There is a tek kreluk fruit shake stand on the corner near our Phnom Penh house. We go there on late nights after work at the Cambodia Daily. We walk out of our concrete-walled, metal-gated, concertina-wired villa, and step into darkness. Like gunslingers, we mosey down the middle of the abandoned street, avoiding puddles of mud and urine and floating trash. Two of our staff have been robbed on this road by the police. We joke nervously about this. It's about 500 meters to the light of Monivong Boulevard, and the whirring sound of tek kreluk blenders.

The stands line the length of Monivong. We sit outside at a plastic table in plastic chairs under a pale florescent light and watch the Cambodians wake and start their day. Motor scooters buzz by, as cyclo drivers silently peddle their three-wheeled passenger vehicles. Some carry charred wood, others iron rebar, and still others live chickens. Normally, Monivong is one of the busiest streets in the city. Chaos and disregard for personal safety prevail, as scooters and motorcycles, cars and Land Rovers all mish-mash together at a reasonably safe thirty miles per hour. Occasionally, two scooters collide, sending the riders sprawling. At night though, things are quiet. Cambodians go to bed early, often around 8 p.m., and rise before partying Western expats even think about going to bed.

In the native language Khmer, tek kreluk means "water shake." A smiling Cambodian puts into a blender whatever fruits and vegetables are in season: pineapple, papaya, durian, mango, dragon fruit, carrot, banana, and others, a tornado of reds, yellows, and oranges. On top of that, you get a raw egg, a cup of condensed milk and a load of ice.

Our stand is next to a massage parlor, a thinly disguised brothel. Not that it needs to be. Prostitution in Cambodia is as accepted as the sunrise, or government corruption. It happens every day, and always will, people figure. Sometimes, while we drink our fruit shakes, a prostitute will come out of the parlor and joke with the tek kreluk girls. They will chatter in singsong Khmer, laugh, whack each other, joke. The prostitutes do not speak to us. They perhaps recognize us as locals, not sex tourists. This is good. We can relax. We drink with students, masons, teachers, drivers, gangsters. Cambodia has all kinds, and they all love tek kreluk. Teenagers meet here for a date, businessmen loosen their ties and debate whether to drink something before or after visiting with the girls next door, and old men sit around reminiscing. I wonder if the old men think about Toul Sleng while they sip the sweet fruit juices.

Two blocks behind our little tek kreluk stand are the remnants of Toul Sleng Prison, S-21, where 16,000 Cambodians died under Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime from 1975 to 1979. They were held under water, whipped, cut, burned, bludgeoned, and beaten. They had their pictures taken before they died. They were chained to iron bed frames, forced to defecate in U.S. military ammunition canisters. The Khmer Rouge leaders were a paranoid sort, and more than a million and as many as two million Cambodians died during their political purges. Slowly the Khmer Rouge began to collapse on itself, losing power to a Vietnamese force that took over in 1979.
In some ways, Cambodia has never recovered from all of that. Nearly all Cambodians flinch at the first sign of physical contact. They laugh, play ticklish, and poke me playfully in return. But underneath, I get the feeling they remember things. They can't forget, and it's hard to let their guard down. Ghosts, spirits, photos, and piles of skulls at monuments won't allow them to. Nor can a casual visitor ignore any of it. I look at my coworkers at the paper and the tek kreluk girls, at their cheerful faces and benevolent smiles, and I can't understand how such an awful thing like the Khmer Rouge regime happened to them. In the face of such things, my concept of justice simply dissipates. I can barely find anyone who wasn't personally affected by the regime. My coworker's father was executed. My friend has no idea where his mother is. Others lost sisters, brothers, or uncles. But I would never know this sitting at my tek kreluk stand on a humid Cambodian night.

And the smiling, singing Cambodian girl at the tek krulek stand tells me nothing of any of this. Once the ingredients are mixed together, she serves our glasses to my friends and me with straws and glasses of fruit-flavored water. She often sits down with us and plays a game on paper similar to tic-tac-toe, or practices her English. But she never mentions the Khmer Rouge or Toul Sleng, as if a tek kreluk shake can sweeten the past too.