Cambodia’s New Look [from the point of view of an American journalist]

By Thomas Beller
http://www.msnbc.msn.com
Travel & Leisure
updated 1/13/2012

When I first arrived in Phnom Penh, in 1994, I looked out the window of my descending plane and saw a landscape of rice paddies dotted with palm trees. It might have been, in a parallel universe, or perhaps just in a neighboring country like Thailand, a pastoral image, but for me it was synonymous with land mines, Agent Orange, genocide, death. My feelings were shaped in part by popular culture—movies such as The Killing Fields and Apocalypse Now and books like Elizabeth Becker’s When the War Was Over and Nayan Chanda’s Brother Enemy. To say they told of a darkly mysterious place where terrible things had happened was only part of it; in 1994 the Khmer Rouge was still in control of large chunks of the country, even after the United Nations had sponsored a historic democratic election the previous year. I had come to Phnom Penh to write for a fledgling English-language newspaper, the Cambodia Daily, a decision whose logic had completely escaped me by the time the wheels hit tarmac. I swore that I would proceed through Phnom Penh with the utmost caution.

But by my second night I was at a party eating a piece of cake that I had just been told had an entire pound of pot baked into it, when someone rushed in yelling, “Coup! Coup! There’s a tank in the middle of downtown!” Because the party was filled with that strange breed of catastrophe addicts who have found their calling as journalists, everyone piled into the backs of pickup trucks and rushed off to look for the tank. I went, too, fretfully, like some eighth grader herded into a group activity he knows is wrong but is too spineless to resist.

We never found the tank.

To arrive in Phnom Penh today is to encounter a city teeming with energy and enterprise. There are skyscrapers, high-end hotels and restaurants, hip coffee shops, galleries, boutiques. The streets are thronging and chaotic but the overall mood is civilized. When I first came to this town, I was fascinated by the way women would ride sidesaddle on the back of motos, one foot on the footrest and the other with the ankle cocked gently upward so their flip-flops didn’t fall off. The modern bustle has removed only some of this charm.

For most of the past decade, until 2009, the country experienced an average of nearly 10 percent annual growth. The despotic prime minister, Hun Sen, has provided stability, which, as a local businessman whom I know remarked, “is the magic recipe for cheap labor for garment factories and two million pairs of feet each year wandering around Angkor.” He also said, “Ten percent growth in a country that didn’t have an economy a decade or more ago isn’t anything stunning.”

But I was stunned, mostly in a good way—Phnom Penh, once a lawless haven for adventurers, layabouts, and hedonists of all stripes for whom freedom was just another word for no real law enforcement, is now praised in similar terms but for different reasons by a new class of small-business owners who see the place as an opportunity.

“There are so many opportunities because they are not weighed down by traditional hierarchy,” said Yoshie Treiber, who runs La Clef de Sol, a fancy boutique specializing in housewares, bags, and dresses. It sits at the end of a quiet alley off hectic Sihanouk Boulevard. Originally from Japan, she spent five years in Cannes before moving to Phnom Penh. “Everything is new here. If you have guts, you can do anything in Phnom Penh.”
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And yet, when I saw a friend who has lived here for 18 years, he said, “Phnom Penh isn’t as exciting as it used to be, but it’s nice that you can get good coffee and Wi-Fi is everywhere.” By this he meant that it no longer felt as if you had arrived at the drop-edge of the world.

I was visiting toward the end of rainy season, which I knew about, and the start of the Pchum Ben holiday, which was news to me. Nuon So Thero, the Cambodia Daily’s general manager, picked me up at the airport. Thero was the first person I ever met in Cambodia, having rescued me as I sat bewildered and a bit frightened outside the locked doors of the newspaper, suitcase by my side, transfixed by the steep pitch of the Royal Palace roof across the street, the bright orange-yellow of its tiles glinting in the sun. Now, 17 years later, I saw his smiling, intelligent face, changed but unchanged, beaming from the waiting crowd. “It still has that fantastic smell!” I said as we loaded the car. Phnom Penh’s air has a sweet, smoky scent, as though someone were slowly roasting cardamom over a fire.

“I live here,” he said, “I never noticed it.” We drove to my hotel, and Thero pointed out the new parliament building and the new office of the prime minister, both radiating prosperity and redolent of something built by Mussolini. We arrived at Raffles Hotel Le Royal, my last recollection of which was as a ruin. “I know exactly where I am!” I exclaimed. “We’re right near the Youth Club.” The International Youth Club was a whitewashed bastion of francophone leisure, fragrant with a colonial prerogative that was only partially antique.

“Youth Club gone,” Thero said. “The American Embassy is there now.”

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“They built the American Embassy on top of the Youth Club?” I said. “Oh, the French must have hated that.”

“I think they did,” Thero said. We headed off to dinner at a Chinese restaurant on Monivong Boulevard. Once there had been an outdoor noodle stand with plastic chairs and a fluorescent light hooked up to a generator. Now, even after midnight, the place was filled with well-appointed revelers. The menu was epic, a scroll of fine print. I had crab soup. Salt-and-pepper shrimp. The restaurant took credit cards.

I spent the next day wandering the streets on foot and by cyclo—a bicycle version of a gondola, but with no singing—a now mostly antiquated form of transportation in a town filled with motos, cars, and SUV’s.

On my first trip into Phnom Penh, cars had been scarce; they pushed through the bikes and motos like a bull gingerly parting a flock of sheep. Busy intersections were manned by traffic police in sharp military-style uniforms and white gloves. They stood on battered metal pedestals and performed a rather ornate and formal set of gestures that combined, either by osmosis or intent, elements of Khmer dance’s fluidity with the more rigid hand motion one associates with the word stop! The effect was a bit like vogueing.

But these were vestiges of an old order. The city now has stoplights that people obey; metal dividers down the center of the avenues ensure traffic is mostly two-way. Once it had been four, or six, or eight-way and composed largely of two-wheeled vehicles, slender as minnows. Turning left had required entering a dream state of faith in which you drifted slowly across the avenue into the oncoming traffic, hoping the force was with you, until you got to your turn.

I met my old friend Ek Madra, who used to be a moto driver but then got a job as a translator and then as a reporter for the Cambodia Daily, and later became an accomplished bureau chief for Reuters. He picked me up at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) in his car. “Madra, I cannot believe what is going on in this city!” I shouted after we hugged. He whisked me off to the Sorya Restaurant, near the madness of the Central Market. Located in a space that was once a movie theater, its lighting was bright; the napkins were red linen; at least one person catered to our needs at all times, which I took to mean that Madra was now a big shot.

“This is a new Cambodia on old land,” he said. “I believe in human lucky.” The phrase contained a boosterism that did not sound like a journalist. It turned out Madra had recently started a business himself. His firm is called Ek Tha & Madra Associates and imports dried fish from Vietnam.

“But Madra, Ek Tha is a pseudonym you sometimes use. Your company is you and you.”
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“Yes,” he said. “That way no one can steal from my family!” Madra, who had always been very dramatic, said, “People are going from war to wealth.”

Completely by chance I was in Cambodia at the same time as Chris Decherd, my old friend from the Cambodia Daily who now runs the Cambodia division of the Voice of America, in Washington, D.C. The VOA had recently stirred up a hornet’s nest with a report on the current Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) prosecution of Khmer Rouge leadership. Pol Pot died in 1998, but Nuon Chea, Khieu Samphan, and Ieng Sary—icons of a genocide—are elderly and alive. The tribunal was supposed to be a cathartic national event, a moment of reckoning, but the VOA suggested it was being undermined by Prime Minister Hun Sen. This provoked a blistering critique of the VOA by Hun Sen, a strongman whose critics have, on occasion, met untimely deaths. I had thought Chris was here to smooth ruffled feathers. But the VOA’s television news clips are in high demand in Cambodia. He was here to negotiate distribution deals. We had dinner at a restaurant called Malis, no pun intended. The chef, Luu Meng, served a feast of green mango and smoked fish, spicy scallops with mint leaves, beef carpaccio, and lemongrass chicken. Chris said he was waking early the next morning for a four-hour drive to Battambang, Cambodia’s second city, in the north and asked if I wanted to join him. “You can drive to Battambang?” I said, amazed.

“Sure,” he said. “You can drive anywhere now.”

I am staying at La Villa, one of several examples of French-colonial architecture in Battambang. It overlooks the river. I collapse in the afternoon and sleep through dinner, waking in darkness to the sound of pouring rain. Within that sound is something difficult to identify, a kind of music. I go to the window and realize it is a monk, chanting into the darkness of Pchum Ben. The river at night looks like a tiny Seine, dotted with elegant lamplights and arching bridges. A moto comes into view, moving slowly through the downpour on the far side of the river.

My room is an attic-like space with exposed beams, ceiling fans, and dark wood floors. There is a bare wooden desk with a gorgeous old standing lamp beside it, and a writing mat. The room, the rain, the chanting, it all suggests the intrigue of a Graham Greene novel, the ruined mansion of Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient, Bogart in Casablanca—I watch the moto move through the rain on its mysterious errand.

A little while later the rain tapers off and I go for a long swim in the pool. The air is filled with the singsong voice of the chanting monk as the trees and plants around the pool reveal themselves in silhouette against the dawn. I swim back and forth in the pool of La Villa, wondering if Cambodia has exorcised the demons of the Khmer Rouge.

In Battambang I go to school. First to an empty high school, where a conference on education is under way, and later to a place where everyone has more or less run away to join the circus. In the morning I hear the nation’s most renowned psychiatrist talk to secondary-school teachers. The title of the workshop is “How History Teachers Who Were Victims of the Khmer Rouge Teach the Khmer Rouge History to Students Who Are the Children of the Khmer Rouge Perpetrators.”

One teacher stands to say she had told her students of her suffering at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, and they had laughed. “I could forgive the Khmer Rouge but not those students who laughed,” she says.

Dr. Ka Sunbaunat, dressed in white linen, is an unlikely apostle of the talking cure. “You have to teach the Khmer Rouge history,” he says to his audience of teachers. “You have to get comfortable with it. Otherwise there is no catharsis.”

That afternoon I visit Phare Ponleu Selpak (PPS), an arts school that functions partly as a shelter for street kids; it is run by ethnic Khmers who were refugees at the Site 2 camp on the Thai border in the late eighties and received drawing lessons from a French teacher. On its small campus at the edge of town there is an outpouring of activity: drawing, painting, video animation, music. PPS is responsible for turning Battambang into something of a hotbed for artistic talent in Cambodia, producing artists such as Srey Bandol, whose intricate pencil drawings of Angkor’s temples subtly reconfigure the landscape, making it feel like it’s an old master painting from Europe.

Its centerpiece, both architecturally and as a business, is its circus, which puts on regular performances in Battambang and tours in Asia and Europe. I spend almost an hour watching kids of different ages fly through the air, twisting and spinning (and sometimes crashing) to the cheers of their peers. Standing amid such energy and laughter, with rhythmic music coming from the building nearby, where kids are jamming on ancient Khmer instruments, I remember a remark by a UN official in 1997: “I don’t think there is a good outlook for this generation. The hope is for the Cambodians not yet born.” Fifteen years later I am watching that future generation. They fly spinning through the air and, most of the time, land on their feet.

I had intended to take a boat from Battambang to Siem Reap, but the torrential rains have flooded the docks. I take a taxi instead. It’s a pleasant drive that arcs around the northern tip of the Tonle Sap. We skirt those areas once held by the Khmer Rouge. Anlong Veng, Pailin. The violence connoted by those names is mocked by the landscape outside the window. I love rice paddies. I love their green. I love the strange, weaving effect of so many tiny strands making a dense, textured whole, a kind of luscious rug. I love the mystery of their always being submerged.