Corn Gold

From the rooftop of our Phnom Penh apartment, I can see the strange Picasso shapes of the Psar Kapko market by the lighting of an early morning, through the thorny trunks of the cactus plants lining the edge. Cambodia awakes reluctantly, curled in a ball under the nubby colors of someone else's old sheet.

Nearly every morning I walk down two-flights of stairs from our apartment to browse the market for fresh produce. I pass women and men frying bananas and sweet patotoes or muffins with peppers and capers. The sun is rising and umbrellas protect them from the heat. Some people are shucking corn on mats in the street. Women are pushing out their sugarcane juice carts. Monks robbed in orange and maroon walk barefoot down the street carrying their silver alms bowls. The market is the first to wake up in Phnom Penh. And its excited for the new day, for the prospect of making a dollar to return to a home outside of the city. Crabs crawl on top of each other, trying to reach the top of the blue buckets, to welcome the day in their own manner, to make their escape into the streets. I throw one back into a woman's bucket. Around her head is wrapped the traditional plaid Khmer scarf. Her face is an amalgamation of every agony she has likely endured.

When Pol Pot took over Phnom Penh and declared the date, April 17, 1975 year Zero, his army, the Khmer Rouge, meticulously began organizing the country into a Maoist, peasant-dominated agrarian cooperative. The day that the troops stormed through the city, families packed up what they could carry and many walked, some drove, out into the countryside. When those who had driven ran out of gas they started walking. At Khmer Rouge check points, those who understoond the workings of the revolution proclaimed that they were poor barbers or street vendors. The new government was on a mission to execute all of the educated, to stop all art and end all culture. In the four years that the Khmer was in power, thousands of people died of starvation, dehydration and exhaustion. Thousands more were tortured and exectuted, often by children forced to become soldiers and kill or be killed. The population of Cambodia at the time was 7 million and as many as 2 million may have died because of the Khmer Rouge.

This means that no one living today was unscathed. The tuk-tuk and moto drivers on the corner, playing Tinglan and betting money, holler at me in a comical tone as I walk down from my apartment, "You want a moto lady, come on give me a job, you know you want to give me this one job." They laugh with their friends when I acknowledge them and reply, "I'm walking" and they say, "It's too hot to walk!" But I just shake my head and they laugh and I find them so pleasant, so ready to joke and laugh and make light. But many are in their 30s or 40s. And I can't help but wonder who they watched, in their youth, walk away from their huts with 2 guards in black uniforms to forever disappear; I wonder how many mothers holding children they were forced to kill, to kill by busting their skull with a blunt farm tool in order to save bullets for the revolution.

Cambodia is one of the poorest places I've been. Along the riverside, barefoot children plead for food, middle-aged men crawl in the street suffering from the landmine that maimed them, destroyed their chance of making a living on the farm, or as a carpenter, destroyed their families. And I imagine that perhaps their wife has started to commute to the city, to sell a few measley, green tomatoes. Perhaps she's more strapped for money because her child is bloated from malnourishment, close to death with the potential of one small infection; she's at one of the restaurants blaring bad karaoke that sounds like screams and shes stroking the arm of a fat, white-man, pleasing him to make a few dollars to feed their children. It's hard to blame those who beg when there exists little infrastructure from the government to help these people.

But Phnom Penh is starting to thrive again. Only ten years ago, gun fights broke out throughout the city every few minutes, men with AK47s cruised the streets and the guns were on sale for $30 in the Russian Market, alongside kilos of marijuana. A few mercedes, owned by government officials navigated around oxen carts on the only paved road leading to the Independence Monument. Now there is a sense of hope, of intrigue, as English schools pop up all over the city and tvs that are even in the dirt floor living rooms of some of the poorest across the country replay old episodes of FRIENDS and Sienfield. I hate tv more and more.

There is a resurgence of culture and pride as Khmer restaurants line the tourist streets and everyone asks the foreigner, "Have you seen Angkor Wat Temples?" I love being in this atmosphere. I love the woman in the market with the bucket of crabs as she smiles at me with two front teeth protruding out above her bottom lip. I love the kids that run up and grab my hand and say in their best, most formal English, "Good morning, How are you? What is your name? Where do you come from?" The corn that is steamed in movable stands in the park next to my apartmentment is the juiciest, most perfectly gold corn I've ever eaten.