Cambodge

(drafted a few days ago)

Apparently I've been tagged for a meme. Too uncool and blog-orphaned to tag anyone else. Does Not Play Well With Other Children here! heh. But anywho...

The instructions:

• Grab the nearest book.
• Open it to page 56.
• Find the fifth sentence.
• Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
• Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

I was hoping it'd be some random Viet book, but sitting here on my dining table / dumping ground (along with socks, a surgical masks, souvenir koalas, toilet paper, a Shins CD, my CV and Keo Mon Sua) is Jonathan Harley's Lost in Transmission. You may know him as the husband of the chick who wrote Holy Cow, or the ABC's South Asia correspondent. The book's about his travels - he was in Afghanistan on September 11th and such. Eh, worth the $4 it cost me as part of a travelogue box set (do I hear a "hell yeah!").

"On both sides of the divide, more than fifty thousand Kashmiris have fled their villages and the raining shells."

Meanwhile, just back from Le Cambodge. Angkor totally deserves the hype. I travelled with my ex-PBL-groupmate and another Aussie student, and collectively we decided Cambodia wins at temples and city architecture. Phnom Penh is a classy joint. Vietnam is bogan in comparison, but at least we win at food! Bun bo hue shits all over your amok! (er) That said, Cambodia is definitely more developing world - complete with the trademark Pong of Asia stinky markets, vehicles overloaded with cargo and people (today we saw a guy clinging for dear life on the boot of a car as there was no space inside), and undernourished, unbelievably cute half-naked children begging for money. Guilt. Trip. As a rule I don't give money to beggars, but sometimes I forget why that's a rule. Well, if you give a man a fish, you feed him one day. If you give an international charity $40 a month, 20% of which goes to glossy advertising and Administrative Costs, and they teach a man to fish, then you feed him for a lifetime. Or something.

In Phnom Penh we visited the Genocide Museum and the Killing Fields. The latter is really just a field, with ominous ditches and signs saying "Please don't walk over the mass grave!", and a monument filled with skulls. The museum is at the school that the Khmer Rouge took over and used as a prison. There are no tastefully lit cardboard placards, few glass cases in this museum, no multimedia whizzbangs - quite a contrast from the Holocaust museum in Washington DC. That's not a political statement...it's just that this shabby place doesn't allow you much historical distance at all. The first thing you walk into is a series of cells. It was late afternoon when we got there, and the cells were unlit. In these dark, bare rooms, there's nothing but a metal bed frame on which sit iron shackles and other sinister implements. On the wall, a picture of the victim found there. Dead or alive, it's hard to tell. No words of explanation. There's only a sign in Khmer outside, with a drawing of a smiling man crossed out. We couldn't figure out what it meant..."no photos"? "No smiling"? I think it's perhaps "no smiling and posing for photos in this place where people were tortured and killed". The next building is the gallery of the dead, photographs of the prisoners at arrest, and sometimes after being beaten. It's the "befores" that were especially haunting, though. Rarely do they show fear or cry, some even half-smile for the camera.

For some reason we decided we'd go see the war museum today upon our arrival back in Saigon. I wrestled with a lifetime's worth of indoctrination. See, the version of the VN War I got as a descendant of soldiers and refugees, was vastly different from the Western notion - all that stuff about guilt, quagmires, good old hippy days, "Communism roolz (in theory)", American imperialists interfering with the nationalist struggle by the valiant VC, etc etc. It blew my 14-year-old mind, that the story we were taught in Year 9 History differed so much from the story I got at home.

So yeah, the museum is an obvious propaganda tool. Captions say things like "American GIs [grinning] after beheading Vietnamese patriot". And yeah, there's a Hanoi Hilton-sized elephant in the room... indeed all the exhibits are of American weapons and their consequences - I didn't see any VC artefacts. But, man, the pictures. Napalm, Agent Orange, land mines... bodies, burns, birth defects, dead kids. "They did it too" is no answer. There are no answers.