Back in Cambodia, headed to Laos, after a week in Vietnam.
It's so easy to be whisked away by the warmth of this place that I catch myself forgetting where I am. Thirty years ago, these were mangled countries. It's hard, here, to reconcile that recent history with what I see--I don't know how this laughter and lightness ever pushed its way through, how it sprang from physical fields of corpses. When reminders of those skeletons come, they are by way of casual conversation, all the more jarring for their unassuming entrances.
'How do you know how to swim like that?' I laugh (yes, so can you): 'We had a pool in my backyard, and we always went to the lake or the ocean in the summers.' My Lao friends cling to the wall of the pool, only daring to take their hands off for a few seconds at a time: 'Can you teach me?' I laugh again, shake my head: 'You never tried to learn, with the Mekong right there?' They shrug, venture a few splashing kicks and are neither self-righteous nor abashed: 'No one did--it was forbidden, so we wouldn’t escape.' The Mekong separates Vientiane from Thailand but is narrow near the city, swimmable. This was the easiest way of escaping the oppressive Communist regime that controlled the country in the 70s and 80s, mirroring Vietnam's. Easy, but not effective: many drowned or were shot halfway; those who made it were often torn from the river by men on the other side and sold into the sex slave trade before their clothes had dried. Though it is the epicenter of their diet, for years no one in Laos ate fish, for fear of coming across a human tooth or ringed finger.
For a while here, every deeper conversation with a Laotian or Cambodian felt like its own minefield (excuse the, uh, pun)--I never knew what question would accidentally tap into a war memory or a painful explanation for the benefit of me, the ignorant foreigner. M got married to a man from a distant province (so never saw her parents again) because Khmer Rouge forced her to, in an effort to weaken familial loyalties. P spent years pretending to be illiterate, holding books upside down and suppressing any gleam of cognizance of street signs, to evade Pol Pot’s brain hunt. L’s friend received a letter in the post written in French--when all foreign languages but Russian were forbidden--and was seized from her home the next day, and never heard from again. Everyone had parents or siblings or children who were killed.
(I have never spoken to anyone who told me of the brutalities of their time in the concentration camp, or the tortures they endured under police interrogation; none of these people survived. Around the corner from our Phnom Penh office is S21, a high school that was turned into a concentration camp under Khmer Rouge. It is a museum now, not curated but eerily preserved with crude cells still standing and blood-stained chains anchored to the floor. From 1975-1979, 20,000 people passed through this prison--of those, 12 are known to have survived.)
These are their stories, as much as summers on the Jersey shore or Lake Winnipesaukee are mine. And unless I delve (as I have, inadvertently, to the point of making these strong women cry), that is how they are told--quietly and not angrily, as something that was there and was bad but has past. I, meanwhile, am left stunned and sputtering by the closeness of their horrors: these are the same tales I read about the Holocaust or slavery, but this is the first time I am hearing them. I recognize it as sheltered, but I can't comprehend it--not really. My understanding of the modern world doesn't have space for this kind of oppression to prevail. And so at the end of another gentle account of another unclaimed death, I, the naive American, exclaim, 'you have to write a book! Your stories...' And this is what finally triggers a reaction--the wide eyes, the slow backing away, the guarded chuckle. In Cambodia, some villages are still Khmer Rouge strongholds--many of those men are still in power. But this wariness resonates even more strongly in Laos. Laos is still a Communist country; the harshness of its regime faded but was never punctuated with a shift of power and was never condemned. Though peace today is stable, even I--melodramatic as it sounds--would not feel comfortable relaying those personal tragedies here.
But at this moment, we are wrapped in sarongs, eating fried rice under palm trees by the pool and comparing freckles (they "pity me" for mine, considering them ugly). The cloud passes, and it is again impossible to believe the fear that stifled these sweet people in this sweet country.
This is how I feel throughout Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. Over and over again, I am staggered by the same two human phenomena: our capacity to be profoundly evil, and our inconceivable resilience.
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