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

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

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