Tuk Tuk Riding in Phnom Penh

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Sovankirry Sim, Unsplash.

Looking for Duras weaves three strands of memoir into one: my lifelong infatuation with the French writer Marguerite Duras, a journey through Vietnam and Cambodia tracing her footsteps, and a musing on mothers and melancholy. (Read prev chap here or browse all chapters here.

             We enter the city proper and I’m glad this time I don’t have to worry about ending up in the wrong hotel. I am going to stay with my six-year-old godson Asher who with his parents, Ellie and Steph and younger brother Miro, arrived here only a few months ago so Ellie could take up her position as country manager with an Australian NGO. Perfect timing for me as Phnom Penh is on my pilgrimage route. MD’s family moved here from Hanoi at the end of 1920 when her father was promoted and her mother secured work as headmistress at a girl’s school. And while there is little written about their time here, I’m interested to see what I can find.

        Our bus pulls into a terminal of sorts and parks so close to a wall we can barely get off. A waiting band of tuk tuk drivers calls out as we alight.

        ‘Madam madam, mister mister, good price for you.’ I scan the mob and lock eyes with a smiling, kind face but as I extract my luggage from the hold, another more insistent group surrounds me.

         ‘Madam, madam, tuk tuk for you, where ever you want to go.’

         I see my pleasant-faced man hanging at the back of the pack and push towards him. He grins at me.

         ‘Oh madam, you are a good person, you went with me, not with other driver, you saw me first.’

        He leads me to his tuk tuk parked a short walk away. It’s a little open-air wagon, attached to a motorbike, cheaper than a taxi, with two flat seats facing each other and an awning to keep the sun off. He throws my suitcase in the back, helps me up and sits astride his motor-cycle.

        ‘Where you go, madam?’ he asks with another big grin.

        ‘Number 76, 57 Street,’ I reply, reading the address from my notebook and wondering if it is correct, hoping it’s not number 57, 76 Street, instead.

        ‘Near Boeng Keng Kang Market,’ Ellie told me to tell the driver. I remember the name because it sounds like King Kong.

        ’Oh very good, Boeng Keng Kang, not so far,’ he replies, as he pulls out into the traffic.

        I make myself comfortable on the warm, green vinyl and take it all in. People on the streets have round faces and sunkissed skin and are busy going about their daily tasks. Rows of endless shop houses with beach umbrellas out front are selling green coconuts, sugar cane juice and benzene, and it doesn’t take long to realise the city is built on a grid and most of the streets have numbers, not names. The French are responsible of course. While the history of Phnom Penh reaches back to the fourteenth century, from the 1870s onwards, the French Colonial Government left their mark, bringing planning, infrastructure and European architecture to the city that became known as ‘The Pearl of Asia’.

        It’s how I imagine the city in MD’s novel The Sea Wall to look, although it is always presumed to be Saigon.  Somehow Phnom Penh feels more spacious, like MD’s writing — less hemmed in, more open to the sky. Perhaps it’s the nearby presence of the mighty Mekong, the Plain of the Birds, the Cardamom Mountains, the Gulf of Siam, that give it a sense of mystery and frontier atmosphere. MD’s family were looking forward to a new start, a step up, and here in Phnom Penh in quarters that were once a royal palace, for a short time at least, they lived like kings.

We arrive at what I assume is the address, although I can’t see the number. The heat of the day is rising as I jump down from the tuk tuk and stand in front of a big green metal gate in the middle of a high concrete wall and ring the bell — a few times. When there’s no response, a neighbour comes and confirms that yes, two small boys and a barang (foreigner) mum and dad live there. Phew, I am in the right place. I call out through the gap,

         ‘Asher! Miro!’

          This time I hear little feet and excited yells and a pretty young Cambodian girl appears. She introduces herself as Sok, while Asher and his brother, Miro (a three year old Rafael Nadal look alike) come running across the driveway. Ellie is at work but their dad Steph, a landscape architect, is home today. While Sok insists on taking my bags, the boys gather me up in their excitement and offer to show me around.

        I met Ellie and Steph in the early nineties when our Buddhist community owned and ran a retreat centre on the lower slopes of Mt Gulaga on the south coast of NSW. The land was wild and wonderful — boulder strewn, with small creeks, grassy paddocks, tall forests and fabulous views to Wallaga Lake and Horseshoe Bay. Ellie and Steph were part of the younger cohort, affectionately known as The Ferals due to their keen organic back-to-the-land ideals and a penchant for dressing in hand knitted leggings and Afghan coats. But their looks belied a level of competence and skill that as a hippy of old, I’m not sure I possessed when I was their age. Ellie was already an experienced administrator and together in our voluntary capacities — me as president and Ellie as treasurer, we worked on a number of big projects for our organisation: running international retreats, overseeing building funds, touring international teachers. It was an empowering experience, we were a dynamic duo working with a great team of volunteers and with ease and enjoyment it seemed we could make anything happen.  Committee roles lasted for three years and when our work was completed, we took the skills we’d learned back into our lives. I started running international writing journeys and Ellie worked her way up the NGO ladder in Sydney and Melbourne and ended up here in Phnom Penh.

         This must be the haut-quartier of bygone days I think, as the boys give me the tour although their house, a former ambassador’s residence, is well past its glory. It is two-story-huge, with high rattan ceilings, fans whirring, large sparsely furnished rooms, ample bathrooms, mosquito nets a-plenty and downstairs a giant living room couch and a wide flat screen TV. Outside — a shady overgrown garden, swings, a wading pool and the long scooter-riding driveway.  Tall walls surround the yard on all sides and near the front gate is a little guardhouse for the night watchman.

        When the boys show me my room they tell me I am their first house guest and proudly point out all the new features purchased especially for me — reading lamp, rice paper blinds and a large circular floor mat made from the water hyacinth plant, gathered from Tonlé Sap Lake, the huge waterway to the north of the country. I drag their presents out of my bag (picture books on Egyptology and Etymology) and we settle down under the big ceiling fan of the living room for a play. I show them my scrapbook and notebooks and tell them I’m writing a book about my trip. I’ve brought little notebooks for them too and magnifying glasses for us to go about the house and garden investigating flowers and objects and writing down what we see.  It’s an old trick Marj taught me one spring morning when she was high either on life or the latest batch of antidepressants she was trying out. We tiptoed around the flowerbeds, peering deep into the hearts of forget-me-nots, violets, tiger lilies, white daisies, camellias, and picking up little rocks, veined leaves, grasses and seed pods. I still keep a big magnifying glass on my desk although flowers are scarce on my balcony these days.

        Marj was a high mistress of dried arrangements. She had all sorts of methods for dehydrating certain leaves and flowers to give them an ethereal, lacey quality. A dried arrangement could last forever, you didn’t always have to be bringing in fresh ones, although she did — bunches of camellias when they were in bloom, the first daffodils of winter, snowdrops and hyacinth. She regularly made up posies of all the flowers in her garden, adding in stalks of mint, lemon balm and borage. Marj definitely had a green thumb and could be seen daily, dragging the hose around the garden, making sure the violet patch had a steady trickle and the grapefruit and lemon trees had enough to drink.

        MD loved dried flowers too. A large coffee table book * I have about writer’s houses, shows sunlit interior photos of MD’s house at Neauphle de Chateau. She may not have had Marj’s green thumb but her collections of dried flowers and grasses are everywhere — in vases, on sideboards, bookshelves and small tables, in little bowls of pot-pouri, and hanging upside down from the ceiling. Any bunch brought inside the house was never thrown out. The large garden they came from was lusciously overgrown until her lover Dionys planted it out with roses and peonies.  She had an apricot tree, Japanese cherry trees, a willow, camellias and irises, even a pond. In winter children would come to skate on the frozen lake. Their voices would interrupt her working, but she didn’t begrudge them. She once said, ‘One does not find solitude, one creates it,’ * and it was in this house and garden that she created the solitude to write her most important books.

        I felt a touch of this quietude once when I was passing through Paris and went to visit MD's grave in Montparnasse Cemetery. Expecting to find a desolate, uncared for patch of sadness, I walked past her grave several times, almost giving up, before finding it lovingly buried beneath an assortment of potted plants, shells and river pebbles. The oddest thing was that MD's grave had a strange familiarity, and pretty soon I worked out why. It was just like standing in my mother's garden surrounded by the same kinds of leafy pot plants decorated with seashells, special stones, eagle’s feathers and small nic-nacs. To see MD being so well cared for in the afterlife was heartening. I couldn't say the same for Simone De Beauvoir and Jean Paul Sartre who, further down the row lay beneath a deserted marble slab graced only by a single, very dead and decaying, long stemmed rose.

         The boys are busy showing me their favourite climbing tree when Ellie arrives home from work on her bicycle. Her office is not too far away although she has to negotiate a couple of big busy boulevards. Steph brings out beers and cool drinks and we sit around on the patio having a catch up. I’m keen to hear about their lives in Phnom Penh and they tell me how difficult it was at first coping with the heat, the four of them crammed into a small hotel room while they waited for a house. Steph has some great stories about meetings with rich clients who turn up with armed bodyguards and guard dogs in tow, and Ellie tells me how difficult it is for the local Khmer community to gain autonomy in such an NGO-dependent economy.

        The boys scooter up and down the driveway until the mozzies descend and our tummies rumble, so we pile into a tuk tuk to the Boat Noodle Restaurant. The food is delicious — I order chicken soup with banana buds, and we all feast on whole fried lemongrass fish, caught from the huge fish tank right next to us that keeps the boys mesmerised throughout the meal. I tell Elle and Steph about my MD quest. They are excited for me in the way close family members often are and I realise that in the absence so far of grandchildren, they are my surrogate ‘grand’ family. My god/grand mother role has an extra poigancy knowing that Ellie lost her own mother to cancer when she was only a teenager.

        On the way back they ask the driver, Mr Larry, to do a loop of the river-front district called Sisowath Quay — a lively strip with neon-lit cafes, bars and restaurants overlooking the vast river. It’s a great night for sipping cocktails at the Foreign Correspondent’s Club but we have small boys to get to bed and a driver who is nervous about pickpockets and bag snatchers. As we head back along the grid of streets and avenues, I trawl my memory for past references and imagined impressions of this city — a tropical outpost, political turmoil, foreign correspondents in white linen suits filing reports beneath humming fans — genocide, landmines, Tomb Raider.

        In the late sixties when I was at teachers college, a country friend of my mother, who was helping a Cambodian student make new friends, invited me to a get-to-know-you afternoon in the neighbouring town. The young man and I got talking and decided to meet up again in Melbourne. I met him in the dark wood-panelled common room of his Christian University College. After a bit of chat he invited me to his room where we sat down on his bed and promptly had sex, but not before he laid a neatly folded chequered cloth beneath us. Did he assume that all western girls were easy? It was the late 60s — flower power, free sex — I guess he wasn’t too far off the mark. It was over fairly quickly and by then we had run out of things to say. I don’t remember meeting him again and now I wonder what happened to him. I imagine he finished his degree and went home to begin his career. But did he survive the terror years from 1975 –79 when the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot dragged his country back into a twelfth century agrarian state, killing, torturing or banishing to re-education camps teachers, professionals, anyone with an education, indeed anyone who wore eye glasses. As I think back, the gaps in my memory shock me though the names of major players remain familiar.  Prince Norodom Sihanouk, Pol Pot, Khmer Rouge, Stop the Suffering in Kampuchea! I’m sure I marched to that cause, wore T-shirts, sported bumper stickers, but did I know Kampuchea was Cambodia? Possibly not, it was just another conflict-ridden state in that intriguing but volatile conglomeration of islands and continents to our north, which we were then and still now, quite ignorant about.

         Our tuk tuk chugs along the boulevard.  Beside us, dark shapes of tall trees stand illuminated by garlands of blue and green fairy lights. We are heading towards Independence Monument, which has a light show of its own going on. The tall stupa-like monument modelled on the central tower of Angkor Wat, has five tiers decorated with one hundred serpent-like deities called naga. The naga fountains and lotus basins around it are lit up with bright pink and aqua floodlights. The wide median strip leading to the monument is packed with people out walking, jogging, playing soccer, buying balloons and snacks. It’s such a carnival atmosphere, I ask if people are celebrating a special occasion.

        ‘No, it’s just what you do here,’ Ellie explains.  ‘It’s so hot, everyone loves to get out of the house.’

        In the open-air tuk tuk we are cool as cucumbers. We arrive home and jump into our beds, large ceiling fans purring overhead.  From a nearby temple, the low sonorous sound of monks’ prayers drifts in on the breeze.                                      

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* Writer’s Houses, Francesca Premoli-Droulers, p 11-12.

* Writing/ Écrire, Marguerite Duras, p 4.