Monsoon

“I know this is irrational, but on the way back home today, were you…?” asks the other intern, who arrived at the Daily house off a moto shortly after I did.

“Convinced that I was going to be electrocuted? Yes.”

It’s absolutely pouring rain when I file my story one evening, and I hang around the office, peering out into the darkness at the noisy streets through the barred windows rattling in the deafening storm, hoping for a sign that rain is letting up. When it has slowed to a drizzle I head out with one of the office’s moto drivers who I ride home with nearly everyday, ready to brave one of the obvious downsides of riding a motobike.

Inconveniently, it starts to downpour as soon as we make it only a few minutes down Norodom – one of Phnom Penh’s main roads - where traffic is nearly at a standstill in the flooded street. Men in plastic ponchos are strolling down the sidewalks, thrusting sticks into the water to poke at the clogged drains.

The driver I’m riding with veers off the main drag, hoping to take side streets instead, but at the end of each street is a gaping lake of a puddle that forces him to turn around and try another. Eventually, he reluctantly putters back to Norodom, saying something to me in Khmer (he doesn’t speak English) and half-laughing to himself, maybe at the ridiculousness of his evening.

On Norodom, moto drivers, stopping at red lights to drop their calves into the streaming water, weave their motorcycles through stopped cars and trucks, whose frustrated drivers rest their elbows on their horns. Along one stretch, with traffic at a complete stop, moto drivers get resourceful, rolling their bikes out of traffic and onto the sidewalk, where they work their way around evenly spaced skinny trees and bob along on the uneven cobblestones. My driver follows suit, pausing once on the sidewalk to shove up his pant-legs to his knees in preparation for the inevitable return to the road.

At the next intersection, the sidewalk ends, and a mass of moto drivers pose hesitantly at the edge of the sidewalk, contemplating the depth of the water pooling below. One brave driver gently nudges his bike off the sidewalk, landing in the water with a heavy plop and a splash, and the rest of the drivers, like baby ducks stumbling off a dock into the pond, follow with surprising order.

My driver, poised at the brink, looks nervously from the sidewalk to the flooded road, and then back again, and in my head I beg him not to, though the alternative is to sit brooding on the sidewalk until the rain stops and the road drains out. I try my very hardest to look totally unfazed – like all the other Khmers looking wet and bored on the backs of motorcycles – as the motorcycle bounces off the sidewalk and as I try not to fall into the river/road.

Observing that the metal fuel tank attached to the side of the bike is casually resting in the swelling water, I’m quite certain that, like the 74 people whose deaths by lightening the Cambodia Daily has reported on this year, I’m going to be electrocuted. When the moto driver drops me safely, albeit sopping wet, at the Daily house, I pay him double, mostly because I feel completely awful that he has to trek his way back to the office to pick up the next marooned reporter.

Another day, at a party on a boat, I mind the rain much less. On the Tonle Sap River, under thick swaths of purple clouds and a cool mist, I sit with a Khmer reporter friend on the top deck with my legs swung over the railing at the boat’s front and watch it pour in Phnom Penh.

A Bad Romance

“I survived Cambodia,” quips a yellow T-shirt that a sweaty vendor gazing blankly into traffic sells from her stall. Yes, all you eternal optimists back home who wished me luck wading through thickly grown over fields dotted with unseen landmines, the Cambodians are in on your joke.

In a cavernous TV station that - with its dirty cement floors, high raftered ceilings, and smoggy cloud of mosquitoes, cigarette smoke, and dust - has the feel of an abandoned warehouse, five other foreigners and I worm our way onto metal bleachers opposite a boxing ring. We are the only non-Cambodians present, and everyone seated in the bleachers snaps their heads to watch us settle in our seats.

Every Friday and Saturday night, the TV Station broadcasts live kickboxing from the dimly lit space, in which hundreds of Cambodians crowd around an elevated ring and cram into creaky bleachers set against the walls. Most are men, though there are some tired-looking wives carrying their wide-eyed babies, who gape at us over their mothers’ shoulders. Little boys mock fight and chase each other around the space, nawing at corncobs from plastic baggies.

Two fighters enter the ring – one in blue shorts and gloves, and another dressed in the red. They pace serenely around the ring, pressing their hands in prayer position and bowing their heads to each of its corners. As they warm up in the ring, the guys I’m with size them up and bet the girls the blue fighter will win, mostly because they don’t like the red fighter’s slick, spiky hair.

With an undetectable nod of yes, let’s begin now, the two fighters begin to circle around one another. A small orchestra of pounding drums and some sort of woodwind instrument sits on the overlooking stage with the newscasters.

The fighters step in time to the music, always seeming to come to a strange pas de deux with their arms clasped around one another as though hugging, while desperately jerking their knees at each other’s sides and thighs.

“It looks like Red is in trouble,” mutters the other intern, who is sitting next to me, as Blue pins his opponent to the side of the ring and slugs him until the referee shoves them apart and back to the center of the ring.

When a bell dings, the two fighters’ aides (probably not the technical term) rush to them, pick them up, and carry them two feet to stools on opposite ends of the ring (why they cannot walk these two feet is a mystery to me). Their fighters seated on the stools, the aides rapidly massage their sweaty thighs and stomachs, pour water over their heads and in, again, for reasons I can’t discern, their shorts, and send them back to the ring’s center.

The fighting gets more aggressive as time goes on, and things take a turn in Red’s favor, who, small and spry, nails kicks to Blue’s head that send visible sprays of sweat into the cloudy air and make the men gathered around the ring yell with approval.

When the second bell dings, and the fighters are again lifted back to their stools, blood dribbles out of Blue’s mouth as his aide whips out his mouth-guard to furiously scrub it clean and then pop it back in.

With the drum beat increasing in tempo, the men yelling louder and louder, and the fighters, with nothing left to lose, seemingly in it to knock one other unconscious, it’s impossible not to get sucked in. When the referee collects the white slips of paper from the on-looking judges, two of whom are seated on each side of the ring, and swings up spiky-haired Red’s arm in victory, the girls cheer as though personally responsible for his win.

The next night, I’m on a stool at the bar waiting for two friends at a trendy lounge at which patrons can sit on bed-like cushions surrounding a gleaming pool when Lady Gaga’s “Bad Romance” comes on the speakers.

The Spanish tourists who have been splashing each other in the pool squeal, leap out, and start wiggling to the beat. The Asian couple sitting behind me start to sway in rhythm. The British woman next to me gasps in excitement and begins to dance in her seat. The Cambodian bartender with whom I’m playing tic tac toe and thumb war (apparently, these are cross cultural games) nods his head to the music and smiles.

“You like Lady Gaga?” “Yes, everyone does!” The other bartenders – all twenty something men– nod enthusiastically in agreement. They play Lady Gaga songs for the next hour. I may just have to stay in Cambodia.

Though, for those who would rather dunk their heads into the pool when they hear Lady Gaga’s music than jump out and dance to it, this evening may have been legitimate cause to buy an “I survived Cambodia” shirt.

Blind as a Bat

“Did you take the blind moto driver to work?”

“Yes?”

“Did you notice that he was blind?” asks the assignment editor, who has just arrived at the office off his own motorcycle. It’s morning and I’m sitting at my desk next to a Chinese-Cambodian reporter with whom I swap mango-flavored milk candy for sour young mango slices dipped in a chili mixture.

I did notice. To be fair, I’m fairly certain that he has at least one functional eye, and there was nothing about his driving that suggested he was unaware of the other motobikes rocketing across our path at intersections. As the other intern and I sped with him on his motorcycle to work we were less concerned about his one obviously ruined eye than we were with the unusually small size of his bike’s seat, on which we were cramped and uncomfortable.

“Tall intern, don’t take the blind driver to work.”

It’s my day off from work today and a moto driver with two functioning eyes takes me to the National Library. The ride takes me past the Anti-Corruption Institution and a stove-sized metal box attached to its gates, which I noticed for the first time today, that reads “Complaint Box.”

The National Library, a yellow and white French colonial building, sits at the northern most end of Phnom Penh across from the US embassy with its enormous grey gates (but not as big as the forbidding gates that would surprise even Harry Potter fortressing the much-loathed Thai embassy). A dusty courtyard, where patrons park their motorcycles and vendors set up under scrawny trees sell sandwiches on French baguettes to students in blue or white button-up shirts, accesses the library. A red truck parked out front is crammed with crates filled with glass bottles of coca cola.

Inside, the library is one large room with pale yellow walls, a high ceiling, and whirring ceiling fans. Random books – Charles Baudelaire, Cleopatra-themed romance novels, UNESCO documents– in Khmer, French, English, and German that seem to be organized in no discernable order sit on tall wooden shelves in the back of the room. I pick up a book of collected National Geographic articles, which, for whatever reason, the library has over ten copies of, and slip into a chair at one of the long wooden tables that run horizontally across the room.

A student in a white button down is sitting to my left with her boyfriend and a pile of notes. She has thick lips and looks like a Cambodian Angelina Jolie, the much-beloved actress who glowers at me from a supersized photo advertising haircuts at a beauty salon near the Daily office. An orange kitten, with the tall, pointy ears that all cats in Cambodian seem to have, surprises me by curling around my legs.

At around eleven most of the students trickle out of the library and I follow, determined to use my extremely underdeveloped navigation skills to get to Lucky supermarket in Sorya mall. I wander south, first down a road that seems to be under-construction (note: the stereotype about construction workers is true everywhere). As I walk, I occasionally stop to take pictures of the whir of the hot, afternoon streets. I think that I’m being super stealthy with my camera, but when I return to the Daily house and click through my pictures I realize that everyone in them is starring at me. It looks as if I stood on the sidewalk and yelled into traffic for everyone to stop and smile for my camera.

Lucky Supermarket looks every bit like an American supermarket, except instead of selling raspberry yogurt it sells yogurt with nata de coco or lychee. Both Cambodian and expat families carrying red shopping baskets stroll down its bright aisles, reading the ingredient list on the backs of instant Chinese noodles and investigating bins of mangosteens (a fat, fairly ugly, purple fruit).

While most of what you can buy in Cambodia is priced lower than it is in the United States, brands imported from the United States run expensive. Post’s Great Grains cereal costs roughly $10 (Phnom Penh uses both Cambodia riels and US dollars). British Vogue costs $20. Which is why I’ve become a fan of cheap German cornflakes and Cambodian women’s magazines (for the pictures - I know less than 10 words in Khmer). Just outside the supermarket, pretty women in black uniforms that say “Revlon: Photo ready” sell “Revlon: New York” makeup that’s kept behind glass cases.

It’s late now, and I’ve just opened my door find a bat hanging by its feet from a ceiling light in the hallway. Its little ears twitch as is ducks its head behind webby wings that draw closed like curtains over its body. I start to tiptoe out of my room, clutching a glass that I want to fill up at the water cooler downstairs, and it abruptly swivels towards the faint sound, spreading its black wings and wiggling its ears. It has vampire fangs.

No it doesn’t.

But maybe I’m not actually that thirsty.

The Electric Home Shower

Above the bathtub looms a faded yellow box suspiciously labeled “the electric home shower.” I suspect it has something to do with getting hot water, but I’m unwilling to fiddle with aging electrical equipment suspended over a pool of bathwater and simply eye it warily as I take my cold showers.

Today is my day off (I work a Sunday to Thursday shift) so I ask a motorcycle driver to take me to Wat Phnom (again), from which I plan to find my way to nearby sites. I asked someone yesterday at the office to teach me how to say “sorry” so that I can apologize to the tuk tuk drivers who wait around the Daily staff house and whom I leave disappointed when I give my business to a motorcycle driver. Tired of the jeers of these rejected tuk tuk drivers when I flash my thighs to straddle the motorcycle in a skirt, I now ride side-saddle.

To Wat Phnom it's one long stretch along Norodom Blvd. It’s a left turn from the Daily staff house’s sidestreet, and the driver has to drive a while into incoming traffic before he can worm his way to the right hand side of the road.

We hurdle past the pale-yellow colored concrete walls of the ministry of the interior and the guards who usher black sedans in and out of its entrances. Opposite the ministry are mostly gated communities: big gates conceal neighborhoods of white and yellow villas that are each in turn fenced in with their own gates.

Past the roundabout at independence monument, residential villas dissolve into open-front nail salons where women sit idly filing their nails as they wait for customers, stores selling Khmer formal wear, and dozens of little markets selling drinks, snacks, cigarettes, and "OK" condoms. The markets double as restaurants with fold out tables and plastic chairs set up on the sidewalk.

Near Paragon mall, four crouching boys play with marbles. Further down the street, two men are using a blowtorch to cook a headless pig.

A university with rows and rows of motorcycles parked within its gates has draped an enormous sign over its entrance welcoming its new students from South Korea. Another university hangs a similar banner congratulating its soccer team, which apparently won some Cambodian collegiate cup.

A recent article in the Cambodia Daily profiled an NGO that has sent a soccer tem to South Africa to play in some sort of children’s cup, under the slogan “Don’t play with landmines. Play soccer.”

When traffic stops at an intersection to watch the blinking red lights count down from 40 something, a teenaged boy hops of the sidewalk and weaves through the motorcycles, selling Khmer language newspapers.

I see what I think are two traffic cops parked in plastic, purple chairs just off the road. One looks disinterested, and the other is tinkering with his phone.

There is no such thing as “that motorcycle almost hit me!” in Phnom Penh, because everyone “almost hits” you. There is also no such thing as cutting someone off, tailgating, or speeding. The only rule of the road seems, to me at least, to be: get where you need to go without actually crashing into anyone else. Crossing the road is an expedition. I think I’ve gotten very good at it. By “very good at it” I mean that I have yet to cause injury to either myself or to another party.

In the early afternoon I visit the central market – an enormous yellow-colored dome structure packed with a maze of vendors. Stalls sell grey suits, shirts with “Gucci” spelled in rhinestones on the front, checkered cloth, souvenir elephant figurines, sneakers, electronics, glittery jewelry, decorated curtains, makeup, and bridal magazines.

For whatever reason, most of the tourists seem to be buying underwear: Calvin Klein briefs and lacy, candy-colored thongs.

Vendors are sitting together on little stools eating their lunch and call after me “Lady! Do you need belt? Do you need purse? Do you need Buddha statue?” “Lady,” which connotes “foreign woman,” is what I’m called in Cambodia. Due to the tremendous presence of NGOs, Cambodians are very used to foreigners, but I, because of my height and light skin, hair, and eyes – and, simply, because I’m also young and female - attract significant attention.

On a motorcycle from Central Market to Wat Ounalom, an expansive complex that houses many of the city’s monks and once housed more than 500 before the Khmer Rouge executed most of its inhabitants, I see a huge group of perhaps 20 or 30 tourists. Each of them is riding in a bicycle contraption where the driver sits on a raised seat and peddles, and the passenger sits in a little shaded seat in front of him.

The vehicles make a long procession down the road, and I feel irrationally superior as I speed by them on the back of a motorcycle, sitting side-saddle, helmetless, and with my hands in my lap. Really, these tourists nestled safely in their comfortable seats are spectacularly more intelligent than I am.

Phnom Penh is a city of low-rise buildings with red and occasionally blue tiled roofs. Over most businesses are apartments accessed by outdoor spiral staircases. Women hang their laundry out the windows and on balconies, and in Wat Ounalom the orange cloths monks wear are strung out on clotheslines. Very few buildings are more than four stories tall, and those that are often serve as landmarks. When I want to go home, I tell a motorcycle driver to take me to the nearby several story hotel, the location of which he is more likely to know than, in a city of seemingly randomly numbered streets, the actual street where I live.

All the way home I notice the sagging messes of droopy electric wires that run along the streets. The Cambodian man I met on the plane, A., told me was an electrician in the United States. When I ask him if he plans to find work as an electrician in Phnom Penh he balks at me: “There’s no demand for electricians in Phnom Penh!”

"You must not cry at all"

Outside the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, tuk tuk drivers leaning on their vehicles laugh with each other, tourists sip mint iced tea at sidewalk restaurants, and young Khmer men in T-shirts with “Playboy” and the iconic bunny ears printed on the back whiz by on their motorcycles. Inside the museum are black and white photos that show a different Phnom Penh of empty streets and ruined buildings.

Soon after taking control of Phnom Penh in April of 1975, the Khmer Rouge, desperate to re-figure Cambodia into an idealistic agrarian community, had the city evacuated under the false pretense that the United States was planning to drop bombs. One room in the museum is dedicated to the particular fate of the city’s residents whom the Khmer Rouge targeted as intellectuals at odds with its ideal.

On the plane into Phnom Penh I met a Cambodian man, A., who was fifteen when he and his family were forced out of the city. His father, a novelist and the 2nd place winner of a prestigious 1959 writing contest put on by the grandmother of the present king, was executed by the Khmer Rouge. A. does not know where he was killed or where he is buried. Soon after the Vietnamese entered Cambodia, A. escaped to the United States.

Tuol Sleng, otherwise known as S-21, was once a high school. Four months after the Khmer Rouge emptied Phnom Penh, it was converted into the regime’s largest detention center where roughly 20,000 victims were, from 1975-1979, “processed” – that is, unlawfully detained, sadistically tortured, and grotesquely murdered.

The school’s classrooms on the lower level became cells mostly for Khmer Rouge officials who the paranoid regime turned on and accused of spying. In these dimly lit rooms sit single metal bed frames from which dangle rusty iron shackles. On the wall of each of these rooms is a large photograph - taken by the Vietnamese when they found the prison after entering the city - of a bloodied, decaying corpse shackled to the bed. On each bed is the spade used to bludgeon him or her to death, and under the bed are lingering, enormous dark stains.

Somewhere, a toddler screams with laughter and the eerie sound echoes in the corridors.

The classrooms on the second and third floors were subdivided into tiny brick cells. Several of the museum’s other rooms exhibit the mug shots – which the Khmer Rouge took of each prisoner – of the men, women, and children who were held in these numbered cells. Some are hesitantly smiling, some seem to be desperately pleading, and some seem simply bewildered.

Not one of these photographed victims survived. Only seven of the 20,000 detained at S-21 lived, and their photographs are displayed separately.

The most famous of the survivors is a painter, Vann Nath, who was recruited to paint propaganda pictures of Pol Pot. After the regime fell, he began painting what he had seen while a prisoner. His paintings – images of guards ripping out victim’s fingernails, bashing babies against walls and trees, delivering electric shocks to prisoners’ nipples, and lashing shackled men and women - line the museum’s grimy, sparse walls.

In another room are the photographs of the 1,700 personnel and soldiers (“combatants”) who worked at S-21. Most of them are teenagers and they pose for the camera with a flicker of pride in their weak smiles. An exhibit at the museum tries to understand if these boys and girls are as much victims of the Khmer Rouge as are the prisoners they slaughtered.

The equipment that students once used for exercises was converted into a gallows from which prisoners were tortured before being revived again in basins of chemically treated water.

The school courtyard was re-figured into a burial ground. It quickly filled and inmates, after being tortured into giving false confessions, were then taken to the notorious killing fields at Choeung Ek, formerly an orchard. The guide that shows the other Daily intern and me around the museum says her husband was murdered in the killing fields. His throat was slit with barbed wire.

The guide lost her entire family – children, siblings, husband – to the Khmer Rouge. A group of teenaged girls are laughing in a stairwell and the guide speaks to them angrily in Khmer. They slip sheepishly out into the courtyard, which this time of year is strewn with big white flowers that fall from spindly, little trees.

A sign erected in the courtyard lists the “rules” of S-21. #6: “When getting lashes or electrification you must not cry at all.”

In the afternoon, the other intern and I sit stunned on a bench in Paragon mall watching young couples in skinny jeans walk by hand in hand.

"Elizabeth! Like the Queen of England!"

Most of the traffic in Phnom Penh is motorcycles, with the occasional car, truck, bicycle, and tuk tuk. Motorcycle is also the preferred way to travel between the Cambodia Daily staff house and office, because, at one dollar a ride, it's cheaper than the tuk tuk, which charges two or three dollars and is used mostly by foreigners.

After picking me up from the airport and bringing me by the office to meet the staff, the Daily’s assignment editor sends me off first thing with a tuk tuk driver, K., to buy a motorcycle helmet. K. drives me to a roadside stand where a woman is selling helmets wrapped in plastic. “Made in Thailand,” says K. of the helmets, and asks me which one I like best, all the while talking to the woman in Khmer. I pick a white helmet over the black and pink helmets because I decide I’m not cool enough for black and not cute enough for pink. The woman that sells me the motorcycle helmet is wearing Hello Kitty pajamas.

My first day at the Daily (yesterday), I chicken out and take a tuk tuk to work. Coming home from work, though, I take a motorcycle. I’d spent the previous night practicing fastening and unfastening the helmet’s tricky buckle so that I wouldn’t end up in an awkward “um, I’ll pay you in a second, let me just wrestle this helmet off my head” situation.

Because I’m wearing a skirt – albeit an ankle long skirt – I’m supposed to ride side saddle. I decide this is too advanced for me and indecently climb on anyway. The motorcycle seat looks to me big enough to seat maybe three relatively thin people, but Cambodians somehow manage to pack on a lot more than that. On the way into the city from the airport, the assignment editor tells me that he once saw seven Cambodians stacked on a motorcycle – though he concedes that a few of them were children.

I grip the back of my seat while the driver weaves through traffic on one of the busy main roads. I’m glad that the helmet is covering my terrified face and clenched teeth as we enter and whip around the roundabout at Independence Monument. This driver is efficient – that is, really fast. No one passes us. By the time we reach the staff house, and I flawlessly remove my head from the helmet, I’ve decided that I love motorcycles.

Today is my day off, and after I visit the National Museum (which I get to by motorcycle) I meet a tuk tuk driver who I ask to take me to a local restaurant. It turns out the restaurant doesn’t open for thrity minutes and the driver, M., suggests that we go to a nearby wat (temple), Wat Phnom, to pass the time.

Wat Phnom, site of the legendary origins of Phnom Penh, sits on the top of the highest hill in the city, in the middle of a park that is free for Cambodians and one dollar for foreigners. M. shows me the resident elephant and looks at me incredulously as I stop to take a picture of a big, grey monkey sitting on some steps (“haven’t you ever seen a monkey before?). We walk up the steep stairs to the wat and sit on a bench that overlooks the whole park. A sleepy looking police officer sits on the bench opposite us and watches us with mild interest.

He teaches me phrases in Khmer – like “what is your name?” – and asks me questions about American culture and English idioms, and I ask him a million questions about everything. He moved to Phnom Penh eight years ago from a village forty minutes outside the city and worked first as a bellboy in a hotel before leaving the job to become a tuk tuk driver. He has an eight-year- old daughter and his wife is expecting their second child in late July. If the child is a girl he wants to give her an American name and asks if I like the name “Hannah.” I tell him that one of my closest friends is named Hannah and he says it’s settled then – his daughter will be “Hannah.”

Number exchanged, I part ways with M. a few hours later, but he sees me again that afternoon wandering around outside the palace and asks if he can take me somewhere. The black clouds in the sky look suspicious so I ask him to take me to the staff house. As soon as I step inside my room, it starts to downpour outside. Excellent timing.

Right now, it’s storming harder and longer than I have ever seen in the United States. The sound of the rain on the roof and of the thunder is deafening, and the palm trees flail in the wind. Lightening flashes every few minutes. In almost every issue of the Cambodia Daily is a brief announcing another lightening death somewhere in Cambodia.