by Brett Dakin
Back on Fa Ngum Road, I once again lost myself in the crowd. The temples along the riverfront had been turned into small carnivals with merry-go-rounds, bingo games, and fortune-telling monks. Vendors sold James Bond toy guns and model tractors. A Vietnamese circus had been set up on a corner, and the ringleader stood outside, shouting through his microphone to the crowd to come inside. Marlboro representatives handed out free cigarettes on the street, lighter at the ready, just a few paces away from a government-sponsored anti-smoking poster.
Teenage boys, hand in hand, strolled from stall to stall and into the bia sot, draught beer shops that lined the riverfront. Powerful stereos inside these shops played the incessant whining that passed for contemporary Thai pop; the teenagers who sat and drank knew every lyric by heart. To these revelers, the boat races were almost peripheral, and only occasionally did they glance over to the water to see which team was ahead. Every once in a while, if in a close race the underdog pulled ahead at the last minute, the crowd would roar with approval.
I walked along the river past the starting line and into the neighborhoods and back alleys north of the center of town. These villages offered a peaceful respite from the festival activity, and they were dotted with houses that had been built by the French—one dated back to 1924. The temples here were deserted, as even the monks had left to take part in the festivities downtown. It had rained the night before, and in spots the mud was quite deep. I stopped to help a lonely tuk-tuk driver, stuck in a puddle, push his vehicle back on to solid ground.
Inside one house, the TV was on. I stuck my head in the door and found three men gathered on the floor of the living room around a rattan table, watching the boat races on TV. As soon as he saw me, Keo, the head of the household, invited me in for a drink. Glad for a break, I removed my shoes and joined them. The men were sharing a bottle of lau lao, or rice whiskey—Laos’ ubiquitous and deadly version of moonshine. It is almost impossible to decline an offer of alcohol in a Lao home, so I downed a single shot, cringed, and quickly chased it away with a gulp of water. On the TV, the commentators were attempting to drum up excitement. They were engaged in the same mindless banter you might hear during an American football game on cable in the US.
In between each race, announcers read advertisements for the sponsors. These announcements were interspersed with Thai commercials for toothpaste and baby powder. The ads had been dubbed into Lao, a meager attempt by the government to limit the influence of Thai consumer culture. A promotion for the Lao national lottery boasted that the prize this month was 100,000 kip—about 12 dollars. The popularity of the lottery in Vientiane, I thought, was the result of a turn to the forces of chance in times of tremendous economic change and increasing uncertainty about the future.
Keo, for one, took the lottery very seriously. Every month, without fail, he would dutifully spend a few thousand kip at the Morning Market to buy two tickets.
“But how do you know which numbers to choose?”
“Aha! I ask the spirits.”
Before buying a ticket, Keo never failed to consult the spirits, or phi, for some serious advice. One weekend, he told me, he’d spent more than four hours sitting outside his house near the river, eyes shut, conversing with the ghosts. They told him that the month’s lucky numbers were 273 and 274, so he went ahead and bought these two tickets. He promptly lost.
“So what do these ghosts look like?”
“Oh, they’re everywhere! You can’t see them? They have strange faces and long feet, and they speak a different language than we do. But I can understand them.”
Just then, a man stumbled in off the street. He was different from Keo and his friends. His skin was shades darker, and he wore an old business suit that was covered with dirt. In his hand he clutched a half-empty whiskey bottle and a shot glass. He was extremely drunk, and began to mumble incomprehensibly as soon as he stepped in—without removing his shoes, an entirely unacceptable act in Lao society. No one seemed particularly surprised, however, when he plopped himself down on the floor next to me. At first I could barely make out a word he said, but I soon realized he was speaking French and English. The simple phrases seemed to be coming from a dark place in his head, one that he had long since forgotten.
“Bonjour, monsieur. Shake hands, shake hands,” he said as he groped for my hand. “Je suis un Laotien, comment-allez vous? Très bien. Shake hands, monsieur. Merci beaucoup, monsieur.”
Eventually he passed out in my lap, and I helped Keo to lay him down on the floor. Who was this guy?
“Oh, don’t mind him. He’s just drunk,” said Keo.
Not satisfied with this explanation, I pressed on. “But is he always like this? Is this usual?”
“He’s not right in the head, you know,” Keo explained reluctantly. “Lao phi ba. He’s crazy. He spent twenty years in communist re-education camps up in Sam Neua. Twenty years! He was an official in the Royal Lao Army, a friend of the French and the Americans, and the communists wouldn’t let him leave until 1995.”
“What happened to him?” I asked.
“Well, he went crazy up there, and by the time he returned to this village, his wife had already left. Now he lives with his mother and drinks most of the day away.”
Keo offered me another shot of lau lao, but I had to decline. Even on this joyous day, not all our evil spirits or unwanted memories could simply be sent downriver. A few ghosts stuck around to haunt us.
After I bade my farewells to Keo and his friends, promising to return one day to share another drink, I walked slowly back to Wat Ong Teu. The races were over, and teams were already heading back to their small villages, miles from Vientiane. The winners in both the men’s and women’s competitions were sponsored by Beer Lao—yet another triumph for the country’s most popular beverage. The men’s team had completed the 1,200-meter course in an impressive three minutes and twenty seconds.
On my way home, I ran into one team of men, dressed in identical blue T-shirts, gathered in the street near my house. They sang and danced, jostling one another and anyone else who seemed an easy target. Two women carried the team’s supplies in a large bamboo basket. The team members soon boarded a large truck that was parked nearby; hard wooden seats had been added onto the back of the ancient vehicle, and I suspected it would be a very bumpy ride home.
“Did you win?” I asked one rower as he lazily hoisted himself onto the truck.
“No way! They beat us by a good ten meters!”
The team continued to make merry as their driver disappeared under the hood to tinker with the engine. There was no rush to get back, and before I finally went home, I shared a communal glass of beer in celebration of the village’s loss.
Over the past few centuries, these streets had seen a lot, I thought as I forced down another swig of beer. The French had come and gone, kings had risen and fallen, temples had been destroyed and rebuilt, and counter-revolutionaries had been sent away and had once again returned home. But one thing had stayed the same. Every October, when the monks’ retreat came to an end, Vientiane still took a moment to celebrate two things that never seemed to change: the beauty of a full moon and the glory of the Mekong.
The Prince
____________
One fish can spoil an entire basket;
the sound of a single gong can fill the whole city.
Lao Proverb
In a spacious, air-conditioned office just upstairs from General Cheng—a few paces away, yet worlds apart—sat another source of power at the NTA. Desa was the vice-chairman and the director of a tourism development project funded by the UN Development Program, or UNDP. He was worldly, cultured, and charming—in short, a marked contrast to his boss. The general might have been kind and soft-spoken, but he was still a rough and tumble military man, a ruthless businessman, and a Party loyalist since the early days of the revolution. In the end, I determined, the main reason he didn’t show up for our English lessons was because he simply didn’t care; learning a foreign lang
uage, and thinking beyond the narrowly defined world over which he had such total control, didn’t strike the man as an efficient use of his time.
Desa, on the other hand, was the NTA’s resident sophisticate. He was fluent in French and fully conversant in English. Whenever a foreigner showed up at the NTA, chances were he was looking for Desa. Even if he wasn’t, he would end up in Desa’s office eventually, guided there by any staff member he might encounter in the halls. Speeches at international conferences, receptions for visiting delegations, study tours abroad, interviews with journalists—such tasks were inevitably reserved for Mr. Desa. If the vice-chairman couldn’t remember an English word while he and I were chatting, he would mutter, “Comment dit-on?” and we’d switch into French. His face was perpetually graced by a bemused, even weary expression, and his legs were always crossed elegantly at the knees. The few strands of fine white hair that remained on his head were perfectly in place. His manner made it clear that nothing anyone said to him, in any language, would be a surprise. After so many years working in the government, he had seen it all.
During my first weeks at the NTA, I had quickly identified Desa as the one man I needed to know. He seemed out of place at the office, respected by his colleagues, to be sure, but set apart from them by a tangible mutual suspicion. Desa fascinated me, and I was determined to learn more about him and where he came from. This proved a difficult task, as he had seemed wary during our first few meetings. He dodged even my simplest and most naïve questions about Laos, and was always careful not to reveal too much about himself. Not only did he speak French with extraordinary fluency, but he had also adopted the intense reserve for which the French are known (and for which Americans are certainly not). But gradually, as the months passed, Desa opened up, and he began to tell me about his background. There was a lot to learn.
Desa hailed from Laos’ pre-revolutionary elite. His father, it turned out, had as a young man married into the royal family of Champassak, Laos’ southernmost kingdom. In the early 1940s, when Laos was still under French control, he had led the Movement for National Renovation, the goal of which was to foster the development of Lao literature, dance, music, and theater. Members of the movement took an intense interest in Lao history and identity, promoting the use of a national anthem and a national flag for the first time. But the movement didn’t openly question French rule, so it was hardly a crusade for independence. In fact, since a central goal of the movement was to counter Thai influence in Lao affairs, the French saw a strategic interest in supporting his effort. Nevertheless, his cause marked the genesis of a genuine nationalist movement in Laos. When the Japanese arrived in Indochina in 1941 and called for an end to French rule, this nascent nationalism moved from the cultural into the political sphere, and ultimately led, in part, to full independence in 1954.
After World War II, Desa’s father served as a minister in the Royal Lao Government. As minister, his personal crusade was to encourage the revival of genuine Buddhist practice in Laos. In May 1949, he wrote: “We have turned Buddhism into a doctrine of lethargy and resignation that is leading our race to its destruction.” He oversaw a flourishing of the country’s Buddhist associations and educational institutions, including the Pali College, founded in 1953. Fluent in French, he wrote perhaps the premier pre-revolutionary volume on Lao culture during these years. Its chapters on Lao religious practice, weddings, and literature remain among the best ever published. One day, Desa lent me his father’s book, a well-worn volume with a faded red leather binding and gold-embossed title. Its pages had yellowed over the years, and by now a few were even missing.
“Please read it,” Desa told me. “You could learn a lot. But please return it to me when you’re finished. It’s my only copy.”
In 1960, Desa’s father was asked by King Savangvattana to serve as Laos’ prime minister. It was a time of intense political maneuvering in Vientiane: the communist forces were gaining strength in the provinces, and the country had returned to civil war in the wake of an attempted military coup d’état. Neutralist leaders were trying desperately to keep the country together through a series of ineffectual coalition governments. Both the king and the diplomatic community in Vientiane viewed him as a possible force for national unity, and they lobbied heavily to convince him to take over as the head of yet another caretaker government.
At the time, Desa was a student at the Lycée Vientiane, the capital’s prestigious French-language high school. Preoccupied with his studies, and sheltered from the fighting, the war seemed far away indeed to the young man. One night, however, a messenger from the American Embassy showed up in the family’s living room with two large suitcases. When his father opened them, he found stack upon stack of newly printed kip notes—a generous incentive to accept the king’s offer. But he stubbornly refused. So the king appointed Desa’s uncle instead, and Desa’s father was named deputy prime minister.
“My father was like me,” Desa explained. “He tried to stay out of politics.” In fact, many of the leaders of the Pathet Lao, Laos’ indigenous communist movement, were friends of Desa’s father. In the early days of the independence movement, he had worked alongside such central Pathet Lao officials as Prince Souphannouvong and Phoumi Vongvichit. When he became deputy prime minister, these men were serving time in a Vientiane prison, having been jailed after the formation of a right-wing government the year before. Soon after he took office, however, his former colleagues managed to break out. According to Desa, the jailbreak itself wasn’t all that difficult. “They even convinced the prison guards to join them!” he recalled with a chuckle. Together, the men embarked upon a secretive four-month journey to the Lao communist headquarters in northern Huapanh province. “When my father later learned that they all had arrived safely, he was relieved.”
Desa’s father died in 1964, nearly a decade before the monarchy finally collapsed and Laos became a socialist republic. I could sense the nostalgia in Desa’s voice as he spoke of his childhood and his father’s efforts to promote traditional Lao culture. Every so often, a stream of government limousines would speed up Lan Xang Avenue past his office window—their sirens reminding us of the absolute nature of the Party’s power—and Desa’s face would betray his distaste for the current regime. It was as if he simply knew that things would have been better had the communists never come to power.
After graduating from high school, Desa completed his studies at university in Switzerland. He returned to Vientiane just a year before the communist victory, and applied for a position with the civil service. He was assigned to the Interior Ministry, but when the communists took over in December 1975, he was still in training. Desa was lucky: if he had been appointed to a full-time position, he would have risked being sent to one of the re-education camps, or samana. The new government, paranoid that those affiliated with the former regime would sabotage the Lao PDR, decided to isolate them at camps in the former communist stronghold of Huapanh. Many officials who were sent up north thought they’d be back home in Vientiane in a matter of months; some were even willing students of the new leadership’s plans for political and economic development. In the end, these men ended up staying at samana for as long as ten years.
Desa was allowed to remain at the ministry, but his new supervisors refused to appoint him to an actual position with the civil service. “They could give me everything—a salary, a house—but not a job. They were afraid.” His family name meant that, in the newly formed Lao PDR, he would always be on the wrong side. His father, after all, had been a high-ranking official in the former government, a good friend of the West, and a member of the royal family. He had been an enemy of the revolution. However, the new government could not resist Desa for long. Most of Laos’ educated elite had already fled the country, joining relatives in France and the US who feared life under the communists. As a result, government officials with foreign language skills—or any kind of skills at all—were in short supply, and when the NTA was first founded in 1989, Desa was a
ppointed vice-chairman. He had been in the same position ever since, serving under five different chairmen in ten years. “I am marked for life,” he said. “I know my ceiling.”
Desa knew that he would never move downstairs into the chairman’s office. Because of his background, he would never be invited to join the Party. No matter how hard he worked, how many international seminars he attended, he would forever be regarded with suspicion in the hallways of the NTA. He would never be included in the most important meetings. In essence, he would never have any real power. Desa hadn’t been an active anti-communist during the war. He hadn’t chosen his family, but his name alone barred him from Laos’ new ruling establishment. And his language skills and extensive foreign experience were only liabilities in the Lao PDR. Despite economic reforms and an effort to open up to the international community in the 1990s, the Party remained suspicious of anyone who had too much contact with the outside world—especially someone whose family had been on the other side. These days, Desa was simply trying to hang on.
___
As the director of a UN project at the NTA, Desa had a lot of contact with foreigners. He had to suffer the presence of innumerable international consultants and their wildly unrealistic ideas for developing tourism. (One Singaporean proposed that a computerized, touch-screen information booth be installed at the NTA. This, when we barely had enough money for toilet paper.) Desa dealt with the foreign businessmen who were perpetually unhappy with the NTA’s efforts to promote tourism. And it was Desa who was ultimately responsible for deciding how to spend the UNDP project budget, which meant an endless stream of proposals to be reviewed, memoranda to be signed, and budgets to be approved. While most of his colleagues shuffled papers from one side of their desks to the other, trying their best not to offend the chairman, Desa actually had work to do.