It was his son who convinced him that they visit Phnom Penh. After all, he wanted an off-the-usual family vacation as a gift to his son who just graduated from a prestigious university with a degree in political science. It is this son of his, from among his five children, who showed great interest in political issues, and would like to pursue the discipline not as a preparatory steppingstone to become a corporate lawyer, which he has become. He later learned that his son wants to pursue graduate studies and eventually earn a doctorate, and he is very much interested in the study of political theory, particular the theories on revolutions and social movements.
He would have wanted him to take a different path. Paris would have been better. And yes. business school. Or a law degree.
But now he is sitting beside him inside a van in Phnom Penh, capital of Cambodia, where he is poised to make an important decision in his life.
As a former student activist in his younger days, and eventually a cadre of the armed leftist rebellion, where he even earned the alias Kumander Dapa, a part of him was greatly pleased that his genes to explore matters that touch on oppression and the human desire for liberation have somewhat embedded themselves in his son. However, a part of him also cannot but feel some trepidation.
There are so many things that he decided to store deep in his vault of locked memories, that he cannot, would not and dare not reveal. Things that are now but painful images that he has successfully rendered invisible and unarticulated as he lives the corporate world, as one of the top-notch lawyers of the country in one of the well-known law firms. His clients are the power brokers, the richest of the rich. He may even be considered as the richest, if not one of the richest, lawyer in the entire country.
He doesn’t want his son to take the same path he took, and encounter the same monsters that he knew he tried so hard to slay, but deep inside cannot just take out from the inner recesses of his thought. This is what made him spend so much time and money with a professional therapist. This is what made him break into night sweats and wake up from nightmares. This is precisely why he opted to enroll all his children in a university other than his alma mater UP. He thought that in being away from the seat of student activism and unconventional thinking, that he would spare his children from taking the journey he was led into in his youth.
All of his four older children were in business-related courses, all destined to help their mother run the chain of clothing stores and movie houses she inherited from her taipan Chinese Filipino father. Who would have thought that he, a former communist cadre, whose mantra was to demonize the evils of capitalism, would marry an heiress of one of the most prominent capitalist enterprise in the country. And who would have thought that he would build his entire career in serving the interests of capitalism, managing mergers and acquisitions, providing legal advice to corporate clients on how to take advantage of loopholes provided in the system, effectively enabling people he once labeled as vultures and imperialist scums.
It was actually a conscious choice. These were the ways he thought he would exorcise his dark past and let him heal from its unsaid pain and horrors. Being married to an heiress of a fortune was less of being an opportunist social climber. Being in corporate law was less in being an enabler of rich people getting away with murder by taking advantage of legal loopholes. He saw these as his way of moving on, and moving away from his past. He hoped that in taking on a life that was diametrically opposed to such past, that it can help him heal his deep psychic wounds.
When his youngest son wanted to take up political science at UP, he had nightmares. It was such a big thing for him that he had to cancel all his appointments for the day to have an honest father-and-son conversation with him. When his son asked him why he is so vehemently opposed to such move, all he can muster was simply to argue that there is no money in political science. But his son was equally committed, and even threatened to just become a working student to finance his studies if he would not be allowed to pursue his interest. Even his wife began badgering him in why he is so emotionally upset about a simple matter of letting their son pursue a course which he likes so much. Why force him to take business or economics, when they already have four children who did exactly that, he remembers his wife asking him.
Eventually, he relented but on the condition that his son would stay focused on taking the course simply to prepare him eventually to take up law, and that he would not enroll in UP but in an equally prestigious private school. He has to bribe his son with a new car, and a new condominium unit near the university.
This deep concern about his son taking up political science is actually out of character, considering that much of his life as a parent he was an absentee father. He never took interest in the daily affairs of his children. He simply allowed his wife to do everything. And his wife was also busy tending to the family business, that their children ended up in the care of nannies, helpers, drivers and their teachers.
Had he been more attentive, he would not have missed that his son became the student activist that he feared for him to become. He turned into a student leader, one of the prime-movers of a leftist-oriented student organization in his university. Unknown to him, he became an active member of a national federation of progressive student leaders. He joined rallies in Mendiola, and at the Batasan. He took time off to visit striking workers in the industrial parks in Southern Luzon, and went on immersion trips among sugar farmers in Negros and indigenous communities in Mindanao. He would have known that his son became a living, breathing leftist ideologue. He would not have missed the undergraduate thesis of his son entitled “The Lapses of the Communist Revolution in the Philippines and Why It Failed.” His son was so critical of the left in the country despite adhering to leftist teachings. He blamed his predecessors in the movement for committing serious blunders.
And unknown to him, while he decided to marry into capitalism and lawyer for it as a conscious effort to heal from the horrors of his past, his son has consciously chosen to live his life as a student activist to deal and cope with the horrors of a present with a father who enables capitalism, and a family who thrives in it.
When his son graduated from college, all he wanted as a gift was for the family to visit Cambodia. He was offering Paris, or New York or even Johannesburg, but his son insisted on Cambodia. His son never stopped talking about Cambodia, this after he enrolled in an undergraduate course where his professor took his class there for an exposure trip. He was adamant that the entire family take the trip with him. What is there in Cambodia that is worth visiting? All he knew about it is that it is a backwater country with a history of genocide, and is currently ruled by a military dictatorship. What pleasure could be possibly derived from spending three days and two nights there, he thought.
When they landed in Phnom Penh and as their van took them to their hotel, what he saw was a city bursting in capitalist potential, with on-going construction, and with western logos and brands now competing with traditional ones. His son was eager to tell them that what they are witnessing is what many do not usually realize: that the divide between communism and capitalism has now been blurred, and that while Cambodia is still ruled by its communist party, like China it is now cohabiting with a brand of capitalism that is as exploitative and as destructive to local business.
He had mixed emotions listening to his son. He cannot but be impressed at the way he can so eruditely discourse on matters such as this, yet at the same time he felt so uncomfortable at what he was saying. He is practically touching on sensitive things about his past and his present. He was confident his son didn’t know about his communist past, but certainly he has enough knowledge to know his capitalist present.
And then his horror began to unravel, as the places they visited in the next days became like beeping reminders that turned alive all the things he wanted to forget about his past.
The Toul Sleng Museum, which during the time of Pol Pot was referred to as the S-21 prison and was the largest detention facility during the dreaded reign of the Khmer Rouge, is a nightmarish compendium of images taken of men, women and children before they were sent to their deaths. These are people who were simply seen as threats to the agenda of the Khmer Rouge to cleanse Cambodian Society of contamination by alien influence. Ordinary bureaucrats, educated people, artists and anyone who spoke a foreign language or had smooth hands and wore eyeglasses were marked for extermination. They were first tortured and interrogated without due process, before they were executed in the prison camp, or sent to another facility of horror where they later faced the same fate. Death for them was simply a matter of when and where, but definitely a certainty it was. When the facility was eventually liberated by the Vietnamese, only seven internees were left barely alive.
And the memories will even be more excruciatingly painful for him when they visited that other place of horror, what is now a memorial of the killing fields in Choeung Ek, where between 1975 to 1978, the same time he was fighting as a communist cadre in the mountains of Sierra Madre, that Cambodian comrades who were also adhering to their own brand of communism, have exterminated more than 20,000 men, women, children and even infants. It was shocking to watch the crying tree still bearing blood stains, searing in his brain the sight of young children and infants being mass murdered by men who bore the same beliefs as his, being held by the feet and being slammed into the tree as a way to economize on bullets, this while revolutionary songs are being played as a background to muffle the cries of babies and their mothers. He wanted to levitate himself from the ground when the tour guide informed him that the ground on which he was standing is a mass graveyard. It was simply too much to bear the sight of the hundreds and thousands of skulls of victims being encased in that pagoda-like monument in the middle of the memorial park.
There was just too much horror and pain to bear.
A part of him wanted to heave a sigh of relief that he turned his back at the ideology that drove these men to commit those atrocities against their own people, their own comrades. He should actually be thankful that he left the movement, and has now lived a life that is its anti-thesis. He felt pleased that despite Pol Pot’s attempt to rewind history to year zero, that capitalism is now planting its roots in a land that he soiled with his brand of genocidal totalitarianism. He cannot but be struck by how the Cambodians, enabled by their nominally socialist government, has effectively turned the horrors of their past into a material to generate tourism revenue, something which his son has vocally railed against, his being part of a woke generation obviously showing.
His son kept on repeating his line. This is what happens when communism is placed in the hands of ambitious and irrational people. It is supposed to be an ideal ideology whose main goal is to wage a revolution to free people from their bondage, but in all of history it was turned into a weapon to feed personal and selfish ambitions. Revolutions, instead of being just a phase to liberate people, have become permanent ones. They also have devoured their own children when those with ambition abandoned the goal of liberating people from their capitalist bondage, and have instead privileged their own interests. What happened to Cambodia should never happen again, his son kept on repeating. And he is hoping for the leftist movement back home to learn from the lessons Cambodia has to offer. For his son, Cambodia is not just a learning moment for capitalists, but also and more importantly for leftists, particularly those who take up arms.
He was in pain. He wanted to tell his son there is more in the monuments and graveyards of Cambodia that he should know.
The images of the mass graves, and of people being tortured and the silent cries of people being executed by their own comrades have left him weakened, and wracked with so much guilt. It brough back his own horrors. He cannot be pleased that he has already turned his back away from an ideology a version of which caused all this horror, for he himself was a silent witness to an equivalent horror in his own past.
He stood there, silent, afraid to voice out resistance, as many of his comrades were brought to trial in kangaroo revolutionary courts during the bloodbath that attended the internal purges which the left imposed in 1987. In 1986, on the year the Marcos dictatorship fell, the force of the Communist Party of the Philippines and its armed wing lost almost half of its size. The leadership wallowed in deep paranoia, fearful of deep penetration agents sabotaging it from within. The revolution turned against its own, and began devouring its own kind even before it could topple the regime. It was immaterial for its leaders that Marcos already left and that it was Cory Aquino, widow of Ninoy, who was President. After all, the problem was structural, and the enemy is so powerful that leaders felt it can even strike them from within.
It is estimated that about nine thousand communist comrades were internally purged during the early eighties. And he was a witness to many of the show trials, and the mass executions. He can still identify their names, many of them were his friends and classmates in the state university. And he can still remember the location of the places where they were executed, and the mass graves where they were buried.
And in all of these, he was silent, He did not dare object or resist because he feared for his life. He watched friends being tried, tortured and murdered. He came out spared from the purge, alive, but deeply wracked with guilt for not doing anything.
These are the painful memories that haunted him, and made him decide to leave the movement as safely as he could. This is the fountain of his guilt, the source of all his nightmares. This is the past he wanted to erase from his memory, and the reason he consciously married into capitalism and lawyered for it. This is why he did not want his children to make a single step that may just bring them to a path which took him to these kinds of horrors.
As he was reflecting on this, one image resonated in his pained and miserable mind, one that in a strange way, has provided him with a new perspective. He cannot but marvel at the way their tour guide, a survivor of the Cambodian genocide, has very casually pointed to the exact locations where his relatives and loves ones were executed by the Khmer Rouge, as if merely reciting places of interest. While partly he thought such would be callous, he also thought it was a poignant embodiment of someone who was able to deal with the demons of his past and moved on.
He asked the guide if he did not feel any anger or even guilt for surviving. His answer struck him like a bolt of lightning, that he had an epiphany at that very moment. No, he is no longer angry, the guide told him. He was tired of being angry. It is just a matter of accepting openly, admitting that somehow you have contributed to the horror by just watching while loved ones were being brutally murdered, and that you have a part in healing. It is just a matter of telling the world that you want to move on.
A perfect lesson, one he can drew strength from.
He looked at his son sitting beside him inside the van, taking a nap after a tiring day on tour. He tapped his shoulder. He woke up. And he silently whispered to him. “Son, want to have some after-dinner beer tonight? Let us talk. I need to tell you something. It is something I have kept from all of you for a long long time.”
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