Summary

In Chapter 8, “Static,” two weeks after returning from Utah, Chloé tells her dean she is doing “dissertation research” in Cambodia and needs to teach her course online (171). Although the dean is perturbed, Chloé feels unafraid of “losing this job” (171). Andrew does not question her need to leave.

Overwhelmed on the plane, Chloé already wants “to go home” (173). When she arrives, the city is overwhelming too. Once she reaches the hotel, she does not contact Andrew, afraid of waking him.

Chloé’s idea “was to consider Aristotle’s paradox of tragedy through the lens of dark tourism” (175). She wanted to write about tourists’ responses to “sites memorializing death and disaster” (175). Because “a quarter of the population had died in the genocide carried out by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s,” Cambodia seemed a fitting place to perform this research (176).

While visiting Tuol Sleng, a...