“Are you all right?” Mr. Chum asks, glancing at her in the rearview mirror.
Teera nods. Chaik knea ros, the taxi driver said on their first ride together that day from the airport, as if apologizing for the disorder. She didn’t quite grasp it then, but she’s beginning to see now that this “getting by together,” this attempt at coexistence in the confines of tragedy, is perhaps a kind of redress, a provisional atonement for the survivors, both victims and perpetrators, amidst the wreckage and loss.
Eyes back on the road, Mr. Chum maneuvers his krabey sang—his “gas-guzzling water buffalo”—around a traffic circle, unperturbed as one motorcycle after another zips past or cuts in front of them. The blue-black 1993 Camry, he proudly told Teera, was “imported” from the United States, from “Cali,” parroting the diminutive for California coined by Cambodian-Americans, as if he himself knew that place well. The car had been totaled in a crash and fated for the junkyard but was instead brought here and, like legions of others, refurbished with a second life. There are countless similarly reincarnated blue-black sedans crowding the narrow lanes around them. Their ubiquitous presence reminds Teera, ironically, of the black-clad soldiers who occupied the same streets decades ago as they declared an end to machinery and forced the populace toward a machine-less existence.
Even more ironic, Mr. Chum was one such soldier, an on-the-spot recruit assigned to drive a truck that would relocate city people to the countryside. He had been a commercial driver, forced to take up the revolutionary cause when the Khmer Rouge stopped him in his vehicle loaded with cases of bottled soft drinks. He would either join them, the soldiers informed him, or face being shot for his “capitalist vocation.” His work for an import-export company had brought him to Phnom Penh, while his wife and three children remained back in their home province. He joined the Khmer Rouge, believing this would afford him the privilege to reconnect with his family. He never saw his wife and children again. To this day he doesn’t know their fates.
When Teera chose him from a crowd of taxi drivers upon her arrival at the Phnom Penh Airport, she knew none of this. While the other drivers jostled one another, fighting to get her attention, Mr. Chum stood off to the side, smiling timidly. She liked him, felt reassured by his serene stillness amidst the noise and movements. What’s more, she thought his childlike face—the square jaw and bulbous nose—made him look like an older, darker version of the Chinese film star Jackie Chan, the quintessential good guy. It was only a couple of days after, when he picked her up at the hotel for her first tour of the city, that he proceeded to divulge his history, as if wanting her to know before she decided to further engage his service. She did hesitate for a moment, then remembered she’d once trusted a soldier and he’d saved her life.
Despite his pravat smoksmanh—his “complicated background”—Mr. Chum has been nothing but generous and patient, always picking up his cell phone on the first ring when she calls. He’s driven her wherever, at the oddest hours, never once questioning her recurring needs to go to the promenade in front of the Royal Palace on a rainy dawn; to the same spot in front of Chaktomuk Theater in the heat of the afternoon, where long ago, she told him, she’d sometimes come for sugarcane juice; or to a ferry crossing to view the confluence of the three rivers.
In less than a week, he’s learned to maneuver his vehicle to the unpredictable twists and turns of her memories, the unmapped leaps of her longings. Time and again, they will search for a place she vaguely recalls from childhood, only to discover that it no longer exists, much to his disappointment, as to hers. Presently, they’re on their way to visit a temple outside the city, though there are countless others closer in. He does not ask her why, and this is what she appreciates about him most.
At a roundabout, they enter congested traffic. A rail-thin woman taps on their car window, begging for spare change. Mr. Chum rolls down the window and gives her one thousand Cambodian riels, about twenty-five cents, enough for a simple packet of rice and fish. She thanks him, palms together in the traditional sampeah. He asks about the small girl strapped to her bosom with a black-and-white checkered kroma, the whites of the cotton fabric yellowed with dirt—“Is she your daughter?” No, the woman explains, but she cares for the girl like her own. The parents were close friends, like a sister and brother to her. She hesitates before proceeding, “They’ve died of AIDS.”
Teera, in her oversize sunglasses, sits frozen in place, unable to speak or move a muscle. How should she acknowledge such a revelatory exchange in so transient an encounter? How should she respond in this place where personal tragedy is routine? She shrinks back in her seat, wanting to give the woman the dignity of her confession.
“Hello, madame.” The woman mistakes her for a foreigner. Mr. Chum gives a sad chuckle but doesn’t explain that Teera is Cambodian.
A way opens up and they move on. Teera is grateful for the escape.
The journey continues. At every pause, they encounter the homeless and the hungry. Sometimes throngs of children in rags press against both sides of their car, bobbing palms joined in sampeah, lips moving in continuous plea. If they’re too aggressive, Mr. Chum keeps his window up and tries to distract Teera with small talk, often marveling about America—“Everything all shiny and new and gigantic, right? Like the people!”—as if by his mentioning America, Teera would somehow forget she’s in Cambodia. At the moment, some children are knocking on her window, appealing to her directly, “Please, madame, little money buy food. Please, madame . . .” They echo one another.
Today more than any other day—perhaps because she’s heading out of Phnom Penh for the first time—Teera feels she’s on a reverse exodus, journeying not toward a strange, unknown destination but returning to a place where she’s become a stranger, where people no longer recognize her as one of their own. They all assume she’s a foreigner—Thai, Malaysian, Filipino, some Asian other than Cambodian—and she wishes they could know that she too is koan Khmer, a child of this ancient race, that she’s come back to a homeland where her home no longer exists, to this land as scarred and ravaged as herself. She wishes they could know that she too went through war and revolution, lost loved ones, survived against incredible odds.
And yet, to put herself next to them, to dig up her past suffering and line it side by side with the hardship they endure daily, their continuing struggle to survive, to think that she and they are the same because they share a history, would be a gross exaggeration of her own plight.