Things Get Heavy

Whoa. Well, I guess this vacation couldn't all be frivolous fun.

The view from my bus window for a full 2 hours.

On Friday afternoon, I was scheduled to take a bus from Battambang to the Cambodian capital, Phnom Penh, a trek which should usually take about 6 hours. Sam, my couch surfing host in PP, was supposed to pick me up from the bus station. Unfortunately, our bus broke down on the side of the road in the afternoon heat about 2 hours into the trip, leaving me and a bunch of Khmer people (no other foreigners) stranded until another bus could be sent to fetch us. In the end, the trip took a full 8 1/2 hours, which ate up my entire day and resulted in Sam missing my pick-up. Upon arriving in PP, I had to hunt down a guesthouse to sleep for the night. If there was one good thing about the breakdown, though, it's that it helped me realize that I am indeed capable of being in such situations without stressing or freaking out. I mean, I was stuck in the middle of nowhere in Cambodia with nary a soul that spoke more than a couple words of English, and truly had no idea what the hell was going on, or if we were going to get picked up, or how I was going to contact Sam (my Korean phone doesn't work in this country)... yet precisely because of the complete impossibility of getting any answers, I just sat back and listened to my iPod and zoned out, having no other choice but to just trust that something would work out. If this had happened in a place where everyone spoke English, everyone would be throwing fits and my stress level would subsequently be up to here. On that note, it was also somewhat enlightening to see the way Khmer people just sat back and waited, almost shrugging as if these things happen all the time. No freaking out or shouting here. Just acceptance and patience. Says a lot about the culture and also says a lot about the country's level of development that bus breakages are just par for the course. (I should note that about half of all the country's buses are old hand-me-downs from Korea, as evidenced by all the hangeul written on everything. So clearly these buses are not in the fresh stages of life.)

Tuol Sleng

I managed to work things out with Sam over e-mail that evening, and we met on Saturday morning at 9 AM near my guesthouse. He was really nice about taking me to all the touristy things in PP, even though he's clearly seen them all several times before, including the Royal Palace and National Museum. But the mood was set at a relatively somber level thanks to the fact that we chose to start our day of sightseeing at Tuol Sleng, which used to be a secondary school until the Khmer Rouge turned it into the largest detention and torture center in Cambodia from 1975-1979. Good god, there are few things more depressing than genocide. I understand the need for things like concentration camps and detention centers to be preserved in order that no one ever forget the terrible things that have happened throughout history. And I also appreciate the fact that things like the Holocaust Museum or the Apartheid Museum in South Africa are places that I and others need to visit in order to comprehend the magnitude and horror of such events. But it never gets any nicer or easier or more pleasant. It's always an awful, awful experience.

Behind the barbed wire lies prison cells on the ground floor and torture rooms on the upper floors. The wire was put up to prevent desperate prisoners from jumping from the upper levels to commit suicide. Guess the Khmer Rouge wanted to make sure they got their fair share of torture in before killing the prisoners themselves. Truly sick.

The prison cells 

Inside one of the tiny cells

A torture room, with photographic evidence.

Just a handful of the victims.

The genocide in Cambodia was one of the worst in history, with around 3 million Khmer people killed. I think one of the things that makes it even worse than the Holocaust in certain respects is that it wasn't some invader from another country, like Hitler, who came into these other countries while rounding up its citizens and killing them. In the case of the Khmer Rouge, it was the Cambodians' own people who were committing these atrocities on the population at large. Sam was born in 1980, so just missed the really awful years by a hair, but told me that there is a huge problem in Khmer society with a lack of trust, stemming directly from the years of the Pol Pot regime. Many Khmer people no longer place their trust in one another as they had in the past because it was their trust in Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge that came back to haunt and destroy them. The more I learned this weekend, the more it tore me up inside that we don't learn about these things in school in the US. I think we find it difficult to accept the role that our own country played in the Khmer Rouge's rise to power. I know I personally had no idea of most of the details of this horrible time period.

The memorial stupa at Choeung Ek, built
to remember those who were murdered.

On Sunday, Sam took me to the Choeung Ek Killing Fields, which is where prisoners of Tuol Sleng were taken to be executed. In 1980, after the regime was overthrown, the Cambodians excavated dozens of mass graves here, with over 200,000 bodies found at this site alone. The whole thing made me feel sick to my stomach. To just pile on the dread over the course of the day, when I eventually got on the 4-hour bus from Phnom Penh to Sihanoukville that afternoon, the movie playing on the bus was the 1980s movie "The Killing Fields," which I have never actually seen but now fully intend to the moment I return to Korea. A middle-aged Khmer man in the row across from me asked me where I was from and if I had ever seen this film. I told him no, but that I had visited the Killing Fields that morning. He told me the film is excellent, but also terrible because it really is an accurate depiction of how things were in Cambodia at the time. He then told me his name was Pech, and he was

Shelves of skulls stacked inside the stupa.

13 years old when everything went to hell in 1975. Pech said that his 2 brothers were killed during the 4-year rule of the Khmer Rouge and his father succumbed to malnutrition during the same period. While I sat feeling sicker than ever, he recounted to me the way he and his family (and everyone else, for that matter) were forced out of Phnom Penh within days of the Khmer Rouge taking over, being forced to live in the forest and plant rice. They had to build makeshift structures to protect from the elements, despite the majority being city-dwellers with little knowledge of rural life; were forced to use old tires to make shoes; scrounged around for large insects in order to supplement what was pretty much a nonexistent diet. Interspersed throughout his story, Pech would randomly stop and just say "How this could happen, I can never understand." You could see the way it still haunts him, the way he just kept coming back to "I can never understand." It was painful and awful and I, for the most part, sat silently because I had no idea what to say.

Even 30+ years later, these poor people are still being given up by the earth.

It was weird and kind of scary to talk to someone who is younger than my mother and yet could recount such terrible things in vivid detail. It reminded me of some of the awful firsthand stories we heard from older people in South Africa about apartheid, and of my friend Olave from Pepperdine who had some serious issues going on due to the events of his youth in Burundi, which basically dealt with the exact same genocidal events as in Rwanda, albeit less well-publicized. You can't help but be consumed with doubt over the inherent nature of humanity when you hear about such awful things that have happened, some of them so recently, and the fact that things like these continue to happen in different parts of the world up to this day. When you travel, you meet so many good, kind-hearted, friendly people but you also come across thieves and scam artists and stories of government corruption, poverty, and worse. I mean, seriously, what gets worse than genocide? There just isn't anything I can think of.

I find myself wishing that people in the US traveled more and were exposed to different perspectives of the world far more frequently. I don't think being sheltered from the bad things of the world provides us with any benefits. It is eye-opening and sobering to learn about the history of Cambodia or South Africa or China and to realize how unbelievably lucky we all are to be born in the US in this particular time period. Something that made me profoundly sad was when Pech went on to tell me about his years spent working in Germany in the 1980s and all the countries in Europe and Asia

that he'd visited as an adult, but that he'd never been to America and it's a dream of his to see it. I couldn't help but think that here was an obviously intelligent, hardworking man who was so kind and friendly and who had been through hell as a teenager for literally no good reason whatsoever. If anyone deserves to have the life afforded to most Americans, it is surely a good person like Pech. Instead, there are so many nasty, ignorant people filling up our country while feeling some supreme, obscene sense of superiority and entitlement because they were goddamned fortunate enough to have ancestors who were immigrants. It all just makes the world feel so very unfair.

And it absolutely drives home, again, how lucky I am, and how lucky my friends and family are, and that we should endeavor harder not to forget it. People I've met while traveling constantly tell me how lucky I am to be an American. For us, life is easy. I need to make more of an effort not to take it for granted.