by Brett Dakin
Unlike so many of Vientiane’s expats, who whiled away their time pining for home over beer on the banks of the Mekong, for Ying, living in Laos had been a tremendous transformative experience. She now openly challenged what her government told her, expressing controversial views over dinner on everything from China’s role in Tibet to its campaign to enter the WTO. Just as I had come to view America in a different light during my time in Laos, Ying had gained a new perspective on her own country. Laos was a prism through which we could more clearly view the places we called home. For Ying, Vientiane had turned out to be a city of revelations, where she had learned more about the world—and about herself—than she ever would have if she had stayed in China.
“Sometimes it’s good to look at your country from another place,” she told me as we waited for the check. “Sometimes you don’t like what you see.”
I agreed with her. But I had trouble reconciling what I knew about Ying—her curiosity, flexibility, and dynamism—with her strong religious convictions. How had she managed to achieve such clarity so quickly, to suddenly accept that there was a single answer to her problems? I had never experienced the sort of revelation she had described to me. Much as I had tried over the years, I had never managed to find the Truth. And for all of its extraordinary contributions to the world, religion had always struck me as a potentially dangerous force. I had always tried to see things from all sides, to try to understand every possible perspective. It’s true, this usually left me confused—and dissatisfied. In a sense, clarity was just what I had come to Laos to attain, but my time there had only made me more confused about the world. Laos had long been a laboratory in which the great powers had freely conducted experiments on how to structure society. Imperialism, independence, capitalism, communism, socialism, development, evangelism, nation-building—Laos had seen it all. But what was to be learned from all this experimentation?
If Ying could find the answer, why couldn’t I?
Funny Money
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“So, what did you do this weekend?”
Thus began many a Monday afternoon English lesson at the NTA. Ill-prepared for class, as I was so often wont to be, it was this question that I’d use to kick off a lesson with my advanced students. The idea was to buy myself some time as I mulled over how on earth we were going to spend the next hour and a half together. Usually, however, my students had no interest in assisting me in this endeavor. Rather than expound upon their favorite weekend leisure activities, they preferred instead to sit in silence and stare. One Monday, however, I did get a response. Seng was the only student who had shown up that day, and in answer to my simple query, he taught me an economics lesson that I’d not soon forget.
“What did I do this weekend. . . ? I worked.”
At the NTA, Seng definitely stood out. He was one of only a handful of employees from Laos’ ethnic minorities. Most of my colleagues were Lao Loum, the lowland Lao who have always ruled Laos. Seng was Lao Theung, the poorest of the country’s ethnic groups. According to government calculations, about half the population was Lao Loum, while thirty percent was Lao Theung. The government trumpeted the nation’s ethnic diversity at every opportunity. Female representatives of each of the three main groups invariably showed up on printed currency, government billboards, and in official festivals and parades. The number of minorities in the National Assembly was representative of their proportion of the population at large. At the NTA, I translated many a speech for vice-ministers and deputy prime ministers that made a point of congratulating Laos’ ethnic minorities for their contributions—never quite identified—to the success of Visit Laos Year 1999-2000.
Seng had been born roughly thirty years before in a rural village just north of Luang Prabang. His parents had converted to lowland rice cultivation under a government relocation plan targeted at ethnic minorities when Seng was only a child; his parents were still farmers in the same small village. After completing his studies, Seng moved south to the capital to make his fortune. Things hadn’t turned out quite as he had hoped. As we sat alone in the classroom at the NTA, Seng told me about his life in Vientiane outside of English class. For weeks now, his one-year old son had been very sick and needed medical attention badly. But good quality, affordable healthcare was hard to come by in a country in which the economy was spinning wildly out of control. The kip was sinking fast, and Seng was struggling just to keep his head above water.
When the Asian economic crisis descended on the nations of Southeast Asia in 1997, Laos was hit hardest of all. The country’s fledgling economy was so dependent on Thai investment, and on the Thai market for its exports, that it simply could not stand on its own. When the Thai baht began to slide, the kip abruptly collapsed. Laos saw a greater depreciation of its currency and a higher inflation rate than any other country in Asia. The kip was still sliding when I arrived in Vientiane, when one US dollar was worth about 3,800 kip on the black market. A month later, it was worth 4,200. By the time summer came around, the exchange rate had reached 9,000 to the dollar. No one even bothered with the official bank rate. The kip had depreciated more than seventy percent, and inflation had surpassed 100 percent. By March 1999, the World Bank had decided against granting a 20-million-dollar credit to the Lao government due to its failure to meet conditions of reform and restructuring to which it had previously agreed. Even worse, as the currency took a nosedive and prices soared, salaries remained the same. In 1997, the average civil servant had been paid a monthly salary worth twenty dollars, but by mid-1999 it was the equivalent of only ten.
That is, if they were being paid at all.
On the morning Seng and I spoke, the staff at the NTA had not actually been paid in more than three months—the office had run out of money, and the central government wasn’t about to supply any more. Even when my colleagues did receive their salaries, the money just wasn’t enough to survive. With prices rising daily, they could not buy what they had been able to in the days before the crisis began. At the market, the average price of meat rose from $1.75 to $2.60 per kilogram, almost overnight. Seng told me that he was now paying more than two dollars per kilogram of beef and pork, a dollar for fish, and a dollar and a half for chicken. As he and his family attempted to stay afloat in a sea of fluctuating currency exchange rates, skyrocketing prices, and absurdly low salaries, Seng found that his hands were tied more tightly than ever before.
No one had any idea how large the country’s foreign reserves were; it was a closely guarded state secret. International economists guessed that 100 million dollars, or just two months of imports, was optimistic. They explained that the depreciation of Laos’ currency was the result of a severe balance of payments deficit—for every dollar of export, Laos was importing two dollars—that had been exacerbated by shrinking export growth during the economic crisis. A steep contraction in the Asian market for timber—regrettably one of Laos’ major exports—had led to a ballooning of the trade deficit. Foreign direct investment had also dried up; investors had their own crises to deal with at home. And the possibility of a bail-out by the IMF or the World Bank seemed unlikely, as the Lao government was unable—or unwilling—to meet the strict conditions set by the international lending agencies.
Seng and his wife, a nurse at Mahosot Hospital, did what it took to get by. To save on housing costs, they lived with their child on the empty, unfurnished second floor of the NTA. They were able to make a bit of extra money this way, as Seng also served as a night guard for the building. Their living space was a gloomy affair, with few windows and none of the comforts of home. The unpainted walls were coated with a thick layer of cobwebs, and boxes of unwanted government papers sat in a corner of their modest kitchen.
Because his wife was a nurse, Seng’s son was guaranteed a place at the hospital’s day care center. But the center was filled with so many sick children that Seng feared a stay there would do his son’s health more harm than good. And Seng couldn’t afford to pay for care at one of Vien
tiane’s private children’s clinics. Doctors at these clinics were known to refuse to tell their patients what type of medicine they had prescribed, in order to force them to return to the clinic each time they needed care. The doctors would crush the particular medicine into an unidentifiable powder and hand it to the patient in a small paper funnel. To make sure you got the right stuff, then, you always had to visit the clinic—the much cheaper pharmacies weren’t an option.
On the weekends, Seng explained, his work did not stop. To help make ends meet, he and his wife produced a popular Lao candy made of peanuts and sugar, and sold it to a vendor at a market just out of town. On Friday night after work, under the sole working light bulb in their makeshift apartment, they would boil pure sugar in a large vat. When the sugar had melted, they would add the crushed peanuts. They poured the mixture onto long, flat baking sheets, rolled it into a thin layer, and let it harden overnight. On Saturday morning, they would cut the candy into small squares and wrap the individual pieces in plastic. Seng would then get on his motorbike and head out of town to the market, where competition from other candy suppliers was fierce. Seng’s vendor would pay him only after every piece had been sold.
Seng didn’t always think his life would end up this way. After he graduated from high school in the early 1980s, he had been granted a scholarship by the government to study in the Soviet Union. Seng saw the scholarship as a tremendous opportunity to gather knowledge that he could later use to help his own country to develop. And it was an extraordinary achievement. People like Seng faced deep-rooted discrimination in Laos; even today, state and Party officials are known to deny qualified people from ethnic minorities the opportunity to study abroad. Generally, given their remote habitats, minority tribes have difficulty influencing government decisions regarding spending and the allocation of natural resources. But Seng was lucky enough to spend six years studying engineering in the Ukraine, and he loved every minute of it. Well, perhaps not every minute.
When he first arrived in the USSR, he admitted, he was a little homesick. The winter was cruel, and he wasn’t used to the faceless concrete apartment buildings in which everyone lived. “But after some time,” Seng told me, “it was okay.” Before long, he found a Russian girlfriend and moved into her apartment near the university. One night, he invited a fellow Lao exchange student, Bounnyang, over to the apartment for drinks to meet his girlfriend and one of her classmates. Bounnyang showed up with a case of beer and some dried, salted fish, a typical Russian snack. The four of them imbibed quite a bit that night, and Bounnyang ended up sleeping with the classmate of Seng’s girlfriend.
When Bounnyang completed his studies in chemical engineering in 1994, he proposed to the girl, and they were soon married at a small church in Odessa. She moved with him back to Vientiane and quickly found work at the Soviet Embassy. The transition wasn’t so easy for Bounnyang. He applied for a position with the government; with his strong scientific background, he was sure he’d be offered something at the Ministry of Science and Technology. But no positions were available to Lao citizens who had studied abroad. Everyone knew that Bounnyang was far better qualified, but those who had stayed behind had filled all the jobs—every desk at the ministry was taken.
Nearing graduation back in the Ukraine, Seng also asked his girlfriend to marry him. But she refused; her family, who lived in an apartment only a block away, would not allow her to leave the country. Upon returning to Vientiane, Seng was offered a job with the NTA. The position had nothing whatsoever to do with what he had studied in the Soviet Union, but at least it was a job, and Seng was glad to have it. Eventually, his girlfriend married a Russian man, and Seng later married a Lao girl. He wasn’t sure if his ex-girlfriend even knew—it had been years since they’d last exchanged letters.
Bounnyang was never able to find a job with the government. When Seng and I spoke, he was working as a delivery man for the Beer Lao Company in Vientiane. He drove from one beer shop to the next, ensuring that all the inventories were in order. His wasn’t a job that required a degree in chemical engineering. At Beer Lao, Bounnyang was making more money than he could ever have made as a civil servant, but he still dreamt of one day actually putting the skills he had learned in the former Soviet Union to work. Every once in a while, Seng visited Bounnyang and his wife at their house on the outskirts of Vientiane. It was a far cry from Seng’s spartan apartment at the NTA. They lived in a neighborhood of large villas, most of which were rented by foreign expats. Just like Seng and his wife, they had a one-year old son.
“When I go to visit, we speak Russian and talk about the past,” Seng said.
“Do you sometimes feel uncomfortable when you go to his house?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” Seng assured me. “Because I know that he is a close friend.” Bounnyang may have been a close friend, but Seng must have recognized the irony in their relationship. Seng had realized his dream of serving his nation in a government position, and now he lived on an empty floor of his office building. Bounnyang, a trained chemical engineer, had been shut out of the civil service—and he lived in a fancy house in the suburbs with a foreign wife, a car, and cash to spare.
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After English class was over, I spent some time in the Statistics Unit helping Seng write and edit the 1998 Statistics Report on Tourism in Laos. But first, I had to take a trip to the only functioning office latrine, my personal roll of toilet paper—soft and welcoming in comparison to the scraps of waste paper someone had kindly placed in a basket inside the stall—in hand. After I returned to the office, we popped the Spice Girls into the CD player and worked together to produce an English-language document that actually made sense, a rarity indeed at the NTA. Towards the end of the day, as he was piecing together a map of Laos to include in the report, Seng suddenly looked up from his desk.
“Mr. Brett, do you think the Lao economy will survive?”
Not grasping the gravity of his question at first, I laughed it off. “Oh, sure it will, come on. It’s okay.” I turned my attention back to the truly riveting paragraph on the screen, a convoluted, statistic-ridden text about tourist arrivals and departures.
“No, Brett, do think it will survive?” Seng insisted.
Taken aback by his sudden and intense concern, I walked over to his desk and asked him what was up. The night before, it turned out, he had heard a Voice of America broadcast on his short-wave radio that had reported that the Lao economy was about to collapse. I had always thought of VOA as a dusty vestige of the Cold War, but even today, Lao who spoke English well enough tuned into the US government broadcasts regularly in order to get a different perspective on news about their own country.
“What happens to my savings if the government runs out of money? Won’t the banks be empty?” he asked.
“Well, what does the government tell you?” I wondered aloud.
“Nothing!” Seng replied. “They just keep saying that everything is okay.”
Throughout my time in Vientiane, the government had been essentially silent on the issue of the nation’s precipitous economic decline. In the local newspapers, officials acknowledged Laos’ financial difficulties only with empty calls for unity, patriotism, and increased devotion to the People’s Revolutionary Party. But the people were worried, and they were beginning to demand explanations. As I listened to Seng talk about the dire economic situation, I sensed an apprehension in his voice that I’d rarely encountered in Laos. I wanted to comfort him, to tell him that things would be all right. I wanted to provide some answers.
But what was I supposed to say? What did he really want from me? Answers? What did I know about economics, anyway? Only what I’d read in books or gleaned from theoretical discussions at school about growth and contraction, inflation and unemployment. I had spent some time studying Asian political economy, reading and writing about the post-war economic miracle and social change in East Asia. But Seng knew so much more about the world, and about living, than I did. He had a wife and chil
d, and faced responsibilities and concerns that dwarfed my own. All I really had to worry about was which restaurant I’d go to for dinner that evening. Chinese noodle soup or Vietnamese spring rolls? Throughout my life, I had been given so much: a supportive family, extraordinary educational opportunities, the chance to live and work abroad. All I really knew about suffering was what I’d read in books or seen on stage. But there was nothing theoretical about the economic crisis in Laos. It was about people’s lives.
And Seng was asking me for answers?
In Laos, I often found myself in this position. It was one that I found unsettling. Here I was, 23 years old, fresh out of the ivory tower. For most of my life, I had been told what to do—what papers to write, what courses to take. And now, as a “consultant” of sorts at the NTA, I was expected to tell others what to do. Not only how to speak English, but also how to do their jobs. But what did I know about their jobs, or about how to develop tourism in Laos? Just about the youngest person at the office—in a society in which age was traditionally respected above all else—I was among the least qualified to provide advice on sound and sustainable development policies for Laos’ future. It is true, I had been offered opportunities most of my colleagues could only dream of. Sure, I knew more about technology and current affairs than any of them. I could use the Internet and name Israel’s prime minister. But they had far more to teach me than I did them about the way the world worked.
In fact, I did have a few words of comfort to offer Seng. I knew from my informal discussions with visiting officials from the Asian Development Bank and other agencies that fears of a collapse of the Lao economy were largely unfounded. Despite all the negative talk, some economic indicators didn’t look all that bad: while the average growth rate for Southeast Asia in 1998 had been well below zero, in Laos, it had been about four percent. Within the region, severe contraction in Thailand and Indonesia had actually been offset by this positive growth in Laos, which had been largely fueled by a major hydroelectric dam project.
