for nearly two hours. One track of the audio tour was a symphony written during the rule of KR. I cannot remember the name of it for the life of me, but I must have listened to it 20 times as I sat on the perimeter of the excavated mass grave. I gradually made my way to the Killing Tree – a large tree used for the purpose of dashing the skulls of infants, swung by their feet. From another tree, the Magic Tree, loudspeakers were hung to blair shrill music of “the revolution” in combination with the roar of a diesel generator to mask the moan of prisoners being executed from surrounding villages. Finally, I staggered to the Stupa, a large Buddhist structure that houses 17 levels of battered victims’ skulls.

Speechless, I sat with Shanniqua for awhile, knowing we could just stew for a bit. Eventually she turned and asked quietly, “How many countries are there in the world? How many countries and not one of them knew?” I swallowed the most horrifying thought I had that day. I thought of the countries who might have known and did nothing. And on a more personal note, the countries who stirred the pot of chaos and then turned their backs.

“No one knew what the Khmer Rouge were going to do. It’s quite wrong to blame the U.S. for the murderousness of the Khmer Rouge, that’s a disgracefully dishonest thing to do.

But… the carelessness with which the U.S. treated Cambodia as a side show to Vietnam did lead to disaster for Cambodia.”

– The Illegal Bombing of Cambodia

We arrived home in a daze an hour earlier than planned. I found my sister, neighbor auntie (ming), and mai huddled up downstairs with the kids watching cartoons on the other side of the room. My sister had fresh tears in her eyes. She is missing her husband today, ming explained, so we are here to sit with her. I sat and embraced her, happy that she leaned in to my comfort this time around. The women brushed themselves off and asked about our trip. I felt like my mind was still back in that Stupa when they asked to see the pictures I had taken. When I pulled up the first frame, a gaping, open mass grave stared back at me.

I lost it. Tears, heavy as marbles, hot and streaming through my fingers. I had Khmer arms all over me, nieces stroking my hair and ming pulling my toes. “Uh’nut,” she repeated again and again. Pity and sorrow. The day was an exhibition of ordinary people harming ordinary people – the most quotidian and pure of all nightmares. Pained by the truth that I can never share the weight of their past, pained by the love for my host family like broken glass in my throbbing heart, my sister and I fell into a deep sleep there on the cool floor.

Where can one go from this point? How does one navigate once the veil of normality feels irreparably drawn?

Fortunately, my remedy arrived with enough hast to cut short my sorrow nap. The youngest member of our family, a calf just one week old, meandered into the open house and sniffed at my face. With my sister long awake and working at that point, I was lone witness to the startled calf ‘s uncoordinated exit. I followed the calf out and saw my kiddos playing in the stark daylight. They looked so brand new. I remembered a shocking statistic about Cambodia: About 70% of the country’s population is younger than 30 years old. Think about that. To this generation, the horrors of the 1970s are mere ghost stories. They have bones to grow, disease to combat, environmental issues to tackle, gender equality to approach, and lots of rubber bands that need jumping over.

I can do nothing for the past save to carry it gently with me as I try to support Cambodia’s bright future. I am embracing the New Things, the things being built. The joy of the young calf. The throng of children that find their way into my room at the height of my morning routine. The childlike wanderlust that fuels Sunday morning bike rides and waffle-hunts. The things that can still grow when light is shed upon them.

I was able to begin my work within this Bright New Future vein earlier in the week. My language group, along with a local Village Health Volunteer, visited the home of a pregnant mother and her family. Sometimes home visits can be provided for community members who might not otherwise seek health care. We asked about her health, enjoyed plenty of laughs, and even provided a touch of health education. I actually got to be a dietitian, performing a diet recall (all in Khmer if you can believe it) and sprinkling in some specific dietary advice for pregnancy in the context of Khmer culture. It was comfortable, well-received, and easy to imagine doing this kind of work every day of the week. It felt for a moment like I could and would be of use in Cambodia. It felt like I could play a part in their national healing and progress. It felt like everything was going to be just fine, and then some.

Also, she was a eating a ton of vegetables and that’s just great.

For further reading about our collective experience at Tuol Sleng, please check out the thoughtful blog of fellow PCT Samantha. She is sharp and tender, all at once.