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well, Indochine avec Catherine Deneuve. The above titles no doubt symbolize once again the pointlessness of my making this journey, not only for its own sake, but also to gauge the amount of lingering French in the region — and to return imaginatively to the era of the postcards, trying to understand something of the people snapping the shutter, as well as of those being photographed.
Just as the presence of the Bangkok Post and the Nation show the strength of the English language in Thailand, the newspapers in Phnom Penh show the comparative poverty of French in Cambodia. The Phnom Penh Post, published only in English as the name suggests, is far and away the most important foreign newspaper in the country. It dares to report Cambodian politics honestly despite fierce government suspicion. Perhaps its most closely read feature, however, is the always lively Police Blotter, from which I cannot help but quote at random for the insight it gives on the city’s daily life.
Police on Thursday raided a café showing porn movies in Chamkarmon district, Phnom Penh, arresting 100 including the café’s two female owners. Police seized 74 motorbikes and the equipment used for showing movies. All but the owners were later released with their motorbikes, but they had to pay money to the police for various reasons.
You will find nothing so sociologically revealing in the Cambodia Daily, which is some sort of subsidized training ground for tyro journalists and looks as though it’s been produced at Kinko’s. It is far below the level of the Cambodia Weekly, published by the University of Cambodia. That leaves only Cambodge Soir Hebdo, which, though it ventures into current affairs, does so cautiously. I saw a headline — les royalistes à nouveau plongés dans le chaos — that might have been plucked from the time the postcards were printed. But then the paper is not independent, but rather “est soutenu par l’Organisation internationale de la francophonie.”
Buildings outlive persons, especially in places where economic growth was slow for so many decades and health care remains, to put the best possible face on the situation, rather basic. Despite the rush of development between the end of the civil war era in 1999 and the global economic crisis a decade later, Phnom Penh certainly harbours examples of French colonial architecture. The quickest to be preserved are the private residences, which are called villas even though they’re in the centre of the city, far from the countryside. They are customarily two storeys high with an elaborate central entranceway and tall, narrow windows with louvered wooden shutters, the whole affair surrounded by a wall (protective but also decorative). The exteriors are often pastel — yellows or blues — and the roofs have Asian lines. These were the homes of French merchants and businessmen, and they appear not to have changed much over the years. Some were pointed out to me as late nineteenth century and at least one as being from the 1930s. The only example I saw that was dated had 1926 in a cartouche over the upper storey. Did these people know how quickly their empire there would vanish once the Second World War cleared the ground for fierce nativism to grow?
Some French buildings on the grander scale, which is to say ones perhaps too big for a single foreign individual to purchase, repair, and restore, have fared far less well. One of these, the former Hôtel Renaske, stands vacant and has been the subject of various legal actions; it may meet the fate of so many smaller ones and be torn down or permitted to collapse. Another one, near the palace, is a wonderfully and monumentally bizarre two-storey mansion with large porticos. It has ornate masonry work everywhere. Although it juggles allegorical Khmer motifs with its many Corinthian columns, it is most definitely the work of a European sensibility. It is also a ruin. The wall and gate are shot up and cracking. The windows are knocked out, a few boarded over with plywood or corrugated iron, but most not. Old tires and wrecked automobiles litter the front garden, which is overgrown with weeds. Birds and animals nest in the arches and on the ledges. Trees grow inside the building itself; one of them is tall enough to be visible through a formerly ornate second-storey window.
I asked Vorn, a young character I had retained for his Local Knowledge, what had befallen this marvellous pile of stones.
“The King build for bodyguards,” he explained. “No more King.”
“But still plenty of bodyguards, eh?” I repied.
Cambodia, like the former Soviet Union, found that as soon as it loosened control of the economy it gained, overnight, a mafia class, whose members enjoyed driving round the city with all their heavily armed retainers, some of them non-Asians, big fellows, Russian perhaps.
Vorn shrugged.
Later I learned that the building is not entirely without some civic purpose. From time to time, it seems, rock concerts have been held there. That may account for some of the outright damage just as the withering of royalist sentiment explains some of the mere neglect. But who knows? The country has gone through such hell in the past few decades that any survival seems miraculous and any loss perfectly if tragically predictable.
The pollution in Phnom Penh, no doubt combined with that of Bangkok, soon left me with a lung ailment. I was able to go to the Russian Market and buy 400 milligrams of Noroxin without a prescription — after carefully checking to see that it hadn’t exceeded its best-before date and showed no evidence of being counterfeit. One doesn’t require a doctor’s scrip in Cambodia because there are too few doctors. Historically speaking, the shortage goes back to the Pol Pot regime, when most of licensed professionals who didn’t flee were systematically murdered. In Thailand by comparison, one needs only a quick nod from a medical middle-man to obtain whatever prescription one seeks. I’m told that the system helps to prevent an even faster spread of sexually transmitted diseases. Lord knows what sort of treatment is available to the sex workers and johns of Kilometre Eleven, the horrifying prostitution-village that sprang up eleven kilometres outside Phnom Penh, catering originally to UN peacekeepers.
— TELEGRAMS FROM ANGKOR WAT —
Vorn is still a young man. I never asked his age, but he was in his twenties when I first met him a few years ago.
M and I were travelling together.
“How many sons you have?” he asked M, whom I had briefed on the rigours of Southeast Asian etiquette.
“No sons,” she said, smiling.
“Girls?” he said without contempt, as he prides himself on the sensitive understanding of Western culture he has gained through being what once upon a time, in China, would have been called a comprador, a Portuguese word: adviser, translator, and, most important of all, fixer.
“No girls, either.”
He then turned to me and said accusingly, “You never worked enough!”
M and I had just returned from a wild boat trip under the guidance of one of Vorn’s brothers-in-law or cousins. These are almost without number. Whatever item or service one needs, whatever deal one is looking for in fields as different as consumer electronics, physiotherapy or the foreign-exchange market, he knows the ideal person, a relative by marriage if not by blood, located, as luck would have it, only moments away.
The boat-operator looked nothing whatever like Vorn, but spoke of him warmly, as far as we could tell. We were in a long-tail boat at the southern end of Tonlé Sap. This is to say, the largest lake in Southeast Asia by far. It becomes still larger during the summer wet season when we were there, going from an area of about 2,500 square kilometres to at least thirteen thousand, inundating the surrounding forests and reversing the flow of Tonlé Sap, the river of the same name, testing the very safety of the elaborate dikes at Phnom Penh, two hundred or so kilometres away. The lake supplies fish to the majority of Cambodia’s people.
The lake is a spooky place when in flood. With the motor off, we sat holding onto the gunnels, rocking in the thick of a forest that the sun barely penetrates. Or rather the top half of the forest, the rest being underwater for the next few months. We carefully tiptoed, so to speak, into the open water, where the lapping sound has the power both to put people to sleep or drive them mad. There were no other sounds, in fact, no other signs of life. The water and the sky were grey. But