"the villages’ history is long and obscure, and no one knows when the first one appeared in Cambodia...
There is also the collective memory, rarely transcribed, of the floating villagers themselves, who corroborate Mouhot’s intuition that theirs is a lifestyle honed over generations to mitigate against the bad harvests, marauding bandits and unfriendly rulers to which minority Vietnamese remain especially vulnerable. Some told me that they had owned land in the early years of independence and that they had lived on the water only seasonally until the land was taken away. Others said they had always lived on boats. Some identified strongly as Cambodian, while others found the question of national allegiance absurd. “We just live on the water, where it’s easy to catch fish,” a monk in Kampong Chhnang told me. “We lived everywhere.”
There is a tradition of rural pluralism in Cambodia that belies its recent history of racial violence. Most of the floating villages I saw were peaceful mélanges of Vietnamese, Khmer and Cham fishers, and many of the people I met, including Hoarith, were the product of mixed Khmer and Vietnamese marriages. But everyone seemed to agree that floating villages were traditionally a Vietnamese way of life, enlarged out of economic necessity to include other groups. Today the ethnic Vietnamese live on the water because they are not able to live elsewhere. Neither documented citizen nor, in most cases, immigrant, they are what the government has sometimes described as “nonimmigrant foreigners.” They cannot attend public schools or open bank accounts, get a driver’s license or a factory job or own land or property. Their children are not issued birth certificates, precipitating a generational cycle of de facto statelessness...
Conversations about the Khmer Rouge can have a dreamlike quality in Cambodia, drifting back and forth over the same gruesome territory — the crude methods of murder, the pitiful rations of rice and broth — while trading in rumors, jokes and legends. Facts are overwritten; memories change midsentence. A story is told that contradicts the one preceding it, and both are accepted as passing glimpses of a historical truth too immense to view head-on. After some cajoling, Poun admitted that Vietnamese may have been killed in the camps. “But we didn’t know,” he added. Then he seemed to change his mind. “The Vietnamese never came to the commune where we were.”...
Most ethnic Vietnamese in the country continue to feel that they are Cambodians of Vietnamese origin. They refuse to give up hope that someday their Cambodian identity will be accepted in the country they call home. Instead, with somewhere between 400,000 and one million members, according to independent scholars, and virtually no international calls for Cambodia to uphold its own nationality laws, they are arguably one of the largest and least-supported stateless populations in the world."
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