In The Playground, Terry McCoy creates a moving, infuriating and necessary portrait of a people abandoned. The broad strokes of the story -- powerful oppressors and the struggle of the trampled-upon to preserve their humanity -- shares the familiar dynamic of stories of injustice. But McCoy treks deeper into the details -- finding devils, certainly, but a manner of angels as well. The transparent rationalizations of multi-billion dollar Chinese multinationals, and the willingness of Khmer apparatchiks to regularly employ violence in pursuit of an oligarchy to call their own, is maddening. The indifference of the United States foreign service is embarrassing.
From beneath the overwhelming weight of this brutal regime and the crushing poverty of Cambodia's disastrous recent history (ably and succinctly summarized by McCoy), Vanny Tep emerges. Her brashness barrels through in McCoy's writing, and the ferocious courage of the women she organizes shines from the rubble of ruined lives. Theirs is a hope without reason, a condition at once indomitable and vulnerable. They carry the vitality of human progress, and McCoy brings them out of abstraction and anonymity.
A pregnant woman, living under a tarp in a relocation camp after the government razed her home to make way for foreign developers, tells McCoy, "The government watches us, but they don't see us." Because of McCoy's journalism, we are all witnesses.
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