Half the Sky on PBS

Naptime at New Light, a children's hostel and daycare in the Kalighat red light district in Calcutta, India. Founded and run by my friend Urmi Basu, New Light aims to break a cycle in which caste, environment, tradition and stigma combine to force children to follow the footsteps of their mothers into prostitution.

Half the Sky, the PBS / Show of Force production based around Nick Kristof and Sheryl WuDunn's bestseller about women confronting the most gruesome problems and issues they face in the (primarily) developing world, will finally be broadcast this coming Monday and Tuesday, October 1st and 2nd, at 9PM EST, on PBS. (Channel 13 in NYC). But check, as they say, your local listings.

Working on this series consumed much of my 2011; I made multiple trips to Asia and Africa, many of which I blogged about in one way or another in these pages last year. Working on "Half the Sky" was a deeply moving and rugged experience, and I hope you'll find the time to watch it. This is one of those rare cases where I really do feel that a film has the potential to bring about positive change in the world!

A wheelchair made from a $2.99 WalMart lawn chair, at the Edna Adan maternity hospital, in Hargeisa, Somaliland. Edna's hospital trains midwives, an incredibly successful, simple, and comparatively inexpensive way to combat the staggering rate of maternal mortality in Somalia.

I'm holding out for Jonathan Franzen in Double Extra Large

 

"Shoes and Clothe" boutique, of Phnom Penh

 

Engrish is an endless source of amusement. For decades already we have found ourselves cackling at the excruciating, the misplaced, the misspelled, the off-center, or the just plain random words and letters that hapless Asians see fit to emblazon on their t-shirts. (Although to blame Engrish entirely on Asia may be unfair. Just today, while filming at Angkor Wat, in Cambodia, I spied a Russian gentleman wearing a burgundy t-shirt boldly emblazoned SOUTH DAKOTA IT'S ALL YOURS DANCE MASTER SCHELUDES.)

The origins of this sort of typographic festival seem to me to be rooted in the fast-fading allure of the great United States, beacon to would-be emigrants and aspirant entrepreneurs from every corner of the globe. In China, Vietnam or Russia, clothing with the English alphabet sprayed all over it denotes a certain hipness. No matter how random, the letters alone indicate worldliness, mobility. This is ironic in that the moneyed classes the world over tend to speak actual English--the Engrish shirt only works for those too low in status and education to comprehend the meaninglessness of the slogans they are sporting. Absurdity is just a click away; Google translate makes it so easy to be so very, very wrong.

The allure of the east and the rise of China as an economic power has somewhat turned the tables, with more and more attention being paid to the parallel phenomenon of Chingrish, including an excellent blog that chronicles the tattoo catastrophes of hipster Westerners.

I can't recognize Chingrish when I see it, but I'm always on the lookout for spectacular examples of Engrish, so my eye was drawn by this window display on the streets of Phnom Penh:

 

Rising up the NYT bestseller list, it's Erheyi Sniamla

Trees Growing on, through and over stuff

Bringing you travel news entirely out of sequence with the actual travels...

Every promotional brochure, National Geographic feature and Discovery Channel documentary on the wonders of the ancient Khmer world of Angkor includes photographs or footage of the interaction between the jungle and the ruined temples. Most of these originate from one temple, Ta Prohm. Here the buttresses of vast trees envelop, bend, and sometimes topple the walls of the complex. This impression of the forest slowly consuming this particular ruin was, according to Wikipedia, intended by the 20th century restorers of Angkor; the implication is that not just Ta Prohm originally threatened to disappear forever beneath the forest. Apparently, only the largest temple, Angor Wat itself, was still in continuous use into the present day, despite the collapse of the civilization that built it in the 15th century. Wikipedia sometimes needs a grain of salt, or the application of your personal bullshit detector, to be ruder about it. Of Angkor Wat the collective genius of the world's editing taskforce suggests that this largest temple was protected from the encroachments of the jungle because it is surrounded by a giant moat, as if jungles spread like forest fires, creeping across the land, instead of thanks to the movements of seeds on the wind and in the guano of innumerable birds. The trees do have a chance, and they will take over if mankind does nothing to impede their growth.

It was an inspired choice, to leave one major temple in the managed state of being swallowed. The enormity of the trees growing directly out of the temple complex provide a direct link to the era of its maximum splendor; one imagines the seedlings that became these towering trees taking root just as the Khmer influence was waning. To the rabid environmentalist, they give hope that the natural world can recover from the grotesque impositions of mankind. In the tops of these giants, Alexandrine Parakeets were croaking and cavorting; Robson's field guide to the birds of Southeast Asia actually lists "temple groves" as one of their preferred habitats. Few trees of this stature remain anywhere in the world; only because this is holy ground, and because of the tidal waves of cash that Angkor tourism represents, are they still here.

Laura swears she overheard someone in a group of tourists remark "I don't understand why they don't just get rid of the trees...."

At Ta Prohm, special platforms have been constructed for the express purpose of having oneself photographed in front of the most impressive of the tentacular roots.

 

Anti-ghost Platoon

As usual on trips so densely packed with new and exciting experiences as this, I'm falling savagely behind on my blog posts. Combine the constant onslaught of new sights and sounds with the sentiment that "I didn't fly halfway around the world to sit in an internet cafe" and you will begin to understand the backlog. I've been back in Vietnam two weeks already since Laura and I visited Angkor Wat, but I'm still blogging my way through Cambodia. Expect to be hearing about Southeast Asia for weeks after my return....

Regular readers know that I'm always interested in the supernatural interventions people across the globe choose to put their faith in. My sister-in-law, Melanie, is a foremost world expert in South Indian techniques for avoiding the "evil-eye," and I share her fascination for these sorts of vernacular expressions of superstition, magic and belief. The sociology of the ways in which talismans, amulets, altars, shrines and so on are manifested across the globe is often obscure, but in Cambodia, driving in the countryside, we again and again encountered houses protected by "scare-ghosts," whose genesis and form seems to make obvious sense in the wake of the Cambodian genocide. There is scarcely anything metaphorical about them.

Invariably constructed at the gateway to the front yard, the Cambodian anti-ghost version of a scarecrow is impressively humanoid. An old shirt, torn trousers and some sort of head are usually enough to construct one, but these protectors, stand-ins for an armed guard at the doorway, often have an evident militaristic aspect. They often sport bits of old military uniform, and sometimes a weapon.

Our Tuk-tuk driver, the incomparable Mr. Boret (well, we considered him incomparable until he stood us up the next day when we had scheduled a ride to the airport) explained that these "puppets" (a loaded word in and of itself in Southeast Asia, as it historically described local collaborators with the Imperialist Yanqui) are placed in front of homes to protect against ghosts, who come at night and take people away. Cambodia, obviously has many of them.

A small taste of Angkor

Not to barrage you with globe-trotting braggery, but I've been to Tikal in Guatemala, Copan in Honduras, Chichen Izta in Mexico, Machu Picchu in Peru, Delphi in Greece, Chile's Easter Island, and the Empire State Building. The breathtaking expanse, the countless temples and the millions of square yards of intricately carved rock of the multiple complexes at Angkor Wat puts them all to shame. Compared with the demented stone-carvers of the Khmer empire, the Mayans seem like tropical layabouts with too much time on their hands. If Angkor Wat is Manhattan, Machu Picchu is Piscataway. The Ancient Greeks might've come up with something if only they had been able to develop a work ethic. The loons of Easter Island, who destroyed their own civilization by devoting all their manpower to building gigantic heads, are like a small village of basketmakers by comparison. And so on.

Please eat your stinky fruits elsewhere...

Not only are taxi-girls in barred from your room at the Green Garden guesthouse, you're not even allowed to bring home your Durian fruit.

Cambodian Land Mine Victims' Orchestra on NPR's "The World"

This news may be a bit late, since I've already heard from an old friend in Los Angeles that she heard me on the radio while she was driving to work, but PRI's "The World" had my audio postcard from the market of Siem Riep on their Wednesday program. In case you missed it, such things are archived, thanks to the glorious internet. They've credited my photograph of the Cambodian flag to my long lost (imaginary) brother Peter, but I think that's just a typo. Or they've mixed me up with my fellow travel writer, the late author of the superlative Brazilian Adventure. Company I'm happy to be confused with.

The "audio postcard" includes my recording of a Cambodian land mine victims' orchestra. Such orchestras, composed of disabled players, are numerous in the touristy Siem Riep area, and at various temples in the vast and impressive Angkor complex. They are intended to tug at your heartstrings, as well they should. Some of the disabled players are war victims from Cambodia's savage 1970s, but the sad reality is that mine victims in Cambodia can be of any age and may have sustained their crippling wounds at any time in the last 40 years. Cambodia remains one of the most heavily mined countries on earth despite constant efforts at removal, and many, many people are killed and wounded each year by ancient mines that have long outlived the heinous military conflicts that saw them installed. Imagine living in a country at peace, trying to forget the horrors of the past, while living with the constant threat of being exploded in your own rice paddy.

Gently up the Mekong

hitch a ride on the riverboat queen...
The Mekong River is so central to the life of Southeast Asia that some people refer to the Lao, Cambodians and Vietnamese collectively as "the people of the Mekong," despite the tremendous racial diversity spread across these three countries. Picture everything south of Cairo, Illinois, in Louisiana, Mississippi, Arkansas, Missouri, western Kentucky and Tennessee as an isolated peninsula jutting into the South China Sea, transpose the Mekong for the Mississippi, and you will begin to grasp the prominence and significance of this vast watery artery.

 home, sweet floating shack...

Like the Mississippi of  Twainian yore, the Mekong is simultaneously home, harbor, highway and horror, its inexorable flow the lifeblood of commerce, agriculture, transport and the creative imagination. From its banks the Khmer Rouge ambushed transport ships bringing supplies up to embattled Phnom Penh from Saigon before either city had fallen, and down its waters floated countless bodies, victims of the genocide. But without it Southeast Asia would not be the rice basket of the world, one enormous system of paddies providing tons of food to millions of people.

moveable tourist beach...

And just as in the glory days of the Mississippi Riverboats and that river's seething, teeming commerce, the Mekong is a place some people are born, raised and grow up without scarcely going ashore. Last week we and a horde of other tourists hoping to experience the romance piled into a sleek speedboat for the five hour journey upriver from Phnom Penh to Siem Riep, on the far side of the Tonle Sap, the vast inland sea that is an appendage of the great river. The boat was narrow and claustrophic, like an airplane fuselage without wings, and we and many others opted for the airy and exhilarating "top deck". A sunburn waiting to happen.

 just paddle up and knock on the door...

One need not fear the annual floods, which spill the banks and flood vast expanses of the land, when one's house floats. Along the Mekong there are entire floating cities. Fishermen raft together in family groups in mid-stream, working their fish traps. Towns built on the banks spill into the river; what were once docks become watery neighborhoods. We zipped past it all.

the Cambodian flag flies over the Tonle Sap...

Genocide Tourism

“You want Tuk-tuk?” It is a question familiar to anyone who has visited Cambodia. This is the battle-cry of the entrepreneurial motorized tricycle driver, stationed outside of every hotel in Phnom Penh. A Tuk-tuk is a brightly painted miniature caravan, pulled by a motorcycle; walk a block or two here and you will be offered four or five chances to take a ride in one. You shake your head, no. “You want Tuk-tuk?” The driver asks again. He has a smiling, friendly, underemployed face. “You want to visit the killing fields?”

The Killing Fields? One thing to understand about Tuk-tuk drivers is that they offer their most popular excursions first. The way the driver says these words makes the place sound like a boutique for shopping, or perhaps the latest trendy restaurant, somewhere one would surely like to go. A destination. In Phnom Penh, the killing fields, that gruesome piece of real estate synonymous with the Cambodian genocide of the late 1970s, is a major attraction, even while its scars still run deep. Welcome to disaster tourism, Cambodian style. 

No Tuk-tuk is needed today; the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum is just across the street from the hotel. It is a former school complex, four three-story buildings that once housed a primary school and a high school in the center of the city, before being converted by the Khmer Rouge into the torture center known as S-21. For this space to have been repurposed once again as a place for learning, even about such a grim history, is already a powerful metaphor. The Khmer Rouge cadres massacred intellectuals, students and professors, treating knowledge as dangerous and subversive. They exterminated as much as a quarter of the population.

 

On a recent afternoon, most of the visitors to Tuol Sleng are tourists, many of them passing briefly through Phnom Penh on their way to Siem Riep and the temples at Angkor Wat. There are many of them, making their way through this very simple and very powerful exhibition. It is little more, really, than a terrible place left virtually untouched since the Vietnamese forced the Khmer Rouge out of power in early January of 1979. The former classrooms crudely divided into tiny cells not fit for animals. Walls now crowded with headshots of the victims.

What brings people here? Why take time out of a hard-won vacation to wander through these unremittingly grim rooms? Posted on the walls of the buildings at Tuol Sleng in the style of “No-Smoking” signs are drawings of a grinning man, covered by a red circle with a bar. They mean “please don’t laugh, or smile.” It’s not a welcome directive on a holiday. But horror, empathy, curiosity and incomprehension combine to form the most powerful of emotions; these are the same ingredients so often exploited by Hollywood to have the maximum impact on moviegoers. 

Inside, nobody is smiling. The most chilling and evocative spaces are in the first building, where neither the torturers nor the museum curators did anything to change the layout. The rooms are large, with unforgettable checkerboard patterned floors of alternating white and yellow tile. They would have been cheery classrooms. In each room is a simple steel bed frame and a few of the mundane props of torture: a shackle, an iron bar. On each wall is a single photograph, impossibly faded and grainy. It is an old and weathered blow-up of one of the images made here by the combat photographer Ho Van Tay, of what he found after the arrival of the Vietnamese. The fourteen bodies left by the fleeing Khmer Rouge are buried in the courtyard outside, in plain white vaults, but until Van Tay arrived, their corpses were still chained to the beds. 

The photographs are murky, almost pitted, and perhaps past due to be reprinted, but upon close inspection one realizes that the exact bed sitting in the center of the room is the same one in the photograph hanging on the water-stained wall. In the image, the checkered floor tiles are gray and white, but they are clearly the very same tiles that are under your feet. One understands suddenly that the room, the floor, and the bed all match, and that only the body, twisted in its final agony, is missing from the current reality of the scene. It is a visceral, emotional moment. One visitor felt it was intensely private. “You feel you are a voyeur, looking at something you shouldn’t be seeing,” she said. “And so for someone else to come into the room when you are there, it’s as if you’ve gotten caught.” But the point, of course, is that one must see, and must not forget, and the feeling of are bearing witness is another of the reasons so many visitors come here. 

Back out in the sunshine, under the barbed wire and the swaying palm trees, the Tuk-tuk drivers are still waiting and hopeful, but they seem to have mercy on the contemplative mood of the departing museum guests. "Maybe tomorrow?" one asks quietly. "The killing fields?"