I'm going to read a long poem called "Tuol Sleng,"
and Tuol Sleng was formerly known as Chao Ponhea Yat High
School.
And during the Khmer Rouge regime,
it was turned into Tuol Sleng, the torture prison.
And today, it's a museum, Tuol Sleng Genocide Memorial.
So having to navigate that space with all
of its different histories has been quite an experience.
I went to Tuol Sleng for the first time with my nephew.
His mother had arranged a whole field trip
just so I could go to all these different sites, including
Tuol Sleng, the Choeung Ek Killing Fields memorial site,
and also the Royal Palace.
So she thought it would be fun to go
with my nephew and his neighborhood friends.
And so I think that I needed--
I felt like I needed to be strong for these young people,
the next generation, who may have been
aware of the history that took place but maybe were not
quite aware.
This poem is happening in sections,
so I might pause a little bit.
"Tuol Sleng."
"Street houses and shops, dirt roads
gathered with rocks, and above, gray palm trees.
Vendors with machetes on blocks of ice,
a wagon of green coconuts, hand-cranking machines
for sugarcane.
In the same place, did they kill Yuos Samon?
We know they dented metal bed frames, chained prisoners
in schoolrooms.
Before the slow act of torture, each prisoner's photo
was taken with a film camera.
Flash.
And now the screeching wagon wheels
hauling green coconuts, stalks of sugarcane nearby.
I come here with my six-year-old nephew, Ratanak,
and two neighborhood girls.
My nephew sprints down the halls,
ducks his head into every classroom,
then off again as though he hears a school bell ring.
"You see that boy running in the halls?"
a tourist asks another tourist.
"Does he have any respect for history?"
Alone inside a classroom, instead
of desks, a bed frame, its metal slats rusted, a hammer
and some chains at the corner.
The floor flecked with blood and the walls the color.
I walk to the chalkboard, a small piece of chalk still
there, a scribble of Khmer on the dusty board and numbers.
I can't understand anything but the numbers.
Meanwhile, in the courtyard, a boy
plays as if on a playground.
Rope hangs from a high wooden frame.
Below, he fills an urn with water, takes someone prisoner,
and bobs his head with rope.
He plunges the head, and the legs struggle upside down.
He is just a boy.
In Lancaster, by the cornfields one afternoon,
to the clopping of a horse's hooves across the way,
I thought of Tuol Sleng.
In family portraits, I'd blink at the flash of a camera
and not be able to see after inside a lighted room
without red invading my eyes.
That same flash capturing the smiles
of my surviving relatives.
Before Samon was murdered, my aunt says,
he had been studying at West Point with other lieutenant
generals of Lon Nol.
But maybe it was Fort Worth, not West Point,
or, like many foreign troops trained on US soil,
Fort Benning.
No way of knowing, except for this photograph,
each man smiling around the table,
a white man at the head, a blonde, curly-haired girl
sitting in his lap.
This picture of my uncle hangs in my grandmother's house.
He turns to look at us.
A boy runs through the halls of Tuol Sleng.
His narrow footprints turn it back into a school.
He checks every room for the other kids.
He sits on a chair and waits.
When I walk in, he whispers, ghost.
The bell rings, and off he goes.
Still, my nephew speeds down the halls,
peeking his head into every room.
Ratanak, I call out, stop running.
Stop, I say.
Don't make me count.
He knows, but he doesn't know, one, this was once
a torture prison, now a museum, two,
though to him, it's just an old school, which
is why he is running, which is why
inside a sepia-toned cell, three, he's lost
and waits for me.
Visitors to Cambodia, who wander around
with crushed limes in their sugarcane drinks,
can say people of this country suffered so much
but are so happy.
Years later, alone in Phnom Penh,
I think of my uncle, whom I did not
know, and imagine him returning from the US taken
at the airport.
And I think of how my mother, washing
dishes bordered with gray flowers, sobbed over the sink
and spoke.
"I don't know what happened to my brother.
His wife and sons pleaded with him to come home.
So heartbroken, your grandmother,
when she learned the news about my brother hoping,
all of this time, he'd been waiting
for us in another country, only to find out that he died alone.
Of all the photographs at Tuol Sleng, not one of my brother.
That day we couldn't find his face, we just went home."
I explain to Ratanak, the tourists are here to stroke
black-and-white photographs of tortured prisoners.
They press closer to look at a picture, a handcuffed boy
leaning toward them.
Walking slow around the prison, they crouch in cramped stalls
and shut themselves in to imagine what horrors.
They walk around the metal bed frame,
cover their mouths at rusted chains, the hammer and toolbox
in the corner, the floor stained and the walls the color.
They cry.
They write on the walls "Never Forget," signing their names.
Now they have been here.
They buy books from the souvenir shops and silk
scarves in crema and handmade purses,
but we come here to look for someone.
The boy is still inside a classroom.
He raises his hand to answer the teacher's question.
The teacher offers him a turn at the board
and gives him a piece of chalk.
His back is turned to the other students.
Now the teacher is a soldier.
Now the boy has chains on his wrists.
Now he's smacked in the face.
Now his glasses break on his nose bridge.
Now he pretends he cannot spell or count how many teeth knocked
out.
Already, the tourists have forgotten while sucking sugar
from cane as they head to the Royal Palace
for the rest of their tour.
But I still stand by the prison entrance with the apparition
of a boy who cannot point to me where my uncle died.
Look at them shaking their heads at Ratanak.
I turn around to find my nephew.
He is running again.
The girls follow him, and now I chase after them
into the schoolyard."