The Best Women's Travel Writing (20 page)

LAUREN QUINN

Bones Surfacing in the Dirt

The cost of ammunition is not included.

I
watched the boy move. Thin, dark, in tattered pants and flip-flops, he walked slowly along the river's steep embankment. He carried a wooden spear, his eyes hunting the small black birds that flitted from crevices in the cement.

It was dusk on my first day in Phnom Penh, exercise hour along the gleaming new riverside. Men in running shoes swung their arms in circles; couples played badminton; elderly women in sun visors lifted their arms in unison, mimicking the aerobic instructor's movements. Behind them the orange sky struck the Royal Palace into silhouette. Its decorative roofing rose from the spires like snakes, twisting like incense smoke. Around me, people smiled.

It didn't feel like a city that had been deserted.

That's all I'd been able to think that first day, walking through streets exploded with the yellows and purples of flowering trees. I tried to imagine it the way the parents of my childhood best friend had left it, as the Khmer Rouge marched into the city and evacuated its two million residents: burned-out carcasses of cars, buildings crumbled, rubbish strewn across empty streets. I couldn't.

I sat drinking a papaya shake when I spied the boy along the embankment. I watched as he approached a bird. A swift stab, a flurry of wings. He brought the stick toward his face, plucked the creature from its spear. He pressed his thumb against its throat and pushed in slow, hard strokes.

Then he placed the small black body in his pocket—a ragged strip of cloth—and continued walking, repeating, repeating.

It wasn't so much the action of it that unsettled me; it was the slowness with which he did it—the calm.

He continued along the steep slope beneath the riverside's bustle, stabbing and gathering.

“It took four people to die for me to be born.”

My best friend Lynn and I were sitting on her bedroom floor, in a little yellow house that flinched every time a bus passed. We were nine years old, coloring and eating crushed ice, sun-sleepy from another day spent at the public swimming pool down the block.

Lynn's comment came out of nowhere. She counted them out. First, on her index finger, her mother Lu's first husband had to die. Then, bending back two fingers at once, Lu's children, the two that came before Lynn and her brother Sam—they had to die too. On her pinkie, her father Seng's daughter.

Another daughter had already died, before the war. Sometimes that other daughter had died because of suicide, because Seng hadn't allowed her to marry the man she'd loved. Other times, that daughter had died because the man Seng had been tricked into allowing her to marry had killed her. I don't remember which it was that day, just that neither that daughter nor Seng's first wife got a finger.

Those were the conditions that created Lynn. If those half-brothers and -sisters and a former husband hadn't died, her parents wouldn't have been arranged to be married. They wouldn't have walked across Cambodia to escape; Seng wouldn't have dragged Lu, pregnant, through a waist-deep river in the middle of a monsoon; Lynn's brother Sam wouldn't have been born in a Thai refugee camp and Lynn later in a farmhouse without heat in northern New York, where the people who'd sponsored their family forced them to live and work until they escaped to Oakland, California.

It was a simple statement, as concrete and non-debatable as the date of one's birth. We'd done a family tree project that year in school; I remember looking over at Lynn's. After two sturdy branches of “Lu” and “Seng,” the tree turned to thin, wispy branches, then nothing. She'd finished the assignment early and stared off, looking bored.

I counted them with Lynn, looked down at my fingers. “Four people,” I repeated. There wasn't anything else to say, so we went back to coloring.

Lynn's room had two doors, one to the living room and one to the hallway. We always shut them both. We locked them sometimes, too—it felt safer that way.

“So everyone you see here,” Cindy looked out from the
tuk-tuk
onto the bustle of the dusty road, “who's over the age of thirty-five lived through the war?”

I nodded.

“God. It's hard to imagine. Every single person …”

Cindy and I were traveling out of the city center. The pavement gave way to dirt, sidewalks to mud puddles, as we made our way closer to the Killing Fields.

I'd just met Cindy. She was a fellow travel writer, passing through Phnom Penh on her way to Siem Reap. We'd arranged to meet up and spend an afternoon together.

I could relate to her observation: my first few days in the city, all I'd been able to think about was the war. I'd come to Cambodia looking for answers. I wanted to understand the war, the Khmer Rouge, and everything else that had never been openly discussed in Lynn's family. I sensed it was a kind of key, the beginning of a story I'd walked in on halfway, a story Lynn and her brother Sam—and perhaps an entire generation—had also walked in on halfway.

Our
tuk-tuk
rattled along the unsteady pavement, taking us closer to the mass-grave and execution site, one of Phnom Penh's two main tourist attractions. The other was the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the former S-21 torture prison under the Khmer Rouge. All the travel agencies along the riverside advertised for tours of the two, sometimes combined with a trip to a shooting range where travelers could fire AK-47s left over from the war (cost of ammunition not included).

Most travelers stayed in Phnom Penh only long enough to see S-21 and the Killing Fields, then they scattered from the city. It was what Cindy was doing, and what I would have too, had I not come searching for answers. I'd been putting off visiting the Killing Fields, not wanting, I'd rationalized, to spend the $12
tuk-tuk
fare venturing out solo. Cindy offered an opportunity to split the cost—but more than that, she offered companionship, and a buffer.

Without buildings to block it, the wind grew stronger, and I blinked bits of dust and debris from my contact lenses. By the time we pulled into the dirt lot in front of the Killing Fields, stinging tears blurred my vision.

“This happens every day here,” I laughed, and dabbed my eyes.

The Killing Fields were set in a peaceful country landscape, with birds chirping and the echo of children singing from a nearby grammar school. Incense burned in front of the bone pagoda, where skulls were separated into tiers by age. We walked past ditches that had been mass graves, trees against which guards had bludgeoned children. None of it seemed real.

A sign told us that when it rained, bits of victims' bones and scraps of their clothing still surfaced through the dirt, more than thirty years later. As we walked, we kept seeing faded pieces of cloth, half exposed in the earth.

Groups of Westerners in cargo shorts and sun hats wandered through the lot with clasped hands and concerned expressions. I saw only two Cambodians—young monks with round faces, their orange robes blazing against the brown earth.

After about an hour, we exited the front gates. Dark-skinned men leaned against their bikes, chatted in the shade, napped quietly in the backs of their
tuk-tuks
as they waited for their fares to return. Many of them, I thought, looked over thirty-five.

I remember laughing.

Not a funny laugh but a
you-have-got-to-be-fucking-kidding-me
laugh. Beside me on the foldout bed, my duffel bag was still packed.

It was the end of my first semester at university, and I'd just returned from my grandmother's funeral on the East Coast. I'd sat down on my bed, turned my cell phone on for the first time in five days, and listened to a string of messages, vague and urgent, from Lynn, Sam, other childhood friends: “Something happened.” “Can you call us?”

“What is it?” my roommate asked.

“The parents of my childhood best friend died while I was gone,” I told her, staring at my phone. I closed my eyes as I said, “Her dad shot her mom, then himself.”

“Oh my God,” was all Rose said.

I walked out of our dorm room and roamed up and down the hall's thin carpeting, a muffle of hip-hop and the smell of Nag Champa leaking from behind the doors, shaking my head and half-laughing. Friends poked their heads out of their rooms and asked me what was wrong; I told them. I didn't yet have the distance I'd develop in the following days.

“They died in a domestic violence dispute,” I'd say, which was softer, more detached. In the hall that night, I kept saying, “He shot her, he shot her,” and people backed away—unsure, I guess, of how to respond.

At some point, I finally stopped walking and stood still at the end of the hall. I slid open the window and breathed the sharp December air. I looked out at the quiet bustle—students carrying books, standing around smoking in the dim light and fog. I realized I wasn't surprised.

I remembered strange things about Lynn's house: footsteps at night, insomniac murmurings from down the hallway. In the weeks to come, more specific memories would return. Bruises across Sam's shins; how Seng would hit him there because it wouldn't show; an image of Seng—pointing at something, screaming, a flash in his eyes and a glint off his silver tooth.

“My dad might be moving back to Cambodia,” I remembered Lynn leaning in, an excited whisper. “He could start his business again, and live over there, and we'd stay here. Like, maybe in six months.” I remembered us sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor; us lying on our bellies on the swimming pool deck; us standing amid the morning glories waiting for our turn on the monkey bars.

And I remembered the hallway—the muffled sound of heavy things moving, coming from behind a locked door, when I'd gotten up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. It had scared me, made me afraid to get up to pee—afraid of that narrow hallway with its mirror at the end.

“I just didn't think it was that bad,” we'd all say, in the days and weeks to come. But even then, no one would say what it was that had made us think it was bad to begin with. Had we all observed little things—bruises and passing comments—that we'd dismissed, ignored, convinced ourselves we'd made up and eventually forgotten?

I didn't remember any of it that night, the night I got the news—when I pressed my head against the mesh screen on the third floor of the dorms, stared out of the window, and tried to breathe. All there was that night was a vague sense, like the uneasy feeling you sometimes have waking up from a dream, and the words I kept repeating: “He shot her, he shot her.”

“What do you think of how the Khmer Rouge is taught to the next generation?”

The question came in a French accent. A standing-room-only crowd had come out to the German-run Meta House cultural center for the screening of
Enemies of the People
—“the best documentary to be made about the Khmer Rouge,” Meta House's director had assured us, “because it is the only one to be made by a Cambodian.”

I counted five Khmer faces in the crowd, none of whom had stayed for the Q&A session with Cambodian director Thet Sambath.

Sambath paused after the question, smiled that bashful Cambodian smile. “This I don't know so much about,” he carefully evaded. “I know for many years, Khmer Rouge history was not taught in the schools.”

The audience was nodding. With nearly three-quarters of the population born post-war—the so-called “new generation”—formal curricula about war history had been conspicuously missing from the schools for thirty years.

“In the beginning, it was still very sensitive,” a young Cambodian had explained to me. “How do you talk about it—especially with Khmer Rouge still in the country, in the government?”

Over the years, that initial avoidance of the subject had deepened into a de facto silence. Young people were left to piece together what they learned from their parents, which often wasn't much.

A massive disconnect formed. Many of the new generation began to doubt the Khmer Rouge even happened. They suspected that their parents were exaggerating.

“How could Khmer people kill other Khmer people like that?” challenged a teenager interviewed in a documentary I'd watched. His mother sat behind him, looking away.

I was shocked. These were young people living in Cambodia, amid the physical and psychological evidence: mass graves and landmines, astronomical rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, and their own absent family members.

“It's time for Cambodia to dig a hole and bury the past,” Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former low-ranking Khmer Rouge, famously stated. Westerners often used this quote to exemplify the culture of silence around the war in Cambodia. Hillary Clinton cited it after a 2010 visit, when she urged the country to continue with the Khmer Rouge trials, because “a country that is able to confront its past is a country that can overcome it.”