dozen or so others decided to take the college theatre troupe on a provincial tour in order to raise money to visit the temples at Angkor Wat:
We performed comic sketches
[Samphân recalled],
in small towns around Kompong Cham like Chi He and Snuol. I played a girl dancer. Sâr’s job was
to raise and lower the curtain. When we had enough money, we rented a charcoal-powered bus and set off. It was 180 miles to Siem Reap, and it took us two weeks to get there and another two weeks to get back. Every couple of miles a tyre would burst, and each time that happened, we would all clap and shout for joy! Because that meant we could get out and explore the villages. The village girls always received us warmly because, for them, college boys like us were really something else! Sometimes we spent the night at a peasant’s house, but more often we slept under the bus. We spent three days in Siem Reap. It was tiny then — just a few Chinese shops and nothing else. One night we put on a performance, to earn some money for the trip back. But most of the time we spent going round the temples. Angkor thrilled us. It took our breath away.
For all Cambodians, Angkor was, and remains, the pre-eminent symbol of the country’s past greatness. As one of the country’s elder statesmen, Penn Nouth, put it: ‘Cambodian civilisation attained its high point about the twelfth century . . . But after five centuries
of
glory, the Khmer Empire succumbed, and ended by crumbling away . . . It is this lesson of history which we do not wish to forget.’ Angkor was both a benchmark and a burden — the proof of what Cambodians could achieve and a constant reminder of their failure to attain such heights again. When Samphân was about ten years old, his teacher at primary school told his class about the glories of Angkorian civilisation.
‘I can still remember it,’
he said, ‘and how terribly disappointed I felt when he told us that after the thirteenth century, Angkor had collapsed. One must never underestimate the effect of these centuries of decline on our national subconscious. It is why young Cambodians still ask themselves, almost instinctively, whether Cambodia as a nation can survive.’
The early summer of 1945 was played out to the wailing of air-raid sirens. In February an American Flying Fortress dropped bombs on the Japanese military headquarters in Phnom Penh. They missed their target and fell near the Royal Palace, killing hundreds of Cambodian civilians. Kompong Cham was not attacked, but at each alert the students gathered for roll-call in an arboretum near the school to await the all-clear. In May, the authorities gave up, and everyone was sent home early for the summer holidays. Sâr
found a job
working for a Sino-Khmer businessman, a comprador who purchased rice from farms along the Mekong on behalf of a French trading house and held the local franchise for the sale of petrol. It was his first and last foray into the world of commerce.
By the time the college reopened that autumn, Thiounn Mumm’s efforts to recruit Cambodian teachers had begun to bear fruit. One of the
new intake, Khvan Siphan, taught mathematics, physics and philosophy. Not much older than most of his students, Siphan quickly won a reputation for fairness and integrity — ‘honest, loving and helpful’, as one of them put it. ‘He prepared his lessons meticulously,’ Khieu Samphân remembered, ‘and when he arrived in class he wrote everything up on the blackboard. The students copied it down word for word and learnt it by heart. [He] was strict and he inspired respect . . . No one dared make the slightest sound.’Even at secondary-school level, young Cambodians in the 1940s were still much more comfortable with rote learning, with which they had grown up, memorising the Buddhist precepts and the
cpap,
than with the Western notions of analysis and questioning which their French teachers tried to inculcate. Pierre Lamant, who taught at the
We performed comic sketches
[Samphân recalled],
in small towns around Kompong Cham like Chi He and Snuol. I played a girl dancer. Sâr’s job was
to raise and lower the curtain. When we had enough money, we rented a charcoal-powered bus and set off. It was 180 miles to Siem Reap, and it took us two weeks to get there and another two weeks to get back. Every couple of miles a tyre would burst, and each time that happened, we would all clap and shout for joy! Because that meant we could get out and explore the villages. The village girls always received us warmly because, for them, college boys like us were really something else! Sometimes we spent the night at a peasant’s house, but more often we slept under the bus. We spent three days in Siem Reap. It was tiny then — just a few Chinese shops and nothing else. One night we put on a performance, to earn some money for the trip back. But most of the time we spent going round the temples. Angkor thrilled us. It took our breath away.
For all Cambodians, Angkor was, and remains, the pre-eminent symbol of the country’s past greatness. As one of the country’s elder statesmen, Penn Nouth, put it: ‘Cambodian civilisation attained its high point about the twelfth century . . . But after five centuries
of
glory, the Khmer Empire succumbed, and ended by crumbling away . . . It is this lesson of history which we do not wish to forget.’ Angkor was both a benchmark and a burden — the proof of what Cambodians could achieve and a constant reminder of their failure to attain such heights again. When Samphân was about ten years old, his teacher at primary school told his class about the glories of Angkorian civilisation.
‘I can still remember it,’
he said, ‘and how terribly disappointed I felt when he told us that after the thirteenth century, Angkor had collapsed. One must never underestimate the effect of these centuries of decline on our national subconscious. It is why young Cambodians still ask themselves, almost instinctively, whether Cambodia as a nation can survive.’
The early summer of 1945 was played out to the wailing of air-raid sirens. In February an American Flying Fortress dropped bombs on the Japanese military headquarters in Phnom Penh. They missed their target and fell near the Royal Palace, killing hundreds of Cambodian civilians. Kompong Cham was not attacked, but at each alert the students gathered for roll-call in an arboretum near the school to await the all-clear. In May, the authorities gave up, and everyone was sent home early for the summer holidays. Sâr
found a job
working for a Sino-Khmer businessman, a comprador who purchased rice from farms along the Mekong on behalf of a French trading house and held the local franchise for the sale of petrol. It was his first and last foray into the world of commerce.
By the time the college reopened that autumn, Thiounn Mumm’s efforts to recruit Cambodian teachers had begun to bear fruit. One of the
new intake, Khvan Siphan, taught mathematics, physics and philosophy. Not much older than most of his students, Siphan quickly won a reputation for fairness and integrity — ‘honest, loving and helpful’, as one of them put it. ‘He prepared his lessons meticulously,’ Khieu Samphân remembered, ‘and when he arrived in class he wrote everything up on the blackboard. The students copied it down word for word and learnt it by heart. [He] was strict and he inspired respect . . . No one dared make the slightest sound.’Even at secondary-school level, young Cambodians in the 1940s were still much more comfortable with rote learning, with which they had grown up, memorising the Buddhist precepts and the
cpap,
than with the Western notions of analysis and questioning which their French teachers tried to inculcate. Pierre Lamant, who taught at the
Similar Books
