“Mama, do you see that echo?” my daughter asked. “On the wall there, looking at me.” She was three years old, and it was her first visit to Phnom Penh, the city of my birth. “Why are there so many in Cambodia?”
I followed her gaze, where she had spied a gecko clinging to a high corner. In her innocent mispronunciation, she’d touched on something I felt was hauntingly apropos: Despite its breathtaking pace of transformation, this is still, for me, a city of echoes, reverberations of the past.
At the Hotel Le Royal, where we’d taken refuge from the city’s bustle during our stay, lizards scaled the walls, and monkeys still ventured from the frangipani trees to steal room keys and fruit from poolside lounge chairs (the monkeys have since been moved to the city zoo). The scene recalled the verdant grounds of my own family estate in the middle of the city, where as a young girl I always had to be on the lookout for sly characters descending from the trees amid the festive din of mealtimes in the garden.
There are echoes too of generations before, as in the Elephant Bar at Hotel Le Royal, where one can imagine the likes of Somerset Maugham and Andre Malraux, intellectuals and explorers, archaeologists and collectors, discussing in
these smoke-filled rooms what to pillage and what to preserve in the fading days of the French protectorate. And in the black-and-white tiled hallway just outside, visitors peer into a display case of elegant cocktail glasses commissioned for the visit of Jacqueline Kennedy in 1967.
So much was destroyed in the war and revolution that emptied Phnom Penh of its residents and plunged the country into genocide in the 1970s that it is all the more striking that such fragile physical remnants should survive. Today one can stroll
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