I dismounted my bicycle as I heard a woman squeal. ‘That’s strange,’ I thought. ‘What is there to yell about?’ The sun was bright and the sky clear; it was the kind of weather thought up by storybook illustrators, interrupted only by cartoon birds carrying song and ribbons in their mouths.

It sounded again. A scream of excitement not fright, I noted. Scanning the faces of the schoolchildren ambling home for lunch I saw her: the middle-aged mango seller. Her juicy ware had prompted my stop, and now my approach egged on her screaming giggles. I assumed what I thought to be an inconspicuous stance, trying hard to sink into the red dust of northeastern Cambodia that now coated my face and arms.

I reached her stand. It was small and wooden, and its lopsided form told me the maker was either unskilled or unfocused; it was made as an afterthought. More time and care had been put into the handfuls of bamboo tubes for sale. They stood erect, ten to a bunch, secured with white string. I imagined them as soldiers, five troops of them in neat sand-colored uniforms. To the right of these sat a small bowl of mangoes.

I had come to Southeast Asia on a post-grad teaching fellowship; though I wasn’t sure I wanted to pursue teaching as a career, I knew I loved to travel, and more than that, I loved to live in places far from my American home. After finishing a year of teaching English at a university in northern Thailand, I set off on a one-month solo trip through Cambodia and Vietnam.

I had bought the ticket to Cambodia months earlier, on a whim fueled by a thrifty deal: AirAsia was offering $30 flights from Bangkok to Phnom Penh. In the initial weeks after the purchase, I dreamed up an elaborate trip, encompassing Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam, and spanning two months. They were only travel dreams though, and I was prone to them. When I sat down to plan it, a month before my flight to Phnom Penh, I realized that I had neither the money nor the time to do the trip I had imagined. I cut out Laos because of a complex land visa process. Instead, I would spend two weeks in Cambodia, and two weeks in Vietnam.

In the midst of my planning, I made the decision to travel alone. I wanted to reflect on my teaching year. For me, this meant putting space between the people and the places — that is, Thailand — I had come to know. By traveling through an unfamiliar place, I could achieve the distance necessary to think on what I now knew so well.

Cambodia would be my first stop. Frugality had drawn me, but in the months before my trip, promises of what I would see replaced this. I read my Lonely Planet travel book guide with increasing enthusiasm, planning for the main attractions. I wanted to visit the Phnom Penh memorials, sites now commemorating the dead that were at one time — from 1975 to 1979 — used by Khmer Rouge members to kill millions; and I wanted to see the temples of Angkor, from which the Khmer empire ruled between the ninth and 15th centuries. Cambodia’s complex history was unlike Thailand’s: a story of ancient glory obscured by contemporary horror. I graded finals and left Thailand in mid-April.

I landed in Phnom Penh in the early evening. Watching others leaving the airport, I discerned the form of local transport: a motorcycle-drawn carriage — I later learned it is called a tuk tuk — with two rows of benches facing one another, beneath a hard cover. I hailed one for a $7 ride to my guesthouse.

The man at the desk was friendly; his manner helped to ease my shock at being in a new country, not to mention my starving, rumbling stomach which, at this point, was making its complaints well-known. He pointed me toward the riverside (later identified by my map as the Tonlé Sap River), and I walked down two blocks, past several bars that were just beginning to open their doors for the night, to find a place to dine at. As I treaded on, the only thing that filled the quiet air was the commotion of hostesses calling out the names of restaurant dishes, like meal-auctioneers. I bid on the third restaurant I passed, and ate a quiet dinner. In the cursory timeline of my trip, I had only budgeted in a day and a half in the capital city; therefore, not wanting to waste the precious time I had left for exploring, I hurriedly finished my meal and, having paid the bill, I walked back to the guesthouse. That night I went to bed early, storing energy for the next day’s plans.

The next day, I rose early and in a sea of sweat in my small, hot room. A coffee shop near my guesthouse offered an early meal of eggs and toast, and I started my day with the $3 breakfast. Hailing a tuk tuk, I pointed to the southern half of my city map, to the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum.

Originally a prison, referred to as Security Prison 21 (S-21), the former high school housed up to 30,000 prisoners of Cambodian Maoist revolutionary Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge. The stark rooms of the museum communicated horror that I imagined would have been lost in cursory captions; I entered prisoners’ rooms that had not been touched since victims were freed by the Vietnamese Army in 1979. Weapons of torture — long metal wrenches and chains — lay across metal cots, and dark pools stained the floor.

Larger rooms — formerly classrooms — housed black and white photograph upon photograph of prisoners, their portraits organized into groups of women, men, or children. They were prison photos, but the subjects were not criminals. A look of confusion, not guilt, dominated their stares.

In the room where pictures of child prisoners lined the walls, I paused at the image of a young boy. He looked no more than three-years-old. It wasn’t his age that haunted me — perhaps in the brief minutes I had been in the room, I had managed to become numb to the many photographs of children his age. Rather, his face reminded me of a photograph from home, a picture of my father as a toddler; for a moment, I saw a familiar face among the unfamiliar and the utterly hopeless. A rush of thoughts seized me: ‘this could have happened anywhere, this could have happened to my own family, this boy could be my family.’ Then the thoughts stopped. ‘It didn’t, and he wasn’t,’ I thought. ‘It didn’t happen anywhere…’

The sounds of a teenage girl breaking down ripped me from my own head. She stood in the same room, the room of children, with her family. Her mother led her outside. The young girl’s sobs — waning, as her mother’s words calmed her — were the only sounds that penetrated the silence of the open-air museum.

(Article continued on next page)