I took no pictures. Enough have been taken. Hundreds, thousands, frozen for nearly thirty years in gray-scale portraits, line the walls in room after room, their stares immortal. Like pages of a high school yearbook, face next to face, near identical, yet no smiles, no well-wishes, no “Fall Sports” page. Infants in their mothers arms, young men and old women, Khmer and Vietnamese, Buddhist and Christian stilled—and for a moment, history stopped and I forgot that the photographs were only the first step in the cruel, unthinkable atrocities that took place against these very people who gazed back at me through decades. They once dwelt in the same room I stood in at Tuol Sleng, S-21 Khmer Rouge Torture Prison. The next room reveals more photographs, these of the aftermath of torture, beatings, and starvation: the finality of death. What occurred to these wrongly accused, mercilessly persecuted, guilty of minor infractions against “Ankar” (like wearing glasses, a braid in the hair, or eating a frog found in the rice field), however, was not unthinkable or unfathomable. The truth is that such things having ever occurred demonstrate just what the human mind is capable of thinking. Do not live vicariously through me, though, for I took no pictures.
The afternoon was unusually cool, and we seized our afternoon freedom with zeal. We were treating ourselves. Yes, we knew the meals at the Lonely Planet-acclaimed “Butterfly Garden” to be a bit pricier—meals starting at five dollars instead of two—but we had survived the first week of class and had earned it. The restaurant itself, hidden away on a side street in Siem Reap, was shrouded in dense bushes. After entering the double gate, no doubt to encourage the butterflies to remain, we drew ourselves into a fantastical secret garden. An immense fish pond, dotted with lily pads and chirping frogs, held enormous golden koi. Lush bushes, adorned with fierce fuchsia and quiet cream flowers created a labyrinth in whose nooks tables with silk cloths hid. And of course, floating from petal to petal, dozens of delicate masterpieces alighted and set forth. I must confess I was more interested in capturing the butterflies than I was in eating. I had strived to catch them from day one, but their wings were much quicker than my lens. This was my perfect opportunity to finally document these creatures’ existence. I tiptoed around with my camera poised. Then a shadow fell upon my shoulder, gracefully casting the range of a small bird. I looked up. Drifting above me, the five-inch wingspan of gleaming black, white, and canary yellow giant soared skyward. The majestic insect suddenly collided with the reality of its surroundings. That’s when I saw it, the black screen net that created a ceiling to the garden, holding the butterflies back. My first thought, “What an ample moment to secure this butterfly!” But as I focused I realized it was entangled. It began beating its wings wildly, fighting to break free. I watched it solemnly, as my appetite slipped away. Slowly, the net’s other casualties came to my attention; at least a dozen other wings hung flutter-less from the cloud-skewing canopy. Even of those still living behind the garden’s gates, I could not bring myself to embrace their captivity and trap them once more on film.
Most of the morning I had spent staring at my feet out of fear of where my gaze would land. That’s why when I tripped over the sliding gate’s track I was all the more startled. Had I not stumbled and my head tossed back, I may have never looked up. The stairway in general made me uneasy—perhaps the haunting rhyme of the ghostly encounter on the stairs was the root.* My double take confirmed it: suspended on invisible grips a few dozen, robin-sized bats clung to the wall at the ceiling’s edge. Ironically, the abandoned stair of the former Khmer Rouge prison seemed the most suitable home for these creatures. Bats had never unnerved me before. They marked breezy summer evenings on the cusp of my aunt and uncle’s butterfly garden, sipping iced tea, while the bats’ silhouettes darted across the maroon and indigo post-sunset sky. Yet now, I couldn’t pull my frightened eyes from them. Their dangling frames epitomized the mood that engulfed the “genocide museum.” I paused at the stair’s threshold, waiting until someone else ventured down before entering them again. The first girl to pass into the well promptly tripped over the gate rail and let out a subsequent gasp of “Oh! Bats.”
Coughing and sputtering the engine gasped then died for the third time on the fateful eight-hour trip upstream to Battambang. The guidebook had given a rough estimate of three to eight hours, and ever the optimists, our band concluded it would a peaceful, scenic ride of no more than four. When hour five drifted by on the hard wooden benches and the engine abandoned its duties on its second collapse, we realized we were doomed. I am not sure what disturbed me more about the trip: the speed boat, carrying twenty plus passengers perched on stern seats, ramming into the porch-roof support beam of one of the villager’s houses when trying to pick up a passenger or the thought that if the boat was so rapidly running out of gas as to warrant needing to be filled up thrice during the journey that the only place for the excess to flow was into the river, the lifeblood of the villages that floated on its edge. Abandoning the impracticality of residing on land with the ever-changing shoreline of the river, the people of the floating villages had taken to houseboats. Like the rise and fall of giant lungs, the lake inhaled during the wet season expanding for kilometers and exhaled during the dry, breathing life into the clusters of communities that relied entirely on the Tonle Sap. Our boat, speeding tourists and Cambodians alike up the river, tore through villagers’ nets, sent currents that rocked and nearly tipped the paddle-boats of the villagers, and churned all of our stomachs. Finally, we docked in Battambang.
Our motivation for such a trying-adventure: Phnom Sampeu and the Killing Caves. This mini-excursion was the defined by its transportation. The roads to the mountain were so poor, that the only way to get there, according to the moto drivers, was by moto. After debating with them about this and praying for safety, the seven of us embarked on seven motos. Following thirty intense minutes of bobbing and weaving Volvo-sized potholes and swooping within inches past cattle trucks and unusual farming equipment less successfully traversing the terrain, we came to the foot of the mountain. One of the moto drivers volunteered to be our paid tour-guide. Again, we debated but settled. Turns out his English was excellent, and he not only was very knowledgeable about the sight but also shared his family’s own tales of surviving the Khmer Rouge. His father lost his parents, both his brothers, and his sister during the years of the Democratic of Kampuchea. His parents met as refugees in Thailand. We went up to the temple, which before the KR had been a monastery and school. During the bloody regime, the building was converted into a prison, one like S-21, where those of the Western Zone who were traitors to “Ankar” met their demise. The prison served the same purpose as Tuol Sleng, to extract confessions by means of horrific torture, yet instead of a field, the executions took place in the nearby caves. Following the Vietnamese invasion and the fall of Pol Pot’s reign, the temple was restored in memoriam of the dead from there and a shrine and a immense image of the reclining Buddha now occupy the caves. The descent into the main cave coiled down nearly three stories, and awe of the natural cave formations held me. The rest of group made their way down first, I lingered behind, sneaking pictures of the cave walls and the Buddha below. As I lifted my camera to capture the wide opening nearly thirty feet above where the trees hung over the edge, our tour guide motioned the rest of the group’s attention to the overhang. Here, he explained, the cadres would deal out the penalty for treachery against “Ankar”—a machete to the back of the neck. The rocks below on the cave floor caught the fallen souls. I did not know, nor did our guide mention, that they still remained there, in the cave. I turned from the sight and wandered, in a slight daze, to the shrine on the other end. Its vibrant gold and blues created a gleeful cast, as the resting, peaceful Buddha seemed unaffected at what had transpired before. Exotic they were, and my pointer clicked away on the camera’s silver button. After a few moments, I noticed one of the other girls, caught in a trance, glued to the side of the shrine. I strode up to her to trace her gaze: the bones of those discovered in the cave filled the shrine that filled my memory card. Earlier in the afternoon, we had seen a skeleton in part, and I had had no second thoughts of preserving this image. Faced with my own hypocrisy, I stared quivering at the image of so many. None of them ought to have been there. The killing machine of the Khmer Rouge consumed thousands, yet just one life taken warrants tragedy and action. Life isn’t valuable just in terms of quantity. Why is it then that we seem immune to the death of one or two and allow the deaths of millions?
The walls had recently been “touched-up”; the splatters and horror-film details made less noticeable. Yet the three by five brick cells, the cot frames, the ankle shackles, torture tables and devices remained. The scratches on the walls beneath the barred windows, the stains on the tile, and the re-enactment paintings provided enough gore for those who sought it. The Korean tourists, Australian do-gooders, and the students from abroad all snapped picture after picture of the walls of portraits, the glass-entombed skulls, and the electro-shock tub. The only Cambodians at the prison, besides the students with our group, were the vendors at the souvenir stands next to buildings one and four and the tuk-tuk drivers looming at the gates, shouting as I walked by “Tuk-tuk, lady? Tuk-tuk! I take you to Choeung Ek; I take you to killing field!”
(Even in my description, I add to the folklore, the bloody legacy—this irony, this hypocrisy, is not lost on me.)
Prior to 1976, the grounds were bustling with young Cambodians in high school. The most recent addition before the cells were two huts for instruction of elementary school-aged children. Then the city was hollowed, the populace purged from its home and forced to the countryside to partake in the great Cambodian agricultural utopia. The deserted streets replaced the buzzing metropolis; a few hundred Khmer Rouge administrators replaced the over 2 million displaced; and traitors of “Ankar” filled the rooms where the students once learned. Over twelve thousand prisoners came through Tuol Sleng, passing from rural countryside camp and rice field to the torture rooms then to Choeung Ek village. The village, home to a several-hundred year-old Chinese cemetery, was transformed into the one of the largest “killing fields” of the Democratic of Kampuchea. The Vietnamese when they “liberated” Cambodia or “invaded,” depending on the day and the historian, in 1979 discovered these sites, the prison, where every document of every person who entered the gates remained yet no survivors were found**, and the fields with partially exposed remains. The Vietnamese, in order to legitimize their occupation of Cambodia sought to preserve how horrific the conditions had been under the Democratic of Kampuchea set up the “genocide museum” and “killing field memorial.” The sites, in theory, are meant to serve as a witness of the atrocities suffered during the late 1970s to future generations of Cambodians; however, only tourists and foreigners with their digital camcorders predominantly visit these places where skulls are stacked atop one another in three story high heaps within the memorial and the clothes of those once buried and now displayed, continue to litter the paths of the field and the rooms of the prison. The village turned mass grave turned tourist attraction: Choeung Ek Village Killing Field Souvenir Shop. The school turned prison turned “must-see” spot.
Our director informally interviewed a few of the Cambodian college students at the university where we are taking classes. Three of them were quite sure that if the genocide took place, then the Vietnamese or the Chinese must have carried it out. Truth is that these students do not know the truth. The Khmer Rouge period is not taught in schools; the government, of whom some in power were also in power during the years of 1975-1979, hope that there could just be a collective forgetting and that the future need not concern themselves with such unpleasant thoughts of the past. Therefore, what purpose does the prison and the field serve? If not standing to educate the younger Cambodians, it propagates this mythology that attracts hoards of foreigners.
Their faces line the walls. Their starving frames, their beaten limbs, and their barely-recognizable human figures fill mural-sized photographs. My knuckles whitened into fists, as I breathed slowly through my nose so not to vomit or faint; my eyes stayed locked on the neon-exit sign at the end of the twenty-five-meter long corridor. I hated being alone in this place but had lost the group. Their images bored into me as my eyes welled at the thought of so many innocent people robbed of their lives over a half a century ago. Three years before I gingerly passed over the field in Choeung Ek outside of Phnom Penh, I walked the halls of Documentation Center of Nuremberg. Yet what purpose did this museum serve, if barely two decades passed before another bloodthirsty regime tore away life from those in Cambodia? What purpose does Tuol Sleng serve if barely a decade after the KR lives were dispensed of as is they had no value in Croatia and Yugoslavia? What do the trial and memorials there matter to those who died at the hands of rebels in Rwanda or Sierra Leon? What purpose do their preserved sites mean to those now dying in Darfur, Burma, and Indonesia? Site after site, memorial after memorial, these designated points claim education, truth-telling, and remembrance, but the masses are still killing the masses while no one lifts a finger. Perhaps, in ten years, a tree, which children were beaten at in Darfur, will have a conveniently placed plaque in English describing what atrocity occurred there, while the locals sell handi-crafts to the swarms of picture-taking tourists, and finally meaning will have been granted to those who lost their lives beneath the tree’s limbs.
*When I was going up the stairs, I met a man who wasn't there. He wasn't there again today, I wish, I wish he'd go away. (Identity 2003)
**Since 1979, fourteen survivors of S-21 have come forward; however, when the Vietnamese took the city, any living prisoners were hastily executed.
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