Mistapim in Cambodia by Christopher Pym (Hodder & Stoughton)

Not many people traveled to Angkor Wat in 1954. The French War in Vietnam, which had spilled into Cambodia, had just ended. Although it was still a French colony until the end of the year, Cambodia was too absorbed with preparing itself as a new independent nation to concern itself with tourism.

It was a Thai prince who organized a sightseeing expedition to Angkor and a member of this group was a young Englishman who was working in what was at that time called Malaya. At 25, Christopher Pym was still young enough to swerve from secure employment into charting his own adventure and when he fell in love with the glories of the ancient Khmer empire, this is what he did.

He began an intensive study of Cambodian history and the Khmer language, moving to Phnom Penh in 1956 without a safety net, determined to “carve one’s own set of circumstances,”

In Malaya, his life had been comfortable. The business firm Pym had worked for in that country had provided everything--”car, house,cook, gardener, cocktails, and so on.” This isn’t the way he wants to live in Cambodia; he finds a wooden house on stilts on the outskirts of Phnom Penh and almost immediately comes down with dengue fever. Moving back to the city, he rents a small room that is next to a shrine for a Chinese deity. His domestic comforts are limited to a bed, a table, and a wooden crate, but unlike his first home, this place has electricity and a rudimentary bathroom.

Learning Khmer and teaching English gives Pym the life he wants, with freedom to travel in search of “the heart of the Khmer people.” After an evening of opium-smoking at the home of a French acquaintance, he decides he isn’t going to find the heart of Cambodia in the company of Europeans in Phnom Penh and he begins to explore village life.

While urban Cambodians are jaded when it comes to foreigners, Pym is a delightful novelty to rural communities who are more than willing to let him witness and chronicle their ways of life. Although he has fleeting contacts with Cambodia’s royal family, Pym becomes close to people of less exalted lineage and he much prefers to spend his time with them.

Perhaps his favorite brush with royalty is when he’s a spectator at the funeral of one of the many princes of the realm. The royal tomb has gone unused for many years and “a combined attack of blunt pickaxes and old crowbars” fail to open the entrance--until a member of the King’s family grabs a pickaxe, throws his jacket aside and leads “a continuing onslaught,” royal privilege be damned.

But any prince of the realm pales beside Pym’s friendship with Om, “a kind of Khmer teddy-boy.” Westernized but “not a delinquent,” Om opens village life and its daily life in a way no prince could ever have done. Because of him, Pym is given free access to Buddhist ordinations, engagement ceremonies, and “ a positively Aristophanic marriage-feast.”. He describes all of these events in photographic detail and with deep respect, without a trace of condescension or British snark.

Even in Phnom Penh, which clearly isn’t his favorite place in Cambodia, he only allows himself a tiny tinge of bitterness when he comes across “a milkbar neon-lit,” and thinks, “Well done, Cambodia, the same as everywhere else at last.”

Pym was lucky--he took up residence in Cambodia when ceremonies and rituals and village life still mirrored what was carved in bas-relief on the walls of the Bayon and Angkor Wat. He journeyed to the distant reaches of the kingdom by oxcart during the rainy season to view the citadel of Bantei Chmar, before looters dismantled it “stone by stone.” And he was invited to see a performance of the Royal Khmer Ballet within the royal palace, watching “the eloquent hands of the Khmer dancers” as they performed The Abduction of Sita from the Ream Ker, the Khmer Ramayana.

There are hints of change in Pym’s accounts--electric lights replacing the gigantic candle that illuminates the months when monks retreat to their temples, an American education center being built in the countryside, and rebel insurgents preventing a journey to a village near the Thai border. As the “temptation to go to Samrong just for fun increased in proportion as the police insisted upon my not going there,” Pym, respectful as always, doesn’t break his word.

The only facetious part of this book is its title, which Pym at the outset assures readers “was chosen by the publishers.” Although he can’t resist flashes of humor, he writes with a scrupulous lack of judgment that an anthropologist would envy and gives meticulous glimpses of Cambodian life that are worthy of Zhao Daguan, back in the days of the Angkor Empire. Thank you, Mistapim.~Janet Brown

The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei by Sachaverell Sitwell (Weidenfeld and Nicolson)

Take one well-born aging Englishman, with a classical education that has centered around Europe, throw him into Asia, and watch him flounder when he’s not in places that were once part of the British Empire. The intellectual consternation that engulfs this sort of gentleman should be amusing but his excellent education keeps that from happening. Instead pomposity takes over, with rare moments of enchantment that veer on the naive. 

For a prime example of this, try to read Sachaverell Sitwell’s The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei.  A member of England’s hereditary peerage and the grandson of an Earl, Sitwell went to Eton and Oxford and was first published when he was twenty-five. This volume of poetry launched a career of writing over fifty more books, almost all devoted to European art, music, and architecture. When he began to age, he turned his attention to other continents, venturing to Japan and Peru, but never deviating from his Eurocentric point of view.

The Red Chapels of Banteai Srei is a misleading title which desperately needed a follow-up subtitle along the lines of And Other Travels in Asia, since only one brief chapter is devoted to what is now spelled “Banteay Srei.” This is probably a mercy because Sitwell was ill at ease in that lovely place or anywhere else in the Angkor complex. That he devotes only five chapters to Cambodia is a relief but that’s almost enough to sink this book.

Sitwell starts off in a sprightly fashion by falling in love with Bangkok. His time there is brief and comfortable, with a room in the Oriental Hotel and trips to places that aren’t yet tourist cliches--The Temple of the Emerald Buddha, floating markets which are still plentiful and utilitarian in the early 1960s, a night at a Thai boxing match. There he concludes that muay thai is “more serious and less amusing than the Sumo wrestling in Japan” and worries that an injured boxer may never be able to fight again. He’s delighted by the broken crockery that ornaments temple chedis and is impressed by the air-con in a Chinese restaurant that had his wife begging for a towel to use as a shawl during dinner. It’s sweet to see him fall in love with Thailand’s capital, which he explores without comparisons or judgements. Those he saves for Cambodia, where he seems determined to denigrate the glories of Angkor.

Although Sitwell confesses he came to Angkor “after half a lifetime of anticipation,” the heat, “of a kind and degree never experienced before,” and the humidity which “was something excessive,” appears to have flattened his enthusiasm. Although he immediately claims “the approach to Angkor Wat is on a grander scale than anything in the living world” and is later awed by the Bayon’s face-towers, he swiftly begins to describe the “sham buildings” constructed by people who had no conception of how to build a room that offered space. He lapses into memories of blitzed London during World War I and begins to long for the “cooing of doves” and a “wood of bluebells.” If it weren’t for his frequent quotes of Zhou Daguan’s eyewitness accounts of Angkor, there would be no substance to his observations, which conclude with “this is a whole dead city…too big even for poetry.”

Things don’t improve vastly in Nepal, where Sitwell becomes obsessed with the sexual nature of temple paintings. He tears himself away from erotic art long enough to write a detailed description of “a living goddess in Katmandu,” a heavily made-up child of twelve, the sight of whom made him decide she was “wonderfully, and a little pruriently exciting.” Once again he wallows in comparisons to Greece, Italy, and Spain and it’s impossible not to wish for the ability to slap him.

India, since the Empire had left it twenty years before, is a sad disappointment to Sitwell, who mourns that hotel dining rooms no longer serve proper English meals and that Delhi’s “houses with pillared porticos and nice gardens” are no longer inhabited by British families. Except for the brilliant colors of women’s clothing, Delhi is a disappointment but he consoles himself with a visit to the Taj Mahal and the Pearl Mosque, which he manages to view without his customary litany of European comparisons. Jaipur’s gardens, however, “did credit to English seedsmen,” and the Italian lakes immediately come into play when he goes to Udaipur. At Bombay he’s thrilled to find streets with English names and statues of British luminaries which might prove to console him when he discovers the Caves of Ajanta “are now too far gone with age to give pleasure.”

At this point anyone who’s persisted in reading Sitwell’s observations would be justified in saying the same of him. It’s a vast relief when he goes to Ceylon and becomes enthralled with its beauty. Perhaps his lack of jaundiced criticisms are because in Columbo he’s able to have a cocktail. “After a sojourn in India the inventor of Singapore Slings deserves commendation.”

Sitwell, sadly, does not--in fact the only way that his book should be read is in the company of several Singapore Slings as anesthesia against pomposity. The reader is warned, as Sitwell’s Victorian forbears used to say--stock up on gin and limes before entering his realm of boring ethnocentricism.~Janet Brown

The Road to Angkor by Christopher Pym (John Beaufoy Publishing)

There’s a certain kind of British male who confirms Noel Coward’s linkage of mad dogs and Englishmen and Christopher Pym is a fine example of this. Like many travelers, he was enchanted by Angkor Wat in 1954. However he, in his early twenties, acted upon that enchantment by spending the next three years studying Cambodian history and learning the Khmer language, in London, Paris, and Cambodia. In 1957, armed with a knowledge of that country’s culture, past and present, and with French and Khmer language fluency, the 27-year-old academic set off on an adventure that verged on insanity. He intended to walk from the part of South Vietnam that had once been the empire of Champa to Angkor Wat, in search of evidence of the ancient road that had supposedly once connected these two strongholds, with 57 resthouses sprinkled along the way. If Pym could find evidence of these resthouses close to his starting point, he’d know the road had actually existed. As it was at the time he began this trek, traces of the road had only been found between Angkor and the citadel of Prah Khan in northern Cambodia, with nothing proving a route between Prah Khan and what was once Champa. Ten weeks, he decides, will be enough time for this walk, one that he’s making on foot because he can’t afford horses or elephants as transportation.

But this isn’t complicated enough for Pym. Neolithic tools had been found in the Vietnamese city of Pleiku and he hoped to find more along his route, confirming that a Neolithic culture had spread across the region. He also had a whimsical goal in mind. He’d read about a tribal hillside chieftain, described by an early French explorer as being “young, handsome, brave, quick, eloquent and confident in the future.” This paragon of manly virtues was named Pim and this was enough to prompt his English namesake to look for him, as “an entertaining sidetrack.”

Pym discovers the most arduous part of this enterprise is getting the necessary permits from bureaucrats, which is a prevailing theme throughout the book. But in the freewheeling spirit that never leaves him, he uses that hurdle to observe the differences between Vietnamese in Saigon, Cambodian monks in a temple near his starting point, and the Chinese in Cholon--”the way they talked, the way they washed, the way they spat.” Pym, unlike many of his countrymen, makes no value judgements nor traces of racism, but it becomes clear that he prefers the company of Cambodians, probably because he’s able to speak their language. One of his few moments of petulance surfaces when a Khmer official insists on conversing with him exclusively in French.

Carrying a rucksack that weighs over thirty pounds and is filled with 1000 cigarettes and four pounds of candy to give as gifts along the way, as well as a copy of Dante’s Divine Comedy, and wearing “car-tyre sandals,” Pym travels less than 14 miles on his first day and fails to reach his initial goal, Pim’s village. On the following day he meets a man who claims he’s related to Pim, “the son of his brother.”

“It was a recognition worthy of a Greek play.” Although Pim died years earlier, his relatives are delighted that a foreigner has come in search of him and the next few days are spent drinking rice wine and existing in an “alcoholic stupor.” 

Drunk or sober, Pym never loses his talent of observation that he cloaks in understatement, delighted by the sight of a Vietnamese woman garbed in a Norwegian sweater, taken aback by nights when the air becomes “quite nippy,” and politely eating “several kinds of unsavory vegetable soup.” When he’s presented with a grilled tiger steak, he overcomes his initial qualms and finds that it’s “most delicious.”

Having found traces of Pim, his next goal is discovering Neolithic tools. Given an axehead that falls into that category, Pym is satisfied, although his prized possession is a much more modern one--a sabre that he’s seen tribesmen carry and has longed to own. “There were none on sale at the market” but when he meets a man who owns two, he’s able to purchase the extra one. Armed against tigers, Pym is able to disregard his bleeding feet and makes his way through “the sugar palm curtain” that marks the Cambodian border. 

Here he finds a flourishing industry of zirconia pit-mining as well as a Khmer Gold Rush near an “unsavory village.” Peasant life, he decides, is “like an antique pitcher with myriad cracks” that’s held together by Buddhism.

Pym turns out to be one of those delightful explorers for whom the journey is more important than the goal and this makes him a fantastic armchair travel companion. His inability to find traces of the road that led from Prah Khan to Champa is thoroughly eclipsed by the stories he gathers on his 450-mile, 7-week odyssey, ones that make The Road to Angkor a diverting travel narrative--and make me eager to find the book that followed this one, Mistapim in Cambodia.  Christopher Pym, where have you been all my life?~Janet Brown 

Under the Naga Tail by Mae Bunseng Taing, with James Taing (Greenleaf Book Group Press)

Mae is eleven when Apollo 11 puts men on the moon, a feat that captures his imagination and makes him feel he’s living in a new era when anything is possible—even for a boy living in rural Cambodia. But as he nears the end of his adolescence, another era closes in upon him, his family,  and his country, one that begins with Year Zero.

Cambodia has been in turmoil for several years, with “freedom fighters” battling the puppet government of the U.S.-backed Lon Nol. Popular opinion sides with the insurgents because they purportedly will restore King Sihanouk to his throne. Mae’s father is a firm believer in this theory, even when a woman emerges from the jungle, fleeing in terror for the nearby Thai border. 

“Monsters…barbaric monsters…that’s what they are,” she tells Mae’s family as she recounts the atrocities committed by the rebel forces, “You must leave.” But Mae’s father is positive that “the freedom fighters were defending the honor of the king.” He had already fled one country, leaving China to find peace and prosperity in Cambodia, and he was certain it was unnecessary to do this again. He and his eight children are staying put, even though it’s a short journey from their home to Thailand.

Within the first twenty pages of Under the Naga Tail, his decision becomes engulfed in horror that becomes impossibly and dreadfully more intense with every passing chapter. Although the rebel forces prevail and are greeted with cheers and hope, they immediately close the border and kill three “Thai thieves” in a public execution that the entire community is forced to watch. Then they evacuate the area, claiming it’s a temporary measure to avoid American bombs. Mae and his family would never live in their former home again and many more wouldn’t survive to return to what once belonged to them.

The savagery that engulfs Cambodia between 1975 and 1979 is unmitigated by liberating troops from Vietnam who have no room for compassion. Across the border, where Mae and his family seek the safety of Thailand after barely surviving four years of starvation and forced labor, there’s no sanctuary waiting for them. According to C.I.A. reports, forty-two thousand Cambodians, Mae and his family among them, were removed from refugee camps by Thai troops and were taken to the sacred mountain of Preah Vihear. From there they were forced to climb down the other side of the mountain, back into Cambodia. Ten thousand of them were never seen again.

Scant mercy is given to the Cambodians who are displaced and subjected in the years between 1975 and 1979—not offered by the liberators nor by the country that could shelter them. The atrocities of the Pol Pot Time and the cruelties of its aftermath are revealed in excruciating detail, disclosed as Mae and his family live them. His account is appalling and soul-wrenching and guaranteed to enter your dreams.

The miracle of his survival, with almost all of his family, only occurred because of strength and courage that goes beyond all human limits. If this book is painfully difficult to read, only imagine the agony that came as a son wrote the words his father used to resurrect a hell on earth for the world to see and remember. Under the Naga Tail shows the bare bones of history that are all too often veiled in statistics and sanitized by bureaucratic reports. It turns readers into witnesses who just might help to change present-day crimes against humanity.~Janet Brown

Slow Noodles: A Cambodian Memoir of Love, Loss, and Family Recipes by Chantha Nguon, with Kim Green (Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill)

Even when she was very small, Chantha Nguon knew the difference between noodles. Instant noodles came in packages and “tasted careless.” Kuy teav noodles, made from wheat flour mixed with eggs, were sold in the Battambang market every day, available to anyone who had the money to buy them. But best of all were her mother’s noodles, hand-rolled into perfect cylinders that took hours to prepare. Slow noodles, she learned as a little girl, are the best and will provide her with an enduring “philosophy for life.” Care and practice, with no shortcuts, make daily living rich and flavorful.

A child with a “puppy nose for food,” Chantha knows what happiness smells like: “cloves, cracked pepper, and pate de foie.” Her mother was a beauty who knew looks weren’t enough. She augmented the gift of her appearance with extravagant meals that took lots of money and time to prepare. Her cooking was a kind of magical theatre production that entranced her little daughter and the memories of that food would shape Chantha’s future.

Cambodia swiftly transforms from “a little girl’s heaven” into a place of turmoil and tragedy. The U.S.-backed government headed by Lon Nol turns against anyone with Vietnamese blood and Chantha’s mother is Vietnamese. She sends her children to Saigon to live in the safety of relatives there. But in that portion of Southeast Asia there is no safety. Cambodia becomes locked in the horror of “Pol Pot time” and Saigon becomes Ho Chi Minh City.

Poverty sweeps over both countries in terrible ways. Chantha’s mother escapes from Cambodia to be with her children, and then witnesses their deaths. Chantha is the only child to stay alive—and then her mother dies.

Chantha has never learned how to be frugal. At one point in her life when her mother made a living as a seamstress, wooden clogs in different colors became the girl’s obsession and she used her pocket money to buy forty or fifty pairs. “I should use those as firewood,” her mother teased her. Later, alone after her mother’s death, Chantha burns them all, one by one, as fuel for cooking rice.

As she struggles to stay alive, a fortune teller predicts she will become even more poverty-stricken in the future but “sewing and cooking will save you….You will take care of yourself.”

The story of her survival and her return to Cambodia with the man whom she would marry is an adventure that tears at the heart, but this isn’t the driving force of Slow Noodles. The theme that prevails is how a country was deprived of its history, with its future jeopardized by Pol Pot’s Communist Party of Kampuchea. Trying to blot out over a thousand years of culture, this government erased “education, medicine, cinema, books, money, cars and religion” by killing anyone “whose job it was to plan for tomorrow: doctors, engineers, teachers, scientists.” “Estimates range from 1.6 to 1 million dead, from one-fifth to more than a quarter of the population.” What was left in the aftermath was “a country with no idea of tomorrow.”

Slow Noodles is a metaphor as well as a cherished culinary memory. Time, patience, persistence, and care are essential for the cooking of this dish and for the recovery of a traumatized nation. Chantha Nguon shows how this is possible to accomplish in a book that celebrates the importance of food in rebuilding a culture and revitalizing a country, while generously offering traditional Khmer recipes to replicate in any kitchen.~Janet Brown

The Golden Voice: The Ballad of Cambodian Rock's Lost Queen by Gregory Cahill and Kat Baumann (Life Drawn by Humanoids)

As a person who’s been an enthusiastic reader for 71 years, it came as a shock when I recently discovered there were reading skills I’ve yet to acquire. I wasn’t allowed to read comic books when I was a child which means I’ve struggled with graphic novels as a (very) mature adult. Giving equal attention to the words and the pictures in each frame wasn’t easy and when I finally learned to do it, I felt quite proud.

Then I bought a copy of The Golden Voice, a biography of the Cambodian singer Ros Serey Sothea, that is written as a graphic narrative. The art is cinematic and the words, readers are told at the outset, are written in three different languages: Romanized Khmer, English, and French, along with a healthy smattering of military acronyms. But here’s what most intrigued me, and almost defeated me—this book comes with a playlist and a QR code that allows 47 songs to be played as the book is being read.

I’m a tremendous fan of the Khmer music stars of the 60s and 70s, especially Ros Serey Sothea and Sin Sisamouth, both of whom died during Pol Pot’s reign of terror. So I happily scanned the QR code and read the accompanying directions. The songs were chosen to complement the narrative and they were meant to be played in order. However there was a little glitch. Icons with the corresponding numbers of each song appeared in the frames, telling readers when to hit play and when to hit stop.

Once I became involved in the life of a girl who rose out of the rice fields in Battambang to become a star renowned and loved throughout the Kingdom of Cambodia, I often overlooked the tiny numbered icons that gave the appropriate background music. They are very small and easy to miss. I ended up backtracking to hit play--but since I’m a rapid reader, I was told to stop much too soon and so I heard only a few bars of each song. By the time I turned the final page, I had a mild headache and felt as if I’d just picked up a raging case of dyslexia.

Probably the ideal way to read this stunning piece of graphic art is to play the 47 songs without stopping--at least for readers like me who are unused to the magic of QR codes and instructions embedded in the text. When I approached the book that way, I wasn’t only immersed in the tragic life of a gifted singer, I felt as if I’d been transported to the radio stations, recording studios, nightclubs, and the American Embassy in Phnom Penh during the war. The art is that detailed, showing not just the city but the rapidly changing facial expressions of the characters that do much to tell the story. Reading The Golden Voice is like watching an animated film.

First published in Cambodia, this book gives a detailed look at the turbulent and tragic years that led up to the Khmer Rouge’s takeover of the country. Gregory Cahill met and interviewed surviving members of Ros Serey Sothea’s and Sin Sisamouth’s families. Unfortunately these relatives were unable to give a complete picture of events that took place after the Khmer Rouge came to power so Cahill cautions readers that not everything he’s written is factual and the tragic end of Ros Serey Sothea’s life may not have happened as he’s shown it in this biography. 

Still, through his text and Kat Baumann’s art, along with the songs they’ve provided, the life of this beautiful woman who died when she was only thirty, is movingly and carefully told.~Janet Brown

Songs on Endless Repeat by Anthony Veasna So (HarperCollins)

“I have less in common with mainstream Asians, like Chinese, Japanese, the usual suspects, than say middle-aged Jewish people because…both older Jewish folks and young Cambos have parents who either survived or died in a genocide!”

Here is the voice of Anthony Veasna So, who died when he was 28, just months before his book of short stories, Afterparties, (asiabythebook.com 8/2021) was published and acclaimed by everyone from the New Yorker to popsugar.com. This offhand line from one of the characters in the recently published posthumous collection of work by So, Songs on Endless Repeat, echoes with absolute truth. The person who would most appreciate and envy that line would now be one of those “older Jewish folks” if he hadn’t, like So, died from a drug overdose--Lenny Bruce.  

So himself took the microphone as a stand-up comedian. He also was a scathing cartoonist, an artist who painted enigmatic self portraits, and a writer whose fiction was published in the New Yorker and Granta and who signed a two-book deal with HarperCollins when he was in his mid-twenties. At the time of his death, he was immersed in writing that second book, “a first novel draft [that] will definitely push the limits of digestible length.” 

HarperCollins paid $300,000 for Afterparties and for the novel that would follow. Determined to get their money’s worth, they scraped together pieces of fiction and nonfiction, tossing it all into the crazy salad that’s become So’s second—and last—published book. They should never have done this. They looted a grave.

Songs on Endless Repeat is an incoherent mixture of five previously published essays, both in print and online, one lengthy and unpublished piece that delves into reality television, and eight chapters of the first draft that was meant to become his novel, Straight thru Cambotown. 

With a stunning lack of respect for this novel that will never be finished, HarperCollins sprinkled those chapters with haphazard abandon among the pieces of nonfiction, as though each portion of what was intended to begin a novel were random short stories. When read as they’re presented on the page, these chapters become staccato. They jangle and chafe. The characters float in a disembodied context, smoking weed, exchanging obscene wisecracks, presided over by a ghostly figure whose funeral is in the offing. They deserve a better showcase than this scattershot presentation, but the only way they’re going to get it is if their readers ignore the nonfiction that gets in their way and encounter each chapter in order, one after the other, as one would when reading a novel. When this way of reading takes place, then the mourning begins. So’s unpolished rush of fiction, his nascent sketches of characters, his tumbled flood of thoughts give promise of a book that would have stunned the literary world.

Vinny, Darren, and Molly, cousins whose childless aunt just died in a fiery car crash, are the dead woman’s prospective heirs. Their aunt was the Counter, a leading figure of her Cambodian community. She headed an improvised bank, with members who contributed to, borrowed from, and earned interest from the communal funds. The Counter was the one who collected and distributed the money, while taking her cut, and it’s rumored that she possessed a fortune. 

An inheritance from her would be welcomed by the cousins. Molly is back home after an unsuccessful stint as an artist in Manhattan, reluctant to sacrifice her dreams to a lucrative career. Vinny is the lead of the Khmai Khmong Rappers, who spits out rhymes in a mixture of Khmer and English in rhythms that hold his memories of the cadence voiced by Cambodian monks. Darren is making his way through the academic morass of graduate student stipends and applications for fellowships, while his thoughts are still influenced by his days as a stand-up comic, terse and cynical, with a vicious bite. 

His is the voice that dominates in these early chapters and his words are the ones that resonate. Describing Cambodian men at family gatherings, he classifies them by what they drink, “Heineken for the humble, Hennessey for the ballers.” A deeper class difference emerges among the men’s children when they reach middle school--are they going to become yellow or brown, choosing academic success or gangster rhythms, “Asian” or “Cambo”? Or will they sink into the mushy definition of Asian American, which Darren derides with his usual scathing insight, “Seriously, we don’t even eat the same grain of rice.”

While Afterparties examined the legacy inherited by the children of those who survived genocide, what’s offered in the opening chapters of So’s unfinished novel is the unwieldy balance between how to succeed in America without jettisoning the cultural roots of the Cambodian community. His final sentences give hints as to how this might have happened for the three cousins, who are forced to immerse themselves in their dead aunt’s livelihood before receiving the inheritance she’s left them. The sketches of Cambotown and its inhabitants give glimpses of a rich and devastating plot that will never come into being, and the sadness of So’s death becomes a matter of literary grief.

But he buries his conclusion among his torrent of words, where it emerges like a polished knife blade flashing in sunlight: “Some things are just lost. So don’t waste your life thinking about it.”~Janet Brown

Ma and Me: A Memoir by Putsata Reang (Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Ma is a woman with a “face spangled with light.” She took her children away from Cambodia’s genocide and brought them to a small town in Oregon, a place where she and her husband found a house and established their reputations as a leading Khmer family in the area. “Use your brain, not your back,” she tells her children, and shows them the consequences of ignoring her advice by taking them to the fields of berry farmers and harvesting crops for money every summer. Quickly they all learn to listen to Ma. All of them succeed in moving far from lives of physical labor.

On the ship that carries her family from Cambodia to a refugee camp, Ma holds tight to Putsata, her dying baby whom she manages to keep alive. “My first feeling was flight,” Putsata says of the memories she has inherited from that voyage. When she turns two, Ma teaches her a game, “Run and hide,” one that the little girl plays so often that it “forms into habit,” her “very best skill.”

“Both of us are storytellers,” Putsata  says. Ma carries a storehouse of Cambodian fables and myth, while her daughter becomes a journalist who quests for facts that might hold truth. The presiding fact in Putsata’s life is one she’s always known: Ma is the savior and Putsata is the saved. “I owed Ma my life,” and in return Putsata “tried to live an immaculate life.” She goes off to work in Cambodia, becomes fluent in Khmer, helps her relatives who survived the Pol Pot years. She turns herself into a model daughter and “Ma made a myth of me.” Nothing seems to shatter that myth, not even when Putsata tells Ma that she’s gay, right up until the day that she discovers that her mother never believed that disclosure was true.

When she finds that she needs to choose between the woman she will marry and Ma, Reang becomes “the single flaw in the beautiful fiction of a family Ma spun for the Khmer community.” Without bathos or drama, she conveys the agony that racks her mother and herself in the moment when long after their voyage to safety ended, “Ma had cast me overboard.”

Memoirs have become a tiresome genre but Putsata Reang has set an impossible standard of excellence with hers. Intertwining Ma’s folktales with the story of her mother’s life and her own, Reang burnishes this with the language of a poet. When her abusive father attacks one of Reang’s young cousins, the blood seeping from the child “lying like a broken bird on the floor”  is “the color of fresh berries.” When Reang visits the death chambers of Tuol Sleng, she feels “the million pinpricks of guilt, shame, and sorrow…calcify in me like a new bone.” The Cambodian monsoons strike as if “through a single slit in the sky, an entire sea crashed onto the land.”

Whether she’s a child working in Oregon’s strawberry fields, “zombie-like and without complaint,” or an adult alone in the country of her birth, seeing it as “an entire nation of the walking wounded,” “so physically beautiful and yet stained with such a grim past,” Reang takes her readers with her, imbuing them with her sense of beauty, her scalding honesty, her refusal to indulge in self-pity, and her extraordinary history.~Janet Brown

Behind the Fire by Steven D. Salinger (Warner)

Steven D. Saligner’s debut novel Behold the Fire is a thriller set in the streets of New York. The murder of a man comes to the attention of NYPD homicide detective and Vietnam vet Mel Fink. However, at the scene of the crime, there was no sign of a struggle, no signs of a break in, and nothing was stolen. 

The victim was Franklin Grelling. He was an employee of Parker Global, a big defense contractor for the Pentagon. The company maintains that Grelling was “a traveling salesman with a fancy title”. Grelling’s partner, Barton believes the murder was related to drugs or to a relationship gone bad. Grelling spots a map of Vietnam on the wall and has a hunch that Barton is dead wrong about why the victim was murdered. 

Clear across the globe, in the jungles of Cambodia is Army Corporal Isaac Johnson, known to everybody as Zach. He is listed as an M.I.A. from the Vietnam War. Johnson was held captive in the Cambodian jungle by the Khmer Rouge for over twenty years. After saving a fellow American and former POW Ev Ransom and illegal arms dealer who works as a broker for Parker Global. 

Ransom agrees to try to return Johnson to his home in the U.S. It is Ransom that sets in motion a roller coaster ride that affects Washington and its relation with Vietnam as Ransom sends the fingerprints of Johnson to an MIA/POW activist senator named Antel Grantham. This is the proof the Senator has been waiting for even though the Pentagon has denied the existence or knowledge of any MIAs. 

To complicate matters even further, Fink has taken a liking to the wife of the first victim and Marissa Grelling seems to have ties to Ev Ransom and Parker Global as well. And the was another murder. The victim is also an employee of Parker Global. The mode of operation was the same as that of Frank Grelling. 

Fink’s continuing investigation leads him to find that the killings were done by a professional. He has also determined that the assassin is Cambodian. The only piece still missing from the puzzle is why the assassin has singled out personnel from Parker Global. What is the connection between Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, Vietnam and Washington? Does Corporal Isaac Johnson ever get to set foot in his home country again? These are the questions that will keep the reader involved in the story up until its ultimate end.

Salinger’s story is fast-paced and exciting. The character development is great and makes you want to help Fink solve the crimes. His descriptions of New York City and the jungles of Cambodia are detailed and make you feel as if you are in the middle of all the turmoil as well. The action may not be enough for fans of John Rambo but this story doesn’t get preachy about alleged MIAs still being held prisoner in Vietnam or Cambodia. The book will appeal to fans of W.E.B Griffin and other military and detective fiction. ~Ernie Hoyt

Afterparties by Anthony Veasna So (Ecco, HarperCollins)

They’re California kids, doing their homework and killing time in their parents’ shops, smoking dope, having sex, wearing teeshirts that extend to the knees of their baggy jeans, stealing packs of their dads’ cigarettes, envying the kid who drives a Mustang—but as one of them says, “carrying...the aftermath of war, genocide, colonialism.” They call themselves Cambos, these children of people who came to the U.S. in flight from the Khmer Rouge and Cambodia’s Auto Genocide, of people who have “clawed their way to a livable and beautiful life,” ”always thinking on the past and worrying for the future.”

As the kids memorize 50 Cent lyrics and watch Boyz in the Hood, hang out in a mall “that did so badly Old Navy shut down,” they balance their parents’ ambitions for them with the weight of the word “survivors.” They attend ceremonies for infants who have come into the world carrying the spirits of dead relatives who have chosen these babies for their rebirth. They put on the robes of monks to ensure that their prayers will allow a dead parent to pass easily into the next life. The simple act of drinking a glass of ice water can provoke a father into saying “There were no ice cubes in the genocide.” Even when they go off to college and begin to enter a larger world, they’re still haunted by the “dreams of the dead...the ghosts of all our suffering.”

At home, their mothers watch Thai soap operas since that’s the closest form of entertainment to what they once knew in Cambodia. A family wedding means “300 Cambos in the Dragon Palace Restaurant” with a singer imported from Phnom Penh. The wife of a man who triumphed over his early years by becoming a doctor in his new country clutches her Louis Vuitton purse and offers an easy way to become rich. All a Khmer boy needs to do is marry a wealthy girl from Cambodia and bring her to the U.S. A young teacher in San Francisco finds a man on a dating app who’s Cambodian and comes from his part of California. Before finalizing the connection, he checks to be certain that the man isn’t some unknown second cousin. His new boyfriend serves him a meal that both of their mothers once cooked for them, but it’s been transformed into health food; “ the essential ingredients were there but it looked disfigured, like it’d been extinct and was then genetically resurrected in a petri dish.”

In the final story of this collection, a mother tells her son “I’ve always considered the genocide to be the source of all our problems and none of them. Know that we’ve always kept on living. What else could we have done?”

The trauma of atrocities becomes part of the genetic code and is passed down to following generations, living in the bodies of the children of survivors as much as the stories of genocide live on as retold memories. “If you think that I’m interesting,” Anthony Veasna So told an interviewer, “it’s probably because you’ve never met someone that’s come from my particular context.”

It’s true that “his particular context” had never been revealed in fiction before. It’s also true that he tells his coming-of-age stories with a sardonic humor and a bitter compassion that’s powerful and irresistible. The tragedy is we enter the lives of his characters only after So’s own life came to an end. He was never able to hold Afterparties as a finished book and he will never write the four other books he had planned to bring into being. Dead at 28, a writer who had already been published in the New Yorker, Paris Review, Granta, and Zyzzyva, So has turned his first book into his epitaph.~Janet Brown

The Heaven Stone by David Daniel (St. Martin's Press)

The Heaven Stone by David Daniel won the 1993 St. Martin’s Press / PWA Best First Private Eye Novel contest. Set in the mill town of Lowell, Massachusetts, it is the first in a series featuring ex-cop turned private eye Alex Rasmussen. During the time of the Cambodian genocide, Lowell accepted an influx of Cambodian refugees and currently boasts one of the largest Cambodian-American communities in the nation, second only to Long Beach, California. 

Bhuntan Tran, one of the refugees from Cambodia, was found ded in his own home. The local police believe it’s an open and shut case of a drug deal gone wrong as they found some cocaine at Tran’s house. However, Ada Stewart, a Chinese-American social worker, has doubts about the official report. She works with the refugee community and knows that Tran was holding down two jobs and had recently moved into his new house. She believes Tran was a model citizen and cannot accept that Tran was involved in anything illegal. She hires Rasmussen to further investigate the cause of Tran’s death.

Rasmussen had worked on the force for eight years before an unfortunate incident found him on the outs with internal affairs. This led him to resigning from the force and becoming a private eye. Thankfully, he still has friends on the force who sometimes give him a helping hand. 

Ramussen’s former colleague and friend told him the killing was done execution-style and may have been a professional hit with two shots to the back of the head at point blank range. This information makes Rasmussen uneasy. “Nothing takes heat off a killing—and therefore the police—like calling it gangland.” “Folks figure, Hey, play with fire you get burnt, victim probably got his due.” 

Tran was the only one of his family to survive the “Killing Fields'' of Cambodia. It was with the help of a non-governmental organization Tran was given the chance to leave the refugee camp in Thailand and start a new life in the U.S. Tran’s neighbors and employers said he was a hard-working, law-abiding citizen; they did not believe he was involved with drugs.

The deeper Rasmussen digs into the case, the less likely he is inclined to believe in the official police report. He also discovers that many Cambodians had hidden their family treasures and often used them to cut through the red tape and make their way to the land of opportunity. This is a story of the American Dream becoming an American Nightmare. 

David Daniel is a fresh voice in the hard-boiled mystery genre. His story will appeal to fans of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett as Alex Rasmussen joins the ranks of Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe. The story Rasmussen narrates keeps you guessing throughout as you try to determine who the killer is and what his motives were. And what exactly is the “heaven stone”? How does the “heaven stone” relate to the Cambodian community? You will be inclined to return to Lowell, Massachusetts by the time you are done reading. ~Ernie Hoyt

A Nail the Evening Hangs on by Monica Sok (Copper Canyon Press)

“Who is this history written for,” Monica Sok asks when she reads about Cambodia. “Is it written for me?”  In her book of poems, A Nail the Evening Hangs On, Sok writes for and about her family, people who survived a time “when family was being destroyed.”

Sok chronicles the words of survivors without ever mentioning the names of the force that tore Cambodia apart. She tells of an afternoon in 1998  when she and her brother were sent outside to play as her parents sit in front of the television, watching “an old man die in his bed.” Only the title reveals that the dying man was Pol Pot.

Words her parents have told her are fired like bullets in her poetry. Sisters search for water but instead “find, full of air, a balloon...swollen in the river.” A man who survives through lies stays awake in the dark: “I thought I heard escape.” A woman watches her husband, “the last historian,” scratch words with a stick onto tree bark; “he burns a dangerous light.”

After the war, Khmer fishermen poison egrets to sell at Thai border markets, “knowing the pendulum of war could swing anytime...They were sure it wasn’t over.” The egrets let them  have food to ration, to save in case they needed to leave again.

In Pennsylvania, Sok’s grandmother weaves silk on her loom, “her hair falls, not as the rain does but as nails the evening hangs on.” Her silk received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. It’s shown on the cover of Sok’s book, saffron and deep turquoise, its texture palpable in the photograph, holding memories and promises, loss and sorrow, transformed into beauty.

Sok has spoken in an interview of “Cambodian experience contextualized to fit into an American gaze.” On her visits to Cambodia, her own gaze is divided by her family’s history and her American upbringing. Eating foie gras prepared by a French chef in Siem Reap, she’s watched by a local family having a meal in their shop, wondering if she, “sitting so fancy on a restaurant patio alone,” is Khmer. “In America I don’t get to do this rich people thing.” In Cambodia, Sok is unable to stomach it, vomiting it up  as she rushes to the toilet. In a Phnom Penh hotel with other university students from the U.S., she says, “The Americans hate me and I hate them, but they’re the only students with me, and maybe I’m American too.” It’s the time of the Water Festival and as people crowd onto a bridge to give their offerings to the river, there’s “a human stampede...347 reported dead, 755 injured.” On the following evening the American students go dancing at The Heart of Darkness, “they still don’t understand but I go with them anyway.”

Trauma, Sok reminds us, is passed down through DNA, “molecular scars in the genes.” But the “revolutionaries who wanted so-called Year Zero so bad” have been turned into mosquitoes, she’s told in Cambodia. “Don’t bend. Slap.”

“We can make our own  worlds as easily as we can laugh,” Sok has said in an interview. Her poetry reveals new worlds while remembering the old one, as her grandmother did when she turned her memories into radiant silk.~Janet Brown

Available from ThingsAsian Books

In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner (Simon & Schuster)

“Your father may have brought you wings, Raami. But it is I who must to teach you to fly. I want you to understand this. This is not a story.” Raami is a seven-year-old girl with a leg damaged by polio, whose father taught her that words could make her fly and that stories are the gift life brings to those who listen. She yearns to walk with the grace of her beautiful mother, to run as freely as her little sister, but her father, Cambodia’s Tiger Prince, teaches her the power of words and the ability to transform her world into poetry.

And a lovely world it is. Every morning Raami’s father leaves their gated villa, wanders through the streets of Phnom Penh and comes with a poem to write. The family is of royal blood, the descendants of King Sisowath, except for Raami’s mother. “Our family,” she tells her daughter, “is like a bouquet, each stem and blossom perfectly arranged.”

And then the bouquet disintegrates when the Khmer Rouge enter Phnom Penh and send the city’s residents onto the highways that lead into the countryside. Hastily Raami’s family throw what they will need into their car—jewelry stitched into an old pillow, food, Raami’s treasured copy of the Reamker, the Ramayana, and in her father’s pocket his fountain pen and the small leather notebook that goes with him everywhere.

Deep in the Cambodian countryside, the family finds that little they brought is of any use to them. The world is new and inexplicable; only Raami’s mother knows how to survive without servants or the safety of a walled garden. The rules have all changed. Religion and education have been swallowed up by the new force which is Angkar, The Organization. Soldiers in black look for class enemies. When they ask Raami to give her father’s name, she announces it proudly. Sisowath rings in the air like a death sentence.

The Tiger Prince is well-known for his courage and his poetry; even away from Phnom Penh peasants smile when they see his face. He gives himself up, telling his captors that the rest of the family are commoners who are relatives of his wife. Raami hears him writing in the dark, tearing a page from his notebook; the next morning he is carried away in an oxcart while his daughter begs him for one more story.

The remaining family is torn apart. Raami, her mother, and her sister are taken to an old peasant couple who have always longed for children and see the three strangers as an answer to their deepest wish. “Don’t forget who you are,” Raami’s mother tells her as she sees her daughter learn to love the rural life. But under Angkar, happiness is a treacherous state and Raami’s mother is forced to teach her oldest daughter that the only way to survive is to put memories of the past in the farthest reaches of her brain.

Ripped from their peasant family after the death of Raami’s baby sister, she and her mother sink deeper into hunger, exhaustion, and the madness of the Pol Pot years. By the end of the book, their deaths seem inevitable, as Angkar puts them to work excavating what seems to be a gigantic gravesite.

The opening dedication of this novel provides a powerful clue to how it will end. “In the memory of my father,” Vaddey Ratner writes, “Neak Ang Mecha Sisowath Ayuravann.” The name rings like a clear bell. It’s the name of Raami’s father.

This book is a novel because, to tell her own story with the depth that she wanted, Vaddey Ratner needed to create thoughts and speech and feelings that as a small child she could neither remember nor completely comprehend. She has taken lives that were snuffed out and lives that held on in spite of unimaginable cruelty and turned what some cynically call a “misery memoir” to a story that is mythic in its scope and description. The beauty of Cambodia, the courage of its people, and the horror of its recent history is told with the resonance and poetry of Raami’s beloved Reamker. This is an unforgettable narrative and a tribute to the courage of Vaddey Ratner’s parents.

Cambodia is attempting to erase the Pol Pot years. In the Shadow of the Banyan helps to ensure that the world, and the Khmer people, will always remember the years between 1975 and 1979 when a group of Cambodians did its best to destroy their beautiful country, and failed.~Janet Brown

This review was first published in the International Examiner.

The Road of Lost Innocence by Somaly Mam (Spiegel & Grau)

When Somaly Mam was told by a European Union representative in Phnom Penh that "there are no prostitutes in Cambodia," her response was blunt and immediate. "Madame," she told the representative, who had lived in Cambodia for "at least a year," "You're living in a world of air-conditioned hotels and offices. This isn't an air-conditioned country. Go outdoors and take a look around."

Nobody knew better than Somaly that the representative was misinformed. Not only was she the founder of an organization that helped women who worked in brothels in her own neighborhood, she had been sold into prostitution herself when she was sixteen.

Born shortly after Vietnam had toppled the regime of Pol Pot, Somaly was a toddler when her parents left her in a communal mountain village where she was nobody's child, "at home everywhere and nowhere." Sold into domestic servitude when she was ten, she was married in her early teens, widowed shortly thereafter, and then was bought by a brothel in Phnom Penh from the man who had owned her since she was a child.

For three years, Somaly was a slave, living in a world of filth, violence, and fear. It is difficult to read about her years as a prostitute; it must have been excruciating to write about them. That she survived them is a testimonial to her courage and her spirit.

Good fortune played a part in Somaly's survival as well. She met Pierre, a Khmer-speaking Frenchman who lived "like a Cambodian" and "of all the people I ever met," she says, "he was the only person who was attentive to me--not to my body but to me." They married and went to France, where Somaly learned that she could work "honest jobs" and "communicate directly...as an equal." After eighteen months when they returned to Cambodia, Somaly came back as a Khmer de France, assured, confident, and secure in her place in the world.

Her life was comfortable in her residential Phnom Penh neighborhood, but Somaly soon discovered that surrounding the homes and gardens were brothels, and the girls within them were so young that foreigners called the area "the street of little flowers." Pretending to be a health worker, Somaly took condoms to the brothels and took the girls to clinics for medical treatment. When she learned that there were children of ten and "sometimes younger still" serving as prostitutes, often badly hurt and sick from the drugs they were given, she, with her husband and his colleagues, decided to create a center that would house girls freed from prostitution, and provide them with vocational training.

First they housed a dozen girls, then twenty, then more than thirty. Money came from the European Union, UNICEF, and Spain's Prince of Asturias Prize. Police raids on brothels freed more and more prostitutes, and as their targets became larger and more powerful, Somaly and her family became the subject of death threats. Her oldest daughter was kidnapped by traffickers and was rescued shortly before being taken across the border between Cambodia and Thailand. Her marriage dissolved under the pressure of her work. And yet Somaly continues to provide safe places for girls and women who are captives of the sex trade--with centers in Cambodia, Laos, and Thailand, and ambitions to go even farther afield in Southeast Asia.

This is an age when heroes are needed desperately. It is incredible and inspiring that this woman who was born into and survived a life of horror has exerted every talent and scrap of energy that she possesses to help other women survive too. Her book is a document of courage and persistence--read it, give it to others, and help wherever and however you can. (More information can be found at www.somaly.org)

The Gate by Francois Bizot (Vintage Books/Random House)

Francois Bizot was a Khmer-speaking Frenchman, an ethnologist who searched for old manuscripts and art that would illuminate the religion and customs of ancient Cambodia. A man whose only gods were Saul Steinberg and Charlie Parker, Bizot lived in a village near Angkor Wat with his Cambodian wife and their little daughter. His world was “enameled with paddy fields, dotted with temples, a country of peace and simplicity.” Then the war in Vietnam spilled over the border into Cambodia and Bizot and his family moved to the urban safety of Phnom Penh.

While working thirty miles from Phnom Penh with two of his Cambodian colleagues, Bizot and his companions were captured by a group of Khmer Rouge. They marched at gunpoint for three days to a remote village, where they were confined on their backs with their ankles shackled within two wooden beams. As they lay there alone and in pain, they could hear the sound of bare feet approaching and a group of young girls, “pretty,” Bizot noted, “ just like those from my own village,” surrounded them and spat on their faces.

The man who was in charge of this Khmer Rouge outpost was young, thin and suffering from malaria. “His authority was total. His silences were mightier than words.” Repeatedly he came to Bizot with pen and paper to receive written declarations of innocence. These statements were written in French but the conversations that Bizot began to have with his jailer were in Khmer. “The bonds gradually forming between us depended entirely on our capacity to understand each other on common ground and this could be done only in his language.”

It was Bizot's ability to communicate in Cambodia’s language that convinced his captor that he was innocent and prompted this man to persuade the Khmer Rouge leadership that the Frenchman should be freed. After three months of imprisonment, of living in shackles, witnessing death, and experiencing humiliation and torment, Bizot was released. No other prisoner left that camp alive; his Cambodian colleagues were executed after his departure, despite assurances from the leader of the camp that they would be safe.

Four years later, the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh. The Americans had fled, Bizot had sent his daughter to France, his wife joined the crowd of Cambodians who were ordered to evacuate the city and took to the roads on foot.

Sent to the French embassy with all other foreign residents of Phnom Penh, Bizot used his Khmer language skills once more to advantage, becoming the link between the Khmer Rouge leadership and the foreign community, and the only foreigner authorized to leave the embassy walls. His descriptions of a city emptied of its inhabitants and of the Cambodian people who were denied the safety that lay behind the gate of the embassy are haunting and soul-wrenching.

Long after the Pol Pot years had passed, Bizot returned to visit Cambodia. The camp where he was held has become famous as Anlong Veng and is now a tourist attraction. The man who held him prisoner and was responsible for his release is known to the world as Douch, the infamous leader at Tuol Sleng, the Phnom Penh high school that was turned into a center of torture and death. Bizot’s history, lived in Khmer, written in French, and translated into English, provides stunning testimony to whatever International Tribunal may someday stand in belated judgment.