In a Brothel Atop Street 63
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IN 1979, WHEN THE KHMER ROUGE FELL from power, the population of Cambodia was 5.2 million people. This number was down by about 2.5 million from the previous decade, due to a three-year bombing campaign by the United States that killed up to 500,000 people, followed by the Khmer Rouge’s three-year experiment with agrarian reform when up to 2 million people died from execution, starvation, or disease. But since that time, in only 26 years, the time frame we think of as one generation, the population of Cambodia has nearly tripled, approaching 14 million. It’s now a country where 60 percent of the people are under the age of 20.
You stand on the street, say Sisowath Quay, on a Sunday afternoon, and it seems no one is over the age of 30, and all around there are young couples in love. A boy on a scooter, shirt unbuttoned, hair blowing in the wind, a girl with her arms around his waist, her head on his shoulder, flapper girl hat pulled down tight on her head, contented. Couple after couple holding hands in the park along the river, each living out their own private karaoke video. Families having picnics on the grass in the park outside the Royal Palace. They bring out the elephant. Mothers and fathers buy incense to burn at the Buddhist shrine for their dead relatives. The kids get candy and cheap toys.
It’s wrong to say the culture was wiped out by the Khmer Rouge. It’s too easy an answer. The Khmer Rouge, for instance, never destroyed the Royal Palace. They left the flaring dragon flames along the roof and the snake running around the foundation. And they didn’t destroy the sense of family identity, although they tried. Under the Khmer Rouge, families were purposefully separated and children sometimes killed their own parents, but today there is nothing more important or present for a Cambodian than his or her family. And Cambodians are still animists. They live with ghosts and spirits. The Khmer Rouge only made more of these. Also, Cambodians are still a very warm and compassionate people, gracious in ways that shame most Americans. They smile a lot and are quick to laugh. This is perhaps the most noticeable thing about them as a culture.
But if you look a little more closely, you’ll see that underneath this veneer of a smile is a deep pool of low-grade terror. It comes from knowing you live in a country where there are no jobs, no industry or source of revenue other than through tourism and the money being pumped in by foreign aid, a country where the average wage is less than a dollar a day and nobody expects it to rise any higher, a country where anything can happen and nothing will be done about it. Look closer at the families picnicking on the grass and you’ll see a mother shaking her one-year-old baby and slamming it into the ground like a rag doll. I watch it through a video lens, zoomed in from a distance. The mother is surrounded by other people and yet no one does a thing. Nobody even looks up.
Pick up the recent issue of the Phnom Penh Post and check out the police blotter. There most likely will be at least one report of a mob beating—fights that start small and quickly attract a crowd, everyone beating on one person. A policeman, off duty, uses his gun to hit a motorcycle driver and take his bike. He’s attacked by women on the street—middle-aged, middle-class women who beat him to a pulp, out of control. Lisa saw one. It was during the water festival, which pulls a lot of people into the city, and many of them come to “go crazy.” The streets were packed, traffic at a standstill, Lisa was sitting on the back of a motodop when suddenly a man a few feet away was down on the ground and other men were kicking his head.
“They were taking a few steps for momentum and kicking it like a soccer ball for a free shot.” She jumped off the scooter and ran to the man on the ground and begged the others to stop—a very brave and stupid thing to do—and if not for her motodop driver pulling her out of there, she could have easily been pummeled. “I was so close and the blows were so violent I could feel them in my body. I’ve never felt that kind of violence and hatred. It was fucking surreal.” She went home and curled up like a small child, aching to be held.
The culture was not wiped out, it just has chronic and endemic post-traumatic stress syndrome.
IT COMES TO AN END, FOR ME, late at night in a discotheque, a hip place with murals of fantasy scenes from a tropical island. There’s a dance floor with a mirror ball and strobe lights pulsing to Cambodian disco music, bodies crushed together, writhing like snakes in a pit. I’m sorry but I can’t get into it. I stay in a booth and lie down, looking up and over at a glassed-off private room that’s dark except for a television on the wall showing a National Geographic program on chimpanzees. There are five or six men in the room, customers, sitting in chairs, and four young women serving beer and walking around in high heels and very short skirts. Two men in suits guard the door. The men in the chairs look bored and tired, uninterested in the women, and there’s a chimpanzee on the screen pounding, pounding, pounding a coconut or something like a coconut with a rock. I think it’s a female chimpanzee, and it seems like she is pounding the rock just to show off to the other chimpanzees around her, as if it’s her rock and she is pounding with it and none of the other chimps is going to stop her. She’s happy, she has a tool and she knows how to use it.
I look to the dance floor and it is also pounding. Lisa is dancing with two Cambodian women, her friends, “professional girlfriends” who were both sold into prostitution before they reached puberty and now support their large families as paid mistresses to sad middle-aged Westerners. They are a success, in a way, but still call Lisa to borrow money when things get tight. Lisa’s trying to dance with her friends, but it seems half the men on the floor, all Cambodian, have surrounded her. This bothers me (did I say I am in love with her?), but she’s like, “okay, whatever.” I look back to the National Geographic special and the chimp is still pounding. Enough, we get it—chimps know how to use tools. From the stone to the strobe light, pounding, pounding, pounding. I understand everything. I understand nothing. I close my eyes and try to sleep.
Scott Carrier is an independent radio producer and writer based in Salt Lake City. His work has been broadcast on "All Things Considered," "This American Life," and "Marketplace" and has appeared in magazines such as Harper's Magazine, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. A collection of his essays, Running After Antelope, was published in 2001.
