Searching
for Hope
By
Adam Piore
The cambodia daily
| Khmer
New Year that first year was a huge, festive outpouring.
People had been afraid to venture out the previous year
in the wake of the 1997 factional fighting. But now
they thronged the streets and alleyways around the Foreign
Correspondents’ Club, dancing and eating and celebrating.
|
The
Cambodia Daily newsroom was uncharacteristically desolate
the day I arrived.
Many of the foreigners had cleared out after the 1998 elections,
and I was one of three new hires scheduled to start in the
coming days. It seemed like the entire expatriate community
was on the move. Every weekend there was a party for someone
else leaving. Most of the Khmer Rouge had defected, and
Ta Mok would soon be arrested. I was told I’d missed
the story.
But the next 12 months were by far the most incredible and
mind-expanding of my career. Like most visitors, I found
the magnitude of the tragedy gut-wrenching.
With Lor Chandara, I wrote about people selling their children
in Poipet. I interviewed more genocide survivors than I
could count. It was devastating. But it was the hopefulness
that year that I haven’t seen since—not in Iraq,
where I just returned from, or in New York City after the
Sept 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
People were beginning to feel safe again. You could sense
the weight of tension slowly peeling away. Sure, there was
plenty of bitterness, and lots of twisted, psycho people
(many were foreigners).
But I had just come from Washington, where fat bureaucrats
bloodlessly contemplate problems with no real sense that
there is any significance beyond their own vanity or petty
political gain.
Cambodia’s palpable hunger for a simple peace and,
after so much devastation, the energy people poured into
rebuilding, surprised me. You could taste the euphoria and
relief, the renewal and resilience, and I found it intoxicating.
Khmer New Year that first year was a huge, festive outpouring.
People had been afraid to venture out the previous year
in the wake of the 1997 factional fighting. But now they
thronged the streets and alleyways around the Foreign Correspondents’
Club, dancing and eating and celebrating. Then-governor
Chea Sophara planted grass by the river, spruced up the
walkway, took away the garbage.
Later in the year I traveled with Thet Sambath to Anlong
Veng, which had defected en masse under Ke Pauk just months
before and driven Ta Mok back into the jungle. I sat on
the simple slatted platform of a local merchant as she recounted
the arrival of the town’s first karaoke machine.
Within days of the defection, two Siem Reap locals set it
up in the center of town. People came from all around to
check it out, spilling out of the building and sitting on
the hardpack outside. Few could afford the 500 riel it cost
to sing a song—and who knew any?
For years, the only song many had been allowed to listen
to was the vitriolic theme song of the Khmer Rouge revolution.
But when that first video lit the screen of a woman and
her spurned lover frolicking in the trees and singing to
each other by a river, when the music came out of that speaker,
many of the locals began to weep.
“The music and their clothes were so beautiful,”
said the merchant, who had worn only gray and black for
years (but who, I noticed on this day, was clad like many
of her neighbors in loud, gaudy shades of pink and purple).
As a jaded American, it never occurred to me that anyone
would cry about karaoke—especially not the overly sentimental,
stylized Khmer version.
The villagers cried for those lost years, and because they
wondered why they had been denied the simple pleasure of
music and the senses. And they cried because the war had
ended finally after 30 years, and finally they were safe
and free. No other story could ever compare.