Another Quiet American

by Brett Dakin

  Furthermore, for the average Lao citizen out in the provinces, the Asian economic crisis meant very little. The vast majority of Laos’ five or so million citizens were agricultural workers who lived in a subsistence, non-market economy. As I told Seng, the farmers down south were not about to stop farming just because of a little kip fluctuation up in Vientiane.

  But my explanation would offer little consolation to my friends at the NTA. The farmers might not have been suffering as a result of the economic crisis, but Seng and his colleagues certainly were. They belonged to the one sector of the Lao population that could not ignore the regional economy: the middle class—its entrepreneurs and civil servants.

  After we had finished talking, Seng took one look at the work that remained on his desk and—although closing time was still an hour away—packed up his things and left. The annual statistics report could wait until tomorrow.

  In an economy that required constant ingenuity just to survive, he had more important things to do.

  The Consultants

  ___________________

  Even with his four legs, the animal slips;

  even with all his knowledge, the scholar makes mistakes.

  Lao Proverb

  Thomas had a problem.

  A consultant with the German government’s official development agency, Thomas had been working in Laos for more than two years. With a professional background in biology and a strong interest in environmental protection, he had been responsible for co-ordinating Laos’ National Wildlife Day in 1997. It had been a great success, but one that had yet to be repeated; for reasons not at all clear to Thomas, there had been no mention of National Wildlife Day since. Even more discouraging, the environmental education project that Thomas used to run out of the Department of Forestry had simply disappeared.

  “So what’s happening at Forestry these days?” I asked Thomas, a balding, soft-spoken man nearing his fifties, during our first conversation over a beer by the pool at the Lane Xang Hotel.

  “Nothing,” he replied with a weary sigh. “Nothing’s happening. One day I came back from holidays and my staff was gone. They had all been transferred to other offices. Now I basically just do paperwork.”

  In fact, most foreign experts in Vientiane had a horror story or two to tell about bureaucratic inertia and corruption at Forestry. When the Lao government established 17 National Biodiversity Conservation Areas (NBCAs)—totaling about ten percent of the country’s land mass—and placed them under the jurisdiction of the Department of Forestry back in 1993, many environmental organizations and foreign governments had been taken in by this superficial commitment to the environment. A flourish of development aid activity in the field of conservation soon followed, and consultants from around the world descended on Vientiane.

  By the time I arrived, most NBCA projects were already as stagnant as the Mekong. Overwhelming obstacles like illegal logging, wildlife poaching, and the government’s nearly complete failure to enforce conservation regulations had left international aid workers feeling frustrated and helpless. Environmental experts seemed to be packing up their things and fleeing the country with a haste that rivaled the exodus of Lao citizens after 1975.

  So why didn’t Thomas just join the crowd and head back to Germany?

  “I don’t like Germany,” he said.

  He was disgruntled with his situation at the ministry, but he wasn’t about to leave Laos. He liked living in Vientiane. His wife, a Filipina who was the lead singer for the house band at the Novotel, also enjoyed life in Laos. So Thomas needed to find a new job. And not just any job—he had a few strict requirements. First was that, “I must stay in Vientiane, not in the provinces. Maybe a short trip occasionally, but I cannot live out there.”

  So now, the Germans’ top priority was to find Thomas some work. That’s how he and Martin, a fellow consultant in the field of geology, ended up at my office one Monday morning for a meeting with Bounh, Desa’s replacement as the director of the UNDP project. The Germans were armed with a spanking new development aid proposal: an all-expenses-paid eco-tourism development consultant stationed at the NTA. The consultant would assist the government by working with local communities and the private sector to develop eco-tourism projects in the NBCAs.

  “Usually, we would need you to write a detailed terms of reference for the office back in Germany,” Martin explained to Bounh over a UNDP-funded Nescafe. “Then they would choose someone who fit the position exactly. But, luckily, in this case we have already somebody in mind.”

  And who would that be? You guessed it: our friend Thomas.

  This all sounded great to my NTA colleagues, of course. As long as the government didn’t have to spend any of its own money, it would happily accept just about any aid project a foreign consultant could come up with. Garbage cans for urban centers? Great! Red tape reduction for the PM’s office? Why not! A foreign aid project to co-ordinate existing foreign aid projects? Come on in!

  With so many international aid agencies and NGOs lining up to pump money into the country, government officials barely had to lift a finger. And, busy sifting through the endless torrent of new aid proposals, bureaucrats certainly didn’t have a chance to propose their own ideas.

  At first, the NTA hadn’t quite understood Thomas’ proposal. As Martin had explained to me the day before meeting with Bounh, whenever the Germans looked into starting up a new aid project, it first distributed a questionnaire to the government in order to assess its needs in the area concerned. At the NTA, this questionnaire had somehow ended up in the mildly capable hands of Nee, of the Hotel Training and Management Division. Using her extremely limited written English skills, Nee had dutifully filled out the questionnaire and sent it back. When Thomas reviewed the responses, he noticed that something was amiss: they had nothing at all to do with eco-tourism. Instead, Nee had requested that Thomas provide customer-service training for hotel and restaurant staff in Vientiane.

  “But I’m a biologist!” Thomas had protested.

  In any case, each of us—Thomas, Martin, Bounh, and I—knew that the questionnaire completion exercise was little more than a farce. Its contents were irrelevant. For, in essence, Thomas was going to be working at the NTA whether the NTA liked it or not. When Martin had first mentioned the project to me, he had presented it as a done deal. “It seems we need to find somewhere for Thomas to work, and somehow NTA is it.”

  I never mentioned it to Thomas, but his modest eco-tourism consultancy project embodied everything that was wrong with development in Laos. His very approach had doomed the project to failure from the outset; like so many aid workers before him, he had put the cart before the horse. Rather than making a genuine effort to discern the needs of the Lao government in a particular area, researching what had already been done and proposing a project accordingly, the Germans had simply come up with something that fulfilled their immediate need: putting one of their frustrated consultants back to work. In fact, an eco-tourism development project was already well underway at the NTA, but the Germans didn’t even seem to know about it.

  Whether or not the project was necessary was immaterial. They just needed to find Thomas a job.

  ___

  “In fact, tourism is not my specialty,” said Mr. Kawabata with a slight chuckle over his chilled asparagus soup at Le Vêndome restaurant. A Frenchman ran this modest eatery in the center of Vientiane, just around the corner from my house and a few paces from the riverfront. Le Vêndome was a favorite haunt of Kawabata’s; in fact, it was the sole restaurant in Vientiane, save his hotel dining room, to which he had ever ventured.

  Kawabata was a consultant with Japan’s official development agency, assigned to advise the NTA for three months on how it might expand access to the Japanese tourist market. It was a field in which he had limited experience, and this evening, with the aid of a bottle of Chardonnay, he wasn’t afraid to admit it.

  As I swatted the occasional mosquito away from my plate, Kawabata told me his s
tory. It was difficult to pay close attention to his every word, as his appearance offered numerous distractions. His hair was perpetually out of place, despite the healthy dose of pomade he used to try and keep it under control. He donned a pair of large eyeglasses, which insisted on sliding down to the tip of his nose during conversation; the thick lenses and heavy black plastic frames were straight out of the 1950s. And he spoke in short, awkward spurts that sometimes gave the impression of an officer barking commands rather than a colleague making conversation.

  Kawabata had been a casualty of the bursting of Japan’s economic bubble in the mid-1990s. When he was laid off in 1997, he had been working at Tokyo Steel for nearly 35 years. So much for lifetime employment. Luckily, with the help of his former employer, he had been able to quickly secure a position as a “senior research consultant” at an international tourism development institute in Tokyo. Overnight, he transformed himself into an expert on tourism development in the Third World—and ended up in an office adjacent to the ICU at the NTA.

  Kawabata’s transition to tourism development in Laos was rather hurried, as I discovered when I first ran into him in the hall outside his office. After introducing ourselves and making pleasant conversation in Japanese for a few minutes, we exchanged cards. On his I was surprised to find the logo of the Tokyo Steel Corporation. This was the same card, I supposed, that he’d used while living and working for Tokyo Steel in Michigan in the late 1980s, a time when the Japanese economy was still on the rise and Japan’s corporations had outposts all over the American economic landscape.

  Now Kawabata lived with his wife and two sons in Japan’s Saitama prefecture, smack in the middle of the Tokyo suburbs. Though they were both nearing thirty, his sons, like most unmarried Japanese, still lived at home—it was cheaper, and, in any case, more in keeping with the central Confucian value of filial piety. Kawabata commuted into Central Tokyo each morning by train, a long ride that gave him a chance to read his favorite conservative daily newspaper. Back in Japan, he lived in an ocean of conformity.

  During his first two and a half months at the NTA, Kawabata accomplished precious little. He sat in his air-conditioned office, an unwieldy Japanese-English dictionary at his side, and dutifully scrutinized the English-language Vientiane Times in an attempt to understand the scintillating articles. Every once in a while, he would come up with a few recommendations for the NTA staff. Once, he fired off a three-page memo to the head of the Marketing and Promotion Unit, pointing out all the typographical mistakes in the English-language “Visit Laos Year 1999-2000” brochure. Kawabata spoke English very well, but his written skills still had a ways to go. He ended up replacing the NTA’s errors with ones of his own.

  During the final two weeks of his contract, however, Kawabata struck gold. Over dinner, he let me in on his minor triumph: the discovery that there was a ceiling on the number of tourists Laos could ever hope to attract. Considering the limited flight capacity into Vientiane, and up north, at the time, Kawabata argued, the NTA would be unable to expand tourism much beyond 1999 levels. The country would need to improve international air access and domestic air travel, and soon. I congratulated him on his observation, but not before noting that there was little, if anything, the NTA could do about it. Kawabata’s pride was undiminished, however, and he waited until just the right moment before he revealed his discovery to the rest of the staff.

  The moment came a few days later, when he was scheduled to give a presentation to summarize the findings of his mission. As he slowly made his way through his notes and prepared to unveil the great revelation, I could sense the excitement gradually welling up inside him. Unfortunately, Kawabata’s excitement was not contagious—his presentation style left something to be desired. He rattled off statistics from his triumphant report without once looking up: 5.9% Japanese travelers, 4.3% male backpackers, a 5% market share. The numbers just kept on coming. Most of the staff in attendance hadn’t the faintest idea what Kawabata was talking about, and when he finally dropped the news about the flight capacity problem, it fell on deaf ears. The only reason half the room had shown up in the first place was for a break from work and a free soft drink.

  As Kawabata plowed on, Khit and others madly flipped through the presentation materials in a vain attempt to follow along. The confusion on my colleagues’ and students’ faces was painful to witness. The office cameraman had been brought in to document the session, and I prayed that he wouldn’t focus on Mani of the Statistics Unit. Her expression betrayed the reality that she could barely introduce herself in English, let alone digest reports on the intricacies of tourism development. Kawabata occasionally tried to ease the tension with a joke or two, but they inevitably fell flat. When they did, his lonely chuckles came across not simply as awkward—in this context, they struck me as almost maniacal.

  Kawabata was a kind man, and well-intentioned, but to my colleagues he appeared as the archetypal “Ugly Japanese.” He had marched into the office and, without any knowledge of the language, culture, or political system, demanded changes that the NTA simply couldn’t carry out. The staff loved to make fun of Kawabata behind his back: his anachronistic fashion, the corner of his shirt that peeked out of his perpetually undone zipper, his disheveled hair. But Kawabata’s main obstacle wasn’t his flawed appearance. It was the content of his consultancy. An employee of the Japanese government concerned almost exclusively with the Japanese market, Kawabata’s advice would always be circumspect at the NTA.

  For in the end, Kawabata’s failure came down to one grand miscalculation above all others: he and his supervisors assumed that the Lao actually wanted more Japanese to visit their country.

  ___

  “I’ve had better luck with Africans,” Nigel whispered to me under his breath before sighing in exasperation. Nigel was an international tourism marketing consultant who had been assigned by the UNDP to work with the NTA. We were standing in the frigid, air-conditioned conference room of the Royal Hotel, where Nigel was trying in vain to conduct a marketing workshop for bureaucrats and those in the tourism industry. I had just dropped in to see how things were going: not very well, it seemed. “There’s a real problem with lateral thinking here,” said Nigel. “These people just don’t know how to work together.”

  So far, the workshop participants had spent the morning playing around with colored slips of paper. The yellow pieces, I learned, signified tourism attractions; the green ones, problems with those attractions; and the blue ones, possible solutions. Participants had been grouped according to region—North, South, and Central Laos—and had begun by writing down every tourist attraction they could think of on a yellow slip, then sticking them up on the wall. After an hour or so, it had dawned on one participant that some organization was necessary, so the slips of paper had been grouped according to province. This task alone had taken more than an hour, for, despite working in the industry, most hadn’t a clue where the tourist sites were actually located.

  By the time I’d arrived, the workshop had succeeded in creating little more than complete confusion. There were slips of paper everywhere, decorating the walls and strewn about on the floor as if in the aftermath of a ticker-tape parade. Most participants had already given up, their attention spans spent and their stomachs grumbling.

  According to Nigel, the task of the day was actually to establish travel itineraries in each region that could be easily marketed abroad. But many participants seemed to think that simply putting the names of tourist sites up on the wall was enough. After having done that, they relaxed. Most were content to sit quietly in the air-conditioned meeting room, sipping the complimentary drinking water, and waiting until the first coffee break mercifully arrived. Officials from the more remote of Laos’ provinces seemed excited just to be in the capital, delighted by the free pens and lined notebooks provided by the UNDP.

  “Just another five minutes, and then I want everyone sitting down so we can attempt an analysis . . . of what we’re doing,” announced Nigel
, hopefully.

  A towering, jovial Brit of about sixty, Nigel had been hired for two three-month stints at the NTA. He was paid 10,000 US dollars a month, the usual rate for UN consultants. Not all of my colleagues knew just how relatively astronomical Nigel’s salary was—about 500 times the average civil servant’s—but they had a good enough idea. And, in private, they all agreed: there simply had to be better ways to spend 60,000 US dollars in development aid.

  In addition to touring the country with Bounh and giving marketing workshops in Vientiane, Nigel’s main task at the NTA was to develop a comprehensive tourism-marketing plan for the country. In the process, he had used a portion of the UNDP project budget to hire a friend’s design firm back in England to come up with a logo for the new campaign—the “Magic of Laos.” The result of six months work was an impressively heavy English-language report that drew largely on his past experiences in the developing world, particularly Africa. In parts, the plan seemed to have little to do with the situation in Laos itself.

  In any case, the likelihood of any recommendation in the report actually being implemented was extremely slight. It would be months before the document was translated into Lao, so most NTA staff remained in the dark as to its contents. After a translation was completed, high-ranking government officials would have to approve the report before anything in it could even be considered. By the time we reached that point in the process—if indeed we ever did—Nigel would have long since moved on to his next assignment.

  A few months after Nigel left Laos for the last time, he sent me a brief e-mail. He had another project up his sleeve: “I have been speaking to the EU in Brussels,” he wrote, “and there is a small fund for short-term support for SE Asian countries, which they seem not to know what to do with.” Free development aid! What an opportunity! “However, it means the use of outside European-based consultants. I have been thinking of how we can get some more help to Laos. . . . I am going to suggest to Brussels that I undertake some detailed market research for the NTA in their potential core markets of France, Switzerland, Germany, the UK, and the Netherlands so that . . . they will have detailed background knowledge of what the needs of European markets are, who the main tour operators are, and also set up meetings for them. Can you ask Mr. Bounh if this would be helpful to him, and if it is I will draft a proposal that he can get the chairman to get the Ministry of Finance to deliver to the EU delegation in Bangkok.”