by Brett Dakin
In my response, I was as frank as I thought appropriate: “I’ll mention your suggestion about market research to Bounh. Of course, I’m sure he’ll say it’s a great idea; as you know, the NTA will agree to almost anything that doesn’t cost the NTA any money or political capital.”
That was the last I ever heard from Nigel.
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I may have given the consultants a hard time, but in truth I couldn’t afford to be too critical. For wasn’t I one of them? After all, according to my business card, I was a “consultant.” And much of what I observed in Thomas, Kawabata, and Nigel, I saw reflected in my own work. With very little relevant knowledge, I was trying to change the way things were done. I made recommendations that I actually expected people to acknowledge. Fortunately, there was one central difference that separated me from the real consultants: money. My relative poverty, which had once so frustrated me, was in fact my best asset. My colleagues didn’t think of me as a walking bank, the smiling face of a rich foreign government or international organization. Rather, I was a free agent, just a guy trying to help out. I had nothing to offer but myself and my thoughts. I was at liberty to actually get to know the people with whom I was working, to find out what they thought about the world and Laos’ place in it.
Nevertheless, when I lay in bed at night, trying without much luck to fall asleep, and I thought about the future, I saw Thomas, Nigel, and Kawabata. I saw a man on his own, traveling from one poor country to the next as part of the international development caravan. Writing reports that no one would read. Sipping the local beer in hotel bars. And wondering what good he was doing.
Was this the man I wanted to be?
Another Quiet American
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You can’t teach a crocodile to swim.
Lao Proverb
The day I first met Joe, it was raining. Hard.
The heavy drops had begun to fall as soon as I had revved up my Honda Dream and set out through the muddy streets of Vientiane for his house. Unlike my neighbors, I hadn’t been deterred by the weather. Whenever it rained, the capital simply came to a standstill. Anyone with plans to go out stayed home, and anyone who had planned to go home just stayed wherever they were. Those who were out on the road when the skies opened quickly sought the nearest cover—under a tree, perhaps, or a nearby living room—and the roads were suddenly cleared of traffic. It was as if everyone was living in Oz, convinced they would melt if they were so much as touched by a drop of rain. The only people crazy enough to be outside were the falang, the foreigners. If we had somewhere to go, no rainfall was going to stop us; you could take us out of the West, but you couldn’t take the West out of us.
Joe lived in a spacious villa built in the early 1970s and hidden discreetly behind a wall in Naxay village, a few minutes from the center of town. I always seemed to miss the turn that would take me down the small dirt road where Joe’s house was. I would ride back and forth, wondering when to venture off the one paved road in the village. The streets in Joe’s neighborhood would wash out with the slightest rain, so the ride could be treacherous. I wanted to be sure I had the right street before I took the plunge.
Deep purple bougainvillea cascaded over the upstairs balcony and down the façade of Joe’s house. That day, small beads of rainwater had collected on the flowers’ petals, and as I pulled into his driveway, I admired the understated beauty of Joe’s garden. So rapt was I with the foliage that I promptly skidded on the thin film of mold that had covered the pavement, and toppled over, landing right at Joe’s doorstep. I picked myself up and brushed myself off as best I could. Joe’s guard, an elderly man, came scurrying out from behind the house—not to help me up, but rather to open the gate to the driveway. He saw that I’d beaten him to it, and quickly retreated.
“Well, hello there!” said a voice from behind the bougainvillea. “Come on in!”
Joe emerged from the front door and, with a firm handshake, welcomed me inside. “How do you like the flowers?” He didn’t seem to notice the dark brown streak that ran down the side of my right pant leg. If he did, he said nothing, so I spent the next few hours covered in mud, trying not to soil his furniture.
Joe was dressed in the uniform of the relaxed expat in Laos: a colorful silk, short-sleeved shirt—always untucked—and pressed khaki slacks. His 56 years hadn’t been kind to his coiffure, and he’d lost most of the hair on top of his head. All that remained up there were two healthy tufts of gray perched above each ear. Joe’s face was broad, pale, and smooth, almost shiny. The sheen was punctuated by a pair of bushy eyebrows that pointed upwards diagonally from his eyes. He was perfectly groomed, down to his fingernails; every strand of hair trimmed to equal length. When I excused myself to the bathroom to wash my hands, I found an array of grooming instruments neatly lined up on a dresser: nail clippers, a nose-hair remover, ear-wax cleaners, and an assortment of shaving paraphernalia.
When I’d finished washing up, Joe and I sat down in his living room to chat before lunch. At first, I wasn’t much into the conversation, as Joe was sitting just in front of a large bookcase filled with old novels and non-fiction volumes about Southeast Asia. My mouth fairly watered at the sight of so many English-language books, all in one place. I managed to pull my attention away from the smorgasbord of literature and heard him explain that I’d caught him just in time, as he was leaving for a business trip to Singapore that afternoon. Just then, the guard slunk past us, carrying Joe’s suitcase and jacket. As he was about to place the luggage on the floor near the front door, my host suddenly cut off our conversation and called out in English, “No, not there, Keo, not there. Put the suitcase out in the garage, and hang the jacket on the window handle. That’s right. . . . Yes. . . . Oh no, not there.” Exasperated, he got up from his chair, and, muttering angrily, performed the task himself.
“These Lao. I just can’t understand it,” he said. “They can’t do two things at once. Can’t fucking walk and chew gum at the same time.”
Three decades before, Joe had served with the US military in Vietnam. His years in the military had rubbed off on his approach to life, and he expected the tasks he assigned to be executed strictly according to instructions. Every aspect of his life was tightly regimented, each activity a part of a routine that could not be upset. That morning, he told me, the water in his neighborhood had been shut off for a few hours—a common enough occurrence in Vientiane—and he’d been unable to shave on time. Joe was just getting over this rude interruption of his daily schedule.
While a pervasive military air surrounded Joe, there was also a strong boyish quality to the man. It often seemed as if he’d never grown up. In conversation, whenever he came upon a subject that interested him, a magical glimmer would appear in his eyes and he would nearly jump out of his seat with excitement. The Internet, for example, fascinated him. He spent hours every day surfing the web and dashing off e-mails to an array of unwitting recipients—from old college professors to President Bill Clinton. The Internet allowed Joe to close the gaping distance between his “home” in Vientiane and the rest of the world.
“Now they can’t ignore me!” he said with a grin.
After six years in Vietnam, Joe returned to the States for college. “I studied political science . . . basically what you choose when nothing else is left.” He was married to an American for a short while after graduation. When the marriage collapsed in the early 1980s, Joe left for Asia. He hadn’t been back to the US since.
Joe led a quiet life in Vientiane. He rarely ventured beyond the gates at the end of the driveway that protected him from the outside world, and almost never went out at night. Each evening he would go to bed at nine, read for an hour, and then fall asleep. To relax, he listened to instrumental versions of Thai love songs; he no longer found much comfort in listening to Western music. “Sometimes I wonder if I’d even understand people if I went back to the US,” he told me. “I’ve been over here for so long.”
Joe
visited Laos for the first time in 1987. He had been enchanted, and was drawn back to the region where he had once fought a war. A few years later, he moved to Vientiane and started a small publishing venture.
Then, in 1997, the Asian economic crisis landed in Laos with a deafening crash. Joe’s Thai partner pulled out, and the business collapsed. By the time I met Joe, he had no regular income and was cutting costs wherever he could. To reduce electricity bills, all the lights in the house were off. He had cut the guard to part time and had come close to dismissing his cook, Sai—until he had tried to do without her.
Joe and I sat down for lunch in his dining room and Sai brought out a plate of BLTs and two bowls of home-made vegetable soup. Sai was an elderly Lao woman with a warm and gentle demeanor that was disarming. But I sensed that she was unsettled in Joe’s presence, and the wan smile that broke through her discomfort was visibly forced. She was smartly dressed in a sin, and her hair was neatly tied up in a bun.
As we ate, I thought of Pyle, the CIA man and title character in The Quiet American, Graham Greene’s seminal novel about the early days of the Vietnam War. In the book, Pyle’s grand idea was that of a “Third Force” in Asia: the notion that, free of any colonial baggage, the Americans would be the force best suited to fight alongside “the people” for democracy in Indochina. “At least they won’t hate us like they hate the French,” Pyle said. And he was so sure that he was right. Having lunch with Joe, I was reminded of just why Pyle’s quaint theory had never really worked. Its premise was refuted on a daily basis amid the post-colonial bliss of this quiet American’s life in Vientiane.
“Not bad,” Joe says as we munched on the sandwiches. “Not bad at all, for Laos.” He tossed off the remark as if it was the first time he’d ever tried Sai’s BLTs—although I knew that this was his lunch almost every day. Once we were finished, Joe rang the small silver bell on the dining room table to the right of his setting. “Dessert?” he asked, the glimmer of youthful excitement returning to his blue eyes. “I think we have lemon meringue pie today! Let me just check with the cook. Lemon meringue pie today, Sai? Yes?”
Sai wasn’t quite sure what Joe was asking, so I translated. Joe had lived in Vientiane for nearly a decade, but he barely spoke a word of Lao. “Oh, so you’re studying Lao,” he said, once Sai had disappeared into the kitchen. “Good for you. I bet you like Lao food, too.”
His compliment didn’t seem entirely heartfelt: I might be studying Lao, Joe was saying, but I would never really learn the language. Expats never did.
After dessert, Joe realized that his ride to the airport was late.
“These Lao, they just can’t do anything right,” he sighed. “You know, when the North Vietnamese fought with the Lao communists over here, they always put a Vietnamese at the front and one at the back of the troops—and one in the middle for good measure—just to make sure the Lao would fight!”
Even after so many years of living and working in Laos, Joe still expected people to be on time. “You know, this is what I can’t stand about the Lao,” he complained to Lath, his office assistant, who had been in charge of organizing Joe’s ride to the airport. “You tell them to do one thing, and they do another. I just can’t play these fucking games anymore.”
Lath had been in the house throughout my visit, always lurking in the background. While Joe and I had been eating, he had pretended to be working in the small office that adjoined the dining room. But he had really been listening in on our conversation. Often I’d catch his eye as he nonchalantly shifted in his seat to get a better vantage point on the dining-room table. Once he saw me, he would quickly look down and pretend again to be engrossed in his work. In fact, there wasn’t very much to do in Joe’s office these days, and I sensed that Lath was looking for a way out. When the driver finally showed up and whisked Joe away to the airport, I went back to the office to see if I might strike up a conversation with Lath. It didn’t take much.
“Sometimes,” he told me, “I feel like I was born in the wrong country. I feel ashamed to say it, but it’s true.”
Lath was full of energy and ambition. Dressed casually in faded blue jeans and a leather belt, to which he had clipped his cell phone, he exuded an intensity that said: this guy is going places, and will wait for no one. During the 1980s, Lath had graduated at the very top of his high school class, and had been sent by the government to study engineering in Czechoslovakia. His early success was the result not only of studying hard, but also of a continuous battle against the inertia of his parents, both farmers in a small village just outside Vientiane.
He had returned from Czechoslovakia excited by the prospect of assisting the government in the development of his country. But, like so many of his contemporaries, he found that he wasn’t welcome. The very government that had sent him to study abroad, now refused to employ him. He would show up for appointments in bureaucrats’ offices and, before he even had a chance to express his interest—let alone to present his credentials—he would be politely told there were no positions available.
So Lath gave up on the civil service and embarked on a winding journey through Vientiane’s private sector. Setting aside the Czech language he had spent so many years learning as almost completely without worth, he set about teaching himself English. By the time I met him, he spoke almost fluently. Among other positions, Lath had worked in a hotel as a waiter, receptionist, and ‘chambermaid’; with his brother in an import-export business; as a manager in a prawn-flavored-chip factory; and in the American Embassy as an assistant to the business consul. Certainly the worst job of the lot had been a stint as a pool hand at the Australian Embassy Recreation Club.
The Australian Club, or “the Club,” as it was known to regulars, sat on the Mekong just a few kilometers from the center of town. It was a family-oriented place that offered Sunday-night movies and the occasional fancy dress party. Each afternoon, pasty white expats would gather by the pool with their children to sip beer and watch the sunset. Just beyond the fence, farmers tended to their paddies on the banks of the river. I went there only once in two years—the membership fee was far too expensive for my stipend.
“Before I took that job, I thought foreigners were different—I respected them,” said Lath. His time at the club had changed his mind forever. According to Lath, the members were unrelenting in their pettiness, quibbling with him over the price of a hamburger or a fruit shake: Sometimes, they would even refuse to pay for food they had already eaten.
“I would bring the bill to a man, and he’d say, ‘Talk to my wife.’ But when I asked her, she’d tell me to ask her husband. They really didn’t act well.”
The most difficult part of all was that whenever the members had something to complain about, they would shout at him—even when it was clear that only his manager had the power to change the situation.
After he had bid his farewell to the Australians, Lath took the job as assistant to Joe. By the time we spoke, however, he was already thinking of leaving. “You know, I like to work, not just sit here playing games on the computer. Well, I don’t play games all the time, but, you know. . . .”
It wasn’t simply the fact that there was nothing to do that was leading Lath to consider other options. There was also Joe: “Sometimes he gets so angry at me—for no reason at all. He’ll run into the office and ask for a file—right away!—and when I can’t find it, he’ll blow up.” After offering his inevitable homily about why he couldn’t stand the Lao, Joe would storm out. Then, a few minutes later, he’d slink back in. The file had been right next to his bed, where he’d left it the night before. He’d apologize to Lath, and things would be back to normal.
But not quite. For Lath didn’t take such behavior lightly. He told Joe directly that such outbursts were not acceptable in Laos. And in the end, he usually ended up acting as a surrogate therapist for the suddenly reflective American, counseling him on “the way things worked” in Vientiane and offering advice on how best to get things done. Joe may hav
e lived here for nearly ten years, but Lath, after all, was the one who knew Laos best.
“I grew up here,” he said. “I am Lao, and I know what to do.”
Lath agreed with me: Joe had been in Laos too long. He had a hard time understanding why Joe stuck around. “You know, foreigners have a choice. I don’t. Sometimes when they start complaining about Laos, I ask, ‘Why don’t you leave? No one asks you to stay.’ You know what Joe’s plan for the future is? He wants to live in Laos, forever,” he says, with a look of disbelief. For upwardly mobile, highly motivated Lao like Lath, the option to leave the country without any hassle was a freedom they could only dream about. He couldn’t imagine why anyone would choose to stay.
What, then, kept Joe in Vientiane? Like many expats I knew, Joe often professed his undying love for Laos: so many smiles, such a relaxed pace. On the other hand, he seemed to expend an enormous amount of time and energy complaining about it. He found fault with nearly everything: the people, the culture, the government—not to mention the help. Perhaps it was just the power of the familiar. When you finally settle down somewhere, entering your sixth decade, it is extremely difficult to move on. Once you’re stuck, it’s hard to get unstuck.
