What the hell is BEYOND?
Well, the story is done. You read it. You felt the brutality of it, thought about it. Maybe loved or hated it. Either is perfect. The meaning is yours.
You did read it, right? Right!? If not, catch up before going any further: https://www.tracingechoes.com/p/innocence.
So, there is more. So much more.
Every BEYOND explores three things around the story. Those three will change with each season. For Backpacks, they are EARTH, HUMANS and MY TAKE.
EARTH is the location in the story. The country, the city, the history, the present. Any of that. Things worth knowing.
HUMANS is the people. Culture, connections, kindness, stupidity, misunderstandings. Things worth feeling.
MY TAKE is me, Jonas. What I personally think. What I believe. What I don’t. Things I learned. The earth and the humans through my very opinionated eyes. Things worth thinking.
Oh, and there will also be photos. Taken there, back then, by me. Good ones and bad ones. They’re all real.
In the story, I’m part of what happened, a character. I loved or hated it just as much. I was there. Here, in BEYOND, I show up as me. Today.
EARTH
When you’re standing in Angkor Wat, you just feel how powerful this civilization was. How ancient it is. Cambodia, most of Laos and Thailand, even southern parts of Vietnam were ruled by the Khmer empire. Angkor was the sprawling Southeast Asian metropolis. Now scroll forward by one thousand years.
In March 2014 I stood on what’s left of the killing fields. The Choeung Ek memorial center was built to remember. The documentation is very blunt. It takes guts to stomach all the brutality. Take the killing tools. Pickaxes, hammers or simply iron bars. I looked at them through the glass display cases. Built to build. Used to kill. The Khmer Rouge. Maybe you heard of them. I hadn’t. Not before I searched “things to do in Cambodia”. The piles of skulls publicly displayed for anyone to look at are still haunting me. Between 1975 and 1979 around two million people died. Roughly a quarter of the country. Many were simply executed. I felt like shit not even thirty minutes in.
The Khmer Rouge had a slogan: “To dig up the grass, one has to remove even the roots.” So they kept beating young children, infants even, against trees, until their dead bodies got thrown into the mass graves alongside their parents. Ensuring nothing grows back. With the goal in mind to destroy modern society, they targeted the educated and professionals. Doctors, teachers, engineers. I’m an engineer. Even wearing eyeglasses could make you look like an intellectual. People hid them. I want to leave. I stay.
I grew up in central Germany. I know evil. I went to the concentration camp in Dachau as a kid. And again as a grown up. I stood inside the gas chamber. School taught us. They also put the pictures in front of us, repeatedly. Evil knows no boundaries. I very much know. Mass graves in both countries. The darkness of humanity, it’s devastating.
The Khmer Rouge left a demographic scar that is still visible today. Cambodia is a very young country. Almost half its population is under twenty-five (as of 2019, https://www.nis.gov.kh/nis/Census2019/Children%20and%20Youth.pdf). And you can really feel it. I felt it back then. I’ve walked through the streets of Siem Reap, Battambang and Phnom Penh. Twice, in 2014 and 2016, I saw very few old people.
HUMANS
A few days before the killing fields, in Battambang, teens kept approaching me. There were way fewer tourists there. The kids and some young adults wanted to know my name, where I was from, what I was doing there. They were practicing their English. Proudly. They told me they wanted to get good enough so that they could leave Cambodia. Earn money. To them, the West was a gateway. A way out. This was 2014, twelve years ago. I wonder if any of them left. How many came back later. Back then, they told me all this with smiles on their faces. They looked happy. I believed it. Looking back I think it was genuine. They were happy.
The first couple of times these young people approached me, I got caught a little bit off-guard. At some point I started noticing it. It wasn’t just me. There were a few groups of teenagers, one or two foreigners in the middle. As a German it’s impossible to hide. I’m white. A few others were as well. We were like magnets. I’d lie if I didn’t enjoy the importance. The attention.
One guy I remember very clearly. He was around twenty, we talked for maybe an hour. I had a little bit more time to kill, so I didn’t mind. At some point, he suddenly asked if I could help him get a Western girlfriend. I thought he was joking. So I laughed. He was dead serious. I triple checked. He sincerely believed I could just arrange this. He told me it was his dream. To this day I don’t know what to make of that guy. I left pretty soon after.
More than two years later, in September 2016 I came back to Cambodia. One night in Phnom Penh I went to a rooftop restaurant. Alone, there was nobody interesting in the hostel. The restaurant was rather empty. I stayed longer than planned. The view was very nice. The waitress and I started chatting a little bit. Small talk. Her English was decent. I enjoyed a cocktail.
When I was about to leave, she asked if I wanted to come party with her and some friends later. My default instinct kicked in. Say no. I do that a lot if I get uncomfortable socially. I chicken out by reflex. For once, I stopped myself. Why not, I dared myself.
We met like an hour later. She showed up with a few friends. Mostly guys. Gay. Fast forward five hours. The sun is coming up, I’m finally on my way home. Well, or the equivalent of home. My hostel.
The Cambodian guys didn’t fuss over me. I wasn’t the attraction I assumed I’d be. The fancy guy from the West. They talked to me, sure, they were interested. But mostly they just went partying and had fun. Two different clubs. We danced, chatted, laughed a lot. They kept buying drinks. I kept trying to pay. I gave up.
I never saw any of them again.
It was one of the best nights I’ve ever had traveling solo. Kind, genuine people being normal people. They let me in. Into their lives for one night, let me be part of it.
MY TAKE
Innocence. I love the phonetics. It sounds beautiful.
Let’s pull up a specific definition.
“The notion of innocence refers to children’s simplicity, their lack of knowledge, and their (assumed or conceded) purity not yet spoiled by mundane affairs.” — Oxford Academic
What very much stands out to me is the lack of knowledge. The innocence of kids is amazing to observe. I have two little kids right now. Four and two. Their naive approach to many things is so refreshing compared to our complicated adult brains. Innocence is like an invisible layer. There are simply so many ugly things that haven’t entered their world yet. I remember when I was that young. I can’t remember worrying. I just lived.
At some point though, there’s ugliness. Ugly things. Knowledge comes. Kids eventually get spoiled by rather mundane affairs. Hopefully, mundane. A friend lies to you and you realize people you love can hurt you. Your parents promise they’ll come to something important. Then they don’t. Now you know disappointment. You start to distrust. Small things. Mundane. A little innocence is gone.
Now read that definition again and think about that Cambodian girl that offered herself up to a stranger. For a night. It’s been twelve years and I still feel the tears coming. It hurts. I wonder where she is now. What she’s doing. In her mid-twenties. I wonder if she’s happy. Truly happy now.
I don’t know if there is anything uglier, more brutal, more devastating, than this. For a girl that young. Oxford defines innocence partly as lack of knowledge. Well, guess what. She knew something no child that age should ever have to know. That’s a wound so deep, how will it ever heal?
It took us three a long time to find any words. To talk to her. Eventually, we told her no. Strongly, passionately. Repeatedly. That this is not something she should ever do. We tried to explain the pure wrongness, the pure evil of it. She said she’s fine. She’s happy. It felt true. It really did. Looking back though, I feel guilty. What we did didn’t feel like enough. At some point, we left. Ran away, nearly. Left her behind. Never saw her again.
And that’s the thing about guilt. You can forgive yourself later. You still did what you did though. I left.
Knowledge is very different. You simply can’t unknow it.
Is there a way forward for her? Can you know something like that and still move on? How the hell am I even supposed to answer that question. I’m hoping. But hoping is rarely enough.
Let me end with Tom Robbins: “It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”
I’m afraid that little girl’s childhood is gone for good. Despite never being guilty.
Before I really end this though, I need to tell you something warm.
That haunting Angkor Wat trip in 2014 eventually resulted in something genuinely good. That picture of me nose to nose, to be very specific. I used it as a dating profile picture on an app called Bumble in 2018. A woman I met there told me she swiped right because she found that picture funny. And now, one last time, fast forward eight years. There are two little kids running around me, they are four and two. They are ours.
Season Two · Backpacks · BEYOND 1/12
So, that was the very first BEYOND. I wanted all of you to see what it is. One full article. Not just promise it or list the benefits.
Because the next BEYOND will be paid. The stories stay completely free.
If you want the earth, the humans, my take, the photos and all the weird things I sincerely care about, come along. If not, genuinely, keep reading the stories. You decide how far you want to go.
I’d love to have you. Thank you for being here.