What I'm doing here; also, Cambodian history

I don’t think I ever really answered that question in the blog! I decided to come to Vietnam (and Cambodia for 5 weeks) because I knew little of the country except for America's involvement here (and I have a fairly limited understanding of that as well). I also wanted to see another side of Asia, as I had already studied Japan and its language. Also, it's just a thrill to live in a dense city for once! In Ho Chi Minh City (aka Sai Gon), I’m taking a sociology class (Contemporary Vietnamese Society), the equivalent of two semesters of Beginning Vietnamese Language, the History of Indochina, and a political science course called “Nation Building After the Khmer Rouge.” History is the one I wanted to talk about in detail here.

Our professor’s name is Michael Vickery, a septuagenarian scholar on Cambodia. From what I know of his background, he’s an American who’s been living in Southeast Asia for at least several decades. On day one, my first thought was “where did they dig this guy up?”: Vickery looks as if he hiked for 2 weeks through the jungle to get to class. Vickery is bald, white haired, and his skin is splotched all over with different skin tones-- you can tell he's been around alot! To every class he wears what I can only describe as a Chinese-style shirt (think this link without a collar; not the one pictured here) along with tan cargo pants and boots. White hair sprouts up through the neck of his shirt and out his ears. He's still got a pretty incredible memory of historical events, though he does make some slips. Probably his best line was while he was discussing a Cham artifact in one of his slides. Vickery said "this piece was found 10 years ago," only to be corrected by our program coordinator who was also present: "you mean 1978."

Still, Michael Vickery is a well-known expert on the history of Cambodia— he’s shown us photos he took in the 1960s of temples when they were still overgrown with jungle. His scholarship on recent Cambodia history is far more controversial: he considers the Khmer Rouge’s genocide to have been far less a product of a radical conception of Marxism and more peasant revolution. He also contests the official casualty count of the Khmer Rouge genocide, placing it at almost half of what other academics consider it to be. Strange when I sometimes think Vickery looks like he's been tortured by several governments! Be sure to check out the reader reviews for his book Cambodia 1975-1983 on Amazon.com.

Vickery is currently advising the defense counsel to the Khmer Rouge leaders and jailers on tribunal right now. I've been told that he once had Duch (the jailer) as a student!

Our class is currently on hiatus while Vickery is in Cambodia for a month, but when the study abroad group I'm part of moves there for rest of the semester, we’ll resume the course and begin learning about the the 1940s onward— and we’ll also get to visit the site where the tribunals are being held! Still, I don’t know if we’ll get to actually see anything transpire. Should be interesting, so I'll report more then.

As for the class itself, just briefly, it's fascinating when we review parts of history Vickery is clearly well versed in, such as the historiography dealing with 7th and 8th century Cambodia, but the classes on 19th and 20th Century have been a drag, even though I was fascinated by those parts of Vietnam: A History (Amazon needs to pay me for all these links!). Most of our readings are from Vickery himself-- as he tells us, everything else that has been written about SE Asia up to the 15th Century or so is wrong! It's great seeing him rip to shreds the other theories about the region, though his tremendous confidence in his own conclusions worries me; less so when he's talking about the ancient Cham empire, but much more when he has talked about the Khmer Rouge!