Campuccino #96
On the conflict
Sou Sdei and welcome to Campuccino, your bi-monthly dispatch of key headlines in Cambodia with a dash of opinion.
To new subscribers, welcome! I’m Darathtey, a communication consultant, writer, and researcher. Learn more about my work here.
This issue is different from the rest because I simply cannot write about anything else. You will understand why when you read my personal essay below. It is my way of responding to the current conflict between Cambodia and Thailand. This will be the last issue of the newsletter for 2025. See you next year, hopefully under better circumstances.
-Darathtey
They say that PTSD can be passed down through genes. How much gets passed down? I haven’t tried to find out. From my own experience, I grew up thinking that my parents’ PTSD genes instilled by the Khmer Rouge escaped me altogether.
That was very naïve of me to believe.
Believe. Yes, I want to emphasise this word because belief has a superpower to make the impossible possible as cliché as it sounds. I believe until I no longer can. There is no scientific backing to what I’m saying next of my own experience in coming to face with what I assume to be the infamous PTSD.
Maybe it is my parents’ combined PTSD genes which finally erupted after decades of laying dormant like an old volcano. Or maybe it is growing up hearing stories of war and genocides at meal times and bedtimes. Or even maybe it is growing up, becoming older, scarred, and humbled by history and ugly lessons of the human world. Or maybe, it is all of the above.
My body holds on to fear and trauma that I’ve never personally experienced. How does one explain that? I cannot walk through Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum without witnessing my body shutting down in the form of not being able to breathe. I’ve tried, twice. At the sound of explosions and air raid sirens, my head throbs and chest tightens. It doesn’t matter if it was from a documentary, a movie, or breaking news. Before my mind can process what is happening, my body recoils at the sight of people evacuating, children crying, places burning. I find it hard to breathe. Maybe it is the doing of my inherited PTSD gene. Or maybe I am just human.
I’m scared to walk off clearly marked paths in dense jungle while hiking and scared for people whom I see doing so in real life or on TV, or in books I read. It seems that my mind is programmed to see forests and vast green fields to harbour potential landmines. Maybe that’s why Cambodians rarely walk on roads unmarked. We often get teased for being too scared, too careful, too nice, but how can you not when you came from nothing and witnessed some of the worst things humanity can inflict on each other.
Why am I telling you all these? To be honest, I don’t know. These words are my way of processing what is happening right now between Cambodia and Thailand.
While I was able to be stoic and stay rather rational and level-headed a few months before on the same matter, I simply cannot do the same this time around. The minute I saw that F16 dropping bombs over my homeland, it felt as if a line had been crossed. I didn’t even know that there was such a line, a boundary of some sorts. As a Cambodian, I felt violated. The image of bombs falling from the sky looks all too familiar. My mind went: I’ve seen this before, in the documentary about Cambodia in the early 70s.
At the end of the day, I’m only human. As much as I try to will myself to think mostly with my head using logic and reasons, I’m still human who potentially possesses a PTSD gene. When witnessing armed conflict, cruelty, and violence, my human self responds with emotions even though most of the time they are silent, those emotional responses. Sometimes I don’t know my body is holding them until I sit down on the ground and my tears start falling. There was something lodged in my chest that I didn’t know was there. It felt a lot like pain and sadness. I kept those to myself, trying my best to steer with my head, read news, put two and two together. It is very difficult.
This entire week I refused to give words to how I feel. Or, it is more like words fail to capture this physically embodied semi-silent emotional response. I find that it is not enough to utter words such as attack, defend, heavy artillery, displacement, air raid, killed, wounded, civilians, death, children, evacuation...
With those words in the back of my mind, I struggle to function. How does one go about their day to day with war at the backdrop knowing that there are more and more refugee camps being erected inside one’s own country? This is our home, we shouldn’t be running.
It is even more difficult not to succumb to anger and hatred of the others that couldn’t choose but were born to bear the flag of what my people call an intruder. But I am trying. While I didn’t choose to be born traumatised either by gene or surrounding, I can choose to fight this evil by fighting with love, sympathy, and kindness.
Their people have been displaced too, I told myself. This is an action of a small group of people that does not represent an entire nation, I repeat every single day like a mantra. While these sentences do not help ease my fear and anxiety, they keep my anger in check and my hatred at bay.
I would be lying if I told you I’m not scared that things will escalate beyond what it already is. I would be lying if I told you my heart doesn’t break every time I see the news and especially thinking about my father who has been through so much. He is one of many Cambodians who have seen more than their fair share of atrocity. It is unthinkable that they have to witness this again.
But what can I do? (beyond clicking a donate button which never feels like enough.)
I can only cope the only way I know how. Keep on and stay grounded because there is no other option, and because…
this is home.
Campuccino is a fortnightly dispatch of key headlines in Cambodia, written by @DarathteyDin.
If you read until the end, thank you. For my fellow Cambodians who are struggling and don’t want to sit alone with your feelings, you can write me at hello@darathteydin.com
The Border Aid Resource linked below is compiled by a fellow Cambodian netizen. I take no credit in the link, simply help sharing it.
Thank you bong for articulating exactly how I feel at the exact same moment
What a powerful writing. Thank you for sharing.