A Bird's Eye View of Pants Run Amok

With Mike and Caroline at Fat Boys Burgers in Phnom Penh

As usual, traveling through Asia and trying to write a weekly blog presents some challenges; namely what can we include or not include that will give a faithful account of the experience?  Since beginning this blog, I think it’s fair to say I’ve never been so torn about what to write.  Everything we’ve experienced seems to need to be shared urgently, but none of the events and experiences would fit comfortably together in one blog.  So I’ve decided to go meta on this one.  I’ve decided to cram language confusion, sight-seeing, funny pants, more fights at religious places, seeing Mike and Caroline, and genocide under the overly generous banner of “A bird’s eye view” of a family on a trip; the highs, the lows, and the guilt. What does that mean practically?  It means trying to understand Mark’s niggling concern that we’ve been vacationing for “too long”.  It means trying to appreciate the good, the band and the ugly.  And for me, who cannot survive without laughter, it means closing my eyes at the end of a tough day and trying to focus, with gratitude, on the good things humanity has to offer; like funny pants.

Tough day?  You’re probably thinking, “How dare you talk about tough days?”  Well, anyone who knows a little about the history of Cambodia will remember the genocide that occurred here between the years 1975 and 1979.  I suppose it’s always loomed large in my imagination because I was born in 1972 and the Vietnam War and Southeast Asia in general had captivated so much of the world for so long.  So I grew up aware that something bad had happened in Cambodia, understood vaguely that a communist group of revolutionaries had swept through and decimated the country with their insane visions of a peasant utopia and egalitarian society, and that perhaps as many as 1.5 million people perished under this twisted vision.

Building A at Tuol Sleng; the Vietnamese arrived here in 1979 to find prisoners who'd been
bludgeoned to death as the Khmer Rouge fled

It’s one thing to know this in the abstract and even to write about it (which I think I did for my IB history exam). But to go to the genocide museum here in Phnom Penh and to see the rooms where tens of thousands of innocent Cambodians (men, women, and many children), were tortured to death, and to see the instruments of torture, to look at their pictures and then see pictures of the killing fields, where their poor bodies were put to a brutal end because there was no space to bury them at the site of the museum (a former school turned torture factory) - to see these things was frankly mind-blowing.  Of the thousands that passed through Tuol Sleng, which is how this particular interrogation site was known, only 7 survived.  Unimaginable that they even survived!  

It is forbidden to take pictures from inside the rooms

Here are the ten cardinal rules prisoners were given prior to interrogation:

1. You must answer accordingly to my questions.  Don’t turn them them away.
2. Don’t try to hide the facts by making pretexts this and that.  You are strictly prohibited to contest me.
3. Don’t be a fool for you are a chap who dare to thwart the revolution.
4. You must immediately answer my questions without wasting time to reflect.
5. Don’t tell me either about your immoralities or the essence of the revolution.
6. While getting lashes or electrification you must not cry out at all.
7. Do nothing, sit still and wait for my orders.  If there is no order, keep quiet.  When I ask you to do something, you must do it right away without protesting.
8. Don’t make pretexts about Kamuchea Krom in order to hide your jaw of traitor.
9. If you don’t follow all the above rules, you shall get many many lashes of electric wire.
10. If you disobey any point of my regulations you will get either ten lashes or five shocks of electric discharge.

I can tell you from the pictures we saw that ten lashes or five shocks would have constituted gentle treatment.

Tuol Sleng used to be a school before the Khmer Rouge took it over.  This was once a swing set,
and was converted into a gallows.

More than anything else, the question I left with was not “how can humanity be capable of this?”.  Anyone who’s visited the Holocaust Museum in DC, or remembers the Rwandan genocide will understand that no society is free of the potential for extreme evil.  The question I had was really, “How in four short years could so much damage be done to an entire country?”  It requires diligence, planning, discipline - all attributes we would normally praise, but which under the circumstances were applied to systematically wiping out an entire class of intellectuals, their children, and seemingly absolutely anyone else, including - eventually, and in a case of perverted justice - some of the very people who started the whole thing.  It’s shocking how quickly you can obliterate a country, if you just put your mind to it.

These are painful, important things to see, and we were glad that the boys could see them, too, though I doubt they’ll take quite the same lessons from it.  Something about being a parent makes you feel more personally connected to these kinds of events, makes you imagine the horrors more intensely.  I was not feeling well last night (was battling Mark’s juicy cold of a few weeks ago) and I was trying so hard to fall asleep but kept being awakened by the specter of those eyes from the pictures, the haunted faces in black and white.  

I am not ashamed to say that I asked Mark, who was reading up on the history of the Khmer Rouge, to show me something funny on the computer, and I fell asleep to a clip of Jimmy Fallon, Martin Short, and Steve Martin cracking each other up.  

If the bird’s eye belonged to the spirits of those departed souls from that era, what would they have said of that moment when I chose to ignore their terrified stares in favor of comedy?  I hope they’d be forgiving.

But here is where I apply a jarring change in tone, because sometimes that’s the only way to move on from traumatic imagery.  The good news is that we are safely here in Cambodia, beautiful country where my brother Mike and Caroline live and which we’ve been eager to visit for years.  They welcomed us into their lovely home late on Tuesday night, Mike wearing a t-shirt that made the following reasonable claim: “Surely not everyone was kung-fu fighting”.  They have taught us some critical Khmai words which at this moment I have trouble remembering.  We told them about some of the good conversations we’d had in Siem Reap.  Here’s but one example involving Mark who will always research a menu to death before ordering:

Mark:  I see here that you have a special Khmer curry, but you also have Amok.  What’s the difference?

Waiter:  It different.

Mark:  Yes, but how?  One is a curry, and the other is….?
Waiter:  Amok.

Mark:  Thank you.  I’ll take the curry.

All was well eventually and we finally figured out what Amok was.  Cambodians are so considerate that they even included an article about it in the Angkor Air inflight magazine!

Cambodians are so polite, so pleasant.  Mark, who has been known to be a bit of an impatient traveller, went to a ticket agent in Siem Reap to inquire when the plane was arriving to take us to Phnom Penh, and that agent disarmed him so thoroughly with questions about how he’d enjoyed Cambodia up until that point, that Mark completely forgot why he’d gone up to the guy in the first place and returned to his seat after being told, “Thank you for your admire!”

To continue with stories about Mark, it has to be said, though Mark won’t appreciate me for including this, that our family was involved in another scuffle at a religious site, this time in Siem Reap, where Micah was denied entry into a temple that would have required him to navigate a steep staircase.  Both Mark and I were outraged, since (no offense to elderly people) the frailest old folks were allowed to go up and down those stairs without hindrance.  But I, you see, made my opinion known calmly and went about my business.  Mark, on the other hand, tried to sneak poor Micah in via a side entrance.  I got a running commentary from Daniel and Eli once we were at the top of the temple and had - of course - a bird’s eye view of things.  Daniel said, “Hey, Dad seems to be in the temple grounds with Micah.”  And then a moment later, I heard Eli say, “Uh oh, Dad’s been detained.”  And I, loving wife that I am, said “Dad’s on his own.”  I feared the worst; that they’d confiscate his ticket and kick us all out of Angkor Thom entirely, maybe even ban us from entering any other temples, like Ankgor Wat!  But again, Cambodians are the nicest people, they were so polite to Mark and just asked him gently to leave.  He left, but I won’t make any comments about his comportment.

The deadly staircase of certain pre-adolescent death at Baphuon Temple

An aerial shot of Mark and Micah.  I should have known from Mark's determined stride
what he was up to...

Thank goodness, Mark didn't get the rest of our temple passes revoked.  If I had to leave without seeing Angkor Wat,
I don't even know....

Other good things: On day one in Phnom Penh, Caroline took me for a foot massage.  Now, anyone who knows me knows that I am a little wary of massages.  I always fear that they’ll break something in me.  Like I might have to say one day, “Back in 2017, I had a massage in Bangkok.  Sadly, since that day I’ve only ever been able to sit comfortably on my left butt cheek.”  What if after this foot massage, they pulled one or two toes so hard that I never again run another half-marathon?  My fears were unfounded, all my toes are in working order, and while I don’t feel like my legs could now belong to Steve Austin (ha!  See if you can place that reference, kids!), I do think it was a nice way to spend an afternoon; having toes pulled and reading about Megan Markle, thinking not about genocide but about Buckingham Palace and mixed-race royalty.

Well, I can’t end without claiming my pride in my son Micah.  Back in Bangkok, I saw a full-grown man wearing some pants which prompted me to tell Mark, “That man has relinquished the right to be called a man.”  My arrogant, sexist, American tendencies in full bloom, I challenged anyone in my family to sport a pair of such pants for one full day in public and receive a handsome reward.  Micah happily took up that challenge, and by the day’s end, we had purchased a baggy pair of elephant patterned pants that he would wear in exchange for McDonald’s followed by Dairy Queen.  

He wore these pants in Siem Reap, and I discovered how small-minded and petty I was when I saw how many people joined him in the universe of fancy pants, proudly encasing their legs in patterns and colors that would not be welcomed in their more conservative European capitals.  And so I say to Micah, good for you, my young and fearless son.  May the bird’s eye view hold you in more favor than your less fashionable mom!

These are the little things, I suppose, that right my universe.  I don’t know, Mark is probably right, we may be off work for too long; things do start to feel a little wobbly - you get a little rootless.  But then you see something that reaches into your soul and makes you glad you’ve been so lucky.  What is it that decides we are the ones who get to travel around and take silly pictures of clown pants, laughing at Jimmy Fallon and wishing Megan Markle and her freckles well, only a few decades removed from the unspeakable terrors endured in this same country?  I don’t know.  But I’ll take it, with deep, deep gratitude.

PS, Still no word on Hazal, though if there's any justice in pretend Istanbul, she'll have been sent to juvie.  Instead, I will leave you with the top twenty fancy pants of Siem Reap.  I was suffering from a bad cold, and used the opportunity to catalog these technicolor pants as a distraction.  They appear in no order of greatness.  I am emboldened by our low but faithful readership and do not fear being sued; I won't blur any of the pant-wearers' faces.  Why should I?  They should be proud of themselves.  Additionally, I don't know how to blur faces in pictures. I was about to edit/crop certain pictures before I realized that on the edges of a frame, another pair of fancy pants miraculously appeared.

PPS, Mark makes the point that many men-folks wear these pants because at temples you're not allowed to reveal your knees.  I say that it's easy enough to wear long shorts.  No, these men wear fancy pants because that's what they're about.