Another Quiet American

by Brett Dakin

  Once safely outside the clutches of the MIC guest-house, Ying hopped on the back of my motorbike and we drove across town to the Liao Ning dumpling shop, the newest Chinese restaurant in Vientiane. The owners, who had immigrated from Liao Ning, a small city north of Beijing, had opened the place only a few months before, but already it was known for its heaped servings of pork-filled dumplings, served steamed or crisply fried. Located on the bottom floor of a simple shophouse around the corner from my office, Liao Ning just barely earned the appellation “restaurant.” A few mismatched tables and chairs had been cobbled together to form the dining area, and the lone woman who worked in the kitchen was unable to handle more than two customers at once. But the food was excellent, the prices reasonable, and the staff invariably pleased to see us. Liao Ning was usually filled with an odd mix of recent Chinese immigrants and young Western expats. Lao people weren’t interested.

  As soon as we took our seats, Ying set about her usual routine of cleaning her own place settings. First, she thoroughly wiped the plate, spoon, and teacup with a napkin, then disappeared into the kitchen to deal with the chopsticks. The Liao Ning wasn’t the cleanest place in Vientiane, to be sure, but I just couldn’t bring myself to wash my own dishes. The very idea struck me as absurd. Ying’s actions were typically Chinese, of course, but they were also emblematic of her entire approach to life: whatever she felt had to be done, she did it. What others thought was essentially immaterial.

  Ying was a rare find in Vientiane. One of the strongest and most forceful personalities I had encountered in Laos, she spoke fluent English, producing flawless sentences at rapid speed. She looked straight at me during conversation, establishing a direct eye contact that was unusual, even unsettling, in a Southeast Asian context. Most Lao avoid direct eye contact at all cost. In the West, speaking while looking someone “straight in the eye” is seen as a sign of honesty and trustworthiness; in Laos it is viewed as circumspect. Perhaps the worst way to get a point across to a Lao colleague was to look right at them. Rather than putting him at ease, it put him on edge.

  Ever energetic, Ying’s speech was marked by constant expressions of playful incredulity. “Oh, really!” she would cry in response to any mildly controversial statement I happened to make. I often saw my friend around town, slowly pedaling her two-speed bicycle as the traffic around her flew by. From afar, I could always spot Ying because of her flowing summer dresses and wide-brim straw hat, the very style worn by rice farmers to shield them from the sun. The bright floral patterns she favored never failed to break through the clouds of dust on Vientiane’s streets.

  Ying worked as an interpreter for a company that was under contract with the Chinese government to build a Lao “cultural hall” in Vientiane. A gift from the Chinese, the gargantuan building was under construction, but already it dominated the Vientiane skyline. Its façade was typical of the architecture of China after Mao: whitewashed walls dotted with eerie metallic-blue windows. In a cursory nod to the culture it was built to showcase, traces of traditional Lao design graced the edges of the building. But no flourishes of pseudo-Buddhist imagery could hide the fact that the entire project was out of place in Vientiane. In fact, its style was diametrically opposed to all that I considered Lao. Whereas Lao architecture was understated and subtle, designed to maximize interaction with the natural elements, this hall was imposing and inescapable—much like China itself, you might say. And not even Ying, deeply involved as she was with the intricacies of the company’s management, could tell me what the building would ultimately be used for. “We just have to finish it on time,” she told me. “That’s the important thing.”

  This emphasis on a speedy completion had led to a few gross errors. When the Lao government had first accepted the project, Ying’s company had sensibly suggested that an underground parking lot be incorporated into the plans. But the Lao government had dismissed the offer as too expensive and time-consuming, insisting that visitors could just as easily park on the streets nearby. As the sprawling building neared completion, the prime minister’s office belatedly realized that there weren’t any streets nearby. So in order to make room for a parking lot, the company was ordered to demolish a group of buildings, left over from the days of French rule, adjacent to the project site. Overnight, the families who had lived here for decades were unceremoniously kicked out of their homes. And by the next evening, in the name of progress, a piece of Vientiane’s architectural heritage had been rendered a pile of bricks.

  The Lao National Culture Hall was a perfect example of how foreign aid could go horribly wrong. The Chinese were aware that it was a fairly useless project. The officials in the Lao prime minister’s office knew it. Ying and her colleagues knew it. And my neighbors, whose lives it was somehow supposed to improve, certainly knew it. No one really wanted the thing, but who was going to refuse a free building?

  “I know that this project doesn’t help the Lao people,” said Ying. “It only helps the Chinese government. They want Laos’ vote in the UN.” The rumor around town was that the Chinese president was even thinking about coming to Vientiane upon completion of the project—the first visit by a Chinese head of state to Laos anyone could remember. Even after a half a century of independence and a quarter century of communist rule, Laos remained a pawn in the grand game of international politics.

  At the Liao Ning, Ying and I ordered a plate of steamed dumplings and two glasses of weak Chinese tea, and settled in for the long wait while our food was prepared from scratch. In the meantime, Ying told me about her experiences as an employee of a Chinese company overseas. Hers was not simply a job, I learned; it was a way of life. She was required to work seven full days a week, despite the fact that, by law, Chinese workers were granted weekends off. “The Chinese government and the Chinese Embassy know, but they keep silent.”

  What about the law?

  “It doesn’t mean anything. The Chinese people can write the most perfect laws in the world, but they are the worst at carrying them out. If I run a red light in China, and the officer is my classmate, he’ll let me go. But if I have no connections, I have to pay.”

  Ying ate three meals a day at the office, slept in the company house, and was even expected to vacation with her colleagues. Over the Chinese New Year holiday, Ying had wanted to take a few days off to travel by herself, perhaps just over the border to Nong Khai in Thailand. But her boss wouldn’t hear of it. The office was going up to Luang Prabang for the weekend, and Ying would be coming. And she would have fun. It would have been considered ungrateful, even treacherous, for her not to have joined the group, so she acquiesced and went along.

  Ying, who was 26, came from Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province. She and I were close in age, but our backgrounds could scarcely have been more different. Ying had been born into a period of unimaginable chaos: China’s Cultural Revolution, a time when Mao’s Red Guard was terrorizing the country and anyone with an intellectual background was labeled an enemy. Ying’s mother, a highly regarded doctor, had been the best student in her class at medical school, a distinction that now spelled disaster. When the Red Guard took over, she was one of the first to be sent to work in a remote village miles from Kunming. She took Ying with her. Ying’s father, a chemical engineer, was sent off to work in another distant rural town, and he took Ying’s younger sister along with him.

  During the Cultural Revolution, all able men and women in China were forced to work full time. Since Ying’s mother ran the only clinic in the village almost single-handedly, she had to leave Ying unattended in their apartment during the day. Ying saw her mother only briefly at dinner time, when she would return from the clinic to prepare some food before heading out once again to study the writings of Mao with her danwei, or work group—often until midnight. No childcare was available for Ying, as her identity papers listed her as a resident of Kunming, and only local children were accepted at the village children’s center.

  Of course, Ying wasn’t the only one who found her
self in this situation. “Oh, everyone has the same story to tell,” she assured me. Each day, once her mother and all the other parents were safely out of sight, Ying would climb on top of her kitchen table, out through the window, to the street below. She would make her way to a large field nearby where the other abandoned children all gathered to keep themselves entertained, requiring a fair amount of improvisation. One of their favorite activities was to capture, kill, and cook small animals over an open fire. “I ate all kinds of strange food at that time—mice, rats, lizards.”

  The children were happy enough with their independence, but they soon learned that the consequences of the Cultural Revolution could be deadly. One evening, while her parents were out at a political education session, one of Ying’s friends set out for the field on her own. When her parents came home late that night and found her missing, a village search committee was sent out. The next morning, on the outskirts of the village, only her clothes were found.

  The girl had been attacked and killed by a wolf, but even this incident didn’t put an end to the madness in the village. And the Cultural Revolution hadn’t put a dent in Ying’s parents’ unwavering support of Mao, a figure they continued to worship. “He is like a god to them, even now,” said Ying.

  So who did they blame for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution?

  “Just ‘crazy people,’ I guess.”

  Ying had begun to lose faith in the Chinese version of communism long before she first came to Laos, in 1995. Even prior to the Tiananmen Square massacre of 1989, she had come to doubt that the West was the source of all that was evil and corrupt in the world. “There were two truths in China when I was growing up: the truth in the textbook, and the reality outside,” Ying explained as we sipped our tea still waiting for our dumplings to arrive. “The textbook said that socialism was the best, that socialist countries were the richest, but we all knew this wasn’t true. But no one said anything. We just lied. Even my parents, they lied. If they wanted to stay home from work to be with their children, they couldn’t tell their superiors. They had to make some excuse that would demonstrate their devotion to the party, so they said they were sick. We all lived a lie, every day.” But Ying had continued to believe that the Chinese government was fundamentally good, and that it had the interests of the Chinese people at heart.

  That all changed when she got to Vientiane. Through her job, she observed first-hand the deep-seated corruption of the Lao government, and came to realize that her own government was operating under the same flawed system. Ying was responsible for taking care of the delegations from China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs that came to Vientiane to monitor her project’s progress. “They just wanted to stay in the best hotels, eat the most expensive food, and have a nice time.” She was surprised by their disregard for the good of the people, Lao or Chinese. But she knew the deal: her company used the Chinese government’s money to entertain its officials, thus ensuring that its contract would be renewed in the future.

  During her first year in Vientiane, Ying fell into a period of confusion, even despair, which was entirely out of character for this determined young woman. She began to question the entire world in which she’d been raised. “I decided that I couldn’t return to China, that I’d go to live in America.” She rejected communist ideas and even challenged traditional Chinese morals. At night, she went out to nightclubs—though, she assured me, she never touched any alcohol. She befriended a group of Western men, a wild bunch who talked openly and almost incessantly about their sexual exploits. “I had all sorts of bad thoughts then, about boys, about what I wanted to do with them. I knew that if I had the chance, I’d do it. I thought, why should I waste my youth?”

  She had a plan, and was just waiting for the chance to execute it. Then, it all fell apart.

  One weekend, she took a trip with a group of Chinese friends to Tad Leuk, a waterfall that lies just a few hours south of Vientiane. As a dare, she and two others decided to walk across the river at the top of the waterfall: “We stepped along the rocks, holding hands, and all of a sudden—I’m sure it wasn’t my fault—my friends slipped and fell into the water, and pulled me down with them.” The three were whisked away by the speed of the water as it rushed towards the falls. Ying grasped in vain for a branch or stone. Soon, she felt herself falling. “I felt water pouring down all around me. Then I hit a rock, and felt a huge bump on the back of my head. I thought to myself, ‘This is it. This is my life. And what have I done with it? What was the meaning of it?’”

  She survived with only minor injuries, but she checked into Vientiane’s Mahosot Hospital just in case. Since the medical care at Mahosot was nearly non-existent, her friends suggested that she see a Taiwanese doctor who was living in Vientiane at the time. But, they warned Ying, there was something she should know: the doctor was a Christian.

  “At that time, I knew nothing about Christianity. Like most Chinese, I just thought it was something foreign, something strange—nothing to do with me! But I was curious, and I thought maybe I could get a free Bible from her, so I agreed!” Reading material in Vientiane was scarce and, sure enough, when she arrived at her bedside, the doctor brought a Chinese-language Bible for Ying to read.

  With little else to do, Ying began leafing through the Old Testament. She was surprised by how negative the whole thing was. “From Adam and Eve all the way through to Abraham and his sons, everything was bad. Nothing nice. I thought, ‘Where are all the good things?’ Then I read the New Testament. And there was one phrase I remember: ‘Ask and you shall receive.’ ‘That’s it,’ I thought. I just have to ask, and my questions will be answered.”

  Soon after checking out of the hospital, she joined a Taiwanese church group and began her journey through the world of Christianity. She stopped hanging out with the same crowd of Westerners. All of a sudden, she had encountered a concept of love that she had never before known. “In communism, we are taught to hate. If your father is a class enemy, you must hate him. The only love we are taught is class love. But Christianity teaches real love, for all people. Love your neighbor as yourself.”

  Not at all religious myself—I hadn’t been to a church in years—I felt the conversation veering into vaguely uncomfortable territory. Just when it was getting a bit too heavy for my tastes, the food thankfully arrived. Ying discreetly bowed her head in silent prayer before digging in. She seemed secure in her new-found belief in Christianity, but I could sense that she was struggling to reconcile her Chinese heritage with the Western concepts of individualism and free choice that she’d encountered in Vientiane. “I just can’t talk to them,” Ying said of her Chinese colleagues. They couldn’t understand why she had adopted a “foreign” religion, or why she chose to spend time with foreigners. If she needed religion, why not Buddhism? Many were wary of any non-Chinese, particularly Americans. As an American man, of course, I was a central target of their suspicions. When we went out for dinner, Ying soon requested that we meet at the restaurant; she preferred not to suffer the scrutiny of her colleagues when I came to pick her up at the office.

  In fact, everything about Ying’s life in Laos was risky. Freedom of religion was guaranteed by the constitution, and Christians were permitted to practice their faith. But the constitution also prohibited “all acts of creating division of religion or creating divisions among the people,” and Christianity had come under increasing scrutiny. In 1999, district authorities—with the support of the police and military forces—orchestrated a renunciation and church-closing campaign in Savannakhet province in the south. By the end of 2000, fewer than half of the province’s churches remained open. In Vientiane, where a similar campaign was launched, officials demanded Christians renounce their faith or face arrest or imprisonment, and more than ten churches were closed. Around the country, about 95 Christians were arrested, and 25 remained in detention without trial at the end of 2000.

  As a foreigner, Ying was safer than Lao Christians, but she wasn’t immune: the government w
asn’t afraid to target non-Lao accused of proselytizing in defiance of prohibitions. It didn’t happen often, but foreigners working for evangelical groups operating under the guise of providing social services like education were subject to arrest and detention.

  Ying’s religious affiliation wasn’t the only thing that set her apart. Her association with foreigners, her desire to eat out with friends or even alone every once in a while—all were liabilities. But by removing herself from the world she knew back home in Kunming, Ying had learned so much, and experienced so many new things, that the risk was worth it. That’s not to say that all of her questions had been answered. In fact, she seemed to welcome my own skepticism about the Christianity she had accepted.

  I was suspicious of the Christian organizations I’d encountered in Laos, whose members often proselytized under the guise of English-language teaching or some other form of aid. They seemed to offer attractively simple answers to deeply complicated questions. How can you know that there is a God? Is the Bible the Truth or simply a convenient fiction? Hadn’t Ying just replaced one dogma with another?

  “Communism is a religion, yes,” she said. “Like a religion, it can never be realized. You can never prove that it’s right.”