Story and Photos by Alison Moran

Last spring, as a voyager of the study abroad program Semester at Sea, I circumnavigated the globe and visited thirteen countries in the process. Those days were without parallel the greatest of my life; they were also the most excruciating as persistent jet lag, foreign parasites, and a firsthand perspective of various atrocities took a toll on my physical and mental well being. Like most travel, experiences can oscillate to various extremes, changing from minute to minute. Cambodia was no exception.
Arriving in Phnom Penh
After a failed attempt at sneaking into the first-class lounge with a pair of dark sunglasses and no ticket, I curled up and began re-reading “The Best Travel Writing of 2008.” This continued as I boarded the plane in Vietnam, flew to Cambodia, climbed aboard the tour bus, and drove down the streets of the country’s capital, Phnom Penh. By this time, I was, oddly enough, reading Ian Buruma’s chapter “Phnom Penh Now.” Usually I read travel writing as a method of escape so it was very surreal to look up from my book and find myself a part of the very world I was reading about; I felt like an explorer – or researcher – locked and loaded with the camera, the pad, the pen.
It was this statement that finally shook me fully from my book: “We don’t keep our money in the bank. All my money is under my mattress.” I looked at the man, the tour guide, more closely: thin, big brown eyes, wearing a Hawaiian button-down.       
“School is half the day because there are not enough teachers,” he went on. He then stopped and apologized for his ‘poor English.’ The microphone stopped working for a minute or two.
“I couldn’t find a teacher,” he stammered and looked around, shifting in his boots. We encouraged him to go on.       
 
In 1975, the Khmer Rouge began enforcing its policies of radical Maoism, policies, he said, that eventually led to the deaths of over one million Cambodians. Fearing capitalism—and in order to create a communist state and agrarian utopia—the Rouge ordered people to the countryside and into forced labor. The intellectuals of Cambodia were specifically targeted due to their espousal of free-market ideologies, and anyone who was thought to be “Westernized” or bright was killed. His parents were executed solely based upon the fact that they wore glasses.
Though the Rouge’s terror ended in 1979, the modern Cambodian government faces a different problem: more than half of its population is under twenty-one and education and jobs are few and far between, especially in the countryside where infrastructure is nearly nonexistent. The tour guide told us the average per capita income in Cambodia is 2,000 USD, a fact hammered home by the number of completely full car lots we drove by. Few people in Cambodia can afford a Mercedes.
To all of this the tour guide concluded with “God Bless America.” I attempted a smile. The tour guide’s insecurity about his education was both humbling but poignant, much like the rest of my time in Cambodia.
Our tour continued down the streets of Phnom Penh where billboards bombard passersby, advertising such things as romance in the form of Alain Delon cigarettes: “A Taste of France!” I snapped a photo of a Bauhaus-style apartment. We drove by the Foreign Correspondents Club. I imagined the interior of the club as insidiously white: from napkin to sugar cube to the pages of daily paper to the man drinking his Baileys and Cream. Phnom Penh was once known as the “Pearl of Asia” but now the city appeared less lustrous, and more derelict, as if that pearl had spent years in an airtight plastic bag to finally be released, brittle and cracked.
We drove down the humid streets almost exclusively pervaded with dress shops and tailors. The mannequins, adorned in taffeta gowns like ghosts of proms-past, felt somewhat allegorical. Though Cambodia has since been reconstructed as a constitutional monarchy, I still thought to myself: had the city modernized since the communist regime?
 
We arrived at the National Museum of Cambodia thirty minutes before it closed. The museum’s collection primarily includes Angkorean and pre-Angkorean stone carvings and sculptures, fundamental Khmer art. Though today Cambodia’s people are predominantly Buddhist, the country was once ruled by a series of Hindu kings. The sculptures most notably represent the figures of Brahma, Vishnu and Shiva, the Hindu trinity of Gods. One statue I found particularly captivating was that of Harihara, the hybridized deity of both Vishnu and Shiva, otherwise known as the Supreme God.
The security guard turned off the lights to each exhibit hall after we were finished. With the breeze blowing from the closing doors, the silhouetted statues appeared to hiss in our direction. I went outside and I gawked at the impossibly gray sky. I heard the colony of Cambodian bats scratching the undersides of the terra-cotta roof. I watched one fly away as the sun said goodnight.
Realizations on the River
In Cambodia, night falls early and our boat ride took place on a small jetty under the still overcast sky.  It was cooler on the water, yet I continued to perspire with every sip of rice whiskey. We slowly floated down the convergence of the Tonle Sap, Mekong and Bassac rivers and watched people go about their daily routines on the waterfront. We took pictures. They left their homes, stood on the banks and stared at us. This was a strange experience. How dare you take a picture of our squalor, I felt them say. I wanted to light someone’s cigarette or fix myself another drink. I wanted to make a phone call. To whom? I didn’t know.       
 
 
I asked our tour guide how often he gave the tour. He said everyday. We started talking about the Hungry Ghost Festival, a Buddhist celebration that includes ritualistic object and food offerings to ancestral spirits. He strayed from the topic of forebears and proceeded to the more pertinent theme of food: “If one has a sweet potato, we kill each other for it.”
He doesn’t like the holiday because he was forced to wrestle a neighbor for the meat of a lizard, on the road next to the railroad tracks, miles from where his parents were shot. I wish he hadn’t told me. I heard the lizards. I saw people cheering him on, screaming while he wept in fear, the lizard in his hand.
“So what you’re saying is you don’t celebrate the holiday?” I looked him up and down. I felt a rush of anxiety as if I’d said too much, as if I knew too little. There was something so inherently sad about his demeanor, the way his back slouched and the way he looked back at me, that I could hardly tolerate it. It was obvious he had seen some shit. I then recognized that I was on the verge of an out-of-body experience. I know what it’s like to lose a mother, but not the way he knows. We shared something more than just that moment, as we floated down the river.
But then he pointed to his cell phone: “I have a call.”  His phone wasn’t ringing. He walked away. I had more questions, but I understood. And I was relieved.

Ending the Day as “Mom”
Later that evening, we visited the Palm Tree Orphanage. A little girl, named Mealea, perhaps five or six, grabbed my hand: “Come see!” Hand in hand, she took me up the steep crumbling linoleum steps to the bedroom she shares with ten others. The bedroom walls were covered, from floor to ceiling, in fashion spreads. I recognized a number of these editorials as I had a collection of magazines at home that was about as tall my new friend.
She was obviously very proud of this exhibit: “Look here. Pretty!” The models, with their fair skin, vacant extractions, and expensive dresses with price tags featuring amounts of money this girl may never see in her entire lifetime left me speechless. I could only nod like a puppet on a string. On the dresser was a framed photograph of a young Cambodian couple on their wedding day, perhaps her parents. Before I could ask she said, “Ok Mom. Let’s play outside.” She called me ‘mom’ the rest of the night. She cried when I left and I cried too. The tears, a result of a new separation that somehow felt very deep-rooted.
I retreated to my hotel, a bamboo bungalow, full of food and exhausted from the pressures of the day. I sat down in the bathtub, under the ultra-fancy rain pressure faucet. Afterward, I crawled to my bed, wrapped myself in the white terrycloth and melted into the down blankets like a stick of softening butter. Sleep, when it eventually came, never felt so good.
But wrapped in my five star comfort, I had trouble falling asleep with visions of the day haunting me. I imagined the little girl in her cotton cot; I imagined the tour guide barefoot, having a smoke, alone. I awoke in the middle of the night and could’ve sworn I saw Shiva in the dark corner of my room, his arms outstretched: “Help me.”

Read the second part of Alison’s story.

Gallery • 9 Photos

The Lost Pearl of Cambodia – Part 1