| People like to talk about their travels, but few of us like to listen to them, must less “read” about them. Such resembles pedagogy, or just plain bragging. Writing is the best instrument I have for metabolizing my experience and clarifying my mind. To process. But writing about some of the dark places in Vietnam and Cambodia I visited…is proving to be difficult. I hardly have the language to articulate it. Any sentences I think to write, soon prove unusable, dry, inconsequential. But it is these places that are proving to be memory keepers and will probably stay within me forever. At least I hope so. That’s the thing about travel—it shoudn’t always be easy. Sometimes it’s necessary. Just because we can see (or not see) the past does not mean it is still not alive. |
| We need to think about the implications of visiting such dark sites. Are we honoring the victims, or are we simply voyeuristically indulging in the macabre? Are we inadvertently glorifying their oppressor? Is it exploitation for commercial gain? Disrespectful? Is tragedy now a destination? Or does it force us to confront the uncomfortable reality of dark history, a warning about the human capacity for cruelty? Going to these places instantly slammed the question, “How much am I willing to feel…or not to feel?” |
| While in Poland In my early twenties, I had the chance to visit the concentration camp in Auschwitz. I chose not to go. I still am not sure if that was the right decision. Since, I have been at the Sarajevo “roses” and in Warsaw, both cities with shrapnel holes still on buildings, ghosts of the past around every corner. I have seen Robben Island, been to Pompeii, Pearl Harbour, Alcatraz Island, The Tower of London, Anne Frank Huis, and the Roman Colosseum—commodification of places of pain and shame. |
| Stories once silenced and suppressed. Places that housed incomphensible atrocities. The people valued less than a grain of rice. Where the impossible happened. There is a palpable energy that stays long with you after visiting such a place. It weighs heavy on your heart. But until you actually go there, all your knowledge comes from secondhand sources, like memoirs and sanitized movies. Now you see it first hand, standing on a part of history instead of apart from it. There is a depth and breadth that gives a whole new authority, poignancy and authenticity. It is here where forgetting is just as important as remembering. But nobody enters these places, they enter you. |
| Yes, I went biking along rice paddies, sailed around the limestone karsts of Halong Bay, browsed the labyrinthine lanes of Hoi An’s Old Town, ate fish amok, walked miles at Angkor Wat in Siem Reap and around temples and temples and temples. |
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But I also went here. |
| “And then they took my father.” |
| “To keep you is no benefit, to destroy you is no loss.” |
| People were executed here by the autocratic, xenophobic, and repressive Khmer Rouge, using the most brutal of methods. Between 1975 and 1979, more than 2 million Cambodians were killed or died of starvation and disease under the Khmer Rouge regime. The soldiers of the Khmer Rouge pushed people into wells and ponds, suffocating them to death. They baked them alive in local tile ovens, some with livers cut out while still alive. Some, they struck down with hammers at the edge of mass graves. Children were smashed against tree trunks or pierced wth sharp bamboo sticks to save bullets. Women were raped before execution, and things done to pregnant women and their fetuses that should not ever have to enter our imaginings. Children abducted and indoctrinated, and forced to commit atrocities. Families torn apart to silence them. It plumbed the depths of horror. It was a world on fire. |
| “When pulling out the weeds, remove the roots and all.” A saying of the Khmer Rouge in an effort to justify the murder of children. |
| The Tuol Sleng (S21)The hell state “prison” where people were held for weeks and months for grueling interrogations before they were either tortured to death or sent for re-education—meaning execution. It is raw and shocking. The shower size cells, the barren and stained rooms used to interrogate them, the metal shackles used to tie prisoners to their cots. Blood is still on the walls and torture tools dot the site. There are paintings that depict the methods of torture used on the prisoners: some had electric shocks administered to their tongues; some had their fingernails pulled out with clamps; and others had their heads plunged under water until they passed out. Some were subjected to medical experiments, including “live autopsies” done without anesthesia and experiments with homemade medications. People bled to death. Of the approximately 14,000 people imprisoned at S-21, only twelve are known to have survived. |
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| The Cu Chi TunnelsJust outside Ho Chi Minh City is a complicated spiderwork of tunnels built within 25 years from 1948 during the war against the French. The tunnels were extended to over 250 kms. during what is known locally as the “American War”. Many skillful, deadly, and dangerous traps were arranged to keep those inside safe. In heavily bombed areas, people spent much of their life there, housing entire underground villages, with living quarters, kitchens, ordnance factories, hospitals and bomb shelters. This was a first-hand look at both the resourcefulness of the Viet Cong and the horrors of war for both soldiers and civilians on all sides. Trying to imagine the endurance, challenges, resilience and adaptability of the people trying to survive for years in those harsh jungle conditions was painfully sobering. |
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Now, nearly 50 years on, Vietnam and Cambodia are still recovering from their barbaric past and continue to grapple with poverty and inequality. They don’t have political freedom and still live in an environment of repression and fear. In many ways, they are still grappling with its dark time and the psychological trauma experienced by survivors and their families. In fact, many Vietnamese locals are reluctant to talk about the American War, and today Cambodian schoolchildren learn only a cursory overview of the Khmer Rouge years. Although education is free for Cambodian children, you still see parents sending them out to work selling trinkets and food to tourists. |
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| You don’t visit these places for enjoyment or pleasure. You visit them to remember, to learn, and maybe grow more towards responsible activism and compassion. I don’t want my travel to be a boomerang dropping me off right where I started, disguising it in a narrative about how I am seeing edifying things—with the photos to prove it. But if one usually avoids museums, then suddenly seek them out for the purpose of experiencing a change, what are you going to make of the exhibits? You might as well be in a room full of Hersey Bars. If you are going to see something you neither value nor aspire to value, you are not doing much of anything besides locomoting. It’s locomotion all the way down. If travel (not an welcome escape vacation), is merely the pursuit of unchanging change, embracing nothing, you might as well use your passport as a coaster or to level wobbly table legs. |
You are an incredible writer. My opinion is there is as you say, a lot of locomoting out there, the bucket lists checking off another item, no thought.
Well done. Daryl
Thank you. Very powerful writing and a necessary message to get out. I hope you have reached many people.
Chris
Thank you for this.
Grounding is good.
Have a terrific holiday season, Karyn.
Peter
Very difficult to read about these atrocities that took place.
I have never been to these countries but cannot imagine the impact it would leave you with.
Extremely hard to believe that human beings are capable of such cruelty.