Free Sun After Dark by Pico Iyer

justice. To embrace the future, it seems, is to evade the past.
    It is a curious thing these days to wander around Phnom Penh, a city of potholes and puddles where most of the elegant French colonial buildings behind gates look like haunted houses taken over by squatters too concerned with their survival tomorrow to worry about upkeep today. Side streets are piled high with rotting garbage, and the small handmade signs above the open sewers say things like SAVING AIDS AND MADMAN VICTIM ASSOCIATION. Policemen crouch on the sidewalks, playing tictac-toe in the cracks of the pavement, and the fanciest hotel in town shuts its gates every night as if to keep the jungle and the darkness at bay.
    The potholes extend psychically, too: almost every Cambodian you talk to has huge gaps in his life story, long silences. Since Pol Pot eliminated all those with education or knowledge of the outside world, Phnom Penh became a city of country people, as well as of orphans, and you still will not find doctors or teachers or lawyers of a certain age. No one knows what their neighbors suffered, or how exactly they survived. To survive today, school-age girls sell themselves for two dollars a visit— ignoring what may be the fastest-rising AIDS infection rate in the world—and children scramble in the dust for foreigners’ coins long after midnight. Their faces, you can’t help but notice, are the same as the ones in the torture center.
    Amidst all the dilapidation, there are gaudy, anomalous explosions of affluence—huge, multistory palaces offering KARAOKE MASSAGE in neon letters, and ads in the local paper for Harry Winston jewels. Above the Mekong a grand casino posts notices about what you must do if you have $3,500 in cash, and the minimum bet at many tables is $20. The security guards who frisk you—NO KNIFE OR OFFENSIVE, say the signs, NO MILITARY⁄POLICE UNIFORM UNLESS ON OFFICIAL VISIT— wear yellow smiley buttons.
    Much of the money comes, of course, from overseas investors eager to make a killing out of need, and gambling that the economy can only improve. “This is the first time since I came here in 1992 when I can feel truly confident of making a profit,” says a Singaporean businessman, sipping pumpkin soup with gold leaf in it (in a hotel where even the telephone receivers are scented with jasmine). The appetizer alone costs as much as a local judge (generally uneducated) earns in maybe six months.
    Along the broad streets—still called Quai Karl Marx and Mao Tse Tung and Yugoslavie on many of the maps—there are clusters of Irish pubs and new French cafés, “Little Tokyo” restaurants and Filipino drinking-places. Local boys in fezzes sit outside a new Turkish restaurant along the Mekong, and the Royal Palace—almost too fittingly—stands where Lenin Boulevard meets “English Street” (so nicknamed for all the English classes on offer). Outside the latest cybercafé, urchins in wheelchairs swivel around at foreigners, crying, “No have mother!”
    For a certain kind of foreigner, there is a half-illicit thrill in living in a place where the officials are running drugs and girls and antique Buddhas when the guerrillas are not. At night, in the Heart of Darkness bar, the talk is all of $200 hit men and whole villages in the business of peddling thirteen-year-old girls. Pizza restaurants are called “Happy” and “Ecstatic” in honor of their ganja toppings, and two of the main sites of entertainment are shooting ranges (public and private) where you can lob hand grenades or fire away with M-16 assault rifles. To rent a twenty-four-room guest house on a lake, with a view of distant temples, costs $425 a month.
    “I lived for two years without electricity,” says a South American restaurant owner, sitting at a café while a woman crouches at her feet, giving her toenails their weekly polish. “Only by candle. It cost me two dollars a week.” Wander off the main streets and you are in a maze of little