Woke up at 7:00 am today. Didn’t want to
go back to sleep so I read articles on my phone until 8:30. I didn’t want to
have another drowsy morning of sleeping in. That room feels like a drug. That
absence of natural light is so deceiving. We got out right away. Caught a
tuktuk to the Genocide Museum and Killing Fields.
On the way to the museum we saw a tuktuk
hauling a bed of tires, it even had tire covers made out of tire parts. To the
side of the road an old man was pulling a cart behind him and honking a horn
made out of a plastic coke bottle. I thought I had seen slums outside Aeon
mall, but that was a naive observation. The real slums lined the red dirty
roads leading to the killing fields. At least the people in the city live in
four walls. The walls may be decaying but at least they are real walls. The
homes we saw on the sides of the roads were sheds. Just blue to slate gray wavy
aluminum walls. The roofs were no different. Apparently it takes five big
pieces of aluminum to make a house. Some of their doors were left open. Some of
them didn’t have doors. But I could see into their dirt-floor homes which were
only one room. Some were built on stilts above the water. Those has floors made
out of wooden planks, but the cracks were huge. One could see through to the
ground below, which had accumulated a mound of garbage. Large trucks made dust
storms in their paths. The sewage water below homes emitted an rotten egg
stench into the streets. It was a bumpy ride. One hand clung to the pole, the
other covered my mouth. I didn’t want to breath in or even open my eyes for
fear of letting that poison red dust into my body.
Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum
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a prisoner's room |
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the museum as formerly a prison formerly a school, the hallways still resemble a school |
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the outside of the prison |
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makeshift doors leading from room to room |
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where a high ranking official was killed |
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view of Phnom Penh from behind the barbed wire |
At the Genocide Museum, where hundreds of
black and white photographs of victims lined the walls, my eyes fixated on the photo of one girl. Her
eyes were watery, as were the eyes of most children who knew their fates. But
from a certain angle, it looked like she had a tear on her cheek. It was
glistening. I looked closely and saw that it was not a tear, but a chip in the
glass covering her photo. If I changed the angle, the tear disappeared. I spent
a few minutes just looking at this one photo, making the tear appear and
disappear and I changed views. I wanted her to still be alive. Not as an old
woman, but as the girl she was in the photo. I didn’t want to believe she died
in that awful camp for no reason at all. And now, without her knowledge, and
probably to her sadness, her photograph hung in a museum, obscure and
unidentified among hundreds of photographs. Her death meaningless.
After the museum I spent an hour reading a NYTimesarticle about the invasion of the Vietnamese, and of the discover of the
prison. I read that article from the air-conditioned first floor of a Taiwanese
bubble tea store not even 15 minutes from where the prison sits now. Outside
the fields we passed a caravan of trucks heading to a wedding. One truck held
the musicians, evidently rehearsing while en rout. Another turn following
closely behind contained the floral sculptures, and a final one bore elaborate
gifts. Life, for these people continues.
I am not the only one to notice these
comparisons. David Chandler also remarked on the contradictions:
“On every visit, I've been struck by the contrast
between the peaceful, sun-soaked compound and the horrific exhibits on display,
between the whitewashed classrooms with their yellow and white tile floors and
the instruments of torture they contain, between the children at play outside
the buildings and the mug shots of other children en route to being killed….
In
the museum, the eyes of the mounted mug shots, and especially those of the
women and children, seem to follow me. Knowing as we do, and as they did not,
that every one of them was facing death when the photographs were taken gives
the photos an unnerving quality…”
Choeung Ek Killing Fields
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the fields were previously an orchard |
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lake near the fields |
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bracelets left from a mass grave where women and children were found |
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skulls of victims inside the pagoda |
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a pagoda erected for victims |
In the Killing Fields we walked over bone
and cloth. The earth brings up more bones and cloth each day, as though the
bodies are trying to speak through the soil. Before I visited I expected to see
a flat, sprawling land. Like a large open rice field. I executed to see no
bodies or bones, but to just simply know that hundreds and thousands of people
had died on that soil. I didn’t know there were buried there, and that their
bones would peak out underneath the soles of my shoes decades later. I don’t
think I have ever been so close to human bones before. And seeing their torn
clothes, how could I think that those clothes were once on a body, not a body,
a person. One of the most moving moments was when I stood by the tree where the
loudspeaker was held. When I heard the same sounds that victims heard in their
last moments. The sound of revolutionary music, a woman’s voice singing into
archaic recording technology, and the sound of a generator. Those noises were
blaring in the dark night, which was lit up only with florescent lights. Those
were someone’s last moments on earth. Not only someone’s, but many, many,
peoples’.
I thought to myself, nothing is promised
to us. No one promised us a good life,
old age, a painless death. No such promises were made. All of the bad
endings are possible. Possible not at the will of god or the devil, but of
fellow humans. The same humans who also want the promise of a good life and
painless death. How can we break that mortal contract with one another?
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fragments of bone and clothing beneath tourist footprints |
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weather and erosion brings bones out of the ground |
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victim's clothing entwineed with roots of a tree |
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