Another Quiet American

by Brett Dakin

  Nevertheless, Laos had a long way to go before it could hope to catch up with the well-developed tourism industries in Vietnam and Thailand. The number of tourists had grown, but it remained tiny in comparison to the number visiting Laos’ Southeast Asian neighbors. As a result, the Lao government decided to designate the 1999-2000 season as “Visit Laos Year.” And it gave the NTA primary responsibility for the campaign’s success. But while government officials had indeed decided to commit to the development of tourism, they remained deeply divided about the effects tourism would inevitably have on Laos’ culture and people. When Party officials looked to Thailand, they saw a country overrun with tourists. The Lao government wanted nothing to do with the booming sex trade, rampant over-development, and environmental devastation Thailand had experienced in the post-war years. They knew as well as anyone about the resort areas in Thailand that only a decade before had been pristine, but were now so crowded and polluted that even tourists were going elsewhere. Some Party officials were also deeply suspicious of the influences tourists would have on political and social stability. For many, tourism conjured up images of long-haired hippies traipsing through the Lao countryside, searching for drugs and spreading crazy new ideas about freedom and democracy. (This image was not so far from the truth.) An influx of foreigners threatened to undo the hard work the Party had put into securing and unifying the country.

  The challenge faced by my friends at the NTA was to figure out a way to develop the tourism industry in Laos in a way that would help the country get richer while at the same time preserving the delicate cultural and natural heritage that attracted visitors to Laos in the first place. So how did I fit into all this? As far as I could tell, they wanted me to help them develop the skills they would need to handle a large influx of foreign tourists. I would teach them basic English, and help them to develop information materials about what to see and do in Laos. But I would also work with them on how to promote Laos as a destination that would attract the “right” kinds of tourists. I would be an unpaid consultant, thinking through the issues and trying in some small way to contribute to a carefully considered, healthy approach to the development of tourism in Laos over the next decade or so.

  While I was excited by the prospect of working at the NTA, I knew that I’d be struggling with many of the same doubts about tourism that were troubling Laos’ government officials. I had done a fair amount of traveling in my life, and I had been to places that had been completely transformed by the arrival of tourists. Often without even knowing it, tourists can easily disrupt a local economy, introduce unhealthy habits to the local community, and destroy ancient cultural traditions. I had contributed to this process myself. If successful, I knew that approaches like eco-tourism and cultural tourism had the potential to create incentives for the protection of natural resources and cultural traditions that were threatened, while at the same time helping people to earn money. But it was a difficult balance to strike. I was also doubtful of my ability to contribute anything worthwhile to the challenge that confronted the folks at the NTA. There were people out there who did tourism development consulting for a living—I would end up meeting quite a few—and I was not one of them.

  I had my doubts, but when the time came for me to leave for Laos, I couldn’t wait. Sure, I didn’t have all the right skills, but I was prepared to use those I did have to contribute in any way I could. Above all, I was eager to learn. I saw in Laos the opportunity to gain a different perspective on the world. To experience life under one of the few remaining communist regimes around. To confront the problems of international development. And to come to terms with being an American in a land where, not so long ago, Americans were the official enemy. I was about to take a giant step across the globe, but I was ready. I was 22, and it was about time. After all, if what I really wanted was something different, I couldn’t get much more different than Laos.

  The General

  ______________

  A boss must love his subordinates;

  a grandfather must cherish his grandchildren.

  Lao Proverb

  When I told people in Vientiane where I worked, they usually showed little interest. The Hongkan Tongtiow Hengsad sounded like just another link in the endless bureaucratic chain that was Laos’ government. The people I met during my first few months in Vientiane, Lao and expatriate alike, were invariably familiar with where I worked. A whitewashed concrete box that seemed to have fallen out of the sky and landed on Lan Xang Avenue, the wide central boulevard in Vientiane, my office was hard to miss.

  Lan Xang Avenue had been known as the “Avenue de France” when the French had been in charge of Indochina, and even today the folks at the NTA like to refer to it as Vientiane’s own Champs Elysée. Even though Vientiane had only a few paved roads—and not a single functioning cinema—when I stepped off the airplane in 1998, the parallels between Laos’ capital city and Paris were not entirely misplaced. Just a few minutes away from my office, Lan Xang Avenue ends at a traffic circle resembling the Étoile, at the center of which stands the Patuxai, Vientiane’s very own Arc de Triomphe. The Patuxai (Victory Gate) was completed in 1969 in memory of the Lao killed in wars before the communist victory. It’s also known as the “vertical runway,” as the project was finished with cement donated by the Americans and intended for the construction of a new airport in Vientiane. Despite the French inspiration, Buddhist imagery is present in the Lao-style moldings, and the frescoes under the arches represent scenes from the Ramayana.

  Adjacent to the NTA was the Morning Market, or Talat Sao, a maze of individually-owned stalls selling everything from antique textiles and carvings to household appliances, from jewelry and silk to electronics. The Talat Sao was where I’d head on a weekly basis during those initial months—before I learned better—to exchange my US dollars for Lao kip. I would sheepishly duck into one of the stalls at the Talat Sao and behind a merchant’s counter in order to engage in this illicit transaction. If I was lucky, my partner in crime and I would escape the notice of the stern (but sorely underpaid) policemen who patrolled the market. As the value of the kip continued its downward slide, I’d emerge from the Talat Sao with increasingly unwieldy and conspicuous piles of Lao cash.

  At the other end of Lan Xang Avenue was Laos’ Presidential Palace, originally built as the French colonial governor’s residence. The French took control of Laos in 1893 and administered the territory directly through the résident supérieur in Vientiane. After independence, King Sisavang Vong, and, later, his son Sisavang Vatthana, used the palace as a residence when visiting Vientiane from the royal seat in the city of Luang Prabang. It is now used for hosting foreign guests of the Lao government and for meetings of the presidential cabinet. The president himself does not live here; these days, he lives in a far more grandiose affair near the outskirts of town. The area surrounding the Presidential Palace was once the administrative center of French colonial rule. This neighborhood includes the French Embassy and residential complex, the Catholic Church, built by the French in 1928 and still offering daily services, and a number of administrative and residential buildings.

  The communist regime followed the lead of the post-independence royalist regime and set up shop in the buildings the French had bestowed on Vientiane. Unfortunately, the NTA wasn’t nearly important enough to have made it into one of these grand edifices. A relatively recent entrant into the bureaucracy, the NTA was located in the sort of bland concrete structure that inspired neither awe nor confidence in the government of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. So, needless to say, people around town weren’t all that excited by my place of employment. On the other hand, when I mentioned the name of the man for whom I worked, they could scarcely believe it. A look of astonishment would come over their faces, and they would struggle to accept the truth of what I’d said.

  “You work for the General?”

  “Yep. The General.”

  “General Cheng?”

  “That’s righ
t. The General.”

  “Wow. The General.”

  ___

  The chairman of the NTA was Cheng Sayavong, a general in the Lao People’s Army and, when I arrived in Laos, the richest man in the country. He was born in 1936 and grew up in Savannakhet, on the border with Thailand in Southern Laos. His distinguished military career had spanned more than four decades, reaching back to the early days of the revolutionary struggle. In 1957 and 1958, he had participated in paratrooper training at the military academy at Pau in France. His involvement in the revolutionary movement had begun soon after he returned home in 1960. He fought against the Americans alongside Khamtay Sipandone, the leader of the revolutionary forces and today the aging president of Laos. After the communist victory in 1975, Cheng rose to the rank of colonel and was sent to the Soviet Union to attend military school in Odessa and the University of Army Engineers at the Kroutchev Academy in Moscow. In 1985, back in Laos, Cheng achieved the rank of general.

  It was also in 1985 that the government put the Lao People’s Army in charge of developing some of the country’s most inaccessible areas. General Cheng was appointed president of the military-owned Phattanakhet Phoudoi Company—phoudoi means something like “rural mountain”—that operated in Central Laos. Thus was the city of Lak Sao born. Lak Sao, or “Kilometer 20,” sits near the border with Vietnam, southeast of Vientiane. In 1985, it didn’t even exist. The region was “an abandoned forest area with tigers. There were only seven inhabitants,” Cheng has said. “It was imperative to rescue these underdeveloped areas.” Access roads on both the Vietnamese and Lao sides of the border were built. In 1987, Cheng constructed a village, complete with a sawmill, an orphanage for minority children, and a wildlife protection project. Soon there were more than 12,000 residents living in the prosperous commercial town.

  But Cheng’s rapid development scheme came at a cost. Intense logging for export to Vietnam, much of it controlled by the military, devastated the natural environment. The proposed construction of a hydroelectric dam in the area allowed loggers to clear vast areas of virgin forest before the project had even been approved. Vendors at the market at Lak Sao sold all sorts of birds, reptiles, and other critters that were no longer found in the wild.

  One evening early in my stay in Laos, I met Bounthang, a university student who had grown up in a small village just a few kilometers from Lak Sao. We were at the home of Rachel, a French girl about my age—though years beyond me in sophistication and style—who taught French at the Centre de Langue Française, just across the street from the NTA. At this point, I hadn’t known Rachel for very long, but there weren’t very many expatriates in Vientiane (and the number of foreigners my age living there was few indeed), and I saw her all the time. It was difficult not to get to know other foreigners in Vientiane rather quickly, as everyone showed up at the same parties, ate at the same restaurants, and hung out at the same cafés. Rachel and I had had a number of awkward conversations, none of which had amounted to much. But I had been quietly pining over her since we’d first met, and in fact had come around to her house that evening hoping to find her alone.

  Instead, I found Bounthang lounging about on her verandah. Bounthang had left Lak Sao as a young boy, long before General Cheng and the Phoudoi Corporation had arrived, and now studied French and civil engineering at the National University. During his vacations, he returned home to visit his parents, who were rice farmers in his childhood village. His parents had been on the receiving end of Phoudoi’s grand strategy in Lak Sao: round up Lao of diverse ethnic backgrounds—most of whom had no previous experience with wet rice cultivation, a practice common only among the country’s ethnic majority Lowland Lao—stick them together in farming villages, hand them heavy farming equipment, and expect them to farm. Bounthang’s parents’ lives hadn’t improved much since he left, even as the landscape around them had been transformed. Each time he went home, Bounthang was amazed by the rapid development of his homeland—and the power of General Cheng.

  “J’ai peur de Monsieur Cheng. He scares me,” Bounthang said in perfect, unaccented French as he blew a puff of smoke into the air above us, where it disappeared into the relaxed swirls of the ceiling fan. Bounthang was not at all what one might have expected from a boy who had grown up in a village near Lak Sao. He was handsome and refined, and his fine features and easy manner disarmed even me. It soon dawned on me that Bounthang and Rachel were more than mere acquaintances. I put aside my jealousy for the moment, and tried to find out more about my boss.

  “What do you think about what Cheng has done at Lak Sao?” I asked.

  “The town was once successful, but there’s nothing there anymore. Il n’y a rien. No trees, no animals. They are all at the market.” Bounthang spoke of the Phoudoi experiment with disgust, but he had not allowed his cynicism about his homeland to impede his hopes for the future.

  Cheng had made a bundle of money from the development of Lak Sao. In 1996, when Phoudoi’s power was at its height, the company exported nearly forty million dollars worth of timber. Between 1984 and 1994, Phoudoi earned 105 million dollars, or forty percent of Laos’ total export earnings. But soon the general became a bit too ostentatious for his fellow Party cadres. He built homes all over the country, flew to and from Lak Sao in his own army helicopter, and began to receive foreign guests as if he were Laos’ president or prime minister. Among the international community, his dubious approach to the environment was well known: according to one American journalist, Cheng was “a singularly venal Party official known for murdering anyone who noted that the logging was an obscenity.”

  So, in 1997, he was transferred to a new job. That’s how he ended up as chairman of the NTA. And that’s how I came to know General Cheng Sayavong.

  ___

  The first day I showed up at the NTA, I was told that, in my capacity as a tourism development consultant and walking English resource center, I was expected to serve as the chairman’s personal language tutor. In fact, I was asked politely if I might be interested in practicing conversational English with General Cheng, but I understood that I had no choice in the matter. “Practicing conversational English” with the chairman would turn out to be quite a challenge, as the man barely spoke a word. Like many Lao of his generation, his French was not bad at all, but he’d never really bothered to study English. Far more serious a problem than this, however, was the fact that Cheng was simply never around.

  The chairman had no regular schedule; he was in when he was in, and out when he was out. No one in my office could tell me more. When the general’s English lessons had first been discussed at the office, the staff had seemed enthusiastic. After much delay, the boss had been located and had even agreed to a regular schedule: Tuesdays and Thursdays at one o’clock. Looking back now, I cannot remember a single lesson that took place during these appointed hours. At first, I spent many a lonely hour loitering outside his office, waiting for my star pupil to arrive. But I soon learned that in order to learn whether or not I had the slightest chance of teaching Cheng on any given day, I couldn’t simply wait around. I would have to go straight to the source: the general’s chauffeur, Oudom.

  Oudom was a jolly fellow, short and plump. His every feature, from his face right down to his feet, was perfectly round—there wasn’t a sharp edge to his body, or his personality. He remained at the general’s beck and call throughout the day, using his free time to clean and polish one of Cheng’s vehicles: his office car, a black sedan with tinted windows, or his personal four-wheel drive Pajero, used for the weekend getaways at which Oudom’s presence was always required. As far as I could tell, Oudom’s close attention to the gleam on his boss’ cars was a lost cause, as the clouds of dust that billowed through the streets of Vientiane were inescapable. No car could remain shiny for more than a few seconds in this glorious capital city. But Oudom was happy to do it. He made good money, and the job was secure.

  When the general first arrived at the NTA, the government had automatically pr
ovided him with a personal secretary. One secretary wasn’t enough for Cheng, however, so he brought in his own. He also surrounded himself with a number of familiar faces from his former career, military types who tended to pal around with one another at the office as if they were still back at the barracks. One was Cheng’s personal assistant Khit, who was known as the office clown, a court jester of sorts who pranced about the NTA poking fun at his colleagues and provoking spontaneous laughter in anyone who happened to be nearby. There wasn’t an ounce of fat on his body, and Khit’s extraordinary elasticity lent itself to his unbridled antics.

  But not everything about Khit was funny. Whenever he traveled outside of Vientiane, as I would later find out, he carried a handgun in his briefcase. Khit could be deadly serious. As Cheng’s long-time aide, he was supposed to know his every move, and to anticipate his every need. If ever he happened to be on an urgent mission for the chairman—making a photocopy, perhaps, or typing up a document—no amount of joshing would lead Khit to crack a smile. But even with two personal secretaries, there was only one man who ever knew where Cheng actually was. If you needed to see the chairman, you went to Oudom.

  Scheduling anything with the general was a lost cause. It was an unwritten rule at the NTA that he scheduled meetings with you. This I learned well before our first lesson. One Monday afternoon, I was teaching my advanced English class, happily explaining the nuances of the word “hangover” to my students and colleagues when Mr. Khit suddenly walked in and announced, “The chairman wants to see you. It’s time to learn English.”