THE COVID SCARECROWS OF BANTHEAY CHMAAR
In January 2020, before Covid locked down the world, I went to Bantheay Chmaar, in Northern Cambodia. This was January 21st, 2020. I found the village, a tiny place, full of scarecrows. But these were not meant to frighten birds. That job was done by plastic bags on sticks. No, these were meant to ward off the new disease. Three young men has come back from Bangkok, weeks before, and died of a new disease. Except, their elders said they had seen it before, and the elders did not catch it.
The young men who died in Bantheay Chmaar were day labourers in Bangkok. They never met anyone from Wuhan. They got sick in Bangkok. They got sick at the same time, or more likely a bit earlier, as the Wuhan outbreak. These scarecrows are powerful evidence that Covid came from Thailand, not China. It’s much more likely that both some Wuhan businessmen and my labourers got it in the same pace, the only one where they could have overlapped—Bangkok.
The first waves of Covid did not cause a general epidemic in Southeast Asia, because the disease had trouble infecting people older than 40. This was very pronounced in Cambodia, but was also true in Vietnam. It was very much not true in China. This implies that Covid itself, or a close precursor, had already burned through Southeast Asia in the late 1970s, leaving a deep shadow of immunity that stood revealed as other parts of the world succumbed. As this previous wave did not reach the rest of the world, it probably took place mostly in Cambodia, which was closed to the world in the later 1970s, until it opened (limitedly) to Vietnam.
We now know that HIV was present as a human disease for decades for it broke out into the wider world. This was probably true with Covid as well. These scarecrows, made by the old to protect the young, represent a very different Covid than was encountered in the West. Covid did not come from China. It comes from Southeast Asia, and I think it arose in the 1970s. To pin this down, we would have to study the immunology of the Khmer, and also the bats of Cambodia, but none of this work has been done
Spiritually, the scarecrows are complex objects. They are always found at the gates of the home compound, facing out. They are not spoken of: I had to find the town skeptic to explain them. To work, they must be scarier than the spirit of the disease. This is why so many of them have moustaches: they look like French people.
There is probably enough ethnographic information, all the labs aside, to trace the origin of Covid. Maybe we should try. I found one chunk. There must be many more.
Some of the best folk art isn’t art. Is this art? It doesn’t feel like art.
