His father was a high ranking general in the army and was killed by the Khmer Rouge after its rise to power in the mid 1970s. His mother's land in the city and the country was taken. She fled, working in the rice patties. Her 4 children were placed in an orphanage, and were raised there. Our guide told us he lived with 100 other orphans, and every morning, the older orphans would go out and bury the others who had died in the night. He left the orphanage at the age of 13.
In the mid eighties, he joined the army. He was wounded in the army. He caught malaria. His mother bought the expensive anti-malarial medicine needed to cure him. I asked him how it is that he survived between the war and disease. He said many people in his troupe died, that he prayed for good luck, and that he would avoid going into battle if he had a nightmare the night before.
In the mid-nineties, he left the army and worked for a year clearing land mines alongside a Dutch non-profit organization. He quit after he saw his boss lose a leg by stepping on a mine. He tried to study to be a nurse, but it was difficult to get a job at the hospital. He became a teacher instead. He said that teachers, army and the police all get paid the same, but through extortion, police can make more. Teaching was hard he said. The kids don't respect the teachers any more. Some of the parents are indifferent. Only 9% of Cambodians go to schools at the high-school level.
And after that, he became a tour guide.
*
The city of Siem Reap, where we are staying, is nearest to the most famous of the more than 200 temples in this region - Angkor Wat. "Siem Reap" is Khmer for "Defeated the Thai," referring to battle in the 17th where they had overthrown Thai invaders that had long laid siege and then occupied the area.
Within our first two days here, our guide frequently enumerated various grievances against the Thai including, but not limited to: stealing temple treasures like the Linga (phallic image worshiped in Hinduism) and Buddha; laying claim of rightful ownership for the Angkor complex; deporting migrant workers who have gone to labor in Thai rice patties; selling them bad fruit, which Cambodia has too little irrigation to grow for themselves; profiteering from the civil war, including levying heavy taxes on the weaponry imported by both the Khmer Rouge and the national government.
(I am struck, while listening, that we never heard about this antagonism while in Thailand. The Khmer hate the Thais, the Thais hate the Burmese. And as it follows, each of the former had been occupied by the latter.)
As a people who have lived through much, there are many such opinions - about the police (corrupt), the French (arrogant), the Vietnamese (recently chummy), the Koreans (bad tourists), the old king (disgraced), and the current political system (still, the walls have ears).
*
The morning of our first day, we go out on the largest fresh water lake in Southeast Asia - the Tonle Sap. Between the wet and dry seasons, water levels vary so dramatically that in the wet season, the lake is fed all the way from the Himalayas in the north. In the dry season, the Mekong actual changes its directions and flows into the lake from the south.
Many locals make their living from the lake. Many live literally on the lake. We visited two such villages, Chong Khneas and Kamong Khleang.
Roughly 9000 people live in floating homes in Chong Khneas, which is closest to Siem Reap. There are tourist catfish and crocodile farms, homes that have TV antenna for their battery operating TVs. A bar and a floating restaurant.
T and I make for a longer trip. Our boat goes for an hour along the distant coast. Along the other side of the boat, only the occasional hand-motor powered boat or fish-trap anchors punctuate the horizon.
We come across the Kamong Kleang village. "Visitors during the dry season are universally awestruck," according to one guide book, "by the forest of stilted houses rising up to 10 meters in the air. In the wet season, the waters rise to within one or two meters of the buildings." T and I were struck by that, I guess, and other things too: the "new" hand-crank telephone, the women peeling dried shrimp caught
yesterday in the river, the girls selling us half-eaten pencils to donate to the school, the garishly painted new Buddhist temple, the young monk, drenched with sweat, crouched over the tiles he was laying.
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