(Kindle Singles) - ’The Playground’ by Terrence M. McCoy
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Kindle Singles isn’t just for brand-name authors. It serves its greatest purpose by showcasing the work of unknown authors of exceptional ability, such as the journalist Terrence M. McCoy. His just-released book, “The Playground,” is an ire-inspiring account of cash-rich Chinese corporations sweeping into Cambodian villages at the urging of the despotic Hun Sen government and sweeping out the locals to make way for five-star hotels and shopping malls. It’s a tale of tag-team tyranny over the defenseless. The work’s length — longer than many magazine articles but shorter than most books — and its strong storytelling are perfect for a few commutes on the Metro and, more important, for engaging the uninitiated in an issue of growing global importance: the ugliness that arises from the lust for economic development in certain parts of the world. At $1.99, the price of enlightenment is low.
McCoy became fluent in Khmer during a two-year stint with the
Peace Corps in Cambodia and is now completing a one-year Master’s
program in journalism at Columbia University. For his Master’s project,
he returned to Cambodia to investigate the tactics of Chinese
corporations. His crisp, vivid narrative depicts the one-sided battles
that rage between developers intent on having their way with the
less-powerful and villagers hoping to cling to their homes. In one
village, “Soldiers had Tasered and sent to prison dozens of villagers —
including two children — with their heads bashed,” McCoy writes, adding
that one woman, distraught over her eviction, killed herself by leaping
off a bridge over the Mekong River.
What separates McCoy’s book
from other tales of authoritarian capitalism run amok is his discovery
of a unique form of protest — led by a most uncommon rebel. During his
Peace Corps years, McCoy writes, “I’d gotten to know hundreds of
Cambodians, dozens of them intimately, and thought I’d met every sort of
Khmer personality the country had to offer. But then I met Vanny.”
Vanny
Tep is a former fashion model whose “life, she says, has no space for
vanity” and who, at 32, “has become the de facto leader of a [Phnom
Penh]-based grassroots movement against the government, violent land
eviction, and development itself,” McCoy writes. He tags along with her
to a meeting of rebels in the village of Boeung Kak, a fishing village
once rich in freshwater fish and water buffalo, and now “something out
of a post-apocalyptic film, barren and cragged” after nearly two-thirds
of its 20,000 residents have fled because of violence and intimidation.
The Boeung Kak rebels at the meeting are not the angry men you’d expect
but a group of about 20 boisterous women.
A few years ago, Vanny
had a realization about the power of women protesters. While Cambodian
soldiers willingly whack the skulls of male resisters, they hesitate
before women. “It’s the Khmer way,” McCoy writes. “A man would be shamed
if he publicly beat a woman.”
For Vanny, the route to effective
protest was obvious: “I need to gather all the women,” she thought, and
soon she had a resistance movement of young and old Cambodian women
wearing Khmer scarves around their necks, waists or bandana-like around
their heads as a symbol of resistance. Their protests befuddled the
police and prevented violence. It also publicized their cause, even
though the outlook for containing China’s corporate aggression is
uncertain.
In McCoy’s adroit hands, the story doesn’t end on the
public battlefield but goes inside the home, where the female protesters
are also rattling Cambodian domestic traditions. Women whose lives
typically revolve around child care, cooking and cleaning have found a
new sense of power. Husbands, used to subservient wives, grumble and
adjust. “This clash of tradition and gender equality,” McCoy writes,
“represented not only a profound shift in culture, but another wrinkle
in the story of development.”
Steven Levingston
is Book World’s nonfiction editor.
THE PLAYGROUND
By Terrence M. McCoy
Kindle Single. 39 pp. $1.99
1 comment:
Why wasting time read any bias and double-standards from media-controlled with pretext to smear other nations like Washington Post, CNN, AP, and etc,.
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