The Gate [Hardcover]

Francois Bizot (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 4, 2003

A literary and historical tour de force: what one man saw and did in a land of pristine beauty on the eve of one of the twentieth century’s most barbaric spectacles.

In 1971, François Bizot was a young French scholar of Khmer pottery and Buddhist ritual working in rural Cambodia. Now, more than thirty years later, he has summoned up the unbearable memory of that moment, letting us see as never before those years leading inexorably to genocide. Perfectly recalled, in-delibly written, The Gate recounts the nightmare of Bizot’s arrest and captivity on suspicion of being an American spy, and his nearly miraculous survival as the only Westerner ever to escape a Khmer Rouge prison. It is the story, as well, of Bizot’s unlikely friendship with his captor, Douch–a figure today better remembered as a ruthless perpetrator of the then-looming terror, about which Bizot tried, without success, to warn his government.

Bizot’s experience to that point would itself have merited report. But upon his return to Cambodia four years later, chance ordained a second remarkable act in this drama. As the sole individual fluent in both French and Khmer, Bizot found himself playing the intermediary in a surreal standoff when the Communist-backed guerillas, now ascendant, laid siege to the French Embassy compound in Phnom Penh. Finally it would fall to Bizot to lead the desperate retreat of the colonial population: here he re-counts how he helped the remaining Westerners–and any Cambodians he could–to escape the doomed capital.

Both beautiful and devastating, The Gate is a searing and unforgettable act of witness and remembrance.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

French ethnologist Francois Bizot's The Gate offers a unique insight into the rise of the Khmer Rouge. In 1971 Bizot was studying ancient Buddhist traditions and living with his Khmer partner and daughter in a small village in the environs of the Angkor temple complex. The Khmer Rouge was fighting a guerilla war in rural Cambodia; during a routine visit to a nearby temple, Bizot and his two Khmer colleagues were captured by them and imprisoned deep in the jungle on suspicion of working for the CIA. On trial for his life, over the next three months Bizot developed a strong relationship with his captor, Comrade Douch, who would later become the Khmer Rouge's chief interrogator and commandant of the horrifying Tuol Sleng prison where thousands of captives were tortured prior to execution. The portrait Bizot gives of the young schoolteacher-turned revolutionary and their interaction is simultaneously fascinating and terrifying.

Finally freed after Douch had pleaded his case with the leadership, Bizot became the only Western captive of the Khmer Rouge ever to be released alive, but his story does not end there. On his return to Phnom Penh, due to his fluency in Khmer, he was appointed interpreter between the occupying forces and the remaining western nationals holed up in the French embassy. As the interlocutor at the eponymous gate, he relates with dreadful resignation the moment when the Khmer nationals in the compound were ordered out by the Khmer Rouge forces for "resettlement."

Bizot's is a touching and gripping account of one of the darkest moments in modern history and it is told with a unique voice. As a Cambodian resident, a lover of Cambodia and a fluent Khmer speaker, Bizot shows an understanding of the prevailing mood in the country that other Western commentators have failed to capture effectively, while as a Western academic he is able to see the forces at work and how Cambodia fits into the bigger picture of South East Asian conflict. What emerges is a tale of a land plunged into insanity and Bizot tells it like a eulogy for a dead friend and a confrontation of old demons. The Gate is a stunning book and a must for anyone interested in this grim period of Asian history. --Duncan Thomson

From Publishers Weekly

"It's better to have a sparsely populated Cambodia than a country full of incompetents!" The speaker of this chilling statement is Douch, the Khmer Rouge true believer who ran the camp that held French ethnologist Bizot for the closing months of 1971, several years before the Marxist revolutionaries unleashed massive bloodshed on the small Southeast Asian country. In 1975, the Khmer Rouge's chaotic occupation of Phnom Penh confined the small French community in the city to the premises of the French embassy, the portal of which supplies this volume with its title. Married to a Cambodian citizen, Bizot was an unusual Westerner there, in that once the terror started, he showed little inclination to flee the country. Bizot exploited his status as a rare Khmer-speaking Westerner not only to escape execution but also to extract a measure of autonomy for himself. He frequently showed remarkable defiance toward his heavily armed and ruthless captors. Bizot's account maintains a melancholy tone throughout. Despite his frequent heroic acts, Bizot emphasizes his own frailty and weakness-when he's not looking to set the record straight. He remains especially angry at Western leftists who insisted that the Vietnamese played little role in Cambodia despite ample evidence to the contrary. What's especially striking is the apparent contradiction between Bizot's sympathetic portrait of Douch and his description of the countless murders Douch committed in the name of the revolution. For many Americans, the senseless tragedy of Cambodia remains a mystery; this elegant volume helps outline the contours of that tragedy from a unique perspective. Maps. 40,000 first printing.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Knopf; First Edition edition (March 4, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 037541293X
• ISBN-13: 978-0375412936
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 6 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (29 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,280,552 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

59 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The book of a lifetime., March 5, 2003

By 

R. ARANT "Toun" (Lanesville, Indiana USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Gate (Hardcover)

Since I met the author in Chiang Mai a decade ago -- when he somewhat reluctantly described his experiences as a prisoner inside the infamous Khmer Rouge M13 prison camp commanded by "Douch" and gave me a copy of the safe-travel pass written for him by a North Vietnamese officer during the first of Bizot's many brushes with death -- this was the one great book I impatiently awaited. As it turns out, "The Gate" is far more powerful than I could ever have imagined. Readers will find it painful to read through their tears, but will be unable to lay the book down. As John Le Carre writes in the foreword, "Now and then you read a book, and, as you put it down, you realize that you envy everybody who has not read it, simply because, unlike you, they will have the experience before them." The brilliantly written introduction shows how little the world has changed since the historic disaster in Cambodia. In contrast to many Frenchmen, Bizot saw the Americans as allies in 1970, but recognized an "inexcusable naivete" in the Americans, and he comments, "I do not know what to reproach them for more, their intervention or their withdrawal." As for the French government of that day he comments, "... fear of appearing to support the Americans so froze minds that nowhere in Europe were people free enough to voice their indignation and denounce the lies (of the Vietnamese and Cambodian communist revolutions)." In one of his verbal duels with his interrogator, Bizot questions the insane logic of the revolutionary, asking if the Khmer Rouge cadre did not see that the revolutionary line was just a trick constructed using basic Buddhist traditions to deceive the people and itself, just as it used the name of Sihanouk as a mask. For me there will never be another book quite like Bizot's to come from a Westerner. Bizot is a man who lives life his way, thinks his own thoughts, follows no man or no government blindly. A true citizen of the world. Fortunately, Cambodians have recently started writing their own stories, and it will truly take river of ink to record the horrors they have experienced. New books by the Documentation Center of Cambodia (dccam.org) go into great detail on the barbaric tortures used at camp M13 and at Tuol Sleng, tortures which even Bizot could not have dreamed of at the time he was held there.

32 of 39 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars There's Just Something Missing..., December 29, 2004

By 

Mike (Bound Brook, NJ United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Gate (Hardcover)

"The Gate" is a true life tale of someone with a close-up view on the precursor to one of the world's most horrific events, the assumption of power by the Khmer Rouge Party in Cambodia in 1975. The author, Frenchman Francois Bizot, lived in Cambodia in the early 1970's and was briefly detained by the Khmer Rouge before being released - purportedly the only westerner to receieve such a release. After his release, Bizot relates how he became a major player in the negotiations between the Khmer Rouge and the French diplomatic mission in Phnom Penh for essentially safe conduct out of Cambodia for most of the westerners remaining in the country at that time.

Ordinarily, this is the type of story that would just be amazing; indeed, two of the three stars I give in my rating are mostly for the story alone. In a setting where just to survive was exceedingly rare, rarer still is the kind of picture Bizot has the potential to paint -- a close look at the captor and captive, doomed and fated to be freed, side by side. If you are looking for a general history of the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, this book isn't it. But if you are looking for a more intimate portrait of what happened under the Khmer Rouge (at least at the ascendency of their power), then "The Gate" will intrigue you.

At the end of the day, however, "The Gate" is lacking in both heart and serious reflection. It would seem silly to say this about a book in which a person describes what might have been the most horrific time in his life. Unfortunately, Bizot's descriptions simply don't go far enough. The absence of introspection in this book -- to go along with a measure of self-aggrandizement and political pontificiation -- turns what could have been a seminal read into a merely interesting one.

One example that bears repeating throughout these reviews that Bizot provides little detail about the unnamed person ambiguously and variously described as his "wife", "the mother of [his] daugher", and "the mother of the blond girl." One would think that such a person deserves at least a name, if not at least a single paragraph as to her fate; this woman gets neither. Interestingly, Bizot mentions the fact that several married French men living in Cambodia sometimes took and even married Cambodian lovers; he even goes so far as to detail the scene of one Frechman giving his Cambodian wife over to certain death for the simple reason that the the Frenchman would not tell the Khmer Rouge authorities that he was married to the Cambodian woman, the man's French wife back in France notwithstanding. It would not be far-fetched to read into the text that this scene was about Bizot himself, which would provide an explanation about what happened to his "wife" and why he does not (or perhaps cannot) even refer to her by name.

Bizot heaps scorn on the U.S. for the "naivete" of its foreign policy in Southeast Asia, yet he has no such contempt for his own naivete when leaving his friend and a co-worker in a prison camp to die after his own release is won. Rather than take any concrete action, Bizot simply requests that the Khmer Rouge leaders promise him that his friend and co-worker will eventually be released. Despite having first-hand knowledge of the Khmer Rouge's brutal practices, Bizot walks out on his friends satisfied that the Khmer Rouge will honor the Frenchman's request. Many years later, it is a shock only to Bizot -- not to the reader -- that the friend and co-worker were executed shortly after Bizot left the camp. What more could Bizot have done, I don't know. But to leave happy with what was essentially a "pinkie promise" with the Khmer Rouge is nothing about which to be pleased.

Bizot also notably leaves out any discussion of France's own culpability in bringing the Khmer Rouge to power. Bizot makes no mention about the abuses suffered by southeast asians at the hands of their French colonial masters in French Indochina, or how the French essentially abandoned the entire region after being defeated by the Viet Minh at Dien Bien Phu. Rather, the entirety of the problems in the region are once again set at the feet of the Americans, although Bizot is thoughtful enough to note that his native servants are overjoyed to see him upon his return from the prison camp. I know this isn't supposed to be a comprehensive history of southeast asia, but if you're going to talk about the causes of the problem -- as Bizot does -- then let's talk about all of them.

And that, perhaps, is the greatest failing of this book -- it is simply inconsistent. There is not enough detail where the reader wants it the most, which is in how Bizot's experiences affected him personally. I'm not going to even describe the "cold soup incident", which is so shallow as to be laughable. Where there is great detail -- such as in some of the conversations that Bizot allegedly had with his captor and later the Khmer Rouge leadership -- there is so much as to strain credibility. Bizot himself admits that these dialogues are not verbatim but, rather, designed to give the reader the "gist" of what was said. Bizot, however, simply goes overboard and often ends up detracting from the power of the what is being said through sheer verbosity.

I kept waiting and waiting and waiting for something in this book - a lesson, a moral, a feeling, I don't know - something. It never comes. I hope it did for Bizot.

15 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not as compelling as I'd hoped it would be..., April 8, 2003

By A Customer

This review is from: The Gate (Hardcover)

I have read a number of books about the Khmer Rouge genocide in Cambodia and I did not find this book nearly as compelling to read as others. For me, this book read like an intellectual recounting of events and not a book with any soul. This may be due to the translation or it may be that the author was a foreigner and so was somewhat detached from events. But it was interesting to read about Duch (Douch), who will probably be tried if the UN Tribunals ever happen.

For a truly horrifying picture of the Khmer Rouge time in Cambodia, I recommend Loung Ung's "First They Killed My Father" for a child's perspective and Haing Ngor's "A Cambodian Odyssey" for an adult's perspective.