Why we are the way we are

I have five children. When people are having a party, for a birthday or another celebration, always they invite all their family. Many people around them. I have no one to invite to my party. I lost my whole family to the Khmer Rouge. That’s why I have many children now, so they will never have to be alone like me.

guide, Kampot 

The Hells, on the lower registers, are pictured in greater detail than the Heavens above.

East section of the south gallery bas-reliefs, Angkor Wat

Photo by Annie Eagleton

Mostly the bas-reliefs carved on Angkor Wat and Bayon are of battles. Pandavas killing Kauravas, monkeys killing demons, Khmers killing Chams, Khmers killing Khmers.

The huge scenes are composed with such bewildering energy, realised with such individuality and skill – and love, in even the smallest details; maybe most of all in the small details tucked around the edges of all the kings and gods and demons and armies fighting to keep the world going or bring it to a halt: the vignettes of ordinary people going about their ordinary business of living. Building and playing, buying and selling, hunting and cooking, making love and music and jokes and babies.

Among all the ancient temples, today’s ordinary people are going about their ordinary business: planting rice and leading their cows home and playing volleyball and begging one-armed, one-legged; trying aged six to sell postcards to tourists.

Over it all the sun is setting plush and sultry, reflected in puddles and paddy fields with perfect fidelity. Rice grows upside-down in a glowing sky, Heaven on Earth or Earth in Heaven.

This cannot be reduced to pictures or words

I got up, I faffed a bit about what to wear, wasn’t too enthused by the picture of my face staring back at me from the mirror, considered how to fill my day. I had breakfast, went for a walk, visited Tuol Sleng, or S-21, where 17,000 or more people were tortured for months by the Khmer Rouge before being bashed over the head and dumped in the Killing Fields.

I watched all the other people like me, walking stickily in the heat around this school turned prison, trying to look solemn, fingering their guidebooks and already thinking about their next move.

I walked on into the busy bright city that thirty-five years ago was cleared of its population overnight and turned into a ghost town. I visited a market, a bookshop… I met friends for cocktails at the FCC and we watched the sun set and the Khmers and foreigners promenade along the riverfront; forgetful, enjoying life.

I don’t know how to process my day. I don’t know why I do what I do.

While I was at S-21 my friend Annie visited a wildlife rescue centre near Phnom Penh. She showed us her photos of macaques and gibbons rescued from miserable lives as toys and tourist attractions; described how they hung disconsolately from the bars, putting a paw out of the cage with a mute plea to be stroked.

“They all have such sad stories.” she said. “Look at the poor things,” their photographed faces so full of expression: soulful loneliness and irritation and desolation and disdain.

The faces of the Tuol Sleng prisoners – row after row of mug shots, the men in high-buttoned shirts, the women with short bobbed hair; nameless, numbered – are mostly expressionless. Or I don’t know how to read their expressions. I can’t see terror or defiance or anger or desperation or despair. They just stare out, one after another after another after another, and I want to look at every single one of them, pay attention, pay them their due because it’s the least I can do, recognise each and every one as an individual with all their hopes and secrets and faults and promise, with fathers mothers siblings spouses friends who loved them –

(Most of these people have never been identified; the records have been lost and maybe anyone who knew or loved them is also dead. There were only seven known survivors from Tuol Sleng)

– But it’s impossible. However much I try, they blur into one face. It’s easier to relate to the monkeys, mute creatures whose feelings we think we can read so clearly. But who knows if they really feel what we think they feel? They can’t tell us.

The prisoners of Tuol Sleng tell us, they told it in page upon page upon page of confession for a regime gone mad; all of it saying one thing – Make It Stop.