Far and Away: Reporting From the Brink of Change

by Solomon, Andrew

  Most Cambodians are soft-spoken, gentle, and attractive. It’s hard to believe that Pol Pot’s atrocities took place in this lovely country. Everyone I met had a different explanation for how the Khmer Rouge could have come to power there, but none of these explanations made sense, just as none of the explanations for the Cultural Revolution, Stalinism, or Nazism makes sense. In retrospect it is possible to understand why a nation was especially vulnerable to such regimes; but where in the human imagination such behaviors originate is unknowable. Such evil is both contiguous with the ordinary evil of all societies and so extreme as to comprise its own law. The social fabric is always thinner than we care to acknowledge, but it is impossible to know how it gets vaporized. The American ambassador told me that the greatest problem for the Khmer people is that traditional Cambodian society has no peaceful mechanism to resolve conflict. “If they have differences,” he said, “they have to deny and suppress them totally, or they have to take out knives and fight.” A Cambodian member of the current government told me that the people had been too subservient to an absolute monarch for too many years and didn’t think to fight against authority until it was too late.

  People cry easily in Cambodia. The words of the American ambassador were in my ears each time I witnessed a smiling Cambodian abruptly begin to weep, without any apparent middle ground or transition. During numerous interviews with people who had suffered atrocities at the hands of the Khmer Rouge, I found that most preferred to look forward. When I pressed them on personal history, however, they would seem to regress before my eyes, slipping into an agonized past tense. Every adult I met in Cambodia had suffered such traumas as would have driven many of us to madness. What they had endured within their own minds was at yet another level of horror. When I decided to do interviews in Cambodia, I expected to be humbled by the pain of others, and I was humbled down to the ground.

  Phaly Nuon, winner of the Figaro Prize for Humanitarian Service and a sometime candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize, has set up an orphanage and a center for depressed women in Phnom Penh. Her success with these women has been so enormous that her orphanage is almost entirely staffed by the women she has helped, who have formed a community of generosity around her. If you save the women, it has been said, they in turn will save other women, who will save the children, and so via a chain of influence you can save the country.

  We met, as Phaly Nuon had suggested, in a small, disused room at the top of an old office building near the center of Phnom Penh. She sat on a chair on one side, and I sat on a small sofa opposite. Like most Cambodians, she is relatively short by Western standards. Her black hair, streaked with gray, was pulled back from her face and gave it a hardness of emphasis. She can be aggressive in making a point, but she is also shy, smiling and looking down whenever she is not speaking.

  We started with her own story. In the early seventies, Phaly Nuon worked for the Cambodian Department of the Treasury and Chamber of Commerce as a typist and shorthand secretary. In 1975, when Phnom Penh fell to Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, she was taken from her house with her husband and children. Her husband was sent off to a location unknown to her, and she had no idea whether he remained alive. She was put to work as a field laborer with her twelve-year-old daughter, three-year-old son, and newborn baby. The conditions were terrible and food was scarce, but she worked beside her fellows, “never telling them anything, and never smiling, as none of us ever smiled, because we knew that at any moment we could be put to death.” After a few months, she and her family were packed off to another location. During the transfer, a group of soldiers tied her to a tree and made her watch while her daughter was gang-raped and then murdered. A few days later it was Phaly Nuon’s turn to be killed. She was brought with some fellow laborers to a field outside town. Her hands were tied behind her back and her legs roped together. After she was forced to her knees, a rod of bamboo was tied to her back, and she was made to lean forward over a mucky field, so that her legs had to be tensed or she would lose her balance. When she finally dropped of exhaustion, she would fall forward into the mud and drown. Her three-year-old son bellowed and cried beside her. The infant was tied to her so that he would suffocate when she fell: Phaly Nuon would be the killer of her own baby.

  Phaly Nuon told a lie. She said that she had, before the war, worked for a high-level member of the Khmer Rouge, that she had been his secretary and then his lover, that he would be angry if she were put to death. Few people escaped the killing fields, but a captain who perhaps believed her story eventually said that he couldn’t bear the sound of the screaming child and that bullets were too expensive to waste on executing her quickly, so he untied Phaly Nuon and told her to run. Her baby in one arm and the three-year-old in the other, she headed deep into the jungle of northeastern Cambodia.

  She stayed there for three years, four months, and eighteen days. She never slept twice in the same place. As she wandered, she picked leaves and dug for roots to feed herself and her family, but food was hard to find, and other, stronger foragers had often stripped the land bare. Severely malnourished, she began to waste away. Her breast milk soon ran dry, and the baby she could not feed died in her arms. She and her remaining child just barely held on to life through the period of war.

  By the time Phaly Nuon told me this, we had both moved to the floor between our seats and she was weeping and rocking back and forth on the balls of her feet, while I sat with my knees under my chin and a hand on her shoulder in as much of an embrace as her trance-like state would allow. She continued in a half whisper.

  After the war was over, Phaly Nuon found her husband. He had been severely beaten around the head and neck, resulting in significant mental deficit. She, her husband, and her son were all placed in a border camp near Thailand, where thousands of people lived in temporary tented structures. They were physically and sexually abused by some workers at the camp and helped by others. Phaly Nuon was one of the only educated people there, and knowing languages, she could talk to the aid workers. She and her family were given a wooden hut that passed for comparative luxury. “While I went around, I saw women who were in very bad shape, many of them seeming paralyzed, not moving, not talking, not feeding or caring for their own children,” she said. “I saw that though they had survived the war, they were now going to die from their depression.” Phaly Nuon made a special request to the aid workers and set up her hut in the camp as a sort of psychotherapy center.

  She used traditional Khmer medicine (made with more than a hundred herbs and leaves) as a first step. If that did not work sufficiently well, she would use occidental medicine when it was available, as it sometimes was. “I would hide away stashes of whatever antidepressants the aid workers could bring in,” she said, “and try to have enough for the worst cases.” She would take her patients to meditate, keeping in her house a Buddhist shrine with flowers in front of it. To seduce the women into openness, she would begin by taking three hours or so to get each to tell her story. Then she would make regular follow-up visits to try to get more of the story, until she finally got the full trust of the depressed woman. “I wanted to understand very specifically what each one had to vanquish,” Phaly Nuon explained.

  Once this initiation was concluded, she would move on to a formulaic system: “I take it in three steps. First, I teach them to forget. We have exercises we do each day, so that each day they can forget a little more of the things they will never forget entirely. During this time, I try to distract them with music, or with embroidery or weaving, with concerts, with an occasional hour of television, with whatever seems to work, whatever they tell me they like. Depression is under the skin, all the surface of the body has the depression just below it, and we cannot take it out; but we can try to forget the depression, even though it is right there.

  “When their minds are cleared of what they have forgotten, when they have learned forgetfulness well, I teach them to work. Whatever kind of work they want to do, I will find a way to teach it to them. Some train
only to clean houses or take care of children. Others learn skills they can use as they care for orphans, and some begin toward a real profession. They must learn to do these things well and to have pride in them.

  “And then when they have mastered work, at last I teach them to love.” I wondered aloud how one teaches such a skill. “Well, I actually teach them that by way of manicures and pedicures,” she said. I raised an eyebrow. “In the camp, I built a sort of lean-to and made it a steam bath, and now in Phnom Penh I have a similar one, a little better built. I take them there so that they can become clean, and I teach them how to give one another manicures and pedicures and how to take care of their fingernails, because doing that makes them feel beautiful, and they want so much to feel beautiful. It also makes them give up their bodies to the care of others. It takes a lot for a woman who has been so wantonly and violently injured to extend her hand or foot, to trust a relative stranger to come at her body with a sharp implement. When they learn not to flinch, it rescues them from physical isolation, and that leads to the breakdown of emotional isolation. While they are together washing and putting on nail polish, they begin to talk, and bit by bit they learn to trust one another, and by the end of it all, they have learned how to make friends, so that they will never have to be so lonely again. Their stories, which they have told to no one but me—they begin to tell those stories to one another.”

  Phaly Nuon showed me the tools of her psychologist’s trade: the little bottles of colored enamel, the steam room, the sticks for pushing back cuticles, the emery boards, the towels. Grooming is one of the primary forms of socialization among primates, and this return to grooming as a socializing force among human beings struck me as curiously organic. When I remarked on that, she laughed and told me about monkeys she had seen in the jungle. Perhaps they, too, were learning to love, she remarked. I told her that I thought it was difficult to teach ourselves or others how to forget, how to work, and how to love and be loved, but she said it was not so complicated if you could do those three things yourself. She told me about how the women she has treated have become a community, and about how well they do with the orphans now in their care.

  “There is a final step,” she said to me after a long pause. “At the end, I teach them the most important thing. I teach them that these three skills—forgetting, working, and loving—are not three separate skills, but part of one enormous whole, and that it is the practice of these things together, each as part of the others, that makes a difference. It is the hardest thing to convey”—she laughed—“but they all come to understand this, and when they do—why, then they are ready to go into the world again.”

  * * *

  Phaly Nuon died on November 27, 2012, from injuries sustained in an automobile accident. Her funeral took place over seven days and was attended by thousands of people, many of whom had been children at her Future Light Orphanage. Hundreds of children who lived there mourned her as their mother.

  The situation of the mentally ill in Cambodia is still bleak, and continues to be aggravated by forced displacement and human trafficking. PTSD is ubiquitous. The suicide rate is nearly three times the world average. Yet despite the citizens’ fragile mental health, the care system is abysmal; roughly one in three mentally ill people is kept in a cage or tied down with chains. Most mentally ill Cambodians neither seek nor receive help. Only 0.02 percent of the Cambodian health budget goes to mental health. Only the Khmer-Soviet Friendship Hospital provides inpatient treatment, and Cambodia has a mere thirty-five trained psychiatrists to serve a population of 15 million. In the spring of 2015, one Cambodian province proposed that mentally ill people be rounded up, sent to pagodas, and cared for by monks to recover their “beauty and order.”

  MONGOLIA

  * * *

  The Open Spaces of Mongolia

  Travel + Leisure, July 1999

  My mother used to indicate the obscurity of some destination—where an uncle she didn’t much want to visit anyway was domiciled, where a college she hoped I wouldn’t attend was located—by saying, “That might as well be in Outer Mongolia.” Perhaps that is why Mongolia became for me a symbol of the remote. Often, I’ve imagined some place to be very exotic only to arrive and find it disappointingly familiar, but Mongolia was emphatically another place and seemed to have lingered in another time. The gorgeousness of Mongolia is a shimmering presence that stays with you as you traverse the country.

  I came down with terrible food poisoning in the Gobi Desert. I was traveling with a colleague who decided halfway through the trip that he had had enough and headed home. By chance, I stumbled upon a college acquaintance who was living in Ulaanbaatar; after a brief conversation, I invited her to join me, and she jumped at the offer. She spoke excellent Mongolian and knew enough to contribute a steady stream of insights, but not so much as to be bored by what we saw.

  * * *

  We took the thirty-six-hour train ride (rather than the two-hour plane ride) from Beijing to Ulaanbaatar. On the way my traveling companions and I saw much of the Great Wall and some of Hebei and Shanxi provinces in north-central China. Then we passed through the endless flat monotony of Inner Mongolia, an autonomous region of China. In the next cabin was a twenty-year-old Mongolian Buddhist monk (he joined the monastery when he was eight) who had been studying in India and was returning home for the first time in five years. He was sharing his quarters with a German management consultant, and next to them were a twenty-one-year-old graduate student of Russian from North Dakota and a retired English teacher from Cleveland. A Polish novelist who wore five wristwatches was in number 5. In the next car were an outrageously beautiful French couple who didn’t speak to anyone and some Hare Krishnas from Slovenia who were trying (unsuccessfully) to convert us all. After two days we arrived in Ulaanbaatar, capital of independent (aka “Outer”) Mongolia.

  Mongolia is one-sixth the size of the United States, with a population of about 2.5 million. Most of its people are nomadic, living in wood-framed felt tents and herding sheep, goats, yaks, camels, cattle, and horses. They do not have paved roads. They do not in general use electricity or own cars. They practice Tibetan Buddhism; in fact, the Mongolian ruler Altan Khan coined the title Dalai Lama more than four hundred years ago. Many temples and monasteries, despite seventy years of Communism, are thriving.

  Though Mongolia has a literacy rate of almost 90 percent and an impressively well-informed population, outside the cities the way of life is much as it was at the turn of the first millennium. The country has important copper and gold mines and is the world’s leading source of cashmere, but it remains largely immune to modernization and industrialization. After almost eighty years as an “independent” buffer state between Russia and China, Mongolia has recently established democracy, and in the last election, despite the limited number of polling stations and the vast distances between them, more than 90 percent of the eligible population voted.

  From Ulaanbaatar the guides and I drove three-quarters of the way toward Kharkhorin before setting up our first night’s camp in a big field near a ger, one of the low-slung tent-like structures in which Mongolians traditionally live. In the morning, we woke to the sound of horse traffic. I sat up, pulled aside the flap of my tent, and saw a tall man wearing a long side-buttoned coat of blue velvet, tied at the waist with a yellow silk sash. I stumbled into wakefulness, half-dressed, and followed him to the ger, where he gave me cheese and butter and a slice of fresh bread. Such hospitality is automatic in this nomad country, and endlessly delightful to a Western visitor. I tried his horses, provoking amused delight from the little boys and girls, who from the age of four know how to ride and at six move more self-assuredly on their mounts than I can walk. An older child, perhaps sixteen, came to look at our car and gestured to the inside of the door with the bemused air of an action hero on an alien spacecraft. I showed him how one could rotate the handle to make the window go up (he thought this amazing); and I showed him how if you push down the lock, people can’t open t
he door from the outside (he thought this hilarious).

  We arrived in Kharkhorin on the first day of its Naadam celebration, a festivity of sport that takes place July 11 through 13 every year. The number of horsemen we saw heading across the roadless countryside and the bright colors they wore told us which way to go even before we had spotted the first of the distant pavilions. As we came closer, we picked up on the crowd’s excitement. The jockeys had set out near dawn, and more than two hundred horses galloped in the morning’s race. At least six hundred others stood in rows, and the spectators sat astride their mounts the way Western audiences sit in grandstands. Everyone was eagerly waiting for the first glimpse on the horizon of the winning stallion. The men and women mostly wore long robes, called del, often of velvet or brocade, tied at the hip with silk sashes of brilliant yellow, crimson, or green. Saddles were ornamented with silver, and many riders had silver crops and chatelaines. Colorful hats, some trimmed in fur, crested in points like steeples. A few hotshot adolescents who had drunk too much airag (Mongolia’s specialty: fermented horse milk, which is what one might call an acquired taste) were riding fast, and from time to time the crowd had to part before them. Children and the elderly were pushed to the front, while the rest of us on foot strained to see over their heads. The air rang with speculations, greetings, family arguments, and plans.

  At last the first horse came through, and the cheering erupted. We parted to make way for an endless line of runners-up, all bearing jockeys ages four to seven. They cantered through the crowd and slowed only in the distance. Ribbons flew from the bridles. The winner was taken to a nearby field, where a lama in a flowing robe and a yellow, pleated hat blessed him in the name of the Buddha. Everyone was laughing, some began singing, and the joy was for old and new friends alike. We received invitations—translated by our guide—from every Mongolian we met: come into our tent, have some of our airag, have a piece of fried dough, some cheese. They struggled to communicate over the language barrier, swore brotherhood with us, gave us their hats to try on, taught us words of exuberant Mongolian.