The Best Women's Travel Writing

by Lavinia Spalding

Another daughter had already died, before the war. Sometimes that other daughter had died because of suicide, because Seng hadn’t allowed her to marry the man she’d loved. Other times, that daughter had died because the man Seng had been tricked into allowing her to marry had killed her. I don’t remember which it was that day, just that neither that daughter nor Seng’s first wife got a finger.

  Those were the conditions that created Lynn. If those half-brothers and -sisters and a former husband hadn’t died, her parents wouldn’t have been arranged to be married. They wouldn’t have walked across Cambodia to escape; Seng wouldn’t have dragged Lu, pregnant, through a waist-deep river in the middle of a monsoon; Lynn’s brother Sam wouldn’t have been born in a Thai refugee camp and Lynn later in a farmhouse without heat in northern New York, where the people who’d sponsored their family forced them to live and work until they escaped to Oakland, California.

  It was a simple statement, as concrete and non-debatable as the date of one’s birth. We’d done a family tree project that year in school; I remember looking over at Lynn’s. After two sturdy branches of “Lu” and “Seng,” the tree turned to thin, wispy branches, then nothing. She’d finished the assignment early and stared off, looking bored.

  I counted them with Lynn, looked down at my fingers. “Four people,” I repeated. There wasn’t anything else to say, so we went back to coloring.

  Lynn’s room had two doors, one to the living room and one to the hallway. We always shut them both. We locked them sometimes, too—it felt safer that way.

  “So everyone you see here,” Cindy looked out from the tuk-tuk onto the bustle of the dusty road, “who’s over the age of thirty-five lived through the war?”

  I nodded.

  “God. It’s hard to imagine. Every single person …”

  Cindy and I were traveling out of the city center. The pavement gave way to dirt, sidewalks to mud puddles, as we made our way closer to the Killing Fields.

  I’d just met Cindy. She was a fellow travel writer, passing through Phnom Penh on her way to Siem Reap. We’d arranged to meet up and spend an afternoon together.

  I could relate to her observation: my first few days in the city, all I’d been able to think about was the war. I’d come to Cambodia looking for answers. I wanted to understand the war, the Khmer Rouge, and everything else that had never been openly discussed in Lynn’s family. I sensed it was a kind of key, the beginning of a story I’d walked in on halfway, a story Lynn and her brother Sam—and perhaps an entire generation—had also walked in on halfway.

  Our tuk-tuk rattled along the unsteady pavement, taking us closer to the mass-grave and execution site, one of Phnom Penh’s two main tourist attractions. The other was the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, the former S-21 torture prison under the Khmer Rouge. All the travel agencies along the riverside advertised for tours of the two, sometimes combined with a trip to a shooting range where travelers could fire AK-47s left over from the war (cost of ammunition not included).

  Most travelers stayed in Phnom Penh only long enough to see S-21 and the Killing Fields, then they scattered from the city. It was what Cindy was doing, and what I would have too, had I not come searching for answers. I’d been putting off visiting the Killing Fields, not wanting, I’d rationalized, to spend the $12 tuk-tuk fare venturing out solo. Cindy offered an opportunity to split the cost—but more than that, she offered companionship, and a buffer.

  Without buildings to block it, the wind grew stronger, and I blinked bits of dust and debris from my contact lenses. By the time we pulled into the dirt lot in front of the Killing Fields, stinging tears blurred my vision.

  “This happens every day here,” I laughed, and dabbed my eyes.

  The Killing Fields were set in a peaceful country landscape, with birds chirping and the echo of children singing from a nearby grammar school. Incense burned in front of the bone pagoda, where skulls were separated into tiers by age. We walked past ditches that had been mass graves, trees against which guards had bludgeoned children. None of it seemed real.

  A sign told us that when it rained, bits of victims’ bones and scraps of their clothing still surfaced through the dirt, more than thirty years later. As we walked, we kept seeing faded pieces of cloth, half exposed in the earth.

  Groups of Westerners in cargo shorts and sun hats wandered through the lot with clasped hands and concerned expressions. I saw only two Cambodians—young monks with round faces, their orange robes blazing against the brown earth.

  After about an hour, we exited the front gates. Dark-skinned men leaned against their bikes, chatted in the shade, napped quietly in the backs of their tuk-tuks as they waited for their fares to return. Many of them, I thought, looked over thirty-five.

  I remember laughing.

  Not a funny laugh but a you-have-got-to-be-fucking-kidding-me laugh. Beside me on the foldout bed, my duffel bag was still packed.

  It was the end of my first semester at university, and I’d just returned from my grandmother’s funeral on the East Coast. I’d sat down on my bed, turned my cell phone on for the first time in five days, and listened to a string of messages, vague and urgent, from Lynn, Sam, other childhood friends: “Something happened.” “Can you call us?”

  “What is it?” my roommate asked.

  “The parents of my childhood best friend died while I was gone,” I told her, staring at my phone. I closed my eyes as I said, “Her dad shot her mom, then himself.”

  “Oh my God,” was all Rose said.

  I walked out of our dorm room and roamed up and down the hall’s thin carpeting, a muffle of hip-hop and the smell of Nag Champa leaking from behind the doors, shaking my head and half-laughing. Friends poked their heads out of their rooms and asked me what was wrong; I told them. I didn’t yet have the distance I’d develop in the following days.

  “They died in a domestic violence dispute,” I’d say, which was softer, more detached. In the hall that night, I kept saying, “He shot her, he shot her,” and people backed away—unsure, I guess, of how to respond.

  At some point, I finally stopped walking and stood still at the end of the hall. I slid open the window and breathed the sharp December air. I looked out at the quiet bustle—students carrying books, standing around smoking in the dim light and fog. I realized I wasn’t surprised.

  I remembered strange things about Lynn’s house: footsteps at night, insomniac murmurings from down the hallway. In the weeks to come, more specific memories would return. Bruises across Sam’s shins; how Seng would hit him there because it wouldn’t show; an image of Seng—pointing at something, screaming, a flash in his eyes and a glint off his silver tooth.

  “My dad might be moving back to Cambodia,” I remembered Lynn leaning in, an excited whisper. “He could start his business again, and live over there, and we’d stay here. Like, maybe in six months.” I remembered us sitting cross-legged on the bedroom floor; us lying on our bellies on the swimming pool deck; us standing amid the morning glories waiting for our turn on the monkey bars.

  And I remembered the hallway—the muffled sound of heavy things moving, coming from behind a locked door, when I’d gotten up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. It had scared me, made me afraid to get up to pee—afraid of that narrow hallway with its mirror at the end.

  “I just didn’t think it was that bad,” we’d all say, in the days and weeks to come. But even then, no one would say what it was that had made us think it was bad to begin with. Had we all observed little things—bruises and passing comments—that we’d dismissed, ignored, convinced ourselves we’d made up and eventually forgotten?

  I didn’t remember any of it that night, the night I got the news—when I pressed my head against the mesh screen on the third floor of the dorms, stared out of the window, and tried to breathe. All there was that night was a vague sense, like the uneasy feeling you sometimes have waking up from a dream, and the words I kept repeating: “He shot her, he shot her.”

  “What do
you think of how the Khmer Rouge is taught to the next generation?”

  The question came in a French accent. A standing-room-only crowd had come out to the German-run Meta House cultural center for the screening of Enemies of the People—“the best documentary to be made about the Khmer Rouge,” Meta House’s director had assured us, “because it is the only one to be made by a Cambodian.”

  I counted five Khmer faces in the crowd, none of whom had stayed for the Q&A session with Cambodian director Thet Sambath.

  Sambath paused after the question, smiled that bashful Cambodian smile. “This I don’t know so much about,” he carefully evaded. “I know for many years, Khmer Rouge history was not taught in the schools.”

  The audience was nodding. With nearly three-quarters of the population born post-war—the so-called “new generation”—formal curricula about war history had been conspicuously missing from the schools for thirty years.

  “In the beginning, it was still very sensitive,” a young Cambodian had explained to me. “How do you talk about it—especially with Khmer Rouge still in the country, in the government?”

  Over the years, that initial avoidance of the subject had deepened into a de facto silence. Young people were left to piece together what they learned from their parents, which often wasn’t much.

  A massive disconnect formed. Many of the new generation began to doubt the Khmer Rouge even happened. They suspected that their parents were exaggerating.

  “How could Khmer people kill other Khmer people like that?” challenged a teenager interviewed in a documentary I’d watched. His mother sat behind him, looking away.

  I was shocked. These were young people living in Cambodia, amid the physical and psychological evidence: mass graves and landmines, astronomical rates of post-traumatic stress disorder, and their own absent family members.

  “It’s time for Cambodia to dig a hole and bury the past,” Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen, himself a former low-ranking Khmer Rouge, famously stated. Westerners often used this quote to exemplify the culture of silence around the war in Cambodia. Hillary Clinton cited it after a 2010 visit, when she urged the country to continue with the Khmer Rouge trials, because “a country that is able to confront its past is a country that can overcome it.”

  I’d read Clinton’s statement and nodded, thinking of my own attempts to understand the things I had been through, what I’d witnessed in Lynn’s family.

  “But, since 2009,” Sambath continued carefully, “there is now a textbook for high schools just on the Khmer Rouge. This is very good.” He paused again. “But I think this is not enough.”

  I thought of the entire section at Monument Books, the high-end, air-conditioned expat bookstore, dedicated to Khmer Rouge histories and memoirs. I thought: no, it’s not enough.

  I was walking out of the market, poised to dodge motorbikes with arms full of bananas and plastic bags of fish, when the smell struck me.

  A particular kind of incense, thick and ancient smelling, wafted from the wats and streetside altars in Phnom Penh. Obscured behind the jumble of market umbrellas, I’d forgotten that I was right beside the enormous Wat Ounalom. I stopped, blinking my eyes as the memory billowed back.

  Lynn’s parents’ funeral was held in East Oakland, a faded funeral home with two stray bullet holes in the street-facing window. I went through the ceremony in a daze, coming away with only a handful of images: Lynn smiling, greeting us casually in the entryway as though we’d come over for dinner; Sam crying at the podium as he read lyrics of an R. Kelly song.

  Old Cambodian women, hunched in their thin Chinatown blouses, rocked slightly and muttered to each other in the pews. Young Cambodian-Americans in baseball caps and baggy jeans talked on cellphones in the back and kept reaching into deep pockets as if to dig for items they never pulled out. A mix of Americans, parents from other families we’d grown up with, filled the rest of the seats.

  “Well, I just loved Lu so much,” Mrs. Reed had said. “She was a real nice lady.”

  No one mentioned Seng.

  The ceremony was both Buddhist and Christian. For the Christian component, an open casket had been elected. We filed past to pay our respects, and I winced at the sight of Lu; beneath the framed photograph, her reconstructed face looked like Silly Putty, a wax figure, a melted doll head.

  I walked past Seng without looking.

  After that came what I supposed was the Buddhist component. The caskets were closed and wheeled out of the room. We followed in a crowd, confused, behind the cluster of older Cambodians murmuring, raising incense sticks to their foreheads. Down a narrow hallway, a narrower doorway, to the crematory. The first casket, I didn’t know whose, was eased into the machine. Lynn and Sam were made to push the button.

  The smell began to filter out: embalming chemicals and burning body mixing with the musky incense. I blinked against the sting, lowered my head. I felt the smoke envelop me. When they began to cremate the second casket, I looked at my mom and whispered, “I have to go.”

  The smell stayed on our clothes and skin; we carried it in the car, back into our house where people gathered to mourn and eat casserole. We balled up our funeral clothes and put them in plastic bags to be taken to the cleaners. But the smell stayed with me, in my nose and hair for days.

  Silvio clutched a can of Angkor beer with dust-stained hands. He’d arrived in Phnom Penh that morning, on a motorbike with another Italian friend. Their backpacks and film equipment sat in a dirty pile in my friend Tim’s flat, where people had gathered for dinner.

  Silvio and his friend were making a documentary, they told me, on Indochina. They were in Phnom Penh for three days and wanted to interview people about the Khmer Rouge. Did I have any contacts?

  “Well,” I began slowly. “Not really.”

  “But you were researching this topic, no?”

  “Yeah, but as an outsider,” I glanced around our table of Westerners, Styrofoam boxes of take-out and cigarette smoke. “It’s hard to have access, you know?”

  I’d been in Phnom Penh six weeks. I’d learned a lot about Khmer Rouge history—read histories and memoirs, researched the state of mental health and trauma services in Cambodia, attended documentary screenings, become a regular fixture at Bophana, an audiovisual historical archive center. But, I had to admit to Silvio, that was as far as I’d gotten. I’d only sat down face-to-face with a handful of people, and even then we only discussed subjects tangentially connected to the war history.

  “It’s a lot to ask,” I told Silvio, “for people to talk about it, open up.” I was vaguely aware that I was talking mostly to myself.

  “Yes, but it wasn’t so long ago,” Silvio said. “There are still many people who lived through it. I think it shouldn’t be so hard to find a person who wants to talk.”

  I nodded slowly. I tried to explain how people didn’t really talk about the war. Sure—it was referenced a lot, was always kind of there, but there wasn’t any open discourse, any real or meaningful discussion.

  I paused. I realized I could have been describing Lynn’s family or her parents’ death, Pol Pot or her father Seng. I could have been describing myself.

  “Yes, but they should.” Conviction flashed through Silvio’s dark brown eyes. “This is how you move forward. It’s not good to keep quiet.”

  I know that, I felt like telling him. We know that.

  “Yeah, but it takes time,” I told him instead.

  He gave a nod, the kind that could mean anything at all, and lifted the can to his arched Roman lips. I watched the smoke twist from his cigarette. It looked, I thought, like incense.

  Lauren Quinn is a writer from Oakland, California. Her work has appeared in 7x7 and The San Francisco Chronicle and on websites such as World Hum, Matador, and the Huffington Post. She writes the blog Lonely Girl Travels and is currently living in Phnom Penh, Cambodia.

  KIRSTEN KOZA

  Mare’s Milk, Mountain Bikes, Meteors & Mammaries

  A nipply night
in nomad’s land.

  Oh, no, Kirsten!”

  My Kyrgyzstani guide’s warning came too late, and stepping in poo had never felt so good. My cycling shoe sank into the dreadful yet luxurious warmth of fresh animal dung. I was chilled to the point where I was actually lingering ankle-deep in feces, by choice.

  Yena shone the light of her cell phone, its only feature that was still working, onto the molten mound enveloping the bare skin of my lower leg. The droppings looked like something a brontosaurus might have deposited. A meteorite seared across the night sky, so close that you could actually hear it crackle as it hissed down the vertical gorge to the Chong-Kemin valley.

  The point of light from Yena’s phone caught me in the eyes. When I’d first met her, yesterday, after traveling thirty-six hours from Canada, I’d told her that I had two irrational phobias. The first one—fear of the dark—I fabricated as an excuse for not wanting to climb the unlit, steep, winding stairs of an eleventh-century minaret. I wasn’t worried about the lack of lighting; I was being lazy. The second phobia—which I’d added to brighten the mood after she looked disappointed that I didn’t want to go up the tower—was real: I was terrified of meteorites. I was seriously scared of being struck by a shooting star. I’d lie in bed at night imagining them out there in space.

  Now here we were on a mountain, in the dark, unable to make it across the pass with our bikes because a fresh rockslide had strewn unstable boulders and scree for several kilometers in every direction, including on the slope directly above us. We’d had to turn back and were descending on foot from an altitude of 4,000 oxygen-deficient meters above sea level, as night smothered Chok-Tal Mountain. The blinding dark was being shredded by the Perseid meteor shower—shooting stars so close it seemed I could even smell their trails of smelting iron and sulfur. I snuggled into the poop.

  “Yena, why did the old Kyrgyz nomad ask me if I was afraid of wolves?”

  “I no know why. Is very strange.”