Sihanoukville, 2016: Chinese capital hits a fishing town.
Cambodia’s ruling family carves up the land for lease a century apiece.
Fishers are driven from stilted shacks, white sands.
Tycoons, pimps, and speculators take their place.
Their anonymous billions.
To build their casinos and karaoke bars.
They go up in months.
On ground where chickens and pigs roamed.
No grid, no inspectors, no permits, no codes.
No cops.
There was an implied impermanence.
2019: an unlicensed seven-storey building is poured under moonlight.
It pancakes and kills 28 of the men who were sleeping on the floors they built that day.
Their families too.
Two months later Beijing forces a ban on gambling and
walks their investment out of Sihanoukville.
The money stops overnight.
Half the towers are abandoned mid-pour.
Those that stand are hollow—judging by the lights.
Maybe one in every twenty units are occupied in any given building.
Squatters sleep in the rebar.
Bamboo turned grey from the six monsoons since the money dried up.
Still no cops, and triads are the law.
Through the husks of buildings
headlights of distant speedboats rise and fall with the wake.
Behind me is something hidden behind gated blocks with barred windows
and their own generators.
Where borders are bought and recreated.
Burmese, Bangladeshi, and Laotians are flown in on job offers.
Their passports get taken.
Etcetera.
The UN estimates tens of thousands of people are trapped across the region
in these industrial slave camps.
Sat in front of laptops and stacks of SIMs.
To run romance scams, or police impersonations.
Seventeen hours a day toggling chats in English, Malay, Hindi, Simplified Chinese.
Neural nets have their grammar near-perfect.
Don’t hit your number
and you’re sold on to the next compound for $10k cash.
Usually beaten, sometimes tortured.
There are three jobs: developer, chatter, killer.
A victim in Delaware invested $240k in some crypto rug-pull.
The money sent away to many decimal places.
Every connection gets its cut.
Twenty billion dollars appears out of nothing.
Anything free lies behind a wrought iron gate.
Beyond that, it’s hard to say.
10°37’15.8″ N 103°30’01.6″ E
