Cambodia: ‘King’s Face Appears On The Moon’

I got back to Cambodia a few days after King Sihanouk’s death. The country was holding seven days of mourning to celebrate his life. It was easy to be cynical at a time like this. Much of the media have portrayed him as a Khmer Rouge puppet who stood by when his people were murdered in one of the bloodiest genocides the world has ever seen.

He certainly moved with the political tide from peacefully obtaining independence from France to assisting Pol Pot’s rise to power, and has his own place in the Guinness World Records as having a greater variety of offices than any other politician. But the people were genuinely moved by his death, and there were shrines to him everywhere and flags at half-mast across Phnom Penh.

The taxi driver taking me from the airport to the Central Market sighed as the traffic came to another stand-still. “Everyone come to celebrate the King,” he said. “He was a good man. The people are sad. His son not so popular.”

I’d been warned the bars had been closed for seven days but it didn’t seem to have stretched to the neon bars on Street 51 or anywhere else I could see. The only sign of enforcement was the absence of music.  

As I walked further on, I kept seeing huddles of people gazing upwards, pointing and chattering. I looked up at a building, half expecting someone to be up there preparing to jump. But there was nothing. Just a sickle moon with a faint yellow halo round it.

I carried on walking. More people were gazing upwards. I asked what they were looking at but they just pointed and looked slightly embarrassed. The only ones not looking were the gang of tuk tuk drivers on the corner.

“Hey! Hey sir! Hello, motorbike?” they shouted. I’d forgotten about the relentless hisses and calls from the taxi drivers. It didn’t matter if you walked past six of them, politely declining each time, the seventh would still ask anyway. They had mouths to feed. I was determined to keep my cool this time in Asia. I was determined to remember how it all worked.

The next morning, I found out what all the staring had been about. The Cambodian social media was full of it, but opinion was heavily divided. Was it really the face of the King or just the crescent-shaped moon staring down at them? From the photos it looked unlikely, but I knew from staring at the moon, and its cracks and shadows, or cloud patterns, after a while you can see anything you want.

And for ordinary Cambodians, what they wanted in their time of grief was to stare once more at their former King and hope it was a sign of better times to come. Rather than the increased power of the politicians they’d been left with.

I walked down to the Royal Palace, where the King’s body would be kept for the next three months, embalmed for all to see. Thousands had gathered outside, praying and buying lotus flowers, as the street kids mingled between them begging for hand-outs.

The air was thick with incense smoke. They had given up burning the joss sticks individually and had set fire to bundles, pouring water on from time to time to control the flames. Tears were streaming down the mourners’ faces as the perfumed smoke billowed towards them, filling the dimming light with a spectral haze.

I returned to my hotel as the heavens opened and waited for the monsoon to stop. Then I waded across the road, two feet deep in water. The stench of the sewers was overpowering. The tuk tuks were holding up a computer print-out of a photo one of them claimed to have taken. One of them held a 10,000 riel note next to it, showing King Sihanouk’s face. They kept pointing excitedly and were still going on about it five minutes later when I returned with my iPhone to take a picture.

They might have been half hysterical, they might have been on the pipes, they might have doctored the photo, but as they held the note closer, there was a resemblance. I pointed to the eye shadows on the note, and nodded my head with the rest of them, and then pointed at the corresponding shadows on the moon. It was the King - the man on the moon. I even half believed them.

I waded across the road back to the hotel. The girl on reception was walking up the stairs. “Did you see the moon?” I asked her. She stopped and shrugged. “I tried...I looked for five minutes, but I couldn’t see the King.”

Bangkok: Water Spinach And War

When I land in Bangkok on my way to Cambodia, the first thing that hits me is the stifling heat and the smell of fish sauce as I emerge from my airport taxi into the warrens of Thailand’s biggest city. I sit down at a street stall on a Saturday afternoon, an hour before sunset, and order one of my favourite Asian meals of chicken noodle soup, but they haven’t got it.

“Pork!” snaps the noodle cook, jabbing a finger at her spidery-scrawled sign. She doesn’t do anything else, and nor does her husband, who’s crouched at the back, busy prepping a grimy tub of water spinach.

I perch on a stool by the roadside, my knees up to my ears. My bowl arrives in seconds. There are a few slices of pork, tandoori red around the edges, a scattering of sliced spring onion greens, a few slivers of crisped garlic, golden brown in colour, angel hair noodles, and beansprouts. The nod to vitamins is the single piece of kale that somehow found its way into my bowl on the back of a spoon.

Four pots of garnishes are thrust at me - pounded dried chillies with what looks disconcertingly like a pube sticking out, an explosive chilli vinegar, sugar, and crushed peanuts. A bottle of fish sauce, toothpicks, and a plastic drum of napkins complete the street food decor.

Except I was wrong about the lack of greenery. As I delve deeper into the last loop of noodles, a piece of water spinach appears in the bowl. For some reason, I think of a story I heard about the Vietnam War, or American War if you live in Vietnam. About how the Americans were literally hoist with their own petards when they bombed the vastly underequipped but ruthlessly cunning Viet Cong making their way from north to south through the mountain passes of the Ho Chi Minh trail.

The passes were marked and American bombers flew over blowing holes in the mountainside. The men with their shoes made from old truck tyres were slowed but still they came, clearing the rubble and finding other trails. And as the monsoon rains started, the bomb craters became pools.

Messages were passed and the next group of Viet Cong brought live fish with them and stocked the pools, and the fish slowly multiplied in their new mountain home. Then they planted water spinach cuttings, which quickly spread - long, hollow stalks with a few leaves at the top, delicious when fried with garlic and fish sauce. As each unit of National Liberation Front militia arrived, they found pools full of fish and swamp cabbage to feed them.

I bite into the tube and imagine those fighters sitting around a pot, sleeping off their evening feast provided by the bombs that were meant to kill them. I sip away at my ice-cold Singh beer as the last of the light fades, the car lights come on, and Bangkok puts on its neon clothes and waits for the hustle and shrieks of night.

The noodle cook sends her young son to fetch more beer from a nearby store. Outside it is a newspaper stand packed full of today’s editions of German and British tabloids - they know their tourist market in Bangkok. At the bottom is The Sun. “Pleb And Buried” is the headline. “Cop slur minister quits at last.” London seems a long way away.

MORE: Vietnam: Remnants From A Stricken Land