In February 1987, I was thriving. I was performing in local Seattle clubs to promote my new album and researching a historical fiction novel based on the life of Joan of Arc. I was in love. But then I got a headache that wouldn’t go away. Throbbing pain made me nauseous. Over the course of a week, my vision morphed from tones of sepia brown to black nothingness, and I became blind in one eye.
There were blood tests, spinal taps, and visits with doctors tapping my joints with rubber mallets. How many fingers do you see? And then the final, fateful test with an ophthalmologist who didn’t mince words. See those white spots? I squinted with my good eye at the black and white Seurat image of my brain. You definitely have Multiple Sclerosis.
I took a sobbing breath, already knowing my world would never be the same. The headache morphed and moved throughout my body, a wolf chewing my arm, a knife stabbing my back. But, eventually, I discovered a hidden secret.
Extreme pain left me with the most significant, most liberating gift the universe could ever give --the realization that I had nothing left to lose. I learned that when dying is not the worst thing you can imagine; you live without fear.
In 1993, a friend was serving with the United Nations Peacekeeping mission in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, where there was an ongoing civil war. The Khmer Rouge, after exterminating half the population of their country, still lurked in the shadows of the countryside. Did I want to go live there? Absolutely.
I was offered a job managing the Cornell University Archival Project documenting remaining prison documents at S21--an infamous former Khmer Rouge interrogation center. The previous director had quit, leaving the country without explanation. Did I want the job? Absolutely.
Every day for months, I went to my dingy office on the second floor of Building B at Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, a former high school turned into one of the most brutal prisons ever known. We microfilmed hundreds, and then thousands, of mildewed, stained pages of terror extracted from prisoners under horrendous suffering. People, long dead, either murdered or starved. Journalists often interviewed me, asking how I could stand to work in such a place. Wasn’t it heartbreaking? Did I feel/hear any ghosts? Yes, and yes.
But as weeks passed, my answers changed. So did I. Bearing witness to true evil is no joke. I discovered my humanity during those months, my empathy. I hope I began to see. To listen. Yes, MS inflicted its own version of torture. But I was unlikely to die of it. I had no blood-stained iron shackles causing my limp. Or a sharp stick poked into my eye causing my vision loss. I had the freedom to choose hope. Flicking on a light switch or watching a crow sail across a sapphire sky. It’s taken me decades to reconcile the meaning of that experience.
My newly published historical fiction novel, THE FOREIGNER'S CONFESSION, is set in Cambodia and draws deeply from my time there. I have tried to make sense of what I witnessed, while also finding my own truth within the horror and beauty that is Cambodia.
After a horrific accident shatters her world and leaves her an amputee, American attorney Emily Mclean moves to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, to work with landmine survivors. She hopes to reinvent herself in this new land, leaving behind her sense of culpability in the death of her husband and the loss of her unborn child.
While visiting the Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide, Emily discovers that she shares an eerie resemblance to a portrait of a former prison inmate, Milijana Petrova, a Yugoslavian communist revolutionary who, in the 1970s, became fatally enmeshed with the brutal Khmer Rouge regime. Emily is not the only one who notices the astonishing similarity—her Cambodian driver insists she is the ghost of Milijana, come back to complete a mysterious task.
This unexpected discovery consumes Emily, who starts desperately searching for answers about Milijana in historical documents from Cambodia’s devastating civil war. As she begins to uncover more clues about Milijana’s life—from the horrible mistakes she made to the terrible price she paid—further similarities between the two women start to emerge, and their stories become intertwined. What happens when life is turned upside down and the boundaries between past and present, life and death, are blurred? Can Emily’s discoveries help her to finally emerge from the pain of her own past, or will Milijana’s tragic end foretell her own?
Mystery | Literature and Fiction [Lure Press, On Sale: February 1, 2022, Hardcover / e-Book, ISBN: 9781737826507 / eISBN: 9781737826514]
Author Lya Badgley was born in Yangon, Myanmar, and spent much of her life in Southeast Asia. She moved to the Pacific Northwest in the eighties, where she became a part of the Seattle arts and music scene.
In the nineties, she returned to Asia, where she opened a restaurant in Myanmar, interviewed insurgents for Human Rights Watch, and microfilmed documents at Tuol Sleng Museum of Genocide in Cambodia, helping to bring war criminals to justice. She's been an elected city council member and a dedicated environmental activist.
She is fascinated by the culture and customs of the region, which has been a huge inspiration for her writing. Tense war zones and insurgencies offer an intense backdrop for her stories. Political and social upheaval vividly mirrors the personal and sometimes violent transformations of her strong female protagonists.
Badgley lives in Snohomish, Washington with her Serbian husband.
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