Places That Changed Us: Phnom Penh, Cambodia

08.01.2025 - 10:35 / matadornetwork.com

This is part of the “Places That Changed Us” series, a compilation of 20 trips that have had a lasting impact on the Matador Network team. To see the other 19 places, click here.

Upon arriving in Phnom Penh in 2016, my wife and I were to meet up with a tuk-tuk driver that a fellow traveler we’d met in Vietnam had connected us to. The brutal legacy of Pol Pot, whose Khmer Rouge government brutally ruled during the Cambodian genocide from 1975 to 1979, casts a spell over Cambodia that is palpable in its capital city today.

I felt this consequence through our driver, who went by Tom. We stepped off the bus from Ho Chi Minh City into a night market swarmed with vendors, shoppers, tuk-tuk drivers, and tourists. The air was tinged with the scent of overripe fruit and ginger. Tom was waiting nearby on his ride. We’d spend much of the next several days riding in the back of his tuk-tuk as he shuttled us to meals, museums, and through 300-year-old alleyways to a local rum distillery and the owners I was commissioned to write a story on.

Near the end of our time in Phnom Penh, our driver took us into a bar he frequented for a plate of lok lak while Muay Thai played on the TV overhead. Tom’s English was decent – muddled, but still far superior than our complete lack of Khmer. He was in his 40s and supporting a family by driving visitors around the city that he’d lived in his entire life. We discussed our families, our jobs, and our sense of place in the world. As an American, I was born into a place of privilege and taught that anything is achievable. Tom and his family, on the other hand, endured one of the most oppressive and murderous regimes in modern history. He grew up in a setting where people he knew and interacted with were routinely hauled off and killed. His survival and moderate stability is a far greater mark of achievement than I will ever know. Despite Cambodia’s immense progress since Pol Pot’s capture in 1997, Tom carried with him the same resignation that I felt everywhere I went in the city. It wasn’t a sense of resignation to doom or gloom, but rather to the fact that it’s impossible to control your surroundings or the hand you’re dealt. Tom displayed a complacent stoicism that appeared key to his survival.

Eight years after leaving Cambodia, I can still feel Tom’s forbearance. Though I will never know the suffering of the Khmers, my memories of Tom play out in my mind each time I feel distressed or overwhelmed. I remind myself that many things are beyond my grasp and the best I can do is to focus on the things I can control. If Tom and his family can push on, my own struggles are most certainly conquerable.