Upon reaching Phnom Penh, our first act was searching for dinner. I will never forget my first meal that truly tasted like home, after fourteen years in exile: It was fitting that it should be prahok—our defining (and aromatic) national condiment. We found someone preparing a version very much like my mother’s splendid cooked prahok: mixed with kroeung spice paste, minced pork, and young tamarind leaves, all wrapped in a banana leaf and grilled. Although I had never developed a taste for raw prahok as a child, that day the luscious, pungent fish was, for me, the flavor of Cambodia. I closed my eyes and drank in the familiar aromas. A sense of relief and well-being washed over me. Something essential from that lost world had survived, after all.
That feeling lasted as long as my first few bites of prahok. No matter how hungry I’d thought we were in postwar Saigon, nothing prepared me for what I witnessed in Cambodia in 1984: people living in inconceivable starvation and squalor, with little relief. Which is why, even with the Khmer Rouge out of power, we Cambodians still streamed toward Thailand by the hundreds of thousands. And Thailand reeled from the onslaught.
Phnom Penh was a dark and crippled city. This was no longer the elegant capital that had bewitched me as a little girl, as I zipped around its glittering streets on the front of my brother Noh’s moto. The stately old buildings were chipped and faded or crumbling into the street, their courtyards and sidewalks overgrown and buckled. The usual big-city bustle of cars, cyclos, street-cart vendors, and families piled onto motos had stilled to a wary murmur. There were no young girls floating by in elegant dresses, no scrubbed and spoiled children dressed in their finery and dragged toward churches and pagodas, no whisper of music drifting out of windows.
A few saffron-robed monks had somehow survived. In the mornings, they strode in quiet rows, much as before. But most of the resplendent old churches, pagodas, and monasteries were now derelict shells or razed to the ground—the Khmer Rouge had demolished many places of worship. Others they had repurposed as storehouses, meeting halls, prisons, or extermination sites. They had converted the national library and archives into a kitchen, and its walled garden into a pigsty. The books and records had been burned; our written history used as firewood.
The city did not function in any meaningful sense. Electricity was rare, and clean water was nearly unobtainable. Trash and sewage were every where. Shops and businesses were shuttered and dark, and many houses sat empty. Except for the very occasional moto (or moto-remork towing a long cart), the only vehicles on the roads were military trucks. Everyone seemed to have the same idea: move into an empty house and find some miserable items to sell in the street. Postwar Phnom Penh was a ramshackle city of squatters, hustlers, and beggars. Of hollowed cheeks and protruding ribs. Even the Vietnamese soldiers looked hungry and haunted.
But the rats and flies thrived.