It’s the cardinal rule of traveling: never store your valuables anywhere except your front pant pocket. What’s more, the Lonely Planet guide for our host country of Cambodia explicitly warned us against the insecurity of backpacker guesthouses. So I shouldn’t have been surprised when my Swedish roommates jostled me awake and asked if I, too, was missing money. As soon as I discovered my missing cash, I knew it was gone and would never come home. We had broken the rule and our disregard had cost us $350.
Theft victims rarely regain their losses even in developed countries; in Cambodia, the chances of compensation are negligible. The state police extorted us from the moment we crossed the Thai-Cambodia border and we expected that they would have little interest in a pro-bono investigation on behalf of four wronged tourists. We were certain that a staff member of the guesthouse was the perpetrator; the average Cambodian in Phnom Penh earns $20 a month, so the motive for theft was clear.
Unfortunately, our dispute pitted the word of a wealthy Cambodian guesthouse owner against that of four grungy barang, foreign, backpackers. We were frustrated and exhausted, though, and determined to pursue some sort of justice despite the obvious futility. One of my travel partners called his Cambodian friend to act as a Khmer-English translator. Together, we walked downstairs to inform the reception desk of what had occurred.
The owners of the guesthouse lived in an ornately decorated apartment on the ground floor. After the receptionist, the owners’ son, nervously went into his parents’ bedroom, his mother ominously marched into the lobby, like a dragon slithering out of its cave. She shot us an icy glare as she sat down in a gaudy wooden throne. The first words came out in a scream, and her voice never lowered in volume nor frequency for the rest of the evening. We expected that she would be irritated by the disturbance, but had no idea she would be the angriest person in the room. Our Cambodian told us that her rage focused on our general uncleanliness. The four of us were confused and irritated by this seemingly irrelevant criticism, but she continued to screech with flamboyant hand gestures about our general repulsiveness.
As the night progressed, the rest of her family and staff became involved in the argument, as well the esteemed Cambodian police. Yet no matter how many parties entered the mess, this woman’s ferocity never subsided and never strayed from her main point: our cleanliness. She showed our room to the police, gagging emphatically upon entrance. The room was in mild disorder, but such controlled chaos was inevitable, considering the room was inhabited by four backpackers in Southeast Asia.
We didn’t get our money back. And despite her demonstrated insanity, I don’t believe that the matriarch of the guesthouse was responsible for the crime or knowledgeable about the identity of the culprit. Her aggression still mystifies and, on some level, bothers me. Perhaps she simply felt disdain towards young white travelers for their stereotypical drunkenness, sexual impropriety, and general exploitation—maybe our “messiness” have indicated these qualities.
Perhaps when she said foreigners, she actually meant Americans and her disdain was grounded by different qualifications. She had only seen my passport and knew that my home country was the USA, the nation which killed hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, through illegal bombings in Cambodia. Did she consider me, and my Swedish friends by association, perpetrators of mass murder? Did she see those bombings as a catalyst for the rise of the Khmer Rouge and hold us partially responsible for the genocide of approximately 20 percent of the country’s population? As an American in Indochina, I can never know, or even expect, that resentment will not exist for these atrocities. Our loss of $350 was certainly not fair, regardless of how many beer cans were on the floor. Yet, as a U.S. citizen traveling in a land that my country ravaged, how clean am I?
