Heartbreak in Indo-China

I moved through Indo-China last month with Jon Swain’s River of Time as a heartbreaking companion. Walking along the trash-filled streets of Phenom Penn, the never-ceasing noise of the 4 million motorcycles in Saigon, the eroded banks of the Mekong, I was pained to think these were the places of gentleness and beauty before the war. Now, crassness and penury dominate over any other characteristic.

But greater than my sorrow is my amazement at how quickly people have rebuilt their lives in a mere 35 years. In American efforts to obliterate the Ho Chi Minh trail and the Vietcong, more bombs were dropped on Laos (a country smaller than Texas) than during all of WWII. Today there are no traces of the flattened landscape (but unexploded landmines wouldn't be cleared until 2050 at the current rate). Saigon’s streets after streets of food vendors make it hard to believe it was anything but a city of people eating pho three times a day when it was actually a fashion show for the latest American and Chinese military gadgets not so long ago. An estimated 5 million Vietnamese died during the 16-year conflict, but its population jumped from 55 to 80 million after the war. How resilient people are, to have borne the unbearable and multiplied.

It’s not long (a few minutes) until I am broken out of my reverie as the next tuk-tuk driver or handicraft seller chases me down. I wonder if it embarrasses them as much as it does me that they are begging from me: a Chinese American, whose governments did them such atrocities. Women whose parched skins and hunched backs, making them look 100 years old, hold outstretched skin and bones to each passing tourist. Have we: the West, the East, driven them not only to their graves and destitution, but also robbed them of their dignity and gentleness? Are they as outraged as I am that they now have to beg from their perpetrators?

My sorrows come together in Cambodia as nowhere else. I watch the old, fat, white men with their arms around the local girls. And I wonder if they also mourn their exploitation beneath all the makeup that does not hide their youth. Cambodia has the highest rate of HIV/AIDS in SE Asia and a prostitution ring so cheap it is drawing customers away from Bangkok. This is its happy ending after centuries of occupations by the Chinese, Thai, Vietnamese, French, Japanese, Americans. No concrete statistics could be taken, but it’s estimated that of its 5 million population pre-war, under a million were killed or wounded in the Vietnam War. 2 million more were tortured, starved, or worked to death by its own people: the Khmer Rouge. But its population stands at 8 million now with nearly no old people.

Do Cambodians mourn their bloodied past, impoverished present, and bleak future as I do? Do they demand justice and truth about why they suffered? Or are they too tired from just trying to survive the present? Is the war, one generation separated, already too far back to be of concern today? If so, perhaps that is a greater tragedy: to forget not only trivializes the dead but ensures that the blood baths, ideological wars will happen again and again.