The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  We had consumed many rounds of Russian beer, purchased on the other side for about a dollar a can. (Norwegian beer costs eight times as much.) Brede Sæther, a businessman and the landlord of the Independent Barents Observer, suggested a nightcap at his place. Six of us followed him through downtown, where dusk cast pale-cornflower light onto the snow. Sæther led us into his backyard and along a neatly shoveled pathway through hip-high snow. He knelt down and, with a grunt, yanked up a great metal door in the ground. “Here,” he bellowed theatrically, with a slight backward sway, “is my bunker!”

  A staircase descended more than a story underground and deposited us in a massive cavern of around a thousand square feet, an echoing, apocalyptic ballroom. The main chamber had 20-foot ceilings and connected to half a dozen other rooms, some blocked by metal doors, others accessible via a low-ceilinged hallway. “There are bunkers all over Kirkenes,” said an awestruck Staalesen, “but I’ve never seen anything like this.”

  During the Second World War, Kirkenes was on the northernmost front, and there’s a whole underworld in the city, built by the Nazis—and perhaps by their Russian prisoners of war—to defend against Soviet forces. Sæther tossed us each a beer and called us over to a narrow, circular stone chamber that reached all the way up to the crust of earth above us, where we could see an opening onto the evening light. He had discovered this tubular room only last year, when a crack running beneath an adjacent wall inspired him to take it down with a jackhammer. He soon realized that the room was filled with the garbage that he and his family had been dumping down a mystery hole in their backyard for decades. Because of its shape, he deduced that the room had been a gunner station. “We thought there might be treasure!” Sæther said, laughing. “But it was just my own trash!” He slammed his hand against another wall, which seemed to promise more mystery just beyond. “This summer, I’m going to knock it down.”

  Sæther’s remark reminded me of a conversation I once had with an undocumented family living in a studio apartment in the Tenderloin, in San Francisco. I’d asked why they’d come to the United States. “We just always had this curiosity,” the mother said. The border, she suggested, had an appeal that was irrational, almost mystical. “We just wanted to know,” she recalled, placing her hand against her forehead as if scouring the horizon, “what is it on the other side?”

  Later, I read that while the Nazis were building the bunker network in Kirkenes, Adolf Hitler issued Directive 40, which called for another defensive public-works project: the so-called Atlantikwall, a fortification that would surround the sea perimeter of the Nazi empire. In March 1942, he conscripted 260,000 soldiers and civilians to build the wall, imagining it as a physical barrier between the Third Reich and the rest of the world. In the end, the project was a series of unconnected fortifications along the coasts of Germany, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, and France. Hitler boasted that the wall was impenetrable, but in 1944 the Allies would manage to breach it in a single day.

  When migrants first started crossing the border into Kirkenes, the Norwegian government commissioned a series of social media posts to discourage the influx. “Why would you risk your life?” the posts read in Farsi, Arabic, English, and French. The goal was to “inform people of the dramatic consequences of embarking on such a large journey,” explained Teigen, the political adviser. If online rumors helped to facilitate migration along the Arctic route, the thinking went, perhaps the same medium could be used to stop it.

  On my last morning in Norway, I went to meet with Edin Krajisnik, who was working as a refugee-resettlement adviser with Norwegian People’s Aid, a humanitarian and charity organization. His office in downtown Oslo is a few blocks from the building where, in 2011, Anders Breivik, a radicalized former member of the Progress Party, set off a bomb. He went on to massacre dozens of leftist Labor Party youth leaders on a nearby island, hoping his actions would spark an anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant revolution.

  “There are more invisible walls in Norway than visible ones,” Krajisnik said. These take the form of repressive, anti-immigrant laws, of government-sponsored Facebook posts discouraging migration, and even of anti-immigrant public opinion. When he came to Norway in 1993 as a young refugee from Bosnia, Krajisnik was met with open arms. Today, he lamented, new arrivals face a different reception. The spike in anti-immigrant fear “coincided with an increase of images of ISIS on the internet,” he told me. “They’re seeing more images of terrorists than they are of suffering children.”

  This embrace of the internet—of walls that are essentially virtual, made of algorithms rather than steel and concrete—as a political tool is perhaps understandable. Physical barriers are moving toward obsolescence. Yet we keep building them anyway. Why? In Walled States, Waning Sovereignty, the political scientist Wendy Brown asserts that such walls are a reaction to “the dissolving effects of globalization on national sovereignty.” The more enmeshed, known, and mutually dependent we are, the more we fear that the nation-state itself is toppling into irrelevance. Meanwhile, the internet also helps propagate fear—of terrorism, of the other—with racist media, hate groups, tweets, and viral content thriving online and further stoking irrational paranoia. The wall craze, like global nationalist movements, can be seen as a backlash, a call for clear, knowable boundaries in an increasingly porous world.

  Perhaps in response, walls loom large in contemporary popular culture. In the world of the Hunger Games trilogy, walls protect the bounty of the capital. On Game of Thrones, an immense, icy barrier shields civilization from the unknown, sinister evil on the other side.

  Politicians, too, invoke this imperiled sense of identity in their calls to close off borders. Forced migrants are moving around the world in record numbers, and the refugee crises are steadily moving toward the global North, into wealthy nations whose fixed borders have traditionally defined them. When millions of refugees cross from one sub-Saharan country to another, there is no threat to the United States and Norway. In such cases, governments offer humanitarian rhetoric, aid packages, and resettlement opportunities, which do little in the face of mass migration. But a mass of refugees clambering over your own borders is something altogether different. Images of these migrants can evoke a humanitarian response but also populist fear. If a nation seems to be coming apart, perhaps a wall can hold it together. We convince ourselves that we’re in a state of perpetual siege; we turn the state into a bunker.

  After my meeting with Krajisnik, I stopped at Akershus Fortress, the old walled center of Oslo, built in the thirteenth century to defend the city against the Danes and the Swedes. The cobbled grounds, which resembled something between a college campus and a cemetery, led to a hilltop, with the glistening harbor visible over the lip of the wall. In spite of multiple attacks from the Swedes, the Scots, and the Danes, Akershus was never successfully besieged. (It was, however, given up to the Nazis without a fight.)

  Up on the rampart, I stood within fortifications used to defend against a knowable enemy. Today, we are assaulted by threats that we cannot always see, and in our fear it’s as if we’ve become sentinels on our own walls, ever ready for battle.

  I thought of the fences of yesterday, and the fence of today. There was something absurd about traveling all the way to Norway to see a fence so small. Yet its flimsiness was somehow fitting: it was, after all, no more than a screen onto which anyone could project needs, fears, and dreams.

  When I was ready to leave, I somehow took a series of wrong turns and found myself stuck in a maze. Surely this path will lead me out, I kept telling myself, but instead, every turn I took led back to the wall itself. There was still something ominous about being trapped amid the looping pathways and the trilling Akershus birds.

  My flight was leaving in a few hours, so I pulled out my phone and followed my blue-dot avatar out of the fortress and back into the city, onto the train, through passport control, then finally up into the air. From the plane, everything below was just sea and ice and then land a
gain; the distance rendered the borders invisible.

  BEN MAUK

  The Floating World

  from The New York Times Magazine

  The best handyman living among the boat people in Chong Koh was named Taing Hoarith. Most days, Hoarith woke up at 5 a.m. and bought a bowl of noodle soup from a passing sampan, the same genre of wandering bodega from which his wife, Vo Thi Vioh, sold vegetables houseboat to houseboat. When she left for the day, around six, Hoarith rolled up their floor mat and got to work.

  Chong Koh is one of hundreds of floating villages, comprising tens of thousands of families, on the Tonle Sap River and the lake of the same name in Cambodia. Dangers on a floating village multiply in the rainy season. When I first visited, in late July, there was always something for Hoarith to do: repairing storm damage in a wall of thatched palm, clearing the water hyacinths that collected along the upstream porch. Sometimes the house had to be towed closer to the receding shoreline so that storms or the waves of passing ships would not capsize it. Every few months, he got his ancient air compressor working and swam beneath the house, a rubber hose between his teeth, to refill the cement jars that kept the whole thing buoyant. He was mindful of pythons.

  The afternoon of my arrival, Hoarith was squatting over an old butane camp stove, scraping at a rusted gas valve. Rust was the common enemy on the water. Someone had thrown the stove away, but he thought he could fix it to sell on his next trip onto the lake. His wooden long-tail, moored against the house, covered in tarpaulin, and heavy with cargo, carried him to floating villages as far as 90 miles away. “I know Tonle Sap like my hand,” he said. There was Prek Tor, a remote village where every family, rich or poor, had a wooden cage for raising crocodiles. And Kbal Taol, where fishermen lived in clustered homes on the open water, risking the daily storms, competing to catch hatchlings with nets up to half a mile long. Hoarith visited them all. He was sometimes on the lake for a month at a stretch, selling pots and stoves, sleeping rough under the long-tail’s planked roof.

  But he always came back to Chong Koh, his home of several years, where the villagers live on cabin-size houseboats and junks arranged in tidy rows orthogonal to either shore. In the space between houses, some families raise carp and catfish in bamboo cages or keep floating gardens of potted pepper and papaya trees. Other villages are labyrinthine extensions of nearby shore towns, with broad Venetian canals and twisting alleyways, floating temples, churches, schoolrooms, and oil-black ice factories. Chong Koh is relatively small, and shrinking—Cambodian authorities would like it to disappear entirely—but it lies about a mile from the heart of Kampong Chhnang, the large provincial capital, and as Hoarith worked, a steady fleet of peddlers took their boats to and from its markets.

  While Hoarith picked at the stove with a screwdriver, a neighbor lay in a hammock, watching him work. The neighbor, like Hoarith and everyone else in the village, was ethnically Vietnamese, and he had a Vietnamese name, Vieng Yang Nang. But most of the time he went by Samnang, which means “lucky” in Khmer, the language of Cambodia’s ethnic majority. Both men kept two names on the water—one Khmer, one Vietnamese—and switched between them freely. They felt at home in both worlds, although they weren’t always accepted in the first. In Cambodia, where the concepts of nationality and ethnicity are inextricable, members of the ethnic Vietnamese minority are known as yuon, a ubiquitous slur that is sometimes translated as “savage.”

  I sat on the floor listening to Samnang and Hoarith revisit a conversation from earlier in the day. That morning we had visited the school and the Vietnamese pagoda, stilted buildings near the fish market where Chong Koh once stood. Local officials evicted the village in 2015, forcing residents to move more than a mile downriver, and both buildings were now hard to access. Such evictions are frequent and unpredictable, and sometimes lead to other trouble. After Hoarith asked the authorities to help with costs related to the move, the police arrested him and accused him of inciting villagers to resist eviction. He spent three months in a squalid prison cell before Thi Vioh borrowed enough money for his release, after which the charges against him were dropped. They only wanted to send him a message, he thought. “I hadn’t committed any crime,” he said. “I had a reputation.”

  Hoarith and Samnang agreed that you can’t fight evictions on the water. Floating settlements are technically illegal, and the Vietnamese in particular are powerless against such orders. “The poor will become poorer,” Samnang said. Hoarith said nothing, only swept the pile of rust flakes that he amassed into a knothole in the floor. He set a can of butane into the stove’s empty chamber and pressed the pilot button. A bull’s-eye of blue flame appeared. We laughed. A few houses away, a woman sang love songs on a karaoke system powered by a car battery.

  The Mekong River’s lower basin is vast, encompassing parts of Myanmar and Thailand, virtually all of Laos and Cambodia, and parts of southern Vietnam, where, after a 3,000-mile journey across five national borders, the mother of rivers divaricates into a complex delta network and drains into the South China Sea. Tonle Sap Lake sits roughly in the middle of this lush expanse. On a map, it appears as a crooked blue finger extending from the Mekong near Phnom Penh. But it is more often described as Cambodia’s heart, both for its rhythmic flood pulse and the sustaining role it plays in the country’s economy and food supply.

  Tonle Sap’s unique hydrology makes it one of the most fertile ecosystems on the planet. For half the year, the Tonle Sap River flows southeast from the lake to Phnom Penh. But during the rainy season, the swollen Mekong forces the Tonle Sap to flow in reverse, and the lake engorges to as much as six times its dry-season expanse, two miracles of plenty which over the millennia have drawn fishermen and rice farmers alike to its doubly silted, nutrient-rich shores. Eels, frogs, shrimp, and fish proliferate with tropical abandon, particularly in the fecund bottleneck where, viewed from above, the river appears to fray into dozens of delicate blue fibers before braiding itself back into open water.

  The border between Vietnam and Cambodia, which divides the Mekong Delta, has occasioned more battles than nearly any other in Asia. The people living on either side have been in contact for at least a thousand years, an uninterrupted exchange of goods and labor that for the last four centuries has been marked by bold Vietnamese expansion. In the 1630s, a Cambodian king married a Vietnamese princess and allowed the Vietnamese to set up customs ports along the Mekong. The settlers eventually annexed the region, cutting off Cambodia’s access to the South China Sea and stranding many Khmer people inside Vietnam, where they developed a distinct ethnic identity as Khmer Krom. This occupation of “Lower Cambodia” has never been forgiven.

  Cambodia’s borders were formalized when the country became a colonial protectorate in 1863. The French imported Vietnamese workers for its rubber plantations and drew on Saigon’s educated elite as administrative clerks. The number of Vietnamese in the country increased 30-fold, to more than 150,000, or 6 percent of the population. By the time Cambodia declared independence in 1953, the country was polyethnic and multinational, with enclaves of hill tribes and other distinct indigenous minorities; populations of Chinese, Lao, and Vietnamese speakers; and boundaries that bore only a loose resemblance to those of its precolonial realm. It fell to Cambodia’s first modern leader, Norodom Sihanouk, to unify this haphazardly circumscribed populace.

  Sihanouk’s grand idea was to redefine the historic term “Khmer” to include a wide range of ethnic identities. The policy rendered most of the nation’s indigenous groups, including even its Muslim Cham minority, inheritors of the ancient imperial lineage. But the ethnic Vietnamese had no place in this new national typology. Although small numbers of them had lived in the country for centuries, they were Cambodia’s hereditary enemy. After a 1970 coup, they became the targets of pogroms and massacres, adding to the chaos of that decade, which began with civil war and a brutal United States bombing campaign and ended with occupation by the Vietnamese Army. In the interim, during the five-year reign of t
he Khmer Rouge, millions died from execution, starvation, and disease.

  Since 1979, the ruling Cambodian People’s Party, or CPP (with the former Khmer Rouge commander Hun Sen at its head), has kept the ethnic Vietnamese in a state of limbo, informally granting and rescinding rights depending on local political climates. The CPP’s opposition, the Cambodia National Rescue Party, or CNRP, is more consistently xenophobic, threatening to expel the Vietnamese invaders and reclaim “Lower Cambodia.” The party’s former leader, Sam Rainsy, once proposed to “send the yuon immigrants back,” and before the 2013 national elections he claimed that “if we don’t rescue our nation, four or five years more is too late—Cambodia will be full of Vietnamese; we will become slaves of Vietnam.”

  Human Rights Watch has described the traditional Cambodian hatred of the ethnic Vietnamese as “almost pathological.” It is strongest in the cities, particularly in Phnom Penh, where it can be hard to differentiate between observable corruption and baseless conspiracy. There are legitimate grievances about illegal logging and fishing by Vietnamese companies, but some people also insist that the Vietnamese are to blame for the spread of AIDS or that Pol Pot was a Vietnamese spy sent to annihilate the Khmer race. The hatred is vernacular. Cambodians undergoing gastrointestinal distress say their stomachs are “made in Vietnam,” and the short, prickly tree whose nettles deliver a daylong rash, and which is known to invade a region and quickly overrun it, is the ban la yuon: “the Vietnamese barb.”

  It’s tempting to view the floating villages, where the highest concentrations of ethnic Vietnamese live, as a consequence of politically waterborne lives. In truth, the villages’ history is long and obscure, and no one knows when the first one appeared in Cambodia. The French naturalist Henri Mouhot—who “discovered” Angkor Wat in the 1850s, although it had never been lost to locals—found in Phnom Penh a floating population of 20,000, more than twice as many as lived on land. He described one village of Khmer and Vietnamese merchants just outside the capital: