by Peter Jaggs
“When I was a young boy my mother and my two sisters and I fled away from the troubles and the famine and across the border to Thailand where we made for one of the many refugee camps there. Life was hard, but it was better than being in Cambodia where we would surely have fared much worse. My father had already been murdered by the Khmer Rouge after they discovered he had previously been a doctor. He was one of the many professional people who were suspected of being educated and therefore killed during the Pol Pot regime. Although I was very young I still remember the day when everyone was driven out of Phnom Penh to the fields on the seventeenth of April in 1975. This was the year they called Year Zero, the year when Cambodia was to sever all links with both her past history and the world and take the first steps to becoming a self-sufficient country of Maoist peasant farmers.
I was a little older than my two sisters and a very cute kid and I used to run errands for a good-hearted Thai policeman who lived on a small farm near the refugee camp and took a shine to my spirit. In return he would give me rice, eggs and fish which helped to keep my family in better health than many of the other Cambodians in the refugee camp. I made friends with the young son of the policeman and as young people learn quickly I soon learnt to speak Thai very well. When I became older I worked for the policeman, looking after his animals and painting, cleaning and repairing the sheds and buildings on the farm he owned. He didn’t pay me much money but with the food he gave me, it was enough.
In 1992 the Thai people considered that the troubles had diminished enough for us refugees to be sent back to Cambodia. I didn’t want to go back at all. My homeland held only memories of hunger and hardship, my friends were mostly Thais and for the first time since we had lived in Phnom Penh my mother and sisters did not have to worry where the next mouthful of food was coming from. But the Thai people had decided they did not want us in their country any more so there was nothing to be done but return to what was left of our previous life.
We were all taken to the border in large groups and told to walk back to Cambodia. The way back was still littered with mines and many of my people lost their lives as we made our way across the dangerous area. All around me people were being killed and injured by the mines as they were detonated by their walking feet. My mother was holding the hands of my two sisters and they were walking in front of me. I had dropped back to help an old lady who had difficulty making her way along and I was a little way behind them. We had very nearly made it all the way back when mother stepped on a mine and both her and my sisters were thrown into the air and fatally injured by the explosion. The old lady I was with stayed with me to try to comfort my mother and sisters as they bled to death. We had to leave their broken bodies in the minefield and I still dream about that terrible day even now.
I just couldn’t get that day out of my mind and when I was back in Cambodia I believe I went a little crazy for a while. My family were all gone and I felt I had nothing to live for. I travelled around and lived alone in the fields and forests for several years and my only companions were the birds and animals. I became very wary of other people at that time and avoided anyone I saw. Eventually, the monks at a temple in Phnom Sia near Kep took pity on me. I was living in the caves there at the time. I began hanging around the temple and they left food out for me as if I were a wild animal. I began to perform tasks for them in return, such as sweeping the yard and washing their robes. I suppose it was inevitable I would become a monk myself one day, as apart from my family and the Thai policeman, the monks were the only people who had ever shown me any kindness.
Like you, I am a traveller, and I cannot stay in one place for any length of time. Although I spend more time in Sihanoukville than anywhere else, every so often I feel the need to wander. I stay in different temples on my travels, although never for very long at any one place. Being a monk gives me a certain freedom and I have been all over Cambodia. Sometimes I travel across the border to Thailand where I have been to nearly every province, and I move from temple to temple for a night or two. The Thai people are very generous when giving alms to monks and I never have any trouble receiving enough to eat as my needs are very simple.
My great passion in life are the animals and birds that are all around us. It was my destiny to be a wandering monk, but if I had the opportunity and my life had been different, I would have loved to have trained as a veterinary surgeon.”
The solemn words of the young monk and the encroaching sunset had a sobering effect on me and Rainsey noticed my serious expression. To my surprise, he stopped talking and gave me a playful punch on the arm.
“But you don’t want to hear about all that!” He said, changing his mood instantly. “You have come to my country to have some fun!”
Rainsey asked me about Pattaya. He said he had never been there before and he wanted to know if the wild reputation of the city was exaggerated. I looked around the quiet beach and the dirt track that led up to the simple nightlife of Victory Hill and I told him it was not, and that everything he had heard about the city was probably true. He asked me about the temples in Pattaya and I said there were many, but that the two largest and best known were Wat Chaimongkoon and Wat Hua Yai. Rainsey told me how he would like to visit Pattaya one day and he asked me where I stayed. I told him about my apartment at the Happy Home and thought no more about it.
Before the monk left I showed him the photograph Ron had given me and he shook his head and said he had never seen the old man or his girl. After I had related Ron’s story and told him all about my mission to find Psorng-Preng, Rainsey looked at me with a strange expression on his face. “I hope you find her,” he said.
The sun was now very low in the sky and Rainsey bid me a good evening and walked off up the track. His bare feet raised little puffs of dust at every step he took and his saffron robe glowed in the last weak rays of the setting sun.
Two months later I was back in Pattaya, snoozing the morning hours away in the Happy Home apartment block, cuddled up to a soft and pretty gogo girl with curves in all the right places. The girl wasn’t as sweet and innocent as she looked and our previous night’s antics had left me in a state bordering on exhaustion. The last thing on my mind was the wandering monk of Sihanoukville. At six-thirty a.m. the telephone next to my bed rang and I cursed loudly. All my mates knew I never arose before ten. I prepared to give some plonker a mouthful and go back to sleep. I picked up the phone and Noy, my favourite counter-girl at the Happy Home, spoke to me in an incredulous voice.
“You had better come down here, Joe, there is someone to see you,” she told me with a definite timbre of concern in her voice.
“Who is it?” I asked her, but true to form the lazy receptionist (that was why I liked her, she was so much like myself) had hung up.
I disentangled myself from the sleeping gogo girl and threw on a crumpled T-shirt and a pair of jeans. Grumbling loudly to myself and wondering what idiot had disturbed my slumbers, I walked down the stairs and into the reception area. Noy pointed to one of the wooden tables that are placed by the little swimming pool and I was astonished to see Rainsey, calmly sitting there waiting for me. He had come all the way from Sihanoukville to Pattaya just to say hello.
We talked together for a while and I couldn’t help thinking that had our lives been different we might have become very good friends. Rainsey told me how he had travelled across on the boat to Koh Kong, then hitched a lift into Trat in the back of a truck full of merchandise belonging to a Thai market trader who bought his wares in Cambodia at knock-down prices. A backpacker at the bus station in Trat had then given Rainsey an unwanted ticket to Pattaya. Apparently the young Australian traveller had met a Swedish blonde at his guesthouse who suggested that he accompany her to the tranquil island of Koh Wai. So here was Rainsey.
The monk told me he had taken a look around Pattaya and agreed with me that the reputation of the city was certainly not exaggerated. He had slept at Wat Chaimongkoon the night before and arisen very early to collect alms with
the other monks in the temple. After we had spoken together for an hour he rose to his feet and shook my hand in a grip a lumberjack would have been proud of.
“And now I am off to Khorat,” he said, as if he were simply popping down to the local supermarket instead of beginning a trek of several hundred miles. “Good luck, my friend!”
Rainsey walked out of the gateway of the Happy Home and into the quiet of the Pattaya morning and continued on his travels. I stood under the palm trees by the side of the pool and watched him disappear up the almost deserted street, feeling proud and privileged to have received a visit from the wandering monk of Sihanoukville with the sad past.
Back on The Hill at the Crazy Monkey guesthouse I was in dire need of a shower after my hard day on the beach. I stripped off and turned on the lukewarm water and tried to work up a good lather with one of the microscopic pieces of plastic-wrapped soap the guesthouse kindly provided. As I did so, I noticed that a lizard had become trapped on the slippery tiles in the shower room and was in danger of being washed down the drainage-hole. I have always been fond of the little reptiles and I made a grab at the creature, hoping to save it from a watery grave. Unfortunately, as is the nature of lizards, the creature mistook my attempts at assistance as the attentions of a predator and shed its tail. Many species of lizards do this—the idea is that the predator is distracted by a wildly wriggling tail and the lizard can then make good its escape. Even though I knew I had not hurt the lizard it was still rather disconcerting to see the tail part from the body and squirm around with an apparent life of its own.
I grabbed the paperback I was currently reading from the bedside table and scooped the soaking wet lizard onto the cover of the book. There was an electricity junction box screwed to one of the walls and I put the sodden reptile on top of it to dry out. I thought the lizard might have drowned at first, but after a few minutes it scurried behind the gap where the plastic box met the wall. From then on, this convenient hidey-hole became the lizard’s home.
During my stay on Victory Hill the funny, now tailless little creature appeared in my room every day. I christened him ‘Stumpy’ due to his radical new appearance. Stumpy seemed to become quite tame and would run around on the wall near my head just under the light above my bed, catching tiny insects whilst I read a book. Sometimes I would put a few sugar grains down on the bedside table as a treat and Stumpy would gratefully make a feast of the ants that came to partake of the free feed. I grew inordinately fond of the diminutive lizard and I would look out for him every evening.
CHAPTER SEVEN
One of the places on the list on the back of the photograph Ron had given me where he thought it possible I might find Psorng-Preng was called Phum Thmei. I had no idea whether the place was a bar, a restaurant, a street or even a person, so that afternoon I asked Narith if he knew exactly who, where or what this mysterious Phum Thmei was. The tough motodop driver gave me a wolfish grin and dug a sharp elbow into my ribs.
“Everyone knows Phum Thmei, my friend,” he told me. “It is the street that most of you foreigners call the Chicken Farm.”
I groaned. This was one place I had really not intended to inspect at close quarters.
It was around seven in the evening and I had spent the last couple of hours in my room in the Crazy Monkey plucking up the courage to visit Phum Thmei. All the horror stories I had heard from the boys in Pattaya had come back to haunt me. The three dollar blow jobs from someone it was too dark to see and the underage girls. The day old Bill was kidnapped by a bunch of half-crazy hookers who wouldn’t let him go until Thomas and Keeniaw Kevin pounded on the door until they let the terrified old boy out. The time Jim the Perv was disturbed by a rat running over his bare arse as he partook of one of the many services offered in the dim, dingy shacks. And the famous occasion when Dozy Dave had to make his way back to The Hill clad in nothing but his underpants because someone had pinched his trousers and shirt whilst he was otherwise involved with one of the girls. After listening to all these tales and more, it was understandable that I was very apprehensive about making my way down to this apparent hell-hole in the blackness of the night. Whatever you do, don’t go down there after dark, the boys had all warned me. I suppressed a shudder. For that was exactly what I intended to do. I was both surprised and saddened by the timidity the passing years had brought upon me, for I knew that back in my adventurous twenties I would probably have been in every one of the shacks in the Chicken Farm by now.
Narith told me there was little point in going to Phum Thmei during the daytime because the place didn’t come alive until after dark and most of the girls would still be asleep. When I mentioned my misgivings about the coming adventure to him he laughed.
“I’ll look after you,” he said. “You will need me to translate if you’re going to show that photograph around.” The motodop driver flexed his arm and showed me a bicep as big as a swan’s egg that I fervently hoped we wouldn’t need that night. “Buy me a couple of beers and I’ll make sure you get back in one piece,” he finished confidently.
I still didn’t much like the idea of a nocturnal visit and all afternoon I tried hard to persuade myself an afternoon trip to the Chicken Farm would do the job just as well. But of course, I eventually had to admit that going before the place had even opened up properly would be dicking out. Before I left I smoked a spliff hoping it would calm me down a bit and release the knot of tension that had tied my stomach into such a knot. In fact, the wacky backy had completely the opposite effect and by the time I left my room I had become completely paranoid and was anticipating wandering down some dangerous, unlit alleyway with shadowy hands reaching for me from all directions and danger hiding behind every corner. I had heard so many stories about the Chicken Farm, I didn’t know what to expect, and my imagination was working overtime. By eight p.m. I was still looking for a way out but I knew I had no excuses left when I saw Narith sitting on his motorcycle in his usual place outside his uncle’s restaurant as arranged. When he saw me coming he kicked his bike into life and made room for me on the pillion seat.
“Don’t look so worried!” he laughed at me. “You will probably enjoy yourself!” I doubted that very much.
The Chicken Farm was across the railway lines and down near the port about five minutes drive from Victory Hill. We jolted over the rusty rails of the train track and turned a sharp corner, then made our way down a bumpy, unmade track. At first there seemed to be nothing down the unmade road but stones and dirt, but we soon came into an area where wooden shacks were lined all along one side of the road—which had more ruts and potholes than a building site. There was nothing on the other side of the track apart from a large field behind a wall built of blocks. All the small huts looked like badly repaired farm buildings and were hammered together from a collection of wooden boards and corrugated tin. Some of them were dimly-lit by electric lights and some were illuminated by oil lamps. There was no music playing down Phum Thmei and just like my first night on The Hill during the power-cut, I had the feeling I had stepped back in time; only this time it was for real.
We rattled and thudded over the holes in the dark road until we reached the furthest hut along the track. Narith said the shacks at the far end of the Phum Thmei were occupied by Vietnamese girls whereas those nearest the port housed Cambodian women. About halfway down there was a larger block building and I was astonished to see it was a tiny guesthouse. I wondered if anyone was actually pervy enough to stay in such a seedy location, until I realized it could be a fine place for a sex-starved sailor with a night or two’s shore leave whose ship might be docked in the nearby port. Narith asked me where I wanted to stop first and I said I would leave it up to him. The ramshackle huts all looked pretty much the same to me and none of them looked particularly inviting. I suppose there were about thirty of them in all and I knew at once I was on a fools’ errand if I expected to find Psorng-Preng in such a tumbledown, hotchpotch of darkened buildings. Whatever had old Ron been thinking of when he
had sent me down here? I wondered if despite his apparent sharpness the old sailor had perhaps been a bit senile and I hadn’t noticed.
The first hut we went to was the one at the very end of the road. There were four dirty plastic chairs placed outside and we sat down and ordered a couple of cans of cold beer which the Mamasan took out of a red cooler filled with tins and ice. Narith told me all the girls were Vietnamese. Two of them sat next to us. One of them was very pretty but her eyes stared vacantly into space and it was plain there was something not quite right about her. The girl who sat next to me was also attractive until she opened her mouth to reveal a set of broken, rotting teeth. I guessed the poor girl didn’t have enough money to get them fixed. Another girl came running out of the dark entrance to the shack carrying a kind of metal pan full of burning papers. She placed the makeshift incinerator in the road outside the shack and let the fire burn out; she was barefoot and I was surprised when she took a running jump and leapt over the flames; several of the other girls did the same thing. I looked up the track and I saw many of the huts had similar fires burning outside. Narith said the smoke drove the mosquitoes away from the buildings and the girls jumped over the flames for good luck. The small fires outside the huts lit up the darkness of the track for a while until the flickering, orange flames finally died and once again we were in virtual darkness. Every so often a group of shadowy cattle wandered along the dusty road slowly, lowing plaintively in the darkness.
Before we left I had given Narith Ron’s photograph and at my insistence he showed it to the Mamasan. She barely looked at it and shook her head. It was obvious she had lost interest in us when she realized we were not about to employ the services of any of her girls. As we drank our beer I asked Narith how the Chicken Farm had come about. He told me how someone who lived in one of the little houses along the track had thought it would be a great idea to rent out pussy to the sailors from the nearby port and the place had escalated from there. After that first shack had opened for business, one short year later the whole street had become a knocking shop. I gave a sharp intake of breath as I watched a motorcycle blast by at a ridiculous speed, wobbling and leaping dangerously over the ridges and depressions in the road. Narith told me there was a serious motorcycle accident in Phum Thmei nearly every night. Punters either drunk or high on sex and drugs flew over the treacherous surface away from the Chicken Farm only to hit a hole or rut and ended up splattered all over the road or up the block wall that ran alongside it.