ABSTRACT
The urban development projects that mushroomed on the Chrouy Changvar peninsula in recent years are often viewed as testimonies to the impacts of global capitalism on Cambodia’s capital, Phnom Penh. This paper, however, destabilizes this assessment by revealing a network of significances beyond economic terms, linking Chrouy Changvar to the history of antagonism against ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia. Building on ethnographic evidence, the chapter discusses the legacies of “Cap Yuon,” a historical series of politically motivated attacks against ethnic Vietnamese residents in Cambodia, which left its mark on the Chrouy Changvar peninsula itself in 1970. An analysis of the transformation of a popular Buddhist tale about the Fertility Goddess Neang Kanghing Preah Thorani into wartime propaganda by the Khmer Republic conceptualizes the extreme violence in terms of larger socio-religious dispositions toward the Vietnamese Other. This history of ethnic violence starkly contrasts the image of ethnic Vietnamese as menacing and powerful, as symbolized by the luxurious Sokha Hotel on Chrouy Changvar, a project of the Sokimex corporation owned by ethnic Vietnamese tycoon Oknha Sok Kong. A site where contrasting narratives on otherness collide, Chrouy Changvar testifies to the curious complexity that underpins the image of the Vietnamese Other in Cambodia.
