Cambodia

In the Shadow of the Banyan
Vaddey Ratner

After spending a few days in Viet Nam, where I was able to purchase Dumb Luck by Vietnamese author Vũ Trọng Phụng, the second stop on my Read the World project was Cambodia. Like with Viet Nam, I was counting on local bookstores to step up to the plate when my bookstore back home fell flat.

Almost completely by chance I came across Monument Books while walking the streets of Phnom Penh. It is a wonderfully comprehensive bookstore covering the whole of Cambodia's history from Angkorean temples through Khmer Rouge hardship right up to the present day, while not skipping over specialty topics such as French colonial map-making and movie star biographies. While the shelves had a wealth of fiction written about Cambodia by foreign authors, Cambodian writers seemed focused on harrowing memoirs about the horrors of the Khmer Rouge period, with titles such as First They Killed My Father or To the End of Hell. 

Undoubtedly, now that Cambodians have the time, space, and possibility to reflect on that truly traumatic period, much needs to be said and purged, as we the case following the Great Leap Forward in China. Like Ann Morgan, I had to now decide what I would count as a "story". (Read about her choices here). Were memoirs "in"? What about plays? Poetry? Journalism?

Some books don't fit in any box, while others, such as In the Shadow of the Banyan, might straddle several. While clearly proclaiming on the title page to be "A Novel", the story is a semi-fictionalised account of the author's own personal experiences living through the Khmer Rouge. – Suits my purposed well enough.

While I'll aim to focus on prose fiction for this project, I recognise that its not native to every culture, nor necessarily accessible to foreign readers. I will need to bend the rules here and there.