by Brett Dakin
Unlike many others out on the road that day, I was wearing my helmet with a transparent plastic face shield that worked to keep at least some of the dust out of my eyes. I didn’t always wear a helmet in Vientiane, I must admit, but I was glad of it that day. Eventually, through the clouds of dust, I caught a glimpse of a Shell station to my left. I crossed my fingers, hoped for the best, flipped on my blinker (a futile gesture), turned in between two of the pipes in the road, and veered onto a side street that led out of the storm and into a quiet suburban neighborhood. I took a few moments to catch my breath and wipe the dust from my eyelids before I set about trying to find the museum. At the first few shops and houses where I asked for directions, I encountered mostly blank stares. These people did know who Kaysone was, but most had no idea that there was actually a national museum dedicated to him. Many directed me to his gravestone, a stupa located back near the center of town. Some even wondered if I was looking for his hometown, Savannakhet, more than a day’s journey away—and certainly more than my Honda could handle.
Eventually, I came upon a small noodle shop in a more isolated area of the neighborhood. Exhausted, I sat down for a Pepsi and began to chat with the owner, who wondered what on earth I was doing out in this area of town. Though I was hesitant to raise the subject of my elusive destination yet again, weary of rejection, I told him. It took the man a few minutes before he realized what I was talking about, but once I made myself clear with extended references to the great leader of the Lao people, the revolutionary hero who had liberated his country from colonialism and oppression, he responded with mild enthusiasm.
“Oh yeah, I know about that museum,” he said. “I’ve never been, of course, but I have heard about it.”
Finally, I was getting somewhere. “Do you know where it is?” I asked.
“Sure, it’s right there.” He pointed directly across the street to a fenced-in forested area and an unmarked, wide-open gate. So here it was, Laos’ national memorial and museum dedicated to the founding president of the country, the equivalent of Uncle Ho in Vietnam or Chairman Mao in China—and it didn’t even have a sign. Why was Kaysone hiding?
After thanking the shop owner profusely, I downed the last of my Pepsi and ambled up to the open gate. Immediately, a guard emerged from the sentry box hidden behind the fence, and demanded to know what I was doing there.
“Um, to see the museum,” I replied, a tad sheepishly.
“The museum? What country are you from?”
“America,” I responded, albeit with a certain reluctance. Images of the US bombing campaign in Northern Laos and Kaysone’s heroic role in the long struggle for independence came immediately to mind. Much of the museum, I imagined, was dedicated to recounting the dark history of America’s involvement here, and the great success that Kaysone had had in leading Laos into the light. There may not have been a sign above the gate, but there was a national flag, and I felt the white sphere in its center, which symbolized the light of communism, burn into my American imperialist self.
“Oh, America, very good!” the guard replied, and his harsh demeanor instantly disappeared. “Chao ben kon Amelika baw? Dee lai!” He placed a call from his small box to the museum, to let the receptionist know that a rare visitor had arrived, and proceeded to tell me where I would find the museum entrance. He waved as I drove down the long, tree-lined driveway that led to a clearing in the forest. There, I found a collection of one-story, ranch-style brick houses that immediately brought to mind the suburban neighborhoods that had first sprouted up all over America after World War II.
That this place would strike me as a Lao Levittown was no coincidence. The Kaysone memorial and museum, which officially opened in 1994, was located inside the former compound of the US Information Agency, or USIA. It was from the comfort of this suburban paradise at Kilometer Six that the Americans had operated their extensive aid programs and information campaigns during the 1960s and early 70s. Today, it had the unsettling feel of a deserted Anytown, the appealing set for a TV program like “Leave it to Beaver,” but without any of the actors. In my mind, I could picture the wholesome American families that had been stationed here in the days leading up to the end of the Vietnam War. Sheltered from the realities of a deteriorating political situation outside, American kids would ride up and down the paved streets on bicycles. When it got too late, their mothers would call them inside, and they’d be welcomed home to the cool relief of their air-conditioned kitchens and a plate of freshly baked chocolate-chip cookies and milk. This was the unreality of American life in Vientiane before the communists took over, and it was carefully preserved up until the very end.
Soon after Kaysone assumed power in December 1975, he and his fellow cadres established their headquarters at the former USIA compound, taking up residence in the homes of their former American enemies. Kaysone lived by himself at Kilometer Six from 1976 until his death in 1992; his family, it seems, lived elsewhere, a slight perversion of the paradisiacal suburbanite lifestyle to which he seemed to aspire. It was from this place that, sequestered behind whitewashed walls, Kaysone orchestrated the failed socialist experiment of his early years in power. Just like the American imperialists before them, the new communist rulers were isolated from the reality of the changing political situation around them.
I was greeted at the entrance to one of the buildings by the receptionist, a young woman neatly dressed in an official green army shirt and sin. She directed me first to a meeting room in which a small TV had been placed beneath a portrait of Marx and Engels. The scratchy black-and-white film recounted, in Lao, the basics of Kaysone’s life. He had been born Cai Song to a Lao mother and Vietnamese father in Savannakhet in 1920. As a young man he lived in Hanoi, where he studied law, and eventually helped to organize the anti-French resistance movement in the 1940s. Along with 25 other founding members, Kaysone helped to establish Laos’ own communist organization, the Lao People’s Party, in 1955 in Sam Neua, a small city in the north. Much of the film was dedicated to wartime footage of Kaysone leading enthusiastic communist forces into battle against the Americans. After their victory, he served as prime minister from the founding of Lao PDR in 1975 until his death at age 72 on November 21, 1992. In a sign of just how much the regime’s approach to religion had changed in the nearly twenty years since it had come to power, Buddhist rites were performed during the week-long mourning period following Kaysone’s death, and he was cremated in accordance with Buddhist tradition. Given the emphasis in Buddhism on the immateriality of human life, embalming Kaysone in a mausoleum was clearly out of the question. Deprived of a common means of perpetuating the legacy of a fallen communist hero, the new leaders set about creating a museum in his honor—with funding from the Vietnamese government.
A tour of the exhibition itself begins in a hall dedicated to Kaysone’s life and that of the nation—the history of Laos and its revolutionary struggle is depicted as a journey paralleling Kaysone’s own life story. The exhibit is clearly modeled after the much larger paean to Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, and even uses similar exhibits like the (albeit rather more crude) diorama displays of important scenes from Kaysone’s life, from his humble beginnings and early childhood to his orchestration of the war effort from caves in Northern Laos. The kitschy mock-ups of him deep inside the caves at Vieng Xay reduce what was in fact a genuinely heroic time in his life to a cheap papier-mâché imitation.
Encased in plastic display cases throughout the hall was Kaysone memorabilia: the notebooks he filled while at school, the binoculars he looked at the enemy with, the glasses he used to read with when his eyesight began to fail. Prominently displayed in the center of the hall was one of sixty-odd golden busts of Kaysone that were donated by North Korea—a regime well-versed in the cultivation of cults. These busts have been erected all over the country, at the provincial, district, and even village levels. Whenever I came upon them—in Muang Sing, Luang Nam Tha, Oudomxay, and elsewhere—these statues always seemed lonely and ignored, summar
ily shunted off to the side. They struck me as forlorn attempts to convince a people that Kaysone was a man they should not only admire, but worship. It didn’t seem to be working.
Kaysone may have been the “Son of the People”—as the title of the government’s official 1991 biography put it—but no one seemed to care. I didn’t meet a single Lao in the two years I lived there who had ever been to see the museum. At the entrance to the first exhibit hall, I was handed a small golden pin in the shape of Kaysone’s silhouette as a souvenir. This gesture was clearly an attempt to further the creation of a “cult of Kaysone,” but it only served to remind me of the project’s utter futility. Around Vientiane, I did see photographs, pins, and other trinkets that represented the faces of some of Laos’ important historical leaders, but Kaysone was never among them. Living room walls bore far more likenesses of Laos’ last king, his brother Prince Pethsarath—who was thought to have magical powers—or even King Chulalongkorn of Thailand than any representations of Kaysone. This son of the people had been disowned.
In China, Mao Zedong still makes frequent appearances in households across the country, even though the government has admitted that one third of what he did was wrong. In Vietnam, I was always struck by the degree of reverence even people my age had for Ho Chi Minh. But in Vientiane, I rarely heard anyone so much as mention Kaysone’s name. If I were ever to bring him up in conversation, the strongest reaction I could ever elicit was that he was an “important” historical figure. The only people who really seemed to get excited about Kaysone were visitors from abroad. In the museum’s guest registration book, a few pages had been left blank for comments. But the only thoughts I could find had been inscribed by representatives of the various foreign communist parties that had made official visits to Laos since the museum’s opening in 1994. The book included wishes of health and happiness from comrades in Nepal, Cuba, and even Canada. “The heroic Laotian people,” one wrote, “have freed themselves under the able leadership of its important leader, Kaysone.”
I signed my name, adding a far simpler message. Just as I closed the book, a fleet of black sedans with tinted windows pulled up to the museum entrance. A group of men emerged from the cars, each dressed in matching suits and sunglasses. As far as I could gather from their lively chatter, these were representatives of China’s government in town on an official visit. They were welcomed by a group of young women who had gathered on the museum’s steps to greet them, flowers, ribbons—and of course, free Kaysone pins—in hand. Before the Chinese entered the exhibition hall, I was whisked away by one of the receptionists and led to the next section of the museum. As we made our way past a slightly overgrown lawn of lush green grass (another suburban American fantasy) to another building nearby, I let my guide know what was on my mind.
“Do Lao people ever visit this museum?”
“Not really,” she told me. “Only school groups and government officials. You know, it’s so far from the center of the city.”
Perhaps the Party had decided to place the museum so far from the center of things because they didn’t want the “people” to come and visit. After all, whatever one thought about his political beliefs and approach to governance, Kaysone had been a strong leader. He had stood up to the French and the Americans, and though he could not have done so without the help of his Vietnamese comrades, he had prevailed. Kaysone had had a vision, and he had achieved it. While he may have presided over a disastrous socialist experiment, he had been pragmatic enough to know when it was time to change course. That alone was more than most Lao people could say for their current leadership.
Kaysone was succeeded by his former deputy prime minister and defense minister, Khamtay Siphandone, the father of one of my colleagues at the NTA. Khamtay seemed more interested in finding ways to benefit personally from the New Economic Mechanism than in promoting real economic growth. He maintained close ties to the country’s military, and what passed for economic development often amounted to the timber contracts and trading concessions he secretly negotiated on its behalf. It’s true that Vientiane had been transformed in the years since Kaysone’s funeral; what had been a sleepy town of bicycles, empty roads, and a strict seven o’clock curfew had become a hectic, neo-capitalist free-for-all. But almost all new wealth was concentrated in the capital, and most of it resulted from the sudden influx of international aid, not any economic boom that Khamtay had orchestrated. One display case at the Kaysone museum was all too revealing, containing as it did, every product ‘manufactured’ in the Lao PDR: Beer Lao, Pepsi, lumber, cigarettes, and cement.
The only vision for the future that Khamtay seemed to offer came in the image of his new private mansion in Vientiane. His dream house, constructed mostly with materials imported from Thailand, was a glimmering white edifice that towered above all the surrounding homes. A set of tall, thin columns graced the main entrance, and the complex was surrounded by a blank white wall topped with barbed metal spikes. A new sidewalk had been constructed around the periphery—though the only people I ever saw there were members of the household staff, who washed the outer wall daily. Among the first roads to be completed in the city’s reconstruction project were those surrounding the new house, which was situated directly next to the compound in which Khamtay and his family lived, and from which Khamtay rarely emerged. Certainly the largest private home in Laos, the new place was actually meant as a gift to the president’s daughter—my colleague at the NTA—and her fiancé. It was always big news at work whenever she returned from a shopping trip to Thailand armed with a new set of drapes, tiles, and other furnishings for her future home.
Khamtay’s monstrosity stood in striking contrast to Kaysone’s private living quarters at Kilometer Six, which was the highlight of the memorial and museum and the next stop on my tour. Compared with the opulence enjoyed by today’s Party cadres, Kaysone’s life at Kilometer Six was a modest affair. He lived in a small, one-bedroom house, along with most of his important possessions. Even today, the bookshelves in the living room—which is carpeted, wall-to-wall, with the green shag that was so popular then—were filled with Kaysone’s favorite works in Lao, French, English, Russian, and Vietnamese. For a man who once proclaimed, “The best university is the university of the people,” Kaysone certainly liked to read. His running shoes and stationary exercise bike stood in the very spot where he left them. His meeting room was located in the house’s modest screened-in porch, and according to my guide, the notes on the dry-erase board that you can read today are the very same that were taken on his final working day.
Standing in Kaysone’s living room, it became clear why the current regime really might not want its citizens there. A visit might lead some to draw unfavorable comparisons. Perhaps it was better to keep them as politically disinterested in the recent past as they were in the immediate present. What with a glorious king and a magical prince already occupying people’s thoughts, who needed another dead leader for people to dream about?
___
As I’ve said, it was rare indeed that I encountered any overt symbols of communist rule in Vientiane. So I was surprised to find an enormous red flag bearing the hammer and sickle soaring above the main entrance to the city’s post office on Lan Xang Avenue when I went to check my mail one Monday morning. I only went to the post office about once a week, as I rarely received mail during my time in Laos, and it was always a bit of a treat. The Lao postal service did not actually deliver in Vientiane, so if you wanted an address to which people could send things, you needed to sign up for a mailbox. It was an indication of just how small Vientiane was that all of this capital city’s mailboxes fit into two floors of a small shack in the grounds of the post office, and that a good number of them remained empty. The mail room was reminiscent of the one at my college, a musty room where students would stop off after lunch to check if that eagerly anticipated package or admission letter had arrived. In Vientiane, each mailbox was a simple affair of plywood and hand-painted blue numbers—mine was n
umber 9083—and could only be opened with a key that one obtained at the main desk for a deposit of a few hundred kip. When I first opened mine, I had to clear out the cobwebs and dust.
After I checked my mailbox that Monday morning—as usual, there was nothing inside—I noticed as I drove around town that the hammer and sickle, along with the Lao national flag, was flying all over town—not only on every government ministry, but most private enterprises as well. That night, the city’s nightclubs shut down a bit earlier than usual, and the police were out on the streets in full force, flagging down motorbikes and cars on Lan Xang Avenue in the late evening and checking papers even more rigorously than usual. Les mouches were up to something.
They were preparing for the forty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Party, which would be held on March 22, 2000. By mid-week, banners were everywhere, gracing even the façade of the Victory Nightclub just around the corner from my house, where teenagers gathered every night to drink whiskey and dance to the latest Thai imports. I felt privileged to be living in Laos in 2000, which promised to be quite a year. Not only was it the new millennium and the anniversary of the Party’s founding, but it also marked the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Lao PDR and Kaysone’s eightieth birthday. And, lest we forget, it was Visit Laos Year. In short, it was time to Party.
As I’d learned at the Kaysone museum, the Party had been founded in 1955 by a group of Lao representatives of the Indochina Communist Party. The conflict between the Vietnamese-supported communists and the US-backed royalists was quickly evolving into a bitter civil war. Soon, Laos would be the only country in the world where the armed forces on both sides of a civil conflict were entirely financed by foreign powers. The US, from the safety of Kilometer Six, was willing to spend almost anything to prop up the royalist regime and prevent the communists from taking power; from 1955 to 1963, it contributed more aid per capita to Laos than it did to South Vietnam. Beginning in the late 1960s, Laos’ leadership engaged in a series of ill-fated coalition experiments, through which the royalists sought to neutralize the communist forces by incorporating them into the Royal Lao Government. But in the face of such strong and unrelenting outside influence from both sides, these coalitions were bound to fail. In the end, the success of the “revolution” had little to do with a popular demand for communism. Kaysone and his forces capitalized on the citizens’ desire for a strong and independent nation, free from foreign influence.
