tony

there's this buff cambodian who lifts weights every day at the pool.
he comes in and puts 45's on either side of the bench press bar, making a total of 135 lbs.
on a good day he'll press 40 times in a row, on a bad only 30.
i've tried to match him before, but i could only make 27.

anyway. he asked me if i ever got robbed at fred's.
i tell him no, and he starts talking about how good people have it here in the U.S.
usually he doesn't talk like this, but i went along with it.
he said how people in cambodia flaunt their money, but they really don't have the safety that people here with money do. over there you'll get shanked at night in your home.

so. i then asked him about the Khmer Rouge, you know, the whole coup thing that took contol of the government headed by Pol Pot in the late 70's, and how he ended up killling about 2 million of his country men...

so tony goes, yeah. the government sent out people to your door.
they would ask you your name and profession.
if you said anything that was an educated job, like a teacher, doctor or lawyer, they come back to your door at a later time and ask you to step outside.
once you did that, they'd handcuff you and take you away to kill you.
good stuff.

but i guess tony was only 15 at the time so he didn't have any such profession.
he said they had him dig and dig ditches.
at first i thought these were like for mass graves or something, but he said that they were just irrigation systems and built up land to keep the water in for rice paddies. he said that cambodians usually did one rice crop a year, but the cambodian government was nice enough to demand that they do it 3 times a year.
if you had any complaints about the matter they'd take you away behind some bushes and beat you in the back of the head with a metal bar until you died.
this was because they didn't want to waste any bullets on you.

so i go, "jesus, this sounds like a jewish concentration camp!"

to which tony responds, "yeah, have you seen pictures of the prisioners from those camps, how skinny they were?"

nod.

"that was me."

holy shit...

he said that they were only fed a cup of rice a day, and that the cup was mostly water so it really wasn't that much rice.

so that led to the question of how he made it here, to the US.
he told me that he really wanted out of his country, but was only planning on going to thailand, one of their neighboring countries.
and around 1978 when the cambodians pleaded with vietnam to help them out, and they did for a monetary exchange, and Pol Pot fled to south america, that tony finally fled to the thailand border where there were some international red cross people. he hooked him and his friends/family up in a safe haven area for just over a year.
in that year he wrote to a fellow cambodian who had made it to the united states in 1978. he eventually helped him and his friends and family get flights over to the US by 1981.
tony's never been back.
he says in a few years he might go back, but he hasn't yet.

the only question that remained that i didn't get to ask. this was because other people came into the weight room and i'm sure he didn't want to share his life story with all of them.
but all i wanted to ask was, "why do you think the government was doing this to you?"
i don't think this is really a question that i can randomly just ask after the fact unless we get into it again.

last night was kinda weird because i talking to that guy who dug up the incan mummy and he unprovoked started talking about genocide with me. although he didn't mention cambodia, he talked about how the europeans just raped and spanked the rest of the world during their exploration days.
and he's right.
in diamond's book, of the list of 20 genocides around the world from 1492 - 1950, all the killers were from europe except a scurmish in india that had muslims and hindus killing each other.
it wasn't til the 1950's that any asian groups were commiting genocide, and all these incidents were politically influenced acts of violence.

last night was also kinda weird because i got two requests that i should see "The Killing Fields".
one by tony, because he was saying that that movie does a pretty good job of depicting what happened, and the other guy that said i should watch it is this guy that recently got himself a thai girlfriend and is going over to thailand for 10 days here pretty soon. he said i should watch "Swimming to Cambodia", and also "The Killing Fields" cuz it was written by the same guy.

i'm starting to realize how interesting cultural anthropology can be.
it always seemed like a fluke of a job cuz you just ask interesting questions to people who seem interesting because of their exotic culture.

i would be scared shitless to go to southeast asia, but this makes me again want to go to mexico or south america to see what kind of idiosyncracies are out there.