To Market, to Market

There is a mosaic of crushed river clams on the sidewalks and streets of Phnom Penh.  Hatted peddlers traverse the city pushing blue carts spread with clams tossed in chili, garlic, salt, sugar and sometimes lemongrass.

There is a congregation of clam sellers that park their cart on a side street in the slum where I live.  In the morning the sellers can be found sprinkling spices on a line of trays.  In the evenings the trays are parked again on the street.  A collection of half-dressed children chew and suck on leftover bivalves.

During the day the clam sellers push their carts along the streets.  The sidewalks are too uneven, with upended tiles. 

Instead sidewalks are used for impromptu food stands with stubby tables and foot-high plastic stools.  Sidewalks are for hammocks slung between trees.  And sidewalks are for barbershops – long lines of barbershops: a chair, a mirror propped against a wall, a table holding scissors and razors, an awning against the sun.  Halos of black hair clippings accumulate on the sidewalk tiles.

But the real business of the city happens in the markets.

The markets of Phnom Penh are crowded, low-slung affairs with dim lighting and narrow alleys between the sellers.  There is Russian Market, named for a time when Russians dominated the foreign demographic.  The market now hosts few Russians, but many tourists and trinkets to entice them.   There is the French-colonial Central Market, painted egg-yolk yellow with a grand central hall filled with jewelry sellers and extending branches of clothes shops, pillow stands, cooking equipment, cleaning supplies and curled and pinned wigs of fake, styled hair.

Hole-in-the wall hair stands are everywhere in the markets of Phnom Penh.  Lines and lines of women being shampooed, only an aisle or two away from mattress shops, soup stands, or meat stalls with intestines strung up like tinsel.

I have woken early to accompany my roommate on the dorm’s daily shopping expedition at our local market.   Bong Trabiek market used to be a lake, now it is a maze of half-erected food stalls with narrow aisles of broken tiles and mud. 

Slabs of meat and collections of hanging pig hooves.  Troughs of flopping silver fish.  The most exuberant ones successfully fling themselves out into the muddy walkway where they writhe until the seller notices and throws them back in the trough.  The process repeats.

We amass onions, eggs, peppers, chilies, two chickens.  I lean back to avoid a man carrying an entire pig carcass, its body cleaved in two with one bloody half draped over each of the man’s shoulders.

Where in other countries I might venture into the markets for the delicious aromas and enticing platters of food, I have found that the food here is not what draws me to the markets.

Guidebooks proclaim that Cambodian cuisine is subtly elegant – and it is if you can pay for the subtlety.   The food lacks the spicy kick of Thailand or the platters of fresh spring rolls and greens common in Vietnamese cooking.   There is slow steamed fish in coconut – Amok, and sautéed beef – Lok Lak.   But food prices have continued to increase at a rate faster then the rate of income.  Khmer meals, for those without wealth, center around heaping bowls of rice and a small piece of protein – perhaps a fingerling of dried fish or a couple cubes of meat.  Perhaps this is yet another residue of years of civil war and genocide, perhaps it is a sign of an imbalanced economy.

I head to markets for different reasons.  My favorite market is a hot twenty-minute walk up Monivong road.  BKK market – a microcosm of a market on a manageable scale. 

But if one wants to take on the market of all markets, one must head to Orssay.

Orssay is three floors tall, possible four – it is hard to tell with all the stairways and warrens of stalls.  One walks through vast blocks of sections at Orssay.  You are surrounded by only moto parts, then only by raw meat, then plastic bags of rice, then glittering red and gold Chinese New Year decorations, then drapes of silk, then hanging garlands of dried fish, silvery fish, chalky white salted fish. 

Stands are small and square and sellers string hammocks up and sleep suspended among their goods.

Orssay is a market for getting lost in.  It is for pointing at and trying multi-colored jellies bathed in watered down coconut milk.  It is for navigating between muddy puddles between buckets of squirming fish and bubbling lobsters.

 It is a market for conversing (through my roommate who acted as translator) with an old women selling dried meats who insisted that I was in need of a Khmer husband and gave me, in parting, a small brilliant-red curl of dried snake.  I am still unclear if there was a direct connection. 

Fried Squid and Mistletoe

Khmers do not, for the most part, celebrate Christmas.  However this does not stop the residents of Phnom Penh, including the girls in our dormitory, from donning felt Santa Hats.

The country may be 95% Buddhist, but come the middle of December the markets fill with miniature plastic Christmas trees, garlands of tinsel and mini stands of flashing, multi-colored lights.

“Happy Merry Christmas” signs abound.  Christmas songs play in all the chic cafes near independence monument.

Embracing the holiday spirit we bought a mini plastic fir tree, strung up lights and tinsel and set about making paper snowflakes – notwithstanding the fact that the girls at the dorm have never seen snow.

And then, a day before Christmas Eve, the thirty-four girls threw a Christmas party.  Preparation started early with a morning trip to the market.  There followed a flurry of meat chopping and lime squeezing. In the lazy heat of the afternoon a table was laid in the courtyard and speakers were set up. 

The spread was not classic Yuletide fare: fried squids with pepper lime sauce and chili sauce, cold nests of rice noodles –thin and latticed, hairy rambutans and fingerling bananas.  But it was certainly festive.

There was an exchange of gifts overzealously adorned with ribbons ,and lots of photographs.  And then, the dancing.

With speaker blasting and music videos streaming the girls danced late into the night – skipping and twirling and stamping.  Gangnam Style followed by Rhinana, followed by traditional Khmer Apsara dancing, followed by Bollywood, followed by Thai Pop, followed by . . . more Gangnam Style.   The usually studious and demure students danced late into the night.

New Years was spent in a slightly colder climate – amid the curving hills and towering skyscrapers of Hong Kong.

Two years ago I visited Hong Kong on the heels of contracting dengue fever.  I stayed with my Princeton roommate (who was pregnant at the time) in the heat of the summer, amidst storm warnings.  We cooked curries, indulged in cheese and pastries (Thailand lacks both) and ate dim sum and hand pulled noodles.

Now, at the end of December, Hong Kong balances on the edge of brisk and the men and women of the city don jackets and scarves.  I again stayed with my roommate Shobi and was introduced to the newest member of her family: nearly two year old Rania.   I have become “Aunt Jess.”

In a compact two days we ate our way through many dim sums and, in a throwback to our dorm lives, sipped even greater quantities of tea.  We hiked along the Dragon’s Back trail in the mountain over the city and then through the dense forest of apartment skyscrapers many with protruding poles of laundry that flapped precariously in the wind, thirty stories high or more.

For our New Year’s meal we taxied to the heart of the city to an elegant eight-table restaurant serving up the spiciest Sichuan food I have ever consumed.  We ate our way through an intimidating twelve courses, which quite literally brought tears to my eyes.  The most interesting was a fried chicken with a Sichuan pepper: rather than having the expected burn, it numbs your lips and then makes them feel as if they were actually bubbling and frothing. 

Driving back to Shobi’s apartment New Year’s Eve, I reveled in the holiday spectacle – a light show of skyscrapers decked like Hallmark Holiday cards with building-sized flashing Santas, reindeer, wrapped presents and tree bobbles. 

We welcomed 2013 on the roof of a Hong Kong Apartment – shivering in the cold, watching fireworks burst over the metropolis.

Going with the Flow

There are two small boys, heads shaven, draped in robes of orange, taking pictures of each other.  They stand on the cement slope leading down to the muddy Tonle Sap River patchy with clumps of detached riverweeds.

For half the year the riverweeds float south, past the capital.  But, the Tonle Sap is fickle and twice a year changes direction, flowing south during the dry seasons and north – all the way to Tonle Sap Lake just south of Siem Reap and the jungle temples of Angkor Wat and Angkor Thom – in the midst of the monsoons.  The riverweeds go along for the ride, floating back and forth in indecision.

It is early January and the river is flowing south.  After traveling just under a hundred miles, the Tonle Sap arrives here, at the promenade of downtown Phnom Penh and caresses the edge of the city before merging with the Mekong.  

The pedestrian boulevard along the riverfront is wide, tiled and made for ambling in the Parisian style.  It is perhaps the single grandest architectural relic of colonization left in the developing city.  A line of palms runs up the center providing little meaningful shade.  When it is cool, in the early morning and evening, the walkway fills: with street vendors – hawking grilled corn and roasted tarantulas, with families out strolling, and with competing aerobic classes dancing out a radio station’s worth of beats.

But now, in the heat of the day, the shadeless quay is empty save for a few wandering tourists and a handful of street children selling bracelets and pirated copies of books detailing the horrors of the Khmer Rouge.

The road along the quay is lined with hotels – high class and sleazy intermingled.  Across the doorway to one is hung a large banner: “Welcome Mr. Obama.”  There are bars and pubs and an abundance of pizza joints offering “Happy Herb Pizza Specials” in bold lettering.

Across the river sits Diamond Island.  A spit of land filled with constructions sites and half-erected buildings that might one day become a complex of luxury hotels.  The girls at the dorm like to cruise the island on their motos on days off.  Two years ago, while living in Thailand, I first read about the island when, during the November Water Festival celebrating the Tonle Sap’s reversal, a stampede erupted and 350 Khmer were crushed to death under the feet of thousands.

Up river, closer to the ill-fated bridge, a sewer valve opens and putrid canal water, thick and opaque, gushes out into the river. 

Boats cruise up and down the river.  Large metal barges puffing smoke and shallow fishing canoes with colorfully painted tips.  There are few boats of sizes in between.  The fishermen pull up along and moor along the riverweeds that are profuse at the edge of the Tonle Sap.  There are fishermen too – both men and women – who walk down to the water’s edge with extended fishing poles.

 Near me, along the quay, where a row of international flags flap overhead, the two young monks are still taking pictures.  They have stopped posing for each other.  Instead they crouch down, sitting back on their heels, orange robes billowing around them.  They hold the camera out, training the lens on the boats and the fisherman and Diamond Island and the Tonle Sap and all the floating riverweeds.  Snap – they capture the scene.

Poisonous Trees

There is still blood on the floor.

Thirty-four years later there remain splatters and smears that have seeped into the floor tiles of the classrooms.

The former secondary school occupies most of a block in a residential neighborhood, in the center of Phnom Penh.  These days the blocks surrounding the school are lined with cafes, hole-in-the-wall convenient stores, a cupcake shop, a pink bubble-tea shop and a Korean travel agency.

When the Khmer Rouge took over Cambodia in 1975 they converted the school into their most notorious prison.  They renamed it Security Prison 21 (S-21) and, over the course of four years, they imprisoned, tortured and killed nearly twenty thousand people during the years of genocide.

Today Tuol Sleng prison is a museum and testament to the past.  In Khmer, Tuol Sleng means “Hill of Poisonous Trees.”

Today, January 7^th, is Liberation Day, the day that the Khmer Rouge fell to Vietnamese forces.  Today also marks the start of the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia.  Anniversaries depend on your perspective.  In past years I have heard that there have been celebrations, even parades, at the towering mauve Independence Monument.  Celebrations are subdued this year as the former king, Norodom Sihanouk has recently died and currently lies in state for a February funeral.

The Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum lacks the typical accouterments of a museum. There are no display cases, no descriptions.  For the most part, the rooms are left as they were when the Vietnamese discovered the prison, drawn by the stench of rotting corpses, on January 8^th 1979.

The first floor of Block A contains warped metal cots.  The second floor: empty classrooms.  The top floor is the same as the second, though school blackboards remain on the walls.  Room after empty room, tiled in ochre and cream with hazy orange walls. 

The repetition and the crowded emptiness is oppressive.  The mind becomes unmoored into a sea of imaginings.

And then in the last room on the third floor: a bloody eddy of stumbling footprints.

 Block B holds rows and rows of photographs.

The Khmer Rouge was methodical.  Prisoners were given a number and forced to sit for photographs.

Men. Women. Grandparents. Babies. Most stare solemnly.  Some appear confused.  There are a few faces turned away, their eyes looking stubbornly to the side, in a final act of resistance.  Only a few have the daring or the energy left to give the camera a defiant glare.

Room after room of faces. Unending.

Block C was for the common prisoners, the farmers and laborers.  The classrooms here were divided – shoddy cells constructed of brick or wood.  Crude doors were knocked between the classroom walls.

There are four classroom blocks, each three floors tall.  They are set around a large yard that now contains palms and jackfruit trees and the white-washed, raised graves of fourteen final murders.   A now-grassy area that was once a playground and once a yard for conducting torture. 

When the Khmer Rouge tired of torture, they smuggled the prisoners of S-21 out at night and trucked them out to an orchard outside the city called Choeung Ek.   Here they lined the prisoners up and clubbed them to death.  They did not shoot them:  Bullets were too expensive.

Two years ago my dad and I traveled out to these Killing Fields.   Past the gate stands a towering stupa of skulls. 5,000 skulls in total.  There were more bodies, perhaps as many as 10,000 but many skulls have been crushed and many more remain buried. Past the stupa you can walk in the crater-filled orchards.  The depressions are not the result of war bombs.  They are the excavation of mass graves.   When it rains bones emerge from the earth.  Femurs, molars, the jigsaws of a cranium.  Clothes blossom too.  Ragged edges of the traditional checkered black and red krama scarves, the former sleeves of shirts, a two year old’s flounced jumper.

At some point, thirty years from now maybe as many as fifty years from now, when the monsoons come, bones and clothes will cease to sprout from the ground.  Then there will only be the stories and recorded memories. The horrors of history will then no longer be so abrasively palpable.

It has been thirty-four years to the day since the fall of Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea.  The abandoned streets of Phnom Penh are filled once again.  The roads are clogged with traffic, restaurants line the riverfront; construction projects are omnipresent.   There are bustling universities and tour buses full of tourists.

There are also beggars – blind, missing arms, missing legs.  Cambodia has one of the highest rates of amputees in the world, a result of an entire countryside seeded with landmines.  There are countless victims of PTSD across the country, most who remain untreated.  How could there not be after thirty years of war and four years of genocide?

My students are the next generation.  They wake up early and study and stay up late and study.  They hope to be lawyers and doctors and businesswomen, fulfilling dreams their parents were denied. 

Their parents are the children of the Khmer Rouge.  They suffered interrupted educations.   They were four and seven and twelve during the genocide.

 My students and I talk of Pol Pot over dinner, sitting along the balconies in the afternoon sun, crouched over bowls of soup in the market place.  The primary schools and high schools of the country cover the subject with a cursory sweep. All of my students have family stories – of starvation or slaughter.  But many of their own parents remained tight lipped.  But not all.

At dinner one night, while extracting meat from between the bones of a river fish, one of my students talks of her family.

Her grandmother survived the genocide.  Her grandfather did not.  Her mother was four at the time and remembers very little.  She remembers being hungry, but not knowing why. 

My student never met her oldest uncle.  When he was twelve the Khmer Rouge wanted him to become a soldier to fight the Vietnamese.  He nor his mother (my student’s grandmother) wanted him to join.  And so the Khmer Rouge killed him in front of his mother.

“She cries when she talks.”

It is Liberation Day, and the girls at the dorm are up early doing an intense cleaning of the entire building.  As the sun rises and dries the balconies one of the girls points up at the sky. 

A cloud of balloon clusters, ribbons fluttering, floats overhead.  “They are from the celebration.” One girl explains.  “To celebrate the end of the Khmer Rouge,” adds another.  “It’s like a second birth.  A new beginning.”

The balloons float over the apartment buildings and the canal and the markets and the coconut trees heading south out into the province, until they are only specks in the sky. 

Gilded Bananas: or How I danced in Front of 300 Cambodians

In a traditional Cambodian wedding the bride changes her entire outfit upwards of seven times.

When we first arrived at the wedding in the village of Ko Ki Thong, the bride was wrapped in silver silk: a silver sarong, a beaded silver bodice and satin silver heels.  Not to mention a silver necklace, large gold anklets, bracelets and earrings and a pearl studded tiara.

An hour later, the bride appeared to have been painted green.  The sarong, bodice, even the satin heels looked the same, except they were now a brilliant lime.  An hour after that, she was a vision in yellow.  By the time eating had given way to dancing, the bride had exchanged traditional Khmer for a billowing white gown.  By 10 pm dresses were abandoned all together, and the Bride danced the night away in jeans and a striped shirt.  She did, however, keep the tiara in her hair.

                                          

In the country less than a week, I found myself preparing that first Saturday afternoon, for a wedding out in the countryside.  My roommate Houng’s cousin was marrying and I was to be one of three western women in attendance.

To be specific we did not attend the actual wedding ceremony, only the extended reception and party.  But not even Houng could tell me precisely when vows had been exchanged – the party was the main event.

From the start we were a spectacle. Our car’s arrival at the reception was recorded on film, our presentation to the Bride and Groom exhaustively photographed.  We came early and were ushered past a line of colorfully dressed men and women and through a palm froned archway hanging with banana bunches spray-painted gold and silver.

For weddings and other major celebrations, Khmer women wear a silk sarong folded in the front and an elaborately beaded, gilded and lace-sewn bodice.  Everyone visits the hair salon for crimping, spraying and curled extensions. Although I had too little time to be fitted for a dress, I did submit to large quantities of purple eye shadow and fake eyelashes. 

Khmer wedding celebrations follow a particular pattern.  First there is food: plates and plates of steamed fish, fried chicken, grilled chicken, cashews, boxes of raisins, freely flowing beer, orange soda and sugary iced coffee.  Elaborately made up women wove between the tables distributing rice, while men did the same with cans of beer.

At our table Houng’s uncle sat across from me and monitored carefully the quantity of food on our plates, encouraging and then admonishing us with a waggling finger to take more.

Soon after we arrived, an oxen drawing a wood cart equipped with a generator pulled up and the live band -- with dancers, strobe lights and a perfumed fog machines -- started up in full force.  From then until early in the morning, Khmer music blared.

As the sky darkened the tables near the stage were pushed aside, all except one that sat in the very center. Around this table at least a hundred revelers danced.  Khmer dancing does not respond to the tempo of the music, rather it exists at one slow stately speed: A few steps forward a few steps back, much twisting of the hands.  The continual sway is like the lapping of seawater on the beach.

As the night progressed so did the intoxication of the men, who became more persistent in their attempts to persuade us to dance.   Rather than decline one just to be asked by another, I befriended Houng’s young cousins. With ten small children circling we made our way into the throngs on the dance floor.

While the men had no success cajoling me onto the dance floor, Houng somehow succeeded in convincing me that I must dance on stage.  I’m still not quite sure how this happened, but I am susceptible to the silly adventures that come with being a tall white American in South East Asia.  So there I was at 10 pm, dancing on a wedding stage in perfumed fog and strobe lights in front of 300 Khmer. 

Hours later, we slept under mosquito nets in Houng’s house.  The house, like most in the countryside was raised on stilts with one large room where everyone slept together.  The bathroom, which housed one hairy tarantula, was out back, surrounded by a collection of water urns for bucket showers and dish washing.

The next morning was for lounging, for eating noodle soup at the local market down the road and for playing badminton in the yard with the collection of kids who had adopted me the previous night.  Time at the stilt house in the countryside grew lazy. There was a second breakfast (hobbit style) of forest chicken – grilled and chopped by Houng’s grandmother – and of course large bowls of rice.  When the kids tired of badminton, they went in search of wildlife, returning to the yard with an endless collection of crabs, one snake and a cat.  The crabs became instant pets with impromptu leashes made of string secured to their claws.  The snake was prodded.  The cat smartly ran away.

We stayed as long as we could, relaxing under the shade of the house. In the end though, we needed to return to the dust and bustle of Phnom Penh.  And so we made our goodbyes, piled into the car and headed back to the city.