The Lesson of Ghost Mountain — Strength Without Bitterness

A Country That Remembers Without Hate

I wasn’t looking for anything heavy that day. If I’m honest, I wasn’t looking for anything at all.

Like most days when I’m working, I had YouTube running in the background — the digital equivalent of having the radio on. Something to fill the silence, keep the energy moving, but not enough to demand my attention.

I usually let the algorithm wander — a mix of travel documentaries, old interviews, and random bits of history I might half-listen to while answering emails or editing a video. And then it popped up.

A title I didn’t recognise: Ghost Mountain: The Second Killing Fields.

It didn’t feel like the sort of thing you “click on” casually, the way you might watch a cooking video or a clip from a late-night show. The title itself felt heavy. And maybe that’s why I almost scrolled past it. But I didn’t. And that one choice — to stop what I was doing and watch — changed the whole day for me.

The film isn’t new, but it’s not widely talked about either. It covers a chapter of Cambodian history that rarely makes the headlines, even in the long shadow of the Khmer Rouge years. It’s about the people who escaped. Who thought the worst was behind them. Who crossed the border into Thailand seeking safety… only to be pushed back.

Not just “sent back.” Pushed. Down a cliff. Down an actual mountain.

It sounds impossible until you see the footage. The sheer drop, the rocks, the scrub, the dust — and lines of human beings clinging to what was left of their lives. Children in arms, pots and blankets tied to their backs, a few plastic bags holding the sum total of everything they owned.

And here’s the part that shook me — it wasn’t just the brutality that the film lingered on. It was the dignity.

You see faces in the crowd — men, women, children — who have been hollowed out by starvation and fear. But you also see something else: a posture. A quiet refusal to let cruelty take the last thing they have — their humanity.

The filmmakers could have made the whole thing about outrage, and no one would have blamed them. They could have hammered home the political failures, the moral cowardice of nations that stood by, the layers of bureaucracy that turned living, breathing people into “numbers in a report.” And they did show some of that. But they also did something rarer. They showed the survivors as more than victims.

They showed the nurse who cradled children with no food to give them, but still sang to them. They showed the man who’d lost half his family, still holding a stranger’s child as they walked down the mountain together. They showed the resilience in the smallest gestures — helping someone stand, sharing the last sip of water, adjusting the cloth over someone’s shoulders to shield them from the sun.

It’s those moments that stayed with me.

And maybe it’s because I live here now, in Siem Reap, that the impact hit harder. Because after the credits rolled, I didn’t switch off my laptop and return to some faraway life. I walked outside into the heat of a Cambodian afternoon.

The tuk-tuk driver at the corner waved at me, the same way he always does. The lady selling iced coffee smiled as she poured the thick, sweet liquid into a plastic cup. The older man down the street was sweeping leaves off the pavement in front of his shop, moving with slow care, like this ritual was as much for his spirit as it was for the cleanliness of the road.

I’ve walked past these people countless times. I’ve sat in their shops, shared their food, heard their laughter. But that day, it all felt different.

Because the film had just reminded me that there’s a good chance some of them — or their parents, or grandparents — walked down a mountain like that. That some of them buried more than they’ll ever speak about.

And yet… here they are. Not bitter. Not cold. Not looking for someone to blame.

Just living. Just showing up. Just doing what needs to be done.

I’ve lived in other countries. I’ve seen how history can calcify into grievance. How old wounds become the organising principle of a people’s identity. How bitterness gets passed down like an heirloom, until the original events are almost secondary to the anger itself.

That’s not a uniquely “bad” thing — in some places, holding onto the grievance is seen as survival, as honour. It’s the story of much of Europe, where my own country’s history is tangled up in centuries of invasion, betrayal, and occupation. It’s the story of the Middle East, where the weight of the past can be as present as the air itself.

And yet Cambodia…Cambodia is different.

This is a country that could have been defined entirely by what was taken from it. By the genocide, the betrayals, the silence of the world. And yet — it isn’t. It remembers. But it doesn’t let the remembering curdle into hate.

I think about that a lot when I see the way the world is going now — the way online discourse makes outrage the default, how quick we are to assume the worst of each other.

I’ve seen people in wealthy countries lose friendships over a comment on Facebook, or spiral into bitterness because of a single political decision. And I’m not saying those things don’t matter — they do. But when I hold them up against the image of a woman in 1979, carrying a baby down a cliff with nothing but the clothes on her back… it forces a kind of recalibration. It makes me wonder what we could all learn from a place like this. Because Cambodia’s strength isn’t the Hollywood kind — loud speeches, clenched fists, a triumphant ending with swelling music. It’s quiet. Steady. It’s the strength of someone who still offers you tea, even when they have almost nothing in the cupboard. It’s the smile that comes easily, not because life is easy, but because they’ve decided not to let hardship take that from them. And in a world that’s constantly telling us to fight, to win, to “take what’s yours”…I think that kind of grace might be the rarest strength of all.

That’s what Ghost Mountain left me with. Not just a historical lesson, but a personal one.

That surviving isn’t just about making it through the worst. It’s about who you choose to be after.

And Cambodia…Cambodia has chosen something remarkable.

It has chosen to remember without hate.

When You Think You’re Having a Bad Day

There’s a line in Ghost Mountain that won’t leave me alone.

It comes from a Western nurse — one of the rescuers who ran the refugee camps on the Thai side. The kind of person who doesn’t get statues built for them, who doesn’t write memoirs, who just quietly shows up when things are falling apart.

She said:

“When you think you’re having a bad day… think about the refugees on that mountain.”

And here’s the thing — she didn’t say it with malice. She wasn’t rolling her eyes at first-world problems. She said it gently, like someone who has earned the right to speak plainly. Because she had been there.

She had held children too weak to cry. She had watched mothers try to soothe their babies with nothing to give them — no food, no water, just a kind of desperate lullaby. She had seen men walk for days in silence because the weight of what they’d lost was too much to carry and speak of at the same time.

I live in Cambodia now. Not as an expert, not as a historian — just as someone who came here, fell in love with the place, and stayed.

And because I live here, that quote doesn’t stay abstract for long.

I can walk outside my front door and see an old man loading ice blocks onto the back of a rusted motorbike, ready to deliver them in the heat of the day. I can see a grandmother — bent with age — carrying bags of vegetables to sell at the morning market. I can watch a tuk-tuk driver wave his son off to school before heading out to work a 12-hour shift.

And I know — in a way you can only feel when you live here — that many of them are carrying histories I can’t imagine. Maybe they were children during the Khmer Rouge years. Maybe they lost someone and never got to bury them. Maybe their life was built entirely from scratch, starting with nothing but willpower and a bit of borrowed land. And yet — here they are. Laughing with their friends. Making sure their kids have clean shirts for school. Sharing mangoes with a neighbour just because the tree was generous that season.

That nurse’s quote has become a kind of internal checkpoint for me.

When the Wi-Fi goes down during an upload and I feel my shoulders tense. When I get an email I didn’t want to get, or a payment that’s late. When I start spiralling into self-pity over a day that just isn’t going to plan. I hear her voice: Think about the refugees on that mountain. Not as a guilt trip. Not to minimise my own life. But to restore perspective. Because our bad days are real. But there’s a difference between a bad day and a devastating one.

I remember one afternoon, sitting at a small café here in Siem Reap. It was raining — the kind of heavy, curtain-like rain that makes conversation pause because you can’t hear much else. Across from me was the café owner’s father, a man in his late seventies. He was peeling boiled eggs with the slow precision of someone who’s done it a thousand times. We got talking — as much as my Khmer and his English would allow. He told me he was from Battambang, that he had been a farmer all his life, that he had “seen bad years” but that “life is better now.”

He said it with a small shrug, as if “bad years” covered the whole arc from war to famine to loss. And then he smiled, offered me an egg, and asked if I wanted more coffee. It’s moments like that when you realise something: Kindness is not the default. It’s a decision. It’s easy to become hardened when you’ve been through hell. Easy to close off, to protect yourself, to stop giving. But the older generation here — the ones who have the most reason to be bitter — are often the ones who give the most. They’ll press food into your hands before they’ve eaten themselves. They’ll wave you under their roof when it rains, even if you’re a stranger.

And I think that’s what the nurse in Ghost Mountain meant.

She wasn’t saying we should feel ashamed of our problems. She was saying: remember the scale of human resilience. Remember what people can survive — and how much grace they can still hold after.

If you’ve travelled, you’ve probably seen versions of this in other countries too. In Nepal, after the earthquake, people brewed tea over camp stoves for their neighbours before rebuilding their own homes. In Rwanda, survivors of the genocide work side-by-side with the families of those who killed their relatives — not because they’ve forgotten, but because they’ve decided that healing is more important than staying in the wound. In the Philippines, I’ve seen whole towns turn out to rebuild a neighbour’s house after a typhoon, laughing and singing while they hammered new tin sheets into place.

It’s humbling. Because the more you see of it, the more you realise — this isn’t “charity” or “nobility” in the way the West sometimes romanticises it. It’s survival. It’s the knowledge that life is short and community is everything.

I think that’s the quiet genius of Cambodia. That it has every right to define itself by tragedy — and doesn’t. It doesn’t erase the past. It doesn’t pretend it didn’t happen. But it refuses to live as if the worst thing that happened to it is the most important thing about it. And that’s a lesson worth carrying into our own lives. Because bad days will come — for all of us. Sometimes they’ll even be catastrophic. But if the people who walked down Ghost Mountain can still choose to smile, still choose to be generous, still choose to keep showing up…

Then maybe we can too.

Mockery, Spitefulness, and Walking in Their Shoes — A Call to Empathy

This channel was never meant to be about anger. It was never meant to divide. It was about connection. About noticing. About seeing what’s in front of you with both eyes open and your guard down. But some days, keeping that intention intact feels like holding a candle in a windstorm.

The week I watched Ghost Mountain, I made the mistake of opening the comments section on one of my videos. Not the documentary — my own video. One where I’d been speaking about Cambodia’s spirit, its resilience, its quiet ability to endure without turning bitter. And there it was: Mockery. Smugness. Sarcasm so thick it didn’t even pretend to hide the contempt. Not for me — I can take that.

For them.

For the people whose lives I’d been talking about. For survivors of genocide. For a country that had been through hell and still managed to keep its door open to strangers.

It’s a strange kind of cruelty, the online kind. It’s not shouted across a street where someone can look you in the eye. It’s typed. Sent. Forgotten by the sender in thirty seconds. But it lands somewhere — in someone’s day, someone’s heart, someone’s sense of humanity.

I sat there, scrolling, with the faces of Ghost Mountain still in my mind.

A mother carrying her child down a cliff without food or water. A man standing where his brother died, unable to speak. A nurse remembering the smell of the camps — not from the cooking fires, but from the unburied dead. And against those images, the comments looked even more alien. Like graffiti sprayed on a temple wall.

I’ve thought a lot about why this happens — why mockery is such a common reflex online. Part of it, I think, is distance. It’s easy to be cruel when you don’t have to see the eyes of the person you’re speaking about. It’s easy to turn a tragedy into a punchline when it’s just words on a screen.

But there’s another part — and this one is harder to admit — that comes from us being uncomfortable with pain. Real pain — the kind that doesn’t wrap up neatly, the kind you can’t fix with a donation or a hashtag — makes us feel powerless. And powerlessness makes some people angry. They’d rather laugh at it than sit with it. Because sitting with it means admitting it could happen to them.

And here’s where the elders come in.

Spend enough time in Cambodia’s countryside and you realise — the older generation is like a living library of what it means to survive.They don’t all tell their stories. Many don’t speak of the past at all. But you see it in how they move. In the way they prioritise people over possessions. In how they can read the sky and tell you when the rain will come, because they’ve lived enough seasons to know the signs.

They carry a kind of wisdom that doesn’t shout. And part of that wisdom is knowing that mockery is a waste of breath. Life’s too short, and dignity is too precious, to spend it tearing someone else down.

We’ve lost some of that in the online world. We’ve made quick takes and hot opinions into a sport. We’ve mistaken cleverness for wisdom. We’ve convinced ourselves that the way to prove we’re strong is to never show softness. But elders — here, in Cambodia, and in so many places I’ve visited — know the opposite is true.

Strength is the mother who can still sing to her child after burying another. Strength is the farmer who plants rice again after a flood, knowing it could all wash away. Strength is the choice — after everything — to remain kind.

And that’s why the mockery stings so much. Because it’s not just unkind. It’s lazy.

It’s easy to sit in a chair and laugh at a story you don’t understand. It’s harder to get on a plane, sit in the heat, walk into a village, and listen. Really listen. It’s easy to be cynical. It’s harder to be hopeful.

It’s easy to write people off as “backward” or “corrupt” or “pitiful.” It’s harder to accept that they might have something to teach you about living.

If I could make every one of those commenters spend a single day here, I think something would shift.

I’d take them to meet an 80-year-old man in Kampong Thom who lost his parents in the war and now teaches children to read under a mango tree. I’d take them to a market in Battambang where a woman who lived through famine now gives away extra vegetables at the end of the day to anyone who needs them. I’d take them to a quiet riverside in Phnom Penh, where elders gather at sunset not to talk politics or the past, but to watch the light change on the water.

And maybe — just maybe — they’d understand that history doesn’t just live in museums. It lives in people. People who have every right to hate, but choose not to.

That’s the miracle of Cambodia. It carries its history in its elders, in its art, in its silences. And it teaches, without ever needing to announce it, that forgiveness and dignity are not weaknesses. They are the hardest things in the world to hold onto.

And if we’re lucky — if we listen — maybe we can learn a fraction of that grace for ourselves. Because the truth is, mockery dies the moment you look someone in the eye. Spite melts when you sit on the same step and share a meal. And the need to always be clever or “right” fades when you realise what it takes just to survive.

So this is my call — not just to remember Ghost Mountain, not just to protect the dignity of elders, but to practise empathy like it’s a skill we’re in danger of losing.

The internet has given us reach. But reach without depth isn’t connection — it’s just noise. And maybe the way we bring depth back is simple: By walking in each other’s shoes. By letting the stories of those who came before us soften the way we speak and act. By remembering — as the nurse said — that when you think you’re having a bad day…You could be on that mountain.

And if the people who were on that mountain can choose to keep walking, keep giving, keep smiling — Then so can we.