January 26, 2026

It was our time to go to Angkor Wat. We left Siem Reap for the site in predawn chill, carrying flashlights. The bus carried us within a mile of this ancient place. We hiked a rocky path, stepping gently in silence through the darkness. For a short few hours we left behind the bitter coarseness of our time.

Cambodia, like most of Southeast Asia is a land of Buddha. His image, and the gold spires and sharp gables of his temples preside over every village, town, market. He stares benignly from public buildings and private homes. He calls his people to sacrifice, to meditate, to find wisdom in his divinity, in his way.

Moving northwest through the central plain from Phnom Penh, the forests become thicker. Mountains emerge along the Thai border. In the province of Siem Reap the devotion to the Buddhist pantheon becomes more intense. To the east of a wide lake called Tonle Sap, through which the Mekong River passes, is the land of Angkor. Here, the temples of Angkor Wat, Ta Prohm, and Angkor Thom form the nexus, the center of the Buddhist soul.

The Angkor sites celebrate belief, faith in the continuum of life. Around every massive sandstone corner, serene images of gods and goddesses gaze at each other and at men, women, elephants, snakes, monkeys and other creatures. Angry demons scowl and snarl.

The Hindu king Suryavarman II started construction of Angkor Wat in 1132 as an earthly home for the Hindu god Vishnu. Suryavarman died around 1150. Three decades later a Buddhist, Jayavarman VII, led a Buddhist revolution. He captured the temple and converted it to devotion to Buddhism, although he permitted Hindus to preserve their shrines.

For Cambodians Angkor Wat (“temple city”) is the national symbol, the centerpiece of the nation’s flag. Unlike other Buddhist temples, Angkor Wat is oriented to the west which, some archeologists say, shows that Suryavarman planned it as his mausoleum.

Five massive towers rise to three levels and enclose a series of galleries. We learned that the walls of three galleries display Vishnu’s three cosmic eras. One gallery is devoted to the human world, another to heaven and hell. The site, surrounded by a moat, occupies more than 400 acres, with the temple complex at the center. Nearby are six “libraries” which experts believe were used to house documents.

Our guide, Ting, a young man of vast expertise, pointed out that carvings on the walls show the four stages of the Buddhist mind: compassion, joy, love, equanimity.

The Ta Prohm temple, originally called Rajavihara, meaning “royal monastery” and Angkor Thom, or “great city” sites are close by, within a couple of miles, complementing and reinforcing the intensity of Buddhist devotion. Many of the Ta Prohm towers emerge from massive, octopuslike roots of gigantic trees that grew beneath them hundreds of years ago. 

Angkor Thom, once called Nokor Thom, is thought to have been Jayavarman’s capital. The temple space is roughly two miles wide (Angkor Wat’s area is one mile), and is enclosed within a 30-foot-high wall. Archeologists believe that more than 100,000 people once lived inside. Inscriptions reveal that some 4,000 elephants were used to drag the giant stones from quarries 30 or more miles away.

The Angkor Thom complex includes Bayan, Phimeanakas, and Magalartha temples. The Bayan is a Mahayana Buddhist temple, reflecting the faith of Jayavarman VII. The Bayan, according to the information offered, gives “material support to the energies of the kingdom.”

The walls of Angkor Thom are engraved with thousands of exquisitely chiseled human figures that tell the story of the Angkor kingdom. Cambodian and Chinese soldiers are engaged in combat. Men, women, and children are depicted in every aspect of life: working, fighting, entertaining, eating, caring for others. The images show men fishing for carp as long as a canoe. A crocodile devours a man fallen from a boat.

We found one etching of a woman in childbirth being coached by a midwife. Another woman is apparently primping, gazing at her own image in what looks like a mirror while another arranges her hair. Women in flamboyant costumes and headdresses perform the traditional Apsara ceremonial dances.

Over days, we walked the Angkor causeways and paths, across the broad courtyards and stepped around the massive blocks that over time slipped from the towers. We looked up, wondering, at the four faces carved in the gate towers at Angkor Thom. At Angkor Wat we moved deliberately through dark chambers. We climbed the stairwell built for tourists and wandered across the broad porticos on the third level.  

Sometime around 1600 the Angkor area was attacked by Thai invaders. The capital at Angkor Thom was moved to Phnom Penh. Wars were fought, armies came and went. The name “Siem Reap” marks the victory of the Khmer nation over Siam. Europeans discovered the site, explorers visited, awed by its breadth and beauty, created through the sheer power of religion, devotion to the sublime mysteries of the Buddhist faith.

By mid-morning hundreds of visitors thronged across the site, awestruck by the vastness, the silence, the absolute, implacable permanence of the place. They lined up to climb to the third level, many glancing backward nervously. Looking west, sunlight dazzled the forest out to the horizon. Here, we imagined, is where the monks of 12th century gathered with King Jayavarman and his people to seek Buddha’s blessings.

Fourteen centuries passed until we arrived, armed with our brochures, cell-phone cameras, our audio devices and admission passes around our necks, knees respectfully covered. We noted the scaffolding installed here and there for restoration work. A monk sitting near a column conveyed a blessing on a man kneeling, head bowed.

We caught our breath in wonder at the sense of immortality, of abiding beneficence and goodness of this place. We descended to the temple floor, then made our way back to our own time, our own world.

January 19, 2026

 We crossed the border into Cambodia in the middle of the night. At dawn we looked out at the intricately curled gold spires of Buddhist temples, which dot the land and convey blessings on all who seek them. We thought we knew about the curses, then learned how little we knew.

Phnom Penh, the capital, is a modern, fast-moving city. The name means “mountain of Grandma Penh,” honoring a wealthy woman, Madame Penh. The legend holds that she found a four-faced Buddha floating in a river. She retrieved it and had a temple built, called Phnom Wat, to house it at a place that is now the center of the city. The four faces of the Buddha signify earth, wind, water, and fire, the fundamental elements of life.

Phnom Wat, atop a hill reachable by 89 stairs, shows the intensity and beauty of the faith. We removed shoes and hats and stared awestruck at the delicate sculptures of the angels, many fashioned in brilliant gold, who guard the sacred images. 

Long before Phnom Wat, over a stretch of 1,000 years, various strains of Brahmanism and Buddhism had supplanted Hinduism as the dominant religious faith in Cambodia. More than 95 percent of Cambodians are Buddhists. Today it is endorsed as the official state religion.

The Theravada Buddhist tradition of Cambodia weaves ancient beliefs and practices into every aspect of life. We learned, as all Buddhists know, that Buddha is not a person, but the embodiment of true enlightenment, or understanding of the meaning of existence. Following Buddha is the vocation of every young man who joins the monastic life, a life of meditation, study, and discipline.

We visited the National Palace, Silver Pagoda, and National Museum, a complex of stunning structures that showcase the depth of the nation’s Buddhist traditions. The king, Norodom Sihamoni, succeeded his father, Norodom Sihanouk, in 2004, after a career of government service. The monarchy is an elected ceremonial post with no political power. 

The king, a 73-year-old bachelor called the “quiet king,” follows the Buddhist way. At his coronation he declined to wear the king’s traditional gold-and-diamond crown and did not take his seat on the throne.

We headed north on the Mekong to Kampong Tralach and Oudong, Cambodia’s former capital and site of the country’s largest monastery, home to about 200 Buddhist monks.

We waited with other tourists for a blessing by the monks, whose soft chanting, in some mysterious way, conveys serenity and peace. They ended the twenty-minute blessing by tossing lotus blossoms and jasmine among us.

The next day, in Oknhatey, we walked a dusty road past dozens of family tombs holding the ashes of families’ members. We visited an elementary school filled with joyful kids who sang “Jingle Bells” and “You Are My Sunshine” in crystal-clear English as their teacher, who speaks no English, smiled.

The students’ enthusiasm showed no awareness of the Cambodian genocide of 1975-1979, which their grandparents survived—or perhaps did not survive. The fanatical Khmer Rouge army that seized power on April 17, 1975 murdered roughly two million, possibly as many as three million Cambodians and others.

It occurs to me that in 2026 no room for further horror remains. Since Cambodia we lived through the Serbian and Rwandan genocides of the early 1990s. But Americans did not know what was unfolding in Cambodia in those nightmarish years. We worked at recovering from Vietnam. We didn’t want to hear about Southeast Asia.

The Khmer Rouge aimed to recreate an agrarian society. They banned money and business, shut banks and schools, and emptied the cities by force-marching their populations to rural areas to work on farms. Educated people and ethnic minorities were killed. Monasteries, churches, and mosques were looted. Thousands of Buddhist monks were killed.

Today the visitor can’t avoid what took place in more than 100 “killing fields” around the country and at a Phnom Penh prison called S21 where Khmer Rouge soldiers, many of them 15 or 16 years old, savagely tortured men, women, and children who wouldn’t confess to being CIA agents or other trumped-up falsehoods. More likely they stared in silent terror.

We visited the awkwardly named Choeung EK Genocidal Center about seven miles from downtown, where dozens of mass graves were found in 1980, after Vietnam deposed the Khmer Rouge. Evidence found—bones, skulls, clothing fragments—revealed that thousands of victims were executed there, often with hacking tools to save bullets, the bodies then dumped and covered with lime.

A loudspeaker was hung on a large gnarled tree to blare Khmer Rouge music to drown out the cries of victims. The killing sometimes went on until late at night.

Simultaneously, others were brought to S21 for interrogation, torture, and death. The prison superintendent was a former academic who required strict recordkeeping. Thousands of head-and-shoulders photos of victims were taken. Today they remain posted on the prison walls, the faces showing they knew what lay ahead.

We walked the S21 grounds. An elderly man sat under a tree, telling his story, as our guide translated. He talked about torture, fear, of watching family members killed. He survived because he knew how to fix typewriters. The Khmer Rouge bureaucrats needed their typewriters.

We ponder these things now. It’s been 46 years. The Khmer Rouge leaders are dead. A few, just a few, were put in prison for life. The country is struggling to move forward. The school children are singing joyfully. The monasteries are quiet, serene. The people are looking again to Buddha, seeking wisdom.

January 12, 2026

Maps and airlines call it Ho Chi Minh City, but to the locals it is still Saigon, or Sai Gon, the once-legendary capital of South Vietnam, which once was a country. Today it’s a giant metropolis of some 14 million, but second city to Hanoi, capital of unified Vietnam.

Since April 1975 Vietnam has been a Communist country, and Saigon leaves no room for illusions. The red-star flag and iconic hammer-and-sickle insignia are everywhere, usually decorating portraits of Vietnam’s George Washington, the grandfatherly-looking Ho. The legend on your visa reminds you you’ve entered the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Whatever that brand of communism or socialism, it doesn’t discourage a hyped-up entrepreneurial economy. Thousands of Saigon’s citizens at any hour are piloting motorscooters on some business or other, navigating expertly among fleets of Toyotas, Hyundai, Kia sedans and minivans. The city counts something like 9 million scooters. It seems there is no actual rush hour because it’s every hour. Many haul passengers, some children or animals. I saw one fitted with a cage of four dogs. The guidance for pedestrians is “don’t try to avoid them, they’ll avoid you.”

The center city, laid out in a sort of grid from Tan Son Nhut airport, is pure, unadulterated free enterprise. Furniture stores that lay their merchandise out on the sidewalks, cafes, coffee bars, department stores, shops of every kind, blare their names on giant boldface signs that rise from ground floor to high-rise level. The city streets pulse with business energy. Saigon has attracted a huge corporate presence, operating out of hundreds of shiny downtown skyscrapers that gorgeously light the night sky.

All the excitement doesn’t conceal a central truth: Saigon is a city in recovery, going on now for fifty years, since the last American helicopters and transport aircraft flew out with the last escapees. At the end of that infamous April the U.S. troops were gone except for embassy personnel who stayed till the end. Thousands of Vietnamese military, civilian U.S. government employees, Vietnamese government staff, and their friends and family members, also got out. Those who did not faced the vengeance of the North.

The government ensures no one forgets. In the center of town an elaborate memorial honors Thich Quang Durc, a Buddhist monk who immolated himself on June 11, 1963 to protest the South Vietnam government’s war against rural people. The former presidential palace was renamed the Reunification Palace. The grounds preserve the North Vietnamese army tank that crashed through the palace gates on April 30, 1975.

Americans may recall the Vietnam war. To the government here it’s the American war. If a tenet of Communist rule is keep the people loyal by preaching some powerfully emotive, unifying cause, the truths of the war, by whatever name, works. The Museum of War Remembrance, just blocks from the palace, supplies the proofs in spades of the insanity of the U.S.’s Southeast Asian tragedy. The two-story space tells the story of the Ho Chi Minh trail through jungles and swamps, traveled by Viet Cong volunteers and ordinary civilians to deliver munitions and supplies. They carried them on their backs, on pack animals, and in false-bottom boats to outmaneuver the government troops.

Hundreds of graphic photos of war crimes committed in the name of keeping the Asian subcontinent safe for democracy, the timeworn, long-ago abandoned rationale for the American war, have the power to turn visitors away.

At this point, defending America’s war aims is recognized as crude sophistry. Vast stores of government documents, starting with the Pentagon Papers released by Rand analyst Daniel Ellsberg to New York Times reporter Neil Sheehan, told the whole story in 1971. The American leadership’s pursuit of body counts, carpet bombing, the use of Agent Orange to contaminate vast ranges of the country, the nightmarish war crimes like My Lai and others tortured a nation and its people for two decades.

We visited the Cu Chi tunnels outside Saigon, a complex of caverns hundreds of miles long built by thousands of rural people, daytime rice farmers who became Viet Cong at night, to hide and move fighters, weapons, and provisions. I crawled through a 20-meter length of tunnel no more than three feet high. I felt the clammy, stifling sensation of dread those people felt, many for months and years as they fought and died up to the end.

And yet—on the grounds of the National Post Office, the government palace, and sidewalks around the city, thousands of young girls in beautiful traditional Vietnamese dresses pose with bright smiles for photos. Our hosts for these few days, the servers, hotel staff people, managers, store clerks, and tour personnel offer exquisite, scrupulously polite service to the American descendants of the G.I.s, and the G.Is. themselves who have come back.

They prove that time may not overcome horror but can assuage pain, as the countless European memorials to war’s cruelty have done. As hard as the government tries, the young grow up and move along in their futures and careers without the contrived Communist bitterness. Westerners, including American veterans who witnessed the nightmare, are welcomed. Tourist revenue has a huge role in the growing prosperity of this wounded place.

We stood in the line for Customs at Tan Son Nhut behind two tall, young, blond fellows. They said they were from Norway, here to spend four months backpacking around the Central Highlands, Hue, Da Nang, the once-wartorn, bloody places. Were they researching history, I asked. No, just backpacking, they answered. Here for the spectacular natural beauty, the mountain vistas, the joy of meeting the people.

So—the oldtimers may be struggling with their memories. They’ll soon pass from the scene. The young ones are coming, to help restart life, which is inevitable, as it should be.

January 5, 2026

The year ended here with good news, nine six-to-12-year-old boys and girls eating pizza and ice cream with Christmas-like enthusiasm at a kitchen table usually occupied by two senior citizens. Pizza and ice cream, the happiest way to close out 2025.

It was a major departure. Most evenings we go with our nearly iron-clad routine, maybe something from a vegetarian cookbook, maybe leftovers, old-folks chitchat. The kids came for an evening, then went home with their parents. The drill now is to brace for the further cycles of surreal news from the moral slum of the administration, in George Will’s apt phrase.

So for the present, pizza. But the coming years—the future—belong to children excited about what lies ahead in their lives.

The older grandson, Noah, who just turned 12, spent the afternoon with us. We tossed a football in the backyard, he threw mostly perfect spirals and talked about playing quarterback in high school. For the pizza pickup he carried a half-dozen fairly heavy boxes.

Since then we turned to the nuts and bolts of the trip. We have the vaccinations, the visas, the scanproof wallets. But the preparation really has to do with memory, because for Americans, Vietnam is much about memory. So we read Marguerite Duras.

Duras was born in Vietnam in 1914 as Marguerite Donnadieu. She lived there intermittently until 1933, when she returned permanently to France. She earned a law degree. She joined the Communist party, and during World War II served with the French Resistance. In 1943 she published the first of her many novels, adopting the name of her father’s hometown, Duras Lot-et-Garonne.

Duras led a life of brilliant creativity of writing and film-making set off by drug and alcohol abuse. She fell into a coma for six months, regaining consciousness in June 1989. She died in 1996 in Paris.

Her great work, The Lover, published in 1984 when Duras was 70, is a memoir, the story of a teenage French girl in Vietnam’s ethnic-racial stew of Vietnamese, Cambodians, Europeans, and Chinese, her family’s poverty, the difficult relationship with her mother and older brother, and her final departure from Saigon for France.

The memoir’s centerpiece is her passionate relationship, as a 15-year-old, with a wealthy 27-year-old Chinese man whom she meets on a ferry as she travels to boarding school in Saigon. They both know the affair had no future, their families would never tolerate it. Eventually her mother and brothers are shocked to discover it. The man helps them financially; the family sees their connection as a source of money.  

The girl on the ferry becomes the girl leaning against the rail of her ship as it pulls away from the pier. She sees her lover’s car, and understands he is seeing her for the last time. Her memory of her life in Vietnam becomes a foundation of her career as a writer.

Scholar and novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen writes that “The Lover famously begins with the narrator recalling an image that either is pulled forth from memory or rose from the past to place itself before the narrator’s eyes. Duras exploits one of the fundamental, tricky parts of our recall—do we seek out memory or does it find us?”

Nguyen, professor of English, American Studies, and Ethnicity at the University of Southern California, understands memory and history. As a child he escaped Saigon with his parents in April 1975 as the North Vietnamese army entered the city. In 2015 he published his first novel, The Sympathizer, set in South Vietnam and the U.S. The book won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction.

Nguyen, deconstructing Duras’ masterpiece, explains that it leads us to the understanding of the poignant and powerful affect of memory in our lives. And at the dawn of 2026 we are looking back at the trauma of 2025: chaos and corruption of national politics, but also enduring things; the heroism of firefighters and law enforcement personnel, researchers leading breakthroughs in cancer therapy, the everyday bravery of teachers in their classrooms.  

For many Americans the indelible wound of Vietnam remains a touchstone of penetrating memory, as it did for Duras, who most Americans have never heard of. That tiny corner of the globe became for two decades a stage for vast suffering and a setting for great heroism.

Unfolding as it does in Vietnam, the love affair that consumed Duras through her life and led her to creative brilliance, becomes also a beacon of the need for love of every human person. So we fast-forward to the present moment, the happy chatter of children around our kitchen table. Where does it fit, why does it matter?

We know the answer: children are our repository of memory. We watch them in the moment as they learn their world, then they’re adults, decades from their past and ours. We watch them outgrow the pizza party while we feel the years, aches, and burdens. They leave us the memories of those precious moments. They move forward to create more memories, treasured or regretted, but always new, always becoming.