Another Quiet American

by Brett Dakin

  Sally murmured her agreement from the back seat: “Together.”

  Inside the restaurant, Sally seemed weary. Her hair was slightly askew, and the emerging lines on her face revealed the hard work she had put into raising three children alone in a foreign country. Life in Amarillo was a far cry indeed from her aristocratic upbringing in Pakse; when she’d arrived in Houston, she barely knew how to cook, and had never driven a car. “For the first time, there were no servants to drive us, to cook and clean.” For both Dan and Sally, the shock of the fall in status was great. On Emily Street, the second-hand BMW in the driveway and the living room’s home entertainment system—complete with six remote controls and a set of speakers taller than I—were tangible reminders of the difficulty of letting go of their memories of an upper-class lifestyle. “With everyone’s salary, we have a pretty good income,” Dan explained, “but we spend it all.”

  Dan and Sally had returned to Laos for a brief visit the previous winter. At the shabby airport in Vientiane, Dan told me, the immigration official on duty had immediately recognized his surname as a sign of royalty. But Dan decided that he wouldn’t hide his past. “Yes, I fought in the Royal Lao Army,” Dan had told him. “I worked for the Americans. I am American. So what do you want to do?” The officer had been reluctant, but eventually let Dan through without incident. Now that it was Lao government policy to allow most émigrés back, the official had had no choice.

  A number of Dan’s Lao friends in Amarillo had also served in the Royal Lao Army, and they refused to believe that it was even possible to return while the communists were still in power. “‘Aren’t you scared?’ they asked me before I went back,” said Dan. “Some are still fighting the war. They talk about taking over, about sending money for fighting. But I don’t get involved.” In fact, Sally dreamed of saving enough money to spend a few months of every year in Laos after she and her husband eventually retired. Her sister lived in Vientiane, and had even reserved a room in her house for Dan and Sally.

  “Why don’t you move back for good?” I asked her as we were driving home after dinner.

  “I’ve lived in Amarillo for 21 years,” explained Sally. “It’s like my home, you know.”

  “We work hard,” Dan added. “But we still love America. You know, here, we have freedom.”

  Dan sounded convinced, but I wasn’t so sure. Yes, they had freedom, but at what price? His statement sounded suspiciously like a bit of pro-American rhetoric offered just for my benefit. But what did Dan and his wife really think of me? The only connection I had to their family was my friendship with their son-in-law’s brother, a man they’d never even met. And yet they’d welcomed me into their home so openly and with such apparent ease, as if I’d been an old friend. Were they happy to host a random American who happened to have lived in Laos? Or did they consider it a burden, yet another encroachment on their precious free time? I wondered if they appreciated their new lives in the US as much as they let on. Perhaps in my presence they felt obliged to appreciate America—in the same way that they felt obliged to the Catholic sponsors who had helped them to come to Texas in the first place. As I mulled over whether or not to voice any of my confusion, I heard Sally echo her husband from the back seat.

  “Freedom,” she said.

  ___

  It was well past midnight before I first met Robert, Kham’s brother and the man I had come all this way to find. He walked into the living room, where I was once again leafing through old photographs, this time on my own, and introduced himself with a firm handshake. Robert was strong, and his muscles bulged through his work uniform of white jeans and a white T-shirt. He was a healthy man in his mid-thirties, but he looked exhausted.

  Like many other Lao and Vietnamese living in the area, Robert worked for IBP, a beef processing plant and the second largest employer in Amarillo. When I had driven by IBP on Route 40, the rancid odor of the meat had penetrated the car. According to Robert, it wasn’t that comfortable inside the plant either. “It’s really cold in there, like 35 degrees sometimes,” he told me after he had taken a shower and changed. “That’s, like, freezing!”

  At the plant, Robert worked near the end of the line. First, the cattle—thousands per day during summer—were skinned, gutted, cleaned, and sawed into pieces. Then, agricultural officials inspected and stamped each individual piece, marking grade level and ensuring safety. Finally, it was time for Robert to punch the assigned government code and categorization of every piece of meat into his computer.

  “I’ve been working overtime lately,” he said, “’cause a lot of people, the economy is so good, they quit for another job.”

  But Robert never refused the extra work, thinking of the payments on his new Jeep Cherokee and of Billy’s future education. He and Beth wanted to send their son to a local private Catholic school, which would cost a few hundred dollars a month, an enormous investment for the family. They had enough to get by, but not much beyond that.

  Robert had worked hard all day at the plant, but he wasn’t too tired to go out this Saturday night. He kissed Billy good-night and we piled into the Jeep and drove over to a friend’s house for a party. Robert seemed relieved to be leaving his son, wife, and parents-in-law behind, at least for the evening. “So much responsibility. I have to work for everyone now.”

  I thought immediately of the money and clothing Robert regularly sent to Kham back in Vientiane.

  In Robert’s friend’s backyard, Lao men sat around, drinking beer and chewing on slices of grilled pork fat. I was the only white guy, but I was right at home; it felt just like a typical Saturday evening in Vientiane. I sat down, opened a Heineken—Beer Lao wasn’t yet available in Texas—and listened. Not a word of English was spoken as the men discussed the work week, argued about the true age of a Thai singer who had performed at the community center the other night, and commiserated about the trials of life in Texas. They seemed happy to be among the people they knew best, free from the daily struggle with a language and culture that wasn’t their own. Every once in a while, the men would sigh and reminisce about Laos—even those who, having lived in America most of their lives, could barely remember the place. News of the Lao government’s recent economic liberalization program had convinced many of these men that the real golden opportunities lay back in Vientiane. Life over there just had to be better than this, they thought. As I listened, I didn’t try and convince them otherwise. But I knew that they were really speaking of an imagined Laos, a romantic illusion of their homeland.

  When I asked for the toilet, Robert grinned and gestured to the shadows just behind the wooden fence at the back of the house. I made my way through the large and slowly expanding pile of junk that sat in the backyard: corrugated metal and timber, cans and bottles left over from previous nights of revelry, miscellaneous car parts, a discarded weightlifting set. As I stood in the dark, unpaved alley behind the house, I glanced over my shoulder. After all, public urination was a crime in most municipalities in America. I sensed the depth of my own nostalgia for Laos, where such concerns would never have crossed my mind. From the perspective of the mundane workaday world of Amarillo, with all its rules and regulations, life in Laos seemed blissful, almost impossibly comfortable.

  When I sat back down again, I met Jamie. Jamie had lived in Amarillo for nearly twenty years, ever since he left Laos with his family at the age of age five. These days, he was thinking of going back. “I wanna move back to Laos, you know. Start a business. Make some money, you know. Life is easy over there.”

  Life is easy: that’s just what my colleagues and friends in Vientiane had so often insisted about life in America. Their dreams of one day moving to the US to make it big sounded oddly familiar to Jamie’s grand plan. Like Robert, Jamie worked at the meat plant, hosing down the freshly slaughtered cows. In his free time, he liked to gamble. “One night, I lost 5,000 dollars,” he boasted to me in front of his friends. “Bet on four football teams, and they all lost!”

  While the
men relaxed outside, their wives and daughters were gathered in the kitchen. According to Robert, they were preparing for the traditional ceremony that would be held the following morning to welcome a pair of monks visiting from Laos. The floral votive arrangements were identical to those I had seen during the boat racing festival on the Mekong so many months before, though crisp dollar bills replaced the 100-kip notes. In the driveway up front, a group of Lao-American teenagers had gathered to hang out. I had heard them talking when we’d first pulled up to the house in Robert’s Jeep. They discussed the latest gossip, compared new clothing, and complained about school. No one talked about Laos. Every now and then, one of them floated into the backyard, and two worlds seemed to collide; rarely conversant in Lao, these teenagers precariously balanced their identities as Americans with their connection to the Lao traditions being practiced around them. A plump boy of about 13 drifted in and out of the group of men throughout the evening, munching on potato chips. He fulfilled his traditional obligation to serve his elders (“Get me a beer, will you?”) with evident distaste. His acne and extra pounds demonstrated, I thought, his full assimilation into American society.

  When I noticed that Robert had begun to yawn, I suggested that we call it a night. He quickly agreed. As we prepared to leave, the gambling began. Dollar bills were passed quickly between hands and on and off the Lao astrological board game. The rules were simple: roll the dice, and predict the sign on which it would land. Would it be the rabbit? Or the snake? Jamie took a swig of his Colt 45 malt liquor and keenly observed the board. I imagined that he had a lot riding on this game. It was three o’clock on Sunday morning in Amarillo, and the work week was finally over.

  ___

  Much later that same morning, Robert, his wife Beth, Billy, and I drove to Amarillo’s popular Golden China restaurant for the all-you-can-eat lunch special. “A lot of people come here after church,” Beth told me after we’d taken our seats at one of the few remaining free tables. I glanced around me and found that, indeed, many families were in their Sunday best. Robert and I had only recently woken up. While Robert helped himself to the buffet, Beth told me about her job at Amarillos’s public health department, which provided free medical advice, birth control, and baby formula to single mothers in need. She enjoyed her work, but was not entirely convinced the city was doing the right thing for these women.

  “You know, Brett, I think a lot of the women lie,” she said. “They have really nice cars and everything. They say they aren’t married, but they are. I don’t understand these women—a 12-year-old came in yesterday, pregnant. We have a lot of Spanish, you know; they don’t believe in birth control. Ten, 12 children, all from different fathers.” Across the dining room, a small child screamed and threw a fistful of moo shoo pork in our direction.

  Not all the Lao-American students in Amarillo were as successful as Beth had been. She told me that the city was struggling with the scourge of teenage gangs; Lao and Vietnamese, Hispanic, and African American, they seemed to split along strictly ethnic lines. Fortunately, there had been little violence so far. Mostly, the kids hung out, drank, dabbled in drugs—and produced unwanted children. Beth attributed much of the trouble to a lack of parental supervision and attention. With both parents working non-stop, often nights, to make it in a new country, it was no wonder that some Lao kids simply fell through the cracks.

  Back in Vientiane, it had often seemed that Kham, Bing and my other Lao friends could talk of little else but coming to America. It remained in their minds the promised land, a place of untold opportunity and freedom. But in Amarillo, the constant preoccupation of Robert and his wife was just the reverse. When I asked about Robert’s thoughts about the future, he said, “I want to save enough money to go to Laos. It is my dream.” For he knew first-hand what his relatives back in his homeland refused to believe: life in America wasn’t easy at all. Sure, you made more dollars, but they seemed to disappear before you even had a chance to put them in the bank. Living in the US meant working overtime just to pay for health insurance, monthly car installments, a mortgage—a myriad concerns that the average Lao simply did not face.

  And there was another thing, too. “Here in America, you have all the material things,” Robert said. “Everything you want. But it’s not the same feeling as in Laos.”

  Beth sensed the spiritual emptiness of her American life as well, and longed for the chance to go back to her homeland. She was desperate to visit a place she hadn’t seen since she was nine. If and when she did get the chance to return, I thought to myself, she would be in for quite a surprise. Judging from her unceasing stream of queries about life in Laos, she would need to prepare herself before she went. “Do they have ‘all-you-can-eat’ over there?” she asked. “How are the burgers? I heard they were dry, not like here. Do they have donuts?”

  After lunch at the Golden China, we did what all the other families in Amarillo did on Sunday afternoons: we went to the mall. “Billy likes to shop,” Beth told me. At ten months old, Billy could barely crawl, but already he liked to shop. The mall was bursting at the seams with customers on this July afternoon, and there wasn’t another white face in the crowd. I hardly heard a word of English through the polyglot din of Spanish, Vietnamese, and Lao.

  In the food court, Robert ordered a Coke, the largest size possible. Beth chuckled before saying, almost to herself, “I bet you can’t ask them to ‘supersize’ it over there, huh?”

  I wandered with Robert and his family in and out of the crowded shops, past the latest fashions in outlets like Britches and The Gap. We strolled up and down the aisles of a giant toy store, and I watched Billy’s eyes widen at the innumerable choices before him. The mall was the key to the American dream. It was the one place where people from around the world, of disparate races, religions, and cultural backgrounds, could come together to purchase their own part of America—a new pair of sneakers, perhaps, or the latest DVD player. In 1998, the average American consumer spent 1,508 dollars on clothing alone. That same year, the average annual income in Laos was less than 400. Robert worked hard, earned money, and decided how to spend it, and therein lay the power of America. The freedom to supersize.

  The lens of my disposable camera framed an image of Robert carrying Billy triumphantly on his shoulders through the mall. I saw a proud American father, confident that he owned at least a small piece of the American dream. I snapped the shutter and, satisfied, put the camera away. This was the photo I’d give to Kham when I returned to Vientiane.

  Up North

  ___________

  When I came into work again after the summer, it felt as if I’d never left. Back at the NTA, nothing had changed. General Cheng was still in charge, Mon was still wondering whether or not to leave, and the computers were still crashing every few minutes. None of my colleagues seemed to have noticed that I’d been away. Some things in Vientiane had changed, of course. The traffic had increased, as had the number of teenage boys with long hair and girls in jeans. And the capital had a brand new airport, courtesy of the Japanese government. The gleaming international terminal had sliding glass doors, elevators, and a snack bar. All we needed now were the tourists.

  One afternoon soon after I returned, Khit, General Cheng’s gun-toting right-hand man, told me that he and a few other NTA staff members would be taking a trip up to Sainyabuli province in the northwest. The purpose of the trip would be to survey the province for potential tourist attractions. The general wanted to know if I’d like to come along. Khit had given me as little advance warning as possible: they’d be leaving the following morning. But I jumped at the chance, determined to see more of the country I was helping to promote.

  I rushed home after work and packed, informed my neighbors that I’d be away for a few days, and let my friends know where I’d be in case of an emergency. My colleagues and I would be traveling on Route 13, and some of my friends wondered aloud whether it was worth the risk.

  Laos may once have been the Kingdom of the Millio
n Elephants, but when I lived there, the country only had one major road. The French completed the southern portion of Route Coloniale 13 back in 1930, when Laos was still firmly part of Indochine and on the receiving end of France’s grand mission civilisatrice. In the early 1940s, construction on the section from Vientiane to Luang Prabang was finally begun. But the road wasn’t actually completed until another five decades had passed, when the final stretch from the unremarkable town of Kasi north to Luang Prabang was paved in 1997. For years, this small part of the road had been a constant source of trouble for the communist government.

  In 1995, anti-communist rebels attacked a convoy on the road, injuring two French tourists and killing four Lao. In June of 1996, bandits hijacked a Swedish aid agency vehicle in the same area. Later that same year, a van belonging to a Vientiane-based tour operator was attacked near Kasi. Four passengers were killed, including the company’s owner, Claude Vincent, a Frenchman and at the time a major figure in Laos’ nascent tourism industry. Vincent had lived in the country for most of his life, as his father had been a teacher at the Lycée Vientiane before the revolution. In the capital, Vincent was considered something of an honorary citizen, and his passing was mourned by much of the community. When the road between Kasi and Luang Prabang was finally paved and secured in 1997, the government claimed that the banditry problem had been solved. For the first time in history, Laos’ two most important cities were connected by a safe and passable road.