Tea at Trianon: Cambodia's Tragic Truth

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Saturday, September 15, 2012

Cambodia's Tragic Truth

Told through fiction.

Vaddey Ratner was 5 years old when the Khmer Rouge swept into power in 1975, claiming the lives of more than 1 million Cambodians, including most of her family. But while her first book, “In the Shadow of the Banyan,” is rooted in these events, it’s no memoir.

It instead uses fiction, telling the story of a precocious 7-year-old named Raami who begins her tale in a gated Phnom Penh estate before revolution arrives. “My first and foremost goal was always to honor my family with a work of art,” said Ms. Ratner, who fled Cambodia with her mother to the U.S. in 1981. “Fiction allowed me to step out from my own solipsistic concerns and limited memory and imagine the ordeals and fears of others more fully.”

Her family, composed of Phnom Penh intellectuals descended from a branch of the Cambodian royal lineage, was an early target of the anti-bourgeois “purges” and re-education programs that eventually subsumed the country. (Read entire post.)