Dale Carnegie, The Carpenters and Cambodia

JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY / JANUARY 1999Brents / CAMBODIAThe problems of politics in the postmodern were never made more clear to me than dur-ing a visit to Cambodia and Vietnam in 1990. The following is an autoethnographic taleof my struggles as a white, middle-class, female, political sociologist encounteringthese remains of the Vietnam War. I write about my problem of locating a stable place forpolitical action in the antifoundationalist epistemology of postmodern thought and withinthe hyperreality of postmodern media culture. I juxtapose a journal I kept while in Cam-bodia with my subsequent reflections on this journal to explore the ironies of linesbetween the “reality” of war and the “unreality” of U.S. postmodern culture. Bringing themateriality of body, place, and time and the fictions and fantasies of desire into sociologi-cal writing may be a way of writing the political in a way that pursues social justice.

DALE CARNEGIE,THE CARPENTERS, AND CAMBODIA

BARBARA G. BRENTS

BETWEEN THE SYMBOLIC and the real stands Cambodia, atleast for me and others of my generation. I was born into sociol-ogy a Marxist and became a feminist. I have found myself moreoften agreeing with my “modernist” colleagues in resisting thisso-called postmodern tendency to see everything as a specta-cle or a text. Do not get me wrong. I never believed in “truth”;realities are certainly inscribed by texts. I have even found Bau-drillard interesting in his observations that we exist more in aworld of hyperreal simulation than any illusion of reality.

But when talking about the death, violence, and the realhuman tragedy of war or mass genocide, is it the best use of ourtime to play in “textland” as Dorothy Smith (1993) calls it? Didthe Gulf War really not take place, as Baudrillard (1995) titledhis essay on the media construction of that war? Would thefamilies of the 100,000-plus dead Iraqis disagree? Would the

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AUTHOR’S NOTE: I would like to thank Kate Hausbeck, Allen Shelton, Ellen Rose, andMichael Pawlak, my four traveling companions, and JCE reviewers for their invaluableassistance and inspiration in the various stages of this work. I would also like to thankthe University of Nevada Las Vegas Foundation, the Department of Sociology, and theVietnam Veteran’s Foundation of America for providing funds for this trip.

JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY, Vol. 27 No. 4, January 1999 435-460 1999 Sage Publications, Inc.

survivors of the millions of Cambodians murdered by Pol Potand the Khmer Rouge disagree? Must the view from myself/ourselves always be playful, decentered, like watching a televi-sion full of fleeting images that we can turn off and on at will? Iwas always bothered by the overattention to popular culture, thepolitical individualism, and the stifling of political action, impliedin some so-called skeptical postmodernist writings. I alwaysthought political action, resistance, and revolution involvesomething real that gives purpose, that is a beacon to justice.

But when Chaang (our Cambodian guide, all names used arefictitious) told me she read Dale Carnegie’s self-help classicHow to Stop Worrying and Start Living to survive the bombing ofCambodia during the Vietnam War, the murder of her husband,the possible rape of her daughter by the “Pol Pot men” (she’llnever know for sure), and two years of forced labor under theKhmer Rouge siege of Cambodia, I was struck with such pro-found disunderstanding. It shattered many of the ways I havealways thought about the real and the unreal, violence and trag-edy, social justice and social action—that which we should takeseriously and that which we should not. What is more real, Iused to think, than the genuine tragedy of war, especially theVietnam War that was such a part of my childhood? What ismore unreal, more distraction, than “American” pop culture, ofwhich self-help books such as Dale Carnegie’s are a part? Sowas I ever confused when the war and pop culture collided.

This article struggles to dance at the feet of this disunder-standing. This article chronicles my search for the “reality” thatmatters, or whether there is any that matters. It is about my con-structions of self and “other.” It is about my desires and fanta-sies, and the Vietnam War and my politics, and Cambodia. Iguess this article is really about how we/I construct a discourseof reality, that is, how we try and draw the lines around whateverwe call reality.

Also, I have found that the only way I could write about this ina way that communicates anything is in autoethnography, amethod developed in the writings of Carolyn Ellis (e.g., 1995). Inparticular, dwelling on the way my body feels my memories orrather marks my memories has given me the comfort of a place

436 JOURNAL OF CONTEMPORARY ETHNOGRAPHY / JANUARY 1999

to start writing my experience. This place has been much morecomfortable than the traditional academic writing that I thoughtwas the most convincing way to mark and communicate reality.Anthropologists Clifford and Marcus (1986) years ago recog-nized that the process of writing social science and ethnogra-phy was itself political. Writing is a site of struggle with a politicsof authority over reality.So this article is also about constructingreality in writing as well. Writing is politics.

A final methodological note: I rely in many places on irony tochronicle the struggle. Donna Haraway (1990) in “A Manifestofor Cyborgs” says,

Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into largerwholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incom-patible things together because both or all are necessary andtrue. Irony is about humor and serious play. It is also a rhetoricalstrategy and a political method. (p. 190)

I am consciously aware of the words I used to describe my iden-tity, reality, my sense that truth has revealed itself to me, and myjokes on myself, on postmodernists, on Marxists, on us all. Thisis both a rhetorical strategy and political method. This dialoguewith myself has many layers that continue to reveal themselvesto me in different ways as I read and reread my words. I write thisso that you may enter the dialogue as well.

HOLIDAY IN CAMBODIA

At one level, we were tourists in Cambodia. Of course, thatwas, after all, only one level.We went in May 1990, twenty yearsafter Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia. “We” included me, anotherprofessor and his wife, and two Vietnam War veterans who werealso students. The Vietnam Veteran’s Foundation funded mostof our trip to encourage academics to see postwar SoutheastAsia. I assume the foundation felt that sending objective socialscientists to observe would lend legitimacy to their politicalefforts to open relations with Vietnam and Cambodia. Our re-search agenda was to “find out” about the political system, eco-nomic system, education system—you know, the Parsonsian

Brents / CAMBODIA 437

institutions. Some of us were also interested in ethnicity andracism. And of course, being a feminist, I wanted to find outabout the “situation of women.” We had ten days, no knowledgeof the language, and given the embargo and travel restrictionsthe U.S. government had imposed against Cambodia and Viet-nam, it was impossible to make any prior arrangements. None-theless, thanks to the cooperation of the Cambodian tourismbureaucracy and an extremely helpful and sympatheticEnglish-speaking guide and translator, Chaang, we were ableto interview relief workers, government bureaucrats, and a fewpeople on the streets. Because she was our only link to under-standing this strange world, we became very close to Chaangand her family. Each day brought a flood of unfamiliar sights,sounds, and smells that demanded translation, that demanded Ibe able to explain, as an academic. Each day, I struggled moreand more to draw on my political sociological training to makesense. I would have to write about Cambodia when I returned. Idid not want people to think we were just there on vacation.Each day brought questions, more contradictions.

Follow my head while I was in and as I now relive Cambodia. Iwant to communicate my experience through a dialoguebetween the journal I kept while there and my search for under-standing “the real.”

Journal entry, Monday, May 21,1990, Phnom Penh:Phnom Penh.Cambodia beautiful. See defoliation from Agent Orange fromplane. Beautiful town. Beautiful, rich architecture and people liv-ing all over. Shanties on mansions. Poverty spread equally.Mahogany is everywhere. Hand hewn timbers. They are rebuild-ing our hotel without power tools.

Pol Pot so horrible and real, yet it is not real. I devote concernto bugs and water.

I remember vividly the scenes that moved past the van win-dow as we were driven through the city to our hotel and after.The infrastructure, roads, sewers, water, housing, and electric-ity were in shambles. Everywhere we looked, mazes of wireswere connected to already overloaded electrical poles.Electric-ity was erratic. We were told that lucky areas of the city gotmaybe four hours per week of electricity. Places that could


afford it had their own generators. Children played in the city’sback alleys, where the sewer and water system intermingled,still in major disrepair. A major cause of death among childrenwas diarrhea from bad water. The city looked extremely over-crowded. When the people moved back into Phnom Penh afterthe Vietnamese drove out the Khmer Rouge, the lucky ones gotapartments on the lower levels that they now use for busi-nesses. In areas that looked like they used to be parking lots,less lucky people built shanties against the existing walls ofbuildings with whatever materials they could find. Refugeeshave continued to pour into the city escaping war in thecountryside.

Most of the urban population are women widowed by Pol Potand the more recent civil war.Most had no marketable skills, butyou could see the lucky ones who now owned small businesseson the streets selling cakes or bananas, making about twenty-five cents a day. Sochua Mu Leiper, consultant for Women inDevelopment, UNICEF told us, “And now you see children onthe street, collecting garbage. . . . If they don’t bring in this extraincome, they go to bed hungry.”

Journal, Wednesday, May 23, Phnom Penh: The streets, chil-dren, mud brown and grey and grey-red. Beautiful brown skin.The colors. It makes it all so good. What can I say anymore?Words are clichéd. Are the feelings clichéd? This troubles me.

Two things keep recurring and continue to bother me as Ibegin to read back over my journal.One is a struggle with what Iam supposed to be doing as an academic. Second was mystruggle with references to popular culture. I have this preoccu-pation with my own inability to find a settled place for my feelingsas a white Western newcomer sociologist—that is, the contra-dictions between (1) the “reality of war,” (2) me as a middle-classkid, and (3) me as an alleged objective, all-knowing academic. Igo back-and-forth among these alleged points of reference,these vantage points that are supposed to provide some framesof certainty in interpreting events, to mark reality, but that just donot seem to work.

About a year after I returned from Cambodia, I gave a slidelecture presentation on my trip to a university audience of about


two hundred people, although I do not think I ever noticed theaudience. Before and during the talk, I felt like I was showingslides from my vacation. I started the talk with my inability tospeak about Cambodia as a sociologist. The abstracted con-cepts, the objective distance we are supposed to use, did notget at any reality I felt while there. I think my sociologist col-leagues were a little confused at that point.

It was true though. When I first returned from my travels, themore I tried to communicate what I saw and felt, the more itsounded clichéd, like a movie. I felt like no one believed me. I fellinto a game of how many gory, shocking stories could I tell tocounter, “Oh is this your first trip to a third world country?” or,“What’s the big deal with Cambodia, you should see our owninner cities?” Everyone had already seen the movie The KillingFields. I had to find a way to make my words go beyond thesemovie, fictional, invented frames I and others were using thattook the reality away from my message. What I saw was real. Ihad to connect to the real—to capture the social—otherwise myfeelings were not legitimate.

So even though I started my talk with the epistemological cri-sis of sociology, in the end I could find nothing else to do but grabmy sociological voice and talk about global political relations.Yet, even then I thwarted myself, because the last ten minutes ofthe talk I flashed pictures of Khmer children playing on thestreets while I verbally abstracted the foreign policy issues fromtheir lives. My friends told me after that it must have been acathartic exercise. I thought they just missed the larger episte-mological point. I hoped that the emotional and visceral reac-tions people would get from the pictures in contrast with theabstracted foreign policy discourse would communicate what Ithought I just was not academically smart enough to proclaim inwords alone. In that method of communicating the discontinui-ties, I felt satisfied. Yet, for reasons I still do not understand, thatwas the first night in my life that I did not sleep one wink.

Now, I do not know if I could have explained it in words—atleast the way I have been taught to use words. What strikes meso deeply in rereading my journal is this search for and rejectionof a voice of some authority. Who am I, an academic from Las


Vegas, to speak? What can I legitimately speak of? I am dis-gusted with the abstractions some academics and foreign pol-icy experts use to speak about these “foreign” lands and theU.S./our relation to them. Yet, how else could I speak or writebelievably about a situation in which U.S. foreign policy was con-tributing to the continued decline of a nation? How else could Ispeak or write believably in a way that did not rely on appropriat-ing the tragedies and emotions of the Cambodians I met? Iguess I’m just not a scientist.

Second, in my journal I struggle with constant references toWestern texts to translate experiences. As you will see, I keepmaking references to K-Mart things saved from tourists. MyWeekly Reader, National Geographic were frames that I usedto try to grasp, to understand this new and frightening experi-ence. Chaang described using Dale Carnegie’s book to getthrough;she described how she sang the Carpenter’s 1974 ver-sion of the song, Yesterday Once More;and she later comparedher last night with her husband to the movie Love Story. This allreally bothers me.Why did she feel the need to use these silly lit-tle pop culture icons to explain what it was like to endure suchtragedy? Why did I? Did she tell me this because she thought itwould help me understand? Was this how she, the same as I,translated the untranslatable? Were these the texts that even“real” third world people—the pure, the uncontaminated, the“natives”—used to frame life? How can this be? These were thepeople who had genuine experience, not the postmodernpseudo spectacles we/I/Westerners seek out to pretend reality.What did they need “our” pop culture for?

MY WEEKLY READER:POP CULTURE ICONS AND REAL TRAGEDY

Journal, Wednesday, May 23, Phnom Penh: I begin to think inshort sentences trimmed of unnecessary prepositions, like ourguide speaks.She is so, I don’t know, lays herself on the line.Shetells us, “Ah, the rain. When it rain under Pol Pot we happybecause then we can cry,” and she smiles.


She took us to her house. We walked up broken wet concretestairs with hoses trailing down them. No lights. It is as though aconstruction site condemned long ago is partially restored. Wewalk into her house. The tile is clean. Lots of K-Mart-type thingsshe save from tourists. Plants. Live ones and dead ones, to sym-bolize the living and what is dead she told us. Two daughters tosymbolize the living hope, the good past and the bad. The firstdaughter is of my husband The second daughter is by Pol Potman, but she don’t know.

One book that help me to put the past behind. . . . She pulls offthe shelf Dale Carnegie, “How to Stop Worrying and Start Living”(Who would have thought old Dale Carnegie courses from the60s would help a Third World country survive extermination.)

I sorry, no fan.15 minutes later the lights and the fan come on.15 minutes later they are off. They don’t come back on again.She serves us tea and we look at pictures Japanese and Frenchtourists have sent her.

When I spied Dale Carnegie’s How to Stop Worrying andStart Living on Chaang’s shelf, I freaked. She struggled to stealfood off her own plate and sneak it, under the penalty of death,to her young daughter. She did not know whether her husbandwas dead or not; she just did not see him anymore. She wasraped by the Pol Pot man and bore a child. So the second of hertwo beautiful daughters has a daddy who killed her sister’sdaddy. She returns to a city with nothing, liberated by a differentkind of Communist regime, Vietnamese neighbors the Cambo-dians had grown up learning to hate, working for a governmentshe hated. She returned to a city with no sewers, no electricity,no plumbing.She had to boil water every morning so her daugh-ters would not get worms, but she thinks they have themalready. Where buildings just blocks away burn to the groundbecause everyone hot-wires the electricity. And Dale Carne-gie’s How to Stop Worrying and Start Living!

Worrying has the marks of psychosomatic illnesses. ButChaang’s experience was real, right? Dale Carnegie was meantto help people with invented problems. Part of the reason this isso incredible to me is that I used to stare at that book in the base-ment with Dad’s other old books from college.As an adolescent,I toyed with the notion that Dale Carnegie was for incompetentpeople to rid themselves of the ghosts of self-doubt wrought by


inadequate personalities. The older I got, the more sympathy Ihad with the oppressed, and I began to see Dale’s book as amind-control technique to make people accept the fate bour-geois capitalist society dealt them. But this self-help book help-ing people through the reality of war? It did not make sense. To“start living,” as Dale Carnegie said, never meant as opposed to“dying.”

CAPITALISTS AND SOCIALISTS AND COMMUNISTS, OH MY!

And speaking of bourgeois, who is this Chaang? The merefact that Chaang in 1976 knew of the movie Love Story and wassinging Yesterday Once More by the Carpenters, an Americanpop band, means she was among the elite in Cambodia. Shewas the French-educated, American sympathizer, anti-Communist, colonized dupe that was part and parcel of thoseoppressing the real people of Cambodia. The Khmer Rougewere born of the U.S. bombing of Cambodia. They hated it. Andthey hated the colonizers. And they hated Western culture thatdegraded and defamed real Khmer culture. Talk about identitypolitics. No borderlands, no multiple identities for the KhmerRouge! You were either in or you were out. Too bad they killedeveryone who was out, but I could see their intentions. TheKhmer had a vision of a rural agrarian society where everyonewas equal and where the real Khmer culture could reign. Whatam I doing feeling sympathy for this colonizer of her own coun-try? She was Western intelligentsia, civil servant elite. Shebenefited from the oppression of her rural country folk. Shewanted the Americans there.

I remember when I came back to the United States, I felt thisirrepressible urge to do something about all this. So I called theeditorial-page editor of the local newspaper. I told him I wantedto write a “Nevada Views” article, space for op ed pieces bylocals, concerning the embargo against Cambodia and Viet-nam.Now, this guy was a right-wing, libertarian ideologue, and Iwas taken aback when he thought the idea was a good one. Ispoke to him after he read the piece to find out when it would be


published.He proceeded to tell me all about those Communistslike Pol Pot and Danny Ortega and Fidel Castro who all hung outtogether in French Socialist intellectual circles. I hung up, at firstconfused as to how he could link Danny Ortega, the good-looking symbol of Nicaraguans’ fight against Reagan-led U.S.oppression, and the evil, genocidal, Pol Pot. Ah, but in his coldwar, anti-Communist mind-set, what held them together wastheir common Communist identity. He thought my opposition tothe Khmer Rouge was an opposition to Communism. Ha! Aftermy trip to Vietnam and Cambodia, I was more than ever con-vinced that Socialism was better than capitalism and that whatwas going on in Vietnam and Cambodia was not “real” Social-ism, just as certainly as Soviet-style Communism was not realSocialism. It seemed to me that being a Communist in the late-twentieth-century global economy was more analogous to thecultural, economic, and ideological implications of supportingthe Dallas Cowboys over the Washington Redskins (pardon thelabels) than supporting any political-economic system.Besides, it was the Vietnamese Communists that liberatedCambodia from the Khmer Rouge “Communists.” Luckily, myeducated conception of what a really good economic systemmight be was still intact. That right-wing editor was silly for let-ting his stereotypical essentialist conception of Communismget in his way of seeing reality.

Those Cambodians still cannot figure out who is a true Cam-bodian and who isn’t. Today I am amused as I read the papersabout the various coups, pseudo coups, and odd coalitions, thedeath of Pol Pot, and fights over his body. (I suspect Pol Pot’s“death” will be a lot like Elvis’s.) I do not feel so profoundly sad ordriven.Just mad.The current Cambodian government seems tobe fighting over who really was or was not Khmer Rouge. Forheaven’s sake, they all were at one time or another allied withthe Khmer Rouge. They just defected at different times. Maybethey should read Gloria Anzaldua’s (1990) Borderlands or TrinhMinh-ha’s (1989) Woman, Native, Other and stop worrying andstart living.At least the United States is not shipping weapons tokeep the civil war going, I hope. And I go on, looking forward tobuying the new edition of The Communist Manifesto.


FOUR DEAD IN OHIO

One day it occurred to me to ask Chaang if she was actuallyin Cambodia during “the bombing of Cambodia.” Now granted,the link between Nixon’s bombing and the rise of the KhmerRouge mentioned in so many analyses of Cambodia was notlost on me. Nor did I miss that fact that I was indeed in Cambo-dia. But it occurred to me that she may have actually experi-enced, in reality, in that place, that same bombing of Cambodiathat I heard Nixon announcing on our black-and-white televi-sion—that same bombing that I experienced in a different place,as “four dead in Ohio,” as scenes of the protest at Kent Stateshown in subsequent television movies. The same bombingthat gave a name to Peace Park, a small park near my graduateSociology Department building. The same bombing thatsparked protests that caused such a huge rift in that samegraduate Sociology/Rural Sociology program that some peoplestill do not trust each other twenty years later. Was she reallythere in an event I had experienced in so many different places?

I blurted out to Chaang, all of a sudden, like when I finallyremember a word I’ve been trying to think of, “Were you herewhen the Americans were bombing?” It was probably unlikelythat she knew the actual moment, I remember thinking, sincewe bombed the Cambodian/Vietnamese border, the Ho ChiMinh trail, and she was miles away in Phnom Penh.We were sit-ting in the outside seating of a restaurant, in Ho Chi Minh City(Saigon as everyone called it), as she was accompanying usback to the airport so we could fly home. “Yes, they bombedacross the river from my house, and I feared my daughter wouldbecome deaf,” she said softly but covered her ears as if shecould still hear it. “Why did the U.S.bomb so close?” I asked, notever having someone as qualified as this to answer. “To kill theKhmer Rouge, but we knew that was not the case.” “Did the U.S.have much to do with Pol Pot coming to power?” I asked, cross-checking the history books. “Yes,” she said gently. “I’m sorry,”she said to me, knowing I would feel bad about it. And I did. Myparents voted for Nixon. I bombed her. There it was. Since I wasnot part of the solution, I was the problem. After a minute, she


looked at me again: “We never thought the U.S. would leave usto the Khmer Rouge. We never thought the U.S. would abandonus.” Abandon you! You were a pawn! There was that colonizedmentality again, I thought to myself.

THE WAR MUSEUM

Before we left home for this trip, I had not really thought muchabout the place where I was really going, for whatever reason. Itwas not until we were landing in Ho Chi Minh City that itoccurred to me that I would finally get to see the Vietnam War.The war ended just as I graduated from high school, and I wasalways frustrated that I could not take part in all the campus pro-tests. But as I grew up, the images of those protests fueled mygrowing activism. I had seen that young people could influenceworld events, and I kept searching for movements that wouldallow me to influence the world for good. The campus protestsof which I was a part—the antinuclear movements, the anti-Contra movements, the anti-Apartheid protests—seemed palein comparison, as if they were incomplete, tentative, not as realas the ones I saw pictured and named on television when I wasa youth.

I was now going to see my war, and I was going with two Viet-nam vets. I distinctly remember flying over the fields as we werelanding in Saigon. I asked them if they recognized anything.They pointed out still-burnt-out fields that had been the result ofAgent Orange. As we landed at the airport, I found myself star-ing and searching for something that would give me a clue. Andthe thought kept going through my head over and over—this iswhat all that fuss was about?

Journal, Saturday, May 19, Saigon: Day of understanding/notunderstanding the Vietnam War. Day of trying to figure out whatthis city is. What socialism/communism is. From love of this cityas a city to mass confusion on how it is not what it should be.Then seeing Roman and John experience this, understandingwhat war is, why we are here. What I don’t know of the world. ATV war . . .


Journal, Monday, May 21, Phnom Penh: So much it is hard towrite. Left Saigon yesterday. Yesterday was impossible to write.One day that set in deep, it was yesterday (Yesterday—it seemslike years ago) (Time has gotten weird). Hours are like weeks.Events—We find someone recommended to us to drive usaround the city.We try and visit hospitals, pediatrics, but we can’tget in because its Sunday.

I get hit by a moped for comic relief . . .We visit the market—smells, people, crowds “exotic” spices. I

feel like I’m in the Orient—Wait, I am. . . . Poverty, Buddhist Tem-ples, incense.

War Atrocities Museum. After three tries it’s finally open.Rains. Intense. I couldn’t write about this yesterday. I remembermy reaction was humans suck. Men/masculinity is this aggres-sion? Photos after photos/captions after captions. Pictures ofpushing people out of helicopters. Water torture. Agent Orange.Setting up heads for display. I read every line.Force myself to ex-amine every picture.

I ask Roman and John. Yes it’s real. Yes we did this in thiscountry I am standing in. Did we really do this? John—yes. It’sreal. Death, murder.

These words as written become all that I knew before. Whynow is it real?

And I had these reactions after just looking at pictures, at rep-resentations of what I was told were real events. I did see realconcrete bunkers, rooms with bars on top that I was told people(people, ha) were kept in, just small enough so they could notstand or sit, bars on top. I still see these bunkers, plain as dayright now. For some reason, it reminded me of when I went withmy dad to Custer’s Last Stand in Montana.There it was, just roll-ing hills and little signs telling of the battles between the Indiansand Custer—how the Indians slaughtered Custer. I just couldnot picture a war or people killed. That was just cowboy/Indianstuff. On the other hand, there were some similarities. The con-crete bunkers in Vietnam reminded me of the restrooms at reststops in Montana.

Journal, Monday, May 21, Phnom Penh: For the first time in mysheltered life, death, war is real.We did it.We do it. In the name ofany and every cause we kill. I snapped. I’m not a dramatic per-son. I keep saying, am I just dramatizing this? I crossed a bound-ary in myself to insensitivity. I keep returning to John and Roman


who lived this and I feel I get a small taste of what their lives werefor two 1/2 years.

Did you kill? I asked them. They just looked at me.Vietnam Vets aren’t just a word anymore. A whole generation

of men in their forties and fifties now who have buried an event. (Isay one because it only happens once, and then it becomessomething else) so deep as to never live the same. Then returnand no one can relate. So 20 years later, it is still as real as it wasthen. They return to say I’m sorry.

Why didn’t you say anything to me or anyone else for that mat-ter, I ask them. No one could understand. They didn’t want tohear, to listen. I hate war. Under no circumstances is war justi-fied, John says. We came here now to prevent this from everhappening again.

We/they journey to a side of humanity that all long for (real ex-perience) that makes you special and part of a secret club. Butthe secret is horrible. No one should have to live this. Horrible. Istruggle with my own shock, my jolt to a new stage of insensitivityjust to deal with it, and I understand how you can kill.

Stefano and Marlena at the war atrocities museum sit on thesteps and quietly but firmly remark, it was a little too much to han-dle. They had left quickly. I checked out of reality to enjoy my tor-ment.

Ah museums, little displays of reality. These recollectionsreminded me of the children’s museum in Fort Worth where mypicture of the elephant got displayed when I was in first grade. Ihad drawn a white elephant in chalk on a green piece of paper.But the teacher drew in a palm tree with colored chalk. It wonthird place in some children’s art contest and was selected tohang in the Fort Worth Children’s Museum. I thought because Idid not draw the whole thing I was cheating, and I was con-cerned. But when I saw it hang in the museum I knew it must beokay, because they would never hang anything that was notreal.

Chaang told us of one of the first times she went in the ToelSleng museum in Phnom Penh after they opened it to the public.She took tourists in there regularly, and she had one group ofFrench tourists this time. This museum had been a schoolbefore the war, and when the Khmer Rouge took Phnom Penh,they turned it into a prison. Apparently, Pol Pot liked to take pic-tures of all the people he killed, similar to Hitler’s enjoyment of


photos. And so they all hung on the walls in this now restoredmuseum. The museum also had rooms full of unidentifiedskulls. Some of the rooms were still set up like they were whenthe Khmer Rouge were finally defeated, with blood and chainsand stuff in little rooms. Chaang was doing this tour and lookedon the wall and saw a picture of her brother. She could not con-tinue. She had not known what had happened to him before.When I heard the story I remember asking myself, if his picturewas there does that make him really dead?

Journal, Wednesday, May 23, Phnom Penh: We visited the vicechairman of foreign affairs. Hot. Then lunch. Then we walk backfrom the restaurant. Risking trouble for our guide in case we getcaught without an escort. Mud, poverty, kids, they followed useverywhere. So much fun. They laugh and fight to get in the pic-ture. Poverty. What word conveys life like this? Squatters in anarea that used to be a home. So misplaced. Lost found. “A Landof Many Contrasts” a word I recall from grade school geographytexts, or My Weekly Reader. Brown skin is truly beautiful.

I don’t know. I feel so selfish, Wow a cosmic experience. It willmake me a better person. So special only we who have beenhere will understand. I want to die and suffer too.

Later that day The orphanage. Dancing, exotic dances. Na-tional Geographic special. This is weird. Weird people weird re-actions. Only I am real. The rest is a Felini movie. What am I do-ing? I can’t cry. I can’t feel. I wonder what is happening on Days ofour Lives.

Only this is real, when you feel what people you care abouthave suffered. Only that is allowed to feel. Dale Carnegie, shit.Too much. I want to cry, cry out, feel my own anguish. I am numb.Who isn’t? Alone and like everyone else. What makes me sospecial?

I longed for a privileged place of suffering, where one couldauthenticate oneself through “real” experience, “real” physical,bodily suffering. I wanted to belong, like my veteran friends, tothis club where only those who have been there, who havereally suffered, belong. I wanted the solace of having my experi-ence count, like theirs did. It was a secret club. More Vietnamvets committed suicide in the years after their return than actu-ally died in the war.This simple fact alone should say somethingabout the implications of how we construct the line between


reality and fantasy. I cannot now talk about how horrible theexperience was without sounding clichéd.Like I am making it allup. Was it the same for Vietnam veterans? After I came back, Iheard all this stuff about post-traumatic stress syndrome.Then Ifigured I had it. Is the inability to reconcile reality (like uh, war is)and fantasy (like uh, war is) and make it fit into the fantasy/realityof home that is easier to take as reality, that fits more neatly, isthat post-traumatic stress syndrome? Maybe if we did not makesuch a big deal about the line between fantasy and reality wewould not have post-traumatic stress.

I remember taking a pain killer later that night. We hadbrought some in case someone was injured and we could notget modern drugs. I do not know if I thought this was something Iwas supposed to do or not. Revel in the pain? Or revel in thenumbing of the pain?

THAT LOVE SONG

Journal, Wednesday, May 23, Phnom Penh:This keeps echoing,Yesterday Once More. The Pol Pot Man.

Do you know what I was doing when the Carpenters sangYesterday Once More? It was on the album with Do Run Run and50s songs. I was 18.Maybe infatuated with Jim then.Listen to thesong and fantasize about mythical whatever feeling adolescenthormones. That 50s radio station and Jim’s impala wagon withthe red hood.She sang the song to herself one night, when it wasraining, thinking the rain would conceal her voice. The next daythe Pol Pot men said some woman was singing in a foreign lan-guage. I was so scared they would find it was me, but I said noth-ing, I was so scared. But God protect me.

What is it that has caused me so much pain? I still get tears inmy eyes to reread this. It is as if these texts, the Carpenters, andDale Carnegie were a part of my childhood, my set of images,my escape. But here, this person from the other side of the tele-vision, had (was using) my head.

I talked on the phone with my girlfriends, and our black-and-white television showed Nixon announcing the bombing ofCambodia. And in the basement Dad’s old books from college,


including Dale Carnegie, became the pictures of my adolescentmemories.Maybe I really did pull out Dale when I was strugglingwith my own fear of confident survival in the adolescent worldaround boys. But then, maybe Chaang’s fears were also about“boys.”

But the Carpenters were my fantasy.That song, Close to You.The place that took me from reality when I was thirteen. Theplace as a teenager I sought maybe to find my identity but cer-tainly where I sought my delight, which of course I defined asopposite to my reality. My world was to be like the world of thatsong. It was that place of fanciful fulfillment embodied in “boys.”It was my erotic or what I now see as my erotic. It was the oneplace where I was in control of my possibilities of failure in theworld of romance. I could be swept away where and how Iwanted to be swept.

That this world that popped into my head every time I heardthe Carpenters was not reality was something I constantlyreminded myself. I remember around age seventeen, Bill Hor-ton called, and as my head began to dance with the possibility ofa “date,” I consciously stopped that thought cold. I knew I couldpossibly ruin it all because the fantasy would become more realto me than the reality, and not only would I be disappointed, Iwould miss whatever was really going on between me and Bill.

Now Chaang throws death and destruction into my fantasy.Grown-ups are not supposed to do this. Especially grown-upswho are real people who existed in the television world of Viet-nam. It was that television Vietnam that came out of the televi-sion and into my politics as I grew up. The Vietnam War was mypolitics. It was what I came to construct as I grew up as reality.Real people were living and dying as a direct result of our sys-tem of us here earning money to watch television so we couldforget about the rest of the world. War was real. The Carpenterswere my fantasy.

This person from the other side of the television was alsothrowing my femininity back in my face. She was a walkingexample of the stereotypical feminine from my gender classes.She was other oriented. She was nothing without a man. She


was into “romance.” One night, we asked what happened to herhusband. She told this poignant, tragic story of her last nightwith him.He had been a pilot in the Royal Air Lines.They were inthe rural camps where they had to work long, hard hours in thefields. He was recovering from pneumonia. Even though theywere kept apart in the camp, she had been able to spend sometime with him, and in the evenings as he recovered, she broughthim food she had saved from her own meal. The last eveningshe remembered well—it was a full moon; he was weak but shewas holding him up, helping him walk outside. It was so roman-tic. She never saw him again. She was later told he was takenaway and killed once he had recovered. She compared it to themovie Love Story.

Give me a break—Love Story?! Now, that is where I draw theline. This was blasphemy to the reality of war. As an adolescent,I may have privately enjoyed romance fantasies while listeningto the Carpenters, but I knew what was sappy, and Love Storywas sappy. I even thought my girlfriends who watched it weresissies. Even though I did like Ryan O’Neal. But I look back withmy feminist eyes proud of my disdain for Love Story and theutter helplessness of the soon-to-die female character (AliMcGraw). I teach about these messages on women’s and men’sproper roles, not only from that movie but from all those lovesongs. Even though I did not like Love Story, as a child I stillwould imagine fainting, and the man of my dreams would catchme, notice me, and then profess love forever. I even had thisdream as a kid that I fainted on the street and someone waslooking over me when I came to, and I would remember thatface and that was prophetic of the man I was to marry. Now Iteach my students about the images of female helplessness—the almost total lack of female control that eroticizes love, thepassion of being swept away, to be carried where rationalthought cannot go but where true love can take you forever intobliss. Of course, I also teach that in Harlequin romances, thewoman always wins. It is, after all, my fantasy, and it turns outhow I want. Even now, I play ER in my head. I am wheeled intothe emergency room, and George Clooney is immediately


passionately aroused, and after saving my life follows me backto my room to profess his desire for me.

Granted, Chaang’s husband was sick and she was the strongone, but I knew what she was really thinking. But it is a shame,nonetheless, that these very real tragedies of Chaang’s lifewere explained, understood, endured, eroticized, and fanta-sized with Love Story and the Carpenters.The romance fantasyis for a woman to fantasize control. She had no control. War isreal. Love Story is for sissies. You would think war would sepa-rate the genuine from the sappy. (War is for boys. The Carpen-ters is for girls.) (Real is masculine.Representation is feminine.)

Speaking of gender and fantasy, in 1990 64 percent of Cam-bodia’s population was female, 34 percent of the population arewidows.

The line between reality and fantasy. We have constructedfantasy as other. For my adolescent childhood, fantasy hadbeen the place before reality. For Chaang, it was the place afterreality. Was it the same? Did we use the same strategy of cop-ing? Her “boy” was possibly dead. My “boys” just existed differ-ently. Was it the same world, a world that was as unreal as myteenage fears?

If her world was as made up as mine, what then was real?Was my reality “other”? Was my reality fantasy? My war? MyCambodia? My boyfriends? My Chaang?

Chaang was gone. Vanished. She was me. No more couldshe lead me to “the truth,” tell me what counts. No more couldthe fantasy of her, the exotic tragedy of her war, the experienceof violence that I would never know completely but I could con-coct as “pure” and worthy object of my politics, no more couldany of this be the real I needed.But now, I had to rely on what myown eyes saw, my own mouth tasted, my own body recoiledfrom, the knot in the pit of my stomach I remember from thenand I feel again now as I write this, the uncertainty I experi-enced, the incompleteness (?) of my experience, my memories,my desires, my now.That was all.She could not give me, be my,certainty.


FINISHING OUR CARCASS

Mike and I were eating our Sunday morning breakfast in thebackyard when he said to me that writing this article was likecrows feeding off a dead carcass.Yea, I agreed.Not only is writ-ing this academic exploitation of the spectacle of destruction inthird world countries, but my lefty, antiwar, armchair politics isalso like crows feeding off a dead carcass. We took another biteof our bagels and decided postmodern thought would say therereally is no such thing as the carcass. We laughed, enjoying thejoke on postmodernists. But what about all the dead people,dead cultures, dead lives? I said, as I chewed the bagel, thepoint to me was not debating the existence of the carcass butexamining what U.S. culture, politics, economy, television doeswith whatever we think the carcasses are. The politics of thosewho “fight injustice” becomes a rally for a hologram of the car-cass. And the hologram becomes a referent for what is on tele-vision about violence—the Vietnam War became Huntley andBrinkley, Apocalypse Now and the competing television spe-cials on what the Vietnam War really was. Nicaragua’s tele-vision show became Ronald Reagan and Saturday Night Liveand Salvador, the movie.Cambodia is hard, because it does nothave its own television show anymore. So I have to use oldshows to explain what war is like to people, and nobody caresbecause real war is long out of our psyches. The Gulf War tele-vision show kept all that nasty blood off the screen, thank youvery much. But even Baudrillard, who claimed the Gulf War didnot happen because it was a virtual war to media viewers, agreedthat this had profound political and social consequences.

As I chew my kale and romaine salad months later (I gottastop eating this stuff), I am struggling to finish this part of thearticle. The conclusion. Where I write what I “really” meant, incase you did not get it.But I cannot.That is the point.The searchfor reality, the desire for that external object that would affirmand justify my existence, affirm and justify my politics, affirm andjustify my sociology, the search for what I really meant in thisarticle so I can write a conclusion, is all the same search forsome constructed authentic “other.” Writing is politics.


One of the reviewers asked, “How can writing the social afterthe epistemological crisis of losing the other still be a vocationcentral to the pursuit of social justice?” That writing the socialhas implications for the pursuit of social justice is important.How one can still write after realizing the “social” depends onconstructing an abstracted other is the critical question. The joyin writing this article for me has been that I have written a seriesof my epiphanies, many coming as I wrote. I wanted to openspaces where words could trigger in myself and a reader’s bod-ily reactions, emotions, epiphanies, memories, and mean-ings—yours triggered perhaps in ways different than mine.Through these, the fantasy/reality of war can be felt personally,physically. Ultimately, that felt sense that something is wrong iswhere much collective action begins to emerge.

Yet, while everything I have written leads me to conclude thatthe real is no more than constructed other, I still just cannot letgo. The intensity of our search begs me to figure out what it is Iam searching for that seems to feel settled in an external object.What do we act on in pursuing social justice? If the search forthe real is nothing more than the construction of any old externalobject, what are we left with? Is it all just a television full of fleet-ing images that we can turn off and on at will?

I wrote a note to myself in the margins of some draft oranother, “what makes this easy to write and to claim a voice isthat it is about war, which is real.”Whatever is real about it allowsme to speak or write. War has some correspondence with anasty “reality” that allowed me to have a voice, to have legiti-macy. I do not even have to proclaim a truth of war; I can justwrite why I dance around it. Even Baudrillard’s claim that theGulf War did not happen rests on the notion that it was not a tra-ditional war because it was not hand-to-hand combat. The GulfWar was a virtual war, a war in the media without bodies. Whilehis play on war skirts the 100,000 bodies that were killed, hisessay revolves around a notion that a bodily war is the ultimatemateriality.

My political sociology friends will think I have gone over to thedark side, but I have to agree with recent writings on ethnogra-phy identifying the body, desire, time, and place as something


left out of most sociological discourse.Ann Game’s Undoing theSocial (1991); Featherstone, Hepworth, and Turner’s collectionon The Body (1991); Patricia Clough’s work (1994, 1992); andseveral other works argue that sociological discourse hasrested on abstracting out the materiality of body, place, and timeand the fictions and fantasies of desire. Bringing these notionsback in to writing are a start toward writing a social that pursuessocial justice.They give a sense of materiality back to the notionthat all is discourse, without essentializing. Writing as if I had abody, was in a time and place, had desires all were the markersfor me.They held me to the ground while I began to speak.Theymark what Cambodia was to me, what “war” was.And they driveaction.

THE BODY

I have been telling people that this was the easiest article Ihave ever written. The thoughts flow directly from my memoriesand my gut and my pain and my anger and my frustration andmy confusion to my fingers to the screen in what feels like a free,unmediated channel. It is unmediated because it is from theplaces before my brain can objectify and analyze. It is unmedi-ated because it is about now, from now. The subject is memo-ries, but the writing is about how my body is experiencing thememories now. It is from my experience as I feel it at themoment I write it. All I know is that this writing seemed to be theonly way to express what I discovered or did not discover. Thiswriting seemed more real to me.

The experience of Cambodia is the bodily rendering of thememories. These memories have been so acute, so profound,so visceral that they defy my tendency to reduce all I see andfeel to spectacle or text and therefore to render it what I havedefined as unreal. I have written the past in the present. I havewritten that place in this place, with the emotions and pains ofmy body now marking the memory. It is only my impression. Butevery time I think about Cambodia, my body changes, my heartrate goes up, my tongue gets a metal taste, and I retreat backinto undefined memory. Is this the real I have been looking for?


Pain has always been a cultural marker for what we define asreal. Just today, in response to a student’s request to waive alanguage requirement because the fear of speaking made hersweat and shake, I told her, “no pain no gain.” Transformationrituals in many cultures exist to embed through pain the experi-ence and the memory into the body. Meaning is literallyincorporated.

Every time I think about Cambodia, the visceral, the acutethat I experience attaches itself to the discourse of a war thatframes not just my life but many, many others.The bodily experi-ence that marks war is death and life collectively defined. Thesecret club. The post-traumatic stress. War, so rendered, hasmarked my life as it has so many others.

But as well, who among academics approaching middle agedid not find themselves sociologists in some way because of theVietnam War? It is a part of most of our biographies. It is sociol-ogy’s biography.

DESIRE

Last spring, I used Patricia Clough’s (1994) book, FeministTheory, in a graduate seminar. For a long time, I could not getwhat she meant by the term desire. I even asked her when shewas on campus to give a lecture. I tried to explain to my studentsthat it was that which is untouched by conventional sociologyyet defines and refines all our thought, action, writing.But desirefor what? Sexual desire? Freudian desire? I desire chocolate,but I do not desire theory in the same way.

What is it? Sure, it is the place of writing about my sexualdesires in sociology. It is that tingly feeling, similar to when I satnear Cecil when I was thirteen in the bleachers, that subtlydrives my passion about theory and social justice? My writing,my feeling, my experiencing, my writing this article, my thinking,my wanting, and wanting and touching but not wanting to feelentirely. That moment of feeling my body is surrounded by,frames, swims in and around and through desire. The feeling ofwanting more, of wanting to be satisfied, but not the feeling ofbeing satisfied. A passage of the journal I now keep describes


both wanting and not wanting to finish this article because thenit would be over. All this is desire. I think of the concept now as averb not a noun. In other words, it is writing about desire anddesiring as a method of writing.

PLACE

Chaang exists in many places at once. She was in a place Iwas. In Cambodia, I sat next to her, I was in her apartment, look-ing at her bookshelf, seeing her things.She was also in a place Iwas when I watched her, or my image of her, on television. Shewas my television war. She was in a place I was not as shebecame my Vietnam War.She was the distant object of my poli-tics.My oppressed other whom I must fight for.She was my con-struction unaltered by interaction with her body. Now as I write,she is in a place I am not.All are constructions.All are real.Whatis important now is that I think about her in time and space, inrelation to my embodiment and materiality in time and space.

My confusions of the bombing of Cambodia. Being there andhere and in Ohio but on television.Writing from the place I am at.Now.All this is nothing more and nothing less than the necessityto see ourselves in time and place.

I have struggled to write this article from the here and now, onmy laptop that roams from hammock to new antique table (ahthe joys of academia) to lap as I lay on the couch watching Daysof Our Lives on television.Whatever is here and now I have triedto write. Its only a marker. But it feels better than abstracting thetelling to some universal.

THE POLITICAL

Mike reminded me of the irony of my writing about politicalaction and Cambodia. I was there eight years ago and havedone nothing to change that situation. And it has taken sevenyears to write anything. I got mad. It is not true. After I got back, Iwas obsessed with doing something. I helped my veteran friendorganize a trip to return to Vietnam to start a Cambodian Educa-tion Project. The project never quite panned out. I had arranged


to go to Washington D.C. to try and testify on renewing relationswith Cambodia. But the Gulf War started, and they canceledhearings.So I poured my life into speaking out against this war. Ilived by the notion that if I did nothing, that was as good as killingsomeone with my own hands. It did not matter what I did. Istopped writing. I went to a counselor. I risked tenure. I helpedorganize teach-ins, protests, media events, fund-raisers.

It has taken me eight years to find a voice as an academic inall this. And what did I learn? I always thought being an activistwas a good way to do theory; this just proved it to me. Any the-ory, modern or postmodern, is better, more “meaningful” whenengaged in time, place, desire—action, experience of somekind. Theory is always written from some time, place, body,desire, be it the material point of being poised at the computersurrounded by books, anxious about promotion or some oneelse’s theory; or poised at a microphone at Senate hearings; orpoised in a group, angry at a particular injustice, trying to decidewhat to do. Swimming in Cambodia, as Spaulding Grey mightcall it, did this for me. I searched for a real Chaang in the hopesthat she could lead me to exactly what to do and found that shewas no more but no less real than I was. Yet, my struggle withher struggle, my experience with my veteran friends’ experi-ence, my own interaction with other bodies drove my action andmy theory. These have contributed to an understanding that, if Imay say so, sheds a different and more relevant if not more truelight on people’s lives than analysts who rely only on fleetingimages of journals, statistics, and other illusions of reality astheir real other.The space of anxiety is a better place to do politi-cal activism and academic writing than a space of certainty.Did Ido the right thing? If we wait to decide that after we know forsure, nothing will ever happen.

I have learned that the construction of a reality can stifle politi-cal action as much as it can empower it. The pages of newspa-pers and talk-show airwaves are filled with voices intending tostifle political action by broadcasting the discovery that theobjects of our crusades for social justice are flawed. ThatChaang likes Western pop music, that welfare mothers arecheats, that Pol Pot is a Marxist, that Hun Sen, the current


Cambodian ruler, commits human rights violations.That peopledeserving of social justice are not pure. If we act based on puretruth, we may never act at all.

And I learned just in writing this ending, that in this style ofwriting I am able to communicate my belief that what has hap-pened to Cambodia we recreate every day. We do it by dis-secting the political/social justice as the other. And we do it byabstracting ourselves out of sociological discourse and by ab-stracting ourselves as sociologists out of a material world.

In the words of Dorothy (from Kansas, not Dorothy Smith),home was right here all along.

REFERENCES

Anzaldua, Gloria. 1990. Borderlands/la frontera. San Francisco: Aunt Lute.Baudrillard, Jean. 1995. The Gulf War did not take place, translated by Paul Patton.

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Clifford, James, and George E.Marcus, eds.1986.Writing culture:The poetics and poli-

tics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press.Clough, Patricia. 1992. The end(s) of ethnography. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.. 1994. Feminist theory. New York: Blackwell.Ellis, Carolyn.1995.Final negotiations:A story of love, loss and chronic illness.Philadel-

phia: Temple University Press.Featherstone, Mike, Mike Hepworth, and Bryan Turner, eds. 1991. The body. Newbury

Park, CA: Sage.Game, Ann. 1991. Undoing the social: Towards a deconstructive sociology. Toronto:

University of Toronto Press.Haraway, Donna. 1990. A manifesto for cyborgs: Science, technology, and socialist

feminism in the 1980s. In Feminism/postmodernism, edited by Linda Nicholson,190-233. New York: Routledge.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. 1989. Woman, native, other. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Smith, Dorothy.1993.High noon in textland:A critique of Clough.Sociological Quarterly

34:183-92.

BARBARA G. BRENTS is an associate professor of sociology at the University ofNevada, Las Vegas. She teaches in the Sociology, Women’s Studies, and Ethics andSocial Policy program courses on political sociology, gender, aging, feminist theory, andpraxis. She has published articles on politics, business, and social policy in AmericanSociological Review, Critical Sociology, and in several edited texts. She is currentlyworking on a collaborative research project on the sex industry in Southern Nevada.


Dale Carnegie, The Carpenters and Cambodia

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