This coming Tuesday we’re hosting a book launch for Chicago author Anne Elizabeth Moore’s most recent book Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh, which chronicles her experience of traveling to Cambodia to teach young women how to express themselves via zines. The event will feature an onstage interview with Moore by Chicago Reader editor Mara Shalhoup and a special dance performance by the Cambodian Association of Illinois. RSVP now!
The Cambodian Grrrl Book Launch will take place Tuesday, September 13th, at 6 PM in the Claudia Cassidy Theater in the Chicago Cultural Center, 77 E. Randolph St., 2nd Floor. Please RSVP to info@chicagopublishes.com.
To whet your appetite, we’ve provided an excerpt from the first chapter of Cambodian Grrrl below:
Where You Go Today?
Chandara
“Where you go today?” Chandara asked as I clambered out of the motorcycle-driven carriage called a tuk-tuk, aggressive and challenging, but bright and flighty in a charming way. She was disarming, and you were never quite sure if she understood your sense of humor until she laughed, laughed, laughed, tossing back her long, black hair like she’d seen done in TV commercials—but not at the movies, because she’d never been to one. Part of it was language: She had only been studying English for a little over a year, a difficult skill to pick up in the Cambodian countryside where she had spent her entire life until a few short months ago. Part of it, though, was deliberate. She was smart and aggressive in a country where women were taught not to be. There were things Chandara knew. That beat before she allowed herself to respond to your joke was her way of letting you know she was special.
She certainly was. She and 31 other young women lived at the Euglossa Dormitory for University Women, a space that provided leadership skills and all-around education to a select group of social-justice minded girls entering college for the first time. Some of the new students were older than the usual age for entering university, 18; this was because the dormitory offered them their first chance to attend school and they had been waiting. Since they were rebuilt in the mid-1990s (around the same time ice came to the country) universities in Cambodia have been located only in larger cities and have not offered housing to students. Despite admissions policies that did not technically discriminate on the basis of gender, girls could not live in monasteries, where some boys resided while they attended school, and were prohibited by strong cultural mores—and often their own families—from renting apartments. Most were left with no housing options, and thus no education beyond the high-school level. Which didn’t even account for the economic barriers that keep smart young people of all genders from attending any university at all. Many of the girls were so relieved excited by the opportunity to go to college, they cried as they relayed the stories of how they came to live at Euglossa.
Being one of thirty-two future young women leaders of Cambodia was a huge responsibility in a country slightly smaller than Oklahoma where recent population estimates hovered around 14 million residents. (Oklahoma’s is a quarter of that.) The national population is growing almost 2% per year, and in 2007, over half of the nation’s inhabitants were under the age of 21.
It’s a jarring ratio given the country’s history with youth leaders, who were chosen for their easy impressionability to carry out the commands of the Khmer Rouge, under whose regime died approximately a quarter of the 1975 population. Recent estimates say as many as 2.2 million people were killed during what’s come to be known as the Pol Pot years. Despite photographic and journalistic documentation of the ravages of this time period, and that every single resident of the country over the age of 30 was affected—including every single one of their parents—most of the nation’s youth population didn’t believe the Khmer Rouge existed.
This is one of the reasons I was drawn to the place. When I was their age, I knew more about the Khmer Rouge than some of the young women in the dorm do now. I had heard of the Killing Fields as a teenager in a movie theater 8,500 miles away, and as a girl was horrified and intrigued by the regime’s willingness to give young people positions of power. Over two decades later I was no less horrified or intrigued, and I visited local genocide sites almost immediately when I came to live at Euglossa, which sits on the south side of Phnom Penh—ten blocks away from renowned torture prison Toul Sleng and nine kilometers from the Killing Fields Memorial.
I was returning from my first visit when Chandara, casting aside verb conjugations and any sense of respect her culture demanded she harbor for elders, wanted to know where I go today. It was Christmas Day, an event I viewed with a cynicism in the States that was only amplified here. Phnom Penh was in the midst of its first city-wide acknowledgment of the holiday, by way of what was referred to as the traditional Christmas Sale. Given the other options, I couldn’t think of a more appropriate way to spend a day reflecting on the meaning of global peace than by visiting the memorial site. The nine-kilometer journey had only taken half an hour by motorcycle-drawn carriage, but it felt significant. This so-called Killing Field was arguably the Khmer Rouge’s most infamous accomplishment: A suburban farm devoted to the mass execution of enemies of the state, although similar mass graves spread throughout the entire country, and more continue to be discovered. The Killing Fields Memorial wasn’t, at the time, really a museum; neither was it exclusively a memorial. It was simply raw proof, a still-under-excavation site owned by a Japanese corporation and informally staffed by locals who hung around the front gate charging the exorbitant price of a couple bucks for tours. My naked fascination embarrassed me: I had wanted to go there for 23 years. And today I had done it.
“Where you go today?!” Chandara insisted again, louder, when I didn’t respond, likely more concerned that I had misunderstood her pronunciation than that I was ignoring her. One does not ignore Chandara.
“Oh, Cheung Eck,” I explained hesitatingly, using the Khmer name for the memorial. Together Chandara and I spoke Khmenglish, a mixture of languages that eliminates helper verbs and most articles, adds S’s to words that don’t need them. I continued. “It was hard. I am sad now. Khnyom kartok,” I said.
I expected an emotional torrent from her, or a roadblock. An expression of rage or sympathy. At least a knowing look. I had witnessed something revelatory and horrifying about her past, her culture, her people. She had a right to claim it from me. To put me in my place as a foreigner, as white, as inexperienced. As, on this matter, stupid. Which I was. I awaited her outburst.
The position I was standing back to ensure her—the privilege of outrage, her birthright—was one I was familiar with. I have lived on several reservations in South Dakota and unless you have, too, you cannot tell me what Native American Indian reservations are like, really. If, like me, you present as white and middle class, I will query you on your ethnic heritage and personal background if you crack genocide jokes on Thanksgiving, or blithely refer to Indian Time. The same principle applied here: Chandara deserved the right to narrate her lived experience.
“What is it?” She asked.
I blamed my Khmer pronunciation for her failure to understand. “Umm, the Killing Fields?”
“Uh huh,” she said. Knowing. Only knowing those words, though. “What is it?” She repeated.
I had lived with her for nearly a month by then, and Chandara was smarter than most Cambodian teenagers. Still, her blank expression and continued confusion in response to my hurried explanation indicated that she had never heard of the Killing Fields. She could not claim her own history. Not because she did not have the skills or the urge or the language to do so, but because she did not know it.
And I wasn’t prepared to explain it to her.
