Touring Remembrance

The campus was the color of old storm clouds, a forgotten kind of gray. It was easier to imagine ghosts of schoolchildren lurking in the courtyard’s corners, eying tour groups as they passed by than actual students milling about in between class. Of course, none had in over forty years. Before the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, there was the S-21 Prison; before that, Tuol Svay Pray High School.

We weaved through former classrooms following the words and trail of our guide, Chenda. A pack of uniformed middle-schoolers shuffled behind us, giggling loudly enough so that we had to hover around her to hear. The sound of tuk-tuk drivers chatting over packed lunches filled the rooms through open windows. Outside, Flowerpeckers squawked at one another, bickering over perch spots.

“My parents were among the first to be imprisoned here. I fled with my sisters to Saigon, where we stayed until 1979. These classrooms were transformed into cellblocks and torture chambers when Pol Pot arrived in 1975. Very few left S-21 alive.” Chenda spoke in the manner she walked – with quick efficiency; her words punctuated by practice rather than pathos. She led us to a room featuring hundreds of the victims’ mug shots. While she zipped past the photographs onto the next talking point, I lingered behind to study the portraits.

Little boys with eyes gaped like craters, their chubby cheeks hung above the sagging corners of their frowns, stared back at me. Young men, each in a black work shirt and pageboy cap, leered at the camera with familiar adolescent conceit. Girls with their parts pinned with bow-shaped barrettes offered shy smiles. Elderly men and women hunched away from the camera-lens, refusing to direct their gaze in a final act of resistance. A cloud moved from the sun and at once flooded the room with light revealing my reflection in the glass encasing victim number 349’s picture. Chenda’s voice echoed from the next room, “Please, if you haven’t, pay the two dollar tour fee.”

I hurried, stepping around the brown bloodstains scarred on the floors, gripping two bills. I cursed myself for forgetting the Cambodian for “thank you” as I walked around the now silent middle-schoolers crowded around a torture exhibit. Chenda stood in the doorframe between the school and the courtyard, waiting for me, her final tourist, to pay. She was still, frozen in a moment of fatigue after an hour-long tour; the sun cast her face in shadow. I rushed over so as not to keep her from moving on.