Lang and Cornelia worked on The Smell of Water for ten years, and No Front Line for one. Our many research trips to the Cambodian outback were rough, and sometimes dangerous. But the importance of telling Lang's story weighed heavily on us. Because what happened in Cambodia can happen again - anywhere.
The first thing we had to do was get to Ba Phnom - the mountain Lang and his comrade had run to when trying to escape from their infantry unit in January of 1979. We couldn't figure out how the older boy had known where they were, and how to navigate back to where they were most likely to find their families. Could he have seen the Mekong from where they hid, halfway up the mountain?
Ba Phnom is a third of the way from Phnom Penh to Saigon. We set out from the capital, and passed mountain after mountain gouged with quarries. Lang's cousin explained that the government was desperate for gravel to pave the roads - whole mountains had already disappeared.
A pit formed in the bottom of Cornelia's stomach. What if Ba Phnom... wasn't there anymore? How could she write the book, with so little information about the start of the boys' journey?
And suddenly, it appeared. Right where our map said it should be.
We drove to the base of the mountain, and took the only road up into the jungle.
We found ourselves in a temple complex looking at a burned-out building. Left standing as a reminder of what the Khmer Rouge had done, thirty-six years before.
As Lang took pictures, Cornelia raced ahead. She got to the stairs that led to the top of the mountain. Two haggard old women sprang out of nowhere and started running after her, shouting and flailing their arms like some kind of evil demons. Cornelia didn't know what they were, but figured she could outrun them. She did.
Lang's cousin later told her they were beggars, trying to get her to throw money at them to make them go away.
In this carefree scene we're climbing down from the Angkorian temple at the top of Phnom Da, a key landmark on Lang's journey from Ba Phnom to where he thought his family might be.
We asked, when we got to the bottom, if the Khmer Rouge had relocated the locals in 1975 because there was a Hindu temple on the top of the mountain. An elderly man said no, they hadn't.
Further inquiry revealed that he was still pro Khmer Rouge - in 2011! We got back into our boat quickly, and left. "You just never know who you're talking to," Lang said. "Not out here. It's not worth taking the risk."
(You can see the temple on the top of the hill.)
We usually went to Cambodia in dry season, when Phnom Penh is very dusty. A speck of something flew into Cornelia's eye one day and scratched her cornea. We spotted an eye clinic nearby. The nurse spoke French and Khmer. She asked Cornelia to read the eye chart. Unlike ours, which is all letters, this one was all numbers. Cornelia read them out in Khmer. Upon which the nurse remarked to Lang that he should be so proud to have a foreign wife who could speak Khmer so well. She didn't realize that all Cornelia knew at that time was the numbers, one to ten!
In 2009 we economized by taking a very small hotel room. Cornelia tripped over her luggage and broke her foot. Three operations to fix it. Most expensive hotel stay we ever had.
In 2012 she walked into an empty cafe and startled a dog sleeping in the back. Six weeks of rabies shots.
In 2016 she started a book on the origins of the patterns in Cambodian silk. She soon realized that this magnificent art form was vanishing so quickly that it might be gone before she could even complete her first draft. What was missing, she thought, was a consumer guide. If people understood what they were buying, they would buy real Cambodian silk - not imported synthetics, passed off as Cambodian silk. So she began A Pocket Guide to Cambodian Silk.
She used a relative’s house in Lang's village as base camp because it was near the brocade makers in Ksach Kandal. One day one of the girls came running in screaming that there was a big snake in the driveway. Cornelia went out to find a three-and-a half-foot King Cobra, hissing and flaring its hood. It slithered off into a lumber pile, carelessly left by a contractor. The snake was living in the front yard.
Now, in Cambodia, few people survive a cobra bite. You have thirty minutes to get to a hospital – one that might have antivenin. There’s just not enough time, and they might not have the antivenin.
We didn’t want to kill the snake; after all, it’s homo sapiens that’s the invasive species. And we didn’t want to drive it away, because any neighbor would surely kill it. We couldn’t clear the pile of lumber because one of us might get bitten. And we certainly didn’t want to hire someone else to do it.
So every time anyone left or entered the house, he first had to be sure the snake wasn’t on the driveway. Cornelia just did what she had to do – wrap up her research quickly, pack up and go back to the U.S.
And the cobra? She’s probably still out there in the lumber pile – with a nest of little ones.
Now, if you're planning a trip to Cambodia, don't let our stories scare you. As a tourist you'll be in the country just a short while, in safe areas near good medical care.
You'll be fine.
