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The idea is touchingly simple. Build modest housing on an idyllic field in the Cambodian countryside, invite all the old people who have no one to take care of them to come and stay, and let them spend their remaining years in relative comfort and tranquility. Those who are still willing and able to work can plant rice, tend the vegetable garden, or use the palm trees to make sugar and other products. Those who are too tired or sick can simply sit and rest. Those who die will be buried or cremated by the others according to the rites of whatever religion they practiced during their lifetime.
The plan comes not from an international aid agency but from one of Cambodia's most well-known contemporary artists, Vann Nath. "People in Cambodia," he explains, "have not had very happy lives. I want them to have a few happy years before they die." This quiet understatement is underscored by Vann Nath's own experience.
Trained as a sign painter in Battambang, in northwestern Cambodia, in the 1960s, Vann Nath was enjoying a comfortable, if modest, existence painting signs, billboards, and private portraits when the Khmer Rouge took over in 1975. Like other city dwellers, he and his family were forced to leave the provincial capital and flee to the countryside. In 1977, he was separated from his wife and children and taken to the infamous Tuol Sleng Prison in Phnom Penh. Almost every one of the sixteen thousand people who entered this prison was tortured and killed. It was only because of his skill as an artist that Vann Nath survived. Removed from the cells where ordinary prisoners were kept, he and several other artists were assigned jobs painting for the Khmer Rouge, producing images of Pol Pot and banners for meetings, all the while trying to block out the screams and sights of what was happening around them. When the regime fell in 1979, Vann Nath managed to escape. Today, he is the only one of the eight known survivors of Tuol Sleng who is still alive. His wife also managed to live through the Pol Pot years, although their two young sons did not survive. Vann Nath and his wife now live in Phnom Penh with their four children born since they were reunited.
In 1979, the government asked Vann Nath and several other survivors to help establish a Museum of Genocide in the former prison, to document the horrors of what happened within the compound's walls. Vann Nath's series of paintings of prison life, with their graphic images of torture and death, hang in the museum halls today. Through these paintings-and through the eerie distinction of having survived a place which killed so many-Vann Nath has become an odd kind of celebrity, sought out by the international press and asked repeatedly to describe his memories of the prison. In addition, he has written a book about his experiences, A Cambodian Prison Portrait: One Year in the Khmer Rouge's S-21. While he persists in this labor of the survivor, committing at least part of his life to ensure that the horrors which he witnessed are not forgotten, Vann Nath also believes that life must go on.
His plan for an old people's home speaks to the future while remembering the past. The Khmer Rouge era, by displacing nearly the entire population of the country, disrupted traditional family patterns. The genocide of those years has left many old people without family. And even those who do have family can no longer count on their children being willing to take care of them. Some are unable to get along with their children. They tell stories of neglect and abandonment, of feeling so unwanted that they eventually left home to fend for themselves. Others have been summarily thrown out. Then there are those who do not want to be a burden on their children, so they try to be self-reliant. Bent and worn, they wander through markets, sharpening knifes, selling cakes, collecting cardboard and cans, doing whatever easy task they can find in order to eke out enough money for food each day. Many of them are filled with memories and knowledge that will never be known if they are not prompted to speak. Vann Nath smiles at the idea of asking them to talk. The home, he explains, will be a kind of memory bank: those who live there can tell their stories and thus pass along to succeeding generations a small part of the traditional knowledge which was torn away by the killings. "Old people are a resource," Vann Nath explains. "In a place with so much aid pouring in for all kinds of communities and groups, it is strange," he adds, "how the elderly are seen as useless, almost dead, as not important to the process of going on."
In the rush to reconstruct Cambodia, the focus has been on younger populations and on the future. Indeed, Cambodia is often described as one of the "youngest" countries in the world. Many middle-aged people died during the Khmer Rouge regime, and many of those who did survive had children in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1997, forty-five percent of the population was under the age of fifteen, and only a little over four and a half percent was over sixty. Thus, outside aid has focused on children and their education, perhaps justifiably, the rationale being that this population is more important than the aging and those soon to die.
It is a point of view which Vann Nath can understand at the same time that he refuses to accept it. The home for fifty residents that he plans to build in his home province of Battambang, where land is affordable and the need for housing for the elderly is great, will be a small start, he explains. If the system works there, then it can be replicated elsewhere. As he shows the drawings of the old people's home, Vann Nath's eyes sparkle. His plans call for a meetinghouse, flanked on either side by the residents' living quarters; the kitchen and pantries, office, and bathrooms will all be in separate buildings. The fenced-in compound will also include a water tank, generator, vegetable garden, and ponds. All that is missing now are the funds to begin. It is hoped that the initial funds (less than $50,000 for the land and construction of all the buildings) can be raised from the expatriate Khmer community and from Vann Nath's foreign visitors. Once the simple houses are built and the old people begin to grow their own food, the place will largely run itself, Vann Nath explains. As he talks or sketches the plans, you sense that Vann Nath knows exactly how the home will work and what spirit will infuse it. In his plan to gather together those who have been left alone and make a community for them, Vann Nath seems to have caught that poignant mixture of sadness and hope which characterizes mourning in its best sense.
Ingrid Muan is co-director of Reyum, an exhibition and performance space in Phnom Penh.
Copyright @2001 by Contemporary Asian Culture, Inc.
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