Helen Churchill Candee was a remarkable woman. She survived the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 (rumour has it that the infamous "I'm flying Jack" scene in James Cameron's film was inspired by her escapades on board). In 1918, as a war nurse in Italy, she aided in the recovery of an injured Ernest Hemingway. And in 1922, she wrote Angkor the Magnificent, an account of her visit to the Angkor temple complex in Cambodia.
Angkor Wat, the world's largest religious building, is one of those monuments that seems too vast to adequately describe. The inclination is to snap a picture of it instead, to let a pixellated screen do the work for you. Mrs Churchill Candee didn't have that luxury, and though her descriptions are a little gushing, you can sense her desire to communicate her wonder with readers who were unlikely to ever see the Wat rising "in fair majesty against the heavens" for themselves.
Maybe I don't have as active an imagination as she did, or maybe it's that the temple was packed with Japanese tourists, but I found it difficult to people the scene with "kings and guards of other days". But the architecture as it stands now is intriguing enough: the "symmetric mountains of ornamental stone", "companions of the sky, sisters of the clouds"; the "marvellous decorations carved in low relief" "sprinkled over the Wat as though a spirit of joy and beauty had laid them there"; the huge faces carved in the nearby Bayon temple, "enigmatic, powerful, heroic as fate is heroic and relentless."
As I cruised around the complex in my tuk tuk, sipping a Coca Cola, I thought that Mrs Churchill Candee, with her pioneering spirit, might not be very impressed with me. As it turns out, she was ferried around on an elephant and "buzzed home to luncheon" in a car each day, which made me feel better. She would be dismayed, however, at how her predictions about future tourism at the site have come true. She worried that if one could "in a few minutes reach the ruins and hastily scramble over" them, one of the world's greatest wonders might "fail to thrill the souls of such a hasty audience". She was right; I was in the complex for two days and can't really remember anything past noon of either day, other than that I saw a lot of temples and it was hot.
There were moments, however, when I did feel the thrill of exploration, and could pretend that I had found a "gem... still unknown to modern man". Arriving at Banteay Srey temple just after dawn, I was the only visitor there. A policeman came towards me, and I assumed he was going to tell me off for leaning on the wall. Instead, he grabbed my camera and ushered me into the roped off area where the best preserved carvings in the complex are hidden, taking pictures of me and everything in sight with an entertainly mischievous expression. In another deserted temple, I found an isolated shady spot where a huge tree had wrapped its roots around a wall and "thrown down [the stones] as if in a rage". It must have seemed a wonder to the first European to stumble upon it and, even with the construction work going on around it, it is still a striking and poignant image, a reminder that even the most magnificent works of Men can be taken back by the earth they were raised from.
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Loung Ung is another remarkable woman. First They Killed My Father is an account of her and her family's experience under the Khmer Rouge regime. While Helen Candee Churchill's remarkable experiences were unique, Loung Ung's author's note reminds us that hers were not:
"This is a story of survival: my own and my family's. Though these events constitute my experience, my story mirrors that of millions of Cambodians. If you had been living in Cambodia during this period, this would be your story too."
On 17 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge, a communist force, won the country's civil war and took Phnom Penh. They cleared the city, marching everyone into the countryside to be 're-educated' and ready to take their place in the new agrarian society. Over the next four years, an estimated two million people, almost a quarter of the country's population, were killed "through execution, starvation, disease, and forced labour". The victims included Luong Ung's parents, and two of her sisters.
Helen Churchill Candee describes the Angkor temples as a "mad riot of destruction". The same could be said of what the Khmer Rouge did to Cambodia, as they tore society apart by the seams:
"This new country has no law or order. City people are killed for no reason. Anyone can be viewed as a threat to the Angkar - former civil servants, monks, doctors, nurses, artists, teachers, students - even people who wear glasses, as the soldiers view this as a sign of intelligence."
People can intellectualise about extreme left wing politics, or the disconnect between radical theory and its application, or the phenomenon of megalomaniacal leaders, or the capacity of individuals to commit horrible atrocities when they are sanctioned by authority. But ultimately, what happened here seems impossible to comprehend.
It's difficult to know how to respond as a tourist visiting the memorial sites. In Battambang, I visited a 'Killing Cave'. The young guide I was with pointed up to a hole in the roof of the cave, and told me that people were executed by being thrown down the hole, because bullets were expensive. He looked at me expectantly for a while, waiting for my reaction. I didn't know what to say. In Phnom Penh, I visited the 'Killing Fields' and Tuol Sleng Museum, a high school building which was turned into a prison under the regime. The exhibitions there are excellent, but the information still seemed surreal. Maybe it's subconscious self-preservation. Maybe it's a lifetime of watching horrible images from around the world on the morning news and carrying on eating my breakfast. Maybe it's because I still can't believe deep down that such horror can be real.
That's why Loung Ung is so remarkable. Not only did she survive and rebuild her life, but she's been able to tell her story. That two million people died can be filed in your mind as an awful but straight forward statistic. It's more difficult to dismiss the horrifying experience of an individual. Stories are important. And though it's so hard to wrap your mind around what happened in those memorial sites, it's still important to go, to stand and bear witness, to be reminded that we need to pay attention and make sure the world is watching when future leaders begin to insidiously inflict horrible damage on their populations.
Today, Phnom Penh is a great town. It's been such a joy to see my friend Meghan, who works for an NGO here, to catch up with her, see how the expats live, and have a break from travelling for a few days (Grey's Anatomy Series Nine has played an important role). And while Meghan's been at work, I've been hanging out in cafes, eavesdropping on the conversations of other NGO workers, listening to how things have been and are being rebuilt here. It's focused my mind on one question that ties together my two weeks in Cambodia: what can I do to be constructive in a world where so many things seem to be broken?
When I figure it out I'll let you know.
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Churchill Candee, Helen, Angkor the Magnificent (1924)
Ung, Luong, First They Killed My Father (2001)
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