The boy without a name

The boy without a name in Siem Reap

Most of us live with the belief that problems should have solutions, that effort should lead to change and that if a situation is bad enough, then surely somebody can fix it. But travel strips away many of those comforting assumptions. Travel sometimes leaves you with monuments, landscapes and photographs. But occasionally it leaves you with something far smaller and far heavier: the memory of a smiling boy on crutches in Cambodia whose name you tried very hard not to learn.

This is the story of the boy without a name, a child we met during a three-night stay in Siem Reap while visiting Angkor Wat.

One of the difficult things about travelling in Asia as a European is the poverty you think you see everywhere. Sometimes that is exactly what it is. Sometimes it is your own perception, shaped by your background, expectations and assumptions about how life is supposed to look. But beneath it all lies one uncomfortable truth. You cannot fix every person with a problem who crosses your path.

Arriving in Siem Reap

We had reached Siem Reap, ready to explore the Angkor Wat complex. We found ourselves a driver at the airport and the six of us went on our merry way. My first observation was that they were “civilised”. I nearly burst out laughing to myself as I prepared the comment for my Spanish friends. The van was right-hand drive. The Spanish constantly throw this “why do you drive on the wrong side of the road?” at me as an Irishman, so I was fully prepared to stir some muck.

Then I realised something else.

As co-pilot, I was sitting in the middle of the road. Not the driver. And once I noticed that, everything became even stranger. Most of the oncoming cars appeared to be left-hand drive. But not all of them. Traffic seemed to operate on a kind of collective optimism and mutual negotiation rather than anything resembling the rigid logic of the Irish or the Spanish systems.

My snide little moment of triumph died fairly quickly, replaced mostly by confusion and fascination. But it gave us something to laugh and talk about as we drove into the city.

Siem Reap itself was still quite underdeveloped then. Dirt roads in places. Dim lighting. Empty stretches between buildings. It felt untouched by mass tourism in a way that made the whole place seem immediate and alive.

I have just looked it up on Google Maps. Bloody hell! It has completely changed! And I don’t know why I am surprised.

The boy on crutches

That first evening we headed out looking for somewhere to eat and crossed paths with a boy who flew around on crutches. He was missing a leg, but seemed more agile than I have ever been. He moved through the streets at speed, grinning constantly, almost oblivious to the fact that half of Europe would have rewritten his entire existence as tragedy before he had even spoken.

And that is the uncomfortable part.

Many people would call that reaction empathy. Sometimes it is. But sometimes, underneath the empathy, there is also a certain quiet condescension: the assumption that a life different from ours must automatically be a life waiting to be rescued by ours.

Nearby, around Battambang and other parts of Cambodia, huge areas were still scarred by landmines. Many local people had been maimed by abandoned explosives left behind long after the conflicts themselves had faded from international attention. Missing limbs were common enough that they no longer stopped you in your tracks every single time. And perhaps that, more than anything, says something horrifying about war and its aftermath.

Over the years, I have crossed paths with so many people struggling to make a life in different parts of the world. Eventually you learn a brutal truth: you cannot fix them all.

Don’t ask his name

At university, while studying a novel by the Peruvian writer Alfredo Bryce Echenique, one lecturer said there were two people who should never know your name: bar staff, because it suggested too close a relationship with alcohol, and police officers, because it suggested you were already known to the authorities.

For reasons I still do not fully understand, that memory surfaced in Cambodia. Along with the memory of what I think was a Mae West character, who, when asked her name, simply replied, “Call me what you want, sugar.” Yet another person that should not know your name. My thoughts do that sometimes. They mix serious ideas with nonsense and somehow arrive at an emotional truth sideways.

And somewhere in the middle of all that noise, my brain settled on one instruction that kept repeating itself:

Don’t ask his name.

“You don’t need to know his name,” another voice was saying. And Mae West was still suggesting I call her “sugar”!

This was self-protection, obviously. Names change things. A child selling souvenirs, joking with tourists, or appearing outside a restaurant can remain safely general until you know his name. Once you know it, the brain files him differently. He stops being part of the scenery of travel and becomes specific. Human. Permanent.

So for three nights we bantered with the boy in broken English. He appeared every evening with the same enormous smile and the same impossible speed on those crutches. We joked. He joked back. And all the while, my brain kept repeating:

Don’t ask his name.

The boy without a name

We had come to Siem Reap to see Angkor Wat, but the memory that stayed with me most had nothing to do with temples.

On the third night, as we were walking back towards the inn, one of the group suddenly sped up. I remember feeling a completely irrational sense of panic because I knew exactly where this was going.

Then I heard it.

She called out: “What is your name?”

And that was the awful moment. The question had escaped. The little wall I had built around myself crumbled before the answer had even arrived.

Because once the question existed, the answer was inevitable.

And once the answer came, he would never again be the boy without a name.

Kim.