A Khmer girl sleeps inside a temple at Angkor

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You go to a new country and in a few days you can make a reliable generalization. These people, they are cranky. These others, they are outgoing and festive. Those there, shy and gentle.

Cambodians stumped me. One week in and I couldn’t condense the national psyche to any nugget worth its air.

I was in a country with fast-paced cities, mind-blowing architectural aesthetics (ever seen a Khmer pagoda?) and a proud heritage of a bygone empire. But the people were a total mystery.

A people of contrasts

At first, Cambodians seem to be polite, smiley and shy. Then you run into pushy touts who grab your arm and don’t understand “no” after five times. You meet children who seem entirely robotic in their sales pitch. They come, one after the other, offering identical products with the same spiel:

“You buy bracelet? OK, not now, later? Pinky swear? You swore you would buy from me. Why you lie?”

And when you try to engage them in conversation, they go blank, reverting to their rehearsed lines.

You talk to locals who don’t seem to have any notion of abstract thinking. They look at a map like it’s a foreign alphabet. When you ask them any question beginning with “why” you get a silent stare in return. Even hand gestures that worked in every other country are lost on them.

Then you hear of the scams and the corruption that is so pervasive, it’s a normal part of life.

So to better understand the present, I turned to the past.

History explains a bit

Cambodian history is still fresh. Anyone over 35 lived through the bloodiest social experiment of the 20th century. They were torn from their homes and forced to work in the fields. They lost family members to starvation, disease, and assassination.

How this manifests in the present population takes some work to understand.

For one, the Khmer Rouge sought to eliminate anyone with an education. Intellectuals, artists, teachers, doctors, engineers… all of them murdered. Only “pure” and “uncorrupted” peasants, or those who could fool the executioners, were spared. To live, you had to act dumb.

“Imagine if everyone except the working class of your country was killed off,” one English expat explained to me. “Imagine that only they had kids and assumed positions of power.”

So you have an uneducated majority left in charge of the country. But that’s not all.

Poor education

“Most Cambodians only really learn two things at school,” another English expat, a hotel owner in Siem Reap, told me. “How to read Khmer and how to write Khmer. The lucky ones learn English.”

Creative thinking and scientific exploration, things we assume are universal in schooling, are sorely lacking here. Hence the Cambodian difficulty in abstract thought.

The same hotel owner told me he doesn’t let Cambodians swim in his pool. Not because of discrimination, but because he’s tired of saving them from drowning: “They see the pool and jump in. But they don’t remember that they can’t swim until they drown.”

Lousy wages

$1 a day. That’s what many Cambodians earn to feed and clothe their families. Not surprisingly, they will use other means of making money. And if the Khmer Rouge taught then anything, it’s that all’s fair in the fight for survival.

Including scams and bribes.

Yet another English expat I talked to no longer calls it corruption. To get anything done, you just have to grease a palm. “It’s commission, mate. It’s just the way things work here.”

History is still unraveling

The country is going through its first period of peace in a long time. Khmer Rouge leaders are still undergoing trials and appealing their sentences. Its people are encountering more foreigners than ever before.

It’s all going very fast: a mostly rural population is coming into contact with an ultra-modern Western world quicker than they can manage to assimilate it. This results in a display of behaviours that strike us Westerners as odd.

Recovering from cancer

“The Khmer Rouge regime was a cancer. We survived it, but we’re still weak from it.” Such was the explanation given by Meang, the immeasurably helpful owner of the Prohm Roth Guesthouse in Siem Reap. This simple thought explained as much as the hundreds of pages I read on the topic.

It seems the Cambodian people are in a collective post-shock syndrome, slowly coming to terms with what happened. Former Khmer Rouge soldiers and executioners walk among survivors of the killing fields. Children taught to smash babies against trees are hustling through adult life.

It can drive one mad if thought about too much.

With such a gruesome mix of causes and a strange set of effects, how can you not want to learn more about its history? Few places have made me this thirsty for knowledge.

Suggested reading and viewing

Books
First They Killed My Father by Luong Ung
Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor
Pol Pot: Brother Number One by David P. Chandler

Films
The Killing Fields
S21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine
Neak sre (aka Les gens la la rizière)

In the town of Koh Kong, near the border with Thailand, there’s a Buddhist spiritual retreat with a bizarre collection of sculptures by its riverfront.

In the photos below you’ll see sadistic-looking sculptures killing people with the heads of animals. You’ll see a man being sawed in half while being pecked by a garuda, a bird of Buddhist mythology.

Ask different people about them and you’ll get different answers: it was made by the Khmer Rouge to turn people away from religion. No, it was meant to scare people to tell the truth.

This article says it’s a depiction of Buddhist hell – what happens when people stray from the moral path.

It’s difficult to get a straight answer, since the Khmer Rouge abolished so much knowledge and culture during its four-year reign of terror. So we are left with our imaginations, to which these statues leave plenty of space.

Click thumbnails to see full pictures. Click on arrows below photos to advance.

[View with PicLens]

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Cartagena: beauty built on tyranny

The more I learn about Colombian history, the more pissed off I get at the Spanish. Which creates an awkward situation: I can’t possibly stay mad at the nation that gave me paella, sangria, tapas, flamenco and Penélope Cruz.

And so I reconcile this loving hate the American way, by which I mean pan-American, from Alaska to Patagonia, a continent founded on Europe’s thirst for dominance and baptized with the blood of natives and African slaves. I paint over the ugly parts, make it pretty, erect small monuments to the tyrannized, and get on with life.

It’s what South Americans excel at, and the city of Cartagena de Indias is the most vivid reminder of this. Stroll near the northeast city walls and you’ll find an enclosed courtyard housing several expensive restaurants. One of them, offering Spanish cuisine, has three angled arches made of aged, exposed bricks. That’s because this was once a gunpowder depot, and if there was an accidental explosion, the arches directed the force of the blast down the length of the room, rather than sideways into the courtyard, where people could be working.

A few blocks away, a series of arched cubbyholes called Las Bóvedas house souvenir shops selling T-shirts, miniatures of the city, and colourful shot glasses. These were once used as prisons, where no doubt the captives were tortured.

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Las Bóvedas. Borrowed from sinosrealestate.com

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I know this about the restaurant because a waiter told me. I now this about Las Bóvedas because an aged plaque above a Botero poster says so. One wonders if the tourists strolling down the city’s cobblestone lanes, admiring the stunning, brightly painted colonial homes are aware that this was a strategic port where the Spaniards shipped treasures they stole from Peru back to Madrid.

You have to look for this, as cartageneros dwell on the past in memory, not in sustained grudges. They swept off the streets the systematic slaughter of Amerindians and the countless deaths from English and French invasions and stored them in neat displays at the Naval Museum and the Inquisition Museum. They’d rather keep the city gorgeous and romantic.

But what defines the Americas if not the beautification of past horrors? From the evils of slavery were borne many beautiful things, like samba and capoeira in Brazil, reggae in Jamaica, compas in Haiti, the blues in the United States. Bloody struggles for freedom became stunning plazas and sobering monuments. Then they blend into the cityscape, citizens give a nod to their memory, and then move on.

In Bogotá, the splendid Museo de Oro houses the few pre-Columbian treasures that weren’t melted into gold coins. And that’s because they were found in buried tombs long after the conquistadores did their damage. There I saw groups of schoolchildren on a field trip taught to admire the ancients’ craftsmanship, silently honour their memory, and move on to enjoy what they have today.

A chant in capoeira has a verse that goes, “I’m grateful for slavery / For without slavery, there wouldn’t be capoeira.”

But this is a continent that has been routinely mistreated by its leaders, men afflicted by psychic echoes of their ancestor’s love of power. And when the hurt subsides, they demand closure so they can honour the tyrannized. We saw this most recently with the movement to bring to justice the leaders of Operation Condor, the conspiracy among right-wing South American dictatorships to share torture and repression techniques in the 70s. Pinochet and other bastards were nailed and others continued to be hunted, despite denials and obstacles by current governments.

And when the truth is found, they move on.

Cartagena is so fascinating because it invites you to look past its beauty and contemplate on the many layers of hideous bits that sustain it. And as such, it becomes a multi-dimensional beauty, more complex and intriguing than other pretty historical towns you’ve visited. And it makes you wonder if perhaps a mutant flower sprouted from the seared grounds of Hiroshima, and if it was more stunning than anything that had blossomed before it.

In the paradisaical Parque Tayrona I met a couple from Barcelona who have been travelling for eight months. I felt the urge to ask them what it’s like to visit the land their ancestors both raped and beautified. Do they feel any retroactive remorse? Should they? But the girl was charming, friendly and beautiful, and the guy chatty and chummy. We talked about food instead and got along great.