The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  [T]oward the southern extremity of the city, we passed a floating town, composed of more than 500 boats, most of them of large size. They serve as an entrepôt for some merchants, and residences for others. All their money and the greater part of their merchandize is here kept, that, in case of alarm, they may be ready to take flight at a moment’s warning.

  There is also the collective memory, rarely transcribed, of the floating villagers themselves, who corroborate Mouhot’s intuition that theirs is a lifestyle honed over generations to mitigate against the bad harvests, marauding bandits, and unfriendly rulers to which minority Vietnamese remain especially vulnerable. Some told me that they had owned land in the early years of independence and that they had lived on the water only seasonally until the land was taken away. Others said they had always lived on boats. Some identified strongly as Cambodian, while others found the question of national allegiance absurd. “We just live on the water, where it’s easy to catch fish,” a monk in Kampong Chhnang told me. “We lived everywhere.”

  Hoarith could count at least four generations of ancestors around Tonle Sap. Born at the mouth of the lake, he was nine when the Khmer Rouge marched into Phnom Penh. His family was captured and sent to a labor camp in the mountains. After four months at the camp—where, he said, “they tried to kill at least ten Vietnamese families a day”—the soldiers loaded the prisoners onto ferries to be deported “back” to Vietnam. Hoarith had never been to Vietnam. He didn’t know where Vietnam was. He asked his grandmother, but she didn’t know, either. The ferry to the border took five days. Anyone who died was thrown overboard.

  Around 150,000 ethnic Vietnamese were expelled from the country in this way, joining the 400,000 or so who had already fled pogroms under the ultranationalist Khmer Republic. The Vietnamese were both regimes’ preferred scapegoat: “ingrate crocodiles” who wanted to swallow Cambodia whole. Those who survived the journey were traded to Vietnam for salt and rice and lived out the disastrous 1970s on farms in the countryside. Those who stayed in Cambodia—20,000 to 30,000 people—were slaughtered, alongside 90,000 Cham and as many as 100,000 Khmer civilians who were condemned for the crime of having “Khmer bodies and Vietnamese minds.”

  When the Vietnamese Army marched into Phnom Penh in 1979 and installed the puppet government that would later become the CPP, hundreds of thousands of civilians followed. Many were refugees returning home, but others were immigrants, and their presence revived the same fears of assimilation the Khmer Rouge had stoked. Hoarith and his family resettled in the village where he was born. It was still dangerous. In 1998, during a last gasp of Khmer Rouge resistance, soldiers waded into Chhnok Trou in the middle of the night with RPGs and AK-47s. The village was mixed, so before shooting, they asked: “Are you yuon or Khmer?”

  There is a tradition of rural pluralism in Cambodia that belies its recent history of racial violence. Most of the floating villages I saw were peaceful mélanges of Vietnamese, Khmer, and Cham fishers, and many of the people I met, including Hoarith, were the product of mixed Khmer and Vietnamese marriages. But everyone seemed to agree that floating villages were traditionally a Vietnamese way of life, enlarged out of economic necessity to include other groups. Today the ethnic Vietnamese live on the water because they are not able to live elsewhere. Neither documented citizen nor, in most cases, immigrant, they are what the government has sometimes described as “nonimmigrant foreigners.” They cannot attend public schools or open bank accounts, get a driver’s license or a factory job, or own land or property. Their children are not issued birth certificates, precipitating a generational cycle of de facto statelessness.

  “Thirty years ago, none of this mattered,” Christoph Sperfeldt, a researcher on ethnic Vietnamese citizenship in Cambodia, told me. “No Cambodians had papers. There was no state presence. But the moment the state starts registering people, suddenly it matters.” The expansion of services, including education and health care, and entitlements, including landownership, has further marginalized those perceived as foreign.

  Last year, fearing a narrowing electoral gap, Hun Sen’s government disbanded the CNRP and arrested Rainsy’s successor on charges of treason. In an effort to defuse the nativism that had fueled the opposition party, the state also began the process of formalizing the status of ethnic Vietnamese as foreigners. Last October, the Ministry of the Interior identified a minimum of 70,000 mostly Vietnamese “foreigners” who possessed “irregular administrative documents.” There may be hundreds of thousands more. Officials began sweeping the country, confiscating IDs and family books and demanding that residents either volunteer to move to Vietnam—where they are similarly considered foreigners—or pay a biannual fee for an immigration card identifying the holder as Vietnamese. “We don’t remove their citizenship; they are Vietnamese,” the head of the country’s immigration department said of the purge. “We just take the Cambodian documents.”

  With no formal legal identity and few of the rights enjoyed by their Khmer and Cham neighbors, Vietnamese claim to pay large bribes to the fishery police, the environmental police, the maritime police, and other, more ambiguous authority figures, some posing as local journalists. They are subject to evictions, mobs, and capricious imprisonment. Hoarith was released in February 2016, but when I met him nearly a year and a half later, the indignity of arrest, for which he blamed his lack of citizenship, continued to occupy his mind. “I should be recognized as Khmer,” he said that afternoon, moving close. His eyes were moss green. “My family has lived in Cambodia for many generations.” He pulled back a curtain in the cramped room, revealing a woman asleep in a hammock. “My mother is seventy-six years old,” he said. “Even she has no documents.” Nor, now, did he. Upon his arrest, the police had confiscated his birth and marriage certificates and the national ID card he received years ago.

  It was agreed I would spend the night on the disused houseboat next door. Some of the weathered boards plunged into space when you stepped on them, and most of the floor was taken up by Hoarith’s supplies: rust-black sheets of tin, a roll of wire mesh, scales for weighing tubs at market. We cleared a spot for bedding, and Samnang and I chased down a boat woman selling old fabrics for a mosquito net.

  Dinner was a leathery fish pounded flat and fried in oil on the camp stove Hoarith had fixed that afternoon. Samnang shouted to his wife over the water that he was staying for the meal. Hoarith’s wife and mother ate together on the other houseboat; his mother deftly hopped the gap to retrieve a can of beer from the icebox. She picked up a few grains of rice I spilled from my bowl. “During the Khmer Rouge, this was our entire dinner,” she said. “This was all the food we ate in a day.”

  As night fell, Thi Vioh washed the dishes in a tub of river water, and Hoarith bought bags of bean pudding from the last sampan of the evening, a dessert cruiser strung with colored lights. We listened to the boats roaring up and down the dark channel. Young men in the village liked to modify boats with car engines for night races. Each motor’s throat cleared the air of the insects’ chirping.

  It was in one of these brief pockets of stillness that Samnang explained how his brother had died last year when a night racer collided with his fishing boat. His four-year-old nephew had drowned that year, too, while the parents were both at work. The water has its dangers, including diarrhea (the most common cause of infant death), accidents, and drowning. Most children under five wear life jackets when their parents can afford them, and improvised devices—the grimmest I saw was an empty motor-oil bottle tied to a length of wire looped around an infant’s neck—when they can’t.

  Everyone was in bed by 11 o’clock. From the shoreline came a hollow chorus of empty hulls knocking into mangrove roots. Behind a half wall near my mat, a few alternating floorboards permitted a view of the river between my legs: the facilities. Under the mosquito net, the world was awash in diaphanous pink flowers. Every few seconds, a green light affixed to a roof beam illuminated the room as a warning to nighttime fishermen, whose boats I dr
owsily mistook for low-flying helicopters.

  In the morning, Samnang came back to Hoarith’s to take me to an old cemetery in the flooded countryside. He pulled up to the house in a timber-decked dory with an outboard motor whose steering arm he commanded like a limb. Chong Koh was already bustling. Families were gathered on porches playing xiangqi and eating breakfast, feeding chickens or exercising pigs and dogs along the waterfront. Women drove their children to market while calling out to neighbors what gleanings they sold, whether gasoline, soup, or Coca-Cola. Two orphan girls were already hard at work, sitting amid great piles of trei chhlart and squeezing the guts out of each gleaming fish with iron rolling pins.

  We drove past the fish market in Kampong Chhnang, where the dock was being hosed down after the morning rush. The village poor, most of them young boys, had moored their wooden taxi boats in the shoals of churned mud and were halfheartedly looking for fares. The water around us was dotted with the crowns of sunken trees and the rooftops of dry-season market stalls. Fishermen who had been out all night were coming home with coolers filled with riel, the silver carp that shares its name with the national currency. The rest were going our way, driving to the systems of nets and bamboo weirs they had installed on the lake according to loose territorial agreements.

  Samnang was friendly with everyone we passed, although he did not wave unless his hand already happened to be rising to pluck the cigarette from his lips. He had a fisherman’s shrewd economy of movement, and his toes were muscular and permanently splayed, the better to maneuver along the narrow gunwales of a boat in motion. There was an archipelago of pitted skin above his left eyebrow, where he said a drunk Khmer villager had once crushed a glass into his face.

  We came to an overgrown graveyard in a raised field. Unlike the Khmer, who cremate their dead, the Vietnamese bury family members in aboveground tombs. Graves thus show a record of Vietnamese residence that no law or loss of document can rescind. Life on the water leaves few ruins, but even families who have immigrated to Vietnam return to Cambodia once a year, usually in March or April, for the annual tomb-sweeping that wards off the wrath of the spirit realm. We drove from cemetery to cemetery, scraping ivy from stones to find the dates beneath, until we arrived at a sunken fen where more gravestones rose from the water like buoys. Samnang pointed to one. “My wife’s grandmother’s,” he said. There had once been a large Vietnamese village here. The stone lay between two converging strands of river. In a few days it would be underwater.

  Beyond the cemetery, behind a field of ban la yuon, we found a floating shack in the shadow of a ruined stilted house. A group of children waved from the window. Their father was in the abutting field, stomping through peat that came up to his shins, planting beans. He remembered the Vietnamese who used to live here, on the land as well as the water. There was even a Vietnamese temple—a wat yuon, he said—in a village not far from here. Samnang didn’t know the village, but we decided to go look for it. The farmer warned that we would find no Vietnamese living there. “After the Khmer Rouge,” he said, “they were afraid to come back.”

  We followed the farmer’s directions down a narrow stream that meandered for an hour past worm-infested trees from whose branches hung the teardrop nests of tropical birds. Around noon we reached the village, which was called Samraong. There was a dirt road where sickly cows communed with the bovine infinite beneath stilted houses frozen in midcollapse. Children played in the tall grass. Neang Kangrei Mountain loomed overhead, and between the village and the mountain stood an incongruously opulent temple. Its gate was red and gold, framing the mountain’s broad green slope. At the entrance stood a banner pillar, which connects heaven and earth in Buddhist cosmology. The pillar was square, in the Vietnamese style. Two stucco warriors stood on either side of the temple, 12 feet tall, pressing their swords into the earth.

  We found an old monk in a hammock outside his hut. He woke up as we approached. Like the bean farmer, he remembered the Vietnamese. They had used this land for centuries, he said. Behind the monk’s house were two brightly painted tombs, whose caretakers traveled from Ho Chi Minh City every March to sweep them.

  A group of men had come up the road as we were talking. Now they approached us. The loudest, Uy Poun, boasted to me that he helped to convert the abandoned pagoda 15 years ago, exchanging the Vietnamese gods for Khmer ones. “I built this pagoda,” he said. It had been abandoned for years by then, ever since the Khmer Rouge had moved the whole town to a camp at the foot of the mountain. Some Vietnamese were taken there, and that was the end of their time in the village. “But they weren’t killed,” he added. “They went to Vietnam.”

  Another man, Ek Srean, disagreed. Many were killed, he said. “I was an eyewitness. I saw the bones. I saw the bones in the pit.”

  “There were bones,” a third said, “but we don’t know if they were Khmer or Vietnamese.”

  The men fought over the fate of the Vietnamese for a while. Samnang and I listened and ate some boiled peanuts we bought in the market that morning. Conversations about the Khmer Rouge can have a dreamlike quality in Cambodia, drifting back and forth over the same gruesome territory—the crude methods of murder, the pitiful rations of rice and broth—while trading in rumors, jokes, and legends. Facts are overwritten; memories change midsentence. A story is told that contradicts the one preceding it, and both are accepted as passing glimpses of a historical truth too immense to view head-on. After some cajoling, Poun admitted that Vietnamese may have been killed in the camps. “But we didn’t know,” he added. Then he seemed to change his mind. “The Vietnamese never came to the commune where we were.”

  We moved on to the question of whether a Vietnamese could ever become Cambodian. As usual, the word “Khmer” was used to denote both ethnicity and nationality. One man in the group put forth a tentative theory: “It depends on their desires, if they want to become Khmer or not. If they give up their Vietnamese nationality, they become Khmer.”

  Srean again held a different opinion. “They can hold the documents, but they cannot become Khmer. The Vietnamese are still Vietnamese.” He shook his head and was quiet for a while. “Unless the king signs.”

  This generated murmurs of approval. We had forgotten the king’s signature. According to Cambodian law, Prince Sihanouk’s son, Norodom Sihamoni, is the final arbiter of Cambodian citizenship. All applicants for naturalization must meet his personal standards of character. None of us knew whether this had ever actually happened. But the men at least agreed that it might, and that the Vietnamese had lived among Cambodians for generations without any trouble. “Vietnamese and Khmer married each other in this very village,” Poun said. “But not anymore.”

  “They were expelled,” another said with finality. “And those who decided to stay were all killed. If they had white skin like a Vietnamese, like that”—he pointed at me, not at Samnang, who was keeping his distance—“they would be killed. I saw it.”

  The man seemed to know what he was talking about. Most soldiers and even senior political leaders who served in the Khmer Rouge melted smoothly back into village life after its demise, sometimes rejoining the very communities where they had once worked as executioners. It is rare for anyone to admit such things. The subject was raised in a tactful way. The man who had spoken thought for a moment, then asked to revise his story.

  “Well, I didn’t see it exactly,” he said. “I heard about it. But someone who had light skin like you would definitely be killed.”

  I spent the next few weeks traveling through floating villages on Tonle Sap Lake and visiting enclaves of ethnic Vietnamese along the Cambodia-Vietnam border. In one border town, I watched a woman use an old land-mine cap as a chopping block. It had been planted in her yard during the Indochina wars and proved itself a dud. In Chhnok Trou, I watched Khmer and Vietnamese neighbors play rousing midnight games of cat te beneath flickering generator light, throwing handfuls of cash into the pot, and everywhere I was the object of extreme village hospitality that kno
ws no ethnic or national distinction: stuffed full of giant river snails and prawn cakes, enticed with can after can of warm Angkor beer.

  Wherever I went, I asked local politicians and police officers what they thought of the ethnic Vietnamese living among them. The answer depended on where I happened to be. Officials spoke carefully in the cities, and I was politely bounced from the immigration police headquarters in Kampong Chhnang. But I had no trouble at the immigration police station in Kampong Luong, a sprawling conglomerate of floating villages, both Vietnamese and Khmer, on the southern shore of the lake. More than 3,000 ethnic Vietnamese lived in Kampong Luong, alongside as many Khmer, and everyone said they got along swimmingly.

  The police station was near the shore, a tin shed floating in a stream of wet garbage. Deputy Inspector Poa Ven was inside the shed, sweating. He was happy to see me. “We are aware of all foreign visitors,” he said, chuckling, when I handed him my business card.

  All the foreigners in the village were Vietnamese nationals, he explained. There was no difference between an ethnic Vietnamese and a Vietnamese citizen unless they got a letter signed by the king. “No one here has Khmer nationality.”

  I explained my confusion. Most of the people I’d met on floating villages could trace their lineage in Cambodia back many generations. They spoke Khmer fluently and had even been issued IDs by previous administrations. They had no ties to Vietnam.

  Yes, he said, even they were Vietnamese. Those were the new orders from the Ministry of the Interior.

  “But why are they Vietnamese?”

  “Because they are still immigrants! Because they came to Cambodia in 1980, they are still immigrants.”