by Brett Dakin
My parents had served as Peace Corps volunteers as part of the first group ever to serve in Kenya, and their experience decades ago remained a central part of our family’s history. My parents had hardly solved Kenya’s woes back then, but their awareness of what life was like in a place so different from their home had always struck me as integral to their approach to the world. I wanted to get away from my comfortable, sheltered life in the United States, it’s true, but in a sense I was only emulating the choices my parents had made before me.
One morning that winter, I was strolling to class in Jones Hall, home to the East Asian Studies department. Jones was my favorite building at Princeton—and not simply because it’s where I spent most of my time. A small, gothic gem in the center of the campus, it had once housed Princeton’s famed mathematics department. (Professor Einstein’s office was in Room 112.) Mathematics had long since moved out of Jones and into a large, modern high-rise building to the West, leaving Jones to those of us who, by the time we were seniors in college, could barely complete our multiplication tables. I felt comfortable in the dimly lit halls and classrooms, surrounded by my Japanese and Chinese language instructors, Asian history and literature professors, and fellow students of the region. Our Department head, Professor Peterson, was firmly ensconced in a spacious corner office on the first floor. He spent his days editing works on Chinese intellectual history, pausing every so often, I imagine, to ponder once again a key passage from the writings of Confucius or Mencius. Whenever I passed his office, I could always count on seeing his dog sprawled out on the floor on a rug just in front of the desk. Oblivious to the students and administrators who drifted in and out of his office throughout the day, Professor Peterson’s dog didn’t have to worry about her future.
That day, I must not have been in much of a hurry either, for as I made my way to class, a sign on the hallway bulletin board caught my eye. The sign advertised the Princeton-in-Asia program, which offered recent graduates the opportunity to work in Asia for a year or so. I had known about the program, of course, but most of the jobs I’d heard about were English-teaching positions in high schools and colleges in China and Japan, places I’d already studied and visited. The prospect of returning didn’t interest me. What I did find intriguing, though, was a small announcement, buried among a sea of others, for a possible job opening—in Laos.
The opening was for a language and marketing consultant at the National Tourism Authority of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, or Lao PDR. The National Tourism Authority, or NTA, was the Lao government’s central office for tourism development, planning, and promotion, and was located in Vientiane, the capital. That’s about all the detail the position description contained, and a conversation with the staff inside the program office didn’t reveal much more. They told me that Princeton-in-Asia had never before sent anyone to Laos, and, in fact, they weren’t even sure the job really existed. They had little idea of what the experience would be like, and couldn’t guarantee anything. As for money, the Lao government wouldn’t be paying me anything, but Princeton-in-Asia would put up enough for housing and food. I was on my own for travel and other expenses.
At that point, I knew next to nothing about Laos. I had come across a reference or two to the country and its people in the context of the war in Vietnam. In its attempts to thwart the ascendant communist movement in Vietnam and Laos in the 1960s and 1970s, the US had dropped enormous quantities of bombs on Northern Laos. The CIA had trained and supported a guerrilla fighting force in Laos made up primarily of the Hmong, a minority ethnic group, many of whom are now living in the US. Just before handing over power to John Kennedy in 1960, President Eisenhower had told the young leader that Laos was “the key to the entire area of Southeast Asia.” If Laos fell to the communists, in other words, the entire region would follow. At one point, the US Embassy in Vientiane was the largest in the world. Nevertheless, Laos is now depicted as a sideshow to the main event, a mere historical footnote. Laos’ place in the world today is rarely considered—it certainly had never come up in conversation with any of my professors or classmates at Princeton.
But while I may not have known much about Laos, I already knew that I wanted the job.
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Once I had been accepted for the position at the NTA, I sought out as much information as I could about Laos. My thirst for knowledge about the country had an urgency that dwarfed my enthusiasm for the classes in which I was enrolled at the time. I enjoyed learning about the history of jazz and the American occupation of Japan, but my interest in these subjects lacked the immediacy of my need to learn about this small country in Southeast Asia. Finding information about Laos wasn’t easy. Not only has very little been written about the country, only a handful of films about Laos have ever been made—and they don’t tend to be very good. As a first step, I went where any good student would go in search of knowledge: the library. I felt certain that the fifty miles of shelves in Princeton’s labyrinthine Firestone Library would hold at least a few answers to the questions I had about Laos. Sure enough, buried among the hundreds of books about Asia’s major powers, I found a few about Laos. I used these in order to get a handle on the essentials of Laos’ history and culture.
It didn’t take long before I was hooked.
What you first notice about a map of Laos is perhaps the country’s most mixed of blessings: it is entirely landlocked, sharing borders with China and Burma to the north, Thailand to the west, Vietnam to the east, and Cambodia to the south. It has had little easy access to international trade over the centuries, but at the same time has suffered from heavy-handed meddling by its neighbors and other outside powers. Constant invasions from Thailand and China were a feature of the country’s pre-colonial past, before the French took over and incorporated Laos into Indochina along with Vietnam and Cambodia in the late nineteenth century. The United States’ perception that Laos could not be “lost” to the communists led to intense American involvement in Laos after it achieved independence in the 1950s. And the Soviet Union showed a keen interest in Laos’ well-being at the height of the Cold War. On the other hand, many today believe that Laos has an opportunity to capitalize on its location at the intersection of major trading routes in the region. In fact, this was the key to the hopes for Laos’ future to which my soon-to-be colleagues at the NTA clung.
Laos covers an area of about the size of Great Britain, and is dominated by the Mekong River, the twelfth longest in the world. More of this great river (the “Mother of Waters”) runs through Laos than any other country in Southeast Asia, most of it freely. This promises to soon change, and when I left for Laos in 1998, at least twenty or so damming schemes were in the planning stages; every week during my time there, it seemed, I would hear of another hydroelectric project “in the works.” The Mekong River Valley provides Laos with its best agricultural zones, and with the fish that—along with rice—are a staple of the Lao diet. The Annamite Mountains run parallel to the Mekong through almost half the length of Laos. The terrain in the north is marked by steep and jagged mountain slopes, while the south benefits from fertile plains such as the Bolavens Plateau, where most of Laos’ coffee is grown. The country’s highest peak is Phu Bia, which lies just south of the Plain of Jars, a series of lush, grassy, rolling hills in the northeast of the country.
Laos sounded like a beautiful country, but what I learned about its climate gave me pause. Laos, like most of mainland Southeast Asia, has three main seasons. The rainy season, marked by the arrival of the monsoon between May and July, can last until as late as November. During this season, the weather is hot, sticky, and wet; daytime temperatures average thirty degrees Celsius in the lowlands and 25 in the mountain valleys. The monsoon is followed by a dry, cool season from November until mid-February, during which the temperature in the Mekong River Valley can drop to as low as 15 degrees Celsius. The third season, dry and hot, begins in late February and lasts until May; temperatures in Vientiane can reach a blistering 38 degre
es Celsius in March and April. I’d been born on a gray, misty day in London, and at Princeton that’s the kind of weather I still found most comfortable. How would I survive in a climate that offered relief from the heat for a mere four months a year?
Poring over the pages of these works, I also began to learn about Laos’ extraordinary ethnic diversity. The country’s population stands at just under five million, and with only twenty people per square kilometer, it has one of lowest population densities in Asia (in neighboring Vietnam, it’s 230 people per square kilometer). The Lao government likes to divide the population into three main ethnic categories, according to the elevation at which they live: Lao Soung (higher mountain), Lao Theung (lower mountain), and Lao Loum (lowland). About half the population are Lao Loum, 20-30 percent are Lao Theung and 10-20 percent are Lao Soung. This is a somewhat arbitrary categorization, as there are at least 68 different ethnic groups in Laos, each with its own linguistic, religious, and culinary traditions. In general, however, the Lao Loum live in the Mekong River Valley, subsist on wet-rice cultivation, and practice Theravada Buddhism. The Lao Theung live on mid-altitude mountain slopes, are largely animist, and suffer from the lowest standard of living of the three groups. The Lao Soung live at altitudes of 1,000 meters above sea level and higher, and have traditionally relied on the cultivation of dry rice and opium. Laos’ ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese communities are strong, dominating the business communities in the country’s urban centers.
Buddhism is the main religion in Laos, and nearly two-thirds of the population are Theravada Buddhists. Introduced to Laos in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Buddhism was heavily promoted by King Fa Ngum, the first monarch of the unified Lan Xang Kingdom, or the Kingdom of the Million Elephants. Theravada, or Hinayana (Lesser Vehicle) Buddhism, which originated in India and reached Laos via Southeast Asia, is the earlier and more “pure” of the two major schools. The other school, Mahayana (Greater Vehicle), is a more expansive Buddhism practiced in North and East Asia. The objective of Theravada Buddhism is to attain nirvana, the ultimate end of physical existence—and thus, all suffering—on this earth. Most Lao Buddhists are of the Lao Loum majority, and regularly donate money and food to the monks at their local village temple in order to acquire merit and help them to achieve this end.
As I read about the country’s culture and religion, I became increasingly excited about going to Laos. What intrigued me most of all, however, was a fact that didn’t seem to fit the image of a deeply religious developing nation: Laos was a communist country. The Lao People’s Democratic Republic, the Satalatnalat Passatipathai Passason Lao, was founded on December 2, 1975, when the communist Lao People’s Revolutionary Party took over from the Royal Lao Government in the wake of America’s defeat in the Indochina War. The king was deposed, the monarchy abolished, and a new class of revolutionaries took their seats in the ministries in Vientiane. To this day, the Party remains the primary ruling institution in the country, exerting considerable influence on people’s everyday lives. Power within the Party lies in the nine-member Politburo, the 49-member Central Committee, and the Permanent Secretariat. Currently, the secretary general of all three bodies is the same man, President Khamtay Siphandone—one of the original “cavemen,” the revolutionaries who orchestrated the war against the Americans from their secret headquarters deep inside caves in Northern Laos. The National Assembly is the nation’s sole legislative body. Representatives, almost all of whom are Party members, are elected by the public and meet once a year to rubber stamp Central Committee decisions and prime ministerial declarations. Only four independents were allowed to run in the 1997 elections, when voting was compulsory and strictly monitored. There is little real opposition to the Party, and no free press.
Although most of my friends in the States couldn’t understand why, this was the aspect of life in Laos that I found most alluring. They wondered why I would want to waste my time in a place where political freedom was limited, and people were being thrown in jail for speaking out. And besides, wasn’t communism dead? Why bother with a failed political and economic experiment? But I wasn’t another John Scott, the famed “American worker in Russia’s city of steel” and author of Behind the Urals. Along with other Westerners enamored with the communist experiment, Scott had traveled to the Soviet Union in the 1930s to report on the great successes of collectivization and the joys of Soviet life. Of course, long before I became a college senior, Scott had been discredited and communism dismissed. I wasn’t looking for a viable political alternative to free market capitalism—I was simply curious. Communism in Laos struck me as an anachronism. I could scarcely understand how it had survived in a country in which eighty percent of the population works in agriculture, fishing, and forestry. What relevance did the theories of Lenin and Marx have to a place with no workers? Where was the proletariat that would unite and overthrow the ruling elite?
After they took power in 1975, the communists did attempt to make some drastic changes in Lao society. The new government confiscated private property, collectivized farms, and sent around 40,000 citizens to re-education camps in the countryside. As a result, more than 300,000 Lao fled across the Mekong to refugee camps in Thailand, and then on to new homes in the US, France, and Australia. However, this early communist zeal resulted in colossal failure and popular resistance, and in 1979 the government abruptly reversed course and embarked on a process of reform in agriculture, monetary policy, and commodity pricing. The economies of urban centers like Vientiane had been transformed since the mid-1980s, when restrictions on private enterprise and ownership of private property began to be lifted. This turn to the West accelerated when the Soviet Union collapsed in the 1990s and Russian aid—nearly half of all foreign aid received by Vientiane in the 1980s—quickly dried up. Almost as soon as the Russian technicians and diplomats were gone, the Lao government began looking to donors like Sweden, Japan, and Australia to replace their former benefactors. In exchange for new aid, the Lao government agreed to further liberalize economic policy, soon developing a foreign investment code that was among the more liberal in Southeast Asia. Thailand and the US now top the list of foreign investors.
But while much has changed since 1975, the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party still has a firm grasp on power. After all, along with its Vietnamese counterpart, it had triumphed over the world’s greatest superpower, and the Lao rightly remain proud of this victory. The cavemen had risked their lives in the great battle against the American “imperialists,” and they were not about to go away now. What I knew about the legacy of America’s war in Indochina—from the bomb craters that dot the landscape to the countless citizens who fall victim to mines each year—made me angry, and, as an American myself, I wondered how I’d be treated in Laos. Would I be welcomed by the people I met? Or would they challenge me to justify America’s actions in their country? Would I be regarded warily and followed closely by government officials? Or would I be accepted as a friend?
While these questions might have led some to shy away, they were among the main reasons I wanted to go. I had to see what life was like in one of the world’s last remaining communist nations.
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I was sure I wanted to go to Laos, but I remained perplexed as to why the NTA would want to hire someone like me. After all, I didn’t speak a word of Lao, a language that is very similar to Thai but has nothing at all in common with Japanese or Chinese, the languages I had spent so many hours in Jones Hall studying. I knew little about Laos and its people. And, although I had been a tourist often enough myself, I had no experience in the tourism industry. All I had going for me was an ability to speak English rather well, French much less well, and a solid liberal arts education. The fact that I had gone to good schools was of course irrelevant—as I would soon find out, no one in Laos had ever heard of any of them. So what was a communist government’s department of tourism doing hiring an American just out of college?
The answer was to be found in
the state of Laos’ economy, one of the ten poorest in the world. Industry is almost non-existent, and the economy is overwhelmingly dependent on foreign aid, pumped into the country by bodies like the United Nations, the Asian Development Bank and the World Bank, and individual donor countries. The Asian economic crisis of the 1990s, particularly the currency woes in Thailand, had had a devastating effect on the Lao economy, sending the kip, Laos’ currency, on a deflationary free-fall. Despite government attempts to keep it under control, Laos had a thriving black market for currency exchange and the trade of untaxed imports from Thailand and Vietnam. In 2000, Laos experienced an impressive real GDP growth of 4.5 percent, but GDP per person was stuck at a mere 272 dollars. Foreign aid accounted for half the country’s budget.
By 1998, some in Laos’ leadership thought they had come up with a solution to the country’s economic woes: tourism. As part of its general policy of economic liberalization, the government had begun in the early 1990s to allow international visitors to enter the country. This marked a major policy shift for the regime, which had kept the country almost completely isolated from the outside world since 1975. After the decision to open up, tourism in Laos quickly took off. Between 1990 and 1997, tourism arrivals increased at an annual rate of 74 percent. In 1990, only 14,400 people visited Laos, but by 1997 this figure had risen to 463,200. The NTA’s statistics indicated that revenue from tourism had grown to 73,276,904 dollars in 1997 from just 24,738,480 two years earlier. Already, Western backpackers were beginning to discover the wonders of a country that had been off-limits for more than two decades.
