The Highway:
I was flying 100/mph per hour down the Cambodian highway. The pink sky had turned a deep blue over the Gulf of Thailand. A nervousness creeped up on me. I had been driving a motorbike through the crowded and unpredictable streets of Southeast Asia for the better part of three months, but I had never gone this fast and never in the nighttime.
What happens on a Cambodian highway at night?
The answer is anarchy: the kind of artful chaos that can only exist where there is no law beyond the mutual recognition of each other’s humanity. You are cautious on a Cambodian highway, not because the State told you to be, but because a whole life just sped past you.
It felt like a waltz of headlights and hazy images. You changed partners every few seconds, as one of you chose to speed up or slow down. Through my helmet’s dirty visor, I saw two older women—both in straw hats—speed past me. I reverently passed families of four packed onto one motorbike, coming home from a day at the beach. I swerved to avoid wagons crossing lanes and almost got hit by a 1998 Toyota Camry pulling off a farm road at full speed. I never felt unsafe. There was no law, no turn signals, and the road was lined with fires burning in almost every yard—but I trusted the people around me.
The Turret:
More than a dozen monkeys manned a turret which sat buried in a forest, on the top of a mountain, at the foot of an ancient temple. I couldn’t tell you why the turret was there, or how long it had been out of commission. It was from the 20th century, for sure—but I couldn’t date it. Cambodia’s various factions and armies had been the beneficiaries of a weapons trickle down from various parts of the world throughout the last 50 years. It would be unsurprising to find a faction of Khmer Rouge holdouts guarding their 1990s borders with Soviet weapons from the 1960s. So, this turret could be from any part of the world at any time in the last 100 years.
If I were to guess, I would put my money on Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. Just 500m down the mountain you can find the “Killing Cave”. A dark, damp, deafeningly silent tear in the earth where hundreds were systematically killed by Khmer Rouge soldiers. Today, it is a tourist attraction. Khmer and foreign travellers make their way to it in trucks and motorbikes, greeted by decaying wood and tin storefronts pedalling Coca Cola and Cambodian soda in colourful tin cans.
As you descend into the cave, you are startled by how quiet it is. You realize quickly that you’ve never actually known what quietness is before. Above the rock there is a constant hum of life and planet. Here, there is nothing. Just silence. You imagine the act of dying here. Oppressed by silence, pierced by the occasional gunshot, then scream. As you make your way up the other side, an old woman sits cross legged right at the mouth of the cave. She burns incense, standing guard at a shrine that has been erected there. It looks Buddhist, but you can’t be sure. Inside the shrine, behind a thin layer of plastic: skulls and bones. The victims of the killing cave, on display. It doesn’t shock you. You’ve seen bones on display before, at the Killing Fields.
In those moments I wonder to myself what kind of thinking goes into displaying those bones? Honour and memory? A warning? I think to the genocide of Srebrenica: all the effort that has gone into properly burying the bodies of the dead, and all of the longing that families have done to find bodies—whole bodies—not fragments or parts in a mass grave. Then I look at the bones on display. Was there not enough money find these bodies whole? To undergo excavation and DNA testing? Was that not in the UN’s budget when they took over Cambodia for a decade? Were there just too many bodies? Millions, not thousands? Or were there not enough families left to long for an answer? Or perhaps did they know that they would not get an answer? Did they know that the Khmer Rouge were still an essential part of Cambodia’s governing coalition into the late 90s, propped up by foreign governments? Did they know that the Prime Minister was ex-Khmer Rouge? Did they know that there was no true will to unearth the crime and tragedy, but rather a will to freeze those actions in time and move forward quickly?
You wonder this all as you criss-cross the country, people pointing out tragedy checkpoints with all the gravity and emotion of a tour guide at Disney Land. I will never get over the way that a tuk-tuk driver pointed to the Killing Fields on a plastic-laminated menu of attractions. I will never get over the way the genocide has been frozen in time and packaged to tourists like me, all while it undoubtedly and painfully lives, breathes, and roils inside people.
500m up the mountain, at the foot of a temple and overseeing the Killing Cave, was a turret, frozen in a time I couldn’t place. Now manned by macaque monkeys, not the Khmer Rouge.
The evidence is all out in the open, for anyone to see: the skulls, the guns, the landmine injuries. The pain hides, though. To that I have no answer and pass no judgment.
The Monkeys and the Kitten:
I’m not sure if you’ve ever spent time around monkeys, but they’re horrible and their novelty wears off in about five minutes. They’re thieves who will bare their teeth if you even think about getting your hat back. They also dominate the temples at Angkor Wat, swinging along the ceilings and plotting the next hit for their organized crime syndicate.
That’s why I was uneasy when I stumbled upon a group of macaques playing with an orange kitten. My fellow tourists were less worried, taking out their phones to record the Disney-movie moment when a little kitten and a group of monkeys turned a medieval temple into their playground. Within a minute or two I was also charmed, waiting on the edge of my seat for the animals to break into an Elton John-penned ballad about unlikely friendship.
But as it went on, my initial suspicions seemed to be coming to fruition. It got violent. You could see the kitten trying to escape as the monkeys yanked its tail, pulling it back. As it became clear that the kitten was stuck, and wasn’t enjoying the game, the tourists protested. The tour guides yelled at the monkeys, and tried to splash water on them. Nobody wanted to get too close, lest they get bit. As the struggle continued, more monkeys showed up. At a certain point it was a six on one attack, with the kitten helplessly trapped by this group of macaques.
As the monkeys started to kidnap the kitten and leave the temple, the tension amped up. People were yelling in disgust, but nobody stepped in. As we watched the group take the kitten into the forest, people offered their conjecture about what was going to happen to the kitten. They went to startingly dark places: the monkeys were going to eat the kitten, whip it around like a toy until it died—one woman even suggested that the monkeys may have a nefarious sexual purpose. The picture that was painted of the kitten’s fate was sickening.
At the time, I took it for granted that they were right. The interaction looked violent, so I assumed that the outcome would be equally so. But then I thought about how much projection was involved in that conjecture. In so many ways, a monkey looks and feels like a person. The monkey is some reflection of what, deep down, we fear ourselves to be: violent, selfish, brutish, thieves. The conjecture was exactly a reflection of that.
Startled by that reflection, I investigated it a bit—attempting to confirm my own worst suspicions. I couldn’t find that confirmation though. ChatGPT and Google both told me that monkey “kidnappings” of kittens were usually followed by parental care practices, grooming and social bonding. I couldn’t believe it. It betrayed my entire conception of power. I kept looking for something to reinforce what I learned from Hobbes, but I struggled—until I stumbled upon the video “monkey eats kitten”.
Now, you’ve got to understand how profound of a choice it is whether to watch a video entitled “monkey eats kitten”. On the one hand, the video may hold the answer to my question. On the other hand, I may have to watch a video of a monkey actually eating a kitten alive. Against my gut instinct, I clicked. I was prepared for the worst, but that wasn’t what I found. Rather, I saw a video of a monkey grooming kitten.
I’m not sure what happened to the kitten at Angkor Wat, but I know that it wasn’t necessarily what we all assumed. Monkeys are more than the violent, selfish creatures we assume they are.
The Conclusion:
I’ve told you a story in the form of disconnected vignettes because I couldn’t think of another way to tell it. The kind of work I did in Cambodia requires a lot of emotional self-regulation. You are faced with fear after fear, that you simply need to move past. The best thing for you to do is fit yourself neatly into a “role” and make sense of the world through its lens. In that role, I learned a lot about Cambodia—but I very seldom felt what I learned. I don’t think I could have.
So, here are some moments where the emotions bled through. Where the enormity of Cambodia’s lessons were presented to me in the ordinary metaphors that dot everyday life.