The Purple Mango Post - Photographs, dispatches and writing by freelance journalist Corinne Purtill

Subway Hero!

Not the actual subway hero, but a sufficiently bad-ass looking figure. Koyasan, Japan, 2006

Just when you thought there was no hope left for the people of Gotham, an anonymous subway hero saves a lady's life and then vanishes into the crowd. Thank you subway hero!

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War Correspondents, Then and Now

The Elephant Bar in Phnom Penh's Le Royal Hotel, a watering hole for generations of journalists in Cambodia.

Check out this fascinating multimedia retrospective in the Phnom Penh Post on the war journalists of 1970s Cambodia. Loved listening to Elizabeth Becker talk about life as a female correspondent. They were in town for a recent reunion of war journalists in Phnom Penh.

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Tea Money

Rest stop, Stung Treng, 2008.

$500 million goes missing in Cambodia each year in under-the-table payments, estimates U.S. Ambassador Carol Rodley. A recent egregious example is the $3.5 million payment that the Australia-based mining giant BHP Billiton signed over to the government in 2006. In exchange for a bauxite mining concession in Mondulkiri, an impoverished northeast province that is home to indigenous minorities, the company pledged $1 million for the concession and $2.5 million for a "social fund." The money was deposited in September 2006; it has not been seen or accounted for on government books since.

According to the Sydney Morning Herald, when asked about the money in 2007 Water Minister Lim Kean Hor told the National Assembly that the BHP Billiton payment was "tea money" - the friendly, under-the-table payments that ministers and businesspeople rely on to grease the wheels of Cambodia business transactions. Another lawmaker backed him up, saying that the money was "just for friendship."

BHP Billiton insists that the money was not a bribe, nor did they expect that a country that consistently scrapes the bottom of Transparency International's corruption index would treat the payment as such. Meanwhile, the Khmer manager of the Mondulkiri project has resigned over the company's treatment of the indigenous communities near the concession, and no one in the province seen a riel of the "social fund."

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Magic Tattoos

Ratanakiri, Cambodia, 2008.

I love this story from the LA Times on the fading art of the magic tattoo in Cambodia. For 2,000 years, Khmer warriors and "strong men" have relied on the magic symbols to protect them from harm and boost their powers. Today, the art form appears to be a casualty of Cambodia's peace. There are fewer bullets flying, and fewer people see the need to ink their bodies with protective designs.

The art is still alive and well in Ratanakiri, where Kieng, a young Tampuon man I worked with, proudly showed off the tattoos his spirit healer father inked for him with a bamboo needle. He got his first, the eagle head on his left forearm, at age 14. It protects him from evil spirits.

“When I have this, I don’t worry about spirits,” he said. The eagle is a bad spirit, gone away from my body. Fire can do everything. It can cook, burn, create, destroy."

Like most tattoo recipients, Kieng was hooked. He wants full-sleeve arm tattoos with colors. “If people see lots of tattoos, they know you can handle a lot of pain,” he told me.

The LA Times reporter got similar recommendations from Khmer kickboxing legend Eh Phoutong, who has magic tats on his body and on his right fist.

"'Magic tattoos make me feel more confident, focused, allow me to punch harder and avoid my opponent's blows,' Eh says, sporting a phoenix, a symbol of rebirth; the Hanuman monkey king, a force of life, agility and learning; and Vishnu god imagery, meant to provide strength. 'They really work.'"

Side note: In 2004 I met Eh Phuthong, the Khmer equivalent of The Rock, at his movie premiere in Phnom Penh. I don't know if "met" is really the right word; I was standing next to him, someone with a camera said "Smile!" and we both turned to the photographer. I look absolutely elated to be having my photo taken with Cambodian kickboxing legend Eh Phuthong; Eh Phuthong looks considerably less excited to be having his picture taken with me.

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Loving Kindness This, Bitch.

Attapeu Province, Laos. To the best of my knowledge, the monk pictured here was not armed.

Let's reach into the archive for one of my all-time favorite Cambodian wire stories.

Cambodian man picks wrong Buddhist monk for fight
Posted : Wed, 20 Aug 2008 05:37:34 GMT
Author : DPA

Phnom Penh - A Cambodian man caught "loitering suspiciously" at a Buddhist pagoda picked the wrong monk to tangle with when a saffron-robed assailant came at him with a machete, local media reported Wednesday. Soy Narith, 22, was recovering from severe chop wounds to his leg and left side after Buddhist monk Em Eat, whose age was not supplied, allegedly set upon him Monday with a long knife, the Khmer-language Koh Santepheap newspaper said.

The paper quoted police as saying that Eat suspected Narith was trying to steal temple property.

Buddhism preaches tolerance and non-violence, but Eat reportedly told police it also taught that people should not steal.

Police were continuing the investigations as Narith accused Eat of being of no good character and that he should possibly change his vocation.

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Public Service Announcement

New York City, November 2009.

Confession time: I have an irrational fear of falling onto the subway tracks. The scene plays in my head every time I feel the corrugated platform edge underfoot - the platform is crowded, people are pushy, and with one unfortunate swing of a briefcase or guitar case, I am a pancake under the 6 train.

And just when I have convinced myself that my concerns are unjustified, something like this happens.

So today the Purple Mango Post indulges in public service with these tips on not getting killed by the subway. Quick recap: don't pee on the tracks, keep your head out of the way of the train, and if you drop something on the tracks, for the love of God, just let it go.

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Meknes, Morocco, 2010.

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A Dragon Apparent

Highlander people, Ratanakiri, Cambodia.

I've spent a lot - a LOT - of time over the last few years reading about the highland cultures of Cambodia, where the subjects of my book come from. Old travel writing is fascinating. The accounts tell as much about the personal sympathies, preferences and cultural biases of the writer as they do about the highlanders themselves, who generally regard their chroniclers with bemused disinterest.

In January 1950, the British writer Norman Lewis traveled to Indochina to observe the waning days of French colonialism. He recorded his journey in the book A Dragon Apparent. I liked Lewis immediately, as he spends a lot of ink on his daily search for coffee, and complains when his hour of departure prevents him from eating a decent breakfast. The French and Vietnamese referred to the indigenous people almost exclusively as Moi – savages – and Lewis employed the term in his writing. His guide to the highlanders was Dr. Jouin, a French medical doctor and anthropologist, had lived among the highlanders for years and was, Lewis wrote, convinced that “this engaging race was doomed in quite a short time to disappear from the earth.”

Lewis arrived at the beginning of an era more threatening to the highlanders’ existence than any danger faced in their long history – the systematic destruction of the natural world. He was appalled by the slave-like treatment of highlanders employed at French rubber plantations, and bemoaned the expanse of commercial rubber farms that turned the wild, untamed landscape into a monoculture of identical trunks. He worried for the highlanders’ future. For a people whose spiritual life was based on the elements of the natural world, Lewis wrote, the highlanders seemed disastrously ill-prepared for the creep of modernity.

“The Moi has not been permitted the initiative to meet an attack from an unexpected quarter,” Lewis observed. “If someone offends the village’s tutelary spirit, the thing can be put right without much trouble. But if a timber-cutting company with a concession comes along and cuts down the banyan tree that contains the spirit, and takes it away, what is to be done? It is the end of the world.”

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Tuol Sleng

Prisoners' mugshots, Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum, Phnom Penh.

I have been poring through notes and photographs from my time in Cambodia as I work to complete the first draft of my book. These images from the Tuol Sleng genocide museum in Phnom Penh never fail to give me pause.

When the Khmer Rouge took over Phnom Penh in 1975, they converted a former high school to a prison. S-21, as it was known, became the busiest and most notorious of Cambodia’s prison and torture centers. More than 14,000 prisoners - men, women and children - entered S-21 after being accused of betrayal or disloyalty to the revolution; only seven are known to have survived.

Today Tuol Sleng is open to the public as a museum of the Khmer Rouge era. It is tucked away in a modest Phnom Penh neighborhood, surrounded by houses and the street-level storefronts of tailors and restaurants. The road to the museum was paved a few years ago. Outside the gates a battalion of motorbike taxi drivers, postcard hawkers and one-legged beggars compete noisily for the business of the tourists streaming in and out.

In one wing of the building, usually the last toured by Tuol Sleng visitors, are a series of former classrooms used as interrogation rooms. Each contains only a single iron bed frame with no mattress, a pair of metal shackles and a gory black-and-white photograph mounted to the wall of the corpse found in that room when the Vietnamese entered the compound in 1979. The prisoners in the photographs are barely identifiable, beaten so severely that some of the bed frames still hold the imprint of their prisoners’ bodies. The photographs are awash in blood. You can still see dark stains on the tiles.

Decades after the last victim was buried, the screams continued at Tuol Sleng: agonized cries for help echoing from the building, thumps with no human cause, ghostly forces that attacked hapless night watchmen who slept on the museum’s grounds. Cambodia is a place that believes in its ghosts, and in few places were the spirits as aggressive as those at Tuol Sleng. A guard died of a heart attack after being visited by specters in his sleep, his coworkers said; another docent abandoned her shift and ran home in terror after a sudden darkness descended in midday. Buddhist monks came twice a year to the grounds of the old prison to placate the spirits there with their chants. The spirit activity flared up in 1999, when the prison director Duch was arrested. That was when guard Keo Lundi heard what sounded like desperate screams for help coming from the back of the building in the middle of the day. He raced toward the sounds but found nothing.

“It sounded like a real person being beaten or killed,” he told the New York Times’ Seth Mydans. “I’d never heard a sound like that. We looked and looked, but there was nobody there. So we think it was a ghost, come to take revenge now that Duch is back.”

Duch converted to Christianity in 1993. In February 2009, he became the first person to face an international court for crimes committed during Democratic Kampuchea. Survivors of the prison called to the witness stand broke down and cried when faced with their alleged torturer, who sometimes cried as well. Duch pled guilty, but asked to be released from jail, arguing that he did what he did only under orders. “So it was a life-or-death situation for me myself, and my family as a whole,” he told the court. “As the person in charge, of Tuol Sleng, I never attempted to find an alternative other than obeying an order, even though I knew that obeying the order meant that numerous people would perish.”

Duch's sentencing is expected in June. Prosecutors have asked for 40 years. His lawyers have asked for leniency.

What do you think?

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Lake Lag Memories

MemChu, Stanford. I don't have a photo of Lake Lag, but I like to imagine that Jesus is calling for the lake to be filled.

Every Stanford student has fond memories of our beloved, beleaguered Lake Lagunita: its oily stank, the steadily decreasing water level, the walks of shame surreptitiously made around the Lake's perimeter. In honor of Lake Lag's 130th birthday, Stanford Magazine has a feature this month on all that the lake has meant to generations of students. One of my essays is in there:

"In the summer of 2000 I was living on campus, working a handful of jobs and enjoying my first summer away from home, except for the feeling that I would die if I did not see the ocean soon." [read the rest]

In other Stanford news, I found out that the Purple Mango Post was recently added to the Stanford Blog Directory, a listing of all the alum-run websites out there. We're in the company of websites that make the world a better place, like Wedding Paper Divas (the design geniuses who made my rehearsal dinner invites) and Orangette (the lovely cooking blog by Molly Wizenburg).

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