By the time we reach Phnom Penh, we’re exhausted. We can’t face another broken bedspring, mosquitoes breeding in the bathroom, the insinuating smell of mold. So we check into Colonial Mansion, which is as billed: reassuringly grand yet discreet, a pale yellow building with white trim and half-moon balconies perched above a central courtyard, where the languid pool is the exact color of a Blue Hawaii.
It’s not a true hotel, but a serviced-apartment complex, currently home to the engineers overseeing construction of the new American embassy across the street—a strategic location, the manager informs us, because it’s a clean run from here to the airport, fifteen minutes without traffic, so if the city falls (as it did to the Khmer Rouge in 1975, and to the Vietnamese in 1979) we can get out fast.
Suddenly, we have a separate living room, a TV with DVD player, a kitchen with a refrigerator that comes up to my shoulder and two burners and a toaster. We sit on opposing couches, in shock. It’s utterly silent: no belligerent traffic under the window, no clunking water sounds from the room above. Downstairs, behind latticed doors, there’s a little gym with weights and one working treadmill. I almost weep.
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Fourteen-Year-Old Girl Killed in Wedding Swordfight
Men Hack Friend to Death with Cleavers While Singing Karaoke
Prison Buries Slain Inmates Amid Secrecy
Ex-Husband, Fifty Friends Storm Wedding Party
Four-Year-Old Abducted by Traffickers
Pregnant Woman Axed by Husband
Man Constructs Own Hydroelectric Power Plant
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Mornings are our new luxury: breakfast at home, still undressed, eating Ahrin’s spectacular omelettes and whole-wheat toast and pulpy, genuine orange juice after months of eggs sweaty with grease, sugary white bread, torpid fruit syrup thinned with water. Then a run in the gym, coaxing back forgotten muscles, at least until a power flicker when the treadmill shorts out, flinging me over the console.
Afterwards, we make forays into the city. Phnom Penh is strewn with parks, long stretches of blank grass where boys play lazy soccer and the homeless shower under garden hoses, crouched low and fully dressed, slapping the water under their clothes. When we attempt to walk, despite the dearth of sidewalks and traffic lights to stop the careening, overloaded trucks and motorcycle-taxis, a woman armed with a bathroom scale offers us the chance to weigh ourselves for a dollar, waving exuberantly at the machine as if it were a Tilt-a-Whirl.
At night, prostitutes cluster on park corners, near the fluorescent hexagons of the public bathrooms. An expat who’s filming a documentary on human trafficking points them out. “Just showing you the sights of Phnom Penh,” she says. She also warns us to wear sunglasses at all times: there’s an epidemic of eye infections in the city, thanks to the ubiquity of flying fecal matter.
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A twenty-three-year-old woman killed herself with insecticide after arguing with her husband. She was angry because he criticized her, saying she didn’t know how to cook a good meal for him.
—The Phnom Penh Post police blotter
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We came to Phnom Penh by boat from Siem Reap, where the temples of Angkor are now outnumbered by luxury hotels. At the temples, the children selling bronze animals and Coca-Colas were smart and quick; when Ahrin told one girl that he didn’t want to buy her elephant because his trunk drooped, she shot back, “He sad because you don’t buy him.” She struck a deal: if she could identify the capital cities of our home states (Hawaii and New York), we had to buy something. We hedged: too easy. What about North Dakota? “Bismarck.” We bought a flute.
In town, however, the children were too stunned and slow to do more than hold out limp hands and stare; they roamed the streets, unattended, in a state of lassitude and vague panic. Sometimes tourists would conspire, beckon the children to their table in a restaurant and pour the dregs of half-drunk Coca-Cola into their hands to lap up, then leave them scrabbling for ice cubes from the empty glasses.
I’m wary of overstating the case, of buying into the myth of Cambodia as lawless, dead-eyed, catatonic from years of carnage and occupation. But things seem desperate here, in a way they didn’t in any of the places we’ve been before, not even in India, with its open sewers and legions of unkempt children besieging us for money.
Perhaps it’s the extremity of the contrasts: on one side, a chic all-white lounge with plump, spotless cushions and mango smoothies and cinnamon-dusted beignets and wi-fi; across the street, a woman pushing a cart of books with a sign that reads, “I stopped begging,” while one of her children, naked, wanders into an Internet café and promptly has diarrhea all over the floor. She swiftly hoists him into a cardboard box and starts cleaning up, but when she’s not looking he tips the box upside down and crawls out into the street, motorbikes gunning by, the box covering his head so he can’t see.
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A man was axed in the chest after he joked, “I have five frogs, so I will probably kill one for eating tonight.” Police said the killer probably has a mental problem, as he mistakenly thought that the victim had compared him and four members of his family to the frogs.
—The Phnom Penh Post police blotter
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Through the black-uniformed doormen of Colonial Mansion, we find that great rarity in Phnom Penh, a tuk-tuk driver who actually knows his way around the city: Kim, twenty-two years old and half Vietnamese, his father a soldier who was killed fighting remnants of the Khmer Rouge in the late eighties. He has a deep, back-of-the-throat laugh, chunky hair that curls around his forehead, a sliver of a gap between his front teeth. As soon as he sees us coming he pulls a blue plastic stool from under the seat and plants it on the asphalt to help me step up. While he waits for us, he naps, lying back on the motorcycle with his feet on the handlebars, or teaches himself French from a Xeroxed pamphlet. He tells us he studied computers in college, but had to give it up because of the extra fees teachers demand on the side.
Unlike the army of motodops who appear to be carrying the entire population of Phnom Penh on the backs of their bikes—two, three, four at a time, girls squeezed together riding sidesaddle with their high heels dangling so low they almost scrape the ground—Kim wears a giant black helmet when he drives. Although the tuk-tuk is too bulky to achieve any meaningful speed, he’s wise to play it safe: we constantly hear stories of Cambodians in car accidents who bleed to death on the road because no one dares take them to a hospital, for fear of being stuck with the bill. After a report in the newspaper about a girl who was ambushed while taking a moto-taxi home and forced by her assailants to strip in a deserted alleyway, we notice that if we stay out late at night, past ten, Kim takes a different route back, sticking to well-lit streets.
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A man was knifed to death while returning home from a dance. A witness said the assailants were angry because the victim had stepped on the foot of their friend while dancing.
—The Phnom Penh Post police blotter
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Meanwhile, we have discovered The Shop, a high-ceilinged, hardwood-floored café down on Street 240 where long-unseen words like “brie” and “mesclun” wobble across the chalkboard menu as in a mirage. Against the wall, a glass case flaunts rows of fussily perfect pastries; on a sideboard, freshly baked olive bread and rustic loaves await dismemberment. Outside, the street is eerie, a kind of film-set replication of a block in Nolita, its minimalist boutiques stocked with overpriced silk handbags and completely devoid of customers. Only The Shop is busy, thronged by expats feeding on focaccia and caramelized pears. In the bathroom, posters summon the budding socialites of Cambodia: Learn how to Play Bridge! Improve Your Golf Swing!
Perhaps such a place should not exist in Phnom Penh. But we are savage in our allegiance. When there are no free tables, we lounge moodily at the front counter, eyeing the other foreigners, ready to pounce.
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Armed Soldiers Bulldoze Villagers’ Huts
The military chief said that his soldiers used force because they were attacked by villagers with sticks. He denied, however, that they burned down any houses. “We didn’t burn. We just bulldozed,” he said.
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In the evening, expats congregate on the waterfront, eating guacamole and chips and slugging Tiger beers. At one table, two middle-aged white men double-date with tight-jeaned Cambodian girls; at another, a chain-smoker downloads mp3s to his Apple PowerBook; in the back of the bar, someone is rolling joints, stacking them in pyramids. Children eddy among us, selling bracelets of jasmine tied with red thread, or used Lonely Planets from a plastic crate. One boy tries to palm off the Phnom Penh Tourist Guide, which you can get for free anywhere along the quay.
Later, everyone heads to Street 240, where a wine bar named Rubies is throwing a third-anniversary party. It’s so crowded, they’re selling scrip to redeem for drinks at the bar. One woman insists that I get drunk and shoves reels of scrip into my hand: “You have to drink. You’re in Phnom Penh!” I overhear a plush-lipped blonde: “I was so hung over this morning, first thing I had a massage. Then I drank Bloody Marys all day, had another massage, and went to dinner at Le Royal and drank loads of red wine.”
Under a tent pitched in the yard, a d.j. spins old-school funk. Nobody dances, despite the swirling kaleidoscopic lights. I sip one of the bar’s signature drinks, a Cock-Sucking Cowboy: shot of butterscotch schnapps with a skim of Bailey’s. Almost all the guests are white, non-natives, and many are wearing red in honor of the bar’s name, not the country’s abandoned experiment in communism. Behind the hedge of trees, rows of motodops stand listlessly at the curb, where they will wait for hours to carry the drunk home.
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One person died instantly and four other people were severely injured after a K-58 mine exploded. A witness said one of the victims tied the mine to his waist, and the mine exploded while he was sitting on it and drinking wine with other people.
—The Phnom Penh Post police blotter
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Certain expats have a mantra: Phnom Penh is fucked up. Has a dark energy. An edge. “Don’t fuck with the edge,” we’re told. People divulge bouts of unidentified and untreatable fevers, demands for bribes, apartments repeatedly broken into. “So many thiefs,” someone slurs, adding gaily, “I’ve been robbed at gunpoint.” (A friend of ours from New York shrugs and mutters, “So have I.”)
We haven’t seen such a concentration of Westerners since Goa. But the expats of Phnom Penh are nothing like the hippies of Goa, stupefied and harmless, lolling on their patches of brown-sugar sand; they’re pilgrims of a different kind, seeking not sun and ease, but danger and devastation. “It’s like we’re veterans,” one whispers.
Some come to Cambodia hoping to save it, thirty years too late. N.G.O.s proliferate, more per capita than anywhere else in the world, each with its disheartening agenda: child trafficking, unexploded ordnance, H.I.V, government corruption, poverty. We meet a few astonishingly good people, who demur when praised and fear their work has little impact. Others snipe, deride the efforts of competing N.G.O.s, airily assure us that we’re better off staying in a place like Colonial Mansion because we couldn’t handle the “real” Cambodia.
Secretly, some of them have no interest in salvation. They like squalor, are turned on by it. They need Cambodia to be dark and fucked-up; they claim kinship with it, insisting that they, too, are tragic and misunderstood. For them, Cambodia is sexy so long as it’s dangerous, like a beautiful, damaged woman, sullen and volatile and just this side of deranged. They look deep into our eyes and confide that Cambodia has torn their hearts open.
And so the city teems with idealists and drunks. The former act as emissaries, bearing the riches and earnest optimism of the West, while the latter style themselves as refugees, fleeing a peculiarly Western notion of tragedy: being doomed to an ordinary life.
It’s not clear what the Cambodians think of this.
•
Hello Freshie Boy and Girl!
Minutes before the final performance of the Hello Freshie Boy and Girl 2005 contest, each spiky-haired boy and perfectly made-up girl takes a single incense stick, kneels, and makes a solemn prayer.
The Freshie contest is an annual beauty and talent competition of Cambodian teen-agers and is an instant star maker. Most winners have gone on to become movie stars or sing in karaoke videos.
To be a Freshie is to embody youth, purity, and potential, says organizer Rauv Noy, like something “fresh or just growing like the tree is growing for its new breath.”
This year saw more than three thousand entries to the hippest pageant in the kingdom. The applicant’s character was taken into consideration during screening. Noy kept a special eye out for “beer girls” trying to pass themselves off as high-school students.
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On the dirt road past Tuol Sleng, the infamous former Khmer Rouge prison, tour buses idle under coils of barbed wire. Inside, a young Australian races down the corridors, brandishing a video camera and reciting some private monologue. He films himself peering through a barred window, staring bleakly, then bangs the door of the cell on his way out. He seems giddy with his proximity to horror: over ten thousand people, two thousand of them children, were tortured here, before they were taken to the killing fields and slaughtered.
At the end of a block of cells, each barely the width of a body and too small to lie down in, he trains his lens on a wall of graffiti. From a distance, I imagine these are messages from prisoners, desperate last thoughts, but up close I see they’re all scribbled in English. “We must never let this happen again,” one intones. Elsewhere, someone has seen fit to interpret the Cambodian genocide as a lesson on the evils of gun control (“First they take away their guns, then they take away their freedom”); others counterattack (“Fuck you! Open your eyes, man!”) with references to Abu Ghraib. Each observation is initialed and dated, as in a high-school yearbook. The banality is astounding.
In another room, a Cambodian family smiles for a photograph, posing by a glass box filled with skulls.
