Expressions of Cambodia: THe Politics of Tradition, Identity and Change (Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia)

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Expressions of Cambodia

Little more than a decade ago, Cambodia witnessed a series of rapid transitions, from civil war to peace, from a socialist-style authoritarianism to multi-party democracy, and from geographic isolation to a free-market economy. Requiring the United Nations to undertake its biggest ever peacetime operation, the elections of 1993 triggered an inﬂux of foreign aid unparalleled in Southeast Asia. Intense international interest since then has been accompanied by a re-emerging ﬁeld of scholarship that has principally sought explanations for genocide and war, or attempted to map more recent economic and political developments. The social and cultural implications of a society that has undergone such profound change has received little scholarly examination until now. Drawing upon multidisciplinary theoretical perspectives and up-to-date empirical research, Expressions of Cambodia reveals the tensions and contradictions involved in post-conﬂict nation building and socio-cultural recovery. Together a team of international contributors take scholarship on the country in new directions, focusing on the politics of tradition and modernity, tourism, the performance of identity, post-conﬂict nation building, and the on-going renewal of ties between diaspora and home. Timely and much needed, the book brings Cambodia back into dialogue with its neighbors and as such, makes a valuable contribution to the growing ﬁeld of cultural studies in Asia. Written in an accessible style, Expressions of Cambodia will be of particular interest to those working in the ﬁelds of Asian studies, tourism, diaspora, and postcolonial and cultural studies. Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier is a writer and lives in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Tim Winter worked on this book as part of his Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Asia Research Institute, Singapore. He is now based at the University of Sydney.

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Routledge Contemporary Southeast Asia Series

1 Land Tenure, Conservation and Development in Southeast Asia Peter Eaton 2 The Politics of Indonesia– Malaysia Relations One kin, two nations Joseph Chinyong Liow 3 Governance and Civil Society in Myanmar Education, health and environment Helen James 4 Regionalism in Post-Suharto Indonesia Edited by Maribeth Erb, Priyambudi Sulistiyanto and Carole Faucher 5 Living with Transition in Laos Market integration in Southeast Asia Jonathan Rigg 6 Christianity, Islam and Nationalism in Indonesia Charles E. Farhadian

7 Violent Conﬂicts in Indonesia Analysis, representation, resolution Edited by Charles A. Coppel 8 Revolution, Reform and Regionalism in Southeast Asia Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam Ronald Bruce St John 9 The Politics of Tyranny in Singapore and Burma Aristotle and the rhetoric of benevolent despotism Stephen McCarthy 10 Ageing in Singapore Service needs and the state Peggy Teo, Kalyani Mehta, Leng Leng Thang and Angelique Chan 11 Security and Sustainable Development in Myanmar Helen James 12 Expressions of Cambodia The politics of tradition, identity, and change Edited by Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier and Tim Winter

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Expressions of Cambodia The politics of tradition, identity, and change

Edited by Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier and Tim Winter

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First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2006 Editorial selection, © Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier and Tim Winter, © the contributors This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Expressions of Cambodia: the politics of tradition, identity, and change/edited by Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier and Tim Winter. p. cm. – (Routledge contemporary Southeast Asia series; 12) Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Cambodia – Politics and government – 1979– 2. Cambodia – Civilization. 3. Cambodia – Social conditions. 4. Cambodia – Economic conditions. 5. Social change – Cambodia. I. Ollier, Leakthina Chau-Pech, 1965– II. Winter, Tim, 1971– III. Title. IV. Series. DS554.8.E87 2006 959.6–dc22 2006010009 ISBN10: 0–415–38554–7 (hbk) ISBN10: 0–203–96689–1 (ebk) ISBN13: 978–0–415–38554–1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978–0–203–96689–1 (ebk)

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To Ingrid Muan, whose voice is sadly missed . . .

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Contents

List of ﬁgures Notes on contributors Acknowledgments Abbreviations 1

Introduction: Cambodia and the politics of tradition, identity, and change

ix x xiii xv

1

TIM WINTER AND LEAKTHINA CHAU-PECH OLLIER

PART ONE

Re-scripting Angkor 2

Subscripts: reading Cambodian pasts, presents, and futures through grafﬁti

21 23

PENNY EDWARDS

3

When ancient glory meets modern tragedy: Angkor and the Khmer Rouge in contemporary tourism

37

TIM WINTER

4

The fascination for Angkor Wat and the ideology of the visible

54

PANIVONG NORINDR

PART TWO

Identity and the liminal space 5

Sitting between two chairs: Cambodia’s dual citizenship debate KATHRYN POETHIG

71 73

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6 Refractions of home: exile, memory, and diasporic longing

86

KHATHARYA UM

7 Rapping (in) the homeland: of gangs, Angka, and the Cambodian diasporic identity

101

LEAKTHINA CHAU-PECH OLLIER

PART THREE

Performing tradition 8 Weaving into Cambodia: negotiated ethnicity in the (post)colonial silk industry

117 119

HEIDI DAHLES AND JOHN TER HORST

9 A burned-out theater: the state of Cambodia’s performing arts

133

ROBERT TURNBULL

10 The (re-)emergence of Cambodian women writers at home and abroad

150

KLAIRUNG AMRATISHA

PART FOUR

Engaging modernity

165

11 Entrepreneurialism and charisma: two modes of doing business in post-Pol Pot Cambodian Buddhism

167

IAN HARRIS

12 Touring memories of the Khmer Rouge

181

TIMOTHY DYLAN WOOD

13 Khmer women and global factories

193

ANNUSKA DERKS

Bibliography Index

205 223

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Figures

2.1 2.2 2.3 3.1 3.2 9.1 9.2

Burmese inscription at Angkor Wat Khmer Rouge grafﬁti at Angkor Wat Leaf inscriptions at the Royal Palace, Phnom Penh Postcard available in Phnom Penh T-shirts on sale in Phnom Penh market The Suramarit Theater in the late 1960s The Suramarit Theater in 2003

29 31 33 45 46 137 138

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Notes on contributors

Klairung Amratisha received a doctorate in Cambodian literature from the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She is currently teaching Cambodian language and literature and Thai literature at the Faculty of Arts, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. Heidi Dahles is professor of organizational anthropology at the Department of Culture, Organization and Management of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She obtained her PhD in social sciences at Radboud University Nijmegen in 1990. She is the author of Tourism, Heritage and National Culture in Java: Dilemmas of a Local Community (2001) and the editor (with Otto van den Muijzenberg) of Brokers of Capital and Knowledge. Changing Power Relations in Asia (2003). Her research interest is in organizational networks and processes of identity formation in transnational spaces in East and Southeast Asia. Annuska Derks is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Berne, Switzerland. She completed her PhD thesis, entitled “Khmer Women on the Move: Migration and Urban Experiences in Cambodia” (2005), at the Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She has conducted research and published on ethnic groups, gender, migration, trafﬁcking and sex work in Cambodia, and is currently undertaking research into contemporary forms of “bonded labor” in Southeast Asia. Penny Edwards is currently afﬁliated with the Center for Khmer Studies, Phnom Penh. Her main research interests are nationalism, identity, and heritage in colonial and postcolonial Cambodia and Burma. Her publications include Cambodge: The Cultivation of a Nation (2006), and two edited volumes on Chinese diaspora in Australia and Southeast Asia. Ian Harris was educated at the Universities of Cambridge and Lancaster. He was Senior Scholar at the Becket Institute, St. Hugh’s College, University of Oxford (2001–05) and is currently Professor of Buddhist Studies in the Division of Religion and Philosophy, University College of St Martin, Lancaster. The author of The Continuity of Madhyamaka

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and Yogacara in Early Indian Mahayana Buddhism (1991) and editor of Buddhism and Politics in Twentieth Century Asia (1999), he is also co-founder of the UK Association for Buddhist Studies. Responsible for a research project on Buddhism and Cambodian Communism at the Documentation Center of Cambodia (DC-Cam), Phnom Penh, his most recent book is Cambodian Buddhism: History and Practice (2005). John ter Horst is a PhD candidate at the faculty of Culture Organization and Management at the Free University of Amsterdam. Working on a research project entitled “Khmer Diaspora Ties and Processes of Ethnicization in Cross-Border Silk Trade in the Greater Mekong Region,” his main themes of interest are identity politics, minority groups, the production of culture, and how people organize their livelihoods in relation to an often problematic past. He has conducted ﬁeldwork in Holland, the Philippines, and more recently in Cambodia. Panivong Norindr received his doctorate in Romance Languages and Literatures from Princeton University, New Jersey. He is the author of Phantasmatic Indochina: French Colonial Ideology in Architecture, Film, and Literature (1996), and is currently completing a book entitled (Post)Colonial Screens. He teaches French and Comparative Literature at the University of Southern California, and begins his tenure as Chair of the Department of French and Italian in late 2006. Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier received her PhD in French literature from the University of California, Los Angeles. Her research has focused on twentieth-century postcolonial literature, Asian women writers of the diaspora, particularly from Southeast Asia, and cultural studies. She is the co-editor of a volume entitled Of Vietnam: Identities in Dialogue (2001) and now lives in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Kathryn Poethig is Assistant Professor of Global Studies at California State University, Monterey Bay. Her main areas of research are transnational religion, citizenship, and conﬂict in Southeast Asia, particularly Cambodia and the Philippines. In Cambodia, she has published on the citizenship debates during Cambodia’s transition to democracy in relation to diaspora Cambodians returning in the early 1990s. She has consulted for the World Bank and published widely on the development of Cambodia’s peace regime, primarily focusing on the Dhammayietra, a Buddhist peace walk, most recently in history, Buddhism, and new religious movements in Cambodia. She is currently investigating women’s inter-religious alliances for peace in the Philippines. Robert Turnbull studied at Goldsmiths College, University of London, and San Francisco Conservatory of Music. He arrived in Cambodia shortly after the military coup of July 1997, since then he has contributed articles on Asian culture, and Cambodia in particular, to the New York Times,

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Notes on contributors the Financial Times, the International Herald Tribune and TIME. He also writes on Western classical music and opera, publishing The Opera Gazetteer in 1995.

Khatharya Um is a political scientist and professor of Asian American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She received her PhD in Political Science from the University of California, Berkeley, and was the Chancellor’s Distinguished Post-Doctoral Fellow at Berkeley (1990–2). She is the ﬁrst Cambodian American woman to join the ladder-ranked faculty of the University of California. Professor Um’s research and teaching interests include foreign policy, international security, and international migration, with a special emphasis on refugee and diaspora studies, and Asian American histories, contemporary issues, and politics. She has written and published extensively on politics and developments in Southeast Asia, on conﬂict and post-conﬂict development, and on Southeast Asian diaspora. Professor Um has received many awards for her leadership and advocacy work. Tim Winter received his PhD from the University of Manchester. Having published a number of articles and chapters on tourism in Cambodia, he is in the ﬁnal stages of preparing a book on Angkor that examines a decade of heritage and tourism within a framework of globalization, postconﬂict reconstruction, and postcolonial relations. After two years spent as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Asia Research Institute in Singapore, he is now based at the University of Sydney. Tim Winter’s current research projects and publications focus on tourism “Of Asian Origin.” Timothy Dylan Wood is a PhD candidate in Anthropology at Rice University in Houston, Texas. His dissertation research is on Cambodian efforts at historical representation dealing speciﬁcally with the Khmer Rouge period. His ﬁrst visit to Cambodia was in 1998, and he has maintained a long-term residence in the country. He has conducted extensive research on the historical-tourist area of Anlong Veng as well as Cambodian history, culture, and politics in general. His other research interests include continental philosophy, with a particular focus on contemporary critical theorists such as Jean Baudrillard and Gilles Deleuze.

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Acknowledgments

First and foremost, we wish to extend our heartfelt thanks to our contributors for agreeing to add their voices to ours, for their enthusiastic support of the volume since its inception, and for their thought-provoking work. Though we are scattered across three different continents, Cambodia brought us together within the space of this project and elsewhere when our paths happened to have crossed. Ingrid Muan was one of the ﬁrst scholars to whom we brought this book project. Her knowledge of and dedication to Cambodia, its people, culture, and language, was an inspiration to both of us. Her generosity in sharing her knowledge and insights, providing direction, names, contacts and critiques, helped us shape this book, and her voice, even after she was gone, continued to resonate in our heads and kept us on our toes. Her untimely death on January 29, 2005 was a big loss for Cambodian Studies and for the whole community of scholars, students, researchers and artists in Cambodia. To Ingrid we dedicate this book. David Chandler and Penny Edwards have taken time from their busy schedules to read drafts of the introduction, posed the important questions, provided guidance and insightful comments. Michel Rethy Antelme has generously and patiently lent his expertise to help us with many linguistic difﬁculties. Many individuals have contributed to enhance our understanding of Cambodia. Among them we wish to acknowledge Fabienne Luco, John Shapiro, Boreth Ly and Toni Shapiro-Phim for many enlightening conversations, and Sophiline Cheam-Shapiro and Sopheap Pich for being amazing sources of inspiration. We are very much indebted to them. Extra special thanks are owed to Laavanya Kathiravelu, for her dedication to the project. Generously giving over her weekends during our moments of panic, her editorial efforts ensured the book was delivered on time and free of all our errors and inconsistencies. Now an expert on Cambodia, we wish her all the best with her PhD studies. We also wish to thank Stephanie Rogers, our editor, for her belief in this project and the whole editorial team at Routledge for their invaluable support. Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier would like to acknowledge the support of the Henry Luce Foundation for a fellowship at the Center for Khmer

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Studies in Siem Reap and the Asia Research Institute, Singapore for a visiting afﬁliate. Tim Winter would like to thank the British Academy for his postdoctoral funding. He would also like to acknowledge the support of the Asia Research Institute, Singapore for the opportunity to work on this book over the course of a two-year fellowship. We also wish to thank the wonderful and supportive staff from the Center for Khmer Studies, Siem Reap and the Asia Research Institute, Singapore. As always, no work would ever be possible without the love and friendship of those closest to us. They have lent us their shoulders, their ears, and their eyes to read multiple versions of several articles and even the entire manuscript: Jerry Gorman, Winnie Wong, Amanda Summerscales, Fabienne Luco, Toby Anderson, Jacob Ramsay, and Christiane Lalonde, thank you!

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Abbreviations

ABCP AEKE AKW APSARA BFD CLA CMAC CPP CPR DC-Cam DK EFEO FUNCINPEC GDP GTZ IKTT IMF KAA KAF KI MOT NGO NPRD PDR PPP PRC PRK RUFA RUPP SOC

Asian Buddhists’ Conference for Peace Association des Ecrivains Khmers à l’Etranger Association of Khmer Writers Authority for Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap Buddhism for Development Cambodian Living Arts Cambodian Mine Action Center Cambodian People’s Party Center for Peace and Reconciliation Documentation Center of Cambodia Democratic Kampuchea Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendant, Neutre, Paciﬁque, et Coopératif Gross Domestic Product Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit Institute for Khmer Traditional Textiles International Monetary Fund Khmer Arts Academy Konrad Adenauer Foundation Khmer Intelligence [www.khmerintelligence.org] Ministry of Tourism non-governmental organization National Program to Rehabilitate and Develop Cambodia Lao People’s Democratic Republic Phnom Penh Post People’s Republic of China People’s Republic of Kampuchea Royal University of Fine Arts Royal University of Phnom Penh State of Cambodia

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UN UNDP UNESCO UNTAC

United Nations United Nations Development Programme United Nations Educational, Scientiﬁc and Cultural Organization United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia

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1

Introduction Cambodia and the politics of tradition, identity, and change Tim Winter and Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier

“What” do we want? We want peace, independence, freedom, and democracy. We want to preserve our culture. We want development, self-sufﬁciency, good life, and a bright future for ourselves, particularly for our children, to enjoy the same peace, independence, freedom, democracy, and well-being that are cherished by citizens of the developed world. Sam-Ang Sam It is true that our arts and classical dance are part of the grandeur of Kampuchea . . . but if noble Japan and other wealthy powers, friends of the Cambodian people, would like to help our people, of whom 90 percent are poverty stricken peasants, dramatically short of rice to feed themselves, these friends from wealthy countries could give absolute priority to the rehabilitation of our agriculture. Norodom Sihanouk [Khmer] architecture, at its peak, left us temples, in particular Angkor Wat, and because of our ancestors’ ingenuity, it serves as a symbol of everlasting Khmer art. The saying goes: “The Khmer will never perish because they built Angkor Wat, and Angkor Wat is their soul.” The Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts and other institutions relative to the conservation and protection of works of art have to use these marvels as resources of our tourism industry. Norodom Ranariddh1

Cambodia stands encapsulated within two dominant, and somewhat contradictory, narratives. On the one hand, it is commonly suggested that an era of civil war and genocide inﬂicted irrevocable damage and that Pol Pot’s attempt to return to “year zero” annihilated, even erased, the country’s culture, whereas for others, Cambodian culture is being successfully restored, rejuvenated and, perhaps, even enjoying a renaissance. For those with an unshakeable investment in Cambodian culture, such as our three speakers above, the coexistence of these two narratives has paired feelings of hope with despair, optimism with anguish.

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Tim Winter and Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier

Taken from the ﬁrst International Conference on Khmer Studies held at the Royal University of Phnom Penh (RUPP) in 1996, these quotes offered some insights into the needs and wishes of the Cambodian people, and highlighted pressing issues confronting a nation still recovering from years of civil war and the devastating regime of the Khmer Rouge. As with other post-conﬂict, developing countries, economic progress was high on the agenda, but equally important for some was the rehabilitation of a national identity and culture based on the ideals of “peace, independence [and] freedom.” Held three years after the ﬁrst internationally validated multi-party election in Cambodian history, the conference rightly captured all the hope, concern, and differences in opinion in terms of the priorities to be set inherent in a nascent “democracy.” However, after spending in excess of two billion dollars on the 1993 elections, an unprecedented amount for a peacetime operation, the United Nations (UN) would see their efforts at establishing a compromise dual government unravel in 1997 with Hun Sen of the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) staging a coup de force to oust his co-prime minister, Norodom Ranariddh of the Royalist FUNCINPEC Party (Front Uni National pour un Cambodge Indépendant, Neutre, Paciﬁque, et Coopératif). Hun Sen’s seizure of control over the military forces, police, and civil administration signaled Cambodia’s return to a more familiar model of “Strongman” authoritarian politics.2 And yet Cambodia had changed. After decades of turmoil and isolation the country opened itself to the world as never before. As the above quotes illustrate, despite posing an array of challenges and threats, globalization and international capitalism were seen as important catalysts for a program of national reconstruction. Like many others, Cambodians wish for “the same peace, independence, freedom, democracy, and well-being that [they believe] are cherished by citizens of the developed world” (Sam 1998). And why shouldn’t they? Not surprisingly, and as we shall see throughout this book, a fragile optimism for the future would seek strength by gazing back towards more prosperous pasts, whether it be the cultural glories associated with long-lost imperial power or the deeply felt nostalgia for the “way life used to be” in the years before the 1970s, before the war and the destruction wrought by the Khmer Rouge. Published a decade after the RUPP conference, this book revisits and builds on many of its themes. In examining contemporary Cambodia— beginning in the earlier 1990s with “the UNTAC (United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia) period” as the Cambodians themselves refer to it—the book departs from the idea that Cambodian culture is “a rooted body that grows, lives [and] dies” but rather views it in terms of “sites of displacement, interference, and interaction” (Clifford 1997: 25). In so doing, we address the tensions and contradictions stemming from the exigencies of progress, economic development, politics, and the preservation of a national identity and culture to reveal how “tradition is about change,” which, as Sarup reminds us, all too often passes unacknowledged (1996: 5).

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3

The twelve essays gathered in Expressions of Cambodia: the politics of tradition, identity, and change offer an examination of contemporary Cambodian culture at home and abroad from a theoretical and multidisciplinary perspective by established and young scholars from Cambodia, Southeast Asia, Europe and the United States. Divided into four thematic sections, the essays represent the ﬁrst sustained exploration of the relationship between cultural productions and practices, the changing urban landscape, and the construction of identity and nation building while addressing the politics of development and conservation, tradition and modernity within the global economy and transmigratory movements of the twenty-ﬁrst century. In so doing, the volume responds to Clammer’s call for an analysis of contemporary Asian societies that “move[s] the study of culture from the periphery, and its position as explanation-of-last-resort back to its rightful place in the centre of social analysis . . . in a way that places social change in a sounder relationship to cultural developments” (2002: 26). The essays contained here adopt a broad range of analytical vantage points—including postcolonial theory, tourism/heritage studies and gender studies among others—to look closely at various forms of socio-cultural ﬂux—discursive, artistic, performative, and quotidian—which continuously weave in and out of the historical and political discourses to make up the fabric of society. Expressions of Cambodia sets out to illuminate the ways in which Cambodian society continues to invent itself, deﬁnes and redeﬁnes its identities, extends itself inward and outward, navigates between past, present, future and back, gestures toward a beyond, a becoming, and negates closure.

Strolling through the Cultural Village As with many publications, the inspiration for this project came from a somewhat unlikely source. On the ﬁnal evening of a conference ambitiously titled “New Trends in Khmer Studies,” held at the Center for Khmer Studies in Siem Reap in early 2004, the dinner conversation turned to the Cambodian Cultural Village, a new tourist attraction that had recently opened in the town. For those who had paid the ten-dollar entrance fee, the Village delivered a “unique” and “fascinating” experience, but one that seemed best captured by the terms “Disneyesque,” “surreal,” and “tacky.” With a number of effervescent and vivid descriptions in hand, we decided that a visit the following afternoon would provide the ideal antidote to two long days of academic papers. Nestled in between a sprawl of luxury hotels along the short stretch of road that connects the town with its airport, the Cambodian Cultural Village is instantly recognizable. A watch tower, four-storey-tall artiﬁcial mountains, and an even taller water wheel clearly signal its purpose as a theme park. For those who cannot afford the time or the money to visit other parts of the country, the Cultural Village offers its visitors the luxury to

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Tim Winter and Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier

travel in time and space to discover the history and the cultures of Cambodia in just a few hours and with all the comfort a modern and immaculately clean theme park can provide. Its purpose is to “edutain.” Its imperative is the “staging of a nation” (Edensor 2002: 85). Showcasing reproductions of several ethnic “villages” in Cambodia—among them, the Cham village, the Chinese Village, the Phnong Village, just to name a few—it also includes a traditional Cambodian “millionaire house” and a “Khmer Association Overseas” village comprising a “typical” Californian house with a church next door. Miniature replicas of major historical buildings and structures feature, among others, such landmarks as the Royal Palace, the National Museum, and the Central Market in Phnom Penh, the former capital of Cambodia Ou Dong, and the reclining Buddha from Mount Kulen in the province of Siem Reap. Performances ranging from “traditional Khmer wedding ceremonies” to the folkloric coconut shell dance or a variety of “ball and water” team games, in which visitors are encouraged to participate, entertain with their mixture of the ceremonial and the burlesque. The wax museum brings guests on a walk through Cambodian history with ﬁgures of important Cambodian personalities, kings and queens, ministers, and Buddhist patriarchs mixed together with mythical and symbolic ﬁgures such as the apsara dancer, Princess Liu-Yeh, an important character in one of the versions of the country’s myth of origin, a “movie star of the 1960s,” and a “happiness family” (sic) represented by a father, a mother, and their three children in their modern living room; and, lastly, as one is about to leave the museum, a ﬁgure of an “UNTAC election ofﬁcer” shown exiting a bar in an amorous embrace with a “taxi girl” provides a surprising end to the tour. When asked if they have had complaints from the UN, an English-speaking guide responded that they did, but he justiﬁed it thus: “we don’t see this as bad. We want to show that UNTAC came here to bring peace, bring elections, worked hard through the day, and then enjoyed themselves at night. We wanted to show their enjoyment.”3 While it does not strive to be anything other than a theme park for family entertainment, the Cultural Village in fact provides a progressive and inclusive representation of Cambodian culture, one that is plural, transnational, popular, and forward-looking. Its commemorative approach to history, albeit selective, is free-ﬂowing and seamless. In the words of Gillis (1994: 6), the Village’s narratives on popular memory “dance and leap” through time in a joyous celebration of Cambodian history and cultural achievements, free of the angst often felt in other discursive realms, namely the loss of culture and identity, and the distinction between myth and reality. It makes no effort to single out the glory of the Khmer Empire or the temples of Angkor, placing such histories alongside other events and achievements created along a continuum of history that speaks little of “tragedy” or “burden” (Chandler 1993b, 1998). And yet, while entire Cambodian families travel to the Village from around the country, it

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remains snubbed by the intellectual elite and most Western visitors who decry it as a “disneyﬁed” caricature of the country. Sitting down over a drink afterwards, it seemed easy to criticize the Cultural Village for its superﬁciality, its lack of “authenticity,” or its apparent irreverence. But to judge or dismiss it merely because it challenged, perhaps even offended, our mental and aesthetic maps of what Cambodia is, or should be, would be a denial of its validity and its integrity as part of contemporary Cambodian society. It was clear that the Cultural Village posed a series of important questions that warranted greater attention: questions that, we concluded, should be essential points of focus for a scholarly enterprise attempting to understand the New Trends in Cambodian society. Scanning the shelves of any academic library’s collection of books written in English on Cambodia reveals two dominant, and antithetical, focal points of interest: the ancient glories of Angkorean splendor and the horrors of the modern Khmer Rouge regime.4 A reading of Edwards’ (2006) account of an emergent Cambodge under a French protectorate offers some insight into why countless pages have been dedicated to Angkor over the course of the twentieth century. Her analysis depicts Angkor’s pivotal role in fashioning visions of a “noble Khmer” and an emergent Cambodian nationalism. Through their transformation of Angkor’s monuments into a socio-political totem of an ethnically and culturally unifying historiography, scholars from the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO), such as George Coedès and Henri Marchal, would foreground stone as the key for unlocking the secrets of the past.5 By the time a localized independence movement began to ﬂourish in the 1930s, Angkor had already solidiﬁed as the idealized apogee of a largely monolithic, mono-cultural nationalism. As Panivong Norindr illustrates in his chapter here, the fascination for Angkor back in the Métropole would also accelerate its path towards global fame. Together, these accounts form part of a growing interest in this era of colonialism spanning from 1863 to 1954. In recent years, authors such as Cooper (2001), Muller (2006), Norindr (1996), Robson and Yee (2005), Tully (2002), and Wright (1991) have all pursued a critical postcolonial studies perspective to examine the relationship between politics and culture across Indochina in this period within a variety of contexts, including cinema, literature, grand expositions, art, education, and urban planning. In detailing such themes these authors have added further texture to the now seminal and wide-ranging works on Cambodian history written by Chandler (1991, 1996a, 1996b) and Vickery (1998). Books by Harris (2005a) and Marston and Guthrie (2004) on religion, Stewart and May (2004) on literature, Ayres (2003) on education, Jacobsen (2006) and Lilja (2006) on gender, and Phim and Thompson (1999) on dance, as well as a number of publications produced by the Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture in Phnom Penh,6 have also enabled a more holistic understanding of Cambodia’s social and vernacular past to emerge.

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Given the country’s recent turmoil, it is little surprise to ﬁnd that the majority of scholarship focusing on the decades after independence has been dedicated to an episode lasting a few short, but devastating, years. Understandably, numerous scholars have attempted to comprehend the complex reasons, factors, and motives that caused a small political elite to turn a country in upon itself and pursue one of the most brutal social experiments ever inﬂicted upon a nation and its population (e.g. Chandler 1993a, 2000; Kiernan 2004; Kissi 2003; Ponchaud 1978; Short 2004; Vickery 1999). The broader geo-political dynamics that invariably shape university-based and journalistic research also meant Cambodia received considerable interest from commentators based in the US, Australia, France, and the UK attempting to ascertain and disentangle complicities for a region that became the coalface of a cold war conﬂict (e.g. Evans and Rowley 1990; Grant et al. 1971; Haas 1991; Shawcross 1993). Party politics, along with macro-economic and political transitions, have also been recurring themes within studies examining Cambodia’s recovery from the 1980s onwards. Authors such as Brown and Timberman (1998), Curtis (1998), Gottesman (2003), Hughes, C. (2003), Ledgerwood (2002), Ong (2003), Peou (2000), and Roberts (2001), to name just a few, have all attempted to document a series of transitions: from civil war to peace; from a socialist-style authoritarianism to multi-party democracy; from geographic isolation to a free-market economy; and from refugees to diaspora. Signiﬁcantly less attention, however, has been paid to the sociocultural transformations that have accompanied these transitions. One early and notable attempt is the 1994 volume by Ebihara et al. entitled Cambodian Culture since 1975: homeland and exile. While the contributions by Ayres, Harris, Lilja, Marston and Guthrie, and Stewart and May highlighted above have valuably updated many of the themes explored by Ebihara et al., we believe the rapid and profound changes that have occurred since the early 1990s demand further analysis and new viewpoints of reﬂection. Accordingly, Expressions of Cambodia sets out with a number of goals. The ﬁrst is to open up new spaces of analysis, identify fresh topics of study, and offer rich theoretical perspectives that treat phenomena such as the Cambodian Cultural Village as important and worthy points of enquiry. Accordingly, we began this volume by asking what expressions the Village makes about relationships between tradition and modernity, diaspora and home, memory and identity, and the citizen and the state. Concerned that existing accounts on Cambodian economic, political and social relations too often presume objectivity and a stability of meaning, the book pursues Reynolds’s (2006) call for a cultural studies perspective that opens up, questions, and destabilizes these links. Familiar topics such as Angkor and the Khmer Rouge are thus re-examined from new perspectives, ones that challenge the distinction between history and historiography in order to explore their interplay in the contemporary moment.

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The second goal is to bring together under a single thematic umbrella some of the latest, most up-to-date, research from scholars working on the country. While recognizing Spivak’s (Harasym 1990) or Trinh T. Minhha’s (1989) assertions that any representation claiming to speak about a subject, simultaneously, and inevitably, risks speaking for that subject, our more modest aim here has been to bring together a series of voices that offer certain insights into, and problematize, contemporary Cambodia. The twelve chapters that follow are not intended to be deﬁnitive. Instead, they are presented as openings and, it is hoped, as signposts for further enquiry. Finally, the book aims to bring Cambodia back into dialogue with its neighbors and, in so doing, contribute to the growing ﬁeld of Asian cultural studies. Expressions of Cambodia parallels a number of other recent works on Southeast Asia, including: Skidmore (2005) on Burma; Reynolds (2006), Tanabe and Keyes (2002), and Van Esterik (2000) on Thailand; Pholsena (2006) and Rigg (2005) on Laos; Kahn (1998) on Malaysia and Singapore; Zurbuchen (2005) on Indonesia; and Tai (2001) and Winston and Ollier (2001) on Vietnam. It also ﬁlls an important void in Southeast Asia studies by addressing many of the issues examined in a number of thematically constructed volumes that examine the region as a whole but, for various reasons, consistently ignore Cambodia (see, for example, Shigetomi 2002; Wang 2005; Wee 2002; Yao 2001). The remaining sections of this introduction identify the key themes of the book and provide the reader with an overview of each chapter.

A traditional modernity? A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is ﬁxedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one perceives the angel of history. His face is towards the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress. 7 Taken from Walter Benjamin’s musings on the rise of a European modernity, this 1940 description of Paul Klee’s painting Angel of History strikingly captures the dynamics of early 1990s Cambodia. The storm of progress, a rush towards modernity, would ﬁnd its energy and its momentum by staring back at the country’s past, a past that would be contemplated for both its wreckage and its immutable grandeur. As the decade began, profound and

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rapid changes were desperately required. The country needed to move “from a centrally planned economic system to a market oriented one . . . from a war economy to a peace economy, and from a poor and under-developed economy to a more prosperous and developed one” (Tith 1998: 102). With 85 percent of the population living in rural communities, agriculture accounted for more than 50 percent of the country’s GDP (Quintyn and Zamaróczy 1998). Export manufacturing industries were virtually nonexistent and the limited economic growth at that time was principally fuelled by the UN’s effects on the service and construction industries, the vast majority of which centered on Phnom Penh (Ledgerwood 1998; Shawcross 1994). Nonetheless, the prospect of macro-economic stability—something Cambodia had been denied for over two and a half decades—provided the country with the opportunity to make far-reaching, and desperately needed, reforms in “the context of one of the lowest levels of per capita income in the world” (Ministry of Planning 2003: 5). After nearly two decades of isolation, the future was about regional reintegration and embracing the multitude of cultural and economic ﬂows that process would bring. Accordingly, the country would liberalize its markets and politically realign itself towards a Western international donor audience (Hughes, C. 2003). In lieu of an effective state, a broader civil society was installed, comprised of bilateral donors, multilateral banks, and numerous non-governmental organizations (NGOs). In addition to the 2.2 billion US dollars provided by the international community for the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), a further 2.3 billion US dollars was pledged for the period of 1992–95 alone.8 No fewer than 40,000 personnel would descend on the country to ensure the elections passed off in a peaceful and transparent manner. In a few short months, satellite dishes, Toyota Landcruisers, and advertisements for imported electronic goods would appear in Phnom Penh. International standard hotels would open, offering Australian wines, steaks, and French cheeses. The opening up of the country would also foster a new form of migration: A number of those who had ﬂed the country in the early 1970s returned to resurrect political or business interests. While this inﬂux of foreign aid would cause the value of real estate in the capital to rocket, hospitals, universities, schools, airports, water, and power supplies across the country all desperately needed reconstructing, a task made considerably worse by the isolation from Phnom Penh of many provinces. One of the most pernicious legacies of the conﬂict, both in terms of its cost to lives and its effects on agricultural production, was the silent threat posed by millions upon millions of landmines. In December 1993, only 19,000 of an estimated 10 million mines scattered across the countryside had been cleared (Shawcross 1994: 80).9 A year after the 1993 UNTAC elections, the ﬁrst full-scale national modernization program was launched. The National Program to Rehabilitate and Develop Cambodia (NPRD) outlined six speciﬁc aims, which together

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encompassed the areas of law, education, healthcare, economic stability, rural development, and the sustainable use of natural resources. The arrival of new equipment would allow schools, hospitals, and universities to reopen and modernize their facilities. The opening of commercial banks would also be an important step towards rebuilding trust in an economy characterized by rampant inﬂation and spiraling corruption. Major reforms came with the implementation of an International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank three-year structural adjustment program. Within this program, the garment industry was identiﬁed as one of the key vehicles for development. While this industry has received signiﬁcant attention from developmental economists since then, their accounts have presented a largely de-humanized, positivist picture. Crucially, they fail to interpret the “interplay between the world market and cultural identity, between local and global processes, between consumption and cultural strategies” (Friedman 1994: 103). The chapter by Annuska Derks here ﬁlls that void by focusing on one young woman named Srey,10 who leaves her village in the province to work in a Phnom Penh factory. Srey is presented as an example of women across the country who have to negotiate many conﬂicting positions and new life spaces. Part lured, part seduced by the modern life in the capital city, they attempt to simultaneously uphold the model of a dutiful daughter in their rural communities. Too easily portrayed by the media as victims of the global market, exploited and underpaid, Derks argues that this is indeed an oversimpliﬁcation, for these women have their own aspirations towards modernity of which they have already been given a taste back in their villages through other returning factory workers and television programs. Along with the other two chapters contained in the section “Engaging modernity,” her account offers us important insights into how particular social groups within Cambodia negotiate and interpret transitions between the rural and the urban, the traditional and the modern. Given the immense political and socioeconomic challenges facing the country, it was understandable that rehabilitation and development were deﬁned in such physical and structural terms. Within this paradigm, however, signiﬁcantly less attention was given to the more nebulous, and perhaps seemingly less urgent, need for the rehabilitation of the country’s cultural and intellectual life. Beginning with Pol Pot’s brutal attempts to erase much of Cambodia’s past, recent decades had left a deep-seated anxiety over what actually constituted Cambodian culture or identity. Long associations between ethnicity, conﬂict, and aggressive nationalisms within the Southeast Asian region also meant the destruction inﬂicted upon the country’s cultural landscape would be politically infused as a number of chapters here reveal. Indeed, to understand these early moments of transition is to understand the circularity and continuity of history. When the country emerged from 90 years of French Protectorate rule and became a sovereign nation, the same tone of hope and uncertainties, the same desires and wishes for development and modernization to provide a better life for

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the people of Cambodia, could be felt. Under the leadership of King Norodom Sihanouk this deﬁning period in Cambodian history, known as the Sangkum Reastr Niyum (People’s Socialist Community), is one that the country’s elders recall with fondness and use, for better or worse, as a measuring stick by which to compare all ensuing regimes. A common theme to both eras has been the symbolic values ascribed to Angkor. Associated with ideas of ethnic superiority, historical power, and artistic prowess, Angkor has been a recurring presence on banknotes, ﬂags, postage stamps, and numerous post-independence buildings—cited as an unambiguous source of civic and social pride. With Cambodia situated at the heart of a highly connected region Angkor serves as a powerful resource for the state to assert difference at the national level. It represents an undeniable purity in the face of porous boundaries, cultural mobility, and ﬂux. As Muan (2001) also suggests, the temples would become the focal point of a 1990s post-conﬂict “Restoration Culture” led by international organizations such as the United Nations Educational, Scientiﬁc and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The chapter by Robert Turnbull here explores some of the wider implications of such cultural policies that have overwhelmingly focused on the restoration of architectural antiquities. Turnbull critically examines the current state of the country’s performance arts by situating them within decades of governmental and non-governmental policy making. In so doing, his paper reveals the local and external sociopolitical mechanisms that converge to deﬁne the parameters of what should be valued, and thus sponsored, within a national program of cultural revival. Within this same section—titled “Performing Tradition”—Heidi Dahles and John ter Horst offer us a number of analytic parallels through a study of the silk industry. Their account focuses on this industry to understand how networks of trade and localized forms of development arise around the concept of the “traditional,” a term that, as we shall see later in this introduction, they extensively problematize. Finally here, we have Ian Harris’s paper, which charts the revival of Cambodia’s Buddhist communities. His analysis centers on the complex interplay between two competing discourses: one that strives for a more “socially engaged, development-oriented” form of Buddhism; and the other, which seeks to maintain more “traditional” values. Harris argues that a number of traditionalists have been critical of “modernist practices that [are] incompatible with long-established currents of Cambodian spiritual praxis.” Seen together, these chapters illuminate some of the ways in which the tensions, contradictions, and negotiations expressed in Klee’s Angel of History are played out in a country such as Cambodia.

The expediency of culture In examining contemporary Cambodia this book departs from a realist epistemology that understands culture solely as a bounded sphere of rituals,

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rites, traditions, and symbols. As our title suggests, we see tradition, identity, and change as processes that are, implicitly or explicitly, bound up in social networks of power, political cultures, and an array of institutional relations. In this respect, some of the themes we have sought to explore in this collection draw inspiration from the ﬁeld of Latin American cultural studies, which, through the work of Yúdice, Canclini, Escobar and Alvarez among others, has examined how and why a multitude of social actors adopt culture as a resource to serve certain purposes or goals. Over the years these authors have brought notions of citizenship, civil society, development, the state, and globalization into the fold of cultural studies and, perhaps more importantly, foregrounded culture within debates over such issues for a variety of countries in the region. In justifying this approach, Yúdice argues that the embedding of culture within the economic and sociopolitical spheres of growth and development has set in motion a “particular performative force,” whereby the cultural has a “social imperative to perform” (2003: 12). A number of the chapters contained here pursue such analytical themes to reveal what is “being accomplished socially, politically and discursively” (Domínguez 1992: 21) through culture. As we have already seen, the 1990s was a time characterized by a series of major transformations. With scholarship on this period primarily focusing on key political transitions, few attempts have been made to interpret a near overnight shift from virtual isolation to networks of “cultural globalization” (Featherstone 1990). The arrival of billions of dollars of ﬁnancial assistance would transform this small, largely rural, nation into one of the world’s most aid-dependent countries of the late twentieth century. Far more than merely a monetary intervention, reconstruction would involve a process of “NGOization,” which, as Alvarez et al. (1998) and Canclini (2001) point out, draws upon culture as a resource for achieving its developmental goals. In other words, culture becomes subsumed within, and co-opted by, an industry oriented around the geo-political criteria of “economic progress” or “sustainability.” To see such a situation merely in terms of exploitation would, however, inadequately recognize the other part of an ongoing dynamic of expediency. Far from being passive victims of developmental economics, the country’s arbiters of culture would frequently embrace “foundationspeak” as a vital engine of cultural production (Yúdice 2003: 347). Harris’s chapter, for example, traces the rise of a Buddhist “entrepreneurialism” that seeks the support of either local politicians or foreign NGOs and foundations. He demonstrates how a complex network of relationships thriving on reciprocity and mutual beneﬁt provides monks with both political power and ﬁnancial gain, which some of them in turn use to help the most destitute in the community. Harris’s account vividly illustrates how rampant capitalism and a ﬂuid political environment are challenging and transforming both modernist and traditional forms of Buddhism across the country today.

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The use of a cultural vocabulary by civil society is also taken up by Dahles and ter Horst in their analysis of the silk industry. An infrastructure of international foundations and expertise is critically examined to illustrate how a socially and economically expedient discourse of “revival” has become prevalent within the industry in recent years. In mapping out how this discourse invokes a language of “traditional” or “authentic” Khmer, they argue that an ethno-citizenship of Chinese lineage stretching back several centuries is being eclipsed and concealed. As noted earlier, the purview of a “revival” language is also taken up by Turnbull in his analysis of the art scene. On closing his chapter he concludes that “performing artists serve no immediate political or ﬁnancial purposes” for the state today. Its divestment of responsibility for sustaining Cambodia’s “living cultures” onto a series of foreign NGOs, who energetically take up the task, reveals the presence of certain nostalgias and idealized representations of history, both within and beyond the country. In trying to account for this complex process, Turnbull discusses how property speculation in Phnom Penh, tourism, performances abroad, and foreign pop music all impact upon a community of artists struggling to recover their craft and resources. Likewise, Klairung Amratisha’s article on Cambodian women writers at home and abroad offers insights into how the different governments formed after the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime and international NGOs have “sponsored” literature to meet their respective political or social agendas. A recurrent theme within these ﬁve chapters is an understanding of how a cultural economy has emerged in Cambodia today through an engagement with neo-liberal capitalism. One industry that has epitomized this new phase of economic growth has been tourism, a sector dominated by the temple complex of Angkor. Its listing as a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992 marked the beginning of a pattern of growth perhaps unparalleled in any other country in modern times. From a mere 9,000 in 1993, ticket sales to the site climbed to around 750,000 a mere decade later: a staggering increase of 8,000 percent (Ministry of Tourism 2003). By contrast, the number of visitors to the northeast of the country increased by only a few thousand in that same period. Indeed, government efforts to develop a nationwide tourism industry have been greatly hampered by a grossly inadequate infrastructure, with roads, sea ports, airlines, travel agents, and marketing expertise all desperately requiring upgrading. The chapter by Tim Winter acknowledges these factors but turns to consider how the development of a more geographically dispersed industry has been hampered by an international travel and tourism industry that consistently frames the country as a dangerous destination with little more to offer than jungle-ruined temples. His account examines how the Khmer Rouge and Angkor intersect as they become encapsulated within a cultural economy of guidebooks, tourist cafes, and television documentaries that all rely upon narratives of apprehension and awe, intrigue and excitement.

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Timothy Dylan Wood’s chapter also discusses Khmer Rouge tourism narratives, but in the context of their production at Anlong Veng, the site of Pol Pot’s cremation. His ethnographically rich study illustrates how the Ministry of Tourism is constructing an account that both “stabilizes” and “domesticates” history in order to politically contain the town’s “former outlaws.” This provides the basis for an argument that a “project of historical invention” and the anticipated revenue from international tourism are enabling the prime minister and his hierarchy to maintain their “irongrasp” over a former enemy. Examining Angkor and Anlong Veng reveals how the Cambodian government has re-oriented itself towards the infra- and supra-national consumption values associated with tourism in order to meet its own ideological interests. While Wood’s analysis points towards a struggle over cultural politics at the domestic level, the “branding” of the country on the international stage around a glorious Angkorean culture speaks of a desire for “difference” in relation to the touristic offerings of neighboring Vietnam, Thailand, or Malaysia. As Yúdice reminds us, in such cases where consumption culture “exceeds the territorial boundaries of the nation-state . . . the state is not weakened but, rather, that it has been reconverted to accommodate new forms of organization and capital accumulation” (2003: 167). In drawing the analyses offered by Dahles and ter Horst, Harris, Turnbull, Winter, Amratisha, and Wood together, we can see how the contours of Cambodia’s cultural “revival” are being molded by a socio-political matrix comprised of networks of international aid, localized and transnational capitalism, and an internally embattled state.

Liminality and margins Moving from the performance of culture and identity in Cambodia to focus more speciﬁcally on transnational and gendered subjectivities, let us now return to the opening quote by Sam-Ang Sam, a Cambodian American ethnomusicologist who has resettled in Cambodia after spending many years studying and teaching in the US. In many ways, the question posed— “what do we want?”—triggers memories of the 1960s and 1970s when civil rights marches and anti-war demonstrations in the West were caught on camera and widely televised: “What do we want? Peace. When do we want it? Now,” and so on. In another way, one cannot help but recall one of Freud’s seminal questions: “What do women want?” That these references are taken from a Western context is by no means an innocent gesture. One look at the present Cambodian constitution drafted in 1993 reveals that some of its language is borrowed from the West, and there is no doubt that many Cambodians returning from abroad have helped shape its language. While retaining the characteristic Cambodian grandiloquence, the constitution is strongly ﬂavored by modern Western democratic ideals:

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Tim Winter and Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier We, the people of Cambodia Accustomed to having been an outstanding civilization, a prosperous, large, ﬂourishing and glorious nation, with high prestige radiating like a diamond, Having declined grievously during the past two decades, having gone through suffering and destruction, and having been weakened terribly, Having awakened and resolutely rallied and determined to unite for the consolidation of national unity, the preservation and defense of Cambodia’s territory and precious sovereignty and the ﬁne Angkor civilization, and the restoration of Cambodia into an “Island of Peace” based on a multi-party liberal democratic regime guaranteeing human rights, abiding by law, and having high responsibility for the nation’s future destiny of moving toward perpetual progress, development, prosperity, and glory, With this resolute will We inscribe the following as the Constitution of the Kingdom of Cambodia . . .11

If the presence of the UN and numerous foreign NGOs has been a subject of ongoing debate, the contributions of the Cambodian diaspora and Cambodian returnees in shifting the cultural, economic, and political scenes in Cambodia has been largely overlooked. As mentioned earlier, a segment of the population before, during and after the Khmer Rouge regime went to France, Australia, Canada, and the US as students, immigrants, and, more overwhelmingly, as refugees. “Cambodia” extends itself well beyond the geographical borders of the country, and the Cambodian diaspora in Long Beach, Paris, or Sydney has done its share of politics from afar, and like many other diasporas, has maintained a time-lagged Cambodian culture abroad, a culture that is better preserved in many respects than in the homeland, thus frozen in time and divorced from the realities of both homeland and adopted home. Those who have returned and resettled in Cambodia brought with them a paradoxical baggage of Western education and way of life along with a ﬁxed idea of what Cambodian culture should be and an over-determined identiﬁcation as, and a need to be perceived as, “Khmer.”12 As we know, identity is deﬁned in the encounter with the other and is rooted in alterity, and as the chapters contained in the section “Identity and the liminal space” show, these relations are mediated by notions of diaspora, exile, and return, and in the encounter with the self turned into other. In “Refractions of home: exile, memory, and diasporic longing,” Khatharya Um examines the tenuous and ambivalent relationship maintained by the Cambodian diaspora towards both ancestral home and adopted

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land. Beginning with a look at ﬁrst-generation Cambodia refugees in the US and the liminality of their position in their daily-life struggle to survive in a foreign land and the impetus to keep the Cambodian culture alive, she moves on to the younger generation who have returned to the homeland only to ﬁnd that the reality is far removed from the imagined. For others forced to return because of an agreement signed between the American and Cambodian governments to repatriate non-citizens who have committed crimes and misdemeanors in America, “home” ironically becomes a place of “banishment rather than belonging.” Like Um’s chapter, Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier’s chapter focuses on the Cambodian diaspora in the US. However, her attention turns more speciﬁcally to Cambodian American youth and their participation in hip hop culture. Through an indepth analysis of Prach Ly’s rap music, she explores the Cambodian diaspora’s attempt to deﬁne and to inscribe itself in America, and in the process forces us to re-evaluate the complex issues of identity politics in America as well as the academic discourses on Asian America. Looking at the connection between the diaspora and the homeland, she then considers the implications of the introduction of hip hop for the youth of Cambodia. Returning to a more classical form of cultural production, Klairung Amratisha’s study of women’s writing in the Cambodian language at home and abroad adds yet another dimension to the liminality of identity addressed by Um and Ollier, and sheds new light on gendered subjectivity. Tracing the development of women’s novels from the 1980s to the present, Amratisha reﬂects on the similarities and differences in their works: for example woman as keeper of tradition, still closely adhering to and promoting traditional values as found in the antiquated Cambodian “codes of conduct” for women written in the post-Angkorean era, and agent of social change decrying social injustices and ills in Cambodian society. Like Derks’ women factory workers, women writers also have to negotiate between tradition and modernity. Interestingly, women writers in Cambodia are more apt to tackle more contemporary issues than their counterparts abroad, whose writings still cling to the suffering inﬂicted by the Khmer Rouge. If elsewhere refugees are often perceived as victims of the legacy of war, political and ethnic conﬂicts that marked the twentieth century, and symbolize modern-day trauma, dislocation and statelessness, at home the discourse on the refugee plight takes on another tune altogether. For those who did not or could not ﬂee the country, the refugee status is seen as a privilege rather than a burden. In the political arena, the same discourse has been used to signify a betrayal and abandonment of the country. Looking at the debate surrounding the status of government ofﬁcials holding dual citizenship during the 1990s elections in Cambodia, Kathryn Poethig’s chapter raises important questions about multiple allegiances, transnational politics, and hybrid identities. The case against ofﬁcials holding dual citizenship was used particularly by Hun Sen’s CPP party against

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their opponents, the FUNCINPEC party led by Prince Norodom Ranariddh, himself a dual French and Cambodian citizen, to argue their moral superiority as Khmer Angkor or stationary Khmers, though Hun Sen himself, a former Khmer Rouge, left Cambodia to seek refuge in Vietnam after the events of 1975 only to return with the Vietnamese troops in 1979. Within this debate, most Cambodians of the diaspora seemed to agree with Hun Sen and called for government ofﬁcials to give up their second passports, while those with dual citizenships in ofﬁce insisted more on the importance of patriotism over nationality and the fact that their dual status allowed them to “speak the truth” and bring positive changes to Cambodia. The analysis of Anlong Veng offered by Wood also raises interesting questions about the changing boundaries and margins of the Cambodian political sphere, this time from the perspective of an emergent Khmer Rouge tourism industry. Since the 1980s the Khmer Rouge have gradually moved to the margins of Cambodian politics, a process that would also see an ideology that foregrounded an extreme form of “ethni-nationalism” (Smith 2000) retreat to the geographical frontiers of the country. While margins are deﬁned by their proximity to boundaries, the Khmer Rouge funded their “stronghold” through a trade in gems and lumber that deliberately crossed and subverted both legal and geographic borders. Wood explores how international tourism is providing a catalyst for a new dialogue between this “remote” community in the northwest of the country and Hun Sen’s government in Phnom Penh. The chapter thus reveals how, in the aftermath of Pol Pot’s death, the prospect of an inﬂux of capital is creating new forms of political relations.

Spaces of culture With their focus on diaspora, returnees, and border towns, a number of the chapters here raise important questions about our understanding of Cambodian geographies. In this ﬁnal section of the introduction we push this spatial theme further by considering how Expressions of Cambodia explores a number of places and sites of cultural production that have, hitherto, largely been ignored. Over approximately the last 100 years, a series of values, beliefs, and normative wisdoms have solidiﬁed to deﬁne the parameters of what constitutes Cambodia and its culture as a ﬁeld of scholarly enquiry. A deﬁning feature of this process has been the reiﬁcation and subsequent reliance upon certain knowledge of how “culture” is, and has been, spatially enunciated and iterated. We suggest that such understandings have served to simultaneously erase and reify, conceal and celebrate, different elements of the country, its culture and its cultural history. Pop culture, electronic virtual spaces, and other forms of print and visual media are just a few of the areas that demand our greater attention if we are to better understand Cambodia as a multitude of identities, citizenships, and vernacular cultures.

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To return to Angkor, modern scholarship has relied upon a limited number of intellectual keys for unlocking its history. With decades of study built around reading shifting architectural styles or the interpretation of bas-relief carvings and stele inscriptions, architectural historians and epigraphers have been revered as the ultimate gatekeepers to past glories. Although the translation of Sanskrit and Khmer texts has provided us with invaluable accounts about regal wealth and power, and about deities, population sizes, and agricultural outputs, the study of Angkor has been one that has consistently cast aside more vernacular and social histories in favor of a “high” culture. The chapter by Penny Edwards here calls into question the validity of such distinctions and priorities. Edwards draws our attention to a number of recent inscriptions in order to de-familiarize Angkor as a place bereft of life, bereft of modern cultural productions. Against the backdrop of these non-ofﬁcial yet historically meaningful inscriptions, she goes on to look at contemporary “grafﬁti” written elsewhere in Cambodia contesting the perception that Cambodian culture is largely oral. Far from being mere acts of vandalism, these grafﬁti are reﬂections of Cambodian cultural practices connected with religious beliefs and the spiritual realms, and in signiﬁcant ways they are indicators of the trends of different periods in Cambodian history. Her account thus opens up an intellectual space for further readings of key episodes in Cambodia’s modern history—including the 1980s, the Khmer Rouge years, and the French colonial period—all of which continue to be documented through the textual and photographic evidence found in ofﬁcial archives and publications. The other two papers in the section “Re-scripting Angkor” also look at the site’s circulation within particular texts and cultural industries. The contribution by Norindr considers the narratives and representations at the heart of an enduring, and now global, fascination for Angkor, and in particular Angkor Wat; a situation that, he suggests, needs to be traced back to its French cinematic and literary origins. To reﬂect critically on the legacy of a colonial past, Norindr examines the recent ﬁlm The People of Angkor by Rithy Panh in order to argue that we need to move away from representations that petrify Angkor as a site of “architectural grandeur” towards accounts that focus more on the “invisible, the marginal, and the subaltern.” The chapter by Winter turns to consider Angkor’s circulation within the socio-cultural landscape of international tourism. Tourism in the post-conﬂict era has come to revolve around two historical episodes, the Khmer Rouge and Angkor, framed and represented as “modern tragedy” and “ancient glory.” While seemingly incongruent and polarized, Winter argues that these two histories actually come to weave in and out of each other and mutually constitute one another in unexpected ways. In this light, tourism and its cultural artifacts emerge as forces that have contributed to, and mobilized, particular conceptions of heritage, development, and memory since Cambodia re-established itself as a major destination in Southeast Asia.

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Winter’s analysis of tourism brings into the fold a number of publications and cultural texts designed to help navigate Cambodia as the “other” within a coupling of home and abroad. This mediation of transnational geographies through texts is also paralleled, but this time reversed, by Um and Poethig in their analyses of the internet as a forum for diasporic expressions of the homeland. Poetry and other online postings are examined to explore “questions of active citizenship and public participation, but also questions of cultural citizenship” (Featherstone and Lash 1999: 7). Their accounts reveal how the internet has emerged as a vital cultural space for political dialogues across borders, for articulating and sharing thoughts about exile, banishment, longing, and homeland for members of the communities still straddling the hyphenated and non-hyphenated typologies of Cambodian–American and American–Cambodian. In a similar vein, Ollier’s chapter on rap music, a discursive practice not commonly associated with Cambodia, also offers us a rich point of focus for understanding how a diasporic identity is contingently negotiated. She suggests that rap music constitutes part of a signifying system of identity that engages with, and thus responds to, a shifting US political climate. In other words, by foregrounding a reading of Prach Ly’s lyrics, Ollier analytically draws out a series of connections between the artist, his audience, and the broader public sphere within which that diaspora resides. Away from the technologies of the internet and online ‘virtual’ communities, Klairung Amratisha tells us about the emergence of women writers in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia who, for lack of a publishing industry and due to the high cost of printing, began their career by renting in Phnom Penh’s market stalls copies of their novels written in pencil to ﬁction-starved readers in the 1980s. But just a decade later, these same women would write made-for-television soap-opera scripts and short stories for newspapers, thus bringing to the mainstream this literary genre, which was never popular before in Cambodia. While in a previous section we pointed to the undeniable link between culture and social networks of power, politics, and capitalism, in this section we see signs of more spontaneous, scripted or unscripted, expressions of Cambodia; expressions that together account for the circularity, hybridity, creation, and recreation of culture and identity in its multiple forms, and open the ﬁeld of Cambodian studies to alternative spaces where identity and culture are constantly being expressed, performed, debated, and contested.

Notes 1 Excerpts from Sam 1996: 85; Norodom Sihanouk cited in Sam 1996: 88 and Ranariddh 1998: 23 (our translation). 2 A term adopted by Mehta and Mehta (1999). 3 www.talesofasia.com/cambodia-update-dec03.htm.

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4 The following pages are not intended to be a comprehensive literature review of academic scholarship on Cambodia published in English. Rather, by citing a number of the books published in recent years, our aim is to provide the reader with an overview of some of the dominant themes that give shape to the ﬁeld of Cambodian studies today. Unfortunately, due to limitations of space, we are unable to include numerous recent PhD theses and journal articles that, we fully acknowledge, have valuably contributed to the ﬁeld. 5 See also Edwards 2001, 2002, 2005. 6 Recent notable publications here include: Ashley Thompson (2005) Calling the Souls: a Cambodian ritual text; Ang Choulean (2004) Brah Ling; Anonymous (2003) Seams Of Change: clothing and the care of the self in late 19th and 20th century Cambodia; Vann Molyvann (2003) Modern Khmer Cities; Anonymous (2002) Cultures of Independence: an introduction to Cambodian arts and culture in the 1950s and 1960s. All are published by Reyum Publishing, Phnom Penh. 7 W. Benjamin (1940) “On the Concept of History,” Gesammelte Schriften I, 691–704. SuhrkampVerlag. Frankfurt am Main, 1974. Translation: Harry Zohn (2003), from Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 392–3. 8 Around 61 percent of that total, 1.39 billion US dollars, was actually disbursed: see Cambodian Rehabilitation and Development Board 1996. 9 With around three hundred Cambodians either killed or maimed each month, the effect of landmines on agricultural production and rural communities was devastating (Chandler 1998). 10 Srey is a common Cambodian ﬁrst name and literally it also means “girl” or “woman.” As for the order of ﬁrst and last names, Cambodians in Cambodia place their last name ﬁrst and their ﬁrst name last. Cambodians of the diaspora, on the other hand, have typically adopted the Western ways and do the opposite. But when they return to Cambodia, many of them choose to revert back to last name ﬁrst and ﬁrst name last. The ordering of names used in this volume follow the convention chosen by each individual source. 11 The Cambodian Constitution, www.constitution.org/cons/cambodia.htm (Accessed: 10 June 2006). 12 In this introductory chapter, we have chosen the term “Cambodian” to refer to all people of Cambodia, born in Cambodia or born of Cambodian parents, regardless of their ethnic origin. The term “Khmer” is used here to draw attention to identity assertions made by Cambodians that draw upon ethnic or historical ideas of a “Khmer race” or “Khmer Empire.” In this volume, the contributors have chosen to use one term or the other and sometimes both alternately. Our usage of these two terms does not necessarily reﬂect that of other contributors. Unfortunately, because of a lack of space, it is difﬁcult to discuss in any great depth Cambodians returning from Eastern Europe and from other Southeast Asian countries and their contributions to the politics, culture, the arts, and the business world in Cambodia. It is hoped that more in-depth study will be done on the subject.

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Part One

Re-scripting Angkor

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Subscripts Reading Cambodian pasts, presents, and futures through grafﬁti Penny Edwards1

Grafﬁti is not vandalism, but a very beautiful crime. Bando (New York grafﬁti artist) 1985 Antiquities are history defaced . . . Francis Bacon, “The Advancement of Learning” 1605

“Husband and wife, together forever” reads the Khmer grafﬁto, linking two love hearts. This testimony to eternity is written in the most ephemeral of mediums—sand. It’s the only writing on the ground here, and it’s an odd choice for a lover’s tryst. I’m standing next to a death mound in the former Khmer Rouge stronghold of Anlong Veng. In front of me is the debris-encrusted funeral pyre of Saloth Sar, better known as Pol Pot. His name is increasingly associated here more with numbers than letters, as a demi-god of lotto, whose post-mortem blessings can bring big winnings. Eighty kilometers southeast, at Pnum Kulen, the mythical seat of Khmer civilization, more enduring messages decorate the beatiﬁc, rock-sculpted image of a supine Buddha, despite a recent sign that warns: “Writing on the Buddha Prohibited.” Daubed in paint or chalk, or clumsily etched into the rock, these grafﬁti read like travelogues: so-and-so was here on suchand-such a date. Several hundred kilometers south, spray-paint grafﬁti stretch wall to wall in the decaying Bokor Palace, an abandoned hilltop casino whose colonial heyday saw gilt chandeliers and sleek croupiers, and which now attracts leather-clad bikers for New Year rave parties. Meanwhile, in Phnom Penh, a student inscribes a wish for luck in her examinations on a slender, glossy leaf at a sacred site colloquially known as Pnum Dap Moen (Ten Chickens Mount) in the Royal Palace. She’s in good company. Not so long ago, a tourist from the provinces signed his name to a plea for family harmony, and a few months back, one woman of unknown age and occupation asked for a baby. Up the twisting steps that lead to the Buddha’s footprint enshrined in the hilltop temple at Pnum Dap Moen, a laminated sign warns: “Do not write on the leaves of Buddha. All those who do will be reborn cross-eyed and hare-lipped.” This injunction berates the pain that such writing can inﬂict on living plants. These

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diverse inscriptions are interlinked by a spiritual topography. The sites at Anlong Veng, Pnum Kulen, Pnum Bokor, and Pnum Dap Moen are at, or on the perimeter of, real or artiﬁcial toponyms, whose power stems from both their associations with Mount Mehru in Hindu and Buddhist cosmography, their longstanding status in Khmer belief systems as the habitat of powerful guardian spirits, and their mapping by Khmer queens and kings as vital nodes of a Khmer cultural and spiritual landscape (Chandler 1996b: 25–42; Hang et al. 2004: 113). For the purposes of this paper, I use the term “grafﬁti” to refer to such individual acts and impromptu inscriptions, in contrast to the texts sponsored by the royal donors and wealthy restorers of key spiritual sites. Such grafﬁti have largely fallen outside the margins of ofﬁcial translation, documentation, and conservation projects. However, they offer valuable historical records of transactions between individuals and their environment that can bring marginal and non-national players into the orbit of our understanding of such “national” monuments as Angkor. They also yield insights into the role of such loci as compass points on the physical, spiritual, emotional, and psychological itineraries of visitors. In their layering of old sites with new meanings, these grafﬁti form part of what we might call a “palimpsest” of memory. In his recent book, Andreas Huyssen calls for an understanding of the city as such a palimpsest, and considers how the physical incarnation of diverse pasts and memories in the built environment can shape present political identities (Huyssen 2003: 101–2). Speciﬁcally, he explores the role of monuments to tragedy as stimuli to memory, whose intervention in the present triggers resistance to a common human desire to forget past trauma. As a cultural subscript rather than a self-conscious monument, the grafﬁti considered in this paper operate as a palimpsest of memory, but in a different way. These runes encode past desires for future lives. This paper contextualizes contemporary grafﬁti in Cambodia vis-à-vis ex ofﬁcio writings at Angkor. Following the launch of an active conservation movement in Indochina in 1901, such inscriptions, whether by Europeans or Asians became viewed as acts of defacement. In his stimulating study on defacement, Michael Taussig has argued that the deﬁlement of national icons or royal efﬁgies, such as ﬂags and statues, can generate a form of “negative energy” in the object of defacement (Taussig 1999: 51). State sanctions against such acts are common, and reﬂect recognition of the potential for contagion in this negative energy. In Taussig’s analysis, desecration is also an act of ﬂirtation with the supramundane, and is the closest most of us will come to the sacred in our modern world. By extension, “defacement exerts its curious property of magnifying, not destroying, value, drawing out the sacred from the habitual-mundane” (Taussig 1999: 51). Taussig draws on several contexts in his book, ranging from Australia to Latin America. He does not, however, touch on Theravada Southeast Asia,

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where indigenous practices of monumental restoration and inscription, regional and local valorizations of writing in and of itself as intrinsically sacred, and beliefs about the accumulation of power in objects—beliefs that at once assume that power can be rubbed off and acquired from interaction with particular objects or sites and that such powerfully endowed totems can channel human desires to other worlds—generate a different aesthetic. The word grafﬁto came into usage to describe writings and drawings on the wall, as found at Pompeii, where the eruption of Vesuvius froze quotidian scribbles spanning magic, love, and insults. From this initial meaning it mutated to the plural, grafﬁti, later used to describe “scribblings or drawings, often indecent, found on public lavatories, in buildings, etc.”2 As a recent article in The Economist opined, grafﬁti is both “secretive and public, immediate and obscure.” From Viking runes to the names of French soldiers carved on monuments in Egypt during Napoleon’s campaign, these footnotes of conquest ranged from simple assertions of place and presence to boasts of superior artistry.3 The passage of time typically digniﬁes grafﬁti, even accruing its tourist value, so that it becomes part of the attraction of historic monuments. A memento in situ of the nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century grand tour of military or naval missions, grafﬁti offered room for personal markings on the built environment in an era when ofﬁcial royal and state monuments celebrated divinities, emperors, and kings and queens, but rarely lesser individuals. Since the 1980s, in urban America and Europe, categories have developed to distinguish “gang grafﬁti” from grafﬁti art. The former—in a contemporary extension of the impulse that led French soldiers ﬁghting Napoleon’s campaign in Egypt to hew their names into ancient monuments, and that led ﬁghting factions in late-1970s Cambodia to paint caricatures of the enemy on the walls of redoubts—is bound up in the marking of territory. In their study of young grafﬁti artists in New York City in the 1980s and 1990s, Henry Chalfant and James Prigoff see grafﬁtists as motivated both by a simple fun factor and by the need to express the longing “to be somebody in a world that’s always reminding you that you are not” (Chalfant and Prigoff 1987: 7).

Multilingual Angkor Commonly invoked as an exclusively Khmer icon of nation, the temples of Angkor have long served as a spiritual crossroads: a repository of wishes for future lives, dedications to Buddha and ancestral spirits. The long and elegant Khmer inscriptions sponsored by kings, queens, and wealthy patrons at the temple complex, and most notably at Angkor Wat, have attracted considerable scholarly attention. Between the spaces of these now canonical texts, other lesser-known writings also lend valuable clues to the ways in which the temple has been used over time. The large stones used to build Angkorean monuments often had marks on them, which

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scholars dubbed grafﬁti. Some interpret these ancient marks as evidence of laborers relieving their boredom, while others read more into them, interpreting them as indications of how to lay the stones, mystical signs, or “ancient I-was-here’s.”4 The media of more recent grafﬁti include both engravings and ink-based calligraphy. The contents range from Chinese poetry dating from the Qing dynasty to devotional inscriptions of a range of Asian travelers. These are no furtive, hurried scribbles done out of the public gaze, but careful records of individual presence executed with pride and some degree of craftsmanship. Among Angkor’s polyglot grafﬁti is an inscription in Arabic at a stela at the oldest temple site in the complex, Phnom Bakeng, that cites the Koran: In the name of Allah, the Merciful, the Benevolent. There is no other God than Allah, and Muhammed is the envoy of Allah. Aid from Allah and future victory; and the good news is announced to Believers.5 Ashley Thompson reads this inscription, apparently transcribed by a local stonemason unfamiliar with Arabic script from a written model, as evidence of Angkor’s role as a multi-denominational hub of religious pilgrimage. What mattered was not the source or orientation of the devotional inscription but the strength of the faith that inspired it. Spiritual potency accrued to the stela as to other sacred images, so metaphorically contributing to building the Buddha’s sacred power.6 Elsewhere, in the central cruciform gallery of Angkor Wat, fourteen calligraphic inscriptions in Chinese ink testify to a series of Japanese visits to Angkor between 1612 and 1632. Most give only the name and place of origin of the writer, and were probably the work of merchants conducting maritime trade in the region who made the pilgrimage to Angkor. One text stands out: Morimoto Ukondaya Kazufusa arrived in January 1632 to make offerings to four Buddha images, to perform rituals for the soul of his father, and to pray for his mother’s life (Harris 2005a: 35). These inscriptions are not dissimilar in tone or content to one written in the late Qing dynasty by a native of Guangdong province, apparently as a tribute to his ancestors, that includes a stanza of poetry. Another inscription in Chinese characters, accompanied by a weathered line drawing, speaks in poetic metaphors of a four-faced pavilion and the sound of spring rain washing jade.7 In Chinese cultural tradition, textual inscriptions can act as a more signiﬁcant barometer of the aesthetic ranking of a monument than its architecture.8 The classical Chinese characters used for the Angkorean grafﬁti discussed above were the lingua franca of a Confucian elite embracing China, Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, and would have been understood by

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educated pilgrims and visitors from all four areas. Since literacy in Chinese characters was a mark of elite status, what came to be perceived in the Western tradition as “defacement” probably invited admiration rather than condemnation. This inversion of Taussig’s logic, in Asian monumental traditions, would have been compounded by the notion that such inscriptions, in local belief-systems, were not taking away from, but adding to, the sacrality of a monument and, thereby, to the merit of the inscriber. In Middle Cambodia, as Thompson has shown, acts of restoration were accompanied by inscriptions, and continual additions to monuments represented acts of piety. In several instances, the stone pillars of Angkor were prepared for calligraphic inscriptions with a background of red paint. Red is an auspicious color in Chinese culture, and much like the crimson lacquered layers surviving on stone statues in the temple complex, such groundwork constituted an act of tribute. By contrast, in the heritage tradition developed in nineteenth-century France by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc and others, and later applied to Indochina, such colorful additions were perceived as vandalism. Formalized with the establishment of the Curatorship of Angkor in 1907, European heritage conventions ranked new layers of red and black lacquer on a par with such natural accretions as moss and bat guano, and demanded the removal of such natural and aesthetic damage from antiquities to reveal their inner beauty and artistic integrity. What was stripped away in these efforts to undo the damage of time and the perceived errors of cultural practice were the accumulated layers of spirituality and power intrinsic to particular artifacts and monuments. Such restoration had signiﬁcant and largely negative ramiﬁcations for the merit earned by the original sponsors of such embellishments. As earlier stated, the colonial contact that brought these modes of conservation to Cambodia also opened the temples of Angkor to increased European tourism and a related, apparently new, phenomenon in this locale: non-devotional grafﬁti. On September 11, 1890, a Mademoiselle Veaux added her name to the signatures of Khmers, Chinese, and Vietnamese on the pillars in the outer courtyard of Angkor Wat.9 Such grafﬁti caused increasing concern to colonial policy makers.10 In 1901, the year in which the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) inaugurated its ofﬁce in Saigon, one visitor to Angkor incised his name Thiep in Quoc Ngu.11 Eight years later, Angkor’s ﬁrst European curator, Jean Commaille, referring to the law of March 9, 1900 on the conservation of monuments in Indochina of artistic or historic signiﬁcance, sent two Vietnamese to the Governor of Siem Reap for referral to judicial proceedings. The accused had been “caught engraving their name or some inscription onto the walls of Angkor Wat with a knife.” Despite warnings by Cambodians that this practice was now “formally forbidden,” they refused to stop.12 It is not clear whether the reporting of the culprits by the Cambodian witnesses reﬂected a deepseated taboo against such casual name-dropping, the rise of early cultural

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nationalism, the inculcation of European-style heritage policies in Commaille’s staff, the fear of not reporting such an incident, or a bid for revenge and an effort to curb the recent unchecked tapping of trees for resin by Vietnamese in the vicinity, an exercise of livelihood considered the prerogative of local, non-Vietnamese, long-term residents. Lists of foreign visitors to Angkor from this period brim with names of European royalty, dignitaries and other aristocratic nomads, but give us little idea of Asian visitors. Apart from a visit by King Sisowath and a retinue of thirty-six dancers, records for 1910 show only the Cambodian deputy chief monk and his cortege, two “Japanese monk doctors,” and a “Burmese monk doctor” visiting in October.13 In 1916, Commaille was brutally murdered en route to deliver wages to Cambodian laborers working on Angkor Thom. In December 1922, his replacement, Henri Marchal, reported two acts of grafﬁti by colonial civil servants. One, a supervisor at the Posts and Telegraphs Department, had carved his name, Nutini, on a pillar in a temple cloister, while another, identiﬁed only as “the Indian agent of the Public Works department,” had made his mark in Tamil on the threshold of the doorway to the inner courtyard of Angkor. Despite the apparently diverse cultural backgrounds of the culprits, Marchal interpreted their acts in the same light. Diagnosing them both with “monomania,” he described the alacrity with which they defaced antiquity as a symptom of a “legion” afﬂiction. Reasoning that these “engravers of names” were guided less by malevolence than ignorance, Marchal fretted at their mindset, which combined respect for private property with the notion that “public things belong to no-one.”14 On receipt of Marchal’s letter, France’s highest ranking authority in Cambodia, Résident Supérieur Helgoualch, penned swift and stern rebukes to the heads of the relevant departments, reserving his strongest bombast for the nameless Indian.15 He then cautioned Marchal that tourists posed a far greater danger than the occasional civil servant, and urged him to erect notices in the ofﬁcial on-site hotel, the Bungalow of Angkor, and to post French and English notice-boards at key entrances to the most popular temples, warning the public of the legal consequences of any defacement of these protected monuments.16 By 1925, the annual register of 832 foreign visitors to Angkor included seventy-nine Vietnamese, eight Siamese, twenty-nine Japanese, and eight Chinese.17 In May 1925 police surveillance of the monuments was increased, to counter what was deemed tourists’ growing “obsession” with removing fragments from the Angkor Park. One target of such warnings were groups of visiting soldiers and sailors, who were blamed for causing breakages.18 Curiously, however, when the charter for the protection of Angkor was redrafted in 1925 in response to growing tourist trafﬁc and art theft, grafﬁti escaped special mention. Instead, the revised Charter imposed special license requirements on all those wishing to “paint, draw or ﬁlm” the ruins, and stipulated that anyone wishing to make a mold or

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a rubbing must ﬁrst obtain the special permission of the EFEO.19 These restrictions did not deter Loan Ku-na from inscribing a record of his family’s visit, in Burmese, over an earlier inscription in Chinese characters (see Figure 2.1). His text most probably records a donation or offering to the temple, and reads: 1 June 1288 (AD 1926) Saturday: Loan Ku-na from Patta Pawn city, his wife Ma Aie, niece Mae Kyin, Maung Htun Lu and wife Mae Sit, son Maung Sein, daughter Ma Thein Khin. By the end of the colonial period, the strength and thrust of heritage movements and civic education in Western Europe, coupled with the cultivation of a particular nationalist identiﬁcation around such sites as Angkor, had tarnished such devotional inscriptions as grafﬁti.

Figure 2.1 Burmese inscription at Angkor Wat Photo by Penny Edwards, 2004.

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Postscripts: Khmer Rouge and other grafﬁti at Angkor and elsewhere The social philosopher Michel de Certeau (1984) has likened revolution to a scriptural project whereby an entire society seeks to constitute itself as a blank page with respect to the past and to produce a new history (refaire l’histoire) on the model of what it fabricates. Here, de Certeau echoes Mao Ze Dong, whose poetry likened history to a “blank page” (bai ye) waiting to be written, leaving it to the imagination whether he would end history with a new beginning or begin it with a new ending. Following Cambodian independence in 1954, the blank page comes into its own as a tabula rasa for the production and cultivation of a selfconscious Khmer identity that proclaimed a lineage with Angkor. On the eve of independence, the college student Saloth Sar, the future Pol Pot, penned his ﬁrst-known published essay, in Khmer, on “Democracy and Diamonds,” under the pseudonym Kmae Daem (Original Khmer). Soon after, the philologist and linguistic nationalist Kheng Vann Sak called for the excision from Khmer of all words of Sanskrit, Pali, and European origin and championed the development of a new etymology of Khmerness based on Angkorean terms. Chiseled carefully in stone, eight Khmer names scroll vertically down a column in an outer courtyard of Angkor Wat (see Figure 2.2). The closing epithet, “Revolutionary family (kruesaa padivat), 1970,” identiﬁes the author(s) as Khmer Rouge. Styled in the form of early devotional inscriptions, this Khmer Rouge grafﬁto begins with the father, mother, and then lists family members, probably in order of seniority. Written at a time when Angkor was under Vietnamese military control, this inscription may have been an attempt to assert Khmer ownership over Angkor as well as continuity with the past, and/or to imbue the inscriber’s revolutionary aims with a sacral power. By the end of the decade, the Khmer Rouge would have become synonymous with the eradication of writing and learning, and attempts to erase history. After the fall of the Khmer Rouge in 1979, grafﬁti took on other uses. On returning to Phnom Penh and elsewhere, some families found messages left on walls indicating the whereabouts of their loved ones. As people emerged from the mass dislocation and forced relocation of the Khmer Rouge era looking for family members, a group of stones at a particular site close to the Bayon temple allegedly became the place for inscribing messages to lost and missing family members. Emerging from the trauma of Pol Pot’s revolution, when writing was all but banned for the masses, such grafﬁti became a means of messaging survivors. In urban contexts, grafﬁti acted as a ghostly epigraphy that anchored buildings in the gruesome past. One woman survivor who was allocated a room in a repossessed building in Phnom Penh’s Tuoltompong district found her new dwelling decorated in blood with the slogan, “Always faithful to Angkar” on one wall.20

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Figure 2.2 Khmer Rouge grafﬁti at Angkor Wat Photo by Penny Edwards, 2004.

At Pnum Bokor, the site of ﬁerce ﬁghting in early 1979, grafﬁti on both sides of the ﬁring line included caricatures of Khmer Rouge soldiers by Vietnamese troops holed up in the Bokor Hotel, and Khmer Rouge grafﬁti in the small Catholic Cathedral, half a kilometer away.21 In the past decade, Cambodian and overseas tourists have added to this grafﬁti, scratching, inking, or chalking their names on the walls, making Bokor “an archaeological site of our own time.”22 At Anlong Veng, the last Khmer Rouge redoubt near the Thai border, similar grafﬁti—in Khmer, Chinese, and English—now ﬂourishes on an old bunker and on former Khmer Rouge chief of staff Ta Mok’s cliff-side villa. Meanwhile, in the sacred hilltop temples of Oudong, also the site of ﬁerce Khmer Rouge ﬁghting immediately before and after the regime of Democratic Kampuchea, names in Chinese and Khmer vie for space on ancient stone elephants at the perimeter of a site cordoned off for protection. By contrast, the painted grafﬁti on the Buddha and surrounding walls and pillars at Pnum Kulen is overwhelmingly Khmer.

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Wish lists: leaﬁng through modernity The use of leaves plucked from trees for the writing of Buddhist manuscripts has continued for over fourteen centuries in Cambodia. Trees hold a sacred place in Buddhism, their sanctity highlighted in the Buddhist text Samyutta Nikaya, which teaches that planting gardens (Aramaropa) and forest (Vanaropa) are meritorious acts.23 The thick, heart-shaped, glossy green leaves that ﬂourish around the shrine to Yiyiey Mau at the base of Ten Chickens Mount in the Royal Palace, differ in shape and texture from the long, rectilinear leaves used in traditional manuscript production, and are popularly known as “inscribing-leaves” (slik-caa) for their resilience and longevity. Three strategically placed Khmer signs at the base, along the stairway and at the top of Ten Chickens Mount warn aspiring grafﬁtists of the consequences of their errant art. The logic behind these warnings is the very same that draws people to leave their mark. These are holy leaves, their home a toponym that was allegedly built by the Brahmin Nimit Mok in 1866, perhaps to prepare the site for construction of the new Royal Palace the following year, when King Norodom I moved his royal capital from Oudong to Phnom Penh. The crude wooden ﬁgures of the tutelary deities Yiyiey Mau (Grandmother Mau) and Taa Tambangdaek (Grandfather Iron Stick), which preside over two small niches hollowed out of the rock at the toponym’s base, allegedly date from this time. Leaf inscriptions at the present site reveal varying degrees of literacy, and may be read as responses to the dislocation of modernity. A waitress from the provinces who has just started working at a beer garden in Tuol Kork seeks love. A man in his thirties from the coastal province of Kompong Saom who is now working at a garment factory in the Chamkar Mon district of Phnom Penh, where luxury gated communities rub shoulders with sweatshops, has come here because he has heard this is a place of magical efﬁcacy, where wishes can come true, wishes that, he hopes, can change his poor living standards and bring him an easier life. Interviewed at the site, one monk from the Thommayuth order, known for its insistence on scriptural purity, condemned these practices as the legacy of Brahmanism, and contrasted such superstitions with Buddhism where only actions can change one’s circumstances. Not all monks share this view. One leaf inscription by a monk beseeches Buddha to help the Khmer nation have an easier life, free from poverty and want. Another monk asks for help with his studies, and in having his wish fulﬁlled. One lay-writer who directed her or his wishes to preah-ong, an honoriﬁc that could denote Buddha but here appears to refer to Yiyiey Mao, asks to “help look after me” by providing not only good health but also passage to the US for her and her seven daughters, and for endless wealth. Others direct their wishes to “Grandmother,” Yiyiey Mau, whose shrine adjoins this site. One asks her for a child and for all good things and happiness, for both inscriber

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and spouse. Another asks that the boramy (spirit) will deliver her wishes. Many of these leaf prints appear to be the work of women, wishing for success for their children, to meet a good husband, for longevity and a secure livelihood for their mother and father. Professional success for self and spouse is also sought after: one female student wished to become the top student in the entire country; another woman wanted her husband to excel in his exams so that he might become a “skilful doctor.” The word “become” used here is klaay jie, to change or be changed into. Many of these inscriptions, themselves designed to weather and disappear, appear to be more than the wish to leave a memento or a postscript for posterity. By inserting themselves into this spirited and secluded oasis, away from factory ﬂoors, textile machines, and beer gardens, these signings may be read as text-messaging other worlds (Figure 2.3). To paraphrase David Chandler and the late English writer Bruce Chatwin, we can see these double-edged pleas, which at once deface and decorate these breathing leaves, as song lines at the edge of the forest. Here are seam lines between the urbane and the rural, Buddhism and Brahminism, a shady place in an increasingly restless city. The power of such beliefs is a social leveler. The barely literate ink and scratch their wishes next to the elegant calligraphy of university students and the wish lists of those with a stronger sense of entitlement. “I wish to be the deputy provincial governor,” writes one; another, whose inscription confuses this mountain with the mythical

Figure 2.3 Leaf inscriptions at the Royal Palace, Phnom Penh Photo by Penny Edwards, 2005.

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Pnum Kulen, wants only health; still another calls for a fast car, a nice villa, and abundant wealth.24 Some, apparently resigned to what they have in this life, wish for good skin and a nice ﬁgure in the next, or to be reborn 1.75 meters tall; one wishes to be reborn with parents who are compassionate. After the start of the rainy season in 2005, the leaf inscriptions, which had earlier in the year spanned an array of invocations embracing exam success and luck in love, focused increasingly on wishes for good health. Mixed in with these pedestrian votaries are wishes for “a life with meaning,” an inquiry as to whether there is a next life, and a plea by a monk that Cambodia might attain Nirvana in the future. A few of the pleas are couched in the pidgin that has come to signal sophistication among urban youth, intermingling Khmer with names, and the noun “love” in English. As at Angkor over centuries past, these devotional but ephemeral inscriptions also include Vietnamese, Burmese, Thai, and Chinese.

Conclusion The forms of inscriptions considered in this article are simultaneously tabooed and accepted. Incising letters into a leaf is a violation of Buddha’s injunction not to hurt living things, and yet can be seen as a contemporary, if transient, echo of ancient palm leaf manuscripts. Much of European superstitious and religious tradition, as well as a range of cultural practices from the aesthetics of home decor to romance, has promoted a culture of privacy, secrecy, intimacy, and interiority, where one’s desires are interiorized, and children told not to divulge their wishes lest they do not come true. Explicit admissions of our innermost desires are often exercised in camera, whether it be in a confessional cubicle or on a psychiatrist’s couch. In Cambodia, the reverse holds true: wishes are externalized, as if the translation of a human desire into the material realm, through its transcription as words or symbols on to stone or leaf, might assist in its materialization and ultimate realization. Since the massive upsurge in travel and tourism, globalization has brought with it a new wave in stone- and monument-based grafﬁti. My random survey of several scenic sites that appeal to different senses and phases of history (embracing national mythology, Buddhism, and ancient history at Pnum Kulen; the history of the Khmer monarchy and civil war at Oudong; colonial history at Bokor; and Khmer Rouge history at Anlong Veng) indicates that most new grafﬁti in Cambodia is inspired principally by neither politics nor the will to engage with spirituality in the manner of leaf writing, but rather grafﬁti are used as markers of existence, or souvenirs of being, outside one’s ordinary orbit, in an other-worldly realm. For domestic as well as international tourists, these are runes of a relatively new-found mobility, conferred by improved security and wealth. As

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such, they may be read as signatures of status and ownership, much as the early elite European grafﬁti at Angkor. Paraphrasing Chalfant and Prigoff (1987), we can read some of these inscriptions as expressive of the longing to be, not just somebody, but somebody else, and/or to be somebody, elsewhere. Whether chalked on Buddhist images or incised into urban foliage, appealing to divinities or revealing the writer’s desire to situate herself or himself in the future consciousness of subsequent visitors to a particular site, these historic and contemporary grafﬁti can be read as palimpsests of desires. Here we ﬁnd the desire for memory—the desire both to be remembered by others, and to carve a particular place, moment, or emotion on the memory of the writer—and the desire for a spiritual intervention in the inscriber’s present and/or future life. The grafﬁti at Angkor and in other sites may reﬂect their authors’ desire to forget present predicaments and to escape from present moments. Here it is instructive to recall Ashley Thompson’s emphasis, in her work on Middle Cambodian iconography and inscriptions, on the ways in which futures are rehearsed in apparent repetitions of the past, so that “past, present and future are inextricably implicated in each other.” (Thompson 2004a: 13–14). In focusing on grafﬁti, my aim has been to bring out of the shadows of oblivion what the German writer W. G. Sebald, in another context, has called those “signs and characters from the type case of forgotten things” (Sebald 2001: 151), so as to bring to light the stereometry between living, dead, Buddhist, Brahmin, animist, and other spiritual worlds that inform a range of cultural practices in Cambodia. Reading these practices as diverse scriptural traditions allows us to reconsider a common perception of Khmer culture as an “oral civilization.” The contemporary wave of grafﬁti at sacred monuments and tourist sites, which offers little more than a name and date, might also be viewed in this broader context. Historicizing such apparently trivial pursuits allows us to chart a shift from those inscriptions carved at Angkor by Chinese, Burmese, and other visitors, as well as the Khmer Rouge insignia of 1970. The authors of these latter scripts situated themselves, like the contemporary leaf wishers at the palace site, in relation to family members or ideological movements on earth and divinities beyond the human realm. By contrast, the new trend in grafﬁti is towards a cult of the individual, and may reﬂect a deeper shift within societal norms, particularly among youth. While readily dismissed as vandalism, this new wave of grafﬁti appears to be seen, by its practitioners, as a mark of sophistication, as evinced by the wide deployment of English or mixed Khmer–English. These are not so much totems of the monomania diagnosed by Marchal but signs of a heightened selfconsciousness encouraged by Cambodia’s high velocity transition to consumer capitalism.

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Notes 1 I am indebted to the late Ingrid Muan, who ﬁrst piqued my interest in Angkorean grafﬁti in July 2000, and to my research assistants Miss Mech Samphors and Miss Chea Bunnary. Thina Ollier, Tim Winter, Ashley Thompson, Stephen Heder, Lindsay French, and Erik Davis all offered valuable comments on earlier drafts of this paper. Thank you also to Toe Zaw Latt and Monique Skidmore for their interpretation of the Burmese inscription. Research for this article was supported by grants from the Australian Research Council and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Revisions were ﬁnalized while I was a Visiting Scholar at the Center for Khmer Studies, Phnom Penh. 2 Chambers English Dictionary (Edinburgh and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) p. 617. See also Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture (Harlow: Longman, 1992) p. 570. 3 See Economist 2004: 95–7. 4 Ashley Thompson, private communication, May 9, 2005. 5 G. Ferrand “La stéla arabe de Phnom Bakheng,” Bulletin de l’Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient XXII, p.160, in Thompson. 6 See Thompson 2004b: 88–119. 7 Observed by the author at Angkor Vat, January 2005. 8 See Ryckmans 1989: 2. 9 Ofﬁce of the Oriental and India Ofﬁce Records, British Library, London. Photo 430/86 (31) Cuneiform gallery with inscription. 10 I am deeply grateful to the late Ingrid Muan for ﬁrst bringing these documents to my attention. 11 Angkor Vat, January 2004. 12 National Archives of Cambodia (NAC), observed by the author on a visit to Résident Supérieur du Cambodge (RSC) 15197 Conservateur des Monuments du groupe d’Angkor to Monsieur le Commissaire délégué à Battambang, July 30, 1909. 13 NAC RSC 15197 Poste de Siemreap-Angkor visiteurs des ruines en 1910. 14 NAC RSC 1995 H. Marchal, Conservateur des Monuments du Groupe d’Angkor à Siemreap, to RSC Helgoualc’h, December 5, 1922. 15 NAC RSC 1995 RSC L’Helgoualc’h to Chef du Service des Poste Télégraphes et Téléphones de Phnom Penh, December 9, 1922; RSC to L’Ingenieur en Chef du Service des Travaux Publics, Phnom Penh. 16 NAC RSC 1995, December 12, 1922: RSC L’Helgoualc’h to Conservateur des Monuments du Groupe d’Angkor à Siemreap. 17 NAC RSC 8353 Telegram No. 733, 14 June 1925, Siem Reap to Cabinet de Résident Supérieur du Cambodge, Phnom Penh. 18 NAC RSC 8353, May 19, 1925—L’Administrateur des Service civils, Rés. de France à Siemreap, a M. le RSC. 19 NAC RSC 8353Arrêté (u.d.) Article 4, no. 3; Directeur de L’EFEO, Hanoi, to RSC, 23 May 1925. 20 Duong Sokha “Le 8 janvier 1979, Lim Ky entre dans une ville ‘étrangement calme’” Cambodge soir, January 10–11, 2004, p. 9. 21 See Stevens 1999: 16; see accompanying photo by Beth Moorthy. 22 “Cambodia’s Twentieth Century Ruins,” www.utopia-tours.com/albums/Kep. 23 Ven. I. Pannatissa, Phnom Penh Post, January 22–February 4, 1999, p. 11. 24 Mech Samphors, Report of Field Visit to Palace, May 7–8, 2005 and September 26, 2005; Chea Bunnary, Report of Field Visit to Palace, May 7–8, 2005; Mech Samphors and Chea Bunnary, Report of Phnom Kailas, the Royal Palace, September 24, 2005.

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3

When ancient glory meets modern tragedy Angkor and the Khmer Rouge in contemporary tourism Tim Winter1

Introduction In which country can you stroll through the biggest temple in the world? In which country can you shoot a rocket-propelled grenade launcher and play roulette with former Communist guerrillas? In which country are skulls a tourist attraction just like Buddhist monasteries? Welcome to one of the most contradictory and fascinating places on the face of the earth: Welcome to Cambodia! (Introduction: 90 Days in Cambodia)2

Cambodia’s turbulent transition towards political stability and a free-market economy after a history of genocide, civil war, and foreign occupation has been signiﬁcantly inﬂuenced by an extraordinary growth in international tourism. Reconciliation along with cultural and economic rehabilitation have been urgent and simultaneous demands. The challenges facing Cambodia have been especially severe because of its need to restore a national identity shattered by prolonged conﬂict, the immense scale of the past to which that identity adheres and the dependence of the state on the tourist revenue from Angkor. In this context, tourism has not only played a pivotal role in molding the country’s heritage industry, but has also been instrumental in deﬁning and valuing what is Cambodian in a post-conﬂict era. For the vast majority of tourists who have traveled to the country since the early 1990s, an inherently complex cultural and social history spanning thousands of years has been dissolved into two overwhelmingly dominant, yet polarized, episodes: one modern and “tragic,” and the other ancient and “glorious.”3 Authors of television documentaries and guidebooks, not to mention numerous journalists and photographers, have all enjoyed considerable stylistic mileage from juxtaposing the Khmer Rouge (1975–79) and Angkor (802–1431) eras as paradoxical, contradictory, and inherently ironic. Closer examination of such representations, however, reveals that these two histories are far less polarized and disconnected than they initially appear. Indeed, this chapter sets out to illustrate how international tourism

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has created a socio-cultural milieu within which the Khmer Rouge and Angkor now continuously intersect, often shaping each other in mutually constitutive ways.4 The chapter concludes by brieﬂy reﬂecting upon how such a tourism industry has shaped processes of economic development, nationalism, and the country’s cultural landscape since the beginning of the 1990s.

Conceptualizing tourism Eddie (50s, American, 10-day package to Thailand and Cambodia): If somebody says Cambodia, what do you think of, the killing ﬁelds or Angkor Wat, there is nothing else that comes to mind. Yukio (50, Japanese, 3-day tour to Bangkok and Siem Reap): Yes I heard of Angkor Wat, but all I knew about Cambodia was that it was dangerous, that’s all I knew.5 To date, studies of tourism in Cambodia have essentially fallen within the remit of policy, and received little or no academic attention. Cambodia’s post-conﬂict tourism industry has undoubtedly been both shaped and hindered by the country’s grossly inadequate social and physical infrastructures. Roads, airports, hotels, and the range of skills required for a hospitality industry have all required overhauling over the last decade or so. Given such demands, World Bank or UNESCO heritage management reports have principally discussed tourism in terms of facility provision or infrastructure development. In contrast, little attention has been given to the cultural artifacts produced and circulated by the travel and tourism industry and the role they play in shaping broader social processes such as Cambodia’s socioeconomic development or post-war nationalistic anxieties. In response, this chapter offers four analytical themes—the lure of the jungle; the well-trodden path; revival and restoration; megalomania—to explore the ways in which the country is (re)presented to, framed by, and known by, today’s international visitor. Together, these four themes explore notions of place, culture, and history in metaphorical, metonymical, and literal terms. The chapter speciﬁcally focuses on the connections between the symbolic economies of tourism and the material realities of actually being a tourist in the country. This approach, referred to by Crouch (2005) as “embodied semiotics,” analytically juxtaposes a diverse range of representations and narratives—including hotel interiors, Hollywood ﬁlms, or decades of television news coverage—with the various ways in which tourists talk about and actually encounter the country. Pursuing such an analysis reveals how—despite being separated by hundreds of years and providing the country with two vastly different historical legacies—the Khmer Rouge and Angkor periods do not merely converge but actually fold through and re-cast one another within a socio-cultural landscape of con-

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temporary tourism. The chapter also argues that the dominant framings and representations of Cambodia as a tourist destination are non-Cambodian. While the Royal Government’s Ministry of Tourism has consistently produced a range of promotional material since the mid-1990s, its impact remains minimal in comparison to the consistently pervasive inﬂuence of travel writing or guidebooks and television channels such as Lonely Planet or Discovery Channel. The ﬁnal section of the chapter reﬂects upon the wider social impact of such tourism dynamics. Themes explored in the preceding four sections are brought together to illustrate the various ways in which tourism-related representations and framings inﬂuence highly charged issues such as national identity, patterns of socioeconomic development, and the transmission of the past through forms of material and non-material culture. It will be seen that urban architecture, imbalances in infrastructure development, the priorities of a national heritage industry, and the broader social fabric of Cambodia itself have all responded to the ways in which Cambodia has become framed and encountered as a post-conﬂict tourist destination.

Deep in the jungle Anticipating Angkor, A Dream Deferred Some people are suckers for lost cities. I am. I’ve sought out, among others, Machu Picchu, Pompeii, Petra, Ephesus, Karnak and Uxmal. But Angkor, the jungle-covered capital of the ancient Khmer civilization in Cambodia, has always seemed to me the Mother of All Lost Cities . . . The romance of its ‘discovery’ and exploration by the French in the mid-19th Century was part of Angkor’s glamour . . . Sometimes I just sat trying to contemplate cosmology and civilization, or trying to pretend I was Henri Mouhot, who came upon the ruins in 1861. (New York Times, July 21, 2002)6 Angkor’s re-emergence as Cambodia’s principal tourist attraction in the last decade has been characterized by a small number of dominant framings. In addition to being seen as the premier World Heritage Site of Southeast Asia, it has also come to be seen as the quintessential ruin. Despite being comprised of numerous temples, rivers, monasteries, and villages, the 400-square-kilometer site has been consistently represented through a small repertoire of iconic images. Postcards, travel agent brochures, coffee table books, and even the 2001 Hollywood ﬁlm Tomb Raider shot at Angkor, have all consistently portrayed the site as a deserted landscape, void of modern intrusions (see Winter 2003). In the few instances where people are represented, they are invariably orange-robed

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monks or elderly villagers engaged in spiritual acts. In essence, Angkor is merely a landscape of ruinous stone structures entwined with vegetation and an ever encroaching “jungle.” This notion of the ruin has a very speciﬁc genealogy. Within a context of mid-nineteenth-century European travel and colonial endeavor, a narrative of Angkor “discovered” in the jungle by the French botanist Henri Mouhot emerged. As Mouhot’s diaries circulated, ﬁrst across French archaeological circles and subsequently across Europe, his account of abandoned antiquities lost in the jungle and awaiting reclamation provided the political mileage for further exploration and intervention in the region (Edwards 2006). Today the various cultural artifacts of the tourism industry have become the media through which this notion of lost ruin is transmitted into the contemporary. Late-nineteenth-century engravings of Angkor are reprinted as postcards, battered suitcases become the objet d’art of hotels, and quotes from the diaries of early travelers frame the narrative of early-twenty-ﬁrst-century guidebooks and newspaper articles. At the heart of this historical transmission is romance. The ﬁgure of André Malraux, despite being arrested for looting one of Angkor’s temples in 1923, provides the theme for numerous hotel suites by personifying a golden age of luxury travel. The romance and nostalgia for an Indochina of the past being channeled through Angkor today has perhaps reached a zenith of simulacra in various new luxury hotels in Siem Reap. One in particular, the Victoria Angkor Hotel, has been extensively decorated with antique inkstands, photographs, binoculars, and other artifacts in an attempt to evoke a romanticized vision of the “Far East.” In describing the concept, the hotel manager explained: “we wanted people who would walk in to feel as if this was not a hotel, but one of those grand Indochina homes from the 1930s, whose owner had traveled through Asia and collected objects.”7 Pivotal to the hotel’s concept is the idea of temples hidden in the jungle. In addition to a suite named after Angkor’s iconic partial ruin, Ta Prohm, the hotel is lined with paintings of jungle-ridden, overgrown architecture. Far from isolated, this “imagineering” of Angkor lies within a rich landscape of tourism tropes—including souvenirs, postcards, and themed restaurants—all communicating the idea that Cambodia’s most important historical artifacts still lie buried in the jungle. Somewhat paradoxically, the jungle also acts as a repository for romanticized visions of Cambodia’s more recent history. In his eclectic analysis of how landscape features take on particular collective memories, Simon Schama (1995) illustrates how the forest has been allegorically associated with hiding, darkness, and evil. Accordingly, for many tourists arriving from outside Southeast Asia today, the forest—re-inscribed and exoticized as jungle—serves as a metaphor for a Cambodia imagined in terms of a political “other.” Even the very moment of arrival can be imbued with these very feelings:

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Val (50s, American, Thailand and Cambodia for three weeks): as we were ﬂying in I expected to see much more jungle out of the plane window. Thick jungle. I guess I imagined it that way from all the Vietnam War ﬁlms you see. I imagined all of this region to be like that, it’s known as a place of guerrilla, jungle warfare. Many visitors arrive in Cambodia today with a rudimentary, but perhaps less than detailed, understanding of the atrocities inﬂicted by the Khmer Rouge regime of the 1970s. In addition to knowing about the infamous topography of the Cambodian “killing ﬁelds,” visitors also often arrive with an awareness that the country’s cities were evacuated by the Khmer Rouge in 1975, and that as the regime ceded power throughout the 1980s, ﬁghting continued across remote western provinces. As with Angkor, a popular memory of the Khmer Rouge seems to have formed around an imagining of the jungle; a vision of landscape where evil has hidden, fought, lost, and eventually taken political refuge: Natalie (55, Italian, traveling in Thailand, Laos, and Cambodia for two months): When I said in Italy that I go to Cambodia people say “ah . . . be careful the Khmer Rouge are still waiting there in the jungle . . . there are bombs everywhere,” we were told this by all our friends. On occasions these two histories converge within a single narrative representation. Almost all guidebooks on Cambodia, for example, make reference to the looting of remote jungle-hidden temples by “communist guerrillas” or “Khmer Rouge guerrillas.” A similar theme runs through the 1979 ﬁlm Apocalypse Now, which has become a “must see” for many visitors planning a trip to Southeast Asia today. Put brieﬂy, the ﬁlm tells the story of the assassination of a renegade American soldier who sets himself up as a leader of a mysterious tribe dedicated to the worship of Angkorean-style statuary deep in the Cambodian jungle. Mirroring Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the ﬁlm conﬂates the ancient and the modern of Cambodian history within a landscape of rivers and impenetrable jungle: an aesthetic that lingers today:8 Barry (33, Australian, visiting Southeast Asia for one month): I had the idea that the whole of Southeast Asia was dense jungle, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam . . . and that would be from movies, Apocalypse Now, Predator, from Vietnam war and other jungle type movies. With things, ruins, out there to really explore you know. Stuart (20s, English, two-month trip to Thailand and Cambodia): I expected more jungle in the temples, I think I was expecting more TV jungle. That’s what we were brainwashed to be expecting. We saw Sylvester Stallone carrying his M16 through that jungle, hacking away with his machete, swinging through the vines.

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Interestingly, the very same juxtaposition of exploration and danger also forms the basis of the narrative for documentary makers for TV channels such as the Discovery channel and the National Geographic channel. One documentary in particular, combines the archaeological exploration of lost Angkorean structures with the perils of landmine clearance in order to add a sense of mystique and drama to what would otherwise be a mundane scholarly pursuit, as the following program description illustrates: In the late 1960s war took a murderous grasp on Cambodia and didn’t let go for 30 years. The temples of Angkor were lost to the jungle. During the war years Cambodia was littered with unexploded ordinance and landmines . . . In this program, anthropologist Charles Higham and guide Sokhorn Sin travel to Northern Cambodia to explore the temples around Koh Ker . . . Dr Higham explores seven temples, one of which has not been demined, and brings his unique expertise to bear on them. The program also discusses the demining process, showing how it is done, and witnessing the detonation of some live landmines.9 This account neatly illustrates how Cambodia’s “history” has come to be encapsulated within a single vision of landscape. Continually romanticized and mythologized as either terra incognita or a site of lurking danger, the jungle serves as a metaphor that powerfully conveys a mysterious and “dark” past. For today’s visitor, the ever-present promise of hidden architectural treasures also carries a risk of exploration. Whether it be close to Angkor’s well-trodden temples or in “remote” provinces along the Thai border, the jungle both lures and repels tourists in emotional, cognitive, and corporal ways. As we shall see shortly, this has major implications for the geographical distribution of tourism development across the country. In the meantime, the following section introduces the idea of the well-trodden path in order to illuminate how this imagined geography is subjectively negotiated by tourists.

The well-trodden path These days, Cambodia is not necessarily the most dangerous place in the world, or not even a nasty place, but it is an exotic, very inexpensive stop that every traveler to Asia should make. Is it safe? Well if you stay inside the tourist ruts (literally), don’t venture outside the ill-deﬁned safety zone and watch your step, Cambodia can be safe. Cambodia can also be brutal if you pass through the invisible safety barrier and end up in the hands of the Khmer Rouge . . . One tourist can ﬂy into Phnom Penh and Siem Reap on a modern jet, stay in a ﬁve star hotel, and see the temple complex, complete with ice cold Pepsis, an air conditioned car and a good meal. Another tourist can

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ﬁnd himself kneeling at the edge of a shallow, hastily dug grave, waiting for the riﬂe butt that will slam into his cortex, ending his brief but adventurous life. The difference between the two scenarios might be 10km or lingering a few too many minutes along the road. (W. Fielding’s The World’s Most Dangerous Places, 1998)10 It was suggested above that the re-working of a French colonial history has placed the idea of exploration at the heart of Angkorean tourism. Events in recent history have also led to a strong touristic narrative around the idea of exploring a country that is once again “opening up.” In such a context Cambodia is a land of discovery, a frontier territory, a place embattled by war and political turmoil. Thanatourism—travel oriented around sites of war and genocide—has received considerable academic attention in recent years (Adams 2001; Lennon and Foley 2000). This theme is pursued further here via the notion of the well-trodden path, an element of landscape that is simultaneously kept to, and left, both in metaphorical and literal ways. An omnipresent feature of all guidebooks on Cambodia and Angkor is a “Warning, Landmines!” section. Although the text of these sections is tempered with each new edition as more sites are cleared, readers are commonly advised to “not stray from well-marked paths under any circumstances” (Robinson and Wheeler 1992: 47). Not surprisingly, the very real danger presented by unexploded ordinance has charged many visits to Angkor with feelings of apprehension and fear: Ming (44, Chinese, in Cambodia for three days): Everything I heard about Cambodia was like . . . stick to the path, do the safe things, it has that reputation of landmines, Khmer Rouge, danger. Michiko (60s, Japanese, two-day tour to Siem Reap via Bangkok): We talked to the villagers. They wanted to show us where their village was. We thought about it but we were too worried about landmines to wander off. Michiko’s response illustrates how a call to explore can be countered by a rational voice of caution. For many, though, the very allure of Angkor directly arises from the close proximity of fear and trepidation, and a desire to unearth the secrets of the jungle: Jacqueline (60, French, fourteen-day group tour of Vietnam and Cambodia): We did not adventure ourselves into the jungle, we wanted to, it feels slightly dangerous. Aren’t there animals, snakes in there? And there was no pathway marked. It’s true there are landmines! Our guide advised us not to go off the bigger tracks because there are still some landmines.

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Interestingly, this emotional tension has now become embedded within the narrative accounts of Angkor presented by local tour guides, as this excerpt from an interview with Sophong, a Siem Reap-based guide, illustrates: Sophong (23, resident of Siem Reap, full-time guide): Yes many Japanese tourists want to know what happened to Pol Pot. They always ask if the Khmer Rouge were hiding in the jungle, or in the libraries of Angkor Wat, which temples they mined. So I always talk about that now. They want to know if there are still mines in Angkor, it’s interesting for them I think. For certain visitors to Cambodia, the hidden danger of millions of unexploded landmines generates far more than merely a passing interest counterbalanced by a sense of caution. Since the early 1990s, a game of cat and mouse has been played between de-mining agencies and adventure-seeking tourists. Working geographically outwards from the Angkor world heritage park, bodies such as the Halo Trust and the Cambodian Mine Action Center (CMAC) have endeavored to make numerous temple complexes—including Beng Melea, Koh Ker, and Banteay Chmaar—safe and accessible. The interweaving of travelogues and guidebooks with the more ephemeral, but equally potent, circuit of backpacker tales has created an imagining of the Cambodian countryside bound up in the romance of un-chartered, danger-ridden, territories (see Figure 3.1). It is not only unexploded ordinance that lies in wait; tales of expeditions to remote and dangerous, jungle-buried temples also await their intrepid authors. Sitting at the heart of this desire to “ﬂirt with space” (Crouch 2005) is the idea of kairos, where it is not only important to be (among) the ﬁrst to encounter a landscape, but also to be there at a particular moment in history: Marc (29, Belgian, Thailand and Cambodia for one week): We like to travel to places after there has been some kind of insurrection, we thought Cambodia was stabilizing a bit too fast and if you don’t come here quickly it will be a normal country and boring. We want a sense of danger, not actual danger. We don’t want actual danger, just perceived danger, and exploring all these remote temples gives you that feeling. Implicit here is a broader reading of the country as a whole. Cambodia represents an opportunity to “explore” a place that has yet to be incorporated into the heavily populated tourist circuits of neighboring Thailand, Malaysia, and even, to some extent, Vietnam. More speciﬁcally, Marc’s response illustrates how there is a seduction of place in Cambodia’s landscapes, both rural and urban, built around leaving the well-trodden path of international tourism. In order to mark this spatial transition, both guidebooks and tourists alike commonly present Cambodia’s border crossings

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Figure 3.1 Postcard available in Phnom Penh, 2003 Monument Books Publishing, Phnom Penh.

as not merely territorial boundaries, but as frontiers of wilderness and danger involving a rite of passage. To quote Marc again: Marc: I have wanted to come here for years, a friend of ours came here in 1995 and was telling us how the road is dangerous, and if you take the train it will get hijacked, so in my head I have all these maps. For me the border town of Poipet is a name that is utterly dangerous, my friend came across it by accident and he survived certain death . . . Dani (30, Belgian, partner of Marc): It is now you’re telling me all this! In our guide books it says you cannot go anywhere apart from the temples. I was very scared, and we think it’s the same thing for Phnom Penh. Marc’s account indicates the allure Cambodia holds as a place of insurrection and danger. Sales of T-shirts emblazoned with images of military ordinance or the words “I survived Cambodia” illustrate how this framing is communicated to, and thus circulates across, the broader touristic community (see Figure 3.2). However, while the quest for adventure and risk often seems largely unabated for many young (male) travelers, other

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visitors—including, it seems, Dani as she learns more—see Cambodia as a series of landscapes where desires for exploration are more tempered by concerns for personal safety: Neal (45, American, trip to Thailand and Angkor, in Cambodia for two days): I had the feeling a guide would be assigned to you, the government would be watching what you’re doing, that you had to stay on the paths and that you couldn’t linger anywhere. I was even told to stay on the path in Angkor. They were kind of left over ideas, from American TV, because of the Khmer Rouge, that kind of thing. Alex (32, German, living in Singapore, in Cambodia for three days): Cambodia’s dangerous, for sure. We heard even around Angkor it’s not safe, landmines, old Khmer Rouge cronies. We were recommended by friends, that to be safe, take a guide, see the temples and get the hell out of here. So that’s what we’re doing. Considered together, these various responses once again indicate how visions of an ancient Angkor have become deeply infused with narratives of

Figure 3.2 T-shirts on sale in Phnom Penh market Photo by Tim Winter.

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turmoil, a political “other” and a fear for personal security. Adopting the notion of the well-trodden path reveals how Cambodia’s ancient and modern pasts converge in particular ways to create a touristic encounter characterized by negotiation, desire, and resistance. For some, leaving the path—both metaphorically and literally—is inherently seductive, whereas for others, a perception of Cambodia as dark and dangerous means that sticking to that path is eminently preferable and safer—a fact not lost on many local tour guides, who consistently reap ﬁnancial reward by petitioning clients about the dangers supposedly lurking beyond their net of security.

Revival and restoration Inherent to the idea of history lying in the jungle is the notion of decline. A key part of Angkor’s allure as a tourist destination today relates to its fall and supposed abandonment in the mid-ﬁfteenth century, a narrative that, once again, can be traced back to the diaries of Henri Mouhot. As Edwards (2006) extensively illustrates, the publication of Mouhot’s account of “discovering” Angkor in 1860 would come to play a pivotal role in shaping France’s political strategies in Indochina. Instrumental in molding Angkor as a socio-political totem unifying the cultural, ethnic and nationalistic histories of an emergent Cambodge, France would encapsulate the restoration of former glories within the larger political agenda of forming a protectorate. Reframed as “national” monument, Angkor symbolized a nation in ruins, and the provision of restoration expertise in the form of the French conservation school, the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) would be closely tied to the idea of “restoring” the political strength of early-twentieth-century Cambodge. In other words, moving far beyond merely an architectural enterprise, the reconstruction of temples was imbued with hopes of social and political restitution for a country threatened by conﬂict and potential subjugation from either side. Interestingly, this bond between architectural and socio-political reconstruction would powerfully re-appear after the turmoil of the 1970s and 1980s. Designated as one of the world’s most endangered World Heritage Sites, Angkor would become the recipient of a huge program of aid, with organizations from more than twenty countries offering assistance. Given that Cambodia had suffered one of the most brutal social experiments inﬂicted upon a nation in the twentieth century, restoration of a common cultural heritage was, understandably, seen as a vital part of societal reconstruction. Ongoing international media coverage of Angkor’s desecration and purloin would also ensure this convergence of cultural and socio-political restitution emerged as a prevalent theme within tourism. The following thoughts left in the visitors book provided by the World Monument Fund at the Preah Khan temple complex indicate the role such a theme plays in the way many tourists reﬂect upon their visit to Angkor:

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Tim Winter Naoya (Japan): It has been my dream to come to Angkor for a long time and ﬁnally I have come. I have felt a strong need for the restoration work you do. It is very important for this poor country and for everyone. Dominique (France): We are so glad this country is now open to tourists, it allows us all to beneﬁt from the splendor. Your efforts to repair and protect this magniﬁcent temple are important for this sad country and the entire world. Katia (Canada): Hoping that these marvels will give visitors and humanity the will to live in harmony. The temples should counterbalance the destruction wrought by the Khmer Rouge. Keep up the good work and feel proud.

Angkor’s omnipotence within Cambodian history and sense of national identity would also mean efforts to rehabilitate more contemporary, vernacular, or non-material cultural forms would frequently seek their validity through an association with past glories. Not surprisingly, this connection invariably emerged because of the potential presented by a rapidly expanding tourism industry primarily trading upon the site’s global fame. In this respect, tourism initiated a conﬂation of histories, where the ancient and modern converged within a single narrative of cultural rejuvenation. Crucially, however, the all-too-familiar cultural logics of the tourism industry meant that the legacy of Pol Pot would principally gravitate around the recovery of those traditions or knowledges that could be performed, wrapped or photographed. Take dance for example. Edwards (2001, 2002) has argued that “classical Khmer” dance played an important role in symbolically connecting latenineteenth-century Cambodge with a former Angkorean period. Strongly reminiscent of the carved apsaras lining numerous temples, the dancer represented an embodied and nationalized manifestation of a templed landscape. Today, with the apsara dance now installed as the obligatory cultural performance for visitors to the country, those values have been re-politicized through tourism. Typically introduced as either the “authentic Angkorean,” “traditional Khmer,” or “classical Cambodian” dance, its ubiquity also stems from its metonymic status within a process of national and cultural recovery. Captured within a richly costumed aesthetic of timeless beauty and grace, performances by young dancers involve abstract and unfathomable histories of war and genocide being feminized, domesticated and transformed into a narrative of progress and hope. In addition to dance, the kudos and historical legitimacy attained by associating “endangered” cultural forms with ancient glories has also led to the restoration of Cambodia’s artisan skills being dominated by certain textile or stone and wood-carving industries. As Dahles and ter Horst illustrate in their chapter on the silk industry, this has largely happened through

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a non-governmental civil society deliberately targeting the tourist dollar as a way of marrying demands for community development with the rejuvenation of traditional arts and crafts. The now annual Angkor Silk Fair, along with the Siem Reap-based carving school Les Artisans d’Angkor, are two examples of a well-established landscape of organizations invoking a theme of restitution, a landscape capitalizing on the interweaving symbolic exchange values of Angkor and the Khmer Rouge within a contemporary economy of tourism.

Megalomania In Cambodia today the grand narratives of the country’s history largely pass unquestioned. The sublime resplendency of an ancient past lies in stark contrast to the demonic inhumanity of modern times. Invariably, the construction of these two historical narratives centers upon the idea of a political elite. As the master creator of some of Angkor’s most magniﬁcent structures, including Bayon and Ta Prohm, Jayavarman VII is now widely revered and celebrated as the apogee of Khmer history. Conversely, the name Pol Pot has become synonymous with an era of evil, destruction, and brutality. While the polarization of the two ﬁgures is—or would appear to be—entirely natural, it does, however, mask certain parallels. Closer attention reveals that both leaders shared agrarian-based ideologies requiring the mobilization of vast amounts of enslaved labor. More speciﬁcally, in pursuing their respective ambitions, both forged a social structure around a framework of communitarian politics. A quest for omnipotent power also meant their leaderships were characterized by strong megalomaniac tendencies, traits that, unsurprisingly, contributed to their downfall. Despite Pol Pot’s claims of returning Cambodia to “year zero,” signiﬁcant elements of his radical ideology drew inspiration from a vision of a glorious Angkor. In his examination of the party speeches of Democratic Kampuchea, Chandler indicates how the temples were cited as an example of the power of mobilized labor and “national grandeur which could be re-enacted in the 1970s” (1996b: 246). An attempt to reproduce Angkor’s irrigation technology would, however, lead to horriﬁc consequences for the population (Barnett 1990). Interestingly, international tourism is one context where such parallels are simultaneously hidden and revealed. In essence, the two ﬁgures have come to personify their respective histories, linked by the common thread of megalomania, a theme that continually generates curiosity, awe, and feelings of disbelief among visitors to the country. These feelings are invariably compounded by the fact that such contrasting ﬁgures are presented within a single national history. Within Cambodia’s post-conﬂict tourism industry, Jayavarman VII remains a highly conspicuous motif. Depicted as the apogee of a Khmer civilization by both guidebooks and tour guides, his face also adorns

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numerous coffee-table souvenir books, postcards, and paintings. Most notably, however, is the predominance of his bust as the deﬁnitive souvenir of a visit to Angkor. Countless shelves in market stalls and souvenir shops across Siem Reap and Phnom Penh are burdened by the weight of tens of thousands of miniature stone carvings. A weighty, yet portable, replica of Jayavarman VII promises an enduring connection for tourists between the very materiality of Angkor’s temples and the stories of empires and kingdoms received from guides and guidebooks. Clearly, the circulation of such imagery serves to commemorate Jayavarman VII as the megalomaniac leader of an exalted monumental culture. In the case of Pol Pot, however, this celebratory tone is replaced with a quest for understanding, explanation, and a certain level of fascination in the macabre. Rather than ﬁlling the glossy pages of coffee-table books, Pol Pot is more commonly consumed in the form of dense biographies written by university-based academics or journalists. Along with the ubiquitous Lonely Planet guide, these books have come to dominate the rampant pirate publishing industry that has sprung up around the tourism industry in the last decade. As Wood extensively illustrates in his chapter here, Pol Pot’s death in 1998 heralded the beginning of Anlong Veng’s rise as an international tourist destination. Located in the far north of the country, the town has steadily attracted a growing number of adventure tourists hoping to see the house and grave of a notorious despot. The localized tourism infrastructure now includes a market where tourists can purchase old Khmer Rouge uniforms, grainy video CD documentaries or spent bullet cartridges as evidence of a trip to Pol Pot’s ﬁnal resting place. The Ministry of Tourism plans to develop a package tour combining trips to Angkor and Anlong Veng will also mean Cambodia’s two histories of megalomania will soon be consumed either side of lunch.11 Considered together, the examples provided here illustrate how both Angkor and the Khmer Rouge weave in and out of a landscape of contemporary tourism that focuses on a megalomaniac political elite. The ﬁnal part of this chapter turns to consider some of the broader societal implications arising from the convergence and interweaving of these two histories within tourism.

The consequences of tourism L’histoire Café (8am-11pm) Experience the Khmer Rouge lifestyle. Staff Dressed in KR uniform. Khmer Rouge Meals, drinks and the unforgettable Songs. Traditional Khmer show from 5 to 11pm. St. 130 (in front of Tuol Sleng Museum)12

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As one of Cambodia’s biggest industries today, tourism has become instrumental in driving the reclamation of traditions, which invariably accompanies modernity, urbanization, and (post-) industrialization. An era of isolation and “erasure,” immediately followed by an extraordinary level of global interest and investment, has produced extreme and seemingly contradictory processes. Located at the heart of a highly interconnected and competitive regional tourism industry, the Royal Government has sought to foster wealth and development by branding the country around classical glories. The continual adoption of Angkor’s iconic temples by the state and wider Cambodian tourism industry does, however, reﬂect a much deeper anxiety to re-establish vital cultural, ethnic, and national identity markers devastated by decades of turmoil. The prevalence of Jayavarman VII—a situation that can be traced back to early-twentieth-century French historiography—illustrates how tourism is providing a vehicle for this process. Given that the demonic ﬁgure of Pol Pot still very much resides within the nation’s living memory, Jayavarman VII’s megalomania represents a source of much needed pride and strength. In a country seeking out past glories, Jayavarman embodies a history beyond deprecation. This situation, however, raises major questions concerning identity constructions and a state nationalism rooted in a static, if not timeless, vision of a glorious past. As the Cambodian government carves out a brand in such terms to proﬁt from the global tourist dollar, it risks trapping the country in a mono-cultural, monolithic, unchanging, and inﬂexible identity. The combination of this anxiety to reclaim former glories with the touristic interweaving of the Angkor and Khmer Rouge eras also serves to “erase” the six hundred years of history in between. With Angkor dominating a post-conﬂict heritage industry, signiﬁcantly less attention and funding has been given to other aspects of the country’s socio-cultural past, an issue explored in greater detail by Robert Turnbull here. Despite recent efforts by bodies such as UNESCO to address this situation, tourism is contributing to the imbalance.13 Not only is it not helping to ﬁll these gaps, tourism is actively reinforcing the idea that there is little social or cultural history capable of ﬁlling the present voids and ruptures. The distillation of Khmer performance arts around the apsara dance, and material culture around “traditional silks” or replicas of Jayavarman VII illustrates this point. Moreover, as Turnbull highlights, the ongoing destruction of a cultural heritage associated with the vibrant years after Cambodia achieved independence is passing largely unnoticed in times of rapid urban regeneration and with a national heritage industry consumed by ancient temples. It should be stated that the one exception to the historical vacuum argument advanced here is the French colonial period. Nonetheless, as we have seen, beyond the restoration of certain buildings in Phnom Penh, the memory of this episode is principally driven by its connections with Angkor. Somewhat problematically, such nostalgia for a golden era of

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European jungle exploration and discovery contrived for touristic consumption romanticizes, aestheticizes and strips Cambodia’s history of all its contradictions, political conﬂicts, and complexities. More speciﬁcally, the notion of a lost civilization reclaimed from the jungle and restored by foreign experts has created a situation whereby indigenous perspectives of that period are in danger of being denied or overlooked. This issue holds particular pertinence for a country that has faced major obstacles to the cultivation of a postcolonial voice capable of critically addressing that period of its history. Not surprisingly, critical reﬂections concerning the past have principally focused on more recent events. Although internationally sanctioned trials of Khmer Rouge leaders are vital to ascertaining a sense of accountability and retributive justice, a broader societal understanding of this infamous period, and the tumultuous years either side, remains in its early stages. Marschall (2004) has illustrated how South Africa’s attempts to promote social healing and negotiate a national memory through the erection of memorials and preservation of symbolically charged structures has been largely driven by tourism. Anlong Veng, landmine museums, the “killing ﬁelds” of Choeung Ek, as well as the Tuol Sleng genocide centre in Phnom Penh, all present similar “opportunities” for Cambodia. However, as we have seen in the contexts of Germany, Israel, and Japan the use of politically sensitive memorials and their touristic commodiﬁcation is inevitably fraught with tensions and dilemmas. Apart from the Ministerial proclamations cited by Wood in his chapter, the level of public discussion or detailed reﬂection concerning the role these sites can, and should, play in the construction of a social memory for both Cambodians and foreign visitors alike has remained extremely limited. Examples such as the Khmer Rouge-themed cafe noted above illustrate the risk of this traumatic history being fetishized for lurid consumption. In a society characterized by high levels of illiteracy, it is important that careful attention is given to the ways in which material culture and heritage can simultaneously memorialize tyrannical megalomania, but also allow a population to cultivate “the art of forgetting” (Forty and Küchler 2001). The conﬂation of Cambodia’s history into two particular episodes, and the resultant idea that great voids and barren periods lie in between, has its spatial parallel in the geographical distribution of tourism. For the last decade or so the international tourist dollar has been a vital engine of socioeconomic growth for the country. While Phnom Penh and Siem Reap have been the clear beneﬁciaries of this booming industry, the discursive rendering of the Cambodian countryside as jungle has helped forge the idea that these urban centers are “highlights” surrounded by a barren landscape, devoid of any attractions. Moreover, the commonly held notion among tourists that leaving the well-trodden path comes with risk and danger in Cambodia is also stiﬂing the organic development of a more nationwide tourism industry. Since the beginning of the early 1990s, the

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average length of stay of tourists has failed to climb above a mere two and a half days (Ministry of Tourism 2003). Very little of the millions of dollars generated by tourism every year reaches the 85 percent or so of the country’s population that continue to live in the countryside today (Ministry of Planning 2003). In this respect, tourism is signiﬁcantly contributing to the major social ills arising from the country’s ever increasing wealth inequalities. By considering these various threads together, we can see that only those places, cultural forms, or moments of the past associated with either the Khmer Rouge or Angkor, and their points of intersection, get promoted and consumed within an environment of tourism. By implication, those areas that have fallen outside the cultural logics of Cambodia’s postconﬂict tourism industry remain neglected. International tourism is playing a major role in the country’s social and economic development. This chapter has attempted to offer some insights into that process and highlight a number of implications arising from an industry dominated by an unlikely partnership between ancient glory and modern tragedy.

Notes 1 I would like to extend my thanks and appreciation to Laavanya Kathiravelu, Keiko Miura, Thina Ollier, Nicola Piper, Jake Ramsey (FD), Amanda Summerscales, and Winnie Wong for reviewing earlier drafts of this chapter. 2 M. Stoessel (1999) 90 Days in Cambodia, July–October 1998; www.stoessel. ch/cambodia1.htm (accessed on December 12, 2005). 3 From the 140 semi-structured interviews I conducted with international tourists, the words “tragic” and “glorious” were the most commonly cited terms when discussing the Khmer Rouge and Angkor periods. 4 In using the term international tourism there is little attempt to claim this represents a global/universal account. The examples of media coverage presented here are an attempt to represent the framings and representations that have dominated tourism in the post-conﬂict era. As will be seen, excerpts from interviews with tourists spanning multiple countries, continents, and languages do suggest a strong sense of narrative and representational coherence. 5 These excerpts, and the ones that follow, are taken from interviews conducted with tourists in Siem Reap during 2000–01 and 2004. Lasting between two and three hours, interviews were semi-structured in nature, recorded on minidisk, and later transcribed. 6 See Rose 2002: 23. 7 See Cambodia Daily Weekend (2004) “Rebuilding a bygone era,” July 3–4, pp. 8–9. 8 See also Hartley 2002. 9 For further details see Guardians of Angkor, www.nationalgeographic.com. 10 R. Pelton, C. Aral and W. Dulles (1998) W. Fielding’s The World’s Most Dangerous Places, Redondo Beach CA: Fielding Worldwide. Cited in Adams 2003: 43. 11 For further details see A. Sipress (2004a) “Tourism Plans for the Khmer Rouge Site,” Washington Post, April 28. 12 Advert from Phnom Penh Eating and Drinking (2005), free guide, July– September, Phnom Penh: Cambodia Pocket Guide Co Ltd. 13 See for example UNESCO/Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts (2004) Inventory of Intangible Cultural Heritage of Cambodia, Phnom Penh: UNESCO/Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts.

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4

The fascination for Angkor Wat and the ideology of the visible Panivong Norindr1

Why does Angkor Wat continue, to this day, to fascinate us? That is one of the questions this paper strives to answer. It does so in a circuitous fashion, by harking back to the ravishment experienced by writers, artists, and ﬁlmmakers at the sight of the temple or its other worldly ﬁgurations— the apsaras, the Cambodian dancers, the ruins, etc. This fascination may have been elicited by a reconstitution of Angkor Wat, such as the one seen by the French poet Michel Butor at the 1931 Colonial Exposition when he was an impressionable young boy,2 or by the chromolithographs that adorned the pages of such illustrated journals as L’Illustration, as Clara Malraux recounts in her memoirs.3 For those who wanted to “dream about Cambodia,” they could turn to Francis Garnier’s Voyage d’Exploration en Indochine, with its colorful portraits, lavish maps, and exotic panoramas. And for those in need of immediate contentment, the Musée Guimet would provide all of the rapture that could be felt at the sight of Cambodian artifacts. One thing seems clear: the experience of being spellbound or transﬁxed described by these men and women was achieved by visions or ways of imagining visually. In fact, as Martin Jay reminds us, “the word fascination . . . has itself an origin in the Latin for casting a spell, usually by visual means” (1993: 11). This study traces a genealogy of this fascination for Angkor Wat and what it reveals of the “ideology of the visible”4 and its stakes. Angkor is not simply a monument to man’s creativity, a repository of cultural values, or an object of pure aesthetic enjoyment; it is the site of intense aesthetic re-imagining, and political and economic appropriation. In our times, Angkor Wat has become both the emblem of the political unity of the modern Cambodian nation state—its towers have adorned the different ﬂags of the Khmer nation, which have endured regime changes, covert imperial wars, the Khmer Rouge genocide, and foreign incursion—and the powerful symbol of the nation’s glorious past and the resilience of its people. These different modes of seeing and representing Cambodia through its most prestigious emblem, Angkor Wat, have complex political antecedents and economic ramiﬁcations. We will not focus here on its enormous impact on the nation’s economy nor on the

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beneﬁts it has created for Cambodia’s tourist industry, but on the momentous questions the overdetermined reliance on the symbolic prestige of Angkor Wat raises. As we have seen in the introduction to this volume, since its listing as a World Heritage Site in 1992, Angkor has attracted ever greater numbers of international tourists. But mass tourism has also meant having to manage hordes of tourists and ﬁnding a delicate balance between the preservation of the ruins and the building of new hotels and infrastructures to accommodate the visitors while minimizing their potentially destructive impact on the environment, the people, and Cambodian customs and traditional way of life. Competing visions of preservation and tourism have emerged, and their supporters have voiced diverging opinions over questions of conservation and economic development. On one side, the international community, most notably UNESCO, have pushed for the promulgation of legislation that would protect these archeological sites—which are dispersed over 400 square kilometers in the province of Siem Reap—with the assistance of a full-ﬂedged agency (APSARA—Authority for Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap) that has the authority to enforce the law and prevent the looting of this national treasure; on the other, there is a consortium of lobbies and private businesses that do not always abide by the law when important economic interests are at stake. Tim Winter has cogently examined one such conﬂict. He considers, in particular, the concept of “cultural tourism” promoted to attenuate the impact of “low-quality mass tourism,” which did not prevent such a Hollywood blockbuster ﬁlm as Tomb Raider from being ﬁlmed on location in Angkor, a sight that, he argues, is antithetical to the image of Angkor that UNESCO and the Cambodian authorities had planned to present to the world. UNESCO, through a spokesman, denounced the “violent and warrior-like character of Lara Croft, the heroine” of the Tomb Raider video game (Winter 2003: 67). But should UNESCO be in the business of policing the “image” of Angkor and keep watch over “Angkor’s representation in the global media” (Winter 2003: 63)? Although one can object to the liberties taken by Hollywood producers who have “demonstrated little concern for a representational integrity of Angkor’s cultural and historical particularities” (Winter 2003: 62), we must also recognize that the mission of APSARA has been deﬁned much more narrowly: “to protect, preserve, conserve and develop the archeological, cultural and eco-historical park of Angkor” (UNESCO 1998: 10, my translation). To extend the protection of Angkor beyond real material objects to include ﬁlmic images and other iconographic representations of Angkor is highly problematic because it assumes that cinema (and photography) are transparent media that faithfully (and unproblematically) reproduce reality; it also presumes that one has access to the “truth” of the image, and thus that one is in a position to gauge its degree of realness or authenticity; controlling and regulating the dissemination of sanctioned images of

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Angkor that can be presented to the rest of the world would only succeed in prescribing how one must see and imagine Angkor. This last point needs to be emphasized because it is precisely this constraining of the ﬁeld of vision—which the French instituted more than a century ago by promoting Cambodia’s culture almost exclusively in terms of its glorious past, a practice still pervasive today—that binds its rich heritage to monumental architecture and sacred art and which, I argue, contributes to the impoverishment of our vision. It is also my contention that the reproduction and circulation of the same iconic images of Angkor Wat in painting or cinema, for instance, and the reiteration of the same motifs in literary texts, ethnographic accounts, travel narratives, art catalogues, and journalistic reports construct a discursive ﬁeld that authenticates these images and gives them the status of the “real.” More than simply bestowing upon them an ofﬁcial stamp of “authenticity,” they work to preserve their aura as great works of art that must be saved for the rest of humanity, especially when the Cambodians themselves might appear unable or unwilling to take action. To return to our case in hand, only a UNESCO-sanctioned representation of Angkor that would not undermine its aura would be authorized. Any further violation could be severely punished, and the threat of delisting Angkor from its favored status as a World Heritage Site was made (Winter 2003: 63).5 Winter describes this uproar on the international stage as the result of “a clash of cultures”: “this contradictory clash of imaginary ‘cultures,’ one embedded in the superﬁcial, reductive and aesthetically driven paradigm of Hollywood cinematography, and the other being a notion of heritage built around largely modernist distinctions between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture” (2003: 58). This analysis of the clash between cultures, although accurate, needs further elaboration and must also consider the political terrain on which this UNESCO policy stands—which requires patient excavation in order to account for the sedimented knowledge and memories collected over time. With these issues in mind, I trace, in what follows, the trajectory of the auratic construction of Angkor Wat in French literary culture beginning in the nineteenth century, when Angkor Wat was said to have been “rediscovered” by Henri Mouhot, and examine some of the prevalent ideas and assumptions that undergird its preservation, shoring up, at the same time, France’s prestige and reputation as an enlightened nation. I must also note that the exclusive focus on the different ideologies of conservation seems to me to mask far more serious questions that are less studied by scholars. The real stake seems to be the lack of attention to more popular forms of cultural expressions in favor of an elite history, one founded on royal dynasties and genealogies and expressed in its architecture and art, which are then reﬁgured to embody what is best in Cambodian culture and can even stand for Cambodianness as a whole. The Cambodian people have largely been ignored, except to deplore their fate as victims of the Khmer Rouge genocide or as sexual

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prey in the economy of sex tourism and human trafﬁcking.6 By tracing a history of how this overdetermined vision of Angkor has emerged, I hope to disrupt this “auratic” vision of Angkor and break the “French” frame by which contemporary Cambodia is still apprehended today. New images of vibrant customs and cultural practices must be brought to light, which must distinguish themselves from the same commodiﬁed and instrumentalized images of Angkor mobilized by a global tourism industry. By identifying Angkor Wat and court culture as the quintessence of Cambodianness, writers and scholars support a very narrow deﬁnition of what it means to be Khmer, and perpetuate, at the same time, dangerous myths about the loss of the nation’s cultural heritage and customs, promoting, perhaps unwittingly, high culture over more popular forms of knowledge. One researcher puts it very pointedly in the following terms: “Functionaries and people of learning [les lettrés] evoke voapathoa, the culture. Peasants and common people [les petites gens] talk about toumniem toumnoap, the customs” (Crochet 1997: 51).7 She adds: The voapathoa of the ﬁrst group, from the Pali vappa [to sow] and dhamma [the law, the order of things, Buddhist virtues] refers to a sophisticated body of knowledge and practices, linked to the court, the sangha [the ecclesiastical community] or the University, a classical culture that acts as guarantor for the ofﬁcial image of Khmer identity. As an institution, it has become so ossiﬁed that what has been invented, from start to ﬁnish, merely thirty years ago, is being presented as a Khmer “tradition”: folk ballets—the dance of the peacock, the dance of the coconuts, the dance of the Chams—were created in the 1960s by Hong Thun Hak, at the Royal University of Fine Arts.” (Crochet 1997: 59, my translation) She also lists “certain weaving patterns, the fabrication of silver boxes, the masks and costumes of the corps de ballet, the numerous statues, the ancient texts scrolled on palm leaves and the modern texts preserved in the National Library” (Crochet 1997: 57) as having been identiﬁed as cultural expressions of great signiﬁcance to warrant preservation, and thus sanctioned as being part of the authentic cultural “Khmer heritage.” The loss of the knowledge of farmers about their local ﬂora and fauna, crucial for the continued practice of traditional medicine, or of their oral traditions and festive ceremonies, are never discussed in the same way as the damage done in the Angkor Wat architectural complex by looters who continue to smuggle Khmer artifacts out of the country. The task of the postcolonial critic is not to denounce these losses, nor to bemoan the complicity of scholars who, by the very focus of their study, legitimize certain areas of research and reinforce an elitist view of culture, but to help envision anew and attenuate the force of the French framing model

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by foregrounding many keys issues such as the questions of representation and fantasies, the nature of artistic record and memories, and the relation of art to economic and political interests.

Seeing Angkor Wat Yes, I have seen it, it exists, it is not merely one of Huysmans’ dream in En rade: “Where, in what period of time, under what latitude and horizon could this immense palace rise with its domes soaring in the sky, its phallic columns, its pillars emerging from a paving made up of gleaming/shimmering and solid water? (Butor 1971: 7, my translation) These words articulate, in a poetic fashion, the centrality of vision in the rendering of the sense of wonderment at the sight of Angkor Wat. But we may also ask what Butor saw or failed to see there. As important as the question of sight is the issue of what remains outside the ﬁeld of vision, outside the frame, beyond our visual range or purview. Because I postulate that Butor’s poetic text also expresses the experience of those who have preceded him, I also ask the following question: What did the French actually see when they set their gaze on Angkor? Can “seeing” also mean, as it was for André Malraux, “imagining as a work of art”— “to see means, for us, to imagine in a work of art form” (1951: 272–3, my translation)—which also leads us to ask whether we can trust vision when it triggers a sense of wonderment and obliterates history or disengages us from the material reality of the situation. For Butor, and many authors who have written about Angkor, how then are they to convey to the public at large this great “rediscovery”? To what extent does the suppression or elision of the historical context surrounding the ediﬁcation of Angkor enable a peculiar type of projection of private fantasies that can ultimately be recuperated by a colonialist discourse? What are the recurrent tropes used to signify Angkor? Let us turn to one of the earliest references to Angkor Wat in French literature. It is to be found in Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s L’Eve future,8 the author’s second and last novel. First published on May 4, 1886, it is, admittedly, not a novel about Angkor or French Indochina. Paul Valéry, the great French modernist poet, describes the plot of L’Eve future in these terms: “the creation, by a frenetic Edison, of a woman made of gotta percha and steel, animated by electrical current, but above all, by the charming narrator endowed with an eminently modern spirit” (Valéry 1941: 6). In a novel that many critics consider to be Villiers’ masterpiece, a short passage merits our attention. It is to be found in a chapter entitled “Retrospective,” a chapter that precedes the important meditation/speculation on the “snapshots of world history” (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam 1982: 21) that were never taken, and where Edison expresses his astonishment

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at the fact that no one before him had invented the phonograph: “what is most surprising in history, most unimaginable, is that among all the great inventions across the centuries, no one thought of the Phonograph!” (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam 1982: 19). He then enumerates a long list of inventions or techniques drawn from the archive of scientiﬁc records, including the geometry devised by Euclid and Pythagoras, the laws governing liquids as postulated by Archimedes, the philosophy of language introduced by Aristotle, the astronomy of Eratosthenes who devoted his entire life to “measuring the arc of the meridian between the solstices” (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam 1982: 19), as well as other discoveries made by Babylonian engineers: Of what of the architects of the sacred citadel of Angkor Wat, those unknown Michelangelos of a temple into which one could ﬁt a couple dozen Louvres, and which is half again as lofty, I think, as the Pyramid of Cheops—what of them? Their temple is still to be seen in the northern part of Cambodia; every architrave, every courtyard, every immense column (and there are hundreds of them) is formed and chiseled to perfection, and the whole thing set on a mountain surrounded on every side by a hundred leagues of desert. The temple is so ancient that it’s impossible to discover the god for whom it was built, or the source, or even the name of the nation that built it; everything about the building of this gigantic miracle has been lost in the night to time! Was it not easier to imagine the Phonograph than a temple like that? (Villiers de l’Isle-Adam 1982: 20) If this passage is not central for the development of the plot, it nevertheless draws the reader’s attention by its uncanny presence. What meaning are we to give to this uncanny architectural presence within the narration of L’Eve future that brings us to interrogate the function of these architectural referents in this literary space? On a literal level, what seems to ﬁll Edison with wonder is not simply Angkor’s monumentality as a temple–mountain taller than the great pyramid of Gizeh, built by the Egyptian Pharaoh Cheops, more imposing than “two dozens Louvres,” but the contrast between this majestic monumentality and the “démesure” (excessiveness, immoderation) of the decorative work and ornamental art. The architects, promoted to the rank of “unknown Michelangelos,” join the pantheon of great European artists. But, in the narrator’s laudatory praises, in his will to communicate and convey the rightful place of Cambodian art in world culture, one can also detect the desire to retain “the value of pure marvel” (Valéry 1941: 1042, my translation) of a hieratic art—hence the desire and boldness to locate and suspend Angkor in a type of non-lieu, a non-place, a barren space (“surrounded by a hundred leagues of desert”), a void, a type of representation that reﬂects both the writerly and topographical staging of the idea of a phantasmatic Angkor.

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Angkor is an inexhaustible source for reverie, daydreams, and fantasies. The “temple,” in fact, exists only because it is “named” and its architecture is deﬁned, its existence dependent upon the act of enunciation that states/declines its identity. For Derrida reading Heidegger, “architecture and sculpture,” he writes, “occur only in the opening of saying and naming. They are governed and guided by them.” (Derrida 1972: 20) According to Heidegger, all the arts unfold in the space of the poem that is “the essence of art,” in the space of “language,” and of the “word.” This explained the privilege accorded, in a very classical fashion, to poetic speech (Dichtung) and to song, and a disdain for literature. Heidegger says that Dichtung must be liberated from literature (Derrida 1972: 11). The repetition (the word “temple” is repeated not less than four times in this short passage) articulates and marks this space of writing, erecting at the same time a mysterious and fragmentary image of a fantastic Angkor. Architectural elements that are the material representation of this vision of Angkor seem to anchor it in the real, but the sequentiality of the same elements also consolidate its phantasmic quality. Although the temple possesses a rich history that contains its religious, political, aesthetic memory—as early as 1879, Dutch and French archeologists had been busy studying stone inscriptions on founding steles, bases of statues, door piers, pillars, and temple walls, which provide a fairly accurate genealogical record of its history—its historicity is allegedly not accessible (or recoverable). To confess such powerlessness, such frustrated desire to know the foundations of its religious and political history, which would allow the unveiling of the identity of a nation and its people, is accompanied by a desire to ﬁll this void with a simulacrum of its former plenitude. Angkor thus can become for the French, and continues to be to this day, a privileged source of literary and artistic invention. Angkor, the subject of Edison’s daydream, as well as Villiers’ and Butor’s reverie, does indeed exist. The bas-reliefs and casts brought back to France by the Delaporte Mission in 1873 are the material evidences and concrete proofs of its existence. These fragments, ﬁrst exhibited to the public at the Palais du Trocadéro during the 1878 Paris World’s Fair, constitute the cornerstone of French colonial architecture in successive world’s fairs and colonial expositions held in France. Angkor becomes, as I have argued elsewhere, the signiﬁer for all of French Indochina.9 How are we to reconcile Villiers’ Angkor, this vacant architecture, emptied out of all religious and political signiﬁcation, and the notion of invention and fantasies? The question raised by Edison—“was it easier to imagine the Phonograph than a temple like that?”—provides, somewhat paradoxically, the beginning of an answer. Scholars and critics have shown that world’s fairs were also a golden opportunity to showcase and demonstrate the technological superiority of a nation. The hope was that by exhibiting these new products, the public would be enthralled by them and eager to possess them. Walter Benjamin famously wrote about the

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“enthronement of merchandise, with the aura of amusement surrounding it” (1986: 152). Indeed, “world exhibitions [were] the sites of pilgrimages to the commodity fetish” (Benjamin 1986: 151). Incidentally, it was also at the 1878 World’s Fair that a primitive version of the phonograph, as well as the typing machine and the rubber tire, were ﬁrst introduced to the public.10 There is no need to describe here in any details the 40,000 objects gathered at the Palais du Trocadéro under the rubric “ethnographic objects of the peoples foreign to Europe.”11 It sufﬁces to say that, according to this contemporary report, this exceptional booty was lent by state museums and private collectors. Of particular interest to us here is the room dedicated to Cambodian artifacts, where large pieces brought back by Lieutenant Delaporte were displayed, and among them, “one of the enormous groups of giants that supported the multi-headed snake that lined the triumphant path to Angkor.” Like the objects from Peru, Mexico, and Africa exhibited in the next room, this collection is unique in Europe. What is most remarkable here is the French ofﬁcial report’s assertion that these artifacts and fragments of Khmer architecture are only interesting from an “ethnographic” and not “artistic” perspective, and are more likely to be of interest to “scientists” than to “artists” (La Nave 1904: 329). Villiers’ novel, discussed earlier, seems to endorse this view. However, I would argue that the divide between artistic and scientiﬁc ravishment is blurred precisely in the space of these world’s fairs and colonial expositions. This blurring between artistic, scientiﬁc, and political “ravishment” at world’s fairs and colonial expositions seems to have become more pronounced over time. As we have seen in Butor’s case, these exhibitions exerted more than poetic fascination; they captured the imagination of young men, eliciting passionate professional vocations in some of them. As is now well known, the very ﬁrst images of the Indochinese peninsula to be widely disseminated in France were those sketched in Cambodia by the French naturalist Henri Mouhot. These drawings, reproduced in 1863 in the illustrated journal Le Tour du Monde, revealed for the ﬁrst time to the general public the existence of the ruins of Angkor Wat. Ten years later, in 1873, Francis Garnier’s Le Voyage d’Exploration en IndoChine was published. This travel narrative was accompanied by numerous engravings and two magniﬁcent portfolios. The ﬁrst portfolio gathered together scientiﬁc documents such as maps, travel routes, scale drawings, and elevations of monuments. The other portfolio was the Album pittoresque, by Louis Delaporte who, through his watercolors and washdrawings, attempted to bring to life the landscapes and the peoples he encountered. Delaporte’s album kindled the interest of French architect Lucien Fournereau, who traveled to Angkor Wat on an architectural mission. He brought back, in addition to 520 casts of the temple and thirteen sandstone original pieces, beautiful drawings, seven of which were

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exhibited at the 1889 Paris Salon. At the age of thirteen, Henri Marchal, the French curator of the Angkor complex, whose long tenure lasted from 1916 to 1953, is said to have: foreseen his future vocation by contemplating, during the Grand Universal Exposition, the great drawings of the temples brought back by Lucien Fournereau. A revelation, not to say an illumination. The safeguard of these monuments became his life’s purpose, which led him to enroll at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and bury himself in archaeological work. (Heitz 1997: 34) Successive generations of French scholars were, then, not immune to the charm exerted by Angkor Wat, a fascination that is described as being a “revelation,” an “illumination.” What are we to make today of this powerful vision that has lured them (and all of us) into the realm of the senses, and that has satisﬁed in all of us unavowed desires and, what is more, brought aesthetic or visual pleasure?

The celestial becomes modern The question of visual pleasure is indeed an important one and has been the source of contentious debates among scholars in ﬁelds as diverse as literature, art criticism, and ﬁlm theory. As I have suggested above, the Cambodians occupy a marginal place in these representations if they are not altogether elided from the space of representation. The only ﬁgure that escapes such a liminal economy is the Cambodian dancer, who enters the French artistic imaginary in a spirited fashion, thanks in large part to the sculptor Auguste Rodin and his unconditional admiration for the Cambodian dancers who had earlier encountered the scorn and derision of an undiscerning French public. Rodin was immediately enthralled by the sight of the Cambodian royal dancers who accompanied King Sisowath on his journey to France and the 1906 Marseille Colonial Exposition.12 Their dance embodied for him the “principles of (Western) antique art.” Rodin found the Cambodian dancers and their stylized movements living “incarnations” of the precise shapes of Greek statuary. He even went as far as to claim that they taught him movements that he had never encountered anywhere else in the world. Describing the complex undulation that stirred the body of the dancers, he exclaimed: That is admirably beautiful and truly new. That is what convinced me that my little friends are perfect like ancient art, and possess its eurhythmics (“eurythmie”). These are the emotions that they stirred in me.

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And to sum up, if they are beautiful, it is because they produce very naturally the right movements. (Bourdon 1906: 2) Rodin succeeds in capturing and ﬁxing the beauty and harmony of these Cambodian dancers not only on paper and in his sketches and drawings but also in words. Eight years later, in his 1914 study of French cathedrals, Les Cathédrales de France, the “image” of the Khmer dancer returns from his unconscious, when he encounters the beautiful rendition of an angel in Rheims Cathedral, and compares it to “a Cambodian ﬁgure.” (Rodin 1921: 266) Unlike Pierre Loti, Rodin never visited Angkor Wat. But he conveyed perfectly Maurice Blanchot’s lapidary and seemingly simple statement: “Statues move, we know it” (1950: 201). These words must be returned to their proper context. Blanchot put them forward in a review of André Malraux’s Essais de psychologie de l’art (1950) and was referring more speciﬁcally to the Malrucian thesis of transformation: “What was in a temple becomes a statue in a museum” (Malraux 1951: 199). “Statues move, we know it” may also be a not-so-veiled reference to Malraux’s infamous plundering of the Banteay Srei temple in the 1920s. For Rodin, this aesthetic transﬁguration from sacred object of devotion to work of art was mediated by the ﬁgure of the Cambodian dancer. But ultimately, Rodin’s Eurocentric vision prevailed. The Cambodian dance and movement ultimately embodied, for Rodin, the “principles of (western) classical art.” Rodin’s own contemporaries did not share his belief. The writer Pierre Loti pointed to a particular type of spatial disjunction when he qualiﬁed King Sisowath’s decision to bring the Khmer dancers to France as an “amiable mistake”: “One ought not to profane and diminish such spectacles by making them (the court ballerina) appear outside their native land” (“en dehors de leur cadre”) (1912: 205). In his remarkable account of his pilgrimage to Angkor Wat in Pélerin d’Angkor (1912: 205) Loti considered the “transplantation” of such dancers to be a desecration. He lamented the “violence” exerted on these dancers who, in his eyes, did not belong on a French stage. What seemed to be lost in such a commodiﬁed display was the sacred character of the performance that could only be captured, so he claimed, in the only rightful context, its original setting, that is to say, Angkor Wat. The return to the original location constitutes the familiar trope used by many French ﬁlmmakers to portray the Khmer dancers in the right setting, in the proper frame, “dans leur cadre,” to use the appropriate cinematic term. The Khmer dancers must therefore perform in Angkor, at the original scene. Gabriel Veyre, the Lumière Brothers’ camera operator, commissioned by the Governor-General of Indochina to showcase French Indochina at the 1900 Paris World’s Fair, anticipated Loti’s objection. He ﬁlmed the Khmer dancers in Angkor Wat. But these ﬁfty-second “animated

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views” could hardly do justice to Angkor and the Khmer dancers. The ﬁrst extended ﬁlm sequences of Angkor and the Khmer dancers were, most likely, shot by Léon Busy in the 1920s. The philanthropist and ﬁnancier Albert Kahn sent cameramen throughout the world to shoot footage of vanishing ways of life for his “Archives de la planète” (1919–31). Léon Busy was sent to Cambodia and Vietnam. In February 1921, Busy ﬁlmed various panoramic scenes of Angkor to capture the beauty and complexity of its architecture. Caught on ﬁlm are the gopuras (monumental doors topped by towers), the main Causeway, the galleries and pools, the threetiered temple-mountain of Angkor Wat, dominated by the ﬁve prasat (tower sanctuaries), the sculptural fragments of naga-balustrades, and so on. Of particular interest is the footage of the Khmer dancers shot in the right setting or “frame,” that is to say, in Angkor itself, to suggest and reinforce the commensurability between the Khmer dancers (the living) and the bas-relief apsaras (the stone). Not only are the Khmer dancers wearing the same headpieces and costumes as the “bas-relief” apsaras adorning the walls of Angkor Wat, they are identiﬁed by the camera as being the same through this ﬁlmic staging of the confrontation between past and present. Such cinematic identiﬁcation corroborates the temporal and spatial isomorphism suggested earlier. Busy’s ﬁlm footages, however, were not destined for a large audience. They were shown to accompany “scientiﬁc” lectures delivered by geographers, cartographers, archeologists, and anthropologists. Therefore, only a very small number of people actually saw these footages. The public at large would have to wait until 1927 to see Au pays du roi lépreux,13 directed by Jacques Feyder, better known for his ﬁction ﬁlm L’Atlantide than his ﬁlm on Angkor. Even though much progress had been made by French archeologists and scientists of the Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient (EFEO) to date and understand Angkor’s symbolic and religious function in Khmer culture, for Feyder Angkor remained shrouded in mystery and reduced to a cinematic stage set, a fantasy or daydream in which he “walk[s] through the ruins of old Angkor as if in the middle of an ‘Oriental dream’” (Oms 1992: 15, my translation).14 Angkor is Feyder’s ﬁlmic fantasy. My use of fantasy here is precise. Fantasy is not the object of desire but the setting or staging of desire. Furthermore, “In fantasy, the subject does not pursue the object or its sign: he appears caught up himself in the sequence of images. He forms no representation of the desired object, but is him-self represented as participating in the scene” (Laplanche and Pontalis 1968: 17). Angkor and traditional Khmer dancers have, in fact, been the object of numerous ﬁlms since the Lumière ﬁlms, too long to list here.15 Jacques Kabadian’s 1986 two-part documentary ﬁlm, Apsaras,16 both reasserts and challenges some of these ﬁlmic fantasies about Cambodia and its people. His documentary begins with a shot of a dancer/apsara, performing a traditional dance in a minimalist decor that resembles the bare space of a temple. The

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apsara is none other than Princess Bopha Devi, “star dancer of the Royal Ballet of Phnom Penh.” Kabadian also turns his camera on Cambodian refugees who live in the suburbs of the French capital or in the provinces, and come together to learn traditional Khmer dances. Their desire to gain knowledge of a cultural form that was almost lost to the world and their yearning to be trained are captured on the ﬁlm strip to evoke the resilience of the Khmer people. Of the several hundred royal Khmer dancers, only four survived the Khmer Rouge genocidal violence. With the help of members of the royal family and these star dancers, this cultural expression continues to be taught and perpetuated at quite a distance from Paris, in refugee camps on the Thai–Cambodian border. Young girls and boys are taught the 300 gestures and poses that constitute the repertory of Khmer traditional dance on the grounds of the dance school at Site B refugee camp. Apsaras also feature other members of the royal family, and among them, Prince Sihamoni—who became King of Cambodia in 2004 and was well known as a professional classical dancer trained in Prague and for his work as an inventive choreographer. He put both Western classical dancers and Khmer apsaras on the same stage, to highlight the encounter between East and West, and perhaps to suggest that these traditional and codiﬁed gestures can also change and evolve and be “modern” by the incorporation of new movements into the established corpus of traditional dances. Traditionalists or purists will undoubtedly consider this type of imaginative experimentation unconvincing at best, and scandalous at worst, but it suggests a potentially radical new direction and freedom in Khmer culture, one that is not simply immemorial and unchanging, but modern and postcolonial, as the Ballet Classique Khmer de Paris (Classical Khmer Ballet of Paris) or the work of the ﬁlmmaker Rithy Panh suggests. These women and men are no longer simply the objects of our captivated gaze but the agents of cultural resistance, who fought to perpetuate an artistic tradition that was in danger of being lost after the Khmer Rouge genocide and the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia.

Decentering vision: Rithy Panh’s The People Of Angkor17 I will end this discussion of a literate and artistic Angkor with one of the most original ﬁlms on Angkor Wat, Rithy Panh’s documentary ﬁlm The People of Angkor (2003). As the title of his ﬁlm suggests, Rithy Panh does not merely focus on the temples, the friezes, the Buddhas, but turns the camera on the people of Angkor, those who work in and around Angkor, the “petit-monde,” the invisible workers who rarely appear on our screens and whose laborious industry is seldom acknowledged. Rithy Panh tells the story of their frustrated ambitions and desires. His camera lingers on the face of a young boy, A’ Koy, who peddles postcards, books, musical instruments, and other knick-knacks. We learn that his ultimate goal is to become a guide, a dream that he himself acknowledges will never become

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a reality because of his lack of education and formal training in foreign languages. The director also turns his camera on the peasant who, in order to supplement his meager wages, works on the archeological building site when he is not tending his family’s small rice paddy. And what are we to make of the cock-ﬁghting owner, who cares for his prized rooster like his most precious possession, because he relies on the money earned from the bets to buy food stuff. Rithy Panh offers a brief glance of their laborious lives, and a fragmentary and imperfect view of their daily lives that seem on the surface so unremarkable and ordinary. And yet, when these heretofore silent, subaltern ﬁgures, rarely noticed by the cultural tourists, are given the opportunity to speak, they reveal that they possess extraordinary insights into the history of Angkor and Cambodia. They are no longer simply the victims of the Vietnam War and the American bombing campaigns in Cambodia, the victims of the violence and torture meted out by the Khmer Rouge, or the beneﬁciaries of international aid and non-governmental assistance; they become fascinating subjects of knowledge whose intimate intelligence of Angkor transforms these archeological sites into animated spaces, places re-humanized because they are inhabited by people who work and worship, dream and fantasize in Angkor. Angkor remains a spiritual place of devotion, the dynamic site of pilgrimage, teaching, and reﬂection, and not simply an archeological wonder for well-heeled tourists. Beyond its iconic representation, one that anchors Cambodian cultural identity in the larger frame of the nation, Angkor Wat is a site of memory and repository of knowledge, its history etched in the friezes that adorn the temples and become the subject of animated and divergent interpretations. In Rithy Panh’s ﬁlm, the instrumentalized image is supplemented by the lucid words of the workers. For one man, for instance, a particular frieze narrates and mirrors the life of hardship that is still the common plight of today’s farmers: Here, they’re off to sell rice. Peasants spend their lives ploughing, planting . . . they have to ﬁght, build dykes, harvest, thresh the rice, then cross the forest to sell it to the merchant to buy prahoc and salt. But the merchant gives very little money. How can they buy prahoc and salt? He grips the sack and weeps into his hands. It’s like today. (The People of Angkor 2003) A’ Koy, who has heard the explanations given by multilingual Cambodian guides to foreign tourists, tells this version of the story: According to what the guides say, these people are carrying rice to go and sell it when one of their friends is devoured by a tiger. They are scared and start running. They reach the pagoda. He grips the sack and weeps because his friend has been killed by the tiger. (The People of Angkor 2003)

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This prompts the ﬁrst man to admit, “I don’t know now. They all have different versions.” “It’s like today” is a refrain that resounds frequently in Rithy Panh’s ﬁlm, which compels viewers to weigh the force of the present, of this temporal frame. Mythological and animistic beliefs coexist with Theravada Buddhism in contemporary Cambodia. Although this type of extraordinary local knowledge may not persuade Western spectators who rely on rational, scientiﬁc proof, the ﬁlm succeeds in communicating the complex nature of the Cambodian belief system. In another sequence, a monk is not only narrating a popular version of “the epic poem recounting the mythical construction of Angkor Wat” (Thompson 1997: 28),18 he passes on, at the same time, a body of knowledge that needs wide dissemination. Critics, like the tourists, should not simply remember the name of the ruler who ordered the building of Angkor Wat; they must also recognize the labor of the workers and slaves who made such grandiose architecture possible. The importance of the waterways or baray, the large reservoirs that the master builders of Angkor conceived and realized, is ﬁnally brought to the fore in Panh’s ﬁlm. Although one can admire the barays for the way they must have once framed Angkor Wat and enhanced its changing splendor, their primary function makes it clear that they are part of an economic and political apparatus: the barays were used as water reservoirs that could irrigate rice paddies during the dry season and ensure the economic stability and political ascendancy of the ancient Khmer kingdom. “You need water for the paddy and rice for war” captures perfectly the logic of warfare and political power and control. For many Cambodians, Angkor does not exert the same kind of fascination as it does for cultural tourists. Rather than being ﬁlled with wonder at the sight of monumental architecture that has been bequeathed to Cambodians and the rest of humanity, one local farmer interviewed in the ﬁlm rearticulates the question of Khmer heritage in terms of a living memory, one that is not located in past glories but dwells in the daily practice of farming and the knowledge of rice cultivation that must be passed on to the next generation. The cultivation of rice paddies provides more than food stuff for an extended family; it is more than the main staple in the diet of the Khmer people; it is an art that anchors their identity in the land, and offers the image of a deeply spiritual nation whose fortitude can ﬁnd renewed vigor if the people of Angkor are ﬁnally seen and heard, their knowledge and erudition acknowledged, and their faith in the impermanence of the material world, a central tenet in Theravada Buddhism, recognized. Unfortunately, “No one notices poor people like us. No one notices us,” laments another worker. And it is precisely this state of “invisibility” that is foregrounded in The People of Angkor. Being poor in Cambodia is indeed synonymous to being “invisible,” especially when the divide between poor and rich is exacerbated by the pressures

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exerted by modernity and global tourism on the local economy. Rice, the staple commodity par excellence of Cambodia, is in short supply. The rice harvest having just been completed, the farmers he interviews face a very uncertain future. Small paddies can no longer sustain an entire family. It is the entire fabric of traditional Khmer society that is being torn apart, one based on solidarity and a sense of community, and whose roots are buried deep in the earth. Viewers get a sense of the profound disruption to everyday life, native customs, and local knowledge, when farmers are forced to abandon their land and ﬁnd employment elsewhere, in the new service industries created by an inﬂux of tourism. Even more damaging, for some of these men, a sense of self, bound up in the land and its cultivation, has been irrevocably undermined. On this point one farmer suggests that “without land” he no longer considers himself to be “a Khmer Angkor” (The People of Angkor 2003). The fascination for Angkor Wat may be far more costly than has been previously imagined, exceeding the millions of dollars poured into the conservation of this World Heritage Site and architectural jewel. It may also have deleterious effects on the people of Angkor, and by extension, on all Cambodians displaced from their land. When tourists travel from one temple to another, crossing small villages without even a thought for the true nature of cultural production, they close their eyes to the predicament of the people who remain simply “invisible” to them or part of an exotic landscape. A renewed appreciation for minor local customs and traditions by the community of scholars and experts who lavish so much time and critical energy on Cambodia, deciphering ancient epigraphic texts, reconstructing genealogies or devoting years to the rebuilding of these ruins, will go a long way to address this critical blindness. Our collective fascination for Angkor, then, must be revisited and yield to a dispassionate recognition of the extraordinary genius of the people, visible in even the most mundane expressions of everyday life. The failure to pay heed to their contribution casts them once again in the role of exotic extras (“ﬁgurants”) in their own land. By reframing the sites of Khmer cultural production and decentering our vision (away from monumental architecture), Rithy Panh forces us to see these “invisible” Cambodian men and women in new ways. And by reintroducing the magical and sacred realms, and giving voice to the desires and ambitions of the people of Angkor, Rithy Panh makes it more difﬁcult for us to consume Angkor Wat aesthetically. His ﬁlm offers a much-needed antidote to our desire to petrify Cambodia and its architectural grandeur and ﬁx its cultural traits in a few emblematic signs and ﬁgures of great attraction to writers, artists, ﬁlmmakers, and scholars. Like Rithy Panh, our scholarly attention should now focus on the invisible, the marginal, and the subaltern.

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Notes 1 I want to thank Penny Edwards for inviting me to present a version of this essay at the 1999 Association for Asian Studies Conference, held in Boston, and the editors of this volume for their pointed questions and indulgence. My thanks also to Nora Taylor for insisting that we visit the Angkor Wat Complex, Olivier for sharing in the mystery of Angkor Wat at dawn, Ainhoa for her probing way of seeing, and Marina Perez de Mendiola, as always, my most demanding critic. 2 “What did I know of Cambodia before? When I was six or seven years old, in Paris, at the Colonial Exposition, the reconstitution of a monument, the galleries of the Musée Guimet, and an old book on Angkor found by one of my friends on the quais of the Seine, after the Liberation” (Butor 1971: 51). 3 “For me, I knew that there were waiting, at the end of the voyage, the wonders promised by l’Illustration, on whose glossy pages my ﬁnger had followed the ridges and curves of that temple which taught me what I still ﬁnd astonishing— the inﬁnite variety of man’s creative power” (Malraux 1967: 251). 4 I borrow Jean-Louis Commoli’s formulation, introduced in ﬁlm theory in the 1970s. 5 “Moving quickly to condemn the project, UNESCO publicly warned, via the French press, of the possibility of Angkor being delisted as a World Heritage Site if any similar projects were undertaken in the future” (Winter 2003: 63). 6 In his wonderful article, “Landscape, memory and heritage: New Year celebrations at Angkor, Cambodia,” Tim Winter examines “the practices and values of domestic visitors” (2004: 343) by interviewing Cambodians who insufﬂate new life in Angkor Wat. 7 The powerful force of globalization can even be detected in the etymology of the terms used to describe “culture” in the Cambodian language. According to Crochet, voapathoa is derived from classical Pali while toumniem toumnoa is a word of Thai origin (thamniam) (Crochet 1997: 51). 8 L’ Eve future is translated in the English language as Tomorrow’s Eve. 9 See Norindr 1996. 10 The term “phonograph” enters the French language in 1877, according to Le Grand Robert (Robert 1988). 11 George Coedès published an inventory of these artifacts in his “Catalogue des pièces originales de sculptures khmères conservées au musée indochinois du Trocadéro et au musée Guimet” (1910: 19–62). 12 I was fortunate to be in Paris for the exhibit “Rodin et les danseuses cambodgiennes” at the Musée Rodin, where Rodin’s sketches of the Cambodian dancers were on display from June until September 2006. A lavishly illustrated catalog— Rodin et les danseuses cambodgiennes: sa dernière passion—accompanies the exposition. 13 Au pays du roi lépreux (1927), directed by Jacques Feyder; also known as Notes de voyage. 14 Taken from a letter by Feyder sent to a friend in February 1927. 15 Former King Norodom Sihanouk directed a number of ﬁlms on Cambodia. Critics and scholars have simply ignored his “ﬁlms romancés” because of the perceived megalomaniac nature of the production—he also wrote the scripts and dialogues, composed the music for the soundtrack, and featured himself and members of the royal family in his movies. These ﬁlms were also mocked for their sentimentality. Although one should not ignore his passion for grandiose schemes, a political reading of his ﬁlms would reveal their inscription within a larger nationalist project. Of particular interests to us here, Apsara (1965), his ﬁrst ﬁction ﬁlm, and Ombres sur Angkor (1967).

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16 Apsaras (1986), directed by Jacques Kabadian. 17 People of Angkor (2003), directed by Rithy Panh. 18 Thompson writes that “Aymonier (1878) published a Khmer version of the epic poem mentioned above, along with a summary translation entitled ‘Ediﬁcation d’Angkor Vat’” (1997: 28).

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Part Two

Identity and the liminal space

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5

Sitting between two chairs Cambodia’s dual citizenship debate Kathryn Poethig1

By the time I arrived in Phnom Penh in 1996, the Second Prime Minister Hun Sen had called a French Cambodian government ofﬁcial a “dog” and declared vigorously that those holding two passports were “down-grading for the nation” (Ker 1996). One month later, Hun Sen’s Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) declared single citizenship for government leaders an ofﬁcial position. During the fracas, I interviewed the Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs, Marina Pok, a French Cambodian citizen. When asked about her position on the dual citizenship of government ofﬁcials, she queried in French-accented English: “Why should one give up one’s dual nationality? Is it against the interest of the nation? Is it to have a pure Cambodian nation?”2 This dual afﬁliation had become as excruciating as “sitting between two chairs.” My paper focuses on the charged debate in Phnom Penh regarding the status of dual citizens in the Cambodian government during the 1990s. Through it, I show how the sense of “true” belonging to the post-war nation diverged between local and transnational government ofﬁcials. Those who were against government ofﬁcials carrying dual citizenship included both CPP members and diaspora Cambodians, though their arguments differed. Ultimately, the arguments for and against dual citizenship sought a baseline deﬁnition of national identity and a way to identify those who could signify its center. That the debate on dual citizenship was possible at all reﬂected new global developments regarding multiple citizenships. Dual citizens have increased worldwide in the last 20 years.3 A signiﬁcant increase in this trend was related to the 1990s “decade of return” as the break-up of the Soviet Union and its client states sent thousands of refugees who had resettled in North America, Australia, and Europe, back to homelands undergoing free market makeovers and a “transition to democracy.” The most controversial dual citizens were those returning to high-level government posts in the countries they had ﬂed. Such rewards of exile transpired in several new nations in Eastern Europe, but Cambodia’s government of dual citizens was unique in rank and scope.4 The majority of Cambodian exiles returned from the US, Canada, Australia, and France, which recognized some form of dual citizenship. For the ﬁrst ﬁve years of the new

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government, more than half of the National Assembly and the top ofﬁcials of key ministries were dual citizens. Prince Norodom Ranariddh, one of the co-prime ministers, was a French citizen, and high ofﬁcials of such powerful ministries as the Interior, Information, Foreign Affairs, and Finance were citizens from France, Australia, and the US. Cambodia’s “two-headed government” offered an unusual example of the impact of diaspora politics on globally monitored “transition to democracies” in the 1990s. The 1991 Paris Peace Agreement stipulated that Cambodian exiles could return to their homeland to run in the UNmonitored 1993 elections. Cambodian ofﬁcials of the Vietnamese-backed State of Cambodia had re-organized as the CPP, and as the sole power brokers through Vietnam’s decade-long occupation, they were markedly reluctant to relinquish the government to returning exiles.5 When the royalist FUNCINPEC party won the largest number of seats in the government, the CPP refused to step down. In order to ease the transition, the two parties agreed to a “two-headed” solution—two party representatives for a single position, hence, a First and a Second Prime Minister. Given the catastrophic Khmer Rouge era and the decade-long Vietnamese occupation that followed in the 1980s, Cambodians everywhere were concerned with a crisis of national identity (Ebihara et al. 1994). Indeed, the 1993 Constitutional Convention expressed that one of its “future tasks” was to “determine who, precisely, are ‘THE PEOPLE OF CAMBODIA.’” 6 Just who, precisely, the Cambodian people were precipitated a series of highly charged debates about citizenship in the immigration, nationality, and electoral laws that were drafted in the ﬁrst years of the new democracy. For overseas Cambodians who were returning as dual citizens, the public debate involved their place in the politics of homeland and host nation. From 1994 to 1996, I interviewed Cambodian refugees who had returned to Phnom Penh to explore how their multiple political subjectivities affected their moral discourse of Cambodian citizenship. The subject of our discussions was a slate of new citizenship laws that were the ﬁrst outputs of the new government. What emerged was a peripatetic morality, investing arguments with a moral authority based on their various identities as refugees, Cambodians, Americans, Christians or Buddhists, and dual citizens (Poethig 2003). The controversy about government ofﬁcials with two passports was already circulating among prominent Cambodian Americans in Phnom Penh in 1995. Cognizant of their own ambivalent citizenship, their argument for and against dual citizenship drove to the heart of transnational identity.

Transnational identity and the government debate Dual citizenship occurs because there is no uniform guidance under international law on the acquisition of citizenship (Weis 1979).7 It erodes the basic premises of modern political citizenship as singular and sacred and

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betrays the rhetoric of belonging so primary to the nation state. Anthropologists claim that de-territorialized peoples upset the assumption that one’s identity is ﬁxed to a place or a national culture (Appadurai 1993; Clifford 1994; Hannerz 1996), indicating instead that transnational cultures are formed through multi-stranded social relations between homelands and settlement (Glick Schiller et al. 1995). The identities of those who shuttle across borders are thus hybrid, their allegiances multiple. Cambodians in diaspora uniquely embody this fractured legal, political, and cultural status when they return to Cambodia. Cambodians who became American citizens, for example, chose to retain their original citizenship when they learned that US rulings were amenable to dual citizenship. One could possess two passports as long as the dual citizen produced the US passport upon entry to US territories. At the time, there was, however, considerable confusion around citizenship laws in Cambodia as both immigration and nationality laws were being redrafted. Upon their return, these former refugees often used their US, Australian, or French passport to enter Cambodia and were thus treated as aliens requiring residency visas. The debate on the dual citizenship of government ofﬁcials pitted the CPP as the opposition party against FUNCINPEC and other less visible exiled parties. For CPP ofﬁcials, dual citizenship contradicted their notion of a nation of cultural purity based on stationary Khmerness. They argued that returning Cambodians’ cultural hybridity meant that they were not true Khmer. Furthermore, dual citizens would not be able to adjudicate conﬂicts of interest between the nations in which they held membership. The argument here turned around the terms “Khmer Angkor” and “anikachun.” “True Cambodians” and authentic members of the nation are Khmer Angkor, signiﬁed by an ancient glorious era in Cambodian history. Returning Cambodians are called anikachun. In some cases, they are also referred to as “anikachun chochuh,” a derogatory term. Originally, anikachun or anikajan referred to citizens of a country living abroad or resident aliens, and commonly designated settler Chinese and Vietnamese in Cambodia (who are now called antaoprâve or immigrant). Those I interviewed felt that even a neutral reference to overseas Cambodians as anikachun was an unwanted afﬁliation since settler Vietnamese have long been a pariah group due to the anxiety Cambodians felt towards a history of Vietnam’s aggression.8 To be anikachun or, worse, anikachun chochuh thus implied that overseas Cambodians had not only lost the Khmer “soul” in exile but were allied by association with the historic enemy of the motherland. They thus returned as the inassimilable “other.” Although they too had ﬂed the country during the Khmer Rouge era, the CPP claimed identity as Khmer Angkor and counterpoised it to anikachun. Given this distinction, dual-citizen government ofﬁcials redeﬁned national purity, loyalty, and commitment. They claimed a more hybrid national community, argued that even single citizens could have mixed loyalties, and celebrated the beneﬁts of dual consciousness in the international sphere.

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Prime Minister Hun Sen’s case against dual citizens: noodles or rice gruel By early 1996, a controversial clause in the pending Nationality Law requiring single nationality for senior government ofﬁcials revealed the widening gap between the CPP and FUNCINPEC. As the Electoral Law was still in draft form and both commune and national elections were looming, there was intense pressure to establish the role of dual citizens in the government in the Nationality Law.9 Bou Thang, chair of the CPP Commission handling the draft of the Nationality Law, questioned dual citizens’ ability to be “[loyal] to the country” (Heng and Seng 1996). In a series of public attacks, Second Prime Minister Hun Sen urged FUNCINPEC ofﬁcials to “give up [their] extra nationality now or [they] will have no right to run in the elections” (Hun Sen 1996a; see also Barber 1996). By June, the CPP Central Committee Plenum issued a statement to “support the principle of one nationality of political leaders” (Cambodian People’s Party 1996). Prime Minister Hun Sen and other CPP ofﬁcials argued that expatriate government ofﬁcials were a liability to the nation for two reasons. First, anyone holding two passports lacked a “single-hearted” nationalism and would endanger national security because of their conﬂicting allegiances. Second, as returning refugees, these ofﬁcials were “fair-weather” citizens who were no longer truly Khmer and would be unable to endure the necessary hardship of a poor struggling country. He juxtaposed this with his own party’s status as Khmer Angkor, aligned with the common folk. In the ﬁrst case, the Second Prime Minister noted that he had initially rejected the idea of dual citizenship for government ofﬁcials when it had been raised at the 1991 Paris negotiations. But afterward, he had reluctantly agreed to a grace period: It did not seem to be appropriate for some of the brothers to make the minimal sacriﬁce of relinquishing their foreign nationality because there was then no real stability, no assurances that our country would have the necessary peace to hold elections. Forcing them to relinquish their foreign nationality seemed to be too cruel. (Hun Sen 1996a) With a second national election in 1998 looming, the grace period for the forced collaboration of CPP and FUNCINPEC was over. Prime Minister Hun Sen and his party instigated a call for this “minimal sacriﬁce.” If the loss of a second citizenship was “too cruel,” its sacriﬁce would indicate intent to place Cambodia before all other interests. Claiming the better part of nationalism, he caricatured ofﬁcials with dual citizenship as the nation’s bigamists:10 When one wife is angry with him, he runs to the embrace of the other wife. He steals things from one place and keeps them in the other

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place . . . [P]oliticians should have only one nationality in order to be fully responsible to the nation and to maintain equity between two nationalities. (Hun Sen 1996b) But a pledge of unaligned allegiance was difﬁcult for either party to claim. As CPP ofﬁcials had risen to power during the Vietnamese occupation and FUNCINPEC ofﬁcials returned from nations that had funded the anti-Communist resistance, all Cambodian ofﬁcials were highly sensitive about any compromise of Cambodian sovereignty. Attacked by his opponents as a “Vietnamese puppet,” Hun Sen’s own allegiance had been questioned. Earlier in 1996, FUNCINPEC ofﬁcials had opposed the celebration of January 7 as an ofﬁcial Cambodian holiday established by the Vietnamese to commemorate their rout of the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Both parties had to relinquish foreign patronage to gain legitimate claim to the nation. In his second point, Hun Sen played on a perceived moral weakness of dual citizens who were formerly refugees. His argument challenged the political category of refugee identity itself as the modern icon of victimization and statelessness. He intimated that the burden of suffering was borne not by those who ﬂed, the common refugee plight, but by those who remained. Refugees had chosen self-preservation over duty. Statelessness was thus reconﬁgured as voluntarism and abandonment. This abandonment had not been punished but rewarded by multiple privileges, one of which was a second nationality. The only way to recover trust was to lose something again—the second passport. This argument negated not only the efﬁcacy but the authenticity of “fax nationalisms” (Anderson 1992) against local nationalisms. When Cambodians ﬂed their homeland they betrayed their patriotism so fundamentally that they should not be trusted with its renewed expression in better times. The efforts of exiled Cambodians scattered through France, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, and the US who lobbied for Cambodia’s reconstruction were lost on a populace for whom transnational citizens were fair-weather cousins. They arrived during the good times; they would leave during the bad times. Furthermore, these returning refugees who had lived in luxury while others suffered did not “know what Khmer Angkor are, what really poor people, people in difﬁculty are.” They were not able to eat “only morning glory and ﬁsh paste” (Hun Sen 1996c). Alluding to starvation conditions under the Khmer Rouge, he remonstrated: If we eat grass, rice gruel or noodles, let us eat them together. We should share weal or woe with each other. It is not desirable to have leaders who join in only when it is time to eat good things, such as noodles, and who quickly run away when people are forced to eat rice gruel. (Hun Sen 1996a)

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In short, Khmer Angkor had not ﬂed the country in hard times and would share in the country’s suffering. Returning refugees’ weak nationalism could not compare with the nationalism of leaders who, in local parlance, had “gone through the blood.” This rhetoric, however, obscured the fact that many CPP ofﬁcials who were formerly Khmer Rouge (including Hun Sen) deserted their posts and ﬂed to Vietnam early in Pol Pot’s genocidal regime. When they returned with the Vietnamese troops in 1979, most were installed in the Vietnamesebacked socialist government. As most Cambodian refugees ﬂed at the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime in 1979, it is ironic that Hun Sen claims a share in the suffering of Cambodians—presumably under their own decadelong administration under Vietnam. It is thus striking that Hun Sen characterizes refugee ﬂight as a choice of self-preservation over duty, a choice made by members of his own party. But the CPP challenge to the legitimacy of refugee ﬂight played upon a deep ambivalence towards refugees in the general population. No doubt, a good measure of populist envy also entered into this calculation. Ofﬁcials of the Lon Nol regime who left Cambodia before 1975 were the primary targets of disdain. Those who survived the Khmer Rouge years might inspire the empathy of fellow survivors, but their departure at the point of critical reconstruction at the installation of the Vietnamese-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea was also a betrayal. The link between postcolonial refugee statelessness and colonial afﬁliations demystiﬁed refugee identity. The deposed elite often sought refugee status in the nations that had supported them. If as refugees, Cambodia’s elite turned their early French and US contacts into resettlement sites, returning with the mantle of Métropole citizenship and often under their ﬁnancial backing, how could their claim to Cambodian nationalism escape suspicion? Dual citizens had given away the country, and their plea for the hybrid identity of ofﬁcials could further destabilize the government, claimed Hun Sen (Hun Sen 1996a). If the two parties were wrestling for the meat of the nation, the Second Prime Minister charged that the “foreign” dog (chhkae sot) had its jaws on the leg of the government. If dual citizens could run for ofﬁce, then Vietnamese and Chinese, also anikachun, could take advantage of such an opportunity, producing a “Cambodian parliament and government . . . full of half-blood foreigners” (Hun Sen 1996a). Hun Sen’s diatribe against “half-blood foreigners” in the government percolated on the diaspora Cambodian internet as the debate raged in Phnom Penh. It traveled between a listserve and a newsgroup when I initiated a discussion on the matter from May 9 to May 14, 1996. As many overseas Cambodians were subscribers to both groups, the responses shuttled between them. While there was general assent that Hun Sen’s move was a crass ploy to destabilize FUNCINPEC, and that Hun Sen’s loyalties were split between Cambodia and Vietnam, the morality of multiple citizenships for ofﬁcials was vigorously debated. A minority argued that

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government ofﬁcials could hold two passports; some proposed it as a temporary measure to encourage more highly skilled “Khmer expats” to return; most agreed that government ofﬁcials should give up their second passport to show a commitment to building a Cambodian state. After all, one noted, “[Hun Sen] did not say that expatriates cannot hold high ofﬁces—just that they are not dual citizens” (online posting by psu0000@ odin.cc.pdx.edu 1996). Many subscribers condemned the corruption and moral turpitude of FUNCINPEC and other exiles. The general sentiment of the group was that it was “time to test the seriousness and honest integrity of Cambodian politicians . . . If ones [sic] do not have courage and principles to ﬁght for Cambodia, they should have no damn business in the decision-making that affects the destiny and lives of Cambodian people” (online posting by [email protected] 1996).

Anikachun nationalism For Anderson (1991), national identity is an ideological process in which a political community “thinks” their nation into being; the nation is an imagined community. Such communities are made up of citizens who espouse a “deep horizontal comradeship.” In an era of transnational linkages and ﬂexible citizenships, Cambodian returnees asserted the virtue of multiple “comradeships” and the dangers of an ethnic basis for nationality. Impatient with their discursive and political marginalization as anikachun, dual citizens in Cambodia did not take the quest for a singlehearted nationalism as seriously as their diasporic kin or local Cambodians. Hun Sen’s claim that leadership required an originary Khmerness led one Cambodian American to remark conﬁdentially: All of our leaders came from elsewhere and were supported by them. If you see Sihanouk, supported by French, if you see Lon Nol, supported by who-you-know [sic]. If you see Pol Pot, he was in France and supported by China; Hun Sen, Vietnam. It’s coming back to French again, French and Vietnamese . . . and American. While First Prime Minister Ranariddh kept silent, other dual citizens in ofﬁce argued that their dual nationality did not jeopardize the state but in fact augmented it (Heng and Seng 1996; Ker 1996). They stressed that they had sacriﬁced productive lives in the West to return and contribute to Cambodia’s reconstruction (Cambodia Times 1996). Other transnational Cambodian ofﬁcials stressed the usefulness of their dual national identities. Ahmad Yahya, representing Cham Muslims in the National Assembly, asserted that he would maintain his American citizenship if he had to give up one passport because “nationality is not important. What is important is patriotism” (Cambodia Times 1996). His claim to Cham ethnicity and advocacy for their rights already disrupted the implied ethnic Khmerness of “true

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Cambodian” patriots, and his American passport pressed this point further. His particular form of patriotism reﬂected the ﬂexible interpretation of “nationality” held by most formerly exiled Cambodian ofﬁcials. In our meeting, he noted that if his colleagues came from the US, they were “proUS, if they came from France, they’re pro-France, Australia, pro-Australia.” But unlike their Cambodian communist counterparts, they shared the “same mentality” about democracy, human rights, and rule of law. When queried on their “ﬂightiness,” dual citizens in Phnom Penh were often quite curt. One Cambodian American woman remarked dryly, “Cambodian people here, I’ve heard it many times, they think that once something happens, we’re going to ﬂy away, leave them.” This argument against refugee ﬂight indicted all returning Cambodians, though its implication for government ofﬁcials held the most weight. Various Cambodian Americans stated that if such a political crisis would emerge, money and political power would trump a second passport. A Cambodian American in Phnom Penh stated a simple truth: “The people with the money will leave; the poor will stay.” As for the claim that returning Cambodians had more wealth to protect, the same man admitted that many FUNCINPEC ofﬁcials were certainly corrupt, but added that many former classmates who had never left Cambodia were now much wealthier than he was. However, in the summer of 1997, a brief but violent power struggle between CPP and FUNCINPEC did prove the efﬁcacy of the claims about returning Cambodians. Many former exiles ﬂed to Bangkok or further abroad, and among them First Prime Minister, Prince Ranariddh.11 But in 1996, FUNCINPEC ofﬁcials still claimed sure-footedness, and noted that the CPP’s reference to their ﬂeet-footedness hid the hope that FUNCINPEC ofﬁcials would abandon the government to its former proprietors in a time of duress. Espousing a diaspora nationalism, returning Cambodians argued that their “ﬂightiness” freed them to “speak out the truth” away from the locus of repressive power. Cambodians in diaspora—like those on the internet— were aware of their impact on the Cambodian state. The Cambodian nation was now scattered around the globe and the Cambodian state had to contend with its de-territorialized constituency. Ofﬁcials of the CPP, once isolated from international scrutiny, now found themselves answerable to inﬂuential donor nations, the United Nations, the international development community, and 300,000 Cambodians in diaspora. If the CPP appealed to local Cambodians by declaring the moral authority of a single nationality, they had also to address the complaints of the transnational Cambodian lobbyists who took national politics onto the streets and into the legislative halls of other cities. Hun Sen’s challenge to FUNCINPEC ofﬁcials’ dual citizenship included an admonishment to Cambodians demonstrating in France (Hun Sen 1996a). Those whose “feet are planted in two countries” did not know the lived realities of Cambodia. He asked: “do they know the conditions of democracy in the countryside?” Until they were able to leap over canals with him in the countryside, “it is not

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right to hurl insults at each other in Paris, Belgium, Washington or Phnom Penh” (Hun Sen 1996a). Frustrated by his inability to restrain diaspora dissent, he warned against demonstrations within his reach: “Be careful! I will act. I will use military force to deal with you” (Hun Sen 1996a). This threat to suppress opposition was a good reason to support the dual citizenship of ofﬁcials, noted a Cambodian American on the internet: It is already sad enough that people must exile out of the country in order to speak out the truth on the current situation inside Cambodia . . . The very least we can do is to extend our moral support for politicians that risk their lives by trying to bring changes to Cambodia. (Thean 1996)

Between two chairs: what is true loyalty? If Ahmad Yahya was not a “true Cambodian,” Marina Pok, Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs, was neither “true” nor “pure” Cambodian. She was the daughter of a French Cambodian mother and Cambodian father; her family had escaped to France before the Khmer Rouge arrived in Phnom Penh. As a recipient of “dual cultures” as well as dual nationalities, she vigorously rejected the pressure to relinquish either. During my interview with her, she asked, “Is it against the interest of the nation? Is it to have a pure Cambodian nation?” She demolished the conﬂation of nation and ethnic purity at the heart of Hun Sen’s diatribe by arguing that neither true nor pure local Cambodians exist. The ideology of a pure Khmer ethnicity was a dangerous legacy in Cambodia that had inspired both General Lon Nol’s racist nationalism and the Khmer Rouge policy of extermination. Furthermore, if pre-war Cambodian society was the benchmark for cultural authenticity, it was, as another Cambodian American put it, “deep under the sea.” Marina Pok then struck at the heart of Prime Minister Hun Sen’s charge that those like her were not Khmer Angkor—stationary Khmers who represented the heart of Cambodia. “Are Khmer nationals better citizens?” she asked, “Is their allegiance more certain?” Arguing that historical experience affects morality more than legal afﬁliation to a second state, she remarked that those who survived the Khmer Rouge period and subsequent regimes “had to betray their neighbor, to kill their neighbor in order to survive.” Their “values,” she noted cautiously, were “very . . . diverted.” Then she added: Being a returnee, I need to have a relationship with my colleagues, and loyalty is a basic part of the relationship of work. It’s very difﬁcult, because these people today need me because I am in a strong position. But tomorrow, they will just turn back and follow somebody else who is in a stronger position to serve their interests. And these are people who have one nationality.

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Loyalty, concluded Undersecretary Pok, was a trait that did not sit well with pragmatists; personal affairs often trump national interests. The number of passports cannot measure loyalty and national diplomacy. If, according to Undersecretary Pok, neither ethnic purity nor possessing a single passport has any claim on national loyalties, does dual afﬁliation affect the course of national diplomacy? As Pok was Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs and the liaison to ASEAN, the highly regarded regional afﬁliation of Southeast Asian nations, her dual associations did have multiple effects. She offered three examples. In the ﬁrst case, she referred to her participation in the negotiation between an “Asian” state and “Western” pressure for Cambodia to adhere to human rights standards. The weight of her “heritage of Western education” predisposed her to the human rights agenda more readily than her ASEAN colleagues. In domestic affairs, however, she took an “Asian” interpretation of rights concerned with economic development over civil rights. If in the human rights argument she identiﬁed an Asia–West binary cultural position, her status as an ofﬁcial of an “underdeveloped” post-socialist country set her at the bottom rung of Asia’s aggressive modernity. She related in a second example how she was dismissed by a Western ofﬁcial as an unrealistic diplomat from an “emerging country.” She felt the sting as a Cambodian subjected to the disdain of those with whom she shared, in other circles, similar cultural capital. The bargaining tables of both ASEAN neighbors and Western donors, she suggested, were mineﬁelds that one must maneuver. Neither local nor transnational Cambodians evaded the humiliations, but for those whose identities were doubly ambivalent, the consciousness of being associated with both was more acute. Thus Marina Pok related this ﬁnal tale of Fanon-like epiphany of collapsed consciousness. In a conversation with a French colleague about an upcoming trip to Thailand for a meeting with private investors, they discussed what clothes they would bring: “Are you going to bring a national dress?” my friend asked. And I said “Yeah, I am.” And she said, “It would look so ridiculous . . . because investors want to see the modern. Thai women active in Thai society do not wear Thai national dress anymore . . . You would look like [you were wearing a] boubou” (you know, African women in France who are dressed in the bright African dress). I never thought that if I go to a meeting wearing a Cambodian national dress, it would look like a boubou! To be signiﬁed by a boubou, then, is to be identiﬁed as an inassimilable postcolonial immigrant in the Métropole. Which mask does she wear? Marina Pok was neither a French Cambodian wearing a boubou nor a Khmer Angkor stateswoman. Seven Cambodian women were elected into ofﬁce, and in ofﬁcial photos they posed in “Cambodian national dress.” She related the message that dual citizens know so well—as citizens of

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several countries, they are native to none. In their second homes, they are hyphenated; in their ﬁrst home, they are anikachun. But it is also an argument made in my presence to indicate that as an ofﬁcial in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Undersecretary Pok was cultivating a sophisticated national identity to accommodate Asia’s high modernity. Given the contentious transition in the following year, when many FUNCINPEC ofﬁcials were expelled, Pok’s inference is important because it stresses that dual citizens could be critical to maneuver Cambodia’s transition into a new global polity. This was because, she argued, dual citizens were adept at the reﬂexive manners of modernity, and able to market Angkor’s vestigial glory while interpreting Cambodia’s particular democratic polity to humanitarian donors.

Conclusion The issue of dual citizenship that arose during debates on the Law on Nationality in 1996 was, in some ways, a politics of dissimulation on both sides. On the one hand, it was staged as a vociferous campaign by ofﬁcials of the former regime who invoked a nation of cultural purity based on stationary Khmerness, a status few could authentically claim in twenty years of massive displacement, occupation, and civil war. Returning Cambodians were characterized as morally compromised because they had been self-serving as refugees, and thus unreliable; they were now anikachun and thus not fully members of the nation; and ﬁnally, their dual allegiance was dangerous for a fragile democracy. As both parties were the subject of proxy politics, these claims might have been dismissed were it not that they exploited a deep-seated anxiety about Cambodia’s political stability and general desire for a clear national identity. The dual citizens in government with whom I spoke articulated a moral discourse of dual commitments that resolved for them the dilemmas posed by local ofﬁcials and their diaspora compatriots. They ﬁrst rejected the discursive distinction between anikachun and true or pure Khmer. Because their “purity” had been questioned, disapora Cambodians depicted purity itself as a ploy to keep them outside the nation. In its place they argued for a heterogeneous body of peoples as Cambodia’s future. Plurality in Cambodia’s home space re-narrated the meaning of membership to include its transnational citizens in diaspora communities around the world. Their defense of refugee “ﬂightiness” was less articulate and proved to be prophetic during the 1997 coup when many FUNCINPEC ofﬁcials ﬂed the conﬂict. Their claim to patriotic altruism by returning from lucrative salaries to assist with Cambodia’s reconstruction belied the popular perception that returning Cambodian ofﬁcials were as corrupt and greedy as their local counterparts. Because singular national identity was held as a standard for government service, dual citizens challenged the sacred character of this

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singularity. Their strategies sometimes slipped across the hyphen, asserting Cambodian patriotism while claiming US interests. As far as allegiance was concerned, dual citizens in Phnom Penh contested the inviolability of Khmer Angkor loyalty. Pok’s responses represented a general sentiment among returning Cambodians. If refugees were held suspect for ﬂeeing, those who stayed survived by morally questionable means. Pragmatism often trumped the higher principles of loyalty in difﬁcult times, and no one was above reproach. Rather than a detriment, dual consciousness could facilitate Cambodia’s re-entry into the complex, sophisticated dynamics of international affairs. How does transnational identity affect this moral discourse? The study of the moral reasoning of Cambodian Americans suggests a strategy for inclusion that employs all subject positions available to them. If they spoke as Cambodians to the media, and dual citizens in the Assembly, others adjusted in my presence to identify as US citizens. But this identiﬁcation with two nations is not co-equal, or a slippery status that one can shift into—and out of—easily. It is played along various vectors of power. Claiming the West offers one a taste of positional superiority when returning “home,” it is also a painful reminder of one’s secondary status among those with whom one shares the more privileged passport. Claiming to be Cambodian ranks one as third class in the global hierarchy of nations, and with “locals” one is dismissed by the exclusionary tactics of nationalist and ressentiment politics. This hybrid positionality redeﬁned such politically charged words as national purity, loyalty, and commitment during Cambodia’s reconstruction in the mid-1990s. This was, perhaps, for those engaged in the struggle, as difﬁcult as sitting in a space between two chairs.

Notes 1

2 3

4

Fieldwork for this paper was partially funded by the Social Science Research Council. I wish to acknowledge the two editors, Leakthina Ollier and Tim Winter for their support and careful editing. I am indebted to Leakthina Ollier for her assistance on the linguistic analysis of anikachun identity. Khatharya Um, Aihwa Ong, Claire Fisher, Marty Stortz, and Jane Margold also offered feedback on an earlier draft of this paper. All material quoted without a source in this chapter is from personal interviews with the author conducted in Cambodia in 1996. South America and the Caribbean have had various dual citizen treaties for many years (Jones-Correa 2003). Asian countries where labor migration and immigration are high are also following suit. Among these countries are Cambodia, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Taiwan, and most recently, India and the Philippines (see Renshon 2001). Included here are Milan Panic who was offered the post of prime minister in Serbia in 1992, and Mohammad Sacirby who was offered the post of Bosnian ambassador to the United Nations. Rein Taagepera ran unsuccessfully for president of Estonia, and Canadian citizen Stanislaw Tymin´ski ran against Lech Walesa for president of Poland (Anderson 1994).

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5 Initially named People’s Republic of Kampuchea under the Vietnamese occupation, the government changed its name to the State of Cambodia on April 30, 1989 as Vietnam withdrew. 6 The Cambodian Constitution, www.constitution.org/cons/cambodia.htm. 7 Dual citizenship and dual nationality are often used interchangeably though they differ slightly. Bar Yaacov (1961) identiﬁes ﬁve ways to acquire a dual citizenship: naturalization, through the naturalization of one’s own parents; acquisition through marriage; military service in a second state without loss of earlier citizenship; as an illegitimate child born in one country after which the foreign-born father is identiﬁed; and ﬁnally, return to the country of origin and reactivating former citizenship. 8 Vietnam was Sino-Confucian, and its attitude towards its “barbarian” neighbors included a civilizing mission that in the mid-1800s involved a “Vietnamization” of language, dress, and administration (Chandler 1993a: 123ff.). Additionally, its colonizing strategy involved replacing Cambodian peasants with Vietnamese settlers. This slow appropriation of Cambodian territory and Cambodia’s perception of Vietnam’s ethnocentrism is a large contributor to the long-standing hatred and fear of the Vietnamese expressed by generations of Cambodians. 9 It ﬁnally became evident that dual citizenship was not the domain of the Law on Nationality but the Electoral Law. Though the former determined who would be eligible as citizens to vote, the Electoral Law would identify which citizens could be candidates. The Law on Nationality, passed in October 1996, supported dual citizenship, and the Electoral Law, passed in December 1997, did not bar dual citizens from ofﬁce. 10 Geyer (1996) also uses the metaphor of bigamy when arguing against American dual citizenship. 11 Donovan (1998) argues that the coup de force by Hun Sen revealed his understanding and use of political theater over written law. Ranariddh, a law professor in France, and other exiles were schooled in legal culture of the Western liberal tradition that relied on the force of written law. Hun Sen employed the more ritualized features of the “theater state” of Indic Southeast Asia. Hun Sen could have legally unseated Ranariddh when it was discovered that he illegally imported arms, with further dealings in arms from the Khmer Rouge. Instead, because he controlled the military, Hun Sen sent troops to encircle Phnom Penh. In the meantime, Ranariddh ﬂed the country and was replaced as First Prime Minister by Ung Hout, an Australian citizen. On July 5 ﬁghting broke out between the two forces in Phnom Penh. By the end of the following day, Hun Sen was victorious. Thus instead of using law, Hun Sen employed the armed forces and political theater to establish his sole legitimacy for political leadership.

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6

Refractions of home Exile, memory, and diasporic longing Khatharya Um

The practice hall was nothing more than the concrete courtyard of an ofﬁce building, wedged in invisibility amidst a row of neighborhood stores, noodle houses, and taquerias that dotted the busy Anaheim Street of Long Beach, California. Cambodian American youths, adorned in their silk sampot (Cambodian dress) and ao lakhaoun (a blouse dancers wear during practice), bustled around, exchanging snacks and gossip. A bit of America peeked out through the laced-up sneakers that some of them were still unwilling to shed before class. Like a colorful tapestry, rolled out in one undulating ripple, the students moved into position on the ﬂoor and proceeded, with disciplined regimentation, with the ritual salutation of the kru (teacher). Witnessing this scene unfolding, one ﬁnds oneself standing at a portal to a different world, impermeable to the noise of inner-city America, to that moment when tradition and modernity, past and present, intersect. What was exhibited was more than artistic impulse. It was the indomitable spirit of a nation, struggling to survive in diaspora. On any given weekend, in places such as Long Beach and Lowell,1 it is not uncommon to see young Cambodian Americans seated in makeshift classrooms at the local temple or at a community center earnestly studying Khmer or practicing traditional dance and music. The sound of religious chants from the Buddhist wat co-mingles with the chaos and confusion of the inner-city neighborhood. Elsewhere, in ethnic markets, young Cambodian Americans peruse the stock of transnationally produced Khmerlanguage videos and CDs. Though the words and nuances may elude them, they are drawn to the music by a certain intangible, but undeniable force. As a young Cambodian American college student puts it: “I am not sure what it is. I don’t really understand the words. But there is something about the music, the sound. Outside I am American, but the music, it speaks to my Khmer soul.”2 In fundamental ways, the Cambodian refugee community is a legacy of the nation’s tortured past. War, auto-genocide,3 and exile have left deep and lasting imprints on this refugee population in America. Virtually no Cambodian household is left untouched by the death or disappearance of a family member. Of Cambodian households in California, close to 25

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percent are female-headed—most of the men killed or missing during the Khmer Rouge period (US Census Department 2000). For most ﬁrst generation refugees, the genocidal encounter and circumstances of ﬂight— abrupt, secretive, and further fracturing of family and community—have left a gaping void: “We all have a part of us that has been torn away, something special, precious that is gone” (Iep 1991: 27). A Cambodian woman described herself as “damaged,” like “a broken vase that has been mended . . . [but] will never be whole . . . again” (Samnang Wu cited in Afkhami 1994: 188). Throughout the late 1970s and 1980s, foreign occupation, and the Communist regime’s disavowal of its diasporas, further widened the psychical distance from the homeland. Against the historical backdrop of territorial erosion, the loss of sovereignty under a decadelong foreign occupation evoked a deeply held anxiety about national survival and, for refugees, the permanency of exile. Compounded, the impact on individual survivors and on the families is long-term and multifaceted. According to a 1994 study of the community in Long Beach, trauma-related disorders are found to persist in roughly 50–85 percent of Cambodians who were traumatized as children.4 In diaspora, Cambodian survivors inhabit this “land of absence,” which Gabriela Mistral described as “born to me of things / . . . / That I had and I lost / Of all things livin / that I have seen die / of all that was mine / And went from me” (cited in Kaminsky 1999: 11). The trauma lives on in that “discontinuous state of being” (Said 1994: 140), the “permanent residence in the state of the ﬂux” (Kaminsky 1999: XVI) that accompanies a forced and unexpected severance from the ancestral homeland and somnambulant re-insertion into an alienating context. It is also ampliﬁed by the marginalization that refugees continue to feel in the adopted country. In the shadow of these deeply born dislocations, Cambodian refugees have carved out new homes mostly in America’s blighted neighborhoods, and begun the long and arduous process of rebuilding tattered lives. The stores and coffee houses that line Long Beach’s Anaheim Street, many bearing signs of ornate Khmer scripts etched alongside Vietnamese, Chinese, and English wordings, announce the beginning of “Cambodia Town.” They edify a certain permanence that belies the disconcerting reality of the surrounding neighborhood of dilapidated apartments and hidden ﬂux of a sub-population in constant search of elusive security. Wedged into this socioeconomic topography of poverty and marginalization, nonetheless, is a community determined to reconstitute, anchoring itself to that insistent call of the home/land to drown out the cacophony of displacement and rupture. Like all dislocated communities, re-establishing a sense of continuum in their lives is a key preoccupation especially of ﬁrst-generation refugees. Emerging from a history of devastation and disconnect, this struggle to recollect and heal the ﬁssures is, for Cambodians, an integral part of the overarching struggle to survive as a people. It is a process that has been

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thwarted, however, by the persisting intrusion of politics and by the exigencies of daily survival. In essence, it was politics that created the rupture, and it is political trauma and exile that sustain the dis/connect. In this context of fragmentation and uncertainty, the memory of the homeland, though ﬁltered and refracted by time and distance, presents itself as the sinew of an otherwise dispersed community. Where differentiation and marginalization are the lived experiences that contradict the loftier rhetoric of pluralistic democracy, the afﬁxation of diasporas’ hopes and preoccupation with the “homeland” is an effort to rationalize and cope with their present condition. Nostalgia becomes a way of reclaiming history and identity amidst the loss, disorientation, and liminality of their refugee condition. However intangible the prospect may be, for many diasporas, return is “the only answer we have, the only battle cry, the only way of knowing that we were destroyed but not defeated” (Poli Delano cited in Kaminsky 1999: 42). For some, particularly during the period of occupation, attachment to the homeland and longing for return took on the form of long-distance nationalism and engagement in the struggle for national self-determination. Diasporic politics became infused with a moralizing purpose, with overseas Cambodians viewing themselves, and being viewed by others, as the voice of the Cambodian nation that had been silenced by a captured state and as the vestigial hope for a colonized homeland. Nationalism, in effect, enabled the diasporic community to transcend the internal ﬁssures and the ambivalence that auto-genocide had engendered. For others, the struggle is against the peril of forgetting. In San Diego, California, between multiple shifts at a local machine shop, a French-trained pilot, driven singularly by his love for traditional arts and his memory of home, fashioned a traditional Khmer violin out of a baseball bat purchased from a local K-mart, and carved scenes of the Ramayana from discarded paper boxes salvaged from neighborhood dumpsters. Pointing to the intricate tableau of princes and epic battles hanging, as if frozen in time, on the garage wall among well-used tools, he commented modestly: As a child, I used to go to the ancient temples, and run my ﬁngers over the bas-reliefs. Now I just let my ﬁngers remember. I am not an artist and these are not really arts. They are just memories. My children have never seen Cambodia. This may be the closest to their roots they will ever get. That’s all that is left of Cambodia that I have to give them.5 Prior to 1993, when access to Cambodia was seriously constrained and imports from Thailand prohibitively costly, musical instruments and other accoutrements produced in the Cambodian American community were often the only items available. However imperfect as replicas, they enabled the community to keep the cultural heritage alive.

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Reﬂecting on her own life in exile, Florence Simfukwe noted that it is an existence devoid of “the warmth of home and the history that gives meaning to every part” (cited in Afkhami 1994: 121). Exile thus involves not only a forcible spatial and physical dislocation but also a spiritual disjuncture. What is missed, therefore, is not so much the physical state of being in a country but “the community and togetherness, food and laughter, and the calm that comes from knowing one’s rightful place and the right thing to do in all circumstances” (Afkhami 1994: 123). Above and beyond the more metaphysical aspects of exilic longing, it is, as Mario Benedetti puts it, the “grayer, more opaque, nostalgias”—“the route home. A tranquility, a calm, to know what comes after each corner, each lamppost, each kiosk” and freedom from “the surprises [that] made me tired” (cited in Kaminsky 1999: 38)—that compel return. In diaspora, surviving Cambodians sought refuge from the recent history of loss and suffering in their reminiscence of the Sangkum period (samay sangkum), which many considered to be Cambodia’s “golden era,” of a time when they were “secure and happy” (sok hay, sabay teat): “Think back; happiness was in the country / Lake, stream. Flowering tree, Cicadas sounding their melodies / All this gone, past” (Luoth 1998: 24). The diacritical emphasis on “happiness” rather than mere security conveys the void that physical refuge has failed to address. The resurgence in the Cambodian American market of re-mastered old music favorites, pirated reproductions of the period’s popular ﬁlms (including Prince Sihanouk’s cinematographic oeuvres), revamped menus in local eateries such as “Phnom Penh noodle,” and other familiar markers of the pre-war era can thus be seen as attempts at reclaiming the past, thereby validating the uninterrupted continuity with the present. Similarly, names emblazoned on neighborhood storefronts hark back to familiar sounds and places of belonging—Pailin, Tonle Sap, Battambang—etching into the ethnoscape of urban America an imprint of “home” that refugees carry with them in their exilic imagination. In earlier years when the Khmer nation was kept bifurcated by a geographical and political divide, the cultural memory of home was incubated and nurtured within these enclaves.

Through the prism of time: home/land imagined Where the land has been rendered synonymous with the killing ﬁelds and with compromised sovereignty, the image of “home,” for many Cambodians, was reduced to one constructed out of treasured fragments of pre-war memory, preserved in nostalgia and kept frozen in time, a place accessible only to the imagination: “I wade through solitude / To the cottage where we used to / Gather to drink rice wine / Enjoying false peace” (U 1998: 35). Similarly, for Vann Nath, one of the seven survivors of the notorious S-21 extermination center, the longed-for future is a return to a refracted,

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bucolic past, memorialized on canvas in his painting entitled The Village of My Birth. Memory of home and history, however, is a site fraught with contestation and contradictions. Under the layers of historical trauma, and despite the visceral resistance of the forcibly uprooted, the “home-land” for many Cambodians becomes a hyphenated notion, problematized by physical and psychical dislocation, by memories too painful to relive and even more painful to let go. The tension that is felt is in part a function of the complex, triangulated relationship that diasporic Cambodians have vis-à-vis the ancestral homeland, with the history that they embody, and with their adopted country of America. Unlike other experiences of mass violence, auto-genocide involves a historical injury that is made even more acute by the fact that it is self-inﬂicted. The complexity of the issues notwithstanding, to the average Cambodian who had experienced deprivation and decimation of kin and families, there was little denying that Khmer hands had taken Khmer lives. This, in turn, engenders among surviving refugees a certain ambivalence towards the homeland. The source that connotes the solace of belonging and the “security of sameness” also evokes the memory of death and deprivation, signifying both an indelible connection and, simultaneously, a rupture: “Want to return, but no / Can’t, yet still want to go as / Slim hope grows slimmer still that the homeland / Will ever rest from war” (Luoth 1998: 24). For young Cambodian Americans this ambivalence is inﬂected, furthermore, by the generational distance. For those born in refugee camps or in the US, their memory of, and connection with, the ancestral homeland consists primarily of that nurtured within the family, and perhaps reinforced within the community with which they may have but a tenuous tie. Most attend schools and colleges where their own history and cultural identity are not validated: We . . . live trying to break the silence that keeps us unknown, invisible . . . I read about the Vietnam War that killed so many of my ancestors and left the rest seeking refuge in strange and dangerous places. I don’t see or hear the history of my people. My history is a blur [sic] kept secret. (Asian and Paciﬁc Islanders for Reproductive Health 2000: 8) For many of that generation, the image of Cambodia is solely one ﬁltered through the narratives of mass atrocities, with the nation’s history compressed into the two-hour long movie, The Killing Fields. By extension, their sense of their own historicized identity and connection to the originary source are largely spun of a collage of stories, pieced together from speech interrupted and broken by the loss of the heritage language. Without direct ties to, and memory of, the pre-war period, there can be no refuge in nostalgia for that generational cohort, no solace in the self-denial

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of Cambodia’s sobering present. To many, the country that is exalted in exilic memory is also one stigmatized by a bloody history and an equally bloody present, a country “advertised in disgrace” (Anonymous, “My Khmerness”). A young Cambodian American poet exposes the complex, ambivalent, and conﬂictual position that Cambodia occupies in the imagination of many of his generation: “I hear people speak of Khmer pride— The same people who kill and die” (Anonymous, “Cambodia”). Thus, whereas the elder Vann Nath sought to remember pre-war life as marked by the freedom from fear and the simple self-determination of a cow-herder, Chath Pier Sath, a young Cambodian American poet and social activist, spoke of “the past in Cambodia’s present” (“The Haunting Present”), of power, greed, poverty, and classism, of the real and symbolic violence that once characterized the ancien régime and that persists despite regime change: “as the politicians bicker and ﬁght for power and social status. I am going back to the pre-Khmer Rouge social class, where the rich spit on the poor, and the poor resented the rich, wanting another Khmer Rouge to spill their blood again” (“The Haunting Present”). In the same vein, while many Cambodians, old and young, look to the nation’s antiquarian glory for the reminder of the country’s potential and promise of self-restoration, others see Angkor Wat as nothing more than a “gloriﬁed pile of rocks” (Point_Dexter 2004)6 and make reference to the country’s imperial past as an opiate that lulls the nation’s consciousness, and conscience, from its contemporary stagnancy. In her essay “Insistence of Memory,” Tsvetaeva spoke of the homeland not as “a geographical convention but an insistence of memory and blood” (1994: 99). Despite the ambivalence, and though they have but a fragmented understanding of the nostalgic preoccupation that consumed their elders, young Cambodian Americans often recount those hi/stories with an assumed poignancy, and inhabit those family narratives with a vividness and an immediacy of those who had lived through them. In a fundamental way, they have. Theirs is a childhood nurtured in the shadow of trauma, oppressive in its unshakable omnipresence. Though born after the genocidal period, Prach Ly, whose music centers on the theme of loss and healing, refers to his work as an “autobiography.” In his words, “[the story of the genocide] was inside of me” (Sadiq 2002). For some, the rupture is the connection: “Father was shot, mother was rape [sic], but yet my Khmer soul / Escape to this adopted home . . .. / . . . my Khmerness is untouchable / But not out of sight / You ask if this is Pride, I answer this is what have keep [sic] my Khmerness / Alive” (Anonymous, “My Khmerness”). The pain, palpable in the family and community, is an insistent reminder of the interconnections that defy time, space, and politics. In his autobiographical poem, entitled “The Haunting Present,” Chath Pier Sath wrote: “I still want to go home, even though I would be going to the graves of

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my parents, my brother who died of AIDS, my brother-in-law, and my brother who was murdered by the Khmer Rouge . . ..” (“The Haunting Present”). Unable to avert their gaze either from the ancestral source or the consuming present, they are of a “bifocal of oneness” (Pier Sath, “I am Bifocal of Oneness” 1999) tugging at, and being tugged simultaneously by the bond and the disconnect. Graphically captured in the split images on the cover of his CD Dalama of Angkor Wat juxtaposed with the White House, and ﬂowers with skeletons, this lived contradiction reverberates in Prach Ly’s poetry, rapped in English to the accompaniment of the traditional xylophone: “I love my land to death / A child of the Killing Fields” (2003). However intuitive, tenuous, and conﬂicted, the connection to the ancestral source is, for most, undeniable: “I have never seen the Mekong but I have heard it cries [sic]” (Pier Sath, “The Mekong River”). For Kassie Neou, a returning Cambodian American and renowned human rights advocate, it is this insistence of blood, the fact that “we cannot deny one another” (Reed 2002: 3) that makes reconciliation necessary and possible despite the deep schisms created by a long absence and an even longer history of distrust. For Chath Pier Sath, as for many returning Cambodians, the nation’s present suffering at once repulses and captivates him: “I wanted to leave, but I stayed” (Reed 2002: 3). Orphaned and marginalized in his adopted country, that link, however painful and oppressive, is his sole connection to a past, a history, a family, and a sense of belonging, to a self, however frayed by trauma, and an identity beyond that of a disenfranchised refugee: “My life in exile, homesick for the sentimental miseries of things I had known even pain is desirable whenever I need to redeﬁne my own humanity” (“The Wilderness of Pain”). Without any memory of his father, his “yearning all those years to have one” had to be quenched by nothing more than the facial resemblance of his uncle. It is a tragically eloquent metaphor for Cambodia in exilic imagination. In large part, the need of the youths to claim this history is rooted in the desire to transcend the generational ﬁssure by validating and honoring the sacriﬁces of their elders. As Prach Ly puts it: “i’ma use communication as a bridge / ﬁrst i’ma knock down the walls / between me and my parents / listen to their stories an’ all / without interference” (Stewart and May 2004: 85). For some young Cambodian Americans, acknowledgement of that injurious history soothes the absence that registers in many homes: A day in the life of a broken home and a broken country It must have been hard to run around dodging bullets carrying me You see despite the hardships I am going through And despite the lack of love I received from you

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I can still appreciate what you did for me and my siblings ... And I do see the scars in your souls, I never asked why Every time I see the tears in your eyes I too start to cry. (Anonymous, www.khmervoice.com) It is in effect the “survivor’s guilt” of ﬁrst-generation refugees, transmitted through the generational prism, that cements familial bonds across geography and generation: News of a sick brother and sister, a frail mother ﬁghting to Stay alive so she could see her children. One death here and one there, From the distance our tears keep running down. There’s never enough money to send for a funeral. Every funeral is like a party, with its ceremonial process of remorse ... (Pier Sath, “Arn’s Last Brother”) For many refugees, the homeland and the concomitant desire for return serve as an anchor for an otherwise rudderless life in diaspora. Within America’s racial hierarchy, Cambodian refugees occupy a seemingly paradoxical place, simultaneously visible and marginal. The mutually constitutive force of alienation from one context and gravitation towards another is exposed in poignant eloquence in Prach’s “The End’n’ is Just the Beginnin’”: “They act like we (are) slaves / I rather be back where I was born / Than here confused and dazed” (“Resurrec” 1999). Another young Cambodian American poet spoke of the pain of invisibility: “No one understands in America / The stories my grandmother told me . . . / No one cares about the light / Only the darkness” (cited in Tenhula 1991: 31). Reafﬁrming the historicized tie as such is a way of anchoring their own presence in, and imprinting their identity onto, America’s racial mosaic, and hence of resisting the imposed invisibility. For diasporic Cambodians, young and old, poor or economically viable, it is in the reconstituted world of familiar sights, sounds, and smells—of aromatic curry blending with the scent of sandalwood incense emanating from Section 8 apartments,7 of lemon grass swaying in rhythm with the colorful sarongs hung on clotheslines—that exile ends, and a renewed sense of community is forged in this place “they call ghetto, we call home” (Asian and Paciﬁc Islanders for Reproductive Health 2000: 23). Amidst poverty and marginalization, reconnection with the ancestral homeland and with one’s cultural heritage becomes an act of resistance against the stigma of the dispossessed, a spurning of the outsiders’ attempt to deny refugees not only a country but also a history. Forged in the condition of estrangement, nationalism is above all “an assertion of belonging to a place, a people, a

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heritage. It afﬁrms the home . . . and by doing so it fends off exile, ﬁghts to prevent its ravages” (Edward Said cited in Robinson 1994: 139).

Return and resistance It is within this accustomed tension of longing and resistance that return must be understood. The experience of return itself is qualitatively different depending on the individuals, the circumstances of migration and resettlement, and the expectations harbored. For the older generation, nation and identity are territorially rooted, and there can be no wholeness without the reconnection between place and being: “Let me live on the dirt on which I stand / Bury me smiling in the rich soil of my homeland” (Vorn, “Together We Stand”). An exile from the then Soviet Union, Tatyana Mamonova echoes this elemental need for connection: “as life progresses, I wait to feel the unquestioning attachment to the land again” (Afkami 1994: 161). For some, such as Ronnie Yimsuth, the literal return to the physical site of the family home was essentially a metaphysical journey to all that it represents. As he puts it, it was essentially a return to “the last place where good memories still exist in my cluttered mind,” to “a time when all my family members and my youth were still intact” (“Twenty Five Years Later, The Haunting Nightmares Continue”). To a large extent, however, return can never be fully achieved, for the rupture created by war, genocide, colonization, and, simply, by the steady march of time, is irreversible. The loss of the familiar is fundamentally irretrievable for the changes experienced are simultaneously external in the environment and internal to the returnees. As Kaminsky argues: “the subject produced in and by exile continues to experience the world through the circumstances of exile . . . even after return home has become juridically possible” (1999: 81). She goes on to say: After years of exile, of alienation and acculturation, of adapting the palate and the ear and the line of vision, the exile—and the exile’s palate, ear, and eye—is no longer fully at home anywhere. The end of exile is a richness that must always bear a sense of loss and a desire for what is elsewhere. (1999: 144) For Vann Vorn, the Cambodia unveiled and exposed in the stark present bears no resemblance to the deeply cherished memories: “Cambodian [sic] will never be the same / Innocent souls screaming in pain / The Cambodian soil soaked in puddles of blood left behind by our Khmer people” (“A Dying Breed”). The disconcerting contrast between the actual and the imagined was felt by Chath Pier Sath for whom return brought no refuge in relived memory, only a harsh encounter with post-genocide realities of fractured

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families and impoverished relatives, AIDS, and stiﬂing corruption. From the initial euphoric anticipation of return, his “love for that country turned to hate and disgust . . . Cambodia became a place of nightmares and screams” (“The Haunting Present”). It is thus that return brings home, for many diasporas, the realization that even memory is “stolen” from them, “erased,” “swept away” (Luisa Valenzuela cited in Kaminsky 1999: 120). The exile’s ultimate feeling of alienation from their originary place reverberates in Taras Shevchenko’s piercing conclusion about Ukraine under Stalin: “this land of ours that is not ours” (www.davidkilgour.com/mp/two decades.htm). Though perhaps never fully realizable, that journey—of return and of turning back—is necessary. While sociologists have described refugee migration in terms of ﬂight, diasporic return, be it literal or ﬁgurative, can be seen as an instinctual reaction to ﬂight. In that sense, it is a process that is compelled more by the void carried into, and heightened, in exile, than by concrete ideas of what awaits at the destination point. For those survivors forcibly and prematurely aged by the Khmer Rouge experience, the impetus is to reclaim the childhood that history had deprived them of, to recapture their lost innocence: I remain a child in the body of a man In his yearning for monsoon’s drops As I think of losses left unresolved For me to grow old because I keep wanting My childhood back as a gift I’d have to accompany my death. (Pier Sath, “In the Womb of Life”) For young individuals such as Ronnie Yimsuth, re-inserting memory into its rightful frame yields that release, however momentary, from the temporal prison of a life abbreviated and punctuated by historical trauma: “I wanted to again relive the good memories before the Khmer Rouge . . . walked into Siemreap . . . I had to dig deep into my shattered memory bank to be able to go back in time for just a moment” (“Twenty Five Years Later . . .”).

Return and healing It is in the interstice of disdain and longing, of the desire and the inability to forget, that many of that generation, too young to understand but old enough to remember, confront their liminality: “I am very much a lost Khmer generation during the day . . . and the Khmer Rouge nightmares still haunted in [sic] my dream during the night” (“Twenty Five Years Later . . .”). In prying open a space to “reﬂect on the good and bad memories from [my] youth,” return is the ﬁrst and necessary step for many of

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these young survivors to “heal and to reconcile” (“Twenty Five Years Later . . .”). For Prach Ly, return was initially envisioned as a “soul search”: [Initially] I want it to be a soul search—not to perform. [But the performance near Bantaey Srei] turns out to be the highlight of my trip. It was just being there at the moment. It was in front of kids and in my homeland . . . It was the ﬁrst time that Cambodians had a voice. Some places I went to broke my heart, other places healed it. At Phnom Kiev, kids were chasing after the garbage trucks as if they were ice cream trucks. Across the street, there was a casino. At the Tonle Bassac slum, the people were poverty stricken but they had hope. When they practiced [the music], they laughed and joked and their environment disappeared.8 In this travel from the imagined to the actual, the traveler is inevitably transformed. Similarly for Arn Chorn Pond and Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, the key to personal healing lies in the ability to move across the spatial, temporal, and political divide towards the re/discovery of the beauty and richness of the nation’s cultural heritage. Sophiline, a child survivor of the Khmer Rouge regime and a Khmer classical dancer, reﬂected that: Every time I think about the tragic [events] that happened to me, to my family and to my people during the Khmer Rouge, I have to think also about something that is beautiful about my culture and about my country. And one thing that is beautiful is the dance and music. (Sadiq 2002) It is in remembering and retrieving that aspect of the nation’s past, in reintegrating the “negative and the positive . . . in the web of life” (U 1998: 215) that wholeness can be reconstructed, albeit not seamlessly. It is also a process that leads to collective healing. As Arn Chorn Pond, a returning social activist, points out, for Cambodians, “music and culture and their dance is their soul. How can we ﬁnd healing if we don’t even know who we are” (Letsinger 2004: 2). Pal Vannariraks, a well-known Cambodian author added: “when culture is alive, the nation also survives” (Stewart and May 2004: 171). For Arn, Sophiline, and Prach, arts and advocacy are intertwined. Their works can be seen as acts of resistance, a deﬁance of the erasure of time. Speaking to the challenges of cultural revival, Sam-Ang Sam, a professor of ethnomusicology, reﬂected: “In the oral tradition, when the musicians die they take along with them the knowledge and memory . . . before it can be passed on, so it’s gone” (Letsinger 2004: 1). Arn, who has embarked on a mission to locate surviving master musicians, and to retrieve, document, and preserve Cambodia’s dying

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musical traditions, understands that he is “racing against time” (Letsinger 2004: 2). Whereas transnational social activism deﬁnes Arn’s work, the insistence on remembrance that echoes in Sophiline and Prach’s art is intensely political. Sophiline’s Khmer classical rendition of Shakespeare’s Othello, Samritechak, is an artist’s attempt to extract accountability for the crimes committed against the nation. Though generationally removed from the genocidal encounter, Prach Ly, who laughingly recalls the reference to his overnight popularity in Cambodia as comparable to a “bombing raid of B-52s,” sees himself as a “channel” for “the people who wanted to say something but were scared to speak out.” Claiming that “politics, I don’t understand [and] I don’t want to understand it,” he prefers to describe his work as aimed at raising “social awareness” rather than as being political. Noting that “in Cambodia, you can’t say anything . . . you have a tape over your mouth,” he acknowledged capitalizing on free speech in America to deliver his social message. Both in the US and in Cambodia, his art has an intergenerational appeal which he attributes to the fact that: . . . they can relate to it . . . It is a story not just about me but about them as well . . . “trailing the great escape with ﬂip-ﬂop” everybody can relate to that. It’s also because you’re a young voice [that makes the message compelling to the younger generation].9 As for the passion behind his words and work, he states simply: It’s just justice. That’s how I feel. The people have been murdered, they need justice. Buddhism is not about to [sic] forget but to forgive. My parents would wake up screaming names [of dead relatives]. [The music is] selftherapeutic. Things boil up if you don’t talk about them. . . . Some people in Cambodia don’t even believe or know about the killings.10 It’s a very dark era and you have to shed light on it. (Sadiq 2002)

Forced return—where is home? When the sky turns somber and gray, I miss our country. Never imagined that we would seek refuge in someone else’s country.11 In June 2002, six young Cambodians stepped off the plane into the oppressive heat of Phnom Penh. Bewildered, they were told that they were home. In the years to follow, they were joined by a quiet but steady trickle of

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Cambodian Americans sent back into exile, this time in their ancestral land. Over one thousand more non-citizen Cambodian Americans await deportation from the US to Cambodia for the commission of felonies. Though they had served the sentences for their crimes, they were handed an even longer sentence upon release, activated by an extradition treaty that was signed between Cambodia and the US in May 2002 that made deportation to Cambodia possible. For many of the forcibly returned, it was, as Tom Mintier puts it, “the third time to start over, not as refugees from Cambodia but Cambodians forced to return” (2002). Intrinsically, these deportees personify the liminality of the refugee condition—uprooted from the Khmer cultural world and un-rooted in mainstream America. They stand at the edge of both worlds, belonging to neither, symptomatic of the “multitude of bifocal shreds swimming in a bicultural sea of confusion” (“I Am Bifocal of Oneness”). Antithetical to Ong’s “ﬂexible citizens” (1999), they embody the failings of politics and society rather than the cosmopolitan adaptability of the transnational citizen. While diaspora reﬂects the porosity of national boundaries and the destabilization of the sovereignty of the state, deportation is a sobering reminder of the inﬂexibility of the state. Silhouetted against America’s post-cold war national interests, this measure reveals the conﬂuence of various concerns—America’s post-9/11 political retrenchment, the nation’s anxiety about immigration and immigrant communities, and the persisting rootlessness of non-citizen refugees. It also exposes the generational, class, and ideological polarization within the Cambodian American community. Those who support deportation see resettlement as a privilege that had been squandered. Opponents of deportation, on the other hand, see permanent resettlement as a right to be extended to refugees from America’s war. To them, “we are here because you were there.”12 Signiﬁcantly, in this regard, their position aligns with that of the Cambodian government, which sees these individuals as the product, and hence the responsibility, of America.13 To all, deportees unravel the Horatio Alger myth and remind them of the fragility of resettlement, not only in the circumstances surrounding the social failings of these youths but in the actual deportation itself. Heretofore perceptibly secure in their refuge, deportation strips refugees of that false sense of security. Though deportation affects but a small segment of the community, the anxiety that it engenders has a much wider reverberation. With the majority of Cambodian refugees in the US still without citizenship and mired in economic and social disenfranchisement, there is an unshakeable sense of vulnerability that shadows their daily existence. Whereas return has been voluntary and even desired by most Cambodian diasporas, deportation complicates and problematizes the notion. Embedded in the term and in the process of repatriation is the concept of patrie—the “fatherland.” It is a presumption that is destabilized by the fact that many of the deportees had neither a clear recollection of Cambodia nor any

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tangible or sentimental connection to it as the “home/land.” Most had grown up in Thai refugee camps and came to the US in their pre-adolescence. To them, the notion of “home” conjures images of Stockton, Seattle, Long Beach, and Lowell rather than Phnom Penh or Battambang. Return, therefore, is to a presumed ﬁxed originary source that never was, to a land that is merely a geographical space, and a “home” that signiﬁes banishment rather than belonging. Where the relationship between “home” and “land” is not simply disrupted but where the hyphen symbolizes distinct, geographical domains, the return “home” for the deportees was essentially the return to whatever surviving kin they may have left in Cambodia, however distant or detached. In a land foreign and unreceptive to them, the prospect of re-rooting hinges ultimately on their ability to nurture those fragile ties, real and symbolic, which alone can transform the land into a home. It rain yesterday and I like it a lot. I was just sitting in front of the house and listening to the rain fall and it got me thinking how much I miss the Seattle rain. (Kim Ho Ma, a deportee from Seattle, in Olsen 2003: E1)

Notes 1 As a result of initial resettlement and subsequent internal migration, Long Beach, California, and Lowell, Massachusetts, have emerged as the two largest Cambodian communities in the US. Estimated at 50,000 in number, Cambodian Americans accounted for 10 percent of the population of Long Beach while Lowell is home to an estimated 35,000 Cambodians, comprising about 30 percent of the city’s population. 2 My interview with N., Berkeley 1999. 3 The application of the term “genocide” to the Cambodian experience as well as the deployment of the term ‘auto-genocide” have been the focus of intellectual and legal debates. I have opted to use the term “auto-genocide” to refer to the collective wound that resulted from Khmer Rouge state terrorism against its own populace, irrespective of ancestral origins. Without dismissing the brutalization of ethnic minorities in Cambodia and without relieving external actors of the political and moral accountability for the Cambodian tragedy, it is important to note that most of the victims and perpetrators were Khmer. This experiential particularity is an important analytic signiﬁer in the Cambodian narratives of rupture and healing. 4 Chhim, personal communication 2001. 5 My interview with D. L., San Diego 1996. See also Um 2005. 6 I thank my student Viravyne for sharing this exchange with me. 7 “Housing assistance, in the form of direct payments to a private landlord, secured from a local housing authority that low-income people can use to rent apartments and homes on the private market. Based on a set formula, determination is made on the tenant’s housing allocation as well as the percentage of the rent for which he/she is responsible, with the balance being covered by the housing authority.” (www.nhlp.org/html/sec8/index.htm) accessed 9 June 2006. 8 My interview with Prach Ly, Berkeley, 2005. 9 My interview with Prach Ly, Berkeley, 2005.

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10 My interview with Prach Ly, Berkeley, 2005. 11 My conversation with an elderly Cambodian man at a temple in San Diego, 2000. 12 Slogan of the anti-deportation campaign of the Southeast Asian Student Coalition, Berkeley, 2004. 13 The delay in reaching an agreement on the deportation was largely the result of the general reluctance of the Cambodian government to receive the deportees.

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7

Rapping (in) the homeland Of gangs, Angka, and the Cambodian diasporic identity Leakthina Chau-Pech Ollier

Boys and girls are you listenin to me? This is Cambodia 101, the history . . . praCh

Urban samplings One might be happy to learn that rap music made its way to Cambodia before McDonald’s did; or perhaps not. Then, for those who long for familiar signs of home away from home, and to whom golden arches or cardboard cutouts of Colonel Sanders with his benevolent smile make for a comforting presence, there is solace: Phnom Penh boasts a shiny and spotless BBW (Burger and Bakery World) with its upside-down, though recognizable, golden arches (W instead of M);1 a Pizza House framed inside the same red, black, and white logo as a Pizza Hut; and a KFC, that is, Khmer Fried Chicken. But if the latter still does not meet one’s expectation, the “real and authentic” Kentucky Fried Chicken, imported from Japan, can be found in the frozen food section of the Lucky Supermarket, an upscale store that caters mainly to wealthier Cambodians and expatriates. And then, of course, there is rap music. Across the street from the Lucky Supermarket, an unmistakably catchy rap tune—fusing its invitational refrain “ah yeah! Do you wanna ride with us, ride with us . . .” with the loud and busy late afternoon trafﬁc on Sihanouk Boulevard— blares out from the large speakers of the CD World store and gathers a crowd of young Cambodians not quite used to letting their heads bop to this new rhythm. It is a cut from the ﬁrst CD by a Cambodian rap group, the Phnom Penh Playaz; and Sam Sen Sambo, a.k.a. BO, a member of the rapping quartet, was there in person for the promotion and sale of the CDs (at ﬁve dollars a piece they are expensive compared to the usual two to three dollars for pirated copies of a Beatles or a Britney Spears CD). This was Phnom Penh in 2002. Across the Paciﬁc Ocean, in Little Phnom Penh (Long Beach, California), Prach Ly sells CDs and DVDs of popular singers and variety

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shows from Cambodia (at ﬁve dollars a piece as well) in a small and over-stocked karaoke store. In 2002, this was also where I met Prach for the ﬁrst time. A few weeks earlier, while surﬁng the internet for all things Cambodian, I came across an article in Asiaweek, entitled “Hard Rap on the Rouge” about a young Cambodian rap singer, working in a “hole-inthe-wall” karaoke store in Long Beach, whose homemade rap CD had mysteriously found its way to Phnom Penh’s nightclubs and radio stations, and was selling like hot cakes at the CD World store and elsewhere. When Gina Chon, the Asiaweek reporter, called to interview him from the Cambodian capital, Prach was astounded to know that his CD had found itself in Cambodia but was happy it did. Wanting to learn more about this musical phenomenon, I drove to Long Beach with a vague idea of the small area comprising Little Phnom Penh, home to the largest Cambodian community in the US. One of its main arteries, Anaheim Street, is now lined with Cambodian restaurants and shops, although the handful of carnicerias and taco stands, along with gang grafﬁti on boarded-up buildings, reminded me that this community cohabits at times peacefully, at other times not so peacefully, with a still predominantly Latino and African American population. A century ago the name “Anaheim” itself (which is also the name of a city adjacent to Long Beach) was coined by German immigrants who made this region their “Home on the Ana,” that is, on the Santa Ana River. Cruising this new “Cambodian Home on the Ana” (with no quaint river in sight, however) and determined to ﬁnd either a copy of the CD or the rapper himself, I parked in front of a small karaoke store and went in to inquire. Inside stood two young men. Not knowing how to phrase my request, and having to compete with the stereo playing a loud Cambodian pop tune, I awkwardly uttered: “Perhaps you can help me. I’m looking for someone who made a Cambodian rap CD. I think his name is Prach . . .”. Then I paused, frantically trying to remember the last name while doubting my correct pronunciation of the ﬁrst. Fortunately, one of the young men ﬁnished the question for me: “Ly?” “Yes,” I exclaimed, “Do you know him?” With an amused look on his face (by that time, a few journalists had already come calling and knocking, including the Associated Press), he replied: “That’s me.” Sporting an oversized black T-shirt, baggy jeans, sneakers, and a baseball cap, the then 23-year-old Prach Ly looked like a typical American youth. He had lived in Long Beach since his family had moved there when he was eight, after a four-year stay in Florida (their ﬁrst American destination after ﬂeeing Cambodia in the early 1980s and spending a year and a half at a refugee camp in Thailand). During our second encounter, after we met for the ritual morning bowl of “Phnom Penh noodles” at La Lune, a popular Cambodian restaurant off the Anaheim strip, I asked him to show me Prach’s Long Beach, for he seemed to be the perfect spokesman for the community, wearing the Long Beach logos on both his shirt and cap the ﬁrst time I met him and thereafter. No doubt, Long Beach is a

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corner of Cambodia in America just as Prach considers himself a “Cambodian in America” and not a Cambodian American. During the car ride, he emphatically pointed to all the Cambodian restaurants, shops, supermarkets, and car dealerships that have turned this once-depressed area into a budding business community. Long Beach is home to him, and this community is his stomping ground. Later, we drove to the Northside of Long Beach, where he grew up. There are dilapidated buildings that house a large population of Cambodian refugees and where entire families, including extended families at times, are cramped into one- or two-bedroom apartments. His was no exception, but his family can be counted among the lucky ones. Both parents and eight siblings survived the Khmer Rouge regime and are now living in the US. However, Prach, like many other Cambodian youths in Long Beach, had to walk through mineﬁelds of a different kind: gang rivalries. Cambodian, African American, Latino, and Vietnamese gangs plague the area and soon enough he had to survive yet another war in America. Those troubled days behind him now, Prach showed me his current colors: the Long Beach city logo displayed on both his cap and T-shirt (his trademark) and a tattoo forever etched on his arm. His is not a gang-afﬁliated tattoo, but it shows similar cultural pride and belonging, a ﬁgure familiar to all Cambodians: Hanuman, the monkey warrior infused with magical powers from the Ramayana story. Ironically, he has also moved out of his parents’ home, and now lives on Peace Street. Dubbed “Cambodia’s ﬁrst rap star” (May 2004: 73), the “Cambodian-American hip-hop messenger” (Sadiq 2002) “delivering . . . [the] art of faCt” (Prach, Dalama 2003), Prach embodies his given name perfectly: in Cambodian, Prach is the wise “advisor to the king,” the one “who talks a lot,” and the village near the provincial town of Battambang in which the young man was born. If anything, Prach Ly, the rapper, has only found it necessary to reinvent himself as praCh with a capital “C,” sometimes also written backward and in lower case like a misplaced diacritical mark left hanging above an empty space not devoid of promises, a familiar letter turned foreign, at once backward-looking and forward-looking, at once stylish and out of place, inscribing both homeland and home state: Cambodia and California. When I tell friends and acquaintances that I am writing an article on Cambodian rap, my remark is often met with a combination of curiosity, dismay, and outright laughter. That the two words could be uttered side by side smacks of the “unhomely,” the “freak social and cultural displacement” about which the postmodern and postcolonial critic Homi Bhabha so often writes (1994: 12). Granted, most people I speak to in the US do not know much about Cambodia and even less about rap. At best, those with an interest in the history of American politics, along with the avid Chomsky readers, recall President Nixon’s order of secret bombings in Cambodia during the Vietnam War era. But generally, depending on the person’s level of knowledge of world history and geography, Cambodia

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conjures up images of a backwater country located somewhere in Southeast Asia and verdant rice paddies and more insistently Cambodia has become synonymous with the Khmer Rouge, and The Killing Fields (the movie). Likewise, for the more enlightened ones, “rap” embodies “Black cultural expression,” “community and popular cultural dialogues” (Rose 1994: 2), inner-city poetry, “Black urban renewal” (Rose 1994: 61) as well as one of the most powerful forms of social commentaries in contemporary America.2 To the less enlightened, it is nothing but a symbol of violence, social degradation and degeneracy, lack of mores and respect for law and order, rebellious youth, loud and disharmonious sound, and low culture. Put together, “Cambodian rap” is a combination so absurd in its dissonance that it cannot but elicit the above-mentioned reactions. The compassionate think that after all the Cambodian people have endured during the civil war and the Khmer Rouge regime, they now have to be subjected to yet another trauma, another American export and inﬂuence of the worst kind. The purist thinks that such melange and métissage are ludicrous and damaging to both “Cambodian” and “rap.” But the lovers of “freak social and cultural displacement[s]” (comprising some of my interlocutors), who would not otherwise care to hear about Cambodia and much less listen to rap music, take up on the invitation “ah yeah! Do you wanna ride with us, ride with us . . .,” sit down, and listen intently, perhaps for the ﬁrst time, to a rap tune as they are also given a private lesson on the history of Cambodia. Indeed, it is “Cambodia 101, the history . . .” (praCh, “Intro: The Temple of Peace—The Take Over”). In the process, they might also get more than they bargained for.

Mixing the color lines In the past two decades, journalistic, testimonial, and popular accounts have successively focused their attention on the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge, the whole of Cambodia’s modern history summarily reduced to the “Year Zero” and the “Killing Fields.” To date, Cambodia’s tragedy continues to exert its fascination like an abject wound in the memory of (in)humanity that still needs to be examined, palpated, and dissected. For some, it is an effort to explicate and document history, to make sense of senseless acts that occurred during the four-year regime. For others, it is a search for the “truth,” for justice so that the “dead would not have died in vain”.3 And for those who have lived through the Killing Fields, who have lost family and friends, their testimony is also a form of self-therapy, adding the story of their people’s and their own suffering to other stories of suffering in other parts of the world. But just as the events that happened in Cambodia were intrinsically linked to international political maneuverings, the country’s recent history cannot be accounted for solely within its borders, and the stories of Cambodians do not end there. What has largely been lacking from these narratives is the resulting displacement of countless refugees and their experiences, which deserve

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more than the few lines found in the epilogues of books, ﬁlms, and documentaries about the Khmer Rouge. For the Cambodians who were dislocated but still carry their native land within them, for their children and grandchildren who were born in the homeland, in the US or elsewhere, and possess but a vague or no memory of Cambodia, their stories, not yet inscribed within the history of their host countries, remain part of Cambodia itself. A prophecy known to older Cambodians said that there would come a time in Cambodia when houses and streets would be emptied of people, cities would be ﬁlled only with ghosts, blood would be shed and would rise to the level of an elephant’s stomach, and only the deaf mutes would survive this period of calamity. In hindsight, everyone has attributed this prophecy to the takeover of the Khmer Rouge regime. For those who have escaped the tragedy and have found refuge in another country, playing deaf and mute is no longer a strategy of survival but a state brought about by unspeakable traumas and further silenced by displacement into foreign tongues and territories. If many have resettled in France, the transition made a little easier because of the continued French presence in Cambodia during and after colonial rule, many more have resettled in the United States, sponsored by relief organizations, churches, and family members who had arrived before or shortly after April 1975. Initially scattered through different cities and states, many chose to move little by little to California, closer to family, friends, available jobs, better social support, and a more “generous package of public assistance for refugees” (Ong 2003: 87). And, soon enough, the city of Long Beach began to house the largest population of Cambodians outside Southeast Asia. Forging new lives for themselves, the older refugees often have to rely on their children to serve as a bridge between their home and the outside world, while they pass on to them a complex and contradictory legacy of silence, elliptical stories of a distant past and a distant land gloriﬁed by their absence and a recent past punctuated with trauma, anger, and shame, as well as the survivor’s guilt. The younger generation is left to ﬁll in the void of silence, the gap in between words sometimes lost in translation, the burden of memory of which they can grasp only uncertain contours. In essence, these experiences are not so different from those told by second, third, or fourth generation Asian Americans. However, in the bipolar racial colorization of America, unlike these generations of Asian Americans who “have been traditionally absorbed into Whiteness” (Wong 2000: 85) and the “whitening” of more recent “Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese immigrants” (Ong 2003: 86), Cambodians (and Laotians) remained plagued by their refugee status and “have been located ideologically at the underclass end of the continuum, a position close to the black pole of the ethno-racial scheme.” Welfare dependency, high rates of teenage pregnancy, and location and isolation in inner-city neighborhoods are all contributing factors (Ong 2003: 86). Locating Cambodians within Asian

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America, therefore, proves to be a difﬁcult task, as Aihwa Ong insightfully pointed out in Buddha Is Hiding: refugees, citizenship, the new America: Asian Americanism as an idea has been mainly the product of Chinese American or Japanese American academics and activists seeking to forge a racial community that has historically been wronged, but they have great difﬁculty in reproducing that model in a context of extreme ﬂux and diversity among Asian American populations in the country . . . Theoretically speaking, the model of Asian America as a community of ethnic exclusion is unable to conceptualize new transnational Asian subjects, except to identify them as “foreign-born” and therefore not Asian American. (2003: 256, 258) Given this exclusion, it should not be surprising that the term “Cambodian American” still sits uncomfortably even among naturalized citizens and those born in the US who prefer to call themselves “Cambodians in America” as praCh does. Strangers to Cambodia while they are not yet made to feel part of America, being Asian and yet disavowed by Asian America, the younger generation of Cambodians living in the US have nevertheless learnt to speak up, and like many youths today, one of the more popular means of expression is rap. Through it, they have begun to negotiate alternative identities for themselves, inscribing their own corner of Cambodian America, while disrupting American, Cambodian, and rap’s color lines. With today’s globalization and high commercialization of hip hop, it is easy to assume that rap music has lost its initial controversial and political edge. I would argue, however, that rap music remains a subversive and powerful locus that allows us to think through identity politics. To take Ashwani Sharma’s quote a little out of context, rap is “a space of knowledge, in which local and global identities are being continually negotiated, where histories and memories are being re-narrated” (A. Sharma 1996: 16). Because debates over rap music have always taken place along the Black/White color line of America itself where the musical form originated, a handful of books and articles on Asian rap (see Manuel 1995; A. Sharma 1996; Wong 2000) have deplored the fact that the participation of rap artists of Asian descent in the hip hop scene has been consistently overlooked and remains unproblematized. Speaking of South Asian rappers in England, for instance, Sanjay Sharma wonders whether in the ongoing Black/White debate they are being “subsumed under the label ‘black’,” a point that has never been made clear (S. Sharma 1996: 42). In a revealing article about Asian American hip hop performance, Deborah Wong, on the other hand, argues that:

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for Asian Americans to choose to move in the direction of color is literally unimaginable. When it happens, it’s suspicious, uncomfortable, hermeneutically impossible. And when that bodily movement coincides with rap—one of the most oppositional performatives now at play—everyone is put on the alert except, perhaps, most hip hoppers themselves . . . So Asian Americans rap and engage in a kind of racialized shape-shifting that is unsettling, not unproblematic, but inherently seated in identity politics. Asian American rappers are watched and heard with pleasure and discomﬁture; the cultural tropes they rely on create a discursive environment in which by rapping they can’t be White. (2000: 85) Wong’s reading is indeed a clever one. However, her assertion stems from the place of privilege that Asian Americans have since acquired—albeit not without struggle and not without the profound knowledge that their honorary Whiteness can be washed out at anytime—whereby in this very act of resistance, their perceived “Whiteness” might be shed in the (playful) act of rapping but can just as easily be recovered again. In so doing, she participates in the erasure from Asian America of other Asian groups for whom such a luxury of “choice” was never granted, and reveals further blurring of the line as well as another schism that is not only interracial but also intraracial. In contemplating the case of Cambodian rap(pers) such as praCh, it is my contention that his music forces us to reconsider the complex issue of identity politics under a different light, one that cannot be understood without looking simultaneously at: the speciﬁcities of Cambodian history; the place occupied by Cambodians in America and its discourses on race, and their relationship towards the homeland, their past, present, and future; and the dual status of rap as both counterhegemonic and “whitewashed” under its current commercialized form, ultimately and ironically suggesting, contrary to Wong, that in some ways “by rapping they can be White.” At the end of the chapter, we shall also see that the same holds true for today’s youths in Cambodia.

Scratching the truth The ﬁrst CD by praCh, Dalama . . . “the end’n is just the beginnin,” the ﬁrst of a trilogy, was recorded in his parents’ garage in Long Beach in 1999. The title, the rapper explains, is a combination of Dalai Lama, dilemma, and a “little bit of trauma” (Kane 2002: 21), a word he made up and turned into “the story of his life” (May 2004: 77). When it made its way to Cambodia, the title was changed to two different titles—Khmer Rap and Khmer Rouge, Khmer Rap—praCh’s name disappeared from the CD, and the rapper’s own artwork on the cover was replaced by a new one that shows a picture of a child soldier with an AK-47 in his hands.

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The original cover is an ink sketching of “mirror images” of Cambodia and America (May 2004: 77): in the middle, Angkor Wat joins its highest tower with the dome of Washington DC’s Capitol Building; on its right, the Statue of Liberty stands side by side with Phnom Penh’s Independence Monument; and on the far left, two sugar palm trees rise above human skulls so numerous they appear to populate the post-1975 seemingly tranquil and bucolic Cambodian landscape while on the far right the twin towers of the World Trade Center rise above a bed of ﬂowers in pre-9/11 New York. Dalama . . . “the end’n is just the beginnin” comprises 25 songs and “skits,” most of which are in English; some contain a few Cambodian words here and there, and there are a couple of songs in Cambodian. Five songs are about Cambodia and the Killing Fields, but the rest speak to the Cambodian refugee experience in the United States; more pointedly, they are about Cambodian youth experience in urban America. Unlike the illustration on the CD cover, where America stands in stark contrast to Cambodia, the lyrics suggest that America the Beautiful might hold true for some on the other side of the continent (New York, Washington DC, or elsewhere, but not in some parts of Long Beach), or perhaps in the dreams of refugees before their arrival in the promised land. Lady Liberty might have welcomed the poor, the hungry, and the tired with welfare checks and literacy classes, but once she delivered them on the streets of Long Beach, Oakland, Stockton, or Lowell, they would have to fend for themselves, walking to the corner grocery stores with food stamps in hand while dodging one of the few indiscriminations: bullets. “America, land of the dreamers” (“Outro-the buildin’ of power” 1999), but for many Cambodian youths, the question remains as to how to “reach for [your] dream when [you’re] only ﬁve foot nine / tryin to reach for the cream, but it seems a waste of time” (“Walk a Block” 1999). For their ediﬁcation, praCh invites his listeners to “walk a block in [his] shoes, [to] see what [he sees], why [he does] what [he does] to survive on these streets” (“Walk”), to reconsider the “reality” of America through his neighborhood where “people around [him] are caged behind bars” (“Outro”) and where “[people] die over a buck / [while] the government don’t give a fuck” (“War on the Streetz” 1999). This is the CD that has gotten praCh a lot of media attention. Western journalists working for newspapers and television broadcasts in Cambodia, America, and even Europe came knocking on his door. If they were shown the CD cover at all, they chose to focus only on the left-hand-side drawing of Cambodia and blocked America out of their sight; if they listened to the CD at all, they must have skipped over the majority of the songs to concentrate only on the few about the Cambodian genocide. In the hands of the media, praCh’s CD met the same fate as it did in Cambodia: it was turned into “Khmer Rouge rap.” Understandably, praCh’s brand of angry “gansta” rap about inner-city violence, drugs, discrimination, injustice, and

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poverty is not new to them while a rap on the Khmer Rouge is. But, in their unquenchable thirst for the sensational and the dramatic, the press only contributes to the continued “othering” of Cambodians. To their credit, however, The Los Angeles Times and the BBC have made the correlation between the fate suffered by Cambodians under the Khmer Rouge regime and that of Cambodians in the streets of Long Beach. Nancy Wride, in The Los Angeles Times writes: It’s rare to ﬁnd an elder Cambodian who has not watched victims dig their own graves or be led at gunpoint into the lush forest, never to be seen again. A generation later, it’s hard to ﬁnd children of refugees who do not know someone harmed by urban violence. (2003) In 2003, praCh lost a friend, another Cambodian American rapper, who was “shot at a late-night barbecue by a hooded man,” and to this day, police are still looking for motives and killers (Wride 2003). This is not an isolated case in Long Beach. In an interview with Chris Richard of the BBC, Him Chhim, executive director of the Long Beach-based Cambodian Association of America, makes similar remarks: “During the killing ﬁelds we don’t know what kind of mistake anyone had been killed for. Similarity exists in this Long Beach neighborhood is that people got killed at random. For no reason!” (Richard 2004). Further, in the interview, Richard noted: Mr Chhim also points out that after nearly three decades, the soldiers of the Khmer Rouge have not been brought to justice. Likewise, gang killings often go unsolved. Twenty-year-old Ra Pok suggests a reason why. “Like, the people who were killed in the Khmer Rouge era, they were farmers, either middle class or way below middle class. And if you look at the people who are affected by gang violence, they are people who are below the poverty line.” (Richard 2004) Unlike the Khmer Rouge, this is truly the forgotten and forsaken story. And, interestingly enough, praCh’s greatest contribution might not be his “Rap on the Rouge” but his testimony about the condition of the lives of Cambodian refugees in inner-city America. Speaking of his youth in America, praCh said: “no one knew who Cambodians were. We didn’t really have an identity. They called us Chinese, chinky eyes, gook” (May 2004: 74). Rap would then allow him to build his own legend and to inscribe not just one but several births and intertwining identities for himself. Through the performance of masculinity, “gansta” speak, and rap battling, he is a child of the American “ghetto” (May 2004: 74) testifying to racial prejudice, injustice, and violence in

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the inner city: “where I’m from / broken gates and window bars / perpetrate get regulates on concrete tars / side walk chalk / tape’n up the crime scene / rotten cops patrol the block of my streetz” (“War”). In another song, the narration of his own birth in Cambodia takes on an apocalyptic proportion and can be juxtaposed against legends of the birth of the country itself, including the myth of the deluge, thus establishing in no uncertain terms his ties with the homeland: “I was born in a hut / umbilical cord cut / a little bit torn up / when the big storm erupt / it mudded the sand / ﬂooded the land / . . . / it drown the town into a lake” (“The Great Escape!” Dalama 2003). In one of the myths of origin, what is known today as Cambodia was a waterlogged country. To celebrate the marriage of a foreigner, an Indian Brahman named Kaundinya, and a nagi, a dragonprincess who inhabited the land, her father, the dragon-king, drank up the water to enlarge his son-in-law’s possessions and renamed the country Kambuja (Chandler 1996a). The myth of the deluge, a little lesser known, still ﬁgures prominently among Cambodian legends. After a storm had ﬂooded the land and decimated the entire population, according to some versions only one couple would survive, and in other versions several people would escape alive to repopulate the land (Porée-Maspero 1962). PraCh’s tale of his legendary birth seems to coincide with Cambodia’s own, and the devastating ﬂood likewise ﬁnds its echo in the devastation inﬂicted by the Khmer Rouge, causing the death of more than one million Cambodians and the ensuing exile of another large segment of the population who inherited their mythical ancestor Kaundinya’s fate, without his good fortune of inheriting a new land. And for their sons and daughters brought as infants to, or born in, the US and who have not lived through the war and genocide, the “fragile abstraction they called” Cambodia (Appadurai 1993: 799) and what it means to be Cambodian are perversely made real by the catastrophic ﬂood symbolizing the genocidal regime of the Khmer Rouge. While the average Americans have but a vague idea of where the country is, popular Hollywood-made ﬁlms such as The Killing Fields placed it on the map for them. Likewise, for many Cambodian youths in America, the movie serves as the main reference point. To be Cambodian is to bear the historical weight of the Killing Fields; to be Cambodian is to be born of the Killing Fields (see “Child of the Killing Fields” Dalama 1999). To be other than “Chinese, chinky eye, gooks” or children of the American ghetto, the Killing Fields paradoxically become one of the most important identity markers. In fundamental ways, these processes of identity reclamation and afﬁrmation bear striking resemblance to those of many African American inner-city youths. In “Resurrec,” praCh intones: “They act like we are slaves / I rather be back where I was born / than here confused and dazed” (Dalama 1999). Speaking of the Black performance of “hip hop nationalism,” Jeffrey Louis Decker states:

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All historical thinking, to a large extent, is a remembering of the past in terms of the present. As a popular culture form, rap music—and hip hop nationalism in speciﬁc—is a powerful vehicle which allows today’s black youth to gain a better understanding of their heritage and their present identities when ofﬁcial channels of remembering and identity formation continually fail to meet their needs. (1993: 73) Looking at praCh’s musical corpus, it is clear that the privilege of playing along the color line was not given to him, and “Blackness” was not embraced by design but by forces of circumstance. However, that the theme of his songs closely followed those of his rap’s precursors should not come as a surprise, even if it is quickly disavowed by the Cambodian rapper who has shifted its origin to ﬁt his own needs, testifying to yet another racial tension often kept under wraps in America between Blacks and Asians: [Rap] isn’t really just Black music because if you kind of root it down, in Cambodia . . . they call it “Ah-ye” . . . it’s kind of Khmer Rap . . . they do the same thing in front of the campﬁre, where all the friends get together and they just go at it with each other, in rhymes. I already had that in my blood. (praCh quoted in Sadiq 2002) Whether he chooses to call it “Khmer Rap” or anything else,4 one cannot deny how much Dalama owes to Black rap artists. The anger injected in praCh’s music against White America, the government and the police recalls this famous quote uttered by the African American literary critic, Addison Gayle, Jr: “The black artist in the American society who creates without interjecting a note of anger is creating not as a black man, but as an American” (Gladney 1995: 291). Albeit in a different way, the impact of the movie The Killing Fields on the psyche of Cambodian youths in America seems to echo the inﬂuence of a British-made movie on the Zulu tribe of Southeastern Africa that gave birth to the hip hop nation in the 1970s (Decker 1993: 57). Likewise, there are striking similarities between what is called “nation-conscious rap”—of “reclaiming the ancient Egyptian empire as the African origin in order to generate racial pride and awareness in the struggle over injustice in America” (Decker 1993: 54)—and praCh’s insistence on the supremacy of the “Angkorean Empire” and the Khmer race as well as the gloriﬁcation and mythiﬁcation of pre-1975 Cambodia (“Cambodia, a land ruled by kings and gods” [“Intro”]; “before the war Kampuchea is so beautiful/before the war Cambodia is so beautiful” [“Neutral” Dalama 2003, my emphasis]). But unfortunately, just like the African American rappers before them, the younger Cambodian rappers’ quest for and reclamation of their origin are based on second-hand

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memories, nostalgia they cannot even claim as their own, and are fraught with inaccuracies, contradictions, and misrepresentations of history. As for his rap on the Khmer Rouge, it is clear that praCh has found his inspiration through ﬁlms, documentaries, and stories told by older refugees. In “Intro: the Temple of Peace—the Take Over” for instance, the rapper uses samplings taken from a scene in The Killing Fields. With the loud noise of choppers in the foreground, an American army major briefs the press about a recent bombing of the town of Neak Luong that has caused numerous civilian casualties. The US air force is responsible for the bombing, a mistake the major tries to cover up in his brieﬁng by putting the blame on the Khmer Rouge. In the movie, shortly before that scene, Voice of America announces that the US congress has ruled the secret bombing of Cambodia, which was ordered by the Nixon administration, illegal. The date was August 7, 1973. While The Killing Fields is a Hollywood creation, it still holds merit for showing several sides of the story: Cambodia caught as a “sideshow” of the Vietnam War, the brutality of the Lon Nol army summarily executing Khmer Rouge guerrillas, the madness of the Khmer Rouge regime but also the compassionate acts of a few Khmer Rouge soldiers and cadres. For praCh, “The Take Over,” as the title indicates, is meant to be the Khmer Rouge entrance and takeover of Phnom Penh on April 17, 1975. So one is left to wonder: Why did he choose to remove this scene from its proper historical context? For what reasons did he obliterate the American illegal bombing, not to mention other preceding causes that led to the rise of the Khmer Rouge from his “history” of Cambodia while instead pointing the blame towards the Vietnamese, as so often happens given the age-old animosity between the two neighbors? “Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge were / back up by the Viet Kong / and the North Vietnamese / They were sent out to purify the Khmer race / by creating a classless society” (“Power, Territory, and Rice” Dalama 2003). With this in mind, one is also left to wonder if in his “research and quest for the truth” (“Child”), the truth he is claiming to “pass down to the next generation” (“Child”) is, at best, selective and, at worst, misleading. Again, Cambodia’s and America’s histories are interwoven and linked in more ways than the rapper himself perhaps knows. But as stated, “praCh [was] gett’n school by the oldies” (“Child of the Killing Fields” 1999), and the truths he has left unsaid are the same ones that are often left unsaid by a majority of the ﬁrst generation of Cambodians in the US who like refugees from Vietnam or Cuba for instance, bears strong anti-“communist” sentiment. Furthermore, a sense of gratitude towards America for having given them asylum, combined with the fear of speaking against the government inherited from their homeland, are also contributing factors. Some of that sense of gratitude gets translated in praCh’s second CD Dalama . . . “the lost chapter” cut in 2003. Heralded by the press for his

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songs about the Khmer Rouge more than his rant about growing up in the inner city in his ﬁrst CD, the self-proclaimed “pioneer of Khmer rap” (“Min-tom-ie-da” Dalama 2003) in his second CD expands more on the former subject, delves further into the history of Cambodia (though his research remains limited) and its gloriﬁcation, trades his “gansta rap” for a moralizing rap on youth behavior, and celebrates Cambodian America as well as America. This is where his rap departs from his African American predecessors. While he remains both a “nation-conscious” and a “consciousness rapper” (S. Sharma 1996: 43), teaching Cambodian youths in the US about their culture, here he goes further and preaches to the youth about being good Cambodian sons and daughters as well as good American citizens. In “Wise’s that” (Dalama 2003) sung in Cambodian, he criticizes Cambodian youths in the Long Beach community who misbehave and who in trying to “become Americans and adopt American culture forget who they are and want to behave like Blacks” (here he uses a very derogatory Cambodian term when referring to Blacks). Proclaiming that his “town is still Long Beach,” the moral lesson given at the end of the song is: “Believe me, living in any other country is not as easy as it is in this country, so you have to persevere” (my translation). The cover of this second CD is yet another ink sketching by praCh and shows other “mirror images” of his native and adopted lands. This time, however, we have an inversion of the scene from the ﬁrst CD. The bed of ﬂowers has moved from the ground of the twin towers in New York to the ruins of Angkor. The Statue of Liberty has disappeared. Instead, we see the post-9/11 remnants of the World Trade Center, and the human skulls that once stood at the foot of the two sugar palm trees in the ﬁrst album now stand with the debris from the twin towers. War and destruction have moved from Cambodia to the US as we move from a “lost chapter” of Cambodian history to a “new chapter” of American history. The introduction to the song “Tues.” begins with a sampling of George W. Bush’s speech given after the event of 9/11: “Today . . . our way of life, our very freedom came under attack . . .”—praCh in turn chimes in, rapping about the “darkest day in America’s history . . . a day that would live within me,” agreeing with the US president that the terrorist act was “a threat to all our freedom.” The shift in tone about America is undoubtedly drastic, the persecutors have taken on new faces and praCh has situated himself as an American in the camp of the persecuted. Cambodia and America no longer stand a world apart. The two nations’ histories are locked into one, united by tragedies and memories of ages of innocence and beauty in pre-1975 Cambodia and pre-9/11 America. If there is still reclamation of origin in this second CD, it does not serve the purpose it did in the ﬁrst CD. Rather it stems from the fabulous dream of America, the melting pot, where for one day out of the year the Irish American can celebrate Saint Patrick’s Day, the Mexican American Cinco de Mayo, the

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Italian American Columbus Day, the African American Martin Luther King’s Day, and the Cambodian American the Cambodian New Year. For that one day, they can bring back “the smell of their humanity” (Ong 2003: 97), the smell of their ancestral culture they have to erase during the rest of the year. “Once you start thinking about what it means to be Irish-American, African-American or Chinese-American, then you are American” writes the Chinese American author Gish Jen (1997: 42).

“U better [ . . . ] come home” Since I started to take notice of rap music in Cambodia in 2002, it has become a common sound and sight. If Long Beach is a corner of Cambodia in America, then rap music, like the logos of the Bakery and Burger World, the Pizza House and the Khmer Fried Chicken, provide a furtive glimpse of America in Cambodia and a sign of global trends. In 2005, one of the more popular tunes heard, not just in Phnom Penh but throughout Cambodia, was a hip hop song. Preap Sovath, a famous Cambodian singer, has traded his previous romantic persona and Beatles mop for a cornrow hairdo, Pich Sophea and DJ Sdey are dressed in hip hop gear, and the trio is rapping in Cambodian to the beat of “You Better Not Come Home,” previously sung in English by a German teen band named “Bro’Sis.” The original song, categorized as pop music, was ﬁrst picked up by a Taiwanese band, and the lyrics were changed from English to Chinese; from there it made its way to Cambodia, the Chinese lyrics were replaced by Cambodian ones, and the pop tune became a rap tune. Only the refrain and the title remained the same, thus allowing me to trace its origin. If this is a sign of the times, it is by no means a new occurrence. The beloved Cambodian singer, Sin Sisamouth, whose career began in the 1950s and ended in 1975 when he was killed by the Khmer Rouge, is often nostalgically referred to as the iconoclastic ﬁgure of Cambodian music. What is often forgotten or left unsaid is that his repertoire included many French songs adapted and translated into Cambodian and that the instruments used were not traditional Cambodian ones but Western ones. Cambodian Television Network (CTN), a television station owned by a Cambodian American, broadcasts every Friday night and Sunday afternoon a music show featuring clips of American and Cambodian hip hop. DJ Sdey has started a school to teach children freestyling. Coincidentally, just like praCh, the rappers I spoke to in Cambodia consider rap an educational tool to teach youths about responsibility and good behavior. Though it is still largely consumed by urban youths, it has also permeated, to a lesser extent, the countryside through radio and television programs and the regular ﬂux of migration between cities where people work and the villages they call home and return to during the holidays. I have been told in my interviews with several young people who are part of the Phnom Penh hip hop scene that rap came to Cambodia along with overseas Cambodians

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returning from the US, France, or Australia. While the majority of Cambodians have not heard of praCh, though they know his songs, most Cambodian rappers I spoke to know of him. When I asked what they thought of his “Rap on the Rouge,” they told me that they were tired of hearing about the Khmer Rouge. However, they were even more tired of Thai pop songs that get translated into Cambodian. This is a common nationalistic discourse heard in Cambodia against its other neighbors, the Thais. Rap, then, becomes a way of resisting the Thai inﬂuence on popular culture in Cambodia while the American inﬂuence is welcomed and perceived as a status symbol. And ironically, although Cambodia is far from being a colorblind society, when African American performers are shown on television, they are not perceived as Blacks but simply as Americans. Rap represents the West and the kind of music the “lucky ones” who made it to the West indulge in. By listening to rap and adopting hip hop fashion, rich and poor Cambodian kids alike are given vicarious access to a part of the “American dream” when a pair of real or fake Nikes can be bought at ﬁve dollars and a baseball cap for 50 cents. Of course, not everyone agrees, though the positions for or against rap music in Cambodia follow the same nationalistic line. When asked about praCh’s music, Menh Sothevann, the director of the Music Training Centre in Phnom Penh, said: “[in] developed countries young people think anything strange is good . . . This music is completely un-Khmer . . . Teens are only listening because it is strange, but they aren’t thinking about the meaning of the lyrics” (Deutsche Presse-Agentur 2001). In 2005, praCh also “came home” for the ﬁrst time since he had left Cambodia as an infant. In a couple of free and impromptu performances, he provided enjoyment for many. The reality he witnessed here will no doubt fuel the last CD of the trilogy tentatively called “The Beginnin’ of the End” (May 2004: 81). To speak of the present reality in Cambodia is what many Cambodian rappers wish they could do but dare not. It is not for fear of censorship through litigation, another form of American inﬂuence adopted by the rich and powerful Cambodians these days, but more for fear of the censorship that often enough comes in the form of murder in broad daylight. Despite praCh’s limited knowledge about the country and the Khmer Rouge, it seems that more young Cambodians have heard his songs and might have learned more from them than, for instance, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Phnom Penh, visited mainly by foreign tourists. Unlike the Cambodian diaspora who has an over-determined relationship with that speciﬁc period of Cambodian history, today, some among the young generation in Cambodia do not even believe the Khmer Rouge existed. They think that it is a story their elders made up when they speak about their hardship as compared to the better lives their children and grandchildren now enjoy. Others I have spoken to are so disillusioned by the corruption and the greater divide between rich and poor in Cambodia that they think the Khmer Rouge should actually come back. In light of

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these facts and because of its easy accessibility, rap might indeed hold the power to educate the younger generation more than other loftier forms of representation. Like many other cultural phenomena, rap reminds us of the natural permeability of all borders. And while it is understandable after the destruction inﬂicted by the Khmer Rouge that Cambodia would long to recover its “traditional” cultural practices, one cannot help but be cautious of the desire and call for a “pure Cambodian culture” unspoiled by outside inﬂuences, for that same desire has led to a genocidal regime, that of the Khmer Rouge and its radical closing off of the world.

Notes 1 2 3 4

As of 2005, the Cambodian Ministry of Commerce ordered the BBW sign to be changed, leading some to speculate that Phnom Penh might soon get its ﬁrst McDonald’s franchise. “Public Enemy’s Chuck D once described rap as the ‘black CNN,’” (quoted in Darren Keast’s “Hip Hop Disconnect,” East Bay Express, November 21, 2001). My personal interview with the ﬁlmmaker Rithy Panh 2002. Here, it is interesting to note that praCh has also conveniently adopted as his own, the name—Khmer Rap—which was given to his CD without his permission.

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Part Three

Performing tradition

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8

Weaving into Cambodia Negotiated ethnicity in the (post)colonial silk industry Heidi Dahles and John ter Horst

Spinning the wheel In a corner under her wooden house in Veal, a large weaving town in Takeo province in southeast Cambodia, Sotheap, an elderly lady, sits at her spinning wheel routinely plying the yarn. Like many women of her age, she has cut her hair short and wears a sampot hol,1 a silk skirt with ﬂower motifs, and a white Chinese blouse. While spinning the yarn she gives instructions to her young grandchild who ties silk threads on an old wooden spinning wheel (rohat). Her daughter bows deep over a large wooden frame loom creating new patterns with a knife. Sotheap explains that all family members have to give a hand to ﬁnish the sampot in time. She enjoys describing how her grandmother cultivated mulberry trees in their backyard, fed the silkworms and carefully protected them against insects. She also remembers vividly how her grandmother ﬁlled a special pot with water and put it on a ﬁre to boil the cocoons. She still laughs when recalling her mother chasing away the cows from the mulberry leaves. Sotheap was taught silk weaving by her mother and elder cousin during the early 1960s. Finishing her ﬁrst sampot hol at the age of thirteen, she thinks that she was the youngest weaver in Cambodia ever to accomplish that. During the Khmer Rouge regime, she and her family were ordered to work in a textile factory in Battambang. Talking about the civil war brings back painful memories of Khmer Rouge atrocities, as her husband, two daughters, a son, and many distant kin were killed. In 1979, shortly after the defeat of the Khmer Rouge by Vietnamese troops, Sotheap returned to her home in Veal, where she resumed the family’s silk-weaving activities. She still feels indebted to the middleman who provided her, a widow with children, with credit to buy a new loom, one that enabled her to earn enough money to feed her family under the extreme post-war conditions. Every fortnight she rode a bike for ﬁve hours from Veal to the markets in Phnom Penh to barter her silk products for rice. In the mid-1990s her life ﬁnally took a turn for the better. She and her eldest daughter had proven themselves as skilled and reliable weavers to chen, the “Chinese” middleman who has rewarded them with a second loom. For Sotheap, the second loom came at the right time as her eldest

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granddaughter had by that time reached an age where she was able to weave sampot hol herself. With more productive hands around the house, Sotheap could dedicate more time to her religious duties in the local pagoda, making merit for a better life in the future. Looking back upon her life as a silk weaver not only brings back memories of joy and pride but also of painful backbones and ﬁngers that grew crooked, and of the fear and anger she felt towards the middleman. Sotheap shivers telling how chen used his motorbike to roam around and check the colors she applied and the clarity of her patterns. Sotheap feared his judgment as he had the power to lower the price of her products. Talking about chen, Sotheap suddenly whispers that her grandmother was Chinese too. She was once told by her mother that her grandmother had come to Cambodia a long time ago and had married a Khmer farmer. After her revelation Sotheap hastens to add that she herself is not a chen but a Khmer and a devout Buddhist. But to prove her Chinese ancestry, Sotheap invites me inside the house to show me a small Chinese shrine. In front of the shrine she explains that her daughter became seriously ill ten years ago. She feared for her life and went to the doctor in her village. Dissatisﬁed with his advice, she turned to a Chinese fortune-teller at Saiwaa market who explained that it was saen kbal tuk, the Chinese month of the ghosts, and that her daughter’s sickness was caused by the angry ghosts of her (Chinese) ancestors. Since then, Sotheap has followed the fortuneteller’s advice and burns incense and offers fruit during saen kbal tuk. Then Sotheap turns to a corner of her house to rummage in an old carton box from which she lifts a black hand-woven farmer’s pants (kho kansaen). Resembling the traditional Chinese garments often worn at religious events she states: “These are my grandfather’s, he wore them when he visited the pagoda.”

Two different discourses The story of Sotheap is an excerpt from the ﬁeld notes of this chapter’s second author who spent one year (April 2004 to April 2005) in Cambodia studying processes of ethnicization among silk weavers and traders. This research, which adopts an anthropological perspective and an ethnographic approach, aims at assessing the ways in which the Cambodian silk industry is organized by ethnically based relations between producers, distributors, wholesalers, and retailers. It has been claimed in both academic and policy oriented publications that silk weaving is of tremendous economic importance and cultural signiﬁcance in Cambodia (see, for example, Dahles and Zwart 2003; Morimoto 1995). At present, silk weaving and market trade are important sources of income for Cambodians, in particular Cambodian women, who are often the breadwinners of extended families, given that many men were either killed or disabled.

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Invariably, silk weaving in Cambodia is deﬁned as “Khmer” and as such establishes a cultural asset invested with great pride, most notably through the production of delicate ceremonial clothing. It is said that the weaving patterns currently applied to silk follow Khmer traditions. In most writings on Khmer silk weaving, its origins are traced to the courts of Angkor and are claimed to be passed down from generation to generation within Khmer families. In this sense, Khmer silk weaving seems to be an expression of the national identity of the kingdom of Cambodia and its subjects. Today it is commonly stated that 90 percent of Cambodia’s population is said to be of “pure” Khmer ethnic origin. The remaining 10 percent consist of 6 percent Vietnamese, 2 percent Chinese, and 2 percent Cham2 and from a number of mountain tribes.3 With Khmer ethnicity seemingly so dominant, Cambodia appears to be the most ethnically homogeneous country in Southeast Asia. However, such a picture, along with the claim of the Khmer-based authenticity of silk products, remains highly problematic, as we shall see. In the ﬁrst instance, it should be remembered that silk production in Cambodia’s rural areas was all but wiped out over the course of the second Indochina war and the ruralization programs of the Khmer Rouge. The revitalization of the silk industry in post-civil war Cambodia has come to depend on imports of raw silk from neighboring countries and beyond (Zwart 2000). As we shall see, the revitalization of silk weaving has also relied upon the arrival of foreign expertise. Moreover, against the background of Cambodia opening its doors to foreign investments and tourism, demand for silk products has increased worldwide (Dahles and Zwart 2003). Since the mid-1990s, NGOs have fashioned new Khmer silk products intended to appeal to the taste of Western visitors and markets outside Cambodia. In modern air-conditioned shops they sell expensive hand-woven wall hangings with episodes of the life of Prince Siddharta, the young Buddha. To “protect” Khmer “authenticity,” these NGOs supply Cambodian weavers with natural dyes and provide training to younger weavers to keep Khmer weaving tradition alive. At the same time, silk products manufactured abroad in Burma, Lao People’s Democratic Republic (PDR), Thailand, and China, which do not belong to the “traditional Khmer” repertoire, ﬂood the tourist markets in Phnom Penh and Siem Reap. Nonetheless, vendors sell these foreign silks to backpackers and package tourists as “authentic” Khmer products. The invention of traditions and the social construction of authenticity in the tourism industry have been widely commented on. Yet, to date, the social construction of Khmer ethnic identity for the Cambodian population at large and the role of silk as a national identity marker have gone uncontested. As the case study presented above implies, there is more to outward claims of Khmer ethnic afﬁliation than meets the eye. While investigating the signiﬁcance of Khmer ethnicity as a binding factor in economic co-operation within the Cambodian silk industry, the involvement of ethnic Chinese revealed itself as a hidden layer underneath the

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dominant discourse. With few and somewhat contradictory sources to refer to, the number and role of the ethnic Chinese in Cambodia are areas that remain under-researched.4 In an attempt to address this issue, the chapter looks at the ethnic character of the silk industry in Cambodia against a background of changing identity politics involving competing discourses of ethnic homogeneity versus diversity. To explore the theoretical debate concerning the role of the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia and its relevance for Cambodia, two discourses on the current organization of the Cambodian silk industry will be analyzed: the dominant discourse claiming silk as a marker of Khmer ethnic identity vis-à-vis a re-emerging discourse revealing long-standing and important ethnic Chinese involvement in this industry stretching back to colonial times. In the conclusion, these two different discourses will be interpreted within a context of identity politics and the claims of ethnic homogeneity by the Cambodian state.

Discourses on ethnic identities In adopting a Foucauldian understanding of discourse, one of the tasks of the ethnographer is to reveal social categories and structures of power. In addition to identifying the dominant discourses, it is important to examine more marginalized discourses such as those of rural communities. Doing so reveals the contested nature of the dominant discourse, the limits of power, and the permeability of real and symbolic boundaries. In order to unravel the multilayered web of power inherent to Sotheap’s story, we will consider this case below by distinguishing between two discursive levels. The ﬁrst, and simultaneously dominant, discourse in Sotheap’s story is about her being a “good” Khmer, a faithful Buddhist, and a loyal Cambodian citizen, reﬂecting the nationalistic agendas exerted by the Cambodian state. The second is the re-emerging discourse concerning the identity of the ethnic Chinese in Cambodia, which is only reluctantly revealed in Sotheap’s presentation of self. The silence she keeps about her partial Chinese identity has to be seen as an expression of the marginal character of this discourse, rather than its lack of “realness” or “truthfulness.” However, the challenge for the researcher is to ﬁnd out on which occasions and in whose company Sotheap chooses to discuss her Chinese ancestry or to keep quiet about it. The persistence of a Chinese identity in the margin of the dominant discourse of authentic Khmer silk producers raises questions that pertain to theoretical debates on Chinese business networks in Southeast Asia. The disclosure of a hidden Chinese identity of silk weavers, coupled with the overt Chinese ethnicity of silk brokers in Cambodia who evoke the image of the notorious ethnic Chinese middleman in Southeast Asia, calls to mind the much quoted ethnic Chinese “bamboo networks” that are said to extend across Southeast Asia and beyond. It has been argued that these networks distinguish Chinese from both Western capitalism and “Asian” market cul-

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tures (Hefner 1998), and have contributed to the economic success of the overseas Chinese (Redding 1990). Chinese capitalism has been described in terms of a “network capitalism” characterized by both hierarchical relationships within the family and a system of reciprocal relationships known as guanxi (good connections) that has been traced to a Confucian value system that emphasizes harmony and consensus, trust, and responsibility towards the lineage (Kotkin 1993; Redding 1990). It has been suggested that the centrality of the family as a fundamental unit of social and economic organization gives the ethnic Chinese their sense of Chineseness (Yeung and Olds 2000). However, an ongoing scholarly debate persists between those who detect a “persistent” continuity of Confucian elements in ethnic Chinese business and, therefore, defend the primacy of culture (e.g. Douw 1999; Weidenbaum and Hughes 1996) and those who argue in favor of capitalist reasoning and/or complex client–patron relationships between ethnic Chinese entrepreneurs and state agencies, while at the same time denying that Chinese culture and identity play any signiﬁcant role in ethnic Chinese business practices across Southeast Asia and beyond (e.g. Godley 1999; Hodder 1996; Thireau and Hua 1999). While this debate suggests that cultural bonding, capitalist reasoning, and state patronage constitute distinct strategies that exclude one another, neither one of the positions taken captures the “diasporic” condition in its full complexity. Hamilton’s often-cited “embeddedness” theory (1996, 2000) represents an attempt to combine the different standpoints into one integrated framework. As Hamilton points out, the organization of business ﬁrms is largely shaped by institutional structures, of which business networks may be the most characteristic example. It is important to note that ethnic-based networks represent a meaningful way to relate to business partners in opaque economic and political environments. In culturally plural countries, such as many Southeast Asian societies, where the ethnic Chinese are an ofﬁcially recognized minority, people are familiar with many different codes of conduct, values, belief systems, and multilayered discourses. In such cases, a remarkable ability to easily adopt and shift to new cultural templates or repertoires is commonly found (Hsiao 2002: 111). In Cambodia, however, where the claim is one of cultural homogeneity, an ethnic Chinese mode of organizing business relations is not ofﬁcially acclaimed, and business ties based on cultural afﬁnity have to be kept hidden.

The dominant discourse: silk as a marker of Khmer identity Foreign visitors cannot help but notice the great pride invested in Khmer identity in public representations of Cambodia. Despite Cambodia’s poor infrastructure and political instability, international tourism has increased steadily over the past decade, becoming Cambodia’s second-largest foreignexchange earner after the garment industry (Leiper 1998; Lintner 2002). All

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over the world, earnings from souvenir production and sales, particularly handicrafts made of textiles, represent an important economic asset for transnational hotel companies and local communities alike. In Cambodia, sales of silk and associated products—cloth, scarves, dresses, blouses, pillowcases—establish an important source of income for a multitude of actors in the tourism industry. Silk products are promoted as assets in development strategies by both government agencies and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) to provide a solution to rural employment problems and to strengthen the Cambodian nation with a new sense of national pride. The economic and political interests invested in international tourism are among the major causes of the authenticity claims in the public discourse on silk in which Khmer ethnic identity is merged with Cambodian nationalism. The current discourse on Cambodian silk weaving celebrates ethnic Khmer dominance in the industry at two different levels: ﬁrst, at the level of the origin of the weaving techniques and patterns; and, second, at the level of the present-day production and trade. Among the many stakeholders of this dominant discourse, the Japanese silk expert Kikuo Morimoto plays a prominent role. As an apprentice of the Japanese art of yuzen—silk dyeing for kimonos—the Japanese silk expert came to Cambodia in the mid-1990s. Initially, he studied the economics of the silk weaving industry as a UNESCO consultant, but later he established his own NGO, the Institute for Khmer Traditional Textiles (IKTT). He invested much effort in re-establishing the silk production and revitalizing the silkweaving techniques that were destroyed by the civil war. To accomplish this, he bought ﬁve hectares of forest in the area adjacent to the Angkor World Heritage Site where he grew mulberries and produced natural dyes with the help of sixty skilled silk yarn producers from Tani, a river town near the Vietnamese border. Moreover, Morimoto contracted two experienced weavers from Takeo province to pass on their silk-weaving techniques to younger weavers. Today, IKTT provides jobs for 300 Cambodian women, and there are consistently more than 1,000 women on the waiting list, eager to join the institute. Products from the institute are sold in Morimoto’s shop in Siem Reap as well as in art galleries within the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC. By 2004 Morimoto’s efforts to revive the ancient silk-weaving techniques had caught the eye of the international jury of the prestigious Rolex Award who honored him as the initiator of post-war silk weaving in Cambodia. According to Morimoto (1995), silk production has played an important role within Khmer communities as far back as the twelfth century. This is much in line with the ﬁndings of other experts in the ﬁeld of the history of silk weaving in Cambodia such as Green (2003), who also suggested that during the Angkorean Period, Khmer weavers were entrusted with the production of the delicate silk fabrics worn by the members of the court. The evidence that Green refers to is the Chinese emissary Zhou Daguan, who arrived at Angkor in the late thirteenth century and observed

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a hill tribe woman weaving cotton clothes on a simple Cambodian frame loom (Green 2003: 59).5 Members of the royal family and the Khmer upper class wore silk clothes, and common people dressed in garments made of ﬁne silk at religious ceremonies and weddings. When it is suggested that the production of these garments—from the worm to the ﬁnished product—were produced by Khmer weavers on Cambodian soil, the presence of a highly developed silk industry is implied, starting in the villages with silkworm cultures, spinning, dyeing, and weaving, and extended networks of traders taking the silk cloth to the markets and from there to the consumers. In a silkweaving village almost every household operated a loom. Nowadays, silk weaving villages still exist in rural Cambodia, but the mulberry trees are gone, many of which were destroyed during the Khmer Rouge regime. At present, there are efforts to revive sericulture in the villages. But these efforts have yet to match the quantity required by weaving villages (Chan 1998). Sericulture takes place in the Vietnamese Central Highlands, involving Kinh immigrants from the Northern Red River Delta region (Braun 2000), and silk thread production for the Cambodian market occurs in private-owned spinneries in Tan Chau. Before the war, silk trade is said to have been dominated by ethnic Chinese living in Cambodia. The subsequent conﬂict meant many of them were either killed or ﬂed the country. It is commonly understood that once peace was restored this void was ﬁlled by Khmer women establishing themselves as silk vendors. Khmer wholesalers take “colorless” raw silk from the Vietnamese–Cambodian border towns where they are transported to Phnom Penh, from where a portion is re-distributed to middlemen operating within rural production communities. Zwart’s (2000) research among women traders at the Phnom Penh markets did not reveal any reference to ethnic Chinese identity among the market traders, wholesalers, middlemen, or weavers. She concluded that the women interviewed built up contacts with silk weaving villages and middlemen along family lines and ethnic ties that were identiﬁed as explicitly Khmer. It thus appears that a gap has emerged between these Chinese networks and the narrative of a Khmer industry promoted by Morimoto and others. More speciﬁcally, it is widely stated that silk serves as an effective marker of Khmer identity predicated on an authenticity of production labor and techniques. To understand this somewhat contradictory situation it is worthwhile to brieﬂy trace the historical presence of the Chinese communities in Cambodia.

The re-emerging discourse The colonial origins of Khmer silk Maritime interaction between the middle kingdom and Funan, an ancient Indianized Kingdom extending over the greater part of modern Cambodia,

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goes back as far as the third century CE (Fox 2003; Hall 1981). One notable early record is that of the Chinese envoy Zhou Daguan who visited Angkor in the thirteenth century. In his description of silk-weaving techniques Zhou Daguan noted that Khmer people lacked weaving skills and were not able to produce raw silk. In the early ﬁfteenth century, at the time of the arrival of the famous Zheng He ﬂeets at various Southeast Asian ports, the Khmer king Ponhea Yat moved the capital from mainland Angkor to riverine Phnom Penh to manage and control the lucrative Chinese trade. Although this shift of capital has been explained in terms of politics (Chandler 1996a; Hall 1981), recent research has shown that other Southeast Asian kingdoms moved their capitals to coastal areas for the purposes of maritime trade (Acharaya 2000; Fox 2003). By the early seventeenth century sea-borne merchant empires belonging to Wang Chi and Kapitan Li Tan oversaw ﬂeets of junks traveling between Japan, Taiwan, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, Manila, and Batavia (Frost 2003). In what Reid (1988) has famously dubbed the “Age of Commerce” (1450–1680), Cambodia emerged as one of the ﬂourishing port polities in mainland Southeast Asia, a position that it maintained and subsequently enhanced. Despite a high degree of commercial exchange between Phnom Penh and the great maritime cities of Southeast Asia, trade reports show that the Khmer did not produce raw silk or export silk fabrics (Ishii 1998). In 1742 the French silk merchant Pierre Poivre, eager to set up a French commercial silk establishment in Cochinchina, reported that the quality of raw silk in that area was far superior to that of China, but that the Cochinchinese did not have any knowledge of silk weaving. According to Poivre, only the Chinese had this knowledge at the time of reporting (Li and Reid 1993). Moreover, Fisher (1964) points out that the Khmer did not apply advanced irrigation techniques that were required to cultivate mulberry trees until the early nineteenth century. Although it has been widely accepted that the roots of the Cambodian silk-weaving industry lay in the Angkor Court, we argue here that its origin has to be traced to an odd combination of circumstances in France and a shift in the Southeast Asian trade routes during the French colonial period. Since the reign of Louis XI in the sixteenth century, France’s Lyon-based silk industry became increasingly well known internationally. However, tragedy struck in 1855 when the “pebrine” disease affected the silkworms. Nonetheless, the 1869 opening of the Suez Canal enabled L’Agence Economique de L’Indochine to investigate possibilities for silk yarn production across France’s colonial possessions (Thompson 1968). In their well-preserved monographs French agronomists are enthusiastic about the environmental conditions and the quality of the raw silk in Cambodia. The director of the technical school of silk production in Takeo, Aristide Fabre (1926) concluded that the lowlands of Indochina with their high temperatures and dense population possessed conditions well suited to both mulberry cultivation and the rearing of silkworms. He was also very pleased about the remarkable size and rapid growth of the Indochinese mulberries

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(Fabre 1926). However, to the French agronomists’ surprise, the majority of the Khmer population did not possess skills to produce silk yarn. To compensate for the lack of Khmer laborers, the French legislators contracted mulberry planters from the more advanced Kwantung region in southern China and later the Red River Delta in North Vietnam. As Chinese enterprise in the region predated the colonial presence, the French depended heavily on Chinese syndicates (kongsi) and secret societies for the collection of their revenues and ﬁnding laborers to do the work (Trocki 1997). As the early decades of the twentieth century progressed, the need for skilled farmers, craftsmen, and traders, coupled with relatively easy access to citizenship and landownership, led to an increase of (female) Chinese immigrants in Cambodia and the rise of a Sino-Cambodian ethnic group. In 1921, 91,000 Chinese gave their ﬁngerprints at the immigration ofﬁce in Phnom Penh. In 1931, this number had risen to 148,000 (Purcell 1965: 213). Most Chinese immigrants married native Khmers as data from the 1921 census suggest.6 Although postcolonial Cambodian regimes did not explicitly mention Sino-Cambodians in their later censuses, it has been argued that their number increased signiﬁcantly (Willmott 1967). Banned from rice farming in Cambodia, the Chinese coolies specialized in highly skilled activities such as market gardening, pepper planting, and mulberry cultivation (Purcell 1965). In 1930, along the riverbanks in eastern Cambodia, 6,000 hectares of mulberry trees were cultivated, producing 150 tons of silk yarn per year (Delvert 1961: 282), much to the satisfaction of the French government, who had just signed a contract with thirty Lyonnaise manufacturers to supply them with three million cocoons annually (Thompson 1968). More recently, Edwards (2003) has argued that Chinese immigrants created “hybrid” or “creolized” cultures. However, the nature of this acculturation remains debatable. While historians and sociologists have described communities of locally born Chinese in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in terms of “hybrids” or as “creoles,” largely by studying their domestic culture, outside the household the social engagement of these communities points towards a construction of Chinese self identity (Frost 2003). As for the traders, there are also accounts of Chinese merchants who married Khmer women to assist them with their businesses (Xia 1981, cited in Edwards 2003). Using their identity strategically, both the Chinese farmers and the Chinese traders seem to represent what Frost (2003) calls a transcultural diasporic identity, in which their being Chinese, a métis, a Cambodian national, or ancient Khmer comes to light depending on the context in which the diasporic subject is positioned. Postcolonial processes of ethnic homogenization If we turn to consider the early postcolonial period, we can see that the level of tolerance towards an ethnic Chinese population changed drastically. Cambodian leaders forced the Chinese to choose between departure and assimilation into Cambodian society. Sihanouk, in his attempt to build an

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all-Khmer nation, accused the ethnic Chinese in Cambodia of being under the orders of Peking and Hanoi (Edwards 2003). After Lon Nol’s coup d’état of 1970 the ethnic homogeneity of Cambodia was accentuated even more, with assertions that all ethnic groups in Cambodia—except for the Chinese and Vietnamese—belonged to the “great Khmer race.” Depicting the Chinese and the Vietnamese as communist spies and a ﬁfth column for the People’s Republic of China (PRC), Chinese schools, temples, associations, and newspapers were shut down (Edwards 2003). To accentuate their difference, the Chinese were given special identity cards and charged with a special tax (Hooker 2002). During the Khmer Rouge regime, Pol Pot’s soldiers preached that all Chinese were capitalists who should return to China (Kiernan 1996). All marks of heterogeneity had to be extinguished, forcing all ethnic groups to adjust to Khmer-style housing, dress, and food. Speaking Chinese, using Chinese names, worshipping a Chinese deity, even eating with chopsticks were forbidden and could be punished by death. During the Khmer Rouge regime 215,000 ethnic Chinese were killed (Kiernan 1996: 458). Even after the liberation in 1979 and the constitution of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK), expressions of Chinese identity were repressed and antiChinese sentiment was encouraged. By means of a circular called “351” the PRK conducted a nationwide registration of ethnic Chinese people in their homes (Gottesman 2003). This circular deﬁned Chinese identity in terms of outward characteristics—such as skin color, clarity of pronunciation of the Khmer language—and the presence of Chinese cultural artifacts such as Chinese shrines in private homes. Afraid of being labeled “351,” many Chinese changed their names to Khmer names, stopped speaking Chinese in public, and even darkened their skin (Gottesman 2003). After the establishment of the State of Cambodia (SOC) in 1989, a re-awakening of expressions of Chinese identity emerged, initially because of improved diplomatic relations between Cambodia and the PRC. In 1990, talks between Cambodian and Chinese politicians helped facilitate greater state tolerance towards Cambodia’s ethnic Chinese population. From the 1990s onwards, Chinese schools, associations, temples, newspapers, housing styles, and festivals underwent revitalization (Edwards 2003). Along with this Chinese revival, a recovery of the Cambodian silk industry occurred. In 2001, the French agronomists Pujebet and Peyre (2001: 2) counted more than 10,000 weavers in the same regions where Delvert (1961) had conducted his survey in the 1940s. As we shall see in the following section, the ethnic Chinese had clearly resumed and in many ways strengthened their involvement in Cambodia’s silk industry. Situational identity: Sino–Khmer silk networks In the aftermath of the civil war, Cambodia’s borders remained extremely porous, a situation that allowed the emergence of raw silk trading between Vietnam and Thailand. The silk industry in Thailand was booming and

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catered to worldwide markets, but depended upon Vietnam for the supply of silk yarn. Ethnic Chinese wholesalers (neak loak thom) in Phnom Penh occupied intermediate positions in this trade. They re-distributed most of the silk yarn to Bangkok, but a small portion of it reached the silk weavers in Takeo and Prey Veng. These wholesalers were third-generation Cantonese women and descendents of wealthy colonial compradors. Their parents and grandparents had established widespread networks in the Mekong region, distributing raw silk from the mulberry plantations in Kampot, Takeo, and Prey Veng to French spinneries in Tonkin, Annam, and Cochinchina, and to private Chinese merchants in Phnom Penh, Cholon, and Bangkok. Like their ancestors, these wholesalers championed a distinct Chinese ethnic identity. As descendants of Chinese coolies and Khmer farmers the present-day middlemen know they lack good business and government connections. As one middleman puts it: “the neah loak thom are the boss, they have ‘good relations’ with the Vietnamese and the border ofﬁcials. I do not have these connections. Therefore it is cheaper to buy my yarn with them.” To become successful businessmen and increase their turnover, the middlemen realize they must win the trust of the wholesaler. But that is not easy to do. To control the output of the silk weavers, the wholesaler assigns about ten middlemen to manage between three hundred and four hundred weavers each. To gain trust with the Chinese wholesaler, it is crucial for the middlemen to play down their Khmer identity. After all, the neah loak thom do not trust a Khmer and would never provide silk yarn on credit. To conceal the Khmer identity into which the middlemen are socialized, they create a ﬁctive Chinese identity or play up their Chinese ancestry and present themselves as descendants of Chinese immigrants. Lacking any knowledge of China, the Chinese language, and Chinese religion, they take down their wooden Khmer house and build Chinese shophouses, they replace their yellow Buddhist shrine for a Chinese one, they frame their doorposts with Chinese good luck stickers, and they hang red lampions in the backyard outside their houses. They also require their children to learn Mandarin at the Taiwanese Maitreya church near the Chambak market, carry under their arm a Chinese newspaper (which in many cases they are unable to read), and obey Chinese rather than Khmer rituals. In Phnom Penh, they no longer drive around on their motorbikes but in their newly purchased Toyota Camrys. In order to conform to the dress code of the Chinese businessmen, they would wear smooth trousers, a white shirt, and a golden watch. Sotheap, the silk weaver and elder cousin of one such “converted” middleman, doubtfully shakes her head: “He is not a real Chinese. He is my younger cousin, but he wants to become a Chinese businessman.” A Sino-Cambodian middleman at Saiwaa market in Takeo says: “I was born in Cambodia and I feel Khmer. In Takeo I feel at home and I always wear my sarong, but with the wholesalers in Phnom Penh I will dress and behave as a Chinese.”7

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Conclusion In the dominant discourse of the modern Cambodian nation state, the Cambodian national and the Khmer ethnic identity merge into one tightly knit and homogeneous ethno-national identity. It is to the advantage of a number of powerful players in Cambodia to maintain this discourse as it advances their case. First of all, it is in the interest of the national government to provide a discursive legitimization for their nation-building project. After the traumatic civil war, national unity is high on the agenda. A discourse of ethnic homogeneity merging with national consensus provides a climate of security that is capable of attracting foreign investors and stimulating domestic entrepreneurship. Images of an authentic Khmer silk weaving tradition not only illustrate the economic resourcefulness of the Cambodian economy, but also support political claims of national unity in a country that lived through its last revolt as recently as 1997. Second, the dominant discourse is in the interest of the royal family, who is claiming a genealogical link with the courts of Angkor and whose legitimacy is closely intertwined with their ability to keep alive the ﬁne arts, including the weaving of traditional silk garments for royal and religious ceremonies. These garments cannot be anything but traditionally and authentically Khmer. Third, the dominant discourse advances the programs of NGOs reviving silk weaving in Cambodia, as their standardized and homogenous way of commercializing “Khmer” authenticity makes it both easy and proﬁtable to interact with global buyers. The national government, the royal family and NGOs clearly have an interest in the fourth stakeholder, the international tourism industry, which is heavily capitalizing on Angkor as a national landmark and Khmer authenticity as a unique selling point. Cultural tourism is a powerful force unleashing processes of authentication and the invention of traditions. Claims of Khmer traditions in silk weaving constitute an example of these processes. As the national discourse is one of ethnic homogeneity, the ethnic Chinese are not part of the “touristscape” as they are in other Southeast Asian countries where Chinatowns contribute to the tourist product in terms of colorful ethnic diversity. Hence the complete absence of the ethnic Chinese from the tourist images of Cambodia. Last but not least, “authentic Khmer silk” nicely weaves into the mundane needs of the ﬁfth stakeholder—package tourists and backpackers who carry home convenient souvenirs from Cambodia that ﬁt into suitcases or tightly packed rucksacks. However, French colonial reports as well as recent ﬁeldwork data collected by the second author of this chapter reveal a different discourse conﬂicting with the claims of Khmer authenticity and disclose a historical Chinese dominance in the Cambodian silk industry. One may raise the question why the ethnic Chinese in Cambodia do not attempt to assert themselves and contest the dominant discourse through counter-narratives. One plausible explanation, as we have seen, would allude to the recent

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history in which the ethnic Chinese were traumatized by repressive measures taken against them. As a result, they may feel powerless and only slowly dare manifest themselves as ethnic Chinese. Undoubtedly, the oppression of Chinese identity in favor of nationalist agendas has left its traces. This, however, does not explain why in some contexts—such as on the silk markets in Phnom Penh—Chinese identity is conspicuously displayed, even forged, by non-Chinese. A more provocative explanation would focus on the high degree of assimilation of the ethnic Chinese into Cambodian society. The ethnic Chinese are well integrated because of ﬁrst-generation intermarriage with Khmer people. Therefore, they may not feel the need to reassert their Chinese identity. They just “use” it when it becomes convenient for economic transactions. Chinese identity is a resource to be strategically and situationally exploited when the occasion occurs. In her book On Not Speaking Chinese, Ien Ang (2001), an Indonesian-born ethnic Chinese who grew up in the Netherlands, comments on her ethnic Chinese identity: “I am inescapably Chinese by descent, I am only Chinese by consent. When and how is a matter of politics.” The negotiated and ﬂexible character of ethnic Chinese identity has been commented on by different authors in different cultural contexts (e.g., Bolt 2000; Chan and Tong 2000; Ong 1999; Suryadinata 1997). The multilayered strategy emerging from the situational use of Chinese identity represents an ongoing oscillation between capitalist interests, cultural afﬁnity, and dependency on state patronage. In Cambodia, the political climate has been rather volatile when it comes to tolerance or repression of Chinese ethnic identity. Economically, the contribution of Chinese labor has been of crucial importance for the country’s economy, the silk industry being illustrative of this fact. Culturally, the position of the ethnic Chinese in Cambodia can be compared with their counterparts in Thailand who show a high degree of assimilation. For Thailand, it has been argued that the Sino-Thai, though still capable of speaking Chinese dialect, stand out in the display of Thai identity, most notably in public. Theirs is a double identity—Chinese ethnic and Thai national identities— but they usually claim that the Thai part is stronger (Chantavanich 1997: 249; Suryadinata 1997: 12–13). The Sino-Cambodians not only cherish a Chinese ethnic and Cambodian national identity, they even go as far as assuming a double ethnic identity when they claim they feel “Khmer,” like the silk weaver Sotheap does. This leaves them with a potential of three templates for identity: Chinese, Khmer, and Cambodian. Chinese identity, then, constitutes an addition to their cultural repertoire illustrating an advanced proﬁciency in applying the appropriate paradigm to the appropriate occasion. As has been pointed out, abilities such as these characterize, for example, diasporic and other communities of practice, whose numbers “shift between many different paradigms with no conﬂict” (Dahles 2004; Hsiao 2002: 110–11). With ethnic Chinese identity surprisingly brought up by a Cambodian silk weaver, this theme came to constitute the common

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thread in a research on processes of ethnicization of the Cambodian silk industry. Other scholars may feel challenged to explore critically established claims of the ethnic homogeneity of the Cambodian population.

Notes 1 2 3

4 5 6 7

The Khmer term hol refers to a variety of designs such as birds, ﬂowers, Buddha temples, boats on silk skirts. Hol also refers to a silk-weaving technique in which the weaver creates various patterns and colors before the weaving process. The Cham are descendants of the kingdom of Champa, which controlled what is now south and central Vietnam. In Cambodia today, they form the core of the Muslim community. The estimate of the number of ethnic Chinese living in Cambodia differs according to different sources. Bolt (2000: 23), who compares three different sources, ﬁnds estimates between 300,000 (or 3.7 percent of the population) and 50,000 (1 percent). Others claim that one quarter of the 800,000 inhabitants of Phnom Penh are Chinese (see Suryadinata 1997: 21). Recent research now contradicts much of Willmott’s 1967 account. See, for instance: Cooke (2004). However, Green fails to acknowledge that the same emissary also wrote that the majority of the population, the Khmer, did not cultivate mulberry trees, raise silkworms, spin a wheel, and weave raw silk threads into fabrics (Daguan 1993). Of the 68,430 Sino-Cambodians registered, 19,000 were in Kampong Cham, 18,000 in Kandal, 7,500 in Takeo and 7,000 in Prey Veng (Purcell 1965: 218). Conversation between Sotheap and the second author.

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9

A burned-out theater The state of Cambodia’s performing arts Robert Turnbull

Among Cambodians, it is estimated that between 80 and 90 percent of performing artists died between the years of 1975 and 1979. Faced with the Khmer Rouge’s slogan “tuk min chamnenh, dak chenh ka min khat” (“to keep you is no gain, to kill you is no loss”), dancers attached to the Royal Palace or Royal University of Fine Arts and others closely associated with former regimes lived under constant threat of execution, often administered arbitrarily and with violence. It was only after 1979, while visiting Tuol Sleng, the Khmer Rouge’s detention center turned into a genocide museum, that artists returning to Phnom Penh learned the full horror of what happened nationwide.1 The prospect of losing intangible heritage passed down through word of mouth only increased their resolve, however. Radio appeals were sent out to identify survivors and a nationwide reconstruction of the repertoire was adopted under the aegis of a revived Ministry of Culture. Re-establishing contact between dispersed artists to rebuild morale and identity became a national priority (Phim and Thompson 1999). By November 1979, small troupes of classical dance (robam boran), as well as non-classical disciplines such as lakhaoun ayai, lakhaoun bassac, and lakhaoun yike had been established in Battambang, Kompong Cham, Pursat, and Kompong Thom provinces by, among others, former palace dancers Em Tiay, Proueng Chhieng and Soth Somon as well as Chheng Phon, an actor and former arts administrator who became Minister of Culture in 1981. Cambodians ached for traditional entertainment: the Khmer Rouge’s distinctive theatrical activity took the form of nightly selfcriticism sessions when, to frenzied applause, individuals confessed their “treachery” and disappeared as a result. By 1984, in some areas, nightly bassac and yike shows alternated with al fresco showings of Russian and Vietnamese ﬁlms. These were free: ordinary Cambodians were asked only to provide meals for the artists. In the capital, a newly created National Dance Company within the Department of Performing Arts became the focus of this reconstruction, the results displayed from 1982 in twice-yearly festivals at the Suramarit Theater and the nearby Chaktomuk Hall. With little in the way of resources, artists working in the capital were paid in petrol and rice.2

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The extent of this achievement has yet to be recognized by many in Cambodia and overseas. When, in 1994, a delegation from the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts was invited to a symposium on Cambodian arts at the Library of Congress in Washington, a number of expatriate speakers forcibly denied the validity of any cultural regeneration under Vietnamese occupation.3 Using the same insult with which Pol Pot derided his enemies, artists working under the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) were accused of having “Cambodian bodies, Vietnamese heads” (Locard 2004: 179). It made no difference that, in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge, artists worked diligently and without remuneration to pick up the pieces of their once resplendent culture. Cold war hostilities dictated that even grass roots efforts to resuscitate Cambodian culture were condemned as the work of traitors. Ideological attacks against the roots of Cambodian culture occurred and continued well into the 1980s. A handful of senior Cambodian politicians, some of them in positions of power today, considered banning the robam boran style altogether because of its royal origins, but also on the grounds that barefoot dancing was “unhygienic.”4 While able to pay lip service to the prevailing ideology, Chheng Phon successfully argued in favor of retaining all the indigenous arts as essential tools of national reconciliation.5 There were symbolic compromises, however, as well as the convoluted use of the arts for propaganda. The ﬁrst line of the lyrics that usually accompanied the apsara dance was changed to “January 7th Liberation Day.”6 In 1983, the actor-writer Pich Tum Kravel directed La Marche Nationale, a hybrid piece of political theater glorifying the new regime which began with an army of monks battling the French under King Norodom and ending in January 1979 with Cambodians arm in arm with their Vietnamese comrades.7 Popular dance-dramas, too, were adapted to convey revolutionary ideology. In Kravel’s popular Tum Teav, an ex-monk’s love for a country girl is undermined by her ambitious mother who forces her to enter the palace as a concubine. In the original, the king agrees to withdraw his royal prerogative, but in a later adaptation Tum (the monk) becomes a revolutionary who takes up arms against the monarch.8 Despite the political dimension of the revival, the national imperative to reconstruct performance culture during the 1980s was carried out in an atmosphere of consensus generally untainted by the corrupting inﬂuence of money. The re-introduction of currency affected attendance as Cambodians were expected to pay for tickets.9 Moreover, the political and economic “freedoms” of the 1990s, religiously regarded by some as a panacea, held out the promise of better times, but introduced new social pressures that impacted negatively on the performing arts. Cambodia no longer enjoyed the “protection” of international isolation. Following the terms of the 1991 Paris Peace Agreement, the Vietnamese army left Cambodia to be replaced by 22,000 United Nations (UN) personnel (Cornﬁeld and Summers 2003), who organized the election of 1993 but

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constituted another foreign force, bringing with it the insidious invasion of Cambodia by something potentially as destructive: Western culture had been a popular accessory after independence in 1954, with a plethora of Eagles-impersonating pop groups, but for the vulnerable post-Khmer Rouge generation, the transmission of foreign sexually explicit and often violent television culture can only have added to their cultural disorientation. Regrettably for its sponsors, the highly symbolic election resulted in a virtual dead heat between the Vietnamese-backed Cambodian People’s Party (CPP) and the Royalist FUNCINPEC. The ensuing experiment in power-sharing ended prematurely with the coup de force of July 1997. The end of state communism acted as a green light for those on both sides of the political divide to sell off public assets with impunity, including those of culture. For the arts, the new democracy resulted in the absence of decision making, where, according to the former actor and writer Pich Tum Kravel “political parties shared the spoils of international aid but contributed little to civic life.”10 In the rush to personal enrichment or to “attain merit” within party hierarchies, a new class of cultural administrator emerged. Many of them had scant knowledge of the terrain, while the few luminaries with the capacity to steer the arts towards a brighter future retreated, in disillusion. By 1994 the teaching of folk dance and theater had been removed from high school curricula. The mercenary atmosphere of the day spawned deep divisions within the artistic community over the distribution of the limited work opportunities on offer, destroying the essential camaraderie that characterized the previous decade. The coup in 1997 brought further hardship and insecurity. Chheng Phon joined a number of kru (teachers) in calling into question the feasibility of reviving the classical dance style in the absence of the necessary tranquility and spirituality.11 The integrated cultural life anticipated with Cambodia’s re-acceptance into the international community led, perhaps ironically, to a reduction of activity. The obsession to create a milkable monoculture from the country’s architectural heritage dominated the cultural agenda. Angkor’s admission to the list of World Heritage Sites in 1992 attracted international investment, but the Ministry of Culture under Nouth Narang lost the right to collect tourist entrance fees at Angkor Park to a government-controlled holding company, representing a potentially huge loss of income. Nouth Narang had been responsible for establishing a “Cultural Day” in 1998, a once-yearly showcase of the Cambodian arts, but failed to advance any cultural policy to build on the work of Chheng Phon, who retired from mainstream cultural life in the early 1990s. Nouth Narang’s tenure was also tinged with scandal when he was accused of trying to sell the Ministry of Culture building on Monivong Boulevard to a Taiwanese businessman— which brought artists out on to the streets in protest (Van 1998: 7). The appointment in 1998 of Cambodia’s King Norodom Sihanouk’s daughter Princess Norodom Bopha Devi as Minister of Culture to replace Nouth Narang raised expectations for the classical repertory and its research

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component. Elder masters joined the Princess, a former classical dance star of the post-independence period, to re-establish the “Royal Ballet” using a pool of some 600 artists at the Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA) and over 200 from the Department of Performing Arts to resuscitate a number of key dances. By that time, the Rockefeller Foundation’s Mentorship program, established four years earlier by the Asian Cultural Council, was actively engaging surviving elder masters in passing on the skills to a younger generation and comprehensively documenting thousands of classical gestures known as kbach. A growing awareness and coverage in the international media of the extent of Cambodia’s loss of patrimony led to America’s private philanthropic interest and the ﬁrst examples of foreign investment in the arts since the wars. The fruits of their labor were given the occasional airing at National Cultural Days and Khmer New Year celebrations in Phnom Penh. And there were highly successful tours to France in 1994 and 1998, and the US in 1990 and 2001. The Ministry had scant resources: only non-native funding made this possible. In 2001, UNESCO added classical dance— as performed by RUFA and the National Theater troupes—to the World Heritage list, followed in 2004 by the large form of shadow puppetry (lakhaoun sbeich thom). NGOs and individual Cambodians worked hard to make the case for the performing arts, diverting attention away from Angkor to the country’s equally old and fragile intangible legacy. A Japanese-funded, UNESCO-implemented initiative to revive some of the more neglected forms such as lakhaoun promodtai (a modern form of music drama) and lakhaoun apei (a blend of yike and robam boran) showed their results in schools. According to Proueng Chhieng, by 2005 about half of the classical repertory had been restored. However, the increase in activity in RUFA’s dance halls did not extend to the stage, a problem exacerbated by a ﬁre at the Suramarit Theater in 1994, which robbed Cambodia of its only genuinely well-equiped performance space. Inaugurated in 1968 by Prince Norodom Sihanouk with a ﬁlm festival, the 1200-seat European-style enclosed theater functioned, in part, as a glamorous receptacle for royal cultural pursuits, but it continued to thrive long after the Prince’s deposition in 197012 and was even used by Pol Pot (see Figure 9.1).13 The theater became the focal point of the revival during the 1980s, and even after the ﬁre destroyed the auditorium, it continued to serve as the operational base of the Department of Performing Arts, a 268-strong company working directly under the Ministry of Culture. Since the conﬂagration, it has not been rebuilt. For the artists, the loss of institutional support at home combined with an increase in opportunities to travel triggered another crisis: “defections.” It started in 1990 when ﬁve classical dancers left the ﬁrst American tour. Another six stayed behind after an eleven-city tour of the US in January 2001, followed by another six in 2003, and again in April 2005, four Cambodian women, all outstanding dancers, failed to appear at the end

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Figure 9.1 The Suramarit Theater in the late 1960s Photo by Vann Molyvann.

of a ﬁfteen-day tour. It emerged that while some had planned to leave the tours, others had been encouraged to do so while in America by members of Cambodian communities opposed to the government of Cambodia led by Prime Minister Hun Sen, whom they regarded as a former Khmer Rouge ofﬁcer illegitimately installed by Vietnam, a traditional enemy and totalitarian Marxist state. Viewing any “leakage” to the “free world” as political capital, their aim was to lure visiting Cambodians to seek refuge in America with the promise of housing and jobs, or green cards by impromptu marriages. As ammunition, they seized upon the Cambodian government’s alleged ill treatment of the nation’s performing artists. After the 2001 tour, the Washington Post quoted Radio Free Asia’s Vuthy Huot as saying “[in] Cambodia as a performer, you can hardly survive on that profession” (Kaufman 2001). Referring to the Suramarit Theater, the journalist claimed that dancers had been “demoralized” and that “since the only theater had burned down, there are no stages to perform on”14 (see Figure 9.2). Such an attitude, while not strictly accurate, reﬂected the strength of political dissent among Cambodian communities abroad, but it also implicated Cambodia’s government for its unmistakable neglect of the performing arts. The issue was taken up after the 2001 defections with renewed vigor by promoters and impresarios abroad unhappy at being the

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Figure 9.2 The Suramarit Theater in 2003 Photo by Tim Winter.

unwitting cause of “defections.” Given the large numbers of performing artists lost during the wars, many observers were dismayed that Cambodia’s gilded apsaras, tribal drummers, and other national treasures were not being appropriately honored with the status of the nation’s most valuable exports. “Cambodia’s artists need investment, incentives and a healthier and more supportive environment,” commented Sam Miller, then Chief Executive Ofﬁcer (CEO) of the New England Foundation for the Arts who underwrote the “Dance, the Spirit of Cambodia” 2001 tour: “The fact that artists chose not to return speaks of the urgent need for long range systematic planning and development that will build the capacity of the performing arts.”15 Rather than respond constructively to these comments, the Ministry of Culture’s belated reactions have been guarded and defensive. “Of course we would like to improve artists’ daily lives, like in Thailand, Singapore and Malaysia,” said Undersecretary of State Prince Sisowath Panara Sirivudh, now Minister of Culture, “but until things improve in our country, there’s nothing we can do.”16 Cambodia’s relative economic weakness is unquestionably a factor in the equation. The Fine Arts Department of Thailand (FAD) sponsors six former court disciplines, and supports a national theater as well as ﬁfteen provincial schools speciﬁcally created

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for the perpetuation of traditional dance-dramas. The Singapore government, using a very different model of cultural development, allocates funding to some sixty arts organizations via a powerful centralized arts council. In Thailand, Singapore, and Malaysia, the governments have clearly deﬁned cultural policies and actively promote creative partnerships between their business and performing arts communities.17 With a budget consisting largely of foreign aid, large sums have been spent on health and education. Grants for cultural heritage have been almost exclusively awarded to the country’s architectural and archaeological patrimony rather than its equally fragile intangible legacy. Cambodia’s weak Ministry of Culture generates very low levels of funding, while the localized patronage of performance art that invigorated village life before the wars was effectively destroyed by three decades of civil war. Of the three million dollars on average that the government spends annually on performance culture—a mere 0.25 percent of Cambodia’s national budget— much of it is allocated to a bloated network of around 3,000 administrators.18 The 700 artists that comprise RUFA and the Department of Performing Arts, Cambodia’s only two professional companies, exist on salaries of between 15 and 25 US dollars, occasionally augmented by a small performance fee. Alongside teachers (who might net 30 US dollars, a little more with overtime), they are among Cambodia’s poorest civil servants, compared to the 600 to 700 US dollars afforded prosecuting lawyers and judges. Less than 10 percent manage to make a living from their art, even when they combine performance with television and ﬁlm appearances, forcing them to take menial jobs as motor taxi drivers or waiters. Of course, economic indicators are only one factor underlying morale. Many Indonesian musicians and dancers earn little more than their Cambodian counterparts, but longstanding competition between performing groups within a decentralized framework has generated numerous opportunities to perform around the archipelago and abroad. Artists form a tightly knit community, ensuring that when individuals are selected to represent their country abroad, they generally want to return. The widely held perception among the rank and ﬁle of artists in Cambodia is that the Ministry of Culture is primarily self-serving and riddled with political cronyism. Work opportunities they see as acquired less on merit as through nepotism and political expediency. The Ministry of Culture’s perceived bureaucratic atrophy and the absence of transparency, vision, or coherent leadership have contributed to its long-standing reputation as an unsafe area for investment, if not also one of the most unworkable institutions in the Kingdom. While undeniably low in the ﬁscal pecking order, the absence of strong leadership and persuasive cultural policies has rendered this Ministry ineffective in lobbying the government’s central source of funds, the Council of Ministers, or exploring alternative sources of income and overtures from well-wishers.

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How can a country with such a rich cultural heritage be reduced to this sad state of affairs? An easily digestible explanation for the current malaise has been the legacy of the Khmer Rouge. However, a closer study of Cambodia’s performing arts reveals considerable ﬂux, with episodes of growth and development alternating with periods of stagnation and neglect. We know little of the Angkorean era that spawned the classical genres, and even less about the subsequent “middle period.” Compromised by Siamese and later French hegemonies, the performing arts as a whole reached their creative pinnacle in modern history soon after independence. Since the early 1990s, when Cambodia regained its sovereignty, the original royal link has, in part, been restored, but its ofﬁcial sponsor of the arts, the Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, has been weakly situated in the national pecking order, and artists occupy an uneasy position within an impecunious government whose cultural “policies” reﬂect widespread organic corruption and the vestiges of a reactionary Marxism. While the Cambodian establishment frequently alludes to Cambodia’s classical arts being “the soul of the nation,” it has been largely unwilling to develop performance culture in ways that are sustainable or give artists under its charge grounds for optimism. This begs one fundamental question: just who is responsible for the protection of this culture? With its rich myths romanticizing the magnificence of court life under the Khmer kings, “Angkor” and the culture it spawned are potent symbols for all Cambodians. After the hiatus of the wars, everyday cultural icons quickly resumed their place in the nation’s consciousness, proving ultimately that the Khmer Rouge failed to extinguish its resplendent heritage. However, while Cambodians appear to cling determinedly to the fundamentals of Khmer identity, endlessly replicating the kbach, gilded apsaras, and Hanuman masks for commercial gain, their connection to the nation’s intangible culture has been more tenuous. While, in one sense Cambodians take the arts for granted—weddings, funerals, prayer ceremonies, and Buddhist rituals usually involve some (often recorded) manifestation of music or dance—the paucity of live performances of classic dance-dramas makes it difﬁcult for the general public to form any meaningful attachment with this important body of work. Paradoxically perhaps, an equally strong conviction among the country’s intelligentsia that Cambodia’s politics, culture, and its modern manifestations have suffered a continuous decline since its thirteenth-century zenith is latent in the nation’s psyche. Clearly the Khmer Rouge bear some responsibility. However, notwithstanding this legacy, sensitivities surrounding the roots of its culture have been compounded by the adventures of Cambodia’s more powerful neighbor, Siam. After Angkor’s fall in the ﬁfteenth century, the relocation of Khmer artists to Ayuthaya would have enabled the Siamese to develop their own variation on the robam boran style, while an itinerant Cambodian court, exhausted and under

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siege, would have had less capacity to advance the syntax (Phim and Thompson 1999). Chronological confusion surrounding the identity and authenticity of Thai versus Cambodian performing idioms has led to a legacy of dispute over authorship, which persists to this day and often to the detriment of the latter. Faced with the radical loss of atavistic cultural identity over several centuries and provoked by a legacy of imperialist Thai attitudes, contemporary Cambodian intellectuals and politicians have long sought to “Khmerize” culture by proving the link between modern Cambodians and their ancestral heritage and even advance notions of an imperiled “Khmer cultural identity,” in spite of empirical evidence of complex conﬁgurations of diverse inﬂuences (Phim and Thompson 1999). Norodom Sihanouk’s attempt to establish a nationwide cultural identity after independence went some way to stimulate a new sense of pride and cultural awareness in the country’s most populated areas. However, a sea change in the national consciousness, implicit within which was the European notion of a right to culture, could hardly be established in as little time as ﬁfteen years. To whom, then, does this culture belong? In a country with scant documentation and scholarship, it is almost impossible to trace accurately the genesis of the performing arts or how they developed. The classical style emerged from the courts of the Angkorean kings and remained a royal prerogative for the ensuing centuries of political turmoil and occupation by foreign powers. Courtly dance existed for the exclusive beneﬁt of kings to communicate with gods, though one assumes this would have included royal rituals, such as weddings, funerals, and births (Phim and Thompson 1999). However, by the nineteenth century and under King Norodom, the ﬁrst king under the French protectorate who had himself been schooled in the Siamese court, palace dance had also taken on the role of entertainment, in the form of elaborate dance-dramas. Parts of a danced Reamker, the Cambodian version of the Ramayana story, remained within the context of palace culture but were occasionally presented to the general public, either in the palace itself or for special ceremonies, such as on the occasion of the consecration of Wat Preak Keo Morakot in 2003 (Jeldres and Chaijidvanit 1999). Would Cambodians living in rural areas, the vast majority rice farmers, have found robam boran anything more than a charming anachronism? The ceremonial court dances and animist rituals practiced regularly by inhabitants of Kompong Cham or Kandal would have emerged from powerful belief systems and reﬂected predominantly rural preoccupations that owed little or nothing to classical culture. The developments that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century introduced further complexity. As the “Royal Ballet” entered a ﬁtful decline, exacerbated by the slow demise of enclosed palace culture under the French, more stylized forms of musical theater were taking root in the countryside,

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“subsidized by the rice ﬁelds”19 and supported by the only real alternative center of education to the palace: the pagoda. The relative economic stability and social ﬂuidity of the early part of the century, combined with itinerant performing troupes, seems to have catalyzed the organic growth of a variety of locally based and ethnically diverse entertainments that retain huge popularity today. Lakhaoun yike, notable for its percussive accompaniment, lakhaoun bassac, sung theater from Cochinchina that owes some of its choreographic syntax to Chinese Opera, or ayai, a semi-improvised musically accompanied theatrical comedy, and ﬁfteen other forms of music-theater were passed along generations and came to be identiﬁed with place of origin or famous practitioners. Ayai was probably created by a certain “uncle Yai” (1878–1958) who performed around Kompong Speu province.20 From the 1920s, Phnom Penh assumed a large role in cultural activity. Chha Kruon’s bassac troupe, in Phnom Penh from around the same time, was one of four companies to play to full houses. By the time of independence, the capital enjoyed around thirty private theaters operating for an eager ticket-paying audience. A new class of patrons, mostly merchants with artistic leanings, found the means to invest in small theaters at a time when there was considerable prestige associated with culture.21 The advent of sovereignty after ninety years of colonialism resulted, as one would expect, in a degree of synthesis. It was then that questions of the cultural rights of citizens and the dissemination of culture were seriously addressed. Though robam boran remained under royal control, the fortunes of classical dancers changed dramatically in 1962 when 254 “Royal Ballet” dancers and various ancillary staff became salaried civil servants under an independent sovereign state, the top dancers able to earn the equivalent of 800 US dollars a month today (Jeldres and Chaijidanvit 1999).22 Dancers were encouraged in their newfound professional pride by Queen Sisowath Kossamak, Sihanouk’s powerful mother, who not only swelled their ranks (introducing males for the ﬁrst time in monkey roles) but choreographed ensembles that became the symbols of the nation’s culture abroad, notably the champa meas tes or apsara dance, created in 1957, and the equally popular tep monorom. The palace remained the epicenter of activity just as the syntax continued to be transmitted orally, but the state took on some of the responsibility for the perpetuation of the classical syntax. Inevitably, the regime dubbed the Sangkum Reastr Niyum was inﬂuenced by the dirigiste model of subsidized infrastructure practiced in France, for whose culture Sihanouk consistently professed admiration, without perhaps feeling the same for its foreign policy. A milestone in the democratization and production of the performing arts was the creation of the Conservatoire National in 1964 and the Royal University of Fine Arts (RUFA) in 1965, both administered by a new Ministry of Education; 25 percent of Cambodia’s budget was afforded to this Ministry. Aside

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from training in classical and non-classical genres, students traveled to remote areas to research robam propeniye (folkloric dance) and the recreation of these dances for mass consumption became central to the cultural aims of the regime. The totalitarian model of cultural spectacle practiced in Communist China and North Korea was also a source of inspiration for Sihanouk, who had friendly relations with both nations. To promote the idea of one nationhood in a country of disparate ethnicity, the writer and directors of the Sangkum were required to construct political spectacles symbolizing Khmer power and its adulteration at the hands of aggressive foreigners. “The March of Cambodia” (1964) mounted at Preah Vihear temple and “Jayavarman VII” inside Phnom Penh’s National Sports Stadium (1968) presented Cambodian history in compression, drawing parallels between Sihanouk’s sovereign state and the achievements of Angkor (Pich 2001). This bizarre political theater, or théâtre total, embodied seemingly irreconcilable disciplines. For Cambodian dancers it was mystifyingly new. Apsaras, delicate in their golden braided costumes, shared the stage with ﬂag-waving patriots. Moreover, the regime superseded ethnic, racial, and class divisions by merging Cambodia’s very different strands of performance culture, such as the traditions of temple, court, and village. However, while the Sangkum’s use of tax revenue for the arts subverted the traditional model of feudalism where artists existed exclusively to serve the king (a model still extant in Thailand at the time), the Cambodian cultural experiment remained in fundamental ways answerable to and dependent on a royal family, many of whom were themselves practitioners. Quite apart from her support for the palace troupe, referred to as the Royal Ballet, Queen Kossamak lent ﬁnancial and moral help to companies of various disciplines (Ebihara et al. 1994). A company practicing lakhaoun kaol, a masked form of the Reamker story danced exclusively by men, at Wat Svai eighteen kilometers from the capital would journey to Phnom Penh to borrow essential costumes from the palace.23 The Khmer Rouge view of Sangkum culture as serving the exigencies of a rapacious elite hardly reﬂected the reality of the time. However, unprecedented social divisions began to appear within the theater-going public, increasingly so during the republic that overthrew Sihanouk. In the capital, low-income workers packed the bassac opera theaters to hear stars such as Check March and Sang Sarun, while, from 1968, the growing middle class graced the Suramarit Theater, where, according to the actor Pring Sakhorn, motorbike taxi drivers “would never dare to enter” (Reyum 2002: 138). Moreover, increasing political censorship affected particularly lakhaon niyey, a form of spoken theater on controversial subjects encouraged by Hang Tum Hak, a former revolutionary who became rector of the University and later Prime Minister in 1972. The Ministry initially supported one niyey troupe, but unsure how to react to its popularity, vetted

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its scripts and planted its police at performances (Reyum 2002: 107–8). Several evenings were curtailed at the insistence of the Department of the Interior. According to Chheng Phon, one theater was raided by the authorities, who expected to ﬁnd a stash of arms backstage (Reyum 2002: 107–8). So was this a golden age for Cambodian culture? The Sangkum instigated a cultural policy more advanced than most other Southeast Asian countries at the time. While tinged with narcissism—Sihanouk’s obsession with ﬁlmmaking drew mounting criticism from those concerned with more pressing political matters—it promoted the notion of culture as the root of society as well as an essential human right. The legacy of the Sangkum represents a yardstick by which most aspects of contemporary culture can be judged today, and as such it represents a signiﬁcant threat to the current government, especially while this era’s embodiment, Norodom Sihanouk, remains alive. The current hierarchy refuses to acknowledge better times. Indeed, rather than celebrate the Sangkum’s achievements, it goes to considerable lengths to undermine them.24 For Cambodia’s intelligentsia, the Suramarit Theater is not only a monument to the country’s prestige in cultural matters; its retinue of dancers, actors, and shadow puppeteers are nothing less than guardians of longstanding traditions that deﬁne Cambodian culture and underpin its civilization. In the aftermath of the 1994 ﬁre, the theater was not insured. Overtures from the Japanese and Chinese embassies to rebuild it stumbled at early hurdles over implementation and transparency. Sihanouk himself made no visible effort to revive his temple to culture, even suggesting that any funds raised for its rebuilding be used to combat rural poverty (Heywood 1994: 20). Only months after his coronation in 2004, his son Sihamoni announced his intention to see the Suramarit restored as a public entity under the Ministry of Culture.25 Days later, however, the government announced its response: the theater, along with the land surrounding it, was to be sold to Cambodia’s largest telecommunications company, and the National Theater was to be disbanded. The CEO in question, Kith Meng, instantly announced a plan to build a television tower and a conference hall on the site but refused to be drawn on the fate of the theater.26 His only comment—to the effect that the Suramarit had not been a theater for ten years—was interpreted as an indication that he would eventually tear it down. For the handful of artists who remember performing in it, the Suramarit’s destruction would signify an act of cultural violence not witnessed since the days of the Khmer Rouge. To highlight the threat to the theater and the artists attached to it, the ﬁlmmaker Rithy Panh chose to use the burnedout auditorium as the prime setting of his latest feature, Les Artistes du théâtre brûlé (2005). The ﬁlm portrays a community of dancers, actors, and shadow puppeteers ruminating the insecurity of their lives and the lack of work opportunities, to the accompaniment of the metallic grinding

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of concrete mixers and the cries of construction workers. Panh believes these artists are not just the victims of government indifference but of Cambodia’s neo-liberal policies, which have reached a zenith in property speculation. While Panh was making his ﬁlm, a casino and supermarket were being erected. An entire ecosystem of artists squatting on the site faced forcible relocation to an area 20 kilometers outside the capital with little access to shops, schools, or pagodas. The routine selling of public assets without sufﬁcient guarantees that those institutions will be adequately replaced has become the most alarming facet of the current regime. Barely months after the coup de grâce delivered on the Suramarit, the government sold RUFA’s north campus—the country’s only training ground for performing arts and long a focus for the robam boran revival—to another businessman-patron of the CPP party, Mong Rethy. Not unlike the Suramarit, the campus went far beyond being merely a place of education, having been the focus of the reconstructing of performance repertory after the wars. Some families were handed a mere 70 dollars to abandon their homes amidst scenes of violence and confusion as the developers struggled to keep on track for the building of a new shopping mall. Ofﬁces were collapsing as administrators were still running in to retrieve ﬁles. A new campus was erected hastily and without proper consultation. With inadequate plumbing or security and located ﬁve kilometers from the city centre, many students and even some teachers have been unwilling to take the dusty journey there. Only 10 percent attended the inaugural ceremony in January 2006. The demoralization of RUFA’s hundreds of artists and staff could not have been more effectively achieved. In spite of symbolic resistance, they are clearly unequipped to counter the exigencies of the new business elite. For the current government, moreover, performing artists serve no political or ﬁnancial purposes. Unable, in the post-cold war period, to be of any ideological use or exploited as a force for unity and national reconciliation, they have been relegated to the status of tourist eye candy or graceful accessories, to appear at annual ceremonies—“Cultural Day” or “January 7th Liberation Day”—events where the public is largely excluded. The point that may have eluded Cambodia’s current elite is that it is the artists themselves who bear the burden of the responsibility to maintain and sustain this culture through oral transmissions. However diligent the kru (many are now well into their seventies and eighties) the maintenance of core repertory depends fundamentally on the oxygen of performance. Of well over 100 classical dances performed before the wars, still a large number have not been revived and are therefore in danger of being lost forever. It is a situation that has so alarmed the community that there have even been calls, advocated by Princess Bopha Devi and a number of her older colleagues, that the robam boran discipline should return whence it came: to the palace. This apparent return to feudalism, though not as

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retrograde an idea as it might at ﬁrst seem, reﬂects the innate conservatism of the community still coming to terms with its loss of human resources and hegemony. The classical dance style managed at once to be a celebration of some ill-deﬁned antiquity but at the same time an evolutionary art form as witnessed in the 1950s and 1960s when around ﬁfteen new dances were created in that syntax. However, at a time when the replication of repertory has primal signiﬁcance, attempts to contemporize the form or merely to tweak tradition have been met with ﬁerce resistance. Samritechak (2002)—a classical dance adaptation of Shakespeare’s Othello choreographed by Sophiline Cheam Shapiro of the Los Angeles-based Khmer Arts Academy (KAA), drew parallels between Sita, the Reamker’s victim and heroine, and Desdemona, while casting Iago as a monkey. It proved that an ancient language could be adapted to suit contemporary sensibilities, but for many it was a step too far. KAA’s subsequent project, Pamina Devi, based on Schikaneder’s eighteenth-century Magic Flute, which cast male dancers in male roles, was heavily censured by ministerial ofﬁcials, who invoked UNESCO’s World Heritage status as ammunition. The spectacle of an emasculated government agency with little production capacity attempting to curtail a piece that promised to bring international attention to Cambodia spoke volumes about Cambodia’s myriad cultural insecurities. The very symbol of Cambodia’s cultural malaise remains the burnedout theater. Had the Suramarit been revived soon after its demise, as the current monarch Sihamoni, himself a dancer, intended on his accession to the throne, the theater might have reverted to its original function as a showcase of Cambodia’s performing artists and drawn visitors to the capital. After the ﬁre, the Department of Performing Arts troupe moved to the Chaktomuk but then lost the theater as a base when it was refurbished as a rentable conference hall. Today, the theater is occasionally still used as a theater, but the Ministry of Culture decision to charge between 1,000 and 1,500 US dollars for an evening’s rent—well in excess of what Cambodian would-be producers can afford and far more than the 150 to 200 US dollars needed for electricity, technical staff, security, and staff—has effectively ruled it out as a venue for Cambodian entrepreneurs. The government might collect revenue if it stopped handing out hundreds of free passes to functionaries and friends: in the absence of this income, sponsorship is necessary. However, the symbiosis between the business and arts communities that characterized the halcyon years of the 1960s has not been revived in a tougher commercial climate with the new breed of CEOs pursuing other entertainment options. While Kith Meng prevaricated on the future of the Suramarit, he spent considerable sums setting up a twenty-four-hour “entertainment rock center” on Monivong Boulevard boasting more than 100 karaoke rooms of a “proper international standard.” Classical or folk dance events are not part of the package.

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While devastating to the artists who remember performing there, would the loss of the Suramarit after ten years of inactivity be registered by the public at large? One might also assume that such a formal environment, with its cantilevered staircases and proscenium, must have made many Cambodians feel a lot less comfortable than the traditional open-air grounds of a park or pagoda. The more germane question is whether Cambodia has largely lost the attention as well as the trust of the generation for whom the revival of traditional culture conveys signiﬁcance. While there are so few public performances, conclusions on the matter invariably involve some conjecture. The older generation of Cambodians is certainly nostalgic about the pre-war culture of their youth. The presence of traditional dance forms on television networks offers comfort and deference to those who view traditional arts as a repository of core Cambodian values and therefore the key to society’s rehabilitation. Though some among the older generation, seeing a range of dangers, are less inclined to venture out at night, many others are increasingly attending performances. Paradoxically, the assumption that today’s youth is indifferent to traditional culture is belied by strong attendances both in the capital and elsewhere. The genuine hunger for entertainment that characterized the years after the Khmer Rouge seems hardly to have abated. Yet it would be fanciful to claim the youthful masses yearn for a spiritual link with the past. Cambodia’s middle-class teenagers, like those of neighboring states, are avid consumers, restlessly reacting to the latest trends in technology, fashion, music, and advertising. The pop concerts set up on makeshift stages for weekend live concerts are popular and heavily attended. And yet faced with a pop onslaught from abroad and in the absence of a cultural base, Cambodian youth culture has a weak line of defense and invariably looks elsewhere for inspiration. The followers of Preap Sovath, Pich Sophea, and other pop idols have embraced a generic song-writing culture of largely Thai and Chinese lyrics translated into Cambodian. In the 1960s, by contrast, the country eagerly devoured American rock and French chansons but held a clear preference for the singer-songwriter Sin Sisamouth, the best of whose lyrics combine elegiac references to his people, ﬂora, and fauna with uniquely Cambodian sentiments. One can detect a strong appetite for public performances within Cambodian society. But while the public is ready to pay for its entertainment, the government lags well behind, and the Ministry is reduced to a state of helpless inertia. “We don’t have the sponsors for performances, so only foreigners can help us there,” commented Ouk Lay, former spokesperson for the Ministry of Culture.27 The implication is that the government has divested the responsibility in sustaining Cambodia’s living culture to others, on the basis that those “others” must be ﬁnancially and technically better equipped. A handful of rich individuals have been keen to support the arts, but tend to give selectively and without the respect for priorities. Yet Cambodia’s reappearance on the international stage has been the result

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of considerable enterprise on the part of foreign NGOs and a handful of embassies. The US-based Cambodian Living Arts (CLA) supports around 23 older masters in numerous programs based on teaching, performance, and recording for posterity. The French Cambodian NGO Sovannaphum mounts regular weekend performances of both traditional and contemporary creations from their humble wooden theater. Amrita Arts was set up by an American theater producer to help remount classics but has since expanded to include workshops and co-productions with other regional organizations. Foundations, festivals, and philanthropists bear much of the costs of these exchanges as well as international touring. In the absence of regular work, artists welcome the extra money tourism brings. For some intelligentsia, however, performances produced in house by hotels and tailored to the size of wallets or pseudo, site-speciﬁc notions threaten not only the quality of the dance but also the root of the culture. However, while for the World Monument Funds, dinner dances at the Preah Khan temple are part of the lure, many potential donors to Cambodia have low attention spans. “What will it be? The 10- or the 15-dollar dance,” famously quips Chheng Phon.28 The 2002 Rafﬂes-sponsored opera gala at Angkor Wat, which brought José Carreras together with apsaras and kaol dancers to perform for an audience of Asian businessmen, was, if you like, the 1,500-dollar dance but desecrated by the clanking of knives and forks. Against the tenor’s six-ﬁgure fee, the dancers received between 30 and 60 US dollars (Turnbull 2003). In the absence of ministerial entrepreneurs, all performance helps to ﬁll a vacuum. However, the reality is that foreigners can do little more than put thumbs in the dyke when it comes to restoring a thousand years of culture. In 1960, Cambodia supported around ﬁfty companies and had thirty theaters in Phnom Penh alone. Today, the only two capacious theaters in the country—the privately-owned Chenla, which rents at 150 US dollars per hour, and the Chaktomuk, renting from 1,000 to 1,500 US dollars per day—housed only ﬁfteen cultural performances in 2005. Moreover, foreign assistance has its downside. The capacity building in arts administration and technical aptitude envisaged for Cambodia by some NGOs is proving too ambitious for a country with such a paucity of active theatrical life and with neither RUFA nor the University of Phnom Penh offering courses in either theatrical design or stage management. In areas such as documentation and restoration, Cambodia has made strong advances. However, many Cambodians are unable to easily grasp essentially Anglo-American concepts such as fundraising and planning and would rather others take that responsibility. Feelings of technical inadequacy fuel low self-esteem: build capacity and you unwittingly build dependency. Notwithstanding the lifelines of tourism and foreign involvement, Cambodia’s performing arts infrastructure remains weak and precarious. The relationship between cultural and economic development is almost non-existent outside the context of tourism. As Rithy Panh likes to point

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out: “forget to develop culture and identity and you remain economically poor and spiritually impoverished . . . and to the world at large, just another pool of cheap labor.”29 Will it take a stronger economy to trigger more investment in the arts, or does the situation require a change of regime unscarred and a new generation of politicians, in Chheng Phon’s words, by une mentalité guerrière (a warrior mentality)?30 Cambodia needs visionary men and women who can reignite pride in the culture that the previous generation brought so close to annihilation.

Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30

Interview with Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, 2004. Interviews with Proueng Chhieng, Chheng Phon and Suon Bunrith, 2003–05. Interview with Sophiline Cheam Shapiro, 2004. Interview with Em Tiay, 2005. Interview with Chheng Phon, 2005. Interview with Em Tiay, 2005. Interview with Pich Tum Kravel, 2005. Interview with Pich Tum Kravel, 2005. Interview with Proueng Chhieng, 2005. Interview with Pich Tum Kravel, 2004. Interview with Chheng Phon, 2002. Pichtum Kravel remembers playing Tum to packed houses as late as October 1974. Conversation with Rithy Panh, 2006. Personal communication with Vuthy Huot, 2001. Personal communication with Sam Miller, 2003. Telephone interview, 2003. Personal communications with Pornrat Dahmrung and Tang Fu Kwen, 2003. Interview with Hang Soth, 2003. Interview with Pich Tum Kravel, 2004. Interview with Pich Tum Kravel, 2003. Interview with Pich Tum Kravel, 2005. Also my interview with Hang Soth, 1994. Interview with Julio Jeldres, 2005. Hun Sen televised speeches, 2005. Televised meeting between the king and the author on TVK and Apsara Television stations, 2005. Telephone conversation with Kith Meng, 2005. Interview with Ouk Lay, 2001. Interview with Chheng Phon, 2006. Interview with Rithy Panh, 2004. Interview with Chheng Phon, 2005.

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10 The (re-)emergence of Cambodian women writers at home and abroad Klairung Amratisha1

In 1999, a study on gender and development in Cambodia showed that Cambodian women had been under-represented in positions that required higher skills and qualiﬁcations, both in the public and private sectors (Gorman 1999). The same can be said about the writing profession. Khing Hoc Dy (1993) in his Ecrivains et expressions littéraires du Cambodge au XXème siècle listed only two women writers who had contributed to modern literature from 1938 to 1975, a period in which Cambodian prose ﬁction underwent tremendous development. However, since the fall of the Khmer Rouge regime, there has been an increase in the number of women ﬁctionists and better quality writing both in Cambodia and in Cambodian communities abroad. A considerable number of women’s writings have won prizes in literary competitions and many pieces have been translated into foreign languages. Their novels and short stories have thus become one of the dominant trends in contemporary literature, a distinct aspect that has never emerged before on the Cambodian literary scene. This chapter aims to provide a general overview of this recent phenomenon ﬁrst by tracing the (re-)emergence of women in Cambodian literature in this historical context. Important factors that led to this sudden development and the role of women as writers will also be explored. Second, the novels and short stories by women writers both at home and abroad will be studied in terms of themes and distinct characteristics that have developed into an important direction for modern prose ﬁction.2

The (re-)emergence of women writers in Cambodia With all literary activities curtailed under the Khmer Rouge, the country’s heritage in this area rapidly degenerated. After the fall of Pol Pot’s regime in 1979, the government of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) installed by Vietnam tried to re-organize literary activities. Competitions for novels, poetry, songs, and dramas were held to encourage surviving and would-be authors to write along revolutionary themes. Apart from a few well-known authors who survived, almost all the writers of that period were young members of the Communist Party. Among the most successful

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ones were two women ofﬁcials, Pal Vannariraks and Oum Suphany, whose novels had won prizes in literary competitions. However, outside the government, there were very limited possibilities for authors to publish their works since all writings were subjected to political censorship and all printed works had to be produced through state publishing houses (Tauch 1997). These limitations, together with a high demand for escapist novels outside the context of socialist propaganda, resulted in an increase in the circulation of handwritten manuscripts of love and adventure stories during the 1980s and early 1990s. Using school notebooks made of very poor quality paper, the authors of these novels were mostly anonymous or used pen names for fear of government persecution (De Bernon 2003). The most popular author of this genre was Mao Samnang, a woman writer. When the PRK became the State of Cambodia in 1989, a series of reforms allowed for the opening of a market economy, which, along with literary freedom and the loosening of restrictions on publishing, brought back commercial bookshops and publishing businesses. However, the publication of new novels during the ﬁrst half of the 1990s was still scarce due to the high cost of printing and the small book market in Cambodia caused by the high level of illiteracy and the low purchasing power of the people. Moreover, with the onset of rapid modernization, television became the dominant media for everyday life, replacing novels, which used to be the only form of entertainment. Well-known authors of propaganda and escapist novels were asked to produce ﬁlm and soap opera scripts for television and video companies. Since authors could earn more money by writing video scripts, they began to care less about having their works published. Though the writing of video scripts had enabled some women writers to make a living solely from their pen,3 this would be one of the major factors leading to a slump in the publication of new prose ﬁction during the ﬁrst half of the 1990s. With the arrival of the United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC), an independent print media emerged and provided a space for serialized novels, the most popular types being ghost stories and pornographic novels written by male writers. At the same time, short stories also began to appear in newspapers and magazines, a genre that had never been popular in Cambodia before 1975. Among the short story writers were women authors such as Mey Son Sotheary, whose stories appeared in the newspaper with the highest circulation, Rasmı¯ Kambuja¯. Likewise, the Praja¯priy entertainment magazine and the women’s magazine Kulthita¯ housed many short stories written by women. Their work helped secure the full acceptance of the genre in modern Cambodian literature. After the election in 1993, the Association of Khmer Writers (AKW), which was founded in 1956, was also re-established. Although the renewed association could not perform the same signiﬁcant role in the development of literature as the old AKW had done given the lack of funding, it was able to re-organize competitions for novel and poetry writing. Two literary

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competitions, the “King Sihanouk Award” and the “January 7 Award,” have been held every other year since the mid-1990s. The ﬁrst “King Sihanouk Award” in 1995 was important for the development of literature in general because it initiated the revival of novel writing. The award was also important especially for women writers because it was the ﬁrst time their work had been institutionally approved. From then on, more literary contests were organized both at home and abroad. Women writers have been very active in these contests, and they have been successful at winning prizes. These awards not only provided them with necessary ﬁnancial support but also brought the public’s attention to their writing and led to publication. Since 2000, more novels by women authors have appeared on the market, and their work has become one of the dominant trends in modern literature. Mao Samnang and Pal Vannariraks, now considered two of the three most famous writers of present-day Cambodia, are able to make a living from writing, an achievement very few authors in the country could accomplish. As the majority of women writers in Cambodia today started their careers shortly after 1979, the main factor responsible for their emergence was political in its root cause. First, during the PRK and within the socialist state ideologies, the concept of equality was strongly promoted by the government and thus women were encouraged to participate in every ﬁeld including writing, in order to reconstruct the nation (McGrew et al. 2004). Second, what the Khmer Rouge had done between 1975 and 1979 resulted in the decline in the number of male writers, thus providing a great opportunity for women who had interest and talent in writing to achieve their goals more easily and faster. Under Pol Pot, men outnumbered women as victims of malnutrition, starvation, disease, and execution (McGrew et al. 2004). According to the president of AKW, more than 200 out of the 300 or so post-independence writers were executed between 1975 and 1979 (Sam 1996). It would be reasonable to assume that almost all of them were men as they comprised the great majority of the members of the association before 1975. This gender disparity can be found not only with writers but in the general public as well. A survey after 1979 showed a demographic imbalance in Cambodia where women made up between 60 and 64 percent of the adult population. The life and work of the surviving writers is another contributing factor leading to the establishment of women writers during the 1980s and 1990s. In Cambodia, many older writers who had survived the Khmer Rouge held important positions in the PRK government and did not have much time to produce literary works (Khing 2002). Political involvement was also an obstacle to the progress of the older and new generations of male writers. Kong Boun Chhoeun, a proliﬁc novelist before 1975, wrote only two novels while serving as vice-president of the Cinema Department in the PRK. After 1993, he went back to writing full-time and was a best-selling author in Cambodia before taking political asylum in Thailand in 2000. His novel about an acid attack on an

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actress carried out by the wife of a top ofﬁcial resulted in death threats. Another more tragic example is the case of Nond Chan. A proliﬁc writer during the PRK, he became the editor of a newspaper during the 1993 election and was shot dead due to political conﬂict in 1994 (Khing 2002). Third, the horrible experiences suffered under the Khmer Rouge, combined with the lack of books beyond socialist themes under the PRK, resulted in a need for escapism and the yearning for love stories on the part of the reading public. For this reason, women who wrote sentimental novels were able to gain popularity quickly among the readers. Mao Samnang, for instance, presented the manuscript of her ﬁrst novel written in pencil to the owner of a bookstall in 1981. He recommended that she make ﬁfty copies of her 200-page manuscript and they were all rented out in one week. It was such a success that the bookstall owner helped make more copies of the manuscript himself and distributed them in the provinces (Nay and Amat 1997). In addition to the above-mentioned political and social factors, literary institutions played a key role in promoting women writers. The difﬁculties that writers in the early 1990s experienced in having their works printed continue today. Commercial publishers are reluctant to publish new ﬁction due to the small pool of readers. Therefore, Cambodian writers are, almost invariably, unable to make a living from their writings (Vong 2004). Even those among the women writers who gained popularity from their handwritten novels and video scripts shared the same fate. Pal Vannariraks is a good case in point. For about twenty years, since the early 1980s, Pal wrote 91 novels and only about ten of them were published (Vong 2004). After the publication of her revolutionary novels in 1988 by the government, her works were not published again until she won a prize in the ﬁrst “King Sihanouk Award.” The publication of Unforgettable (Pambhlec min pa¯ n) in 1996 was sponsored by the German Heinrich Böll Foundation, which provided grants to AKW to publish prize-winning manuscripts (Lobo 1997). When Pal entered the contest for juvenile literature organized by the Norwegian ‘Save the Children Fund’ and won the third prize, her novel was again published in 2000 by the Fund. In the past two years, more of her novels, though they have not received awards, have appeared in bookshops. Some have been published by publishing houses while others have received donations for publication from individual readers. It is obvious that the literary awards made the readers aware of Pal and reassured the publishers that her work would sell well. The publications of the novels written by Mao Samnang and Oum Suphany have gone through the same process. Although international organizations were instrumental in supporting the re-emergence of women writers in Cambodia, it is difﬁcult to say that they had any speciﬁc intention to support women writers, for the funds were given to AKW to publish prize-winning manuscripts regardless of gender. But as it happened, three out of the four winners were women.

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Moreover, in the preface of Mao Samnang’s The Waves Wash the Sand (Ralak pok khsa¯ c’), the representative of the Heinrich Böll Foundation praised modern Cambodian women writers for following in the footsteps of their women ancestors of Angkor, Tilaka¯, and Queen Indradevı¯ by writing and giving knowledge to the people (Mao 1996: preface). Women writers abroad also played a role in promoting their fellow writers at home. In the recent “Literature of Peace Award” founded by Pech Sangwawann and offered by the Association des Ecrivains Khmers à l’Etranger (AEKE), all of the winners were from Cambodia, and most of them were women. At least three women’s novels that won prizes in this contest were published by AEKE in 2001.

The emergence of Cambodian women writers abroad Women writers abroad began to emerge after 1975 when Khmer refugees resettled in the West. For them, the painful recollection of lost family members, abandoned homes and vocations is exacerbated by the experience of geographical displacement. The sense of exile in a foreign land fostered a particularly poignant nostalgia for the homeland, which served as an emotional impetus for cultural reconstruction in foreign countries. In France and the United States, Cambodian organizations sprung up and published Khmer-language newspapers and journals with an aim to preserve Cambodian culture. The older generation of writers who ﬂed to France were regular contributors to these newspapers. Among them were women members of the old AKW such as Pech Sangwawann, whose short stories appeared in newspapers both in Europe and America. Besides the creation of newspapers, Cambodian organizations abroad promoted cultural activities including literary contests, which gave a chance to a new generation of women to try their hand at writing. Duong Ratha, the pen name of Siv Darina, was one of the new writers who gained success in a literary competition in California. Some women even took a leading role in promoting Cambodian literature. In 1989, Pech Sangwawann founded the AEKE in France to encourage established and new authors to write and publish their works. Though many of its activities were held in France, the AEKE competitions accepted Khmer language manuscripts from all over the world (Vong 2004). Women writers abroad consisted not only of refugees who ﬂed after 1975 but also those who had lived in foreign countries before 1975 and were not able to return to Cambodia. A good example is Pen Setharin, who lives in Japan. A novelist, she founded an institution to educate the younger generation about the lives and works of Cambodian authors (Vong 2004). However, Cambodian women writers of the diaspora are much less proliﬁc than their counterparts in Cambodia because writing is generally not their main profession. At ﬁrst, their works were published and distributed only in the Cambodian communities abroad, but recently their books

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have also appeared in Phnom Penh, and their readers now include Cambodians at home as well. Although their ﬁctional works have their own distinct characteristics, they share many similarities with the works of women ﬁctionists in Cambodia, and their writing can be considered part of the literary trend created by women writers. The changes Cambodians of the diaspora had experienced after resettlement in host countries, together with the destruction from years of warfare, the horrendous losses during the Democratic Kampuchea (DK) regime, followed by the occupation of the Vietnamese, and the new realities of living in foreign countries, had raised the fear among them that Cambodian culture would be lost or altered and that the Khmer as a people would cease to exist (Ledgerwood 1990). This perception became the main impetus for women authors in exile to write. Pech Sangwawann wrote in the preface of The New Horizon (Joen´ megh thmı¯ ) that she composed the novel only to “continue the preservation of Cambodian literature that had been lost.” She also asked Cambodians of the diaspora who had creative talents to start writing or to write more in order to “preserve” Cambodian literature (Pech 1991: preface). As for Duong Ratha, the Cambodian American writer, writing novels in Khmer helps to “build Khmer literature and culture which were almost destroyed and lost, in order to preserve it for the next generation of Khmers so that they may know what is called Khmer literature” (Duong 1990: preface). That she wanted to write so the younger generation would “know Khmer literature” reﬂects another fear felt by the ﬁrst generation of Cambodian refugees in America that their children would grow up as American and abandon Khmer culture (Ledgerwood 1990: 1). To write a book in the Khmer language for their children to read is one way they can instill in them a sense of identity and pride in being Khmer. However, in writing and publishing Khmer language ﬁction abroad, these women encountered as many difﬁculties as their counterparts at home. Many surviving authors in France and in the US actually continued to write new works after their resettlement but could not publish them because of technical and ﬁnancial difﬁculties. The small population of literate people interested in Khmer language ﬁction in the West was also one of the obstacles (Khing 1994). Thus, the fact that women writers insisted on writing in Khmer and tried in every way to distribute their works showed their strong intention to contribute to Cambodian literature, even if it meant paying to have their work published as Duong did.

Role of women writers The classical literature that directly sets the rules for women are didactic poems called Cpa¯ p’ Srı¯ (Codes of Conduct for Women). Here, women as daughters, wives, and mothers were taught their proper place in society and correct behavior through the concept of srı¯ grup’ lakkhana, the

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perfectly virtuous woman. The characteristics of srı¯ grup’ lakkhana can be summarized under three categories: comportment, activity, and sexuality. In comportment, she is soft and sweet both in movements and words. Concerning her activities, a woman must obey and serve her husband as she did her parents. She takes care of all the household chores and child rearing. In terms of sexuality, the importance of virginity at marriage and faithfulness to her husband is central to her deﬁnition as a proper Cambodian woman (Ledgerwood 1990). From this ideal concept of woman, wives and mothers have a duty to provide traditional comfort at home for family members and to pass on social values to the younger generation. Cambodians, therefore, have considered women the holders of tradition and they have been expected to uphold traditional morality (Mortland 2002). As their roles were limited to the household, women had never been given access to education. In the long history of traditional Cambodian literature, only very few women poetesses were recorded and all came from high society. However, in implanting traditional values in their children through the act of reciting Cpa¯ p’ or telling folk tales, women played an important role in keeping tradition and morality and in diffusing literature at the same time. During the period when modern prose ﬁction was born and ﬂourished in Cambodia, the emergence of two women novelists included in the pre1975 literary canon was exceptional. Educated by her father who was a palace ofﬁcial, Sou Seth, the ﬁrst of these women novelists, started her career by composing traditional poetry but dared to experiment in novelistic writing at a time when less than ﬁve novels had appeared in Cambodia. Her ﬁrst novel, The Predestined Couple—the Unbetrayed Friends (Gu¯ san´ mitt min drust mitt), which came out in 1947, offered a negative view of arranged marriages. As the novel portrayed the cultural conﬂict between a Western outlook and the old Cambodian way of life, Seth’s awareness of the cultural changes within Cambodia was truly progressive (Amratisha 1998). The second and most successful woman novelist, Suy Hieng, was no less radical than her predecessor. A graduate from a French lycée, she was the only woman among the founding members of AKW in 1956, and she owned the ﬁrst and largest Cambodian bookstore in the 1950s. In her novels, Suy created new types of women characters who were courageous, intelligent, and not completely submissive (Amratisha 1998). It is obvious that these two women, through their lives and works, had truly challenged the traditional ﬁxed roles of Khmer women. Of the modern women writers, the majority belong to the generation born in the 1950s and thus beneﬁted from Prince Sihanouk’s expansion of education policy during the Sangkum period. All the women writers who had studied in Cambodia had at least a high school education. Some of them attended or earned university degrees before 1975.4 In contrast to the older generation of women writers, the politics and society after 1979 had given them direct support. Also, unlike their two predecessors

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mentioned above, modern women writers do not really challenge tradition. Paradoxically, when facing the destruction of Cambodia society in general and the destruction of literature as part of Cambodian culture and tradition, in particular, women as the keepers of culture and tradition feel it is their duty to preserve what remains, including the traditional concept of virtuous women. The modern writers still play the role of keepers of tradition and morality. The only change is that they have moved from the role of “telling” to the role of “creating” the stories.

Speciﬁcities of Cambodian women’s writing Under the PRK, guidelines were issued for every publication, and authors had to write along a set of themes, the ﬁrst one being the brutality of the Khmer Rouge and the misfortune the country experienced from 1975 to 1979 (Khing 2002),5 which became one of the dominant themes in Cambodian literature in the 1980s. Women writers in Cambodia contributed to it by bringing the suffering of women to the fore. In the novels by women writers who won awards during the PRK government, the brutality of the Khmer Rouge or forced marriages and their effect on women’s lives were highlighted. Pal’s Waning Moon Has Already Ended (Ranoc phut hoey), for instance, tells of the life of a young woman who witnesses the execution of her father and the killing of many women by women themselves. In Under the Drops of Falling Rain (Krom tamn¸ak di˛k bhien´), Oum Suphany gives us a protagonist who was a revolutionary woman and a victim of forced marriages arranged by the state during the DK. The novel depicts how people were ordered to participate in mass marriage ceremonies presided over by Khmer Rouge cadres who instructed partners to join hands to produce revolutionary children. Vivid descriptions of newly-wed couples being spied on by secret soldiers on their wedding night to ensure sexual intercourse took place were also included. Women authors abroad, like the writers in the homeland, initially wrote about tragic experiences during the DK, but more than their counterparts at home they have continued to cling to the Khmer Rouge issues in one way or another. Novels and short stories by Duong Ratha who stayed in Cambodia during the whole DK period deal largely with life under Pol Pot. One example is the novel Disaster in the Battleﬁeld of Love (Vipatti knun¸ samarabhu¯mi sneha¯ ), which tells the story of two lovers who were parted and then eventually reunite after years of suffering. Through the life of the hero who becomes a Khmer Rouge ofﬁcer, the internal politics and scramble for power among DK cadres from different zones is revealed, while the suffering of the “new people” from hard labor, lack of food, and brutal torture is depicted through the heroine’s life. While Duong concluded her novel with the ending of the Khmer Rouge period, Pech Sangwawann chose to focus on the problems of the Cambodian refugees, as she was able to escape soon after the Khmer Rouge takeover

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and arrived in France in 1977. Her novel, The New Horizon, depicts the struggle of an uneducated woman refugee in coping with her new life in the Western world. With a very limited knowledge of the French language, the heroine becomes the victim of fraud by her fellow Cambodians. The novel also illustrates the fears uneducated refugees have in a foreign environment. There are many reasons why women writers abroad still cling to the issues of the Khmer Rouge and their direct effect on their lives. For Cambodians of the diaspora, reports Mortland (2002), the legacies of genocide have been permanent companions, affecting their every waking, and many sleeping, hours as their losses have been too great for time to heal the grief. From this, what writers found to heal their traumas was the attempt to inform the reader of the reality of the genocide they had seen and personally suffered. Through survival novels and short stories, the authors not only conﬁrmed to themselves, but also to the younger generation, that such incomprehensible destruction actually happened and that the pain they continued to suffer was therefore justiﬁed. Doung Ratha, for instance, dedicated her novel to her teachers and friends in Pursat High School who died between 1975 and 1979. As the novel bears witness on behalf of members of her family and friends who were killed, it thus fulﬁlls a debt to remember and to speak for them so as to ensure that their stories are heard. Apart from their signiﬁcance as literary testimony, the survival ﬁction of women writers abroad gave a new function to Cambodian literature: as the medicine that helped to heal the Cambodian traumas. Moreover, novels about the Khmer Rouge issues were the result of their resettlement, which forced Cambodian refugees to give explanations about the changes in every aspect of their lives, from their everyday activities to the most important—the changes in their identity. To tell about the Khmer Rouge atrocity is indeed to tell about both the historical experiences of the Cambodian diasporas and the reasons for their displacement. Reports also show that Cambodians in exile lived in fear and anxiety that what happened during the DK might happen again (Mortland 2002). The novels of women writers in exile were therefore a kind of lesson the writers gave to remind the young generation not to let this terror occur again. The other dominant theme seen only in the works of women writers at home are the contemporary social problems of women and children indirectly caused by the Khmer Rouge, which would subsequently be exaggerated by the rapid socioeconomic changes during and after the UNTAC period. These included domestic violence, prostitution, robbery, and HIV/AIDS, as well as the continuation of traditional issues such as men taking second wives. While the appearance of these themes partly resulted from the authors’ pity and worry for Cambodian women and children (Mao 2000; Pal 2000a), these themes were also initiated by the literary award organizers. Most of the competitions spelled out speciﬁc

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themes to follow such as national development for the “January 7 Award” or the issue of domestic violence for the “Queen Indradevi Award” (Vong 2004). In dealing with new problems related to women and their families, women writers depicted these social ills vividly. In The Night Has Passed (Yup’ ko rumlan¸), Pal Vannariraks presents a realistic picture of domestic violence that results from a forced marriage. The educated heroine, who becomes the sole breadwinner of the family after the DK regime, must tolerate beating, torture, threats, and insults from her uneducated husband, who is frustrated by the gender role changes and resorts to gambling and violence against his wife. Apart from mirroring the problems realistically, women writers tackled these issues in two major ways. The ﬁrst was to show the cause of the problems. Mey Son Sotheary shows in her short stories that poverty stands at the core of juvenile crimes such as the robbery of motorcycles, the main crime in Cambodia in the 1990s. The story Why? (Haetu avı¯ ) concerns the life of a poor boy who must look after his siblings alone. To do so, he joins a motorcycle-jacking gang and is killed while escaping the police. This tragedy happens because the mother did not repay her creditors and left the children to survive on their own. In other words, the woman did not perform her role as a virtuous mother. Pal expands on this view by showing that youth problems can occur in rich families too if women cannot provide happiness in the family and do not look after their children well. In If the Flower Has Water (Poe phka¯ ma¯n di˛k), the family of a rich, high-ranking ofﬁcial falls apart when the husband leaves his family for his second wife. With no one looking after the children, a daughter becomes infected with HIV while the son joins a motorcycle-jacking gang to ﬁnance his addiction to online gambling. Another way women writers dealt with social ills was to show how the various challenges facing women and children could be solved. In The Garland of Jasmine (Kamran´ phka¯ mlih), Mao Samnang showed that if a woman insisted on being the perfectly virtuous mother, she could protect her children from all juvenile problems. Because of poverty, a widowed heroine must allow her daughter to sell garlands in nightclubs because male customers buy more from girl vendors. By accompanying her daughter in secret, the mother can protect her daughter from sexual harassment. Even in the stories dealing with the effects of the Khmer Rouge regime, writers at home and abroad showed that women overcame their hardship if they held tightly to traditional Cambodian values and culture. The novel Under the Blue Sky of Tokyo (Krom megh barn¸ khiev nai krun´ tu¯kyu¯) by Pen Setharin tells of a Cambodian woman in Tokyo who could overcome the difﬁculty of living alone and not being accepted in a foreign land. She also found no problem in cross-cultural marriage because she was the perfectly virtuous Khmer wife. The author’s attempt to preserve and promote Khmer culture is shown in detailed descriptions of ancient architecture and the Cambodian art of silk weaving. It is worth mentioning

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that this novel came out both in Japanese and Khmer languages. In the Japanese version entitled Under the Blue Sky of Angkor Wat, it seems that the author intends to showcase the high culture of Cambodia while the Khmer-language version is aimed at Cambodian readers, to see and respect the value of their own culture. The idea adopted by women writers that being a srı¯ grup’ lakkhana and holding tightly to traditional Cambodian values and culture can lead to happiness for women and society can be considered one of the distinct characteristics of women’s writings, showing a continuity from traditional folk tales and verse-novels that taught the concept of perfectly virtuous women (Ledgerwood 1990). In terms of characterization, almost all of women’s writings have female characters as the main protagonists. While the young heroines are largely composed of orphans, the majority of older heroines are widows, a reﬂection of the actual situation in post-Khmer Rouge Cambodia. Because women writers both inside and outside Cambodia saw the traditional concept of srı¯ grup’ lakkhana as a tool to solve the problems of the society in general and the problems of women in particular, most heroines were created as perfectly virtuous women. Nearly every protagonist maintains soft, sweet, and modest characteristics. While the younger women are virgins and ﬁercely protect their virginity for their would-be husbands, the married heroines are faithful even to their abusive husbands. The best example of srı¯ grup’ lakkhana can be seen in Mao Samnange’s protagonist in The Waves Wash the Sand. Bussiba is an obedient daughter who does everything for the happiness of her mother. Mao describes the luck of the mother for having a daughter who “has a perfect manner, beautiful appearance, and is grateful to her parents” (Mao 1996: 8). After marrying the man her mother has arranged for her, she performs the duties of a good wife though her husband proposes divorce because of a misunderstanding. With the perfect qualities of a srı¯ grup’ lakkhana, the husband ﬁnally falls for her and her virtues. The concept of srı¯ grup’ lakkhana is also found in the heroines who live abroad and who are the product of mixed marriages. The half-Khmer heroine in Under the Blue Sky of Tokyo is very obedient to her parents. She follows her mother’s order not to marry the weaver she met in Cambodia, who happens to be the mother’s ex-boyfriend. In the works of writers at home, one distinct characteristic added to the traditional quality of virtuous women is endurance. This is partly an inﬂuence of the characteristic of “strong revolutionary women” from the PRK period but is also mostly the result of women writers’ horrible experiences. Pal Vannariraks, in particular, always chooses endurance and determination as the most distinct characteristics of her protagonists. In Unforgettable, Viriya, who lost her parents during the DK, is sent by her orphanage to work as a nanny in the house of a rich man. With her patience and discipline, she is able to tame the very stubborn daughter and wins the father’s heart despite many obstacles. The story ends with

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the heroine opening an orphanage for children who share the same fate as her. It can be said that the main trend of contemporary women’s writings is towards romanticism, for most of the works discussed here are love stories, rather being serious in tone. The prevalence of sentimentality can be assumed, on the one hand, to be a usual characteristic of the works of women who are familiar with writing romantic stories as a form of escapism. On the other hand, when looking closely at their novelistic elements, one can see that many women’s novels mirror the great inﬂuence of the early sentimental novels in terms of plot, characterization, and style of writing. Themes concerning modern social problems are mostly presented through the typical plot of sentimental Cambodian stories: the miserable life of an orphan who eventually overcomes all obstacles and gains love and happiness by his/her virtue.6 Almost every story ends happily with either the single heroines marrying their loved ones or the widowed heroines reuniting somewhat unrealistically with their lovers. In Under the Drops of Falling Rain, the heroine is lucky ﬁnally to fall in love with her husband who was nice enough not to force her to sleep with him. Although they are separated soon after the wedding, she keeps her virginity for him without any hope of reunion until they accidentally meet again long after 1979. The happy case of forced marriage is actually very rare (Boua 1982). But this unrealistic characteristic can be explained by the author’s intention to promote the concept of virtuous women as a tool for women to overcome problems. That the heroine does not agree to sleep with her arranged husband leads him to see her virtue and thus he does not force her. This in turn ignites the love between them. That the heroine is still loyal to her husband ensures an obstacle-free reunion and the couple ﬁnd real love and happiness even in a marriage that was held in a non-traditional way. In terms of writing style and technique, women writers both at home and abroad follow the pre-war literary convention of including high vocabulary and borrowing words from Pali and Sanskrit as well as using alliteration, rhyme, and poetic symbolism in the description of settings and characters. Moreover, the insertion of short poems, serving as courting love songs, poems that characters compose, or epilogues in their prose ﬁction is a standard practice. This again follows the tradition of the pre- and postindependence writers (Amratisha 1998). Examples of elevated language and poems can especially be seen in the novels of Pal Vannariraks, Oum Suphany, and Pen Setharin. Combined with these traditional styles is the use of new techniques inﬂuenced by television. The stories of many novels, particularly those of Mao Samnang and Pal Vannariraks, move rapidly, with more dialogue than descriptive passages. Like soap operas, there are a lot of minor characters and numerous small sub-key plots to hold the attention of the readers. As some writers also produce screenplays for television serials, the inﬂuence of screenplay techniques is inevitable in their works.

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Conclusion From the analysis of novels and short stories of literary women, a separation in the direction of the works of writers in Cambodia and the ones abroad seems to have appeared since the 1990s. While the writings outside Cambodia still cling to the Khmer Rouge issues in one way or another, those in the homeland concentrate more on new social ills, especially those related to women and their families. Both groups, however, attempt to cope with their past and present troubles that have the Khmer Rouge as their very root cause. Interestingly enough, it is the same Khmer Rouge that is also the root cause of the opportunity given to women to have their voices heard. Women’s novels and short stories act as a call for attention from the society to current problems concerning Cambodian women both inside and outside Cambodia. Cambodian and international literary awards also play a great part in supporting the emergence of women writers and in giving rise to the new theme of their writings. Moreover, the study of the main themes and distinct characteristics of women’s writing both at home and abroad shows that although there appear to be some modern, changing aspects, women’s prose ﬁction overall continues the literary tradition both of the classical literature and of the pre1975 literature. This conﬁrms Mortland’s suggestion that: “the Cambodians try to act out the continuity that they see as an antidote to change and the threatening chaos that seems to them to accompany this change” (2002: 159). This idea could be further proved by examining works of women writers at home in the genre of poetry, a genre considered by Khmers as the essence of Cambodian literature. It would also be interesting to study the testimonial literature in English by Cambodian American women that has reappeared gradually since the twenty-ﬁfth anniversary of the Khmer Rouge capture of Cambodia, in order to gain a fuller picture of Cambodian women writers and their writings and thus a better understanding of contemporary Cambodian literature.

Notes 1 2

3

4

I am grateful to Madame Pech Sangwawann, the president of the Association des Ecrivain Khmers à l’Etranger, for sending me her novel and collections of short stories studied in this paper. Writings in English and French by Cambodian women writers in exile are not studied here for almost all of these works are in the forms of memoirs and autobiographies and can generally be categorized as non-ﬁction prose. Moreover, these works were aimed at different readers and thus contain different functions from women’s writings in the Khmer language. Mao Samnang was offered 500 US dollars to write a series of twenty episodes in 1994. From then on, her novels became popular among television producers. She was able to give up her former profession, selling cigarettes and petrol on the street, and devote herself entirely to writing novels and screenplays (Nay and Amat 1997: 4). For details of their lives, see Khing 2002.

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5

6

Other themes included the development of the country after the liberation in 1979, the return of defectors to help the PRK build the nation along Marxist–Leninist lines, and the special friendship and solidarity between the Cambodian and Vietnamese people. This is the plot of the ﬁrst Cambodian novel, Su ¯ pha¯t, written in 1938. Many classic novels from the pre-independence period follow its story line, and thus it became a great inﬂuence on the writers of later periods. For details on early Cambodian novels, see Amratisha 2000.

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Part Four

Engaging modernity

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11 Entrepreneurialism and charisma Two modes of doing business in post-Pol Pot Cambodian Buddhism Ian Harris Introduction Long before the Pol Pot regime succeeded in eliminating organized Buddhism from Cambodia the communists had engaged in an ongoing campaign to undermine the standing of the Buddhist monastic order (sangha) by criticizing its lack of engagement in progressive, socially engaged activity. From this standpoint, Buddhist monks were compared with intestinal worms that sucked the blood of the peasants. In addition they were accused of perpetuating a superstitious world view, and supporting a reactionary social system through their propagation of the doctrine of karma. Nevertheless, monks who were prepared to embrace a changed role by joining the rural revolutionary vanguard were tolerated, since through their contribution of useful labor or work as ideological propagandists, they could be incorporated into a united front in the battle against feudalism and obscurantism. In certain respects this was not such a radical change from what had gone before, since the previous colonial power had also sought to manipulate and coerce the monastic order so that it might more readily contribute to the French mission civilisatrice, while similar policies remained in place in the immediate post-independence period.1 This chapter suggests that the current and dominant international discourse of development is likely to ensure a continuation of similar pressures. Indeed, the process of national transformation that has accelerated signiﬁcantly since the run-up to the 1993 elections, a few short years in which the country came under the international community’s spotlight, has meant that Cambodia’s religious institutions must operate in an environment in which new political structures, enormous quantities of foreign aid, and novel forms of mismanagement proliferate. It should not be assumed that the Cambodian sangha is monolithic and does not possess vigorous elements that struggle to combat foreign inﬂuences. Indeed, part of this chapter attempts to delineate the nature of this rearguard action. But the splits that have emerged as a consequence of the tension and revolve around divisions between modernizers and traditionalists that have been present in one form or another for well over a

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century have proved counterproductive for a weak and vulnerable monastic order still trying to come to terms with the massive impact of the Pol Pot years. As a consequence, its condition as a relatively autonomous institution, as a locus for quiet contemplation, and as a reservoir of morally exemplary individuals is likely to remain a cause for concern for the foreseeable future.

Buddhism re-engages with the outside world It was inevitable that the extreme xenophobia of the Pol Potists would diminish with the overthrow of Democratic Kampuchea and the establishment of the Vietnam-backed People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) in 1979. As the country gradually opened itself to external inﬂuences, Ven. Tep Vong, president (prathean) of a newly formed Uniﬁed Front Monk Community (preah song renakse), visited the Soviet Union and Mongolia where he was able to learn about the nature of church–state relations in a communist setting. In the reverse direction, a delegation of the communistsponsored Asian Buddhists’ Conference for Peace (ABCP) made an ofﬁcial return trip to Cambodia in April 19792 while representatives of the Buddhist Association for the National Salvation of Kampuchea attended the ﬁfth Congress of the ABCP in Ulan Bator in June, complaining that “Chinese big nation hegemonic expansionism [had] imposed on Kampuchea an extremely brutal regime which brought to our nation a genocide never before seen in history.”3 The speech, replete with revolutionary jargon and entirely void of any signiﬁcant reference to Buddhist practice or doctrine, demonstrates that the PRK regime was manipulating religion largely for cosmetic and propaganda reasons connected with the need to forge good relations with the neighboring socialist states. But Cambodian Buddhism was at least starting to establish restricted relations with the wider Buddhist world. With the break-up of the Soviet Union the Vietnamese army ﬁnally withdrew from Cambodia and the country prepared for the restoration of the monarchy. Sihanouk returned in November 1991 and resumed the traditional function of the Cambodian king as supreme patron of the sangha. In December of the same year the preah song renakse was dissolved and Sihanouk appointed chief monks (sanghareach) for each of the two pre1975 monastic groupings (nikaya), the previously mentioned Ven. Tep Vong becoming head of the larger and more inﬂuential Mahanikay while Ven. Bour Kry, a prominent ﬁgure from the Cambodian community in Paris, took charge of the Thommayut. As if to underline these dramatic changes, the Cambodian People’s Party (CPP), a political entity rapidly cobbled together from the embers of the old Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party, now claimed that the “citizens’ honor, dignity and life must be protected by laws. The death penalty is abolished. Buddhism is the state religion with the Tripitaka4 as the basis of laws.”5

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The run-up to the ﬁrst post-Democratic Kampuchea elections in May 1993 marks a turning point in Buddhist engagement with external inﬂuences. Before this time the PRK administration had ensured that the monastic order was molded in a thoroughly patriotic fashion and that external connections were maintained only with Buddhists in other approved socialist settings. But the massive inﬂux of foreign aid workers during and after the UNTAC period ensured that the ﬂoodgates would now be deﬁnitively breached. In fact, 1993 signaled the rebirth of Cambodia as one of the most heavily colonized countries in the world as far as non-governmental organization (NGO) activity is concerned, with current estimates suggesting the presence of approximately two hundred international and four hundred local NGOs active within a total population of only 14 million persons (Trannin 2005: 15). These organizations work largely in the ﬁelds of rural development, education, social development, and health, and it is estimated that around 80 million US dollars of international aid ﬂow through into the Cambodian economy every year as a result of their activities. This clearly impacts on all levels of Cambodian life including medicine, human rights, rural development, banking, art and culture, the rewriting of laws, urban planning, environmental matters, women’s issues, education, disarmament, de-mining, and so on. Many NGOs do extraordinarily valuable work, but some are fronts for dubious business activity, criminality, political interference, or religious, especially Christian, proselytizing. However, even bona ﬁde organizations can exercise an unconscious but deleterious inﬂuence on Cambodia’s Buddhists because they often have a strong need to channel their activities through reliable local partners deemed to possess inﬂuence throughout the country. Given the well-documented and problematic nature of Cambodia’s political and business sector, the sangha has regularly appeared well placed to perform such a role. But this can come at a cost for an institution only now beginning to re-emerge from almost total extinction under Pol Pot. As such, it is very vulnerable to external manipulation, particularly since most monks have only a rudimentary grasp of basic Buddhist teachings and principles and may not always be in a position to offer strong resistance to ﬁnancial, ideological, and other blandishments.

Buddhist social engagement since 1993—an entrepreneurial model Ven. Mahaghosananda (b. 1922) has arguably the highest international proﬁle of any monk within the Cambodian sangha. He had initially left the country for India where he enrolled on a course of postgraduate studies at the newly established Buddhist University of Nalanda. It was here that he came under the inﬂuence of Nichidatsu Fujii, a disciple of Gandhi and founder of the Japanese peace-oriented Buddhist sect Nipponzan Myohoji. In the mid-1960s Mahaghosananda moved to a forest hermitage in southern

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Thailand but decided to leave his seclusion as the humanitarian crisis on the Thai–Cambodia border unfolded following the collapse of Democratic Kampuchea (Poethig 2002: 23). It seems that he formed the Inter-Religious Mission for Peace in Cambodia with Peter Pond, a Christian social activist, in 1980. One of the aims of the organization was to identify, support, and re-ordain surviving Cambodian Buddhist monks, and over thirty temples in Canada and the United States were established in these early years. Mahaghosananda came to wider prominence as the leader of an April 1992 peace march (dhammayietra) in which around 350 monks, nuns,6 and lay Buddhists escorted around a hundred refugees from the refugee camps back to their villages against a background of both Thai and Cambodian government opposition. By the time the marchers arrived in Phnom Penh the numbers had swollen signiﬁcantly and the king conferred the title Leader of Religion and Peace (samdech song santipheap) on Mahaghosananda later the same year in recognition of his enhanced status.7 But his encounter with both liberal Christianity and the values of the international community appear to have reinforced Mahaghosananda’s earlier Buddhist-oriented concern for peace, reconciliation, and social activism. The Dhammayietra-organizing Center for Peace and Reconciliation (CPR), originally based close to Site 2 refugee camp, was subsequently relocated to Wat Sampeou Meas, Phnom Penh. Its founders had been Bob Maat S.J., Liz Bernstein, and the Paris-based Mahanikay monk Ven. Yos Hut. It was they who then co-opted Mahaghosananda. The ﬁrst march, then, was largely organized by foreigners, and many of the early marches were led by chanting Japanese Nipponzan Myohoji monks. Indeed, by 1997, the 27,000 US dollars necessary for the organization of the sixth Dhammayietra came mainly from “Christian and ecumenical foreign NGOs, international organizations, and King Sihanouk” (Yonekura 1999: 86f.). Claiming a Buddhist pedigree on the one hand—the CPR argued that Buddhism itself has a history of such marches, pointing slightly disingenuously to the example of the Buddha who walked every day to collect alms and preach (Yonekura 1999: 90)—the organization also wished to promote an inter-religious character by attempting to involve Cambodia’s other religious and ethnic groupings in its activities. This was largely unsuccessful, for only Buddhists and Christians actually participated in later marches. In addition doubts about the ﬁnancial probity of some senior staff began to surface at the end of the 1990s and attempts were made to decentralize the movement.8 These, and the fact that Mahaghosananda never permanently took up residence in Cambodia but preferred to be based among the Cambodian refugee community of the United States, are some of the reasons why Ven. Tep Vong, who had been involved in the early stages of organization of the ﬁrst Dhammayietra, subsequently withdrew his support. It appears that the supreme patriarch had been warned off from involvement in unpatriotic activity by the government, a point that will be picked up again in due course.9

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Nevertheless, Mahaghosananda has been an important spokesman for socially engaged Buddhism in Cambodia. He once commented that “the Buddha lobbied for peace and human rights” (Maha Ghosananda 1992: 70) and has also argued that, “we must ﬁnd the courage to leave the traditional temple and enter the temple of the teeming human experience that is ﬁlled with suffering . . . it is important to remember that we carry our temple with us always” (Hansen 1988: 61). It is against this background that one can best interpret the establishment of a variety of other related organizations. The Cambodian Institute of Human Rights, for example, was founded in 1993. It has received funding from both the European Community and the French government and works to train teachers in an attempt “to instill the values of nonviolence [and] human rights” in the younger generation (Neou 2000: 305). It explicitly draws on Buddhist ideals and practices as the prime context in which an exploration of human rights can begin. Indeed, the fact that democracy and equality are the very foundation of Theravada Buddhism is strongly stressed (Neou 2000: 309). It also encourages Buddhist sangha members to train in issues related to good governance so that they may become signiﬁcant opinion-shapers in their local communities, and it promotes the use of traditional Cambodian methods of dispute resolution that rely on the good ofﬁces of respected Buddhist monks (McNamara 1992; Harris 2005b: 73f). Rural development and environmentalist concerns are other important focuses for Buddhist-related NGO activity. The previously mentioned Ven. Yos Hut was pursuing postgraduate studies in Paris when the Khmer Rouge took power in 1975. After a spell in Australia he worked for the United Nations Border Relief Organization in Thailand until 1990 (Kalab 1994: 62f.). Now based at Wat Langka, Phnom Penh, he maintains close connections to Mahaghosananda, to the Cambodian diaspora, and to the international community. As president of the Foundation Bouddhique Khmère with ofﬁces in Cambodia and France he is currently engaged in a major project to construct and maintain a hospital (begun in 1996) in his home district of Kampong Trabek, Prey Veng province. Yos Hut has also been planning a forest monastery, with associated educational and development-oriented features, on some 100 hectares of land recently acquired in the same region, against a background of some hostility from the local authorities.10 Such opposition may point to a level of government (i.e. CPP) concern over aspects of the engaged Buddhist agenda, particularly when these are linked to the activities of opposition parties and foreign donors. Funding for socially engaged “development-oriented Buddhism” is, in fact, strongly promoted by the German-based Konrad Adenauer Foundation (KAF). Between 1994 and 1997 KAF also supported the Buddhism for Development (BFD) organization led by Heng Monychenda to the tune of some 750,000 US dollars.11 The BFD, founded in April 1990, had

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emerged from veteran politician Son Sann’s attempts to revive Khmer Buddhist culture at the Rithisen refugee camp on the Thai border, which had also been funded by the KAF. In the ﬁeld, it concentrates on the training of Buddhist monks in rural development work, the establishment of rice and money banks, tree nurseries, and compost-making activities. It has also held a series of annual national seminars on Buddhism and the Development of Khmer Society.12 Since early 1995, another international NGO, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ), has worked with local Buddhist communities in Kampong Thom province to encourage community development. It has also helped to re-develop the pilgrimage site at Phnom Santuk (Bou 2001). The GTZ seeks to regenerate the moral inﬂuence of Buddhism in contemporary society, arguing that lay people engaged in activities such as tree planting and road building may actually be regarded as generating religious merit (bon). This conception of social activism as a form of Buddhist self-interest is shared with the KAF, whose Christian ethos is inclined to look askance at traditional Buddhist contemplative and ritual activities, which from its protestant perspective appear both superstitious and excessively quietistic. One of the more surprising aspects of this attitude is that it parallels the justiﬁcation of Buddhist reforms that were forced through during the early Khmer Rouge and PRK periods. But the modernist direction has also been supported by Sihanouk, who has described engaged Buddism as “an important contribution to the revival of the concept of ‘Buddhist Socialism’ which . . . [he] encouraged during the historic Sangkum Reastr Niyum period [of the 1950s and 60s].”13 Like Western Christian reformers, then, the opponents of traditional forms of the religious life believe that the ancien régime has run its course. This thinking tends to be colored by what seems to me to be an unhelpful distinction between “useful” and “useless” monks and nuns: the former are seen as engaging in socially valuable educational and welfare-oriented activities while the latter are seen as simply wasting their time in empty contemplation and ill-conceived esoteric pursuits. Proponents of these views argue that the ascetic withdrawal of large numbers of young men in the prime of life adversely impacts on economic, social, and cultural activity while the celibacy on which Buddhist monasticism is founded inhibits population growth. Indeed, this traditional suppression of the individual will is deemed to be simply out of tune with a romantic spirit of self-development attuned to both an ideology of development and the global culture of consumption. Financial support from international donors, then, is given exclusively to forms of Buddhism moving in a modernist direction. In this entrepreneurial model of activity we have a clear example of what has been termed “the afﬁrmation of ordinary life,” a potentially momentous move away from “the supposedly higher activities of contemplation” in favor of ordinary living and production.14 But at the heart of this movement is a paradox nicely captured by a tale about the mismatch between the expectations of

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a Western development activist and the Cambodian peasantry.15 Having established village-based micro-credit facilities so that villagers might have the chance to purchase seeds or a cow, the NGO worker was greatly troubled by the fact that many of her clients preferred to borrow money to make donations to the local pagoda, even when they had no realistic chance of paying back the loan.

Traditional monastic patronage—the charismatic model It is clear that socially engaged forms of Buddhism are ﬂourishing and expanding their sphere of inﬂuence in contemporary Cambodia. But in the current fragile economy of the sangha this is bound to provoke a reaction, particularly when we take into account the fact that tension between Buddhist modernists and traditionalists has been a dominant and enduring leitmotif in the history of the Cambodian monastic order for over a century (Harris 2005a: 105–22). Modernizers within the sangha have been disproportionately patronized by almost all twentieth-century Cambodian regimes, whatever their political complexion. The phenomenon seems to have begun in the French colonial period, but it endured through the early stages of independence and into the initial phases of Khmer Rouge rule. It was subsequently reinvigorated during the PRK and has continued since the 1993 elections, although not so much now because of government support but rather as a result of the activities of international donor organizations. The situation has ensured that traditionalists, of whom there are many—perhaps a majority within the sangha—have tended to regard themselves as somewhat beleaguered. 16 But they have always had alternative cards to play. Most especially, they eschew the international links so essential to the vigor of the modernizing wing and are, in consequence, able to play up their patriotic credentials. In addition, some of their most celebrated members are believed to possess supernatural powers deemed by their supporters to spring, in some ill-deﬁned manner, from this indigenous, i.e. Khmer, sense of identity. This I will term the charismatic model. We have already seen that today’s governing circles are often unsupportive of the socially engaged Buddhist movement and have made little attempt to co-opt its leading ﬁgures. In fact, many members of the CPPdominated political class tend to react quite negatively towards what they regard as a foreign-ﬁnanced and potentially un-patriotic segment within the monastic order. This attitude is clearly connected to their previous political and ideological commitments, but it also means that, if they have any inclination towards Buddhism at all, they are much more inclined to support individual members of the sangha’s traditionalist wing. The character of local monasteries may often be quite sharply differentiated in the minds of ordinary people. Some may be associated with the inﬂuence of a powerful local individual, either religious or secular,

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while others may be thought to represent the interests of a speciﬁc political party. This might also mean that the monastery’s chief monk (chau adhikar) has not been elected by his fellow monks but rather by politically motivated and inﬂuential cliques within the local community. However, the relationship between senior monk and lay backers cuts both ways, for the former may certainly owe his position to the maneuvering of lay supporters, but they, on the other hand, can bank on his inﬂuence with the surrounding population when needed, election time being the most obvious of these situations in the contemporary setting. When a senior monk is popularly deemed to possess some magical proﬁciency in manipulating the sacred realm, these relationships are subject to a multiplier effect, since supporters, particularly if operating within the spheres of politics, business or the armed forces, may further enhance their prestige and power through intimate contact with these technicians of other-worldly inﬂuences (boramey) (Guthrie 2002: 70). In this virtuous circle, the monk’s stature and charisma increases by the same degree that satisﬁed supporters hold him responsible for their worldly successes, and they ﬁll his monastery’s coffers with merit making offerings accordingly. Ven. Om Lim Heng (b. 1964), chau adhikar of Wat Champuskaek, a well-known pagoda a short distance south of Phnom Penh on the eastern bank of the Bassac River, is a case in point. He appears to act as a quasiofﬁcial chaplain to Prime Minister Hun Sen, who owns a large estate in the vicinity. The chief monk’s photographs, in which he is often shown in the Prime Minister’s company, are prominently displayed in a rather magniﬁcent thousand-Buddha hall within the monastery compound. Yet despite his relative youth, Om Lim Heng also holds a senior position in the national ecclesiastical hierarchy of the Mahanikay. Believed to possess signiﬁcant magical powers, Om Lim Heng specializes in sprinkling water for his lay followers. This is a long-standing apotropaic and healing rite, but Om Lim Heng has developed the ceremony in a fairly novel direction by using a power hose to lustrate the expensive automobiles of his supporters, many of whom may congregate at the wat on weekends or during days of festivity. Given the high incidence of auto-theft and general lawlessness in the country, the ritual is particularly appreciated, and Wat Champuskaek has become one of the wealthiest religious establishments in the land, beneﬁting enormously from the conspicuous merit-making of key members of the newly emergent kleptocracy. Hun Sen, for example, contributed 110,000 US dollars to the monastery’s 600,000-dollar building program, while other ﬁgures in the current regime, such as Hok Lundy and Moeung Samphan, a three-star general and father-in-law of Hun Sen’s eldest daughter, have also been signiﬁcant donors (Marcher and Bou 2000). Monetarization of the monastic economy has, in fact, been in full swing since comparative political stability was established in Cambodia after 1993. According to statistics released by the Ministry of Cults and Religion in 1998, six million US dollars are spent every year during kathen17

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festivities (Pok and Chaumeau 1998). But it is important to recognize that large-scale patronage need not have a corrupting inﬂuence and can, in fact, do some good. The magical powers of the chau adhikar of Wat Samraung Andeth near Pochentong airport, Ven. Roth Saroeun, has ensured that his pagoda has attracted funds and members of the Khmer diaspora, as well as politicians and businessmen keen to advance their careers through contact with his special powers. But the success of his charismatic endeavors means that the monastery has become a refuge for large numbers of orphans and poor students from the provinces who can be assured of basic food supplies and lodging. Such examples of wealth distribution have clearly been an important feature of institutional Buddhism from its inception. Nevertheless, the demolition of many beautiful and aesthetically restrained old wooden shrines that survived Democratic Kampuchea intact and their replacement by new concrete structures is another consequence of this development. A good example is the recent redevelopment of Wat Nirot Rangsey, now a highly elaborate Buddhistico-brahmanical complex on National Route One, a kilometer beyond Phnom Penh’s Monivong bridge (Guthrie 2002: 62). In fact, building activity at Wat Nirot Rangsey has been temporarily suspended. The cause appears to be a shortage of funding, in part the result of political inﬁghting by lay and monastic supporters of the project. This is not uncommon. Neither is the situation where rival donors wishing to patronize a speciﬁc pagoda engage in a bidding war. In this context one might mention an intriguing story of politicians at the highest level seeking to outdo one another in their merit making, this time at Wat Vongkut Borei. In 1995, First Prime Minister Prince Ranariddh is reported to have made a donation of 14,000 US dollars to its building fund. Not to be outdone Second Prime Minister Hun Sen sent his parents to make a slightly larger donation of 14,500 US dollars somewhat later (Guthrie 2002: 65). It seems as if the monetarization of the sangha has resulted in some sort of Buddhist market place in which a small number of rival monks strive to ensure that their pagoda is larger, better appointed, and more luxuriously equipped than their competitors. Another monk keen to advertise his links with the higher echelons of secular power is Ven. Daung Phang. Originally the chief monk of Kroch Chmar district, Kompong Cham province, he now resides at Wat Prek Barang, Kompong Luong, a short distance from the old capital of Udong, surrounded by numerous iconographical signs hinting at his inﬂuential contacts. Perhaps the most obvious of these is a nearby equestrian statue of King Ang Duang (1848–60) erected alongside National Route Five just north of the wat.18 In the monastery precincts, however, large colorful posters of the chief monk in the company of inﬂuential politicians are also prominently displayed. Daung Phang is said to have the power of prophecy as well as being adept at various magical practices. In addition, he is closely associated with Hun Sen, who also comes from Kroch Chmar.19

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Daung Phang sees himself as a guardian of the traditional monastic practices (boran) that have variously been eroded by political conﬂict and the inﬂuence of modernizing forces on the sangha. In particular he has been instrumental in revivifying the annual monastic rite of probation (parivasa). From the mainstream Theravada perspective, parivasa is a period of suspension and penitence for an individual monk who has infringed certain rules of discipline, but in Cambodia the practice may also refer to a collective ascetic ritual of puriﬁcation. The ﬁrst time this ritual was performed after the Pol Pot period was at Wat Prek Barang in February 1997. It seems that the event invoked some opposition from segments of the sangha less enthusiastic about the re-establishment of pre1970s traditions.20 Traditionalist monks such as Daung Phang tend to be quite critical of certain Buddhist modernist practices that, they argue, have been imported from other regions of the Theravada world and are, therefore, incompatible with long-established currents of Cambodian spiritual praxis. The most important of these imported methods is insight meditation (vipassana), a technique that involves the development of bare insight into the rising and falling of physical and mental phenomena without the need to cultivate highly concentrated states of mind. Some Buddhist modernists claim that by simply applying the three marks of impermanence, suffering, and notself to these states one will eventually gain liberation. Traditionalists disagree, insisting on the need to avoid quick-ﬁx solutions on the path to the ultimate. But the argument is not simply over the correct means to liberation, it is also about the preservation of distinctively Khmer rites and practices. From this perspective, Buddhist modernists have been seduced into following an alien and unpatriotic path. Wrangles of this kind may offer a partial solution to the mysterious death of Ven. Sam Bunthoeun. Shot in broad daylight by at least two assailants at the entrance to Wat Langka, Phnom Penh, on February 6, 2003, he died in hospital two days later. Sam Bunthoeun had been born in Kandal province in 1957 and ordained in 1980. It seems that a keen interest in the cultivation of vipassana, a key marker of modernist practice in most parts of Theravada Buddhist Asia (Houtman 1999: 307f.), led him to set up a center for lay and monastic practice at Wat Unnalom, apparently with the support of Ven. Tep Vong. When his following outgrew these premises, he established the Buddhist Meditation Center of Udong at the foot of Phnom Preah Reach Trop near the old capital.21 At the time of his death he was president of an organization that was well supported by certain wealthy lay followers, many of whom were women. Theories abound as to who was responsible for his murder, a situation compounded by the fact that his assassins remain unidentiﬁed. Some believe it is because he was opposed to Ven. Tep Vong’s edict prohibiting monks from voting in the July 2003 elections.22 But Sam Bunthoeun does not appear to have been a politically active monk (Falby 2003b). Disputes

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with contractors involved in building the new center or the suspicions of a jealous husband of a key female supporter have also been advanced as possible motives. But the fact remains that Sam Bunthoeun represented a trend in Buddhist practice that has prominent opponents in the sangha. His Buddhist Meditation Center was also gathering support at an astonishing rate, and this may be another potentially signiﬁcant factor in understanding the demise of its founder.

Concluding remarks Since 1979, the Cambodian political landscape has shifted from a uniquely extreme and nationalistic communism to a strange amalgam of authoritarianism and rampant capitalism. As Buddhism has begun the process of recovery following its almost total liquidation in the Pol Pot period, it has had no option but to accommodate itself to these bewildering and unpredictable currents of change. In the People’s Republic of Kampuchea the monastic order had little freedom to re-establish itself along pre-1975 lines but was required to act as partner in a logic of national reconstruction determined by the governing regime. Its activities were circumscribed, and it was forced to develop along narrowly patriotic path. Very few independently minded and well-educated senior monks had, in fact, survived the Democratic Kampuchea period. But selected individuals who had either remained in Democratic Kampuchea in a disrobed state, or had escaped to Vietnam, subsequently rose to positions in which they were quite willing to participate in a united front for national salvation. The break-up of the Soviet Union and the consequent withdrawal of Vietnam from direct political and military control of the country meant that the PRK project was time-limited. As successor states came into being, a growth of relative freedom in the religious sphere could be detected. However, those senior monks who had steered the sangha through the early days of its re-establishment remained in commanding roles within the ecclesiastical hierarchy. Despite changed circumstances, such older “revolutionary monks” retained their patriotic line and sought to cement their own position through the construction of a carefully choreographed form of state Buddhism. Traditional currents of practice and belief have taken a little longer to break forth. But monks whose charisma is connected with a supposed ability to manipulate the sacred realm began to emerge and gain a wide following in the immediate post-1993 era. Many monasteries with charismatic or merely politically savvy leaders willing to play the patriotic card have beneﬁted disproportionately from the patronage of wealthy excommunists and members of the mushrooming business sector, particularly since the rapaciousness associated with many modern forms of Southeast Asian governance has meant that the sponsorship of religious rituals is regarded as an effective means of channeling surplus wealth (Evans 1993:

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133). In the Buddhist context this has the added advantage that the act of donation is believed to expunge previous misdeeds. Inﬂuential monks further removed from the paraphernalia of the state, by contrast, suffered suspicion that has sporadically developed into outright persecution from the ruling party and their ecclesiastical placemen. This has especially been the case for an emerging Phnom Penh-based Buddhist intelligentsia largely composed of young and better educated monks. It has also been a factor in the difﬁculties experienced by certain sangha members who survived Democratic Kampuchea and the PRK outside the country and returned in the early 1990s to initiate projects of renovation or reform often funded by foreign individuals or organizations. Their success as entrepreneurs in the “aid game” is further exacerbated by an unintended politicization of the monkhood, consequent upon the international community’s attempt to democratize Cambodia in the build-up and aftermath of the 1993 elections. Underlying so much of this one may dimly detect an element that has remained a constant from the French era, through the short period between national independence and the civil war of the early 1970s, the initial stages of Democratic Kampuchea, and the People’s Republic of Kampuchea. The colonial government had sought to disengage Cambodian Buddhism from its traditional roots through the introduction of a modernism that emphasized the value of a monk’s engagement in socially progressive activity. This is just as much to the fore in the attitudes of many international donors today. In the period before 1970, when the Buddhist monastic order was in signiﬁcantly better shape than it is today, the tension between modernizers and traditionalists could generally be expected to remain within circumscribed limits and did not have the power to tear the institution apart. But it is a different matter in today’s more unstable setting. As a result the contemplative life, which is arguably the central element to which all aspects of Buddhist doctrine and practice must ultimately tend, remains as fragile now as at almost any point in the last 150 years.

Notes 1 For a thorough discussion of the political manipulation of the sangha during the French and early independence periods, see Harris 2005a: 105–30, 144–56. 2 This is mentioned in a letter responding to some criticisms of Michael Vickery by a Sri Lankan monk, Ven. Wipulasara Thera, who had been a member of the delegation and General Secretary of the World Buddhist Sangha Council, published in Wilpulasara, 1994. 3 De Nike et al. 2000: 146f., Document 2.1.2.02. For a ﬂavor of proceedings see the document produced by the follow-up conference, Peace through harmony: proceedings of the ABCP sixth general conference, Ulan-Bator, August 16–18, 1982. Ulan-Bator, ABCP Headquarters. 4 The canonical collection of Theravada Buddhist sacred writings. 5 Kampuchea no. 623 (October 21, 1991): 3–4, quoted by Frings 1994: 363.

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6 Buddhist nuns are very prominent in the movement. On the seventh Dhammayietra held in July 1998, nuns outnumbered monks 80 to 26. 7 Cambodia Daily Special Supplement “Marching in the Buddha’s Steps,” May 1998, p. 6. 8 Mahaghosananda was awarded the 15th Niwano Peace Prize in 1998. The cash involved, amounting to 20 million yen, was used to ﬁnance various Cambodian NGOs, although there have subsequently been some claims of misappropriation. 9 Interview with Bob Maat, February 11, 2001. 10 This has crystallized in the attempt to defrock Ven. Khot Khon, abbot of Wat Beng Bury, for alleged sexual misconduct and involvement in politics. The charge seems to have arisen after the visits of several high proﬁle FUNCINPEC ofﬁcials, including Prince Sisowath Satha, to the monastery (Bou 2000). 11 My interview with Peter Schier, Permanent Representative of KAF in Cambodia, December 11, 1997. 12 The KAF has also supported the activities of Ven. Nhim Kim Teng, a close associate of Yos Hut and leader of Santi Sena, a local NGO based at Wat Prey Chlak, Svay Rieng. Santi Sena works on forest preservation and related environment activity. Both Yos Hut and Nhim Kim Teng have also been involved in a Monk Environmental Education Program funded by the United Nations Development Fund (UNDP) and based around a consortium of twelve local NGOs. A seminar designed to launch the program was held at the Buddhist Institute in November 1997 and a White Paper and other elements of the proceedings of the seminar were subsequently published (Gyallay-Pap and Bottomley 1998). 13 See Buddhism and the Development of Khmer Society 1996: 50. 14 Taylor 1989, particularly Chapter 13. 15 I wish to thank Alix Kent, a British anthropologist who is conducting ﬁeldwork in Cambodia, for relating this story to me. 16 The Thommayut, a small and historically elitist order with origins in nineteenthcentury Thai attempts to purge Buddhism of heterodox practices, has been less oriented to development than the Mahanikay and has demonstrated more reluctance to attend events sponsored by international NGOs. The order’s strict observance of monastic discipline, particularly the prohibition on handling money and digging the soil, may be relevant here. But I would not class the grouping as traditionalist in the sense employed in this essay. Certainly they place great emphasis on observance of traditional monastic rules of discipline (vinaya) but the Thommayut maintains strong links with Bangkok, repudiates magic and charisma, and receives next to no support from the current Cambodian government. 17 A festival at the end of the rainy season at which the Buddhist laity traditionally offer robes to members of the sangha. 18 Guthrie (2002: 68) provides some evidence that Hun Sen’s donation to Buddhist temples, Pali schools, etc, in and around Udong is an attempt to draw parallels between himself and King Ang Duang. 19 A rumor circulates to the effect that Ven. Daung Phang has a direct phone line to Hun Sen (Marston 2000: 8). 20 When Ven. Daung Phang held a repeat of the rite the following year at Wat Champuskaek, he was sternly rebuked by Ven. Non Nget, the dispute becoming so heated that unsuccessful attempts to adjudicate were made by the Ministry of Cults (De Bernon 2000: 475f.). 21 The center publishes a biography of Sam Bunthoeun plus a number of his dhamma books.

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22 On June 15, 2002 Tep Vong issued an edict prohibiting monks from registering as voters for the July 2003 elections. Several weeks later he met with thirtyseven high-ranking members of the ecclesiastical hierarchy (Khmer Intelligence (KI) 2003a describes them as “pro-CPP monks”) and Minister of Religion and Cults Chea Savoeun. The meeting resulted in a further edict that appeared a few days later at some voter registration stations speciﬁcally forbidding monks from participating in the vote. The king entered the argument soon after. Acknowledging that the original June 15, 2002 edict was a “right decision” from the spiritual perspective, he nevertheless apologized to the supreme patriarch for drawing his attention to the fact that in the temporal domain monastic voting was consistent with the country’s Constitution (KI 2003b). Despite this intervention, Tep Vong subsequently, and probably under strong pressure from the CPP, issued instructions to pagoda chiefs not to issue certiﬁcates of residency to monks. This meant that they were unable to register as voters (KI 2003c).

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12 Touring memories of the Khmer Rouge Timothy Dylan Wood1

On December 14, 2001, Prime Minister Hun Sen disseminated a circular that called for the preservation of memorials to victims of the Democratic Kampuchea regime as well as the preparation of the Anlong Veng District to become a historical-tourist site (Royal Government of Cambodia 2001). The decree asserts the necessity to properly maintain stupas and other memorials that remain as “physical testimony of the crimes committed against the innocent Cambodian people by the genocidal Pol Pot regime.” Further, these locales of memorialization are said to function as evidence of historic crimes as well as bases for remembrance and education for generations to come. In the circular, the Anlong Veng region is appended to the list of killingﬁelds sites and is set out “to become a historical museum for national and international tourists in the future.” The directives issuing from Hun Sen’s decree call for local and provincial government, inter-ministerial, and expert institution co-operation in carrying out the preservation and preparation work required for these sites. The document appoints the Ministry of Tourism (MOT) to continue spearheading the initiative to establish a historical-tourist area in Anlong Veng, “which was of historic importance in the ﬁnal stage of the political life of the leaders and military organization of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.” Finally, the circular sets the deadline for these provisions to be implemented before January 7, 2003, in time for the twenty-fourth anniversary of the victory over the Pol Pot regime and to kick off “Visit Cambodia Year” (Royal Government of Cambodia 2001). Among the sites that are demarcated for commemoration and tourist development are Pol Pot’s crematory remains and house. Within the context of the Royal Government of Cambodia’s program of development through tourism, this chapter examines how the conversion of the ﬁnal Khmer Rouge stronghold into a museum area exhibits a unique intersection of historical-cultural deﬁnition and political economic circumstance. In its (re-)invention as a site of tourism, Anlong Veng necessitates the deﬁnition of a “history” for foreign and local visitors as well as those former Khmer Rouge who inhabit the region. The historical restoration initiative incorporates certain versions of the past, while putting the country’s history of suffering at the service of attracting revenue. This

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chapter argues that the top-down effort to market Cambodia’s recent traumatic history produces problematic effects within the area it claims to be representing. Among these are: a singular version of history at odds with and at the expense of local participation; a memorialization apparatus that reproduces and extends existing hierarchies and lines of control; and an intensiﬁed commodiﬁcation of historical sites and land generally that generates greater economic vulnerability and social tension. By exploring the relationship between the market imperative of tourism and the political uses of historical memorialization, this text shows how the use of a particular period of history operates in Cambodia’s post-conﬂict development practices and state ideological consolidation. As the introduction to this book has noted, Cambodia’s post-conﬂict economy has been largely reliant on two targeted areas of growth: the garment industry and international tourism. While the country’s economy has undergone adjustment to globalization and entered the World Trade Organization, Cambodia’s commitment to developing an international tourism industry remains unchanged. As Angkor ﬁgures prominently in the nationalist vestments of previous regimes, so too the positioning of the Khmer Rouge period has been of particular concern for the successive regimes of the Cambodian People’s Party (in its various manifestations), which continue to privilege Khmer Rouge deserters within its upper echelons. With its establishment of the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crime—as a means to not only draw visitors but also use the tourist venue as a means to propagate a version of history inimical to the regime elites’ former comrades in the Pol Pot-Ieng Sary clique—Democratic Kampuchea became the nation’s other internationally renowned offering. This supplementary tactic of using tourist sites to address the recent past is extended into the contemporary effort to establish Anlong Veng as a historical-tourist area. The project to transform the last Khmer Rouge stronghold into a tourist attraction ﬁts within the Royal Government of Cambodia’s strategy of development through tourism, and more particularly the tactic of making available to visitors a particular understanding of the 1975–79 period. While the government initiative emphasizes Cambodia’s “genocidal” past (as a phenomenon similar to the Holocaust), observers outside the process voice ethical concerns about a tourist project that seeks to capitalize on the country’s misfortune. Sidestepping worries about the project’s commercial nature, government ofﬁcials highlight the educational beneﬁts of memorializing (Berger 2004; Fawthrop 2002). Deputy Minister of Tourism Thong Khon, the key agent driving the museum’s realization, elaborated on the project’s purpose and its relationship to the former Khmer Rouge by stating that the government pursues the tourism plan “not as revenge but to educate the new generation about what the genocide has done to this nation” (Ker 2002). Part of the Ministry of Tourism’s aim in Anlong Veng is the reconstruction of the in situ structures within the museum’s borders, in

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some cases seeking the employment of the original construction workers to complete the restoration. The government also intends to use Ta Mok’s lakeside house as a museum displaying Khmer Rouge paraphernalia. This residence will house “artifacts” of the organization’s activities, such as iron cages, photos from various phases of the movement, and videotapes of key events in Anlong Veng, all of which are being gradually acquired from former Khmer Rouge.2 In terms of tourist geography, Anlong Veng’s strategic location, past the outer limits of Angkorean antiquity along Highway 67, offers a convenient stopover en route to the temple site of Preah Vihear. The district’s destinations have yet to become a substantial object of the tourism industry’s institutionalized network. However, the march of peace through Oddar Meanchey’s “beautiful jungle” has laid the foundations for potential development in the proliferation of guesthouses and restaurants. This expansion has been reinforced by the November 2003 opening of the Anlong Veng border crossing with Sisaket Province in Thailand. The sites that constitute this historic area are principally scattered along the crest of an escarpment in the Dangrek Mountains. The peculiarity of Anlong Veng in the theater of historical tourism lies with its late timing and almost oblique relation to the Democratic Kampuchea regime. Subsequent to its “fall” in 1979, the Khmer Rouge re-organized itself into six principal sectors of operation and administration, of which the mountainous stretch around Anlong Veng came under the direction of Ta Mok. While stirrings and scraps of these co-ordination activities date back to 1980, the areas pertinent to the MOT’s current development plan started to become operative in the early 1990s, and many of these structures witnessed subsequent destruction, deconstruction, and reconstruction through most of that decade. For the (re-)invention of Anlong Veng as a tourist site, the reputation of the Khmer Rouge is tapped, even as the events of the area hinge on the dying movement’s breach of the 1991 Paris Peace Agreement. In addition to serving as the headquarters of the movement’s top leaders, Anlong Veng sustained up to 16,000 troops and their families (Sheridan 2001). Logically, the events that endow Anlong Veng’s sites with their signiﬁcance are war-related: an initial 1989 liberation of the area, followed by a series of seasonal advances and retreats (Carney 1990);3 a construction boom that met with destruction as government troops overran and occupied the battle-burned ﬁelds for two months (Thayer 1994); and the disintegration of Khmer Rouge forces amidst defections to the interior and retreats to the periphery. The earliest signs of the movement’s collapse began with the 1996 factionalization and later defection of Khmer Rouge leaders in Pailin (Chanda 1996). Further chaos ensued in June 1997 when Pol Pot ordered his henchmen to purge former Defense Minister Son Sen and slaughter his family at their residence in the Dangrek Mountains (Thayer 1997b); the grassy-covered ruins of this residence are included

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in the budding museum area. Ta Mok’s soldiers pursued and apprehended Pol Pot as he ﬂed his Kbal Tonsaong jungle mansion. Pol Pot, otherwise known as Brother Number One, met with orchestrated condemnation by 500 of his former supporters (Thayer 1997a), and following this show trial, Ta Mok sentenced his former superior to life under house arrest in a modest hut that contrasted dramatically with his earlier, more luxurious abode. The death of Pol Pot on April 15, 1998 and his immediate cremation near this hut preceded a rash of defections to the government, which left Ta Mok and a small group of loyalists as fugitives until the lone rebel’s capture in March 1999. For the others, the lure of integration was the fulﬁlled promise of land and positions of equivalent rank in the government and its military; in this enticing process, earlier defections were rewarded with greater land or higher postings (Thayer 1999; Vong and Marcher 2000). Political discussions about the Anlong Veng enclave invariably focus on two broad areas. The ﬁrst refers to the ﬂatlands of the district proper, encompassing the communes of Anlong Veng and Trabaing Prey. The sites worthy of MOT designation include the infrastructural improvements made by Ta Mok to bolster his popularity among local villagers, most notably a three-story concrete school and hospital constructed before Pol Pot and his entourage made Anlong Veng their last home and headquarters. In an attempt to provide water for dry-season farming as well as a reservoir for ﬁshing, Ta Mok dammed a stream and constructed a home on its new shores. This lakeside complex, by far the best preserved of Anlong Veng’s tourist offerings, would provide a meeting hall for upper echelon decision-making sessions. Murals of monumental and national achievements (Angkor Wat and Prassat Preah Vihear) ﬁll the interior walls. A sawmill, which has been reduced to stagnant water-ﬁlled remains, converted the region’s most lucrative harvests into economic backing for the war effort. The second geographical area commonly discussed is the mountaintop encampment in the Dangrek Range, a region that forms the natural, and somewhat territorially ambiguous, border with Thailand. The foot of this escarpment lies approximately eleven kilometers from the center of Anlong Veng town. Among the highlights of this upper tier of the historical-tourist area are the ashy remains of Brother Number One’s cremation, with the decomposed remnants of his ﬁnal hut in close proximity. Pillars and random planks of wood that mark the impromptu, open-air court where Pol Pot’s trial for murder (of Son Sen and his family) occurred also stand as a vacant sight for tourist consumption. More adventurous visitors can proceed the additional seven kilometers of mountain track to Pol Pot’s former two-storied structure, which has decayed and been looted into a mere shell of its former grandeur. In March 2002, shortly after the death of Khmer Rouge commander Kae Pauk, each of the twenty-eight sites in the historical-tourist area was tagged

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with a blue placard. Because the MOT was not endowed with a grand budget to carry out its memorialization mission, sponsorship was somewhat ironically found in Red Dot, a publishing ﬁrm that circulates Leisure Cambodia: a tabloid expounding Cambodia in her true glory. Such corporate sponsorship has become an increasingly conspicuous feature of the government’s management of its tourist sites, a policy that recently included the Choeung Ek Killing Fields on the outskirts of Phnom Penh. As the government offensive awaits offers of interest, further progress on the Khmer Rouge museum in Anlong Veng proceeds at a slow pace. An ofﬁce was erected in June 2003 to facilitate both the management of the sites and ticket sales; a large industrial-looking steel billboard stationed at the town’s roundabout presents a map of the historical-tourist area in its entirety and a welcome message on behalf of the MOT and Red Dot. The historical theater of battle is divided into four zones of potential tourist activity, each area containing seven to nine sites. The Ministry’s research mission sought out former Khmer Rouge capable of supplying accurate details about sites throughout the Anlong Veng District, facts that were then cross-referenced for accuracy with records obtained by the Royal Academy of Cambodia as well as the Cambodian Documentation Center (DC-Cam). This was supplemented by the recruitment of a select number of former Khmer Rouge for guiding the anticipated swell of Thai, Khmer, and English-speaking visitors. With the goal of offering proper direction through history (and minimizing confusion), the Ministry also closely monitored the participation by former Khmer Rouge, thus revealing a certain degree of mistrust. The MOT’s training sessions stressed the importance of refraining from praising Khmer Rouge leaders4—authenticity of locale overriding the authentic sympathies of locals. Through these efforts, government ofﬁcials attempt to offer a singular, true representation of history as well as its (authentic) restoration/reconstruction. The Anlong Veng museum project demonstrates the government’s integration of the development-through-tourism strategy with the consolidation of a historical narrative—a determinable historical package in consumable form—achieved by its “scientiﬁc” ideas about accuracy, rigor, and clarity.5 This tourist product ignores and radically diverges from views of former Khmer Rouge who populate the museum area. Among locals, the Khmer Rouge elite, particularly Ta Mok, retain a level of favorable popularity. Numerous residents have reported the personal qualities of both Pol Pot (Berger 2004; Crampton 2003) and Ta Mok (Falby 2003a; Kea 2000). The director of the Anlong Veng Health Center has shared his perspective that “Pol Pot was a kind man and the only people killed during the Khmer Rouge time were Vietnamese spies. In the next ten years people will begin to see the positive result of what Pol Pot did” (Crampton 2003). A 52-year-old farmer offers the similar view that “Ta Mok was kind and friendly to people. He gave his people wood for houses and enough rice to eat. He was not responsible for mass killings during the regime”

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(Kea 2000). In addition to these character assessments, informants substantiate support in terms of individual accomplishments. Loyalty to the past is generally divided between praise for either Ta Mok or Pol Pot. Supporters of the latter generally cite his education as well as a trust in the authority ﬁgure’s intelligence and awareness of the larger world picture. Those that recognize Ta Mok typically point to his hands-on leadership style and the socioeconomic improvements he effected. The infrastructural beneﬁts bestowed under his reign, including houses, a school, hospital, road, dams, and a bridge, recurrently crop up in conversations with residents about the district. They also point to his defense of the country against the encroaching Thais from the north and continued combat against a Vietnamese occupation of the country. The caretaker of Ta Mok’s lakeside residence even claims to be carrying on the ﬁght. In his view, the museum is important because Ta Mok’s house and other sites were built in the struggle to protect the nation and its territory from neighboring countries. These alternative perspectives from those who had daily contact with the top commanders, with their evaluations of leadership and innocence, are not welcomed into the historical tourist package the government seeks to market. In Thong Khon’s own words, “Most of the people here [in Anlong Veng] are Pol Pot people. The question is whether they will follow our political line or say whatever they want” (Sipress 2004b). For the stated purposes of development and education, the MOT is content to position Anlong Veng’s history in the continuum of Khmer Rouge atrocities whose representation begins at Tuol Sleng. Despite spatial and temporal distance, the remote jungle stronghold gets included alongside killing ﬁelds sites and memorials in accordance with the Prime Ministerial circular of 2001. The Anlong Veng project, like the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocidal Crime, appears to participate in a similar consolidation of state myth that employs a simulation of history, using geographical reference as its primary claim to validity. The conundrum of “authenticity” emerges exactly at the point where the historical simulation is granted an alibi in the material referent. The issue of authenticity with regard to Tuol Sleng is raised by Ledgerwood (1997) and brought up again by Chandler (2000), who together argue that problems arise in the government’s attempts to shape the museum into a parallel with Nazi Germany.6 More contemporary concerns with regard to Tuol Sleng and its genuine state cropped up when upkeep efforts led to a fresh coat of paint on one of the museum’s buildings. The in situ character of both destinations suggests that the museums are not representations of the past but are remnants of the events themselves. Tuol Sleng as a memorial site condenses around textual and physical “evidence” of the crimes of the Khmer Rouge: conﬁnement, interrogation, torture, and execution (Boua et al. 1980; Chandler 2000, 2002). Anlong Veng, on the other hand, relies on traces of the physical infrastructure for making war against the govern-

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ment and the Khmer people, sustaining offensives even as diplomatic resolutions were being sought among seemingly civilized arbitrators. Tuol Sleng—a site providing evidence of “genocide” for foreigners and attempting to offer meaning to Khmers—remains the “central site for the construction of memories of Democratic Kampuchea” (Ledgerwood 1997: 82). Anlong Veng as an in situ museum ﬁgures in the master narrative of this (post-Democratic Kampuchea) successor state but in an oblique and supplementary manner. Although the remote district is part of a national directive to expand memorial sites and to extend the pimping of Cambodia’s past suffering,7 Anlong Veng does not occupy a central or principal role with regard to the government’s historical meaning production; it is this secondary nature, this tardiness, this disrespect of timeliness, that grants signiﬁcance to Anlong Veng. Whereas scholars such as Ledgerwood (1997) and others have described Tuol Sleng in the context of a recently victorious socialist narrative (see also Chandler 2000; R. Hughes 2003), Anlong Veng also needs to be situated among the processes of national identity formation, as an ideological supplement to the material economic and political consolidation by the Hun Sen regime (Heder 2005; Leung 2004). This later phase in the development and maintenance of the successor state broadcasts that it is the government that keeps delivering peace (often by demonstrating its past war efforts). Anlong Veng remains that bastion of Khmer Rouge who refused integration into the fold of a civilized Cambodia geared toward reconstruction and the locale that harbored the remaining agents of those earlier heinous crimes against the Khmer people committed in the 1970s. When Tuol Sleng ﬁrst opened its doors as a museum in 1980 there was an attempt by the Vietnamese curators to present the atrocities of the Pol Pot–Ieng Sary clique as the deeds of fanatics with no proper relation to the “socialism” that the regime claimed to be trying to build (Chandler 2000; Gottesman 2003).8 This attempt to relegate the Khmer Rouge leaders to a sub-socialist class of renegades resurfaces in the narrative under restoration in Anlong Veng. The last breath of the ousted regime emanating from the jungle encampments is framed as an outlawed organization that continued to massacre the Khmer people in the bloody offensives it executed against the People’s Republic of Kampuchea (PRK) and the subsequent post-UNTAC government. The taming of these jungle dwellers, which had already been achieved on the battleﬁeld and at the negotiating table, is extended into the post-conﬂict control of the presentation of the battleground’s history to visitors. In securing the area for tourist purposes, the government staves off assaults of “illegitimate” historical perspectives from Anlong Veng locals.9 That is, any notions of benevolence in association with Ta Mok or deep respect for Pol Pot, as is generally expressed by those living within the museum grounds, will be cleansed from the tourist (if not historical) record. The conversion of the Khmer Rouge stronghold into a historical-tourist area represents a shift from the exclusively political project associated

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with the successor state’s victory narrative to an historical representation that explicitly avows its motivation in market demand and economic gain. Whereas the PRK’s exploitation of the Democratic Kampuchea past (as manifested in the Tuol Sleng and Choeung Ek sites) occurred in the context of a legitimation crisis with regard to the countries aligned with US and Chinese interests, the current move to pimp the Khmer Rouge period in its post-resurrection, its after-life, is stimulated by a more outwardly commercial logic. The manner in which the government pursues “memorialization” is driven by a desire to make available secondary commerce while neglecting a deep understanding of the historical sites themselves.10 Commercialism becomes the impetus for facets of national identity construction, speciﬁcally with regard to presenting versions of the country’s recent history. Further, a promised material gain is subsequently used as a mechanism to enlist the consent and support of locals who are otherwise at ideological and personal odds with the perspectives foisted upon the area. The restoration initiative, the cornerstone of the Ministry of Tourism’s master plan, implies a “history” for both foreign and domestic consumption. Visiting locals to the sites convey their desire to know and “see with their own eyes” how the Khmer Rouge lived, regardless of the state of disrepair and decay of the individual places. The need to witness the sites suggests that the historical location can provide a mechanism for helping Cambodians answer questions about the Khmer Rouge; in this locale, the issues summoned address why and how Pol Pot, the supposed mastermind behind the country’s tragic experiment, was never captured. For many would-be visiting foreigners, the gravesite of the organization’s leader provides the principal, or perhaps only, lure of Anlong Veng. The draw of Pol Pot’s grave is conﬁrmed in journalistic accounts of Anlong Veng’s potential future as a tourist attraction.11 Rather than any respectful memorialization, an irreverent sense of novelty is encouraged in English-language press accounts of the tourist development, and Pol Pot’s pile of ashes is often exploited for its bizarre nature before becoming a lead-in to tales of other novelties such as Pol Pot’s toilet seat, lottery numbers, or suspicious medicine bottles. The objects become centerpieces for narratives that add myth and mystique to the past leader and the environs of his ash heap. While the useful materials of historical structures were either destroyed in ﬁghting or looted by villagers in the emergent peace, visitors discover the occasional odd artifact to pilfer; these prized possessions are valued by the same “curiosity segment” of tourists who Minister of Tourism Veng Sereyvuth hoped to attract in Anlong Veng (Wain 2002). “Pol’s pot” has emerged in a bar in Siem Reap, the prominent display of which suggests an obscure appreciation of the leader’s notoriety. Remnants lying around Pol Pot’s thatch hut provide evidence of his ailing health but also lead visitors and locals to speculate on the true end of the enigmatic leader. Some argue that the convenient timing of his passing (on the verge of

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mass defections and retreat) suggests he was either murdered (Mydans 2001) or committed suicide (Chandler 2000: 165), while some believe that he slipped across the permeable border as a cinerary hoax smoldered away. Regardless of the veracity of the cremation site contents, some locals and Khmer visitors place faith in the power of Pol Pot’s ghost. In so doing, the grave becomes a shrine where good health, fortune, and lottery numbers are wished for from a spirit who, good or evil, commanded extreme inﬂuence in life. While the reputation of Brother Number One is certainly a key component in the MOT’s Anlong Veng museum endeavor (also drawing on a cult of personality), the mythic power of the ﬁgure will be outweighed in a presentation that reminds foreigners and Cambodians alike of his responsibility for the suffering instilled during the Khmer Rouge’s 1970s reign. The MOT has advertised the budding memorial area in extended television commercials, which feature national cultural offerings on a provinceby-province basis; the Oddar Meanchey message shows the O-Smach casinos before touring Pol Pot’s cremation site in Anlong Veng. Journalistic accounts in the foreign press seem to be doing much of the Ministry’s promotion work by textually seizing and exploiting the area’s piecemeal oddities and by deeming the collection of residues of Khmer Rouge life as a (future) “Disneyland” (Crampton 2003; Falby 2003a), “Colonial Williamsburg” (Sipress 2004b), or tourist resort in the country’s northern jungles (Berger 2004; Sheridan 2001). The absurdity of the Royal Cambodian Government’s blatant commercialization of the remote destination may also contribute to this sensationalism; meanwhile, district elites take the economic promises seriously and continue to construct and expand lodging. Although the government hopes that the Anlong Veng historical-tourist area will become Cambodia’s second most popular destination, after the Angkor Archaeological Park (Ker 2002), current economic indicators suggest otherwise (Lor and Leung 2005). The often-cited poor condition of Highway 67, leading from Siem Reap’s Banteay Srei Temple to Anlong Veng, persists as annual monsoon seasons (combined with the wheel troughs gouged by logging trucks) undo whatever minor perennial repairs may have been attempted at milder and drier times. Thus, from the Cambodian side, access to the Khmer Rouge historical-tourist area is difﬁcult due mainly to a rutted road that frustrates would-be visitors (but perhaps entices the adventure traveler—the still unruly lands of a wartorn Kampuchea). The Choam-Sakngam Pass international border crossing was inaugurated on November 24, 2003, facilitating the travel of goods more than people to and from this jungle area. With the potential for tourists, a mass of merchants ﬂooded Anlong Veng and its border market soon after. However, time has shown that the promised fortune from the expected multitudes of mainly Thai visitors and consumers has met with disappointment (Ker 2002; Lor and Leung 2004, 2005).

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With few visitors, actual ticket sales by an erratically attended tourism ofﬁce have been low, and employees concentrate their energies on collecting the occasional fee from visitors at Ta Mok’s lakeside house. The total number of (foreign) tourists for 2003 was calculated at 160, a low number for which ofﬁcials blame the condition of Route 67 (Lor and Leung 2004). During the high tourist season (when road conditions are best) in early 2004, the tourism ofﬁce in Anlong Veng counted a monthly average of ten foreign visitors; Khmer tourist visits have ranged from 50 to 300 per month.12 Thai visitors seem to be the most numerous of foreign tourists; however, tourist ofﬁcials and other locals indicate that these neighbors to the north are arriving for “eco-tourist” purposes (rather than Khmer Rouge history) to take in the surroundings of the lush jungle in a rapid process of deforestation. Local inhabitants are brought into the government fold by promises of future revenue from tourists ﬂocking to the area in hopes of catching a glimpse of the Khmer Rouge in the movement’s ﬁnal days. The myth of tourist development dispatched to Anlong Veng’s former Khmer Rouge includes visions of foreign hordes spending large sums on accommodation, souvenirs, and locally produced handicrafts. Most ordinary residents appear oblivious to the plans hatched in Phnom Penh ofﬁces. Without the promised droves of tourists braving the drive from Siem Reap, the string of erratically erected blue signs remains a mystery or an unrealized prosperity. For those that are aware, interest in the Ministry’s plans to impose an in situ historical museum on Anlong Veng residents derives largely from a concern for “authenticity”; locals echo the Ministry’s concern for accuracy in the designation of sites. For others whose activities intersect with the memorial aspirations, the government’s sacriﬁce of Anlong Veng to tourist development has generated problems in their material livelihoods, particularly from land grabbing and speculation (Kuch 2004), as well as increased vulnerability to the decreed needs of a memorialization effort. Land rights fears arose in the area of Ta Mok’s sawmill; talk of eminent domain and the displacement of hundreds of villagers for a future restoration of the site prevented villagers from either securing assurances regarding their property or selling their land and relocating. Meanwhile, land values skyrocket around them. The Anlong Veng museum project provides a glimpse into the logic underlying aspects of government development initiatives. First, the processes by which the government and its various afﬁliates have amassed data and pursued representations (by tour guides) demonstrates the ﬁxing of a particular narrative, operating as “truth” and achieved at the expense of the perspectives and participation of locals who were actively involved with the ousted forces of Democratic Kampuchea. At a local level, the Ministry of Tourism project effects an approach, understanding, presentation, and transmission of the past that entails a domestication of possible historical narratives in tandem with the continued containment of the

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former outlaws of Anlong Veng. In this sense, the museum appears as a means of discrete social control achieved through a presumably stable reading and rendering of historical data. As the museum becomes more viable, muted differences of opinion harbor greater potential for conﬂict in following “our political line.” Similarly, the Anlong Veng project of historical invention relies on and conﬁrms lines of privilege that were secured in the last breath of integration and link up with an already CPP-dominated social whole. The merging of a former Khmer Rouge hierarchy with the lines of patronage bolstering the CPP was noted early in the integration process, whose success was credited to a familiarity among the resident population with obedience to a singular authority, and the government’s ability to provide increased security as well as better roads and health conditions (Vong and Marcher 2000). The tourism arrangement, which involves the local elites as participants in the decision-making bodies or actively supportive onlookers, appears as an extension of the Prime Minister’s iron grasp. This material conﬁguration becomes the basis for the implantation of a victor’s history that conﬁrms and promises the continued existence of this hierarchy. Drawing on its faith in tourist revenue as a foundation, the government demonstrates a keen ability to manage its former enemy while simultaneously (and by means of) producing a tourist area. The area seemingly assists Cambodians generally in remembering the Khmer Rouge past and giving sense to a long period during which peace and “reconciliation” were denied. Ironically, the participation of defected elites is secured in this commercialization (subjection to the market) of the failed communists’ history. Lastly, the commercially oriented project, which seeks to ﬁx historical and cultural deﬁnitions, pursues a strategy that contributes to possible community tensions within the museum area. Anlong Veng’s assimilation into Cambodia’s increasingly accessible past has brought with it some discontent and increased vulnerability speciﬁcally with regard to land. The context that encourages this type of development-through-tourism and the commodiﬁcation of Khmer Rouge history transpires as other forms of sustainable development are avoided or made impossible; the mismanagement of (natural) resources is exacerbated by a coalition government plagued by a massive bureaucracy, increased cost, and less efﬁcient decision making as well as an imbalance between government responsibilities and domestic revenues, combined with weak institutions as well as limited mechanisms of accountability, which foster rampant corruption.13 An August 2005 visit to the Choam Pass area of Anlong Veng exposed how some historical sites have been crowded out by the sprawl of brothels and border market stalls. Continued “development,” including clear-cutting often under the auspices of de-mining, continues to reshape the historical landscape into an unrecognizable form. The residences of secondary leaders under Ta Mok, once used as abodes by sellers, have been demolished in accordance with the demands of the market. Further, construction cranes

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and heavy machinery are involved in the “development” of the environs surrounding a number of historical sites; besides providing timber for use and export, logging makes land available for the introduction of casinos. In this respect, Anlong Veng is coming to increasingly resemble that last stronghold of FUNCINPEC, O-Smach, a mere 100 kilometers from Anlong Veng. Thus, while historical tourism was proposed as the economic engine of development in the former Khmer Rouge stronghold, trade in goods and women seems to have supplanted those ideals. If Anlong Veng proves to be a lesson in Cambodian development, it shows the government’s full embrace of market mechanisms, even as these processes come to haphazardly shape (sites of) national identity construction.

Notes 1 Much of the information for this chapter comes from over two years of ﬁeldwork, especially interviews, in Anlong Veng, which spanned 2002 to 2005. 2 Interviews with the author: Thong Phnom Penh, June 26, 2002; Chung Anlong Veng, January 15, 2004. 3 Conversations with informants in Anlong Veng conﬁrmed that this pacing of battle persisted through the 1990s. 4 Interview with author: Chung Anlong Veng, June 12, 2004. 5 This totalizing approach ﬁnds parallels in the work of those attempting to sort through the evidence for genocide, exempliﬁed by DC-Cam and explained in Cook (2002). 6 In fact, much of Chandler’s text discusses the moderate similarities and vast differences between these two horriﬁc historical episodes. 7 This “pimping” a history of suffering occurs within a period of condensation: Khmer Rouge tribunal efforts and preparations; the expansion of DC-Cam’s funding, structure, activities, and publications; and a continued proliferation of publications dealing with the Khmer Rouge period. 8 It was perhaps less a concern for the content of “socialism” for the PRK elites than an interest in de-legitimizing Pol Pot clique links to the Khmer People’s Revolutionary Party to which the CPP traces its political lineage. 9 A couple of local informants suggested that the idea to construct a museum in Anlong Veng preceded Hun Sen’s dictate. According to these interviewees, the district chief, who is a former Khmer Rouge regiment commander, was to direct the organization of staff and the preparation of sites for the memorialization process. Some individuals who were to participate in the museum’s construction have also expressed complimentary views of Pol Pot and Ta Mok rule. 10 Chhang, interview with author: Phnom Penh, August 19, 2002. 11 See for example Berger 2004; Crampton 2003; Falby 2003a; Wain 2002. 12 Interviews with author: Chung Anlong Veng, June 12, 2004 and January 15, 2004. 13 See for example ADB et al. 2004; Calavan et al. 2004; Currah 2002; De Lopez 2002; Lintner 2002: 104; Vickery 1992; World Bank 2004: 31–2, 97–8.

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13 Khmer women and global factories Annuska Derks

Since the mid-1990s, garment and shoe factories have multiplied in the outskirts of Phnom Penh and provided work to hundreds of thousands of people, most of them women. Though this phenomenon happened later than in other neighboring countries, Cambodian women have become part of the so-called “new” international division of labor by taking their place along an imagined “global assembly line.” While such abstractions are often used to analyze structural consequences of global industry, they do not provide an understanding of how new work and urban experiences inﬂuence the lives of Cambodian women working in these “global factories.” Caught in ambiguous and contradictory representations, Cambodian factory workers are considered at once to be dutiful daughters and loose women; a docile and industrious workforce as well as obstinate, lazy workers; a driving force behind national economic development and a threat to Khmer values and traditions. How do young women themselves make sense of these conﬂicting positions when they leave their villages to work in Phnom Penh? And what do they tell us about the changing nature of Cambodian society today? In this chapter, by focusing on rural women who have moved to Phnom Penh to work in the garment industry, I attempt to answer these questions and look at how they deal with various contradictory expectations and aspirations. In so doing, I pay particular attention to the story of one factory worker named Srey, to illustrate how these expectations and aspirations are reworked through urban employment, rural networks, and participation in “modern” consumption and activities. The dilemmas and contradictions that make up her story speak to the challenges that shape not only the lives of young Cambodian women, but also the whole of Cambodian society.1

Global markets, local pursuits I arrived in the city as an ignorant girl. I became a garment factory worker in order to earn money to support myself. [I have] a salary of 40 dollars a month, hardly enough for food and rent, yet not enough to return home. I have only my body left, no money to bring along.

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In “The Weeping of the Garment Factory Worker,” Hem Sivorn, a famous Khmer singer, intones about the grief of a young woman who came to work in a garment factory in Phnom Penh. Confronted with hard work, a low wage, and stiﬂing conditions in the factory, she thinks of her home village where she might, after all, be better off growing rice with the people she loves. The song is not alone in highlighting the plight of factory workers in the city. Various media reports about Cambodia’s garment industry tend to focus on young Cambodian women working long hours in garment factories producing for the global market and struggling to earn a meager income to support their poor families in rural areas.2 However, this image of the ignorant and exploited factory worker clashes somewhat with recurrent stories in local newspapers about strikes and demonstrations, and garment workers demanding proper payment and working conditions. Politicians and investors claim that this kind of activist behavior may affect Cambodia’s reputation and attractiveness among foreign investors in the garment industry. Yet it is not only the country’s reputation but that of the factory workers themselves that is at stake, as their parents often fear. While working in a factory allows their daughters to contribute to family income, it also means that they (temporarily) leave the “safe” boundaries of the village and gain new “modern” experiences in the city that can easily give rise to suspicion regarding their “proper” behavior. Notwithstanding the hardships portrayed in popular songs or parents’ concerns, thousands of young women make their way from rural villages to Phnom Penh’s factories, which are now employing an estimated 230,0000 workers of which 85–90 percent are female (ADB et al. 2004: 21; Sok Hach et al. 2001: 51). The Cambodian garment industry has developed rapidly during the past decade, having grown from seven factories in 1994 to around 200 in 2004. The majority of the factories are owned by foreigners—mostly investors from Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, Korea, Macau, and Singapore—who are subcontractors to clothing companies, such as Nike, Gap, and H&M, and produce garments predominantly destined for US and European markets. With the rise in the number of factories, the output as well as the value of garment exports has also increased considerably during the past few years. The value of garment exports rose from 27 million US dollars in 1995 to 660 million US dollars in 1999, to 986 million in 2000, to 1,607 million in 2003, equal to almost 80 percent of the total Cambodian exports during that year (ADB et al. 2004: 22; cf. Sok Hach et al. 2001). The garment industry has now, as an ADB report states, “become the engine driving the national economy, making the greatest national contribution to poverty reduction by having created some 230,000 direct jobs, probably with as many indirect jobs again, and generating the majority of Cambodia’s foreign currency earnings” (ADB et al. 2004: 77).

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The enormous growth of the garment industry is related to the political and economic developments in the early 1990s. The newly elected government adopted a comprehensive set of market-oriented reforms and created conditions for the establishment of a labor-intensive and exportoriented industry. These political and economic reforms were meant to lead Cambodia, after decades of civil war, to what Prime Minister Hun Sen called a “new era of growth and prosperity” (Ministry of Commerce 2000). This new era is usually connected to what is seen as a necessary and desirable “process of modernization and national economic development” as well as integration into a capitalist global economy (Minister of Commerce Cham Prasidh in Ministry of Commerce 2000). Such references to prosperity, development, and modernity are not just fantastic statements made by the country’s politicians, but play, in fact, an important role in the goals of many Cambodians who are trying to fulﬁll their needs and desires in the context of new opportunities and structural constraints. Young women play a decisive role in realizing these goals. First, their labor contributes signiﬁcantly to the pursuit of national economic development in the factories that produce for a global market. Second, their earnings contribute to fulﬁlling, if only to a limited extent, the needs and aspirations of their rural-based families who, through new commodities, agricultural inputs, as well as the education of younger siblings, hope to enhance their position and comfort in the village. Third, young women are pursuing their own aspirations for modern consumption and display, as images of modernity are promoted in advertising and the mass media, as well as in stories of peers living and working in the city. Needless to say, these three roles are not necessarily easy to reconcile.

Duties and desires Srey’s story exempliﬁes the contradictory expectations and aspirations related to family obligations and concerns, economic needs, and individual desires. Srey is one of thousands of women who have (temporarily) left their villages to ﬁnd work in a factory in Phnom Penh. When I met her for the ﬁrst time, she was eighteen years old and had just arrived in Phnom Penh. She told me that she had wanted to work in Phnom Penh long before, but her father had discouraged her from doing so, arguing that “[t]here is no need to. We can grow some rice and what we have is enough. No need to become miserable in a place far away.” Srey’s father obviously did not like the idea of his daughter working in the big city, far away from the protected home. Srey’s parents, while deﬁnitely not wealthy, had enough land to support Srey and her four siblings. This started to change when her family got into a spiral of debt after her older brother, and then her mother and younger brother, fell ill. The rice harvest did not yield enough to repay the debts accumulated to pay for medicine. This became even more difﬁcult when her father also got sick. He was

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brought to Phnom Penh for treatment, a heavy burden on the family’s already strained ﬁnancial situation. Unfortunately, Srey’s father did not recover. After her father’s death, Srey’s mother was left with a huge debt. The moneylender kept on coming to their house pressing for repayment of the loans. Interest rates, which are generally very high in Cambodia, amounted in the case of Srey’s family to 50 percent per year. Since the rice yield was also very low due to unfavorable weather, Srey’s mother had to sell parts of their land in order to release some of the debt. Realizing the difﬁcult situation they were in, Srey decided that she should go and ﬁnd work in Phnom Penh, but was not sure how to proceed: I could not do it just like that. I was afraid people would say bad things about me, that I am not a good girl because I stay far away from home. People from the village would think that I was going to be a prostitute to earn money in order to release my mother’s debt. Though migration to the city has become a more viable option for Cambodian women from the countryside, a young woman leaving her village may still be viewed with some suspicion as to the nature of her work in Phnom Penh and her virtuousness. The importance of “proper” behavior for the status of a woman and her family is emphasized in a range of sayings, folktales, codes of behavior (Chbap Srey), and other texts describing the perfectly virtuous women (srey krup leak), who due to their virtue, silence, softness, and devotion bring fortune, peace, and honor to their families (Ledgerwood 1990; Pou 1988). Such texts portray the unmarried srey krup leak as a shy, ignorant, vulnerable, industrious young woman, who is devoted to her parents, follows their advice and helps her mother at work. Although the ideals presented in these texts are based on norms and values written by an elite of times past, they are not completely irrelevant for women in presentday Cambodia. With only two years of schooling, Srey, for instance, had never heard about the Chbab Srey, yet she held a very similar view on what a “good girl” was supposed to be, namely: a girl who behaves properly, respects old people, helps her parents, does not play around with boys or seek fun all the time. If she goes to the pagoda, she does not forget to pay respect to the Buddha. That is a good girl. But a bad girl behaves improperly, goes out at night and ﬂirts with boys. That is not good to see. Srey’s comments about a young woman’s behavior towards men serve as a reminder of the importance placed on a young woman’s reputation when on her own and how closely it is connected to her family’s reputation. Just as the srey krup leak can lead her family—and husband—to success,

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the opposite means that a woman ’at leak who is not behaving properly, especially in relation to men, can destroy the reputation and wealth of her family. For a young woman this means that she should preserve her virginity before she gets married. She should ideally stay at home and preferably not leave the house, let alone the village, without the company of a trusted relative (Ledgerwood 1990; Pou 1988). Migration into the city challenges many of the ideals Cambodian women are still more or less expected to uphold. The real and perceived inﬂuences associated with life in an unknown environment may easily give rise to suspicions about their moral conduct.3 A friend of Srey, who had worked in Phnom Penh before, was confronted with such suspicion upon her return to the village. Some villagers, through their gossip, insinuated that she might be kouc heay (literally, already broken; lost her virginity). She defended herself by claiming that she could only be kouc ci’emuey machiin, or “broken (deﬂowered) by the machine.” Her response succinctly made clear that she had been working hard in a garment factory and had not spent her time fooling around. On the contrary, through her hard work in the city, she earned money and could contribute to the household economy. In other words, even though female migration does not follow certain ideals assigned for proper Cambodian women, it is a means through which young women can fulﬁll other important responsibilities and obligations, thus providing for the welfare of their families. Similarly, Srey’s motivations for wanting a factory job seemed to be directly related to the debts and the difﬁculties of releasing them after her father’s death. Her oldest brother had already taken up employment in construction in the provincial town and would come back again when it was time for plowing. Srey aimed to go to Phnom Penh to contribute her part to family income. Yet, as Srey admitted, she was not only motivated by the idea of earning money to support her family. For her, and for many young women like her, factory work had the attractive image of working and living with other young women, working indoors and out of the sun— thus changing the skin color to a lighter shade—and receiving a monthly salary paid in dollars as opposed to the riel or gold that are more commonly used in the rural areas. Srey had seen other factory workers returning to the village with nice clothes, gold jewelry, and a much-desired whiter skin. They told her that “Phnom Penh is a happy place and has many fun places for people to go, like Wat Phnom, the garden in front of the palace, the riverside.” She thus decided that she “also wanted to come and see.” Through these remarks, one can have a better appreciation of the multilayered meanings ascribed to migration by young rural women. The motives are not solely prompted by their sense of duty in relation to the economic necessities and insecurities of everyday rural life. Individual desires for urban experiences, beauty, lifestyle, and modernity equally play an important role.4 Moving to, and working in, the city gives young women such as Srey an experience of “modern” urban life and, with it, an independence

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their mothers never had in their youth. At the same time, however, it gives rise to other dilemmas: how does Srey remain a dutiful daughter while leaving her village? How can she support her family while pursuing her own aspirations? To elucidate these questions, one needs to closely examine and reconﬁgure the (changing) notions of the rural and the urban, of the “traditional” and the “modern” in social relations and practices.

Rural networks and urban employment Even though migration entails leaving the family and village, it does not take place in isolation from family and village networks. On the contrary, these relationships are of major importance to young women who wish to ﬁnd work in the big, unknown city. Networks of related and befriended women from the same area play a central role in providing newcomers with shelter, information, and necessary contacts to ﬁnd a job. At the same time, they serve to strengthen relationships with the family and place of origin, and as agents of social control over migrant women. This was also true for Srey. She saw her chance to go to Phnom Penh when neighbors and friends working in garment factories in Phnom Penh had been given a few days off to celebrate Bon Pcum Ben. They came back to the village with news about upcoming selections for new workers in their garment factories during the days immediately following the Buddhist holiday. Srey was excited and spoke to her mother about it. After learning about the monthly wages, the social protection, and the support that existed among factory workers from the same district, Srey’s mother decided to set aside her worries. She borrowed some money from neighbors and packed a bag of rice and some prahoc (fermented ﬁsh paste) for her daughter. Srey was not the only woman to leave her village after Pcum Ben; she left with four other young women from the same or nearby villages, all with the intention to ﬁnd work in a garment factory in Phnom Penh. They stayed in the upper ﬂoor of a house in Tuol Sangkeo—an area where a lot of garment factories are located—together with about twenty women from the same district, sharing bed, food, joy, and sorrow. The house provided the newcomers a secure place and protective social environment in the otherwise unknown city. While attracted by the prospect of wealth and exciting promises of a Phnom Penh “modernity,” Srey and her friends were also anxious about the dangers accompanying city life, most notably the crime and the ranges of immoral activities, which stood in contrast with the serenity and moral unity that are commonly associated with village life.5 This is reﬂected in how they perceived differences between “people from the rice ﬁeld” (neak sraei) and city people (neak krong). In contrast to neak sraei, city people were thought to be modern (toansamay), rich, better dressed, more hygienic, but also less trustworthy. Srey once remarked that whereas back home she is afraid of ghosts, in Phnom Penh

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she is above all afraid of people (new srok klaac kmaoc, new Phnom Penh klaac menouh). She had heard about the violence in the city and that people easily get involved in ﬁghts and even kill indiscriminately. She also thought that city people were smarter than girls from the countryside, who “are easy to cheat” and thus easily tricked into taking a “bad job” (i.e. prostitution). Moving to the city is considered to include certain risks. For young women these risks are most notably related to having relationships with men, and exploitative and “immoral” work. Yet, as for Srey and her friends, it can be said that the more women migrate from the same area, the lower the associated risks for individuals, as networks for potential migrants become denser. Reliable information about the opportunities and dangers associated with the place of destination and the migration process become more readily available (Curran and Saguy 1997). The experiences, knowledge, and contacts of earlier migrants are helpful in calming fears about the risks of migration. At the same time, they are crucial for ﬁnding a “proper” job for newcomers. Securing a job may take weeks or even months and requires not only connections but also money and endurance. After almost one month in Phnom Penh, Srey still had not found a job. Whenever selections took place at a garment factory in the neighborhood, she and her four friends went there in the early morning to wait in the hope of being selected. When factories need to recruit workers, they usually tell their workers to spread the message among their friends and relatives and put up a paper outside the factory about the date and time of selection. Such an occasion may attract hundreds of women and, to a lesser extent, men. They assemble at the gate of the factory, waiting for hours until a supervisor comes out and selects a number of people to do a test. Srey was selected to do a test twice, but failed, which she blamed on the fact that she did not have enough money to spend on more sewing classes, organized for newcomers such as her. In addition, there is a more direct way of getting a job, namely through a broker, referred to as ksaei or ksaei royeah (literally, string, rope; also used for patronage networks). A ksaei can be a supervisor in a garment factory or someone connected to a supervisor. The ksaei usually demands about a month’s salary for her (or his) service. For 45 dollars, a woman living next door had offered to help Srey and her friends get a job. Although this would be the easiest way to get a foot in the door, they feared that this woman could not be trusted. They might lose their precious savings if the woman just took the money without arranging a job, or if they got ﬁred during the probation period. Srey thus decided to try her luck again at upcoming selections. In the meantime, she slowly ran out of money. What she had brought from home was limited, considering the expenditure she had to make on food, pictures for an identiﬁcation card, and transport. Through visiting

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relatives of one of the women in the house, she sent her mother a message asking for extra money, rice, prahoc, salt, and dried ﬁsh, which she hoped relatives of other villagers would bring along when they came to visit Phnom Penh. She knew that she would otherwise have to return home if she did not ﬁnd a job soon. Yet, she dreaded the thought that others in the village would say that she went to Phnom Penh, did not manage to ﬁnd a job, and spent all the money given to her. She felt ashamed to have to go back home because she was running out of money. Srey’s case shows that migration to the city does not necessarily reap the expected ﬁnancial returns. In the short term, women may actually lose money, especially when expenses for transport and living in the city are taken into account. As Srey eventually did, many women return home empty-handed. In such cases loans may need to be extended or pigs sold in order to be able to pay back the moneylender. Instead of reducing poverty, an unsuccessful job search in the garment industry may lead to an accumulation of further debts. The determination to ﬁnd a job in a garment factory in Phnom Penh is not, however, necessarily stalled after an initial failure. About half a year after Srey left Phnom Penh, she unexpectedly came to visit me at my house. She had arrived in Phnom Penh two days earlier after receiving words from her friends that new workers would be selected in the days following the Khmer New Year. Srey was very excited when she told me she had just passed the test at a factory and that she would work the night shift starting the following week. After her initial failure, what made Srey so determined to come back to the city? Why would she risk losing even more money for a job that would, as Hem Sivorn warns in her song, entail working long hours and earning a meager income? In order to understand the motivations of women such as Srey, it is necessary to go beyond the push—poor conditions in the countryside—and pull—demand for female labor—arguments that are commonly used to explain such migration patterns. While structural conditions and economic motivations certainly play a role, they should be analyzed in relation to women’s own aspirations and in the context of the changing nature of Cambodian society. As I will point out below, Khmer women working in garment factories do not only play a role in national economic growth but also in negotiating Cambodian meanings of modernity. They are indeed important actors in ﬁnding ways to “remain traditional” while “becoming modern.”

Modern experiences For many young Cambodian women arriving from the countryside, Phnom Penh is what Chambers called the “metaphor for the experience of the modern world” (1994: 92). This “modern” urban world is, as many of them imagine, very different from their rural life. Although the urban and

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the rural are not, and have never been, isolated, separated spaces, the stories of fellow villagers working and living in Phnom Penh, as well as the occasional images of urban life and people that reach the countryside through the few televisions and other mass media, bring the city closer than ever to the world of Cambodian villagers. Migration and mass media are, as Appadurai (1996) argued, central forces in the “work of imagination.” Flows of people and images “enable some people to experience, albeit unevenly, new ideas and practices and thereby imagine (if not realize) new ways of being” (Hodgson 2001: 6). For the young people in Cambodia’s countryside, imagining new ways of being are strongly related to their ambitions of working and living in the city. Yet, once in the city, young factory workers are quickly confronted with its less glamorous sides. Working in the factory usually involves long hours of work, unhealthy conditions, strict discipline, and factory hierarchies that allow them little opportunity to move up. Their living quarters in the city are often crowded, hot, and poorly ventilated. The higher cost of living absorbs a major part of their monthly earnings. Although there is resistance to exploitative working conditions, in the form of union action as well as in less apparent everyday forms of resistance such as slowdowns, obstructions, or withdrawal, they do not structurally change the marginal position of factory workers in “global factories.” However, factory workers should not be seen as helpless victims of global economic structures either. While acknowledging the constraints of their position, factory workers such as Srey, in their own ways, give meaning to their position. They regard their employment in the garment industry as a way to gain new experiences. The economic and social constraints with which factory workers are confronted are thereby mediated by their aspirations for participation in new patterns of commodity consumption. For instance, in her study on Thai factory workers Mills argues that participation in “modern” consumption and activities presents an arena within which young rural women “may confront and attempt to rework the tensions and contradictions that underlie their status as urban wage workers” (1997: 41). “Modern” consumption is thereby used as part of young women’s enhanced social life in the city, providing young Khmer women a creative basis on which they try to make sense of the tensions and contradictions they encounter when their “traditional” village values confront their “modern” urban aspirations. Young rural women’s urban aspirations to participate in “modern” city life are most commonly expressed through new clothes, make-up, jewelry, and dai leeng (going out). This, of course, costs money and leads to a delicate balancing of spending on personal pleasure and beauty, and family obligations. Women evaluate their position by giving their own meaning to dominant notions of being traditional (taam propeinii or boraan), modern (toansamay) and too modern (toansamay peek or taonsamay cruel). Although the opposites boraan and toansamay are perhaps most obvious in

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material aspects of life, such as in the way people dress, walk, eat, live, celebrate, and earn their money, “modern” also relates to behavior, between parents and children, between men and women, and also between employers or supervisors and workers. There seems to be a constant juggling between what is acceptable or desirable “modern” behavior and what should be cherished as so-called boraan values concerning seemingly superﬁcial issues such as clothing, make-up, going out, but which are directly related to parental authority and sexuality. Just as “modern” clothes, such as pants and T-shirts, are considered beautiful (s’aat) and desirable items when they are not too short or tight, having some fun, being happy (sepbaay), and dai leeng on Sunday afternoons with friends is also acceptable unless the women return after dark and the friends turn out to be boyfriends. This is toansamay cruel, or beyond modern. It is within this context that many migrant women identify themselves, as “people from the rice ﬁeld” taking part in city life. While these young women are often eager to lose their “provincial image” and change to more modern styles and attitudes once they are in the city, they also make an effort to keep up the so-called village morality. This is clearly exempliﬁed by Srey and her friends, who use part of their earnings for new clothing, jewelry, and photos of their outings, but who are at the same time subject to a strong social control with regard to their way of dressing and going out. Here, peers play an important role in judging each other and preserving certain values as well as in stimulating each other to participate in common “modern” activities and to show off urban sophistication when visiting the village. The latter was displayed in an instance when the women in Srey’s house got a few days off and returned home for Khmer New Year. They pooled some money to rent a hi-ﬁ unit, invited relatives, neighbors, and other villagers, and danced, in their newest outﬁts, until two o’clock in the morning. The relevance of the question regarding what is considered “acceptably modern” and what is not goes beyond individual migrant women and their negotiation of the perceived contradictions between “traditional” rural and “modern” urban life. It touches upon the desire of Cambodian society as a whole to get to the material state of richer and more modern neighboring countries—most notably Thailand—and the associated concern regarding the loss of Khmer culture, tradition, and identity. Prime Minister Hun Sen once warned that the nation’s values are being eroded by the skin-tight and short skirts worn by female singers on television shows and demanded that program managers lower the skirts of their stars and return to modesty (Nov 2000). While it is, of course, questionable if, and for how long, such demands are obeyed, the underlying anxiety shows the degree to which “modernity” displayed in the behavior and appearance of women stands as an important symbol for the preservation or erosion of Khmer culture in general. Prime Minister Hun Sen’s concern regarding the erosion of Khmer culture is similarly shared by many people of the

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older generation. An elderly neighbor of Srey’s family therefore concluded that “too modern is not good, [present-day youth] should keep some boraan values . . ..” In their struggle to strike a balance between what is acceptable or desirable “modern” behavior and what should be cherished as so-called “traditional” village values, young rural women living and working in Phnom Penh variously explore the new opportunities open to them. What Srey and her friends call “too modern” may therefore be part of the work, and also the fun of urban life, for other migrant women. While Srey and her friends pursued their aspirations in participating in “modern” urban life, they made sure to be considered “acceptably modern” within the village they knew they would return to after getting married. And they would accordingly criticize other factory workers who had become more disconnected from their rural background and who lacked the social control from relatives or friends from the village. Such women are often accused of being “crazy about dollars” and “forgetting about their homeland, the countryside.” They, as the common expression goes, like tap water too much. Back in the village “they drink water from the well [. . .], but once they come to Phnom Penh they prefer tap water and forget about well water.” The reference to tap and well water in relation to behavior in the city is commonly used in the context of young rural women who “have a boyfriend” (sangsaa) and “are too happy.” Such women are considered to chlo’ek tik machiin, to “choke on” or to “be crazy about” machine (i.e. tap) water, as they spend too much for their own consumption, get involved in relationships with men, and change their appearance, behavior, and way of talking into “too” urban, or modern, styles. They, in other words, like the water—symbolizing the way of life— in the city better than the (well) water back in the village. In reality, of course, most rural women working in Phnom Penh’s factories drink from both sources, and try to keep up an image of dutiful daughters while exploring the city as “modern” women. In mixing these sources in various ways, young women will eventually change the taste of water, and accordingly shape dominant presentations of neak sraei and srey samay (modern women) within a changing society like Cambodia. As dutiful daughters earning money to support their family, they also challenge ideals related to the protection and supervision of unmarried women; as lowwaged workers with little opportunity to move up, they intently participate in “modern” city life; as important contributors to the country’s drive towards modernization and development, they are condemned for mimicking “too modern” behavior, so actively promoted through television, commercials, and music. The ambiguity of such multiple and contradictory positions appear prominently in the various accounts given by factory women. However, these same ambiguities and contradictions allow factory workers such as Srey to creatively respond to various expectations and aspirations, and to shape their own lives and that of their families, and thereby the directions for social changes.

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Annuska Derks

Notes 1 2 3

4 5

This chapter is based on my PhD dissertation entitled “Khmer Women on the Move: migration and urban experiences in Cambodia.” Material quoted without a source in this chapter is from my conversation with Srey. See, for example, the BBC documentary “GAP Nike—No Sweat?” on working conditions in the Cambodian garment industry, which sheds light on the use of child labor and abusive practices within Cambodia’s garment industry. By comparision, male migration raises less moral issues than female migration. This can be explained in the fact that male mobility has a precedent in off-farm labor during the slack season, as monks, traveling merchants or for administrative purposes. Moreover, there is a double standard regarding sexual morality: generally, men are allowed more sexual freedom before marriage while women are not. Conﬂicts in the family play a role as well. Indeed, not all women opt for factory work in agreement with their parents (see also Wolf 1992). This is similar to the images Svay villagers had of Phnom Penh in the late 1950s, as described by Ebihara (1968).

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1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Index

aid see non-governmental organizations America 73, 75, 86, 89, 93, 97–8, 103–9, 111–13, 137, 155 Amrita Arts 148 Anderson, Benedict 79 Angkor 5, 10, 17, 24, 140, 154; Angkor Wat 54, 91, 108, 184; history 17, 25–31, 58–62, 126; tourism 12, 37–52 anikachun 75–81 animism 35, 67, 141 Anlong Veng 181–92 Apocalypse Now 41 APSARA (Authority for the Protection and Management of Angkor and the Region of Siem Reap) 55 apsara dance see dance ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) 82 Association des Ecrivains Khmers à l’Etranger 154 Association of Khmer Writers 151–2 Ayuthaya 140 Benjamin, Walter 7, 60 Bhabha, Homi 103 Bokor 23 border 16–18, 31, 42, 45, 104, 125, 172, 183–4, 189 Bour Kry 168 Buddhism 67, 97, 167–80, 174; charismatic 173–7; modernist 168–73; sangha 167–80; texts 32–4 Buddhism for Development (BFD) 171 Buddhist Association for the National Salvation of Kampuchea 168 Cambodian Association of America 109 Cambodian Cultural Village 3–5

Cambodian Documentation Center 185 Cambodian Institute of Human Rights 171 Cambodian Living Arts 148 Cambodian Mine Action Center 44 Cambodian People’s Party 2, 73–84, 135, 191 Cambodian Television Network 114 capitalism 2, 11–13, 122–3 Cham 4, 79, 132 Chandler, David 4, 6, 33, 49, 110, 186 Chheng Phon 133–5, 144, 148, 149 Choeung Ek 52, 185, 188 Chomsky, Noam 103 cinema 55–6, 63 citizenship 73–84, 106; dual 73–84; law 75, 76; multiple 73; political 74; single 73–84 civil society 11, 49; see also nongovernmental organizations Coedès, George 5 colonial expositions 54, 60–1 Commaille, Jean 27–8 constitution 13–14, 74 corruption 9, 79, 95, 115, 140, 191 coup: of 1970 128; of 1997 2, 80, 83, 135 Dalama 92, 103, 107–13 dance 62–5, 133; apsara 48, 51, 140; champa mes tes 142; coconut 57; kaol 148; reamker 141; robam boran 133, 141, 145; robam propeniye 143; royal ballet 143; tep monorom 142 Daung Phang 175 Delaporte, Louis 60–1 democracy 1, 2, 6, 73, 80, 88, 135, 171 Democratic Kampuchea see Khmer Rouge

224 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Index

Department of Performing Arts 139, 146 deportation 98 Derrida, Jacques 60 development (social, economic) 1–3, 9–11, 38, 53, 82, 124, 148, 150–1, 167, 171–8, 192 diaspora 13–16, 80, 83, 86–100, 123, 154–5, 158; literature 154–5; nationalism 80, 88; nostalgia 88; politics 74, 88 DJ Sdey 114 Duong, Ratha (Siv Darina) 154, 157, 158 Ebihara, May 6 Ecole Française d’Extrême-Orient 5, 29, 47 education 5, 14, 82, 139, 142, 145, 156 Edwards, Penny 5, 48 ethnicity 119–32; see also identity

identity: Anikachun 75, 83; Antaoprâve 75; Asian–American 105–7; Cambodian–American 73–85, 86–100, 101–16; Chinese 119–32, 131; hybrid 75, 131; Khmer 119–32, 141; Khmer–Angkor 75, 81; national 74, 79, 83, 155, 131; refugee 74, 77, 86, 93; Sino–Cambodian 127, 129; transnational 74–5, 84; see also citizenship Ieng Sary 182, 187 independence 6, 30, 135–6, 140, 152, 167, 173; monument 108; writers 161 Indochina 27, 40, 47, 60, 63, 126 inscriptions 25–31, 35, 60 Institute for Khmer Traditional Textiles (IKTT) 124 International Monetary Fund (IMF) 9 internet 18, 78, 102 Jayavarman VII 49, 51

factories 193–204 feudalism 143, 146, 167 Foundation Bouddhique Khmère 171 France 14, 56, 73, 77, 80–1, 105, 136, 154, 158; colonial period 5–6, 25–31, 40, 47, 58–65, 125–7, 142 FUNCINPEC 2, 73–84, 135 gangs 103, 109, garment industry 193–204 Garnier, Francis 54 gender 5, 150; see also women genocide 86, 87; see also Khmer Rouge Gesellschaft für Technische Zusammenarbeit (GTZ) 172 ghosts 105, 120, 151, 198 grafﬁti 23–36; conservation 24 guanxi 123 guidebooks 37–52 Halo Trust 44 Hem Sivorn 194 Heng Monychenda 171 heritage 39, 57, 96, 133, 139, 140, 141 Him Chhim 109 hip hop 15, 103, 106, 110–11, 115 HIV/AIDS 158, 159 homeland 13–16, 74, 77, 87–8, 90, 93–7, 101–18, 154, 162, 203; see also citizenship; refugee human rights 82, 144, 171 Hun Sen 2, 73, 76, 137, 174, 175, 195, 202

Kaminsky, Amy 87–9, 94–5 Khing Hoc Dy 150 Khmer Rouge 2, 5, 16, 49, 81, 105, 112, 119, 150, 155, 162, 168; grafﬁti 30–1; tourism 37–52, 181–92; trials 52 killing ﬁelds 41, 89, 104, 108 Killing Fields 90, 110, 112 Kong Boun Chhoeun 152 Konrad Adenauer Foundation 171 ksaei 199 Kulthita¯ 151 landmines 8, 43 Ledgerwood 6, 8, 155, 186, 187, 196 Les Artisans d’Angkor 49 Les Artistes du théâtre brûlé 144 liminality 13–16, 95; see also citizenship, identity literature 150–66; literary competition 150–4, 158–9 Long Beach, California 86, 101–3, 105 Lonely Planet 39; see also guidebooks Lon Nol 112, 128 Lowell, Massachusetts 86, 108 Ly, Prach 18, 91, 92, 93, 96–7, 101–18 Mahaghosananda 169 Mahanikay 168 Malraux, André 40, 54, 58, 63 Mao Samnang 151, 152, 153, 159 Marchal, Henri 5, 28, 62

Index 225 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

megalomania 49–50 memorials see memory memory 4, 17, 24, 35, 41 52, 60, 66, 86–100, 105, 111, 182; diaspora 88 Métropole 5, 78, 82 Mey Son Sotheary 151, 159 migration 8, 94–5, 197, 198–201 Ministry of Cults and Religion 174 Ministry of Culture and Fine Arts, 1, 133–49 Ministry of Foreign Affairs 83 Ministry of Planning 8, 53 Ministry of Tourism 12, 13, 39, 50, 181–2, 189–90 modernity 7–10, 32–4, 68, 83, 172, 193–204; Buddhism 32; tradition 7, 51–2, 193–204 monastery see Buddhism Morimoto, Kikuo 124–5 Mouhot, Henri 40, 47, 56, 61 Musée Guimet 54

Pen Setharin 154, 159 People of Angkor 17, 65 People’s Republic of Kampuchea 150, 152, 157, 168, 177 Performing Arts 133–49 Phnom Penh 30, 32, 51, 74, 80–1, 97, 101–2, 114–15, 125–7, 133, 136, 142–3, 155, 170–1, 175, 193–204; development 8, 12, 45 Phnom Penh Playaz 101, 119 Pich Sophea 114, 147 Pok Marina 73, Pol Pot 9, 23, 30, 48, 49, 50, 152, 157, 167, 181, 182, 186, 188 Pond, Arn Chorn 96 pop music 101–16 praja¯priy 151 Preah Khan 47 Preah Vihear 143, 183, 184 Preap Sovath 114, 147 publishing 151–63

National Assembly 74, 79, 84 National Dance Company 133 nationalism 51–2, 75–81, 88, 124, 130 National Program to Rehabilitate and Develop Cambodia 8 Neou, Kassie 92 Nond Chan 153 non-governmental organizations 8, 11–12, 121, 136, 148; Buddhism 168–73 Norodom Bopha Devi 65, 135, 145 Norodom Ranariddh 1, 74, 175 Norodom Sihamoni 144 Norodom Sihanouk 1, 10, 89, 136, 141, 144, 168 nostalgia 52, 88–94, 111 Nouth Narang 135

Ramayana 88, 103 rap see also hip hop 101–16; Asian rap 106–7 Rasmı¯ Kambuja¯ 151 refugee 15, 73, 79, 86–100, 101–16, 154–5; ﬁrst generation 87; camp 65, 102, 170, 172 restoration see revival returnee 76, 79, 83, 84; forced 97–9; see also deportation revival 12, 47–9, 96, 128, 134–49, 150–66; see also Angkor, silk, theater, tourism Reyum Institute of Arts and Culture 5 rice 66, 68, 76–9, 194, 195 Rodin, Auguste 62–5 Royal University of Fine Arts 133, 136, 139, 142, 145 Royal University of Phnom Penh 2

Om Lim Heng 174 Ong, Aihwa 98, 106 Othello 146 Oum Suphany 151, 157 Pailin 183 Pal Vannariraks 96, 151, 152, 157, 159, 160 Pamina Devi 146 Panh, Rithy 17, 65–7, 144, 148 Paris Peace Agreement 74, 76, 134, 183 passport 16, 74, 75, 79 Pech Sangwawann 154, 157

Sam-Ang Sam 1, 96 Samritechak 146 Sam Sen Sambo 101 Sangkum Reastr Niyum 10, 142, 144, 156, 172 Sath, Chath Pier 91–5 Shapiro, Sophiline Cheam 96–7 Siem Reap 9, 50, 52, 121, 124, 148, 188, 190 silk 119–32, 159 Sin Sisamouth 114 Sisowath Panara Sirivudh 138

226 1111 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1011 1 2 3111 4 5 6 7 8 9 20111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 30111 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 40111 1 2 3 4 45111

Index

social activitism 96; transnational 97 Son Sann 172 Son Sen 183 Sou Seth 156 souvenirs 34, 40, 50, 124 Sovannaphum 148 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty 7 Srey Krup Leak 155–6, 160 Suy, Hieng 156 Ta Mok 183, 184, 185, 186, 190 Ta Prohm 40 tattoo 103 Tep Vong 168 Thailand 131; pop music 115 thanatourism 43; see also Khmer Rouge, tourism theater 133–49; Chaktomuk 146; lakhaoun ayai 133; lakhaoun bassac 133, 142; lakhaoun kaol 143; Lakhaoun niyey 143; lakhaoun yike 133, 142; Suramarit 136, 137, 143–6 Thommayut 168 Thompson, Ashley 26, 27 Tomb Raider 39, 55 tourism 17, 55, 123, 148; Angkor 37–52; growth, statistics 12; Khmer Rouge 13, 37–52; tourists 37–52, 68 tradition/traditional 7–11, 32, 49 55, 57, 64, 86, 88, 114, 120–1, 130, 139, 147, 156–61, 171–8; see also Buddhism; literature; modernity; silk transnational see identity Trinh T. Minh-ha 7

Tuol Sleng 50, 52, 89, 115, 133, 182, 186, 187 Udong 175 United Front Monk Community 168 United Nations see UNTAC United Nations Educational, Scientiﬁc and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO) 10, 38, 51, 55, 56, 124, 136, 146 United Nations Transitional Authority in Cambodia (UNTAC) 2, 4, 8, 134–5, 151, 158, 169 Valéry, Paul 58 Vann Nath 89, 91 Vietnam 64, 74, 75, 78, 127–8, 177; War 41, 43, 66, 103, 112 village 120, 125, 139, 143, 173, 194–204 Villiers de l’Isle-Adam 58, 59, 61 Vorn, Vann 94 Wat Langka 171 weaving see silk women 150–69, 193–204; abuse (against) 159; writers 150–69 Wong, Deborah 106–7 World Bank 9, 38 World Monument Fund 47 Yahya, Ahmad 79 year zero 1, 49, 104 Yimsuth, Ronnie 94–5 Yos Hut 171 Zhou Daguan 124, 126

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