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When I arrived in Siem Reap, the town next door to Angkor Wat, one of the many new hotels that have sprung up there recently and that look like pagodas crossed with mirrored sunglasses, was draped with a banner announcing a conference: Gender Analysis in Farmers' Water Management.
This was strong evidence, I think, that the aid agencies were in town, for the conference (it seemed to me) was unlikely to have been arranged on purely Cambodian initiative. The aid agencies are one means by which our current fads, fancies, and obsessions are transmitted to, or should I say imposed upon, small and poor countries, usually with disastrous results. The last thing Cambodia needs, after all, is more deconstruction.
But aid is not the only means of transmission of our obsessions. It is curious how tourism, the constant search for exotic destinations by people disillusioned with their daily lives, always ends up by reducing the difference between the exotic destinations and the places from which tourists seek to escape. A brochure in my luxurious, French-run hotel informed me that Siem Reap was no longer the sleepy little place it once was (when, of course, it wasn't in the throes of massacre and civil war). It was developing quite a night life:
When it comes to partying in bars or downing drinks, the old favorites are holding their own . . . Among the most popular [is] . . . le Tigre de Papier, a sophisticated little spot in the up-and-coming bar strip of Siem Reap. Granddaddy of this strip is the Angkor What? and it is still going strong after four years.
Four whole years! If a week is a long time in politics, four years is an eon in popular culture. As for the temples, built between 800 and 1400 -- well, they're history.
Le Tigre de Papier "rages into the early hours of the morning." Again, it seems rather curious that, in a multiculturalist age when everyone is supposed to be alive to everyone else's sensitivities, a bar's name should make light reference to the words of Mao Tse-tung, who not only caused one of the greatest famines in world history, but was the chief ally and inspiration of the mad Khmer Rouge ideologues responsible for the deaths of between a fifth and a quarter of the entire Cambodian population. No one, I hope, would open a bar called Sonderkommando in Minsk, or Einsatzgruppen in Vilnius (though British Airways, in one of the most unfortunate advertising campaigns in history, did once promise their German customers Sonderbehandlung , the Special Treatment that was the Nazi euphemism for genocidal murder), but ironical reference to Communist horrors is still not only permissible but chic. Perhaps it demonstrates that one hasn't quite abandoned the idealism of youth.
Whatever the destructive cultural effects of tourism, it is Cambodia's greatest economic hope. Hotels are being constructed at a furious rate, in the expectation of a million visitors annually to Angkor within a year or two. The visa fee and airport departure tax alone will add 1 percent to the country's GDP, and all in U.S. dollars.
Never has a country been so dependent upon the visible remains of its ancestral civilization. It is as if Italy depended upon visitors to Pompeii for its prosperity. But the temples at Angkor, spread over 30 square miles, are so spectacular that familiarity cannot stale them, nor will they ever disappoint those lucky enough to see them for the first time. Even a million tourists a year will not vitiate their overwhelming effect, though perhaps it will be difficult henceforth to visit them in the kind of solitude necessary to enjoy any ruins to the full.
It is difficult, though, even in solitude, to completely exclude reflections about Cambodia's recent past from one's romantic reaction to the temples. At the entrance to each of them, hopeful young salesmen tout books in English, mainly pirated editions, about the Khmer Rouge regime. "You want Pol Pot book, mister?" is a common refrain. It was as if Pol Pot had become a tourist attraction too.
There is indeed a connection between Pol Pot and Angkor: The grandeur of the site (first appreciated by the French colonialists) fed Pol Pot's megalomania. He once said, and meant, that the people who built Angkor could do anything, a kind of racial-nationalist version of Mao's thesis about people as blank sheets of paper upon whom the most beautiful characters could be written. People who can do anything have no need to take stark reality, either human or physical, into account. They can decree how much rice is to be produced by forcibly collectivized workers, whether farmers or not, a failure to meet the target therefore indicating counter-revolutionary sabotage rather than physical impossibility. People who can do anything can attack much stronger neighbors, such as Vietnam, and prevail. This Angkor-induced voluntarism led to the overthrow of Pol Pot's regime.
You can't help wondering what kind of labor produced the exquisite monuments of Angkor, with their serene and sublime sculptures. Were the armies of laborers necessary for the erection of the temples so devout that they were happy to toil for the glory of the Hindu gods and their avatars on earth, the Cambodian kings? Or were they wretched slaves? No one knows, but one ancient stone inscription in Cambodia describes how a worker called Viruna tried to escape from his temple and had his eyes gouged out and his nose cut off: not exactly a testament to labor's freedom of movement.
The contrast between the captivating charm and physical grace of the Cambodians, and the inhuman cruelty of the Khmer Rouge, is a source of puzzlement to all visitors to the country. I caught a glimpse of the less attractive side of the Cambodian character at one of the temples. A deaf and dumb girl approached me when I reached the top of the temple and offered me a ring she had woven of palm leaf, obviously in the hope of a tip. One of the female temple guards (and guards are necessary, to prevent people from taking carvings home, a tradition joined if not started by Andre Malraux in the 1920s, when he tried to steal several carved Apsaras) shouted at the girl to go away and then used a switch to beat her, which she did with evident sadistic relish. My wife and I intervened to protect the girl from further beating, which was horrible in its heartlessness. If the guard was prepared to do this in front of foreigners, what would she have been prepared to do when not observed? We took the girl, crying, away.
But had we done the right thing? The girl, after all, was local and would have to stay where she was. Perhaps the guard, also local, would take her revenge upon her for being thus humiliated by our intervention. When you don't know the culture, when you can't read the script or speak a single word of the language, it isn't easy to know whether you're doing good or harm.
It isn't easy to understand a country in which Sihanouk could still be head of state. He has had more incarnations than a Hindu god. He has been a playboy prince, a colonial front-man/king, a Japanese puppet, a fighter for independence, a populist prime minister with elitist tastes, a persecutor of Communists, a neutralist with anti-American and pro-Communist leanings, an exile in Peking, a head of state under palace arrest of a mass-murdering regime, a deposed head of state once more, a leader of an exiled opposition coalition including the party of the mass murderers who deposed him, and finally a figurehead king. But it seems to me probable that he is still widely revered. I think I could study Cambodia for many years, and still not understand.
Mr. Daniels is the author of, among other books, Utopias Elsewhere: Journeys in a Vanishing World.
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