There was no real administration in those days. Many of the resistance leaders who had come back to Cambodia with the Vietnamese had never held administrative positions before; for the most part they were breakaway members of the Khmer Rouge who had been opposed to the policies of Pol Pot and his group. They had to learn on the job when they returned, and for a long time there was nothing like a real government in Cambodia. The country was like a shattered slate: before you could think of drawing lines on it, you had to find the pieces and fit them together.
But already the fledgling Ministry of Culture had launched an effort to locate the classical dancers and teachers who had survived. Its officials were overjoyed to find Chea Samy. They quickly arranged for her to travel through the country to look for other teachers and for young people with talent and potential.
"It was very difficult," said Chea Samy. "I did not know where to go, where to start. Most of the teachers had been killed or maimed, and the others were in no state to begin teaching again. Anyway, there was no one to teach. So many of the children were orphans, half starved. They had no idea of dance — they had never seen Khmer dance. It seemed impossible; there was no place to begin."
Her voice was quiet and matter-of-fact, but there was a quality of muted exhilaration in it too. I recognized that note at once, for I had heard it before: in Molyka's voice, for example, when she spoke of the first years after the Pol Pot time, when slowly, patiently, she had picked through the rubble around her, building a life for herself and her family. I was to hear it again and again in Cambodia, most often in the voices of women. They had lived through an experience very nearly unique in human history: they had found themselves adrift in the ruins of a society that had collapsed into a formless heap, with its scaffolding systematically dismantled, picked apart with the tools of a murderously rational form of social science. At a time when there was widespread fear and uncertainty about the intentions of the Vietnamese, they had had to start from the beginning, literally, like rag pickers, piecing their families, their homes, their lives together from the little that was left.
Like everyone around her, Chea Samy too had started all over again — at the age of sixty, with her health shattered by the years of famine and hard labor. Working with quiet, dogged persistence, she and a handful of other dancers and musicians slowly brought together a ragged, half-starved bunch of orphans and castaways, and with the discipline of their long, rigorous years of training they began to resurrect the art that Princess Soumphady and Luk Khun Meak had passed on to them in that long-ago world when King Sisowath reigned. Out of the ruins around them they began to forge the means of denying Pol Pot his victory.
5
Everywhere he went on his tour of France, King Sisowath was accompanied by his palace minister, an official who bore the simple name of Thiounn (pronounced Chunn). For all his Francophilia, King Sisowath spoke no French, and it was Minister Thiounn who served as his interpreter.
Minister Thiounn was widely acknowledged to be one of the most remarkable men in Cambodia; his career was without precedent in the aristocratic, rigidly hierarchical world of Cambodian officialdom. Starting as an interpreter for the French, at the age of nineteen, he had overcome the twin disadvantages of modest birth and a mixed Khmer-Vietnamese ancestry to become the most powerful official at the court of Phnom Penh: the minister simultaneously of finance, fine arts, and palace affairs.
This spectacular rise owed a great deal to the French, to whom he had been of considerable assistance in their decades-long struggle with Cambodia's ruling family. His role had earned him the bitter contempt of certain members of the royal family, and a famous prince had even denounced the "boy interpreter" as a French collaborator. But with French dominance in Cambodia already assured, there was little that any Cambodian prince could do to check the growing influence of Minister Thiounn. Norodom Sihanouk, King Sisowath's great-nephew, spent several of his early years on the throne smarting under Minister Thiounn's tutelage: he was to describe him later as a "veritable little king," "as powerful as the French résidents-supérieurs of the period."
The trip to France was to become something of a personal triumph for Minister Thiounn, earning him compliments from a number of French ministers and politicians. But it also served a more practical function, for traveling on the Amiral-Kersaint, along with the dancers and the rest of the royal entourage, was the minister's son, Thiounn Hol. In the course of his stay in France, the minister succeeded in entering him as a student in the École Coloniale. He was the only Cambodian commoner to be accepted; the other three were all princes of the royal family.
Not unpredictably, the minister's son proved to be a far better student than the princelings and went on to become the first Cambodian to earn university qualifications in France. Later, the minister's grandsons too, scions of what was by then the second most powerful family in Cambodia, were to make the journey to France.
One of those grandsons, Thiounn Mumm, earned considerable distinction as a student in Paris, acquiring a doctorate in applied science and becoming the first Cambodian to graduate from the exalted École Polytechnique. In the process he also became a central figure within the small circle of Cambodians in France. The story goes that he made a point of befriending every student from his country and even went to the airport to receive newcomers.
Thiounn Mumm was, in other words, part mentor, part older brother, and part leader, a figure immediately recognizable to anyone who has ever inhabited the turbulent limbo of the Asian or African student in Europe — that curious circumstance of social dislocation and emotional turmoil that for more than a century now has provided the site for some of the globe's most explosive political encounters. The peculiar conditions of that situation, part exile and part a process of accession to power, have allowed many strong and gifted personalities to have a powerful impact on their countries through their influence on their student contemporaries. Thiounn Mumm's was thus a role with a long colonial genealogy. And he brought to it an authority beyond that of his own talents and forceful personality, for he was also a member of a political dynasty — the Cambodian equivalent of the Nehrus or the Bhuttos.
Among Thiounn Mumm's many protégés was the young Pol Pot, then still known as Saloth Sar. It is generally believed that it was Thiounn Mumm who was responsible for his induction into the French Communist Party in 1952. Those Parisian loyalties have proved unshakeable: Thiounn Mumm and two of his brothers have been members of Pol Pot's innermost clique ever since.
That this ultraradical clique should be so intimately linked with the palace and with colonial officialdom is not particularly a matter of surprise in Cambodia. "Revolutions and coups d'état always start in the courtyards of the palace," a well-known political figure in Phnom Penh told me. "It's the people within who realize that the king is ordinary, while everyone else takes him for a god."
I heard the matter stated even more bluntly by someone whose family had once known the Thiounns well. "Ever since their grandfather's time," he said, "they wanted to be king."
Be that as it may, it is certainly possible that the Thiounns, with their peculiarly ambiguous relationship with the Cambodian monarchy, were responsible, as the historian Ben Kiernan has suggested, for the powerful strain of "national and racial grandiosity" in the ideology of Pol Pot's clique. That strain has eventually proved dominant: the Khmer Rouge's program now consists largely of an undisguisedly racist nationalism whose principal targets, for the time being, are Vietnam and Cambodia's own Vietnamese minority.