Another Quiet American

by Brett Dakin

  Kee smelled of beer and smoke. When I removed her headphones and asked her what she was doing, she laughed loudly. She was drunk. “You didn’t call,” she said.

  “Um, I lost the number,” I replied, feebly.

  “You lie.” She laughed again, took another sip of her Heineken.

  “So what are you doing here?”

  “You lie!”

  “Why aren’t you at home?”

  She didn’t answer, but instead shut off the Walkman, plopped down on the sofa, and put her feet up on the coffee table. I went back to the kitchen and poured some bottled water. I had been in Laos long enough to know that, even at two in the morning, I couldn’t invite someone in without offering them at least a glass of water. When I came back and sat down, Kee began to talk. She told me more about her family, the difficulty of finding work, how she hated living at home along with three siblings and her parents. She hinted that she and her father didn’t get along well. I sensed that she wasn’t talking about the occasional verbal disagreement, that the situation was far more serious.

  “My father, he doesn’t like me,” she said.

  “I’m sorry—” I began, but she cut me off before I could continue.

  “No, don’t.”

  She talked as well about the man with whom she had been involved with for some time. He was a German, and quite a bit older—in his thirties, perhaps. I might even have known him, and as she talked, a list of possible suspects ran through my head. She had essentially moved in with him, but due to his job he was away from Vientiane for months at a time. It struck me that her romance with the German had destroyed whatever relationship she had with her family. Moving in with an older foreign man could not have been a good move. The German didn’t treat her well, she said, didn’t care much for what she thought or how she felt. “But you, you let me feel . . .” she began, and then broke off.

  We sat quietly for a few minutes, gazing out through the glass in the front door. I had no idea what to say. Why had she decided to tell me all of this?

  A stray cat ambled up to the house, hunting for food. Suddenly, Kee turned to me. “Can I be your girlfriend?” she asked.

  I thought for only a moment before responding, “I don’t think so.” I was prepared to go through with her what had been on my mind over the last week; to provide some sort of rationalization for my feelings, some explanation of my behavior. But Kee didn’t ask for any of that. Perhaps she already knew my reasons. She just smiled, nodded, and took another sip of beer.

  “Can I stay here tonight?” she asked.

  There was no way she was going to make it very far on her bicycle, and I was too tired to drive her, so I said yes. But I did insist that she stay in the guest room. After she took a shower, I led her upstairs across the hall from where I slept. She crawled under the covers and closed her eyes. I kissed her on the cheek, said good-night, and shut the door behind me. Exhausted, I collapsed on my bed and, for the first time in days, fell asleep without any trouble.

  When I woke up, just before dawn, Kee was lying next to me, staring directly into my eyes. I wasn’t surprised, of course. I’d been hoping she would come over. We said nothing, but held each other for some time. Eventually, when the sun had just begun to rise, she decided it was time to go. I tasted her lips for the last time, and she crawled out of bed, leaving me alone to drift off to sleep again.

  When I finally left for work, the Heineken was still sitting on the coffee table downstairs. The can was almost empty, but not quite. I took a sip of the warm beer, and then poured what was left of it down the drain.

  ___

  There’s an old Lao folk tale Desa told me about during one of our last conversations, at his home in Vientiane. It was a story Desa’s father liked to recount to his children long ago, and one that he had translated into French and published in an old issue of the Bulletin des Amis du Royaume Lao. Desa’s father was a master of channeling the tales that had grown out of Laos’ great oral storytelling tradition through the more traditional Western medium of the written word. The story is called “The Two Sparrows,” and it goes something like this:

  It was a very hot year, and the trees in the forest were all dried out. The branches would break in even the slightest breeze, and the birds were on the alert for anyone who might set the trees on fire. Two sparrows, a mother and father, sad and resigned, kept watch from their nests.

  “If the fire takes the forests,” said the mother, “I will die with my children.”

  “Me too,” said the father.

  One day, a fire broke out and chased the frightened animals. The two sparrows reaffirmed their pledge, and decided to die with their children. But at the moment when the fire reached the tree where they were perched, the male flew away. The female, faithful and unswerving, threw herself into the furnace with her children. But not before pledging never to talk to another male in all her lives to come.

  In another life, the sparrow was re-born the daughter of a great king. But she refused to speak to anyone other than her mother and her servants. When she turned 18, her father proclaimed throughout the land that he would give his daughter’s hand in marriage, and the entire kingdom, to anyone who could succeed in reconciling the princess with men. Princes and kings tried, always in vain, to persuade the ravishing young girl to talk. One day, a prince, more handsome than all the others, began to tell the princess a story.

  “Once upon a time,” he said, “there were two sparrows who loved each other and had many children. One day a fire took the forest. Husband and wife decided together to perish in the fire with their children. But, just when they had to execute their promise, the female took off—”

  “It was the male,” replied the princess, indignant.

  She had spoken.

  The court musicians began to play songs of joy, and preparations for the wedding began.

  After that morning, I no longer saw Kee around town. I kept an eye out for her at the pubs where once I would have seen her joking with her friends, but she never seemed to be around anymore. I even went to the bar where she’d been working. She wasn’t there either. I wasn’t sure what I would say to her, but I did want to know that she was all right.

  Then, one rainy afternoon a few months later, I happened to stop in at the Xang Café. The Xang was a small coffee shop on Silom Road owned by a young Brit who’d lived in Vientiane for a few years. It was about the only place in Laos that resembled a coffee shop you might find in an American city. Here, you could even get a Latté, and granola with fruit. The idea behind the Xang was great, but the execution wasn’t, and I rarely went there. Among other things, the owner had a reputation for mistreating his staff, and the employees always struck me as miserable.

  As soon as I entered the shop, I saw her. She was standing alone behind the bar, leafing through a magazine. She was dressed conservatively, and didn’t seem too comfortable. This was the first time I’d seen her in a dress. When the door closed behind me, Kee looked up, but she didn’t smile. She seemed like a different person from the girl I’d met so many months before. I felt as if her spirit had been snuffed out. I was the only customer, and she the only employee, so we couldn’t avoid each other. I smiled and sat down at a table in the corner. When she came over, menu in hand, I ordered a cappuccino, and asked her how she was.

  “Fine. And you?”

  “Oh, fine. It’s been a while.”

  “Yes, it has.”

  And that was it. She went back to the bar to prepare my coffee, and then served it to me without a word. Soon, she was distracted by another customer. The owner came in and gave her some instructions. As I sipped my drink and pretended to read a week-old issue of the Bangkok Post, I wondered about what I had done. Had I made the right decision? Why had I been so scared to get close to her? What would a relationship between us have been like? Now, of course, I would never know.

  I finished the cappuccino, left a few thousand kip on the table, and walked out, alone.

  Party Ti
me

  ____________

  Living in Vientiane, it was easy to forget that Laos was a communist country. Sure, the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party had a stranglehold on political power, and it exercised enormous influence over people’s everyday lives. There was no free press, no freedom of speech, and only the slightest rumblings of dissent. In the mid-1990s, in fact, three civil servants had been jailed for forming a group called the Democracy Club; they hadn’t been heard from since. Nevertheless, the Party was always careful to remain unassuming in its public displays of power.

  Many of the tourists I ran into in Vientiane hadn’t the faintest idea that Laos was under communist rule. Their Lonely Planets were chock full of information about the politics, history, and culture of Laos, but they had somehow managed to miss the fact that the country was in fact a socialist republic. So preoccupied were these visitors with securing cheap rooms, good beer, and tasty banana pancakes (not to mention potent ganja), Laos’ political situation had simply escaped them. Some would even argue with me, unable to square their knowledge about communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with what they saw in Vientiane.

  “If this place is communist,” they would ask, “then where are all the communists? Where’s the hammer and sickle? And the secret police?”

  In fact, these folks were right to be surprised. It often seemed to me as if the Party was trying its best to hide its ideological foundations. If you looked carefully, of course, you could find hints of the political leanings of the regime. For example, Vientiane’s cityscape was dotted with a handful of government-erected billboards that pictured hard-working peasants and engineers, always sure to include equal numbers of men and women, and representatives of each of Laos’ main ethnic groups—comrades, all treated equally, coming together to build a better future. These perpetually cheery, two-dimensional characters toiled beneath messages that grandly proclaimed the inevitable progress that would result from dedication to the Party’s leadership. Unfortunately, by the time I got to Vientiane, the paint on these billboards had already begun to peel, and the words of inspiration were barely decipherable. This state-sponsored artwork of the social realist school hailed from an era that had passed.

  In perhaps the surest sign that such imagery had been relegated to antiquity, these billboards and posters had become collector’s items, even inside Laos. In a back issue of the long defunct Lao Aviation in-flight magazine that Joe had once published, I came upon a story about a Western expat and her husband who had begun to buy up the art. A photograph featured a striking poster of a Lao People’s Army soldier that had been prominently displayed in the salon of the couple’s villa in Vientiane. I found it telling that this socialist artwork had been appropriated by two of the city’s foreign residents, who until recently would have been barred from even entering the country. But if the paintings weren’t of any use to the government anymore, and the people didn’t want them, why not sell them to wealthy Westerners?

  The Party had good reason to be skittish about flaunting its communist credentials. Laos’ leadership had learned the hard way that hard-line communist rule just wasn’t going to work in this small Southeast Asian nation. Under the leadership of the father of Lao communism, Kaysone Phomvihane, the Lao PDR’s first prime minister and eventually its president, the government embarked on a project of overzealous socialist experimentation after it came to power in 1975. The Party had sharply curtailed the private sector, forced the collectivization of agriculture, and curbed the free practice of religion. In 1976, it had even banned the popular village boun bang fai, or rocket festivals, which celebrated the annual harvest. Proclaiming Laos the key “outpost of socialism in Southeast Asia,” Kaysone had launched the co-operativization campaign himself in 1978. The end result was severe drought, crop shortage, a resurgence of malaria—and a popular revolt. Those who didn’t end up fleeing the country—eventually, a whopping ten per cent of the population—made it clear that the government would have to change course if it intended to stay in power.

  In the early 1980s, under Kaysone’s pragmatic leadership, the Party abruptly shifted course. Following the lead of its mentors in Hanoi, Vientiane implemented what it called the New Economic Mechanism. This program of reform was accompanied by a steady loosening of control over citizens’ daily life, particularly in the sphere of religion. Soon, even Party officials began to wrap themselves in the mantle of traditional Lao culture, smoothing the hard edges of communist rule with comforting Buddhist ritual, to ensure that the people would never again rebel against Party hegemony.

  But beyond the support of its citizenry, the Party also had the international community to think about. Key to the success of the New Economic Mechanism, particularly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, was a steady influx of aid from the West. To ensure that Western donors would continue to line up at the border, blank checkbooks in hand, the government had to keep its communist credentials backstage. In stark contrast to its authoritarian neighbor, Burma, an international pariah, Laos had managed to convince the donor community that it was a “kinder, gentler” one-party regime. After Kaysone died in 1992, the government stepped up its effort to make friends with rich powers, East and West. To stay afloat in the alphabet soup of aid agencies and NGOs that flooded Vientiane, the Party carefully replaced its soaring rhetoric about imperialist pigs and capitalist lackeys with soothing words about economic reform, democracy, and human rights. All this would have pleased Kaysone, who was the ultimate pragmatist.

  ___

  It took more than an hour of concerted searching, wrong turns, and many puzzled looks before I finally arrived at the Kaysone Phomvihane Memorial and Museum. I’d decided to embark on this pilgrimage the day before, while at the office, but none of my colleagues were much help. The museum struck me as a good tourist attraction in a city that otherwise had very few—not all foreign visitors were unaware of Laos’ past, and some were actually very interested—and I figured that I’d better learn something about it. But it hadn’t occurred to any of my colleagues that the museum would be of any interest to me or any other foreign tourist, and I couldn’t find one who had actually been there. Mon, who had studied in Kiev at the height of Soviet influence in Laos during Kaysone’s rule, was perplexed when I told her of my plans for the weekend. She had heard something about the memorial, but the best she could offer was a vague sense of where it might be. She told me to head south out of the city on Route 13 for about six kilometers, and then take a left when I saw an old Shell station. Mon certainly couldn’t guarantee that the museum would actually be open when (and if) I arrived. When I suggested that she and her husband and adorable young son might want to come along for a weekend outing, she quite literally laughed in my face.

  Undeterred, on a bright Saturday morning, after a good dose of Lao coffee and a fresh baguette smothered in sweetened condensed milk, I strapped on a helmet, got on the Honda Dream, and headed south. It was early enough that the temperature was still cool, and the breeze felt good on my face as I sped past the Patuxai. I whizzed by the UN office and the Lao People’s Army Museum, where I was working once or twice a week with a young soldier to put together an English translation of the exhibit. And I drove past the National Assembly and recently erected monument to the nation’s war dead, which had been designed to look like a traditional Buddhist stupa.

  As soon as I reached the outskirts of the city, my pleasant journey came to a halt when the pavement abruptly ended, and I hit the maelstrom of road construction that recently blown into town. As part of the capital’s “development,” the government, along with assistance from the World Bank and various other foreign donors, had embarked on an ambitious project to rebuild Vientiane’s entire road network. This involved ripping up the existing roads, laying down new pipes for sewerage, and then, at some point far down the road, re-paving. Vientiane’s thoroughfares hadn’t received much attention since the heady, cash-soaked days of America’s war presence, so this was certainly a necessary pro
ject. Unfortunately, someone in the city bureaucracy had come up with the ingenious idea of contracting out different pieces of the project to different companies—a Korean contractor here, an Italian one there—all at the same time. As a result, there was no co-ordination at all, and over the months to come there would be days in Vientiane when you couldn’t get where you needed to go, because most of the main roads had disappeared. Left in their place were dirt tracks and muddy canals, like a jumbo racetrack in the States. Expats and wealthy Lao responded as you might expect: they purchased ever larger and more powerful four-wheel-drives to navigate the increasingly dodgy urban road network. The rest of us were left behind in the dust. And at the NTA, it made Vientiane an increasingly difficult place to sell as a “relaxing” tourist destination.

  It was shock enough when the asphalt disappeared from beneath my wheels. Worse still, in the middle of the road sat a series of enormous concrete cylinders, which were to be set into the ground to replace the nineteenth-century drains. It was a Saturday, of course, so no work was being done, but these cylinders, taller than my motorbike and I, had been left in the middle of the road nevertheless. This made the road something of a slalom course, the cars, motorbikes, and occasional tractors weaving in and out of the cylinders. This race was made even more challenging by the dust that swirled about us. I couldn’t see farther than a few feet ahead, and had to rely on the wheels of the motorbike in front as a guide. Just as my frustration—and fear for my life, to be frank—began to overwhelm me, I looked to my right and saw a middle-aged man leading a herd of cows down the road. The cows’ hooves were slipping and sliding in the dirt, and as he swatted their backs with a switch of bamboo with one hand, he used the other to hold a piece of cloth over his mouth to keep the dust out. He removed it long enough to look over at me, smile, and shrug, as if to say, “Well, what can you do? Maybe one day we’ll have good roads, and all this will have been worth it.” Maybe so, I thought, and smiled back.