Heat, the Killing Tree, and a Jazz Jam

This year’s Chinese New Year was meant to be a short reset. I took a few days in Phnom Penh with my wife to step away from marking, proposals, and the quiet strategising that comes with building a life in higher education. It was supposed to be a pause, a sightseeing holiday. Instead, it became perspective.

We visited Tuol Sleng (S21), the former school turned prison under the Khmer Rouge. The rooms are preserved as they were found: metal bed frames, shackles, faint blood splatters on the walls. Of course, many emotions made their rounds through our minds and bodies; you could feel them viscerally, but what really got me, both in hindsight and in the moment, was how HOT it was. It was considered a “pleasant” day by tropical standards, and I am no stranger to tropical weather, yet the heat made me wonder what it must have been like for those imprisoned, starved, tortured there.

There was one prisoner (only 7 out of 12,000 survived. Yes, 7, not 700, not 70, though numbers vary according to sources. Still, not many. Not many at all) who survived because he could paint: Vann Nath. His art kept him alive; he was made to produce portraits of Pol Pot, and we saw some sculpted busts still kept in a corner. Later, he used that same skill to document the atrocities. I was shook. In another political system, being educated, being artistic, being “intellectual” is not an advantage. It is a liability.

The regime did not just eliminate people. It targeted teachers, artists, and thinkers. Cultural memory was interrupted. And the so-called “blank slates,” even children made to do the killing, capturing, and torturing? Simply unbelievable. Brainwashing does not happen overnight; it accumulates slowly, through repetition and ideology, until cruelty feels normal.

At the Killing Fields, we walked carefully along paths marked with signs where bone fragments still litter the earth. There is a tree there, the “killing tree.” It is the one many of us have read about, though the name feels like a misnomer; the tree is not the killer, any more than the heat is sentient. On the real murderers, we kept wondering, out loud and to ourselves: How does a society turn against its own culture so thoroughly? How do humans turn against their own species, their own nature?

That evening, we went to a bar called The Deck. It hosts local artists, and there’s a casual jazz jam every Thursday night. No stage, hardly any backline. The first thing I heard when we walked in was an older flautist drifting in and out on “Footprints.” A guitarist, the jam master, clearly strong, clearly capable, but playing without ego, holding the centre and keeping things together. It was very real, very sincere. I did not introduce myself. I was there as a visitor, not as a participant. I sat with my wife, had a beer, and listened.

Earlier that day, I had stood in rooms built to erase identity. That night, I watched people insist gently on having one. In Phnom Penh, jazz felt very human; a few people gathered to make sound because they could, because they must.

I spend much of my year building and teaching across institutions, publishing, planning, and positioning carefully within systems that reward output and credentials. There is nothing wrong with ambition, nothing wrong with the hustle, but walking through S21 forces a recalibration. Infrastructure is not permanent. Stability is not guaranteed. I came back to Singapore grateful for safety, for infrastructure, for the ability to think, teach, write, and make art without fear. Cultural ecosystems can be dismantled within a few years… and this experience gives me no neat conclusion, only rumination. Perhaps that is enough.