Dried or Smoked Fish? Your life might depend on it.

Bizot, in his auto-biographical work "The Gate" describes a tense scene at the French Embassy in Cambodia. Expatriates and Khmer refugees have holed up there in the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge take-over of Phnom Penh. It is 1975, Lon Nol has fled to the United States, his US-supported regime has collapsed; US forces are withdrawing from Vietnam under the cover of a peace agreement that barely cloaks their defeat. Cambodia will soon be forgotten and left to the Khmer Rouge. Tens of thousands will be executed, millions will die of over-work, malnutrition and un-treated disease.

In the Embassy, staff face their captors and possible executors for the first time. No one knows what will happen. Will their diplomatic immunity be respected? What will happen to the Khmer who crowded in with the expats, friends and colleauges, most with no foreign passport? (Some of the drama of this episode is communicated by the movie: "The Killing Fields".) More immediately is the question of food and water for everyone. Bizot describes this first meeting with Nhem, who is the commander of KR forces in Phnom Penh, to discuss these issues. Tension immediately rises over what Bizot implies is a translation error.

The French Ambassador asks for dried fish and rice and water (of course he asks in French, not English). His interpreter asks for what is most easily translated back into English as smoked fish, not dried fish.

"The atmosphere in the room grew tense," Bizot writes. "Yet what could be more legitimate than our modest requests?" The Ambassador knows something has gone wrong, but does not know what. The interpreter repeats the request "more gently". Bizot immediately sees the difficulty. He is asking for smoked fish, not dried fish: "a request as inappropriate as if we had requested smoked salmon from people who had been surviving on bread and water. Trai ngiet had become a rare commodity. It was a sought-after specialty of the Great Lake, a complicated preparation using only one or two types of extremely expensive fish." (Modern smoked Cambodian fish are pictured above).

Bizot intervenes and says that actually all that is needed is "for the fish to be dry, 'snguot', or edible in any way. This question is unimportant." The Khmer Rouge look relieved (face has been saved, there was no way they could get smoked fish, and no way to say that they could not), the Ambassador is happy. For Bizot this is a transformational moment. He becomes the primary intermediary between the Embassy and the Khmer Rouge commanders and one of the few allowed outside the Embassy to look for other expatriates and to scavenge for tinned and other foods. He becomes an important witness to what became of Phnom Penh in the immediate aftermath of the Khmer Rouge takeover. (The second picture in this post shows some of the salted fish offerings at the O'Russei Market).

And the interpreter? Bizot says "I had caused him to lose face." Of the 'mistake' Bizot says: "the confusion was commonplace, if not inevitable in such a pressured situation."

I have a different take. Bizot says that the interpreter knew the "Khmer language perfectly". Of course he did, that is not the question, the question is how well did he know French. I suspect, given the job that he had, the elevated plane on which he worked, he knew that as well as one might a second language (as I assume that it was), certainly well enough to know the difference between smoked and dried fish in spoken French. He made no mistake; he knew what he was doing.

What I imagine is that this high-level interpreter working directly with the French Ambassador could not imagine that the Ambassador might be satisfied with what was peasant food, dried fish. If he was going to eat something other than fresh fish, how could the interpreter facilitate anything less than trai ngiat! I imagine that in his mind that was his job, to take care of the Ambassador, and that meant, in this case, trai ngiat, not trai sgnuot. (The second picture above shows modern salted fish offerings at the market).

If Bizot had had more presence of mind, he might have asked the interpreter whether he thought that in fact simple dried fish might be okay, allowed the interpreter to acknowledge that yes, of course, dried fish would be fine and then allowed the interpreter to rephrase the question to the KR. No one would have lost face, the aim would have been achieved the KR satisfied. The question put to the interpreter would have given him permission to move away from his own definition of what his job demanded, and if the question had been put in French, it would have had best effect. (They did not ask for salted fish, pictured above and to the left).

But how could one fault Bizot? In such a situation one would have been terrified, the near-term question of food and water was the focus, but the elephant in the room had to be the question that could not be asked: "Are you going to kill us all?"

In the end, the expatriates with passports, and the Khmer who had foreign passports or who could get French passports forged for them, as many did, got out through Thailand. The vast majority of the Khmer who had taken refugee in the Embassy, slipped out at night, or, if they stayed until the end, were taken out by the KR, the vast majority executed.

Bizot does not tell us what happened to the interpreter (he gets another mention late in the book). But I feel a deep sadness for him. His 'mistake' did not increase the likelihood that he would be executed, if taken by the KR he was already doomed by his work with the French -- and his family too. He is less than a footnote to history, but I believe that he made no mistake. I believe that he was doing the job to the best of his ability. Ambassadors do not eat dried fish. If they eat any at all, it must be the best. He was taking care of his Ambassador in the only way he knew how, the way that his upbringing and culture demanded.

He was publicly humiliated, but if things had not happened in this way, it is possible that we would not have gotten Bizot's first hand accounts of his conversations with Nhem, or his observations of Phnom Penh after entry of the KR.

Bizot, Francois. "The Gate", translated from the French by Euan Cameron. The Harvell Press, London, 2003, pages 158-9

(All pictures taken at O'Russey Market, Phnom Penh, November, 2009)

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