Discovering Phnom Penh: A Personal Story

Phnom Penh...even before setting foot, as one flies over the outskirts of the greater metropolis, observing the dry, flat terrain spotted by occasional green trees surrounding tiny villages, one has the distinct notion of having been here before.  Maybe it’s the bias of a surely traveler, having visited great cities and having reveled in their unique diversity, hypocrisy and ultimate social confusion.  But Phnom Penh is a distinct amalgam, fused by traditions of the great Khmer kingdom of the past and a present day society attempting to rise from the ashes of an atrocious and recent genocide.   And that does not even address all the years in between. 

So all one ultimately does is vainly observe the “surface details” one sees:  A city lying in physical ruins, yet with a sprinkling of beautifully restored French colonial architecture.  Streets pot marked by decades of war and neglect, yet an able and mobile society navigating these very streets with motor scooters.  At least a dozen different forms of police, militia, private security guards, Cambodian army troops, UN soldiers, political party protectorates, and just plain generic thugs roaming the city streets, yet people go about their business in a surprisingly amiable way...for the most part. 

But just as one’s sense of logic, based on a Western mindset, begins to explain things, a sudden, maddening and insurmountable feeling pervades: “What the hell am I doing here?” And quickly you learn to loosen your Western perspective, to forgo an attempt to understand these people and their city and to ultimately let your imagination and intuition flow...a society with too much social standing and where nothing is the way it seems.  That is how I came about observing Phnom Penh.

Amit May

April 1997