My Yale professor who taught the history of Southeast Asia described the Mekong River as one of the most fertile. The monsoon causes the river water to rise above the trees, and when it recedes, numerous fish hang from the trees along the river. When my small airplane from Bangkok flew low over the Mekong River toward the ancient city of Phnom Penh, looking out the window, all I could think of was the fish hanging from the trees.
It was in May 1997. Save the Children’s annual program review meeting lasted three days in a small non-air-conditioned room in the tropical heat. When it was over, we all agreed to the city tour. Glen, a locally hired young British citizen on the staff, drove us first to Tuol Sleng, a genocide museum, a former high school building the Khmer Rouge turned into a prison torture chamber.
We paid a small admission and entered the courtyard, surrounded by rusted barbed-wired fences. Tall coconut trees with long leaves swung among the beds of overgrown weeds. The former classrooms of the adjoining decrepit three-story concrete building looked empty. I peeked into the first room before going in as if to check for a ghost. An iron bed frame sat on the concrete floor. The glass windows seemed to have been replaced with iron bars. An old black-and-white photo of the bed hung on the wall. In that photo, a naked man on his stomach lay on the same bed. He looked dead.
“The man who took this photo handed it to the museum only a few days ago,” said Glen.
“What happened to the photographer?” I asked.
“Nothing. He lives around here.”
“But he participated in this.” I pointed at the gruesome picture.
“There are lots of participants. They live right next to the victims and their families. Everyone knows everyone else but nobody wants to talk about it. They are too tired to dig out the past.”
“If no one talks about the past, how could we prevent history from repeating?”
Glen shook his head apologetically as if he were responsible for the bad news. “When you live in a place like this, you see weird dreams. The whole country is haunted.”
In the next cell, another iron bed frame sat with more blood stains underneath. It was hard to imagine this was once a high school, a place for learning.
In the backyard, large metal devices spread over the grass. Some were used to hang people. Other tools looked like traps with blades and guillotines. I held my camera to place the devices in the frame. I could almost see them—men and women, their heads down, lined up to have their bodies hung by teenage soldiers in their khaki uniforms, who had once been their neighbors. I put away the camera without taking any photos.
In the next building, the first two rooms exhibited headshots of men, women, and small children. These were the victims. The Khmer Rouge left numerous photos, confession letters, and papers on which were written the victims’ names, birthdays, and birthplaces. As did the Nazis.
The third room had a giant map of Cambodia mounted on the wall. Walking closer to it, I gasped. The map was made entirely of human skulls. The Tonle Sap and the Mekong River were painted crimson red as if blood were flowing down.
The last room displayed paintings by a few of the survivors who described how the Khmer Rouge tortured and killed those they captured. One showed a soldier standing by a pile of dead babies. He was throwing a baby up in the air and shooting and laughing. Another painting showed the agonized face of a female victim whose nail was being peeled off by a soldier.
Desperate for more light and fresh air, I exited the unlit building. No one spoke in the van as we drove out of the city. Soon, frail bamboo houses were spotted along the unpaved road. The farm animals on the roadside looked skinnier as we went further north.
We stopped at the entrance of a non-descript field and stepped out of the car. Several naked children came to surround us, cheerfully extending their hands begging. Their stomachs were bulging from malnourishment, but they were full of life.
“It took twenty-some years to get the population back to the pre-genocide level of eight million,” Glen said. “Two million died from torture and starvation.” He guided us toward the field.
The first thing that came into sight was a glass tower packed with human skulls. Under the hundreds of skulls, piled up twenty feet high, were layers of fabric with bloodstains. Someone left a wooden plaque with a prayer for world peace written in Japanese and a large flower bouquet at the base of the glass tower.
I stood there with my eyes closed for a moment before I went to join my colleagues. They were standing in the grassy yard, looking down a hole, a few feet deep and about eight feet across, covered by summer weeds. There was nothing extraordinary about it at first. As I looked around, the hole appeared to be one of many. Then I heard a faint groan from a colleague nearby and noticed that pieces of blood-stained fabric were peeking out of the ground next to my feet and all over the yard. It was the mass grave that I was standing on. It was for the victims who were blindfolded, shot, and buried by the Khmer Rouge soldiers. Frozen in place, I gazed at the bloodstained graves spreading like dark ocean waves.
My colleagues walked ahead of me. I caught up with an education specialist. “Ellen, what do we do to prevent this?”
“Early education,” she said flatly. “We’ve got to teach children about non-violence, democracy, and citizenship early on. That’s the only way. And that’s why we are here.”
I agreed, admiring her conviction, but I wondered if that would be enough, if it would take something more intensely affectionate, intimate, and spiritual, like nursing a baby or non-stop prayer.
Two days later, the meeting ended and I caught the last flight back to Bangkok. In the small plane leaving Phnom Penh, I sat next to a young white American who looked in his mid-twenties. He said he had flown from Portland, Oregon, to marry a Cambodian woman he’d never met until their wedding was held that weekend. He was now returning to the United States without her, as she had to wait for her immigration papers to be processed before she could enter the United States.
“How did you meet her?” I was curious.
“Through my friend who works at Nike with me. He’s from Cambodia and told me about his family’s friends, who are now my new in-laws. This girl was the youngest and the prettiest. We exchanged letters and photos for four months. I finally proposed to her and she said yes!”
“You never saw her until the day of your wedding?”
“That’s right. But it feels like I’ve known her all my life. It’s like I found my soul mate, you know what I mean?”
Soul mate? I wondered if the Cambodian girl would say the same thing in Khmer. She might have wanted to leave her country and get a green card. “What was your wedding like?”
“It was fantastic. The women put on colorful clothes and spent hours dressing my bride while I waited in a separate room. They made so much food.” He beamed.
“How did you communicate with them? Do you speak Khmer?”
“No. And they don’t speak English.” He shook his head, smiling, almost proudly. “My Cambodian friend, the co-worker I told you about, came with me and translated for us the whole time.”
“Does your wife speak English?”
“She understands a little. We wrote letters to each other, you know. But I’ll sign her up for an English class in Portland. She’ll learn in no time.”
His innocence was absolute, plowing through my skepticism. “You must really love her.”
“Oh, yes. I can’t wait to see her and start our new life in America!” The plane shifted its angle in preparation for departure, and his childlike face turned brilliant orange as the sun cast its last light on us.
Yuko Iida Frost is a first-generation immigrant from Japan and a retired teacher of math and science. Her memoir excerpts and essays have appeared in several literary magazines such as: Apple Valley Review, which awarded her with the 2022 Editor’s Prize and nominated her piece for Pushcart, 34th Parallel, Hippocampus Magazine, LIT Magazine, and Arcturus (Chicago Book of Review). One more piece has been accepted by Cimarron Review and is scheduled to appear sometime soon. Yuko’s scholarly essay on Japan’s non-profit sector appeared in The Brookings Review. Her Yale thesis on the American NGO sector was published in the Institute for Southeast Asian Studies in Singapore. She has a BA in Government from Smith College and an MBA from Yale. Yuko is currently pursuing an MFA in Nonfiction at Bennington College. She is also an award-winning pastel artist. She lives with her husband in northern Virginia.
