The Best American Travel Writing 2019

by Jason Wilson

  “But if they were originally from Cambodia, why are they immigrants?”

  “Because during the civil war, they went to Vietnam, and after the war they came back.”

  Nationalism is always in search of an enemy. In Cambodia, the search has a neat circular logic: The Vietnamese are enemies because they are foreign. They are foreign because they are enemies. Their existence here betrays a contradiction between the myth of a pure Khmer empire and the country’s lived history of migration and movement along the Mekong. The contradiction has been resolved at times by violence, but it is perpetuated by education. The Khmer Rouge years may be fading from living memory, but children are still taught to resent the loss of “Lower Cambodia,” and every student has heard of the rapes, gas attacks, and elaborate acts of torture that Vietnamese soldiers are believed to have committed during the Indochina wars.

  “All of that stuff tends to weigh very heavily on Cambodian minds,” Craig Etcheson, a Khmer Rouge scholar at Harvard, told me. “And that is very easy for opportunistic politicians to exploit and inflame.” Etcheson is a founder of the Documentation Center of Cambodia, which has provided much of the evidence for the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia, or Khmer Rouge Tribunal, convened in 2006 to try a handful of senior Khmer Rouge leaders for crimes against humanity. The second phase of the trials, concerning genocide against minority groups, including the Vietnamese, concluded its final arguments last summer. A ruling is expected this year.

  Lyma Nguyen, an international civil-party counsel at the tribunal, told me she had hoped that one consequence of the trial would be a pathway to a stable legal identity for Vietnamese survivors of the Khmer Rouge. But she encountered insurmountable resistance to the idea. Current plans for reparations include only a watered-down education program for raising awareness about nationality laws. “Many mainstream Cambodians, including some lawyers and academics, actually don’t think the Vietnamese victims of the genocide should have a legitimate claim to having suffered genocide, because they’re Vietnamese,” she said. “They think it’s all a big conspiracy by Vietnam to swallow up Cambodia.”

  Most ethnic Vietnamese in the country continue to feel that they are Cambodians of Vietnamese origin. They refuse to give up hope that someday their Cambodian identity will be accepted in the country they call home. Instead, with somewhere between 400,000 and 1 million members, according to independent scholars, and virtually no international calls for Cambodia to uphold its own nationality laws, they are arguably one of the largest and least-supported stateless populations in the world.

  The ethnic Vietnamese have taken to hiding their documents from the police currently sweeping the country. It’s not the first time this kind of thing has happened to them. At the Vietnamese pagoda in Kampong Chhnang, I met a diminutive 80-year-old seamstress. Only monks and laypeople are meant to live at the pagoda, but she didn’t have any family—her children died before her eyes in a Khmer Rouge labor camp—so the monks took pity on her. I asked whether she ever received any identification papers. She shuffled to her room and came back holding a small packet wrapped in twine. “You’re lucky,” she said as she untied it. “I’ve never let anyone look at these before.” She began spreading an astonishing half century’s worth of documents across the table. There were cards from Sihanouk’s Cambodia alongside decades’ worth of residency permits from Vietnam, to which she was twice deported. So long as she never showed them to anyone, the documents could never be invalidated or purged. They were her private legal self, a superposition of identities both Vietnamese and Cambodian. She would not give them up. “I’ll keep these documents with me until I die,” she said, “and then I’ll take them to the grave with me.”

  The monks on the floating pagoda in Kampong Luong were preparing for the ceremony of the drowned, arranging yellow orchids and four-o’clocks beneath a Buddha framed in flashing lights. A rented pavilion had been floated over and stocked with chairs. Young volunteers scattered riel and mangos on a picnic table, and all morning long pilgrims from Phnom Penh arrived to give money to the poor and receive blessings. It was August, and the air was torpid.

  Drowning is a bad death, the temple laymen explained. The souls of the drowned become water ghosts—khmoch teuk in Khmer—causing shipwrecks and pulling swimmers under by their legs. The ceremony coaxes the spirits out of the water so that they may find their way to the next life or proceed to the heavenly plane.

  The heat broke with a late-afternoon downpour. The children of supplicants made a game of leaping through the deluge onto an empty fish barge moored to the pagoda, then back again with fearless precision. At dusk, the ceremony began. There was an hour of amplified chanting before the head monk tossed holy water over the crowd and called for the doors of hell to open. As if on cue, the rain slowed, then stopped. The temple emptied into the ferries and sampans outside. At the front of the largest ferry, a monk rang a finger cymbal to wake the drowned, and the boats slipped onto the open lake. There was no moon. The water was black. Webs of distant lightning soundlessly limned the clouds red. Along the sides of the ferries and the gunwales of each boat, families placed paper rafts and plastic lotus flowers into the water. Each was topped by a burning candle, such that the lake became a field of bobbing orange stars. All was still, save for the families who boated past, singing into the dark. Some of their boats nearly spilled over with children. Some of the paper boats flared up in a flash and sank.

  Beyond the scarp that runs along Chong Koh, a new market complex was under construction, and with it came berms of red soil and cement foundations cratered with silted ponds. Once the market was finished, the villagers in Chong Koh would be evicted again, ahead of floating communities across the province. Officials said the villages were illegal and environmentally toxic. Their residents would be squeezed onto marshy rented plots earmarked for immigrants, far from their boats and fish cages.

  Neither Hoarith nor Samnang wanted to move. “I can’t speak out,” Samnang said as we sat drinking coffee in his house. “They claim to give us a choice. But we have no right to buy any other land, so really it’s no choice at all.”

  We paddled next door, where Hoarith was too consumed by boat repair to worry about any new evictions. Last week he had chopped three feet off the back of his long-tail. Now his transmission was spread out before him like a gutted squid.

  As he worked, Hoarith’s thoughts often went back to his prison cell and to the spot of cold floor next to the toilet where he had slept. “I never discriminate against anyone, Vietnamese or Khmer,” he said. “But I was treated so badly.” If he were granted Khmer citizenship, he said, all would be forgiven. “My parents were born here, and I was born here,” he said. “I have that right.”

  There was nothing to say. Samnang found a hatchet to sharpen on the rear step over the water. Hoarith turned back to his work. A washer, slick with oil, shot from his hand. It bounced against the floor and off the side of the house before he caught it over the water, hissing in surprise.

  The first people to leave Chong Koh went by night as soon as the new immigration cards were announced in 2014. Since then, at least a thousand have shoved off to other provinces or sold their houses and hitched to Vietnam, part of a growing exodus all over Cambodia. In village after village, the immigration police and council leaders said the same thing: “The Vietnamese are leaving.”

  In a pinch, Hoarith thought he might be able to live with his wife’s relatives in Vietnam. Better was the lake. On the open lake it was more dangerous, but he would be close to his ancestors, and the authorities there weren’t as strict. The boat people had figured out how to manage them, as they managed the squalls and the waves. They knew how not to challenge the weather but survive it, was how he put it. That was the trick. You had to plan for the storm before the clouds opened up.

  DEVON O’NEIL

  Irmageddon

  from Outside Magazine

  As a kid, you can’t control where you grow up. To land somewhere lik
e St. John, in the US Virgin Islands, takes luck—and in my case an adventurous mother. My fraternal twin brother, Sean, and I were five years old when our mom decided that she was tired of commuting from Westport, Connecticut, to New York City. So in December 1985, she and her boyfriend bought a 41-foot sailboat named Yahoo, we packed everything we owned into 19 duffel bags, and we headed south.

  St. John, half of which is covered by Virgin Islands National Park, offered singular beauty—and plenty of places to anchor our new floating home. Mom took a job as a landscaper in Fish Bay and eventually got her real estate license. Sean and I fell in with a rat pack of kids who congregated after school to play tackle football, catch tarantulas and lizards, and crawl under barroom floors in search of quarters. We grew up boogie boarding and surfing on the south shore. One day we took turns reeling in a 350-pound shark off the west end of Jost Van Dyke, next door in the British Virgin Islands.

  After two years on the boat, Mom bought a house. A house that, on September 6, 2017, was completely destroyed by Hurricane Irma. At the time, my mother was on the mainland for a wedding and a visit with Sean and me in Colorado, where we both live with our families. Four days after the storm, we found a YouTube video with aerial footage of our neighborhood. It was annihilated; I didn’t recognize our home, a modest two-story structure that had survived hurricanes for 30 years. It looked like someone had shot a missile into it. So did our neighbors’ houses. I watched the video five times. Despite studying the footage, which covered at least a quarter mile in all directions, I could not locate our roof.

  It had been more than 15 years since I’d lived on St. John, but I still considered it home. It’s where I learned about the world, everything from fishing to race. When we were nine, my brother and I spent an entire spring glued to a chain-link fence watching St. John’s all-black Little League team practice. The West Indian coaches, former pro prospects Orville “Chopper” Brown and Terry “Chino” Chinnery, asked if we’d like to join the team the following year. We did. On September 16, 1989, while practicing in the island’s main town of Cruz Bay, I got hit by a pitch and broke my elbow. As the doctor wrapped it in a cast, he said, “Have you heard about the storm coming?”

  He said it was called Hugo and that the territory was in line for a direct strike. The Virgin Islands have a long, fatal history with tropical cyclones. The first recorded major hurricane hit the island in 1697. Devastating storms followed in 1772, 1819, 1867, and 1916. It had been decades since a legitimate threat had materialized.

  By then we were in our new house a half mile above Cruz Bay; other residents lived in small communities scattered above bays and beaches. We were oblivious to the storm’s power. Instead of installing hurricane shutters or armor screens, like people do now, we duct-taped an X over each of the six sliding glass doors and sat on our living room couch as Hugo roared through with 150-mile-per-hour sustained winds. We watched a neighbor’s roof peel off, a shed get picked up by a tornado, and a restaurant’s roof slam into our yard like a kite. When the glass started to bow, Mom told us to hide under the bed.

  In 1995, Hurricane Marilyn landed another roundhouse. Sean and I were in Connecticut when it hit; Mom rode out the storm on a boat in Hurricane Hole, a sheltered bay that offers some protection from the wind. Though the boat held its position, people who hunkered down in more vulnerable locations onshore still insist that the winds were substantially stronger than the 115-mile-per-hour forecast.

  I recall images from those storms, but the damage I saw on the Irma video was in a class by itself—three or four times as bad as Hugo and Marilyn combined, locals estimated. “The forces were just incomprehensible compared with previous storms,” says Rafe Boulon, a St. John native and retired scientist whose great-grandfather opened the US Weather Bureau office on Puerto Rico in the early 1900s. “Some places lost probably ten thousand years of sand and vegetation in a matter of three hours.”

  As soon as Irma formed as a tropical storm off the west coast of Africa on August 30, it grabbed scientists’ attention. Weak upper-level winds over the Atlantic and sea-surface temperatures that were 2 degrees warmer than average made for an ominous mix as the storm moved toward the Caribbean.

  “It’s amazing how much difference just one or two degrees can make at that water temperature in terms of how strong a hurricane can get,” says Jay Hobgood, an associate professor of atmospheric science at Ohio State University who tracked Irma and has been studying hurricanes since the 1970s.

  Despite a roughly 400-mile diameter, Irma had to thread a needle to inflict catastrophic damage on populated places. Most destruction occurs in a hurricane’s eyewall, a band of brutally violent wind spinning counterclockwise around the eye; beyond that, winds drop off quickly. This creates a 40-to-60-mile-wide path where you don’t want to be. Almost all hurricanes pass between Trinidad, just north of South America, and Bermuda. But most of them track north of the US Virgin Islands, which have only a 3 percent chance of being hit by a hurricane that’s Category 3 or stronger.

  Irma soon grew to Category 5, with maximum sustained winds of 185 miles per hour—the second-highest speed on record for an Atlantic hurricane. The day before it hit, Chopper got a call from his son, Okyeame, who works in intelligence for the US Navy and is Sean’s and my godson. At 61, Chopper is built like a defensive end and remains as imposing as when he served as the island’s unofficial patriarch, someone who mothers would bring their sons to for discipline and direction. Okyeame told his father that he had researched the storm and it was a monster—nothing like it had hit St. John in generations, if ever. Chopper felt a wave of fear wash over him.

  The same day, I called my closest friend from childhood, Galen Stamford, who was living in the one-bedroom apartment on the first floor of my mom’s house with his wife and six-year-old daughter. Sean and I met Galen our first week in the Virgin Islands. He grew up to be one of the top surfers in the region and a beloved island figure. Like everyone else, he had been watching Irma’s advance with dread. “I don’t think your mom’s house is going to survive this one,” he said. He had decided to stay at a friend’s concrete house in Peter Bay, on the north side of the island, where the windows and doors would be protected by a large armor screen. They had stocked enough food and water to last three months.

  Across the 20-square-mile island, the 4,000 residents finalized preparations of their own. In Rendezvous Bay, on the island’s south side, Carlos Di Blasi, a 53-year-old restaurant owner, had decided to ride out the storm in the house that he and his wife, Maria, had built 16 years earlier. It had one-foot-thick concrete walls and a roof made of corrugated tin, three-quarter-inch plywood, and half-inch cedar.

  Sailors in the area frantically rushed to secure their boats. Longtime skipper Richard Benson, 66, buzzed around in his dinghy helping other people get ready, including his son, Daniel. Benson owned one of St. John’s iconic charter boats, the all-black, 84-foot “pirate ship” Goddess Athena. He had a long blond beard and gold teeth, and he was known for his stern temperament and reliability. He and Daniel had five boats to prep between them, but as they worked, Daniel was fighting a stomach bug that left him barely able to speak. “I felt terrible,” recalls Daniel, a 26-year-old artist and surfer. “All I wanted was to be with my dad and help him.”

  Before Benson steered the Goddess Athena to Coral Bay on September 5, he did something that was rare for him: he admitted regret. “We should’ve sailed south two days ago,” he told a friend.

  Benson didn’t have as many options as smaller-boat owners did for where to seek shelter. In Hurricane Hole, the National Park Service allots 105 spots across four bays where captains can clip onto a one-inch-thick chain strung across the ocean bottom. But boats longer than 60 feet aren’t allowed to use the chain, so Benson positioned the Goddess Athena in the shallower water and mud of Sanders Bay, across the harbor.

  Just north of where Benson anchored, a 50-year-old lifelong sailor named Adam Hudson tied off his 27-foot Bristol, Solstice, in ro
ughly the same spot he always did: in front of the old customhouse on the east side of the bay. The first time he rode out a major hurricane on the water—Hugo, when he was in his early 20s—Hudson escaped a pileup of boats by jumping into chest-deep water and wading to shore as raindrops shelled his skin. He and his dad watched their boat get pounded for the next eight hours, irreparably damaged. This time he figured he’d be fine, if for no other reason than he’d always been fine in this spot—the same rationale Benson seemed to be using.

  The night before Irma struck St. John, it mowed down Barbuda—an island three times the size of St. John—leaving 95 percent of its buildings uninhabitable. St. Johnians who watched the radar that night were forced to accept a grim reality.

  “Imagine you’re skydiving, and you pull the rip cord and nothing happens,” Daniel Benson says. “You look at the ground, and the glance that you and the ground exchange, that moment of imminence—that’s what it felt like.”

  On the morning of September 6, the storm ramped up at different times in different places, but it happened quickly everywhere. In Peter Bay, Galen and his storm mates—seven people and six dogs—observed an almost instantaneous change when the eyewall arrived at around 11:15 a.m. “It was like a snap of your fingers,” he said. “There was no warning. We went from 70- to 160-mile-per-hour winds like that. The bronze railings started to whistle. You could hear ceramic roof tiles getting ripped off one by one.”

  Five miles south, Carlos Di Blasi and his family lounged in a bedroom watching a movie, wondering why it was so quiet. Their house faced east and was tucked against a mountain, sheltered from the west winds. Until 12:30 p.m., you could have heard a quarter hit the floor. Then a big gust shook the house, and Di Blasi decided that they should move downstairs to a more secure room. He walked to the closet to get his shoes as Maria and their 11-year-old son, Alejo, looked out the window.