I come to Cambodia thinking I understand what poverty looks like. I don’t. Not really. Not until I’m standing on a boat, engine sputtering diesel fumes into the heavy air, watching an entire civilization built on water that refuses to stay still.
Chong Khneas. The floating village on Tonle Sap. It’s not charming. It’s not quaint. It’s not some picturesque postcard moment for Facebook friends, though plenty of people treat it that way. It’s thousands of people, ethnic Vietnamese, mostly, living on structures that rise and fall with a lake that can’t make up its mind. During the wet season, the lake swells to six times its dry season size. The houses float. The schools float. The basketball court floats. Everything moves.
These aren’t houseboats in the Amsterdam sense. These are shanties on barrels, cobbled together from whatever materials could be scrounged or afforded. Corrugated metal. Weathered wood. Blue tarps that do almost nothing against the monsoon rains. Yet, there’s life here. Real life. Kids diving off porches into brown water. Women hanging laundry that will never quite dry in this humidity. Men repairing nets for a catch that gets smaller every year.
This place is dying.
The environmental damage to Tonle Sap isn’t some abstract concept you read about in reports. It’s visible. It’s measurable. The fish populations have collapsed. The natural resources that kept these communities alive for generations are simply… gone. Illegal logging upstream. Overfishing. Climate change making the seasonal floods unpredictable and violent. The usual cocktail of human stupidity and greed.
The people here are caught in a bureaucratic nightmare that would be Kafkaesque if it weren’t so goddamn real. Born in Cambodia. Lived here their entire lives. But they’re ethnic Vietnamese, and they can’t produce the right papers. The documentation doesn’t exist, or was never issued, or got lost somewhere in the machinery of a government that’s never been particularly concerned with people who live on water and don’t vote.
So they’re being repatriated. Sent “back” to Vietnam. To a country many of them have never seen. To start over with nothing, because what little they had is tied to a lake they can no longer access and a livelihood that no longer exists.
I sit there in the boat, and I try to process it. The guides, and there are always guides here, because one can’t navigate these waters alone, they tell me the facts in practiced English. They’ve learned what tourists want to hear. They know when to pause for photos, and angle the boat just right. But if one shuts up for a second and actually look at their faces, you see something else.
Resignation, maybe. Or just exhaustion.
There’s a floating school. A floating church. A floating karaoke bar, because even in the middle of this slow-motion catastrophe, people still need to blow off steam and forget for an hour or two. There’s something almost defiant about it. Life insisting on itself even when all the evidence suggests it shouldn’t bother.
The water is brown. Not picturesque turquoise, but murky brown, thick with sediment and probably things you don’t want to think about too hard. Kids swim in it anyway, because kids swim anywhere there’s water and they’re bored. Their laughter sounds the same as kids anywhere.
That’s what gets me. Not the poverty itself, though that’s stark enough, but the normalcy threaded through it. The everyday moments of human life persisting in conditions that should be intolerable. Mothers washing dishes. Fathers fixing motors. Teenagers being teenagers, probably complaining about the same things teenagers everywhere complain about, just doing it on a platform that’s currently floating six meters above where it was four months ago.
I leave Chong Khneas knowing I’ll never really understand it. Not in an hour, not in a day. I leave with more questions than answers, and a sense that I’ve witnessed something that’s ending. A way of life being quietly erased while the world looks elsewhere. And I wonder, like I always wonder, what the hell any of it means.
