In the Classroom

The yellow-and-white checkered floor tiles—a predictable, cheerful pattern—lie. Nothing predictable or cheerful here. This walled compound of faded yellow three-story buildings once formed a school. Someone chose these tiles thinking of young people. Or maybe there wasn’t much thought put into the tiles. Maybe yellow-and-white checkered tiles are simply the typical school floor in Cambodia. The buildings, arranged around a courtyard, with balconies acting as hallways between the classrooms, resemble schools across Cambodia—a standard school architecture. Its former name, Tuol Svay Prey High School, comes from the area of the city where it is located. Another school in Phnom Penh has apparently taken the name Tuol Svay Prey High School; looking at photographs of this newer school on its Facebook page, I see it has the same yellow-and-white tiles.

In 1976, when this school was no longer Tuol Svay Prey High School, it was transformed into S-21, a prison and interrogation center for the Khmer Rouge, where up to 20,000 citizens were held and then executed. Only a dozen survived. In 1980, just months following the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime, it opened as the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum and has been operating as such since.

Rain hangs above, waiting in clouds, the afternoon I visit Tuol Sleng. It’s July and hot, and earlier in the day the sun shone bright. That morning, as my husband and I stood outside the walls of the Royal Palace on the stretch of Sothearos Boulevard closed to traffic, a child who couldn’t have been more than two appeared in the middle of the empty six-lane road. I don’t know where she came from. With hair cropped close, she wore only an oversized pink dress made for a much bigger child. She could’ve been a boy; I wasn’t sure. The pink dress was my only clue. Her shadow moved along the pavement, longer than she was tall. She had bare feet and placed them carefully, one in front of the other, on the white lines marking the lanes, following the line past us and to the barriers that held back morning traffic. There was no one else around. No parents waiting on a nearby corner. No saffron-robed monks keeping a watchful eye. Across the boulevard, an empty swath of green park, and then some palm trees and the river leading to the Mekong. I wasn’t sure what to do. The girl seemed to know where she was going, or at least know that she was following the white line. I spoke no Khmer and stood frozen, baffled. She reached the traffic barrier at the end of the block, turned left, rounded the corner, and disappeared behind the palace walls. I didn’t try to track her.

In the small towns near where I live in northeast Ohio, schools are traditionally brick two-or three-story blocks—solid, with wood floors and chalk-boards—built on theories of what makes us learn and keeps us healthy. Windows rise high to cast sun on desks, natural light that early twentieth-century designers felt should enter only over the left shoulders of students to prevent eye strain. Straight hallways leading to stairs leading outside for quick egress onto calm green lawns. Symmetrical and stately.

The old school at the heart of the town near my house is gone, its shadow now sunlight on grass. The grass belies what’s missing, what was here: the landmark of the community, the doors the community passed through. I’ve been taking it for granted, its brick and glass, its architecture of permanence on this corner. Now I can see past where it stood to the block of houses beyond, homes suddenly facing an expanse of nothing. They’re knocking down places around here, school by school. The old schools are inconvenient and costly. Daily, I drive past a blonde brick elementary school. The crossing guard steps into traffic, waves her stop sign. Backpacks drooping, children pass, steered by a sidewalk to the school’s front doors. Built in 1928...