My favorite tree-and-temple photo of 2015

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Another one from Cambodia

(Photo by your humble blogkeeper)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Zero Hour in Phnom Penh, and what one can learn from crime novels

Christopher G. Moore's novel Zero Hour in Phnom Penh, written based on travel to Cambodia during that country's administration by the United Nations in 1992 and 1993, is full of didactic and journalistic passages:

“`So I’m going to fill in a gap in your knowledge. We French have been here since the last century. We imported the Vietnamese to run the civil administration of the colony."

“`The French were in Cambodia for fifty years before they built the first school,'” said Calvino."

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Photos by your humble blogkeeper, Peter Rozovsky
except for the one obviously by someone else.

"This was Ratana’s Thai way of not just showing loyalty for her boss but taking a much larger step, bringing him into the kinship fold—where family looked after family, checking and double-checking on their safety, consulting with other family members."

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"Cambodia in the 90s was a second chance, a new frontier, a new gold rush. And guys like Hatch and Patten weren’t going to miss out this time around."

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"These strongmen had the unquestioned right over the peasant population. Who among them would have cared about the fate of one such girl? Hundreds of Khmers were stepping on land mines every day of every week, and it looked like that would keep on happening for the indefinite future."

Me and Christoper G. Moore
at Bangkok's Check Inn 99.

I would not like that sort of thing in most crime novels; I'll read a history book instead. But Moore has two things going for him: Cambodia is, in fact, a mystery to many, if not most, Western readers, who could use a bit of background, and he is forthright about his role as a cultural explorer or rather a cultural detective, to borrow the title he used for his book of reflections about life as a writer in Southeast Asia (a book to which I was honored to write the introduction).

So the didactic moments are pretty easy to get used to. Even if you disagree, you might like Moore's borrowings, of which one, when the protagonist, Vincent Calvino, finds a naked news reporter in his bed, is this:

 "She giggled. `You’re cute.'"

That just might remind you of Philip Marlowe and Carmen Sternwood in The Big Sleep.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Crime and vice in Cambodia

I got some good monkey shots outside Phnom Penh today. In the human-being department, I looked up "China white" after my tuk tuk driver offered to get me some. He also offered "Girl, anything. Cambodia has lots to make happy-happy."

Had he offered to hook me up with some good loc lac or sticky rice with mango, he might have had a customer As it was, I declined with thanks.

And now, the monkeys, with a guest appearance by a human from the Russian Market.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Monk's cell, Phnom Penh

(Photo by Peter Rozovsky)

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Photos from Phnom Penh

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The path to a higher state, then and now.

Not from the museum. This is on site at the Banteay Srei temple,
whose ensemble of stone carving has to be among the greatest
and most breathtaking on the planet.

Weirdest experience so far in Cambodia has been the Angkor National Museum in Siem Reap, whose layout, like those of the country's celebrated Buddhist/Hindu temples, leads the visitor on a path that symbolizes a larger journey. In this case, that journey's successive steps are marked by swelling music, heavy on strings with occasional minor-key passages to signify that this is serious stuff, and other passages that sound like Zamfir's pan flute.   Oh, yeah: there are some good pieces of Khmer sculpture, too,

The museum is run by a private company in conjunction with Cambodia's Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, and it reminds me of the trend in some American museums of turning, likely because of declining government support, to blockbuster exhibits and multimedia presentations that appeal to a limited attention span.  In science museums, this takes the form of lots of stuff about dinosaurs and Star Wars. At art museums, it means lots and lots of exhibitions of the Impressionsts. One guidebook calls the museum "edutainment," and that seems about right to me.

In the temples from which the museum's sculpture is taken, the journeys replicate a path through life and attainment of a higher state. Here, the journey ends in the souvenir shop.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Some photos from Cambodia

I haven't forgotten about you or about crime fiction; I've just been busy shooting. All photos by your humble blogkeeper.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Cambodia, crime, and history

Andrew Nette (right) with your humble blogkeeper
at Philadelphia's Noircon convention in 2014

I've been so immersed in such a welter of Cambodian history and crime fiction that I can't remember just which book is the basis for each of the following observations.

First, the books on which the observations are based:
1) Phnom Penh Noir, edited by Christopher G. Moore
2) A History of Cambodia, by David Chandler
3)  Pol Pot: Anatomy of a Nightmare, by Philip Short
4) Ghost Money, by Andrew Nette
5) The Pol Pot Regime, by Ben Kiernan

For one, at least two of the stories appear to include allusions, conscious or otherwise, to Casablanca. This makes sense; Casablanca was a refuge or a last stop for dubious sorts with agendas of their own from all over the world. So was Phnom Penh after Vietnam ousted the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Among the dubious sorts in Phnom Penh, living high amid the local squalor, were workers from non-governmental aid organizations. This is the heart of the first story in Phnom Penh Noir, by Roland Joffé. who directed The Killing Fields.

Second, orientation by landmark is less frequent than I expected in the stories set in Cambodia and written by foreigners, but it is nonetheless present. Without descending into travelogism, the stories will situate places in the story by their relation to major landmarks in a way I suspect native writers would not.

Third, the mutual enmity of Cambodians and Vietnamese, whose best-known manifestation in recent decades is probably Vietnam's 1979 invasion, may have its roots in conflict of countries that fell under the sway of Asia's two great ancient civilizations of India (Cambodia) and China (Vietnam).

Finally, to scramble the notions of native and foreigner, came "Broken Chains," a selection of rap poetry interspersed with biographical snippets in Phnom Penh Noir by Kosal Khiev, born in a Thai refugee camp, migrated to the United States as an infant, convicted of attempted murder, jailed for 14 years, then deported to Cambodia. Where does he belong?

While you ponder that question, here's Andrew Nette on Phnom Penh Noir and writing noir in Asia. 

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

សូមស្វាគមន៍មកកាន់ប្រទេសកម្ពុជា

I'm off to Cambodia in a few weeks, so first a shout-out to crime writers who live in Southeast Asia, set their novels there, or both: Christopher G. Moore, Tim Hallinan, John Burdett, Colin Cotterill, and others. Those are the writers I know; I hope to meet more when I take a short side trip to Bangkok.

My guidebook to Cambodia includes a list of suggested reading, and two of the fiction titles are or include crime stories. This raises once again that question of why authors find crime fiction a window through which to view a country other than their own.
 
And how is an author to approach a country that has known such terror as Cambodia so recently has? As soon as I booked my trip, I visited my native informant — a Cambodian-born, French-trained baker and pastry maker in South Philadelphia.  Yes, he talked about Khmer Rouge torture techniques, but he also offered acerbic comments on the technological backwardness that opened his native country to exploitation and on the superiority of the British to the French as colonizers. And there was an element of shocked humor to his discussion of Pol Pot, who spoke impeccable French, yet was responsible for the deaths of untold numbers of foreigners as head of the Khmer Rouge. (A Wikipedia article on Pol Pot says he was forced to return to Cambodia after failing his exams three years in a row. So yes, while hallucinogenic, nightmare horror is appropriate to the story of Cambodia after World War II. there's a place for grim comedy, too. How is a writer to handle this?)

And then there's the woman in the bakery — I'm unsure if she was a worker or a customer — who said matter-of-factly that she had lost three relatives to the Khmer Rouge, but also that she wanted to take her children to Cambodia one day so they could see their ancestral country.  How is an author to portray this complexity of attitudes and reactions?  I'll tell you next month.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

The secret life of traffic jams

Here are two more bits from Christopher G. Moore's Zero Hour in Phnom Penh that give a fair picture of how Phnom Penh must have looked to an outsider in the 1990s:

“Winded, she explained to Ratana, Calvino’s secretary, that she had been delayed in a massive traffic jam on Sukhumvit and then got lost. The traffic jam was the big, easy lie everyone used and just about no one ever got called on. The lie that allowed a couple of hours for a busy executive to spend with his mia noi while assured that his major wife wouldn’t question the heavy traffic excuse. No one with a mistress in Bangkok ever wanted the city’s traffic jams fixed.”

and

“Singh was no more than in his early 40s; he had been assigned from his unit—the New Delhi Anti-Terrorist Squad—to UNTAC Civ Pol and found himself in charge of the seven police districts in Phnom Penh. ...  `How much does a Cambodian cop make a month?' [Calvino] asked.

"Det. Supt. Singh glanced over at Calvino.

“`Nine dollars a month. When they get paid,' he replied.

“`And how much does an UNTAC cop make?'

“`One-hundred-thirty a day. Rain or shine' smiled Det. Supt. Singh. `Who said that life was always fair? It wasn’t an Indian or a Khmer.'”

© Peter Rozovsky 2012

“Time walks fast”

Here's a bit from Christoper G. Moore's novel Zero Hour in Phnom Penh or, more precisely, from the author's introduction to a 2005 reissue of the book, which had first appeared in 1994.

Moore calls the introduction "Genocide to Latte," the jarring contrast meant to suggest the jarring strangeness of his return to a country once ruled by terror and human extermination, then by a nervous, edgy post-war sense that anything could happen, and now by tourists in expensive hotels and Cambodians hungry to rejoin the world:

“`Time walks fast,' said the young Khmer woman DJ with a breezy California accent. She might have been in a shopping center in Los Angeles. But she had never been outside of Cambodia. And she was young, broadcasting in English to the generation of Cambodians born after the Khmer Rouge had been defeated. `Time walks fast,' she said again.”

and

“On the 7-dollar ride from the airport, the driver had tuned to an English language station in Phnom Penh. He understood English. The whole country was studying the English language. The bookshops stocked Madonna, An Intimate Biography and John Grisham’s Summons. How to do tapes for Chinese, French, and Japanese were displayed on the shelf. A little more than a generation earlier the Khmer Rouge had been killing anyone who spoke a foreign language or read foreign books. Now the streets were filled with students in their white shirts and black trousers carrying books and dreaming of riches.”

That's a nice portrait of post-war strangeness. How does one capture in words the strangeness of seeing frenzied consumer-fueled optimism in a land that had only recently known the horror of mass murder? How does one mind encompass both? How does one who knows the first look upon the second without experiencing a queasy sense of unreality? Damned if I know, but Moore makes a nice start.

© Peter Rozovsky 2012