“There’s no shortage of options for hot and bothered expats in Phnom Penh, with a wealth of swimming pools at hotels and fitness clubs that are open to casual visitors. Sometimes, however, the only real way to satisfy the urge for a swim is a wide, empty beach, a cold drink and a lazy float on a gentle current,” went the Phnom Penh Post article about Silk Island, a Mekong River sandbar where you can buy hand woven silk scarves.  

I was depressed when I read the article during a New England winter that would dump five feet of snow on my city. The expat journalist saw Silk Island as evidence that the ‘Pearl of Asia’ was rising again, but for me, the scene suggested a personal victory. From depression, Silk Island shimmered with hope. I could smell its spicy barbecued chicken, cooked in beachside food huts and sold by the skewer. I could see myself floating in its cool water, clutching a frosty beer. I could feel the swish of brightly-colored silk scarves through my fingers. The weaver’s face would break into a toothy grin. We’d broker a deal and I’d come home with a talisman of healing.

Silk Island was something to want. It was the first thing I’d wanted in months. So I set my heart on a visit.

__________

While I usually enjoyed the defamiliarization of travel, which got me out of my head, in Cambodia I had the self-consciousness of a teenage girl. I was acutely aware of myself as an outsider looking in. 

It might’ve been the new construction dust, mixing with smoke from burning garbage, which left me fighting to breathe. It might’ve been the wealth disparities, inescapable in cities where elites drove luxury cars while entire families huddled on one shared motorbike. Or it might’ve been the expat who cut us in line while we waited to check into our Phnom Penh hotel. 

She handed her cell phone to the desk clerk and asked him to translate something for her cleaning lady. She was British, with pale freckled skin, dark brown hair, sensible clothing. Her family had flown in for a visit; they waited poolside. On another night, the four of them might venture to the trendy bistro with the good wine list and rattan furniture and soothing neutral palette, khaki and wood and white. But tonight, the expat waited for her translation with crossed arms, accustomed to giving orders. Once everything was taken care of, she went back to the pool and we received a key to a spartan room with two double beds. 

My wife showered off the road dust. I read up on the city’s dark tourist attractions and tried to ignore the guilt blooming in my chest. I’d felt guilty in Siem Reap, when we shrugged off children begging outside a temple. Or at the end of a long day of sightseeing, when women rescued from sex trafficking massaged our aching feet. 

That was supposed to be conscious consumerism, trading dollars for a service that supported women’s rights, but it felt like virtue porn. In helping these women start new lives, the massage organization reduced them to trope. They would always be ‘rescued,’ reliant on the help of foreigners to escape a desperate situation. The nonprofit’s logic was akin to white saviorism.

If I found it odd that the expat and her family were vacationing in Phnom Penh, at this charmless hotel, I had to ask myself why we’d come. 

Bearing witness was the answer we gave when asked. Now that I was here, I didn’t understand what that meant. All around me, white tourists were openly moved by redemption narratives. They gushed over moving performances by circuses of orphaned children. Raw need, trotted out for us to observe, so we might be moved to give, made me uneasy. But if that wasn’t witnessing, what was?

In the morning, we toured the Choeung Ek Killing Fields. An oral history audio guide featured survivors’ stories. Forced into a child labor camp at age thirteen, one man took along a fairytale book and a bicycle. He survived the separation and forced labor, then fled to America when he turned eighteen. I listened to his story on a bench in front of the glass-walled memorial stupa holding remains of the dead while butterflies floated over the burial pits. The memorial was ringed with flowers. Its obvious symbolism touched me. I yearned for healing. Here, surrounded by butterflies, it seemed forthcoming.

On our walk to the parking lot we passed genocide survivors you could photograph for a small fee. Cambodia was dependent on tourism; its painful past had been folded into its rich cultural heritage and put on display, commercialized for U.S. dollars, the country’s main currency. I’d been lured in by the glossy expat rag; set up to play my part. In my travel journal, I wrote around my growing discomfort.

__________

We found a tuk-tuk driver outside our hotel and bargained on a fare: $20 for a half-day. We settled in the back of the open-air cart for the hour-long journey with kramas to our faces, bandit-style, to keep out the mixture of road dust and ash. The traditional checked scarves were our first souvenirs, and mine was unraveling in less than a week. 

At a traffic light, we pulled up alongside a family riding a single motorbike. Three teen boys shared the pillion seat. The oldest had shaggy hair. The youngest was dressed in the saffron robes of a monk. When I snuck a picture of the three boys, the oldest framed us in his phone camera.

Our driver, Mr. Dara, wore sunglasses and a striped button-down shirt, faded from washing. He was old enough to remember the Khmer Rouge, so I wondered whether his family was forcibly relocated to the countryside. How he wound up in Phnom Penh, driving a tuk-tuk. How he survived. Who he lost. 

In Siem Reap, we had visited a local silk farm. While Cambodia has exported silk since the 13th century, their silk industry suffered under the Khmer Rouge. Women were killed before they could pass their knowledge of traditional weaving patterns to the next generation. Mulberry trees, the silkworms’ food, were cut down. Unable to produce silk thread without trees to feed the worms, Cambodia relied on imported thread. The silk farm hoped to restore the local industry by planting trees and training a new generation of weavers. 

Newly hatched worms munched on mulberry leaves. When they ate enough, they would form silk cocoons. You had to boil the cocoons, killing the silkworms to obtain their thread. A single cocoon could form a gossamer-thin silk thread that stretched a mile long. 

Weaving was women’s work. Women fed silkworms, boiled them alive, spun their cocoons into thread, dyed it in vats of plant-based dyes, strung looms made of scrap wood and bicycle wheels, and wove the scarves that fetched over $100 in the boutique. 

The silk farm touted itself as ethical tourism, but it relied on foreigners in the same way as the hawkers chorusing buy something, lady when we walked through the night market. Buy we did: sifting through piles for handmade gifts to take home, visiting charity shops and massage parlors, eating at vocational training restaurants that promised job training to rural villagers. We bought so much, we filled our emergency duffel bag. Still I went to pieces at Mr. Dara’s shirt. 

__________

Depression turned down the volume on my emotions. Life wasn’t particularly bad, but good things had stopped feeling good. When we set off on our trip, on New Year’s Eve, I thought a new year and new scenery could lift my depression. On the other side of the world, far from familiar life, I’d be able to see and feel everything that was blocked. 

It turned out my depression was a cloud. Its density thinned and thickened from one day to the next in no discernible pattern. On bright days, I glimpsed a conditional sort of happiness. I didn’t know how to bring it inward, where its light could burn off the clouds. 

I was still puzzling this out on our drive to Silk Island when we passed a group of child monks walking alongside the road dressed in vibrant orange robes and flip-flops. They headed for a nearby temple; its gate was adorned with winged gods. 

I envied the young monks for their routines, their certainty. I had no certainty, no faith tradition, nothing to sustain me when dark thoughts crowded close. Exhausted from pretending, I longed for refuge. I thought I might find it at a temple. On a meditation mat, I could confront the numbness inside me. If thoughts rose up, I wouldn’t react. I wouldn’t spin out the usual stories. I’d find the inner strength of the child monks, with their shorn heads and determined steps. 

We visited so many temples, I lost count. I wanted to make an offering, but I was afraid of doing it wrong, so I offered nothing.

__________

Mr. Dara turned down a lane that dead-ended at the Mekong River. Ferry traffic stretched from the water to the upper end of the street, where bicycles clustered in front of a school. Girls in white blouses and navy skirts waited for snacks at a restaurant that fronted the lane. Posters advertised Angkor beer, Fanta, and ice cream. 

As we inched toward the water, Silk Island came into view. Green trees and farm fields stood out against the island’s packed red dirt. I snapped photos of the schoolgirls, the bicycles, the farmer leading cows toward the ferry. My wife pulled out a package of peanut butter crackers to tide us over until our beachside lunch. 

Finally, it was our turn to cross. The island was quiet, a one-lane road looping between traditional stilt-raised homes. There were no signs advertising the weavers. Mr. Dara stopped at this house and that, inquiring about where to go. We stared at cows, banana trees, and loose red dirt, the day’s plan threatening to unspool, but at last he beckoned us forward. Wallets in hand, we stepped into the ground floor of a traditional stilt home.  

Wooden beams bisected the open-air room into quarters. There were four looms, each strung with the vibrant purple threads of a work-in-progress. A grandmother sat at one of the looms. Her daughter, a middle-aged woman in hot pink, brought out scarves. My wife tried on a red and purple scarf shot through with gold threads. I draped scarves over my sunburned shoulders, one after the next, the fabric cool against my skin. Which one might ward off depression?

Four scarves, including the gold one, cost $37. We settled up and our host offered us a weaving demonstration. Her feet tapped the pedals as she passed a shuttle back and forth. Purple and gold threads came together in a diamond pattern. I wanted to know what the pattern meant. I wanted to know how Silk Island’s conscious consumerism worked on an individual level. If the scarves made their way to fancy boutiques in Phnom Penh or Siem Reap, or if they were sold only here, directly to people like us. If it made a difference. I didn’t ask. I took photos. Then we left, bowing with our hands in front of our hearts.

We had the beach to ourselves. The riverfront sandbar was littered with trash and the barbecue shacks, made of rusting corrugated metal, were closed. Thatched palm beach huts edged out over the river. When we dropped our bags at one, a woman rushed over to collect money. The entry fee didn’t cover use of a hut, so we moved to the sand. I nibbled a Larabar, dipped my feet in the Mekong, and watched Phnom Penh’s skyline glitter in the distance.

__________

We asked Mr. Dara to drop us off at the Royal Palace. The butter-yellow of the Royal Palace’s exterior wall stood out against the sky. Cambodia’s red, white, and blue flag fluttered in the breeze as we entered the palace compound through a teal-colored wrought iron gate. There were topiary trees, formal gardens, and an open-air pavilion where Khmer classical dancers performed. Seven-headed nagas, or water serpents, snaked up the stair rails. 

Legend had it that Cambodians descended from a marriage between an ancient king and a naga princess. The temple roof was lined with statues of Garuda, the bird king, holding a ball in his mouth. The water serpent and the bird king were rivals, but here in the palace compound, both offered protection. 

We made our way to the Silver Temple, which boasted an emerald green Baccarat-crystal Buddha, a solid gold Buddha crowned with 2,086 diamonds, and a silver-plated floor. On its walls, murals depicted the Reamker, an epic poem that infused the Ramayana with Buddhist principles. Paint flaked from scenes of invading armies and monkey soldiers. A plaque explained that mural restorations were sponsored by a Polish group, which ran out of funds. 

I took the English-language signs praising restoration efforts at the palace as evidence of continued meddling. The West had made a mess of things; we didn’t know when to quit. 

Later, I learned the restoration backfired. The concrete used to patch the wall exposed the remaining scenes to water, which destroyed the paint. 

Despite its decay, or maybe because it wasn’t picture-perfect, I fell in love with the Royal Palace. I found it more impressive than the temples at Angkor, which had the ancient, hulking veneer of an earlier civilization. 

__________

The Khmer Rouge left the Royal Palace alone as a gesture of respect for Cambodian culture. Meanwhile they imprisoned and tortured close to 20,000 Cambodians and foreigners at Tuol Sleng, a high school turned prison turned genocide museum located three kilometers away from the Palace. 

When the Vietnamese Army liberated the prison, they found twelve survivors. Two survivors visited Tuol Sleng daily, making a living by letting tourists take their photographs. 

After Vietnam overthrew Pol Pot, the U.S. threw its support behind the Khmer Rouge out of Cold War panic. Ex-Khmer Rouge officials held Cambodia’s seat at the United Nations until 1993; until 2023, one was Prime Minister. He tried to limit the reach of U.N. criminal tribunals, claiming convictions could ignite another civil war. 

The tribunal court spent eleven years and $300 million to win convictions against three men for their role in the Cambodian genocide, sentencing them to life in prison. 

The director of Tuol Sleng accepted full responsibility for the torture and execution of prison inmates. He became a born-again Christian and eventually cooperated with the tribunal. “I ask for your forgiveness,” he said while visiting Tuol Sleng during his trial. “I know that you cannot forgive me, but I ask you to leave me the hope that you might.” 

Was his hope a curtain? Was it a cloud? What shape did it take as he waited for death, or judgment, hands clasped in front of his heart in traditional greeting and Western-style prayer? 

So much for justice and a happy ending suggested by the English-language tourist signs. Behind his palace walls, the king was a figurehead. The Prime Minister had all the power, and he didn’t want the tribunal looking too closely at the former Khmer Rouge officers currently serving in government. He dissolved the opposition party, imprisoned his opponents, and censored the media. 

My journal was full of questions I couldn’t voice, and couldn’t stop asking. The tourism and garment industries, the two ways foreigners could alleviate Cambodia’s poverty, consumed and commodified women’s bodies. So did the illegal-but-ignored sex trade. 

Poverty was tangled up with these industries. It was trotted out for my gaze and my open wallet. My witness was currency. It was penance. Every purchase preserved cultural traditions. Fed villagers. Sustained the white savior narratives that funded the NGOs and charities that employed those bossy expats who flocked, hot and bothered, to the shores of Silk Island. 

__________

The area by the Royal Palace was thick with do-gooder shops. In one, I fingered a checked silk tie, the fabric creamy against my skin. I hadn’t planned to buy more, but I couldn’t resist something that fit my gender identity so into the bag it went. 

The quick hit of an impulse buy papered over my difficult emotions, but I remained unsettled by the things we’d seen. I found myself in a sanitized theme park for dark tourists, and discomfort pricked something inside me that hadn’t gone numb. 

I was a barang, a foreigner. I framed the story in linear fashion, forgetting forward motion was Western logic. I kept looking for wholeness, for connecting threads. But the longer I looked at Cambodia, the more my gaze splintered, kaleidoscopic. 

When I looked inward, the same thing happened. Racking my brain for the precise cause of my depression didn’t heal me. Forcing my pain into a narrative prolonged my recovery, but I did eventually get better. 

I never made it to the meditation mat, but I grasped the truth of something Buddhists say often: life is suffering. After that, I stopped fighting my depression. I quit forcing the pieces of my sadness to make meaning. I dropped the heaviest stone, hope. Out of this, eventually, came healing. 

The Killing Fields survivor who fled to America subsequently returned to Cambodia to manage elections. He had the trappings of a good life, air conditioning and a car, yet said he was emotionally broken. “I see the whole country as my family,” he said in the conclusion to his oral history. “When I see a woman who lost their child, who is poor, who lost her brother and sister, I see my sister.” Reconciliation wasn’t about talking, he said, but about each individual putting the broken pieces back together.