Opium Fiend

by Steven Martin

  After a few years in Chiang Mai, I relocated to Bangkok. My teaching jobs gave way to writing gigs—first for a local magazine, then for the in-flight magazine of Thai Airways. This led to freelance journalism for the wire services Agence France-Presse and the Associated Press. Later, along with features for the wires, I began penning travel pieces for the Asian edition of Time magazine. Then came the guidebooks: For nearly a decade, I paid the rent by doing updates for Lonely Planet and Rough Guides, contributing to biennial editions of guidebooks about Thailand, Burma, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Brunei, and the Philippines.

  Not long after arriving in Thailand I began collecting again. The writing jobs meshed perfectly with my old hobby: Suddenly I was getting paid to travel all over the region and had ample opportunities to scour its antiques shops. Based in Bangkok, I lived frugally in a small apartment in the city’s Chinatown, spending less than five dollars a day on food and channeling the rest into whatever I was collecting at the moment. I owned no television and, except to browse Bangkok’s Saturday night thieves market, rarely went out at night. After some initial exploration, I found the allure of the city’s famed nightlife easy to resist. Some people collect hangovers and sex partners. My follies were less fleeting.

  Thailand and the surrounding countries offered seemingly endless collecting possibilities. It wasn’t just that the cultures of mainland Southeast Asia had been producing collectible artifacts for thousands of years. Even if you took away the antiques shops and discounted old things altogether, the simple fact that Thailand, Laos, Burma, and Cambodia used non-Roman scripts to write their respective languages made their modern products exotic—and hence collectible—in my eyes. In the Philippines, a Coke bottle looked just like a Coke bottle did in the States. In Thailand, the Coca-Cola logo had been rendered into the Indic-based Thai script—voilà! Instant collectible.

  After a couple years in Thailand I began collecting something that was inarguably an art form: textiles. One would have to be blind to spend any time in Southeast Asia and not notice them. Many of the different ethnicities in the region have longheld weaving traditions and have been producing works of art in silk and cotton for centuries. What I found most interesting was that historic events, such as forced migrations in the aftermath of war, could be traced by reading what experts referred to as the “grammar” of the region’s textiles.

  Prices could go as high as tens of thousands of dollars for museum-quality pieces, but I found that during my travels I often passed through villages in rural Laos, Cambodia, and Burma whose inhabitants would part with interesting textiles—usually sarongs—for just a few dollars each. In southern Laos, in the bamboo jungles along what was once the Ho Chi Minh trail, I visited a village whose weavers had produced cotton blankets with motifs that could not be misidentified: American fighter planes and “Huey” helicopters. It was as though I had found the exact opposite of a World War II cargo cult. This isolated culture living along the former Ho Chi Minh trail—one of the most heavily bombed pieces of real estate in history—had produced talismanic blankets in the hope that those wrapped in them would be protected from the terrible rain of bombs and bullets.

  After a few years I had built up a respectable collection of textiles, but then my interest started to wane. One thing that turned me off was my fellow collectors. From afar they looked harmless enough. Some were matronly Thai women with big hair, titled according to the kingdom’s system of ever-diminishing nobility. The Thai men were either moss-backed academic sorts or flamboyantly gay. They were an elite crowd and often spoke excellent English, and you wouldn’t earn any points for speaking Thai to them unless it was flawless. There were also Westerners who collected the region’s textiles, a bohemian-looking lot who had lived in the region for decades. Yet this was no polite circle of tea-sipping friends. According to stories I heard, the eccentric façades masked a cutthroat competitiveness. Okay, most serious collectors of just about anything will be able to tell you eye-popping stories of greed and deceit, and with the sums of money involved it came as no surprise that the Southeast Asian textile crowd had some real scoundrels among them.

  Take, for example, the Thai university professor who approached a woman from Chiang Mai—a friend of mine—who was selling off a collection she had inherited. The collection itself contained some rare pieces, particularly from northern Thailand, an area that had been officially a part of the kingdom for less than a century and whose textiles reflected cultural influences from neighboring Laos and Burma. As established collectibles, such textiles had a high market value and could sell for thousands of dollars. The professor explained that he was writing a book, and he requested a selection of relevant pieces from the woman’s collection that could be professionally photographed to illustrate it. My friend agreed but immediately there was a glitch: The photo shoot would take much longer than expected. When the textiles were finally returned to her months later, many of the best pieces were nowhere to be seen. Instead, similar but inferior textiles had been substituted. The professor was an acclaimed expert on northern Thai textiles, and my friend with the inherited collection was a nobody. Guess who never saw her textiles again?

  Such tales were disturbingly common. Southeast Asian textiles were beautiful, but I had little affinity for the people who collected them. Perhaps I was afraid that if I kept at it, I would become just like them. Or perhaps I was simply bored with textiles. After some years of collecting, I abruptly stopped. I wanted to collect something new; something romantic without being common or clichéd; something whose collectors were not snobby or grasping but open to sharing knowledge and enjoyable to be around. I also felt I should be helping to preserve the old ways of Asia—ways that were fast disappearing. I didn’t set out to actively look for my next collectible. It wasn’t necessary. These things just have a way of finding me.

  The most direct road and speediest conveyance to Paradise … is by means of that subtle drug, opium.

  —Mordecai Cubitt Cooke, The Seven Sisters of Sleep (1860)

  No matter when you visit the capital of Laos it always seems half a century behind the times. Vientiane has changed little since John le Carré used it as a backdrop for his spy thriller The Honorable Schoolboy. All the monuments that commemorate Laos’s role as a Cold War pawn are still standing. There’s the tawdry copy of the Arc de Triomphe, built with concrete donated by the United States for the construction of an airport runway. There’s the huge bronze statue of a Lao king presented by the Soviet Union in 1972. Perhaps the statue possessed some Trojan horse quality—a few years after receiving it, the Lao monarchy was dead and the Kingdom of Laos was a Communist state.

  Not that you’ll get much revolutionary fervor out of the Lao. The residents of Vientiane are an easygoing, unpretentious lot, living in the shadow of pompous monuments about which they know little. Their capital is a dust-blown, low-rise city that clings to such French colonial traditions as shoulder-shrugging bureaucracy and the after-lunch sieste. The Lao temperament kept the Communist revolution from sliding into the draconian. The royal family’s demise notwithstanding, it was nothing like the toxic Maoist experiment in neighboring Cambodia. Instead of fanaticism, the new leaders of Laos continued the Lao tradition of asking for and living off foreign aid.

  By 1991 restrictions on visiting Laos had begun to ease up, and in April of that year I went to Vientiane for the first time to obtain a fresh Thai tourist visa. I was excited to see that heavy reliance on Soviet charity had clapped a bell jar over the country and preserved traditional aspects of life that had all but vanished in Thailand. While strolling about Vientiane taking photos one cool morning, I stumbled across a procession led by a white elephant. Where else could one see such a sight? No hype, no tourists, nothing for sale—just this near-mythical beast of the old Orient, draped in silks and being lured at a stately pace by handlers clutching bananas. The encounter was both unexpected and typical. It was later that day that somebody pointed out to me one of Vientiane’s opium dens.


  Laos was well known in the 1990s as the only place in Southeast Asia where opium could still be experienced in the Chinese manner. Sure, there were (and still are) plenty of opium-smoking tribal peoples, such as the Hmong, who inhabited villages on Southeast Asia’s mountain slopes, grew their own poppies, and smoked their own harvest. But to find a genuine, urban, Chinese-style opium den that was open to the public—one of those storied haunts of yore—you had to go to Laos. In fact, Vientiane is the only Southeast Asian capital where Chinese-style opium dens survived into the twenty-first century—all the way until 2002, when an antidrug crusade funded by the French government shut down the last one for good. These establishments were very basic and run by ethnic Chinese and Vietnamese, most of whom had fled North Vietnam for Laos in the 1950s when the French quit their former colony.

  The two dens that I occasionally visited during visa runs in the early to mid-1990s were rooms set aside in private residences. One was run by Madame Tui, who with her husband had come from Hanoi in the late 1950s. Madame Tui looked like an Asian version of Grandmama Addams from the 1960s television sitcom The Addams Family. She always dressed in black and had that signature shock of ghostly gray hair parted down the middle. Her husband was once the principal opium pipe maker in Vientiane but had retired by the time I met him. Although he had been living more than forty years in Laos, he never learned to speak Lao, and so I never had the opportunity to converse with him. Not that my spoken Lao was anything near fluent, but the Lao and Thai languages are, with some good-humored patience, mutually intelligible. I have always had a knack for picking up languages, and after a few years in Thailand I was getting adept at Thai. I also found that whenever I stayed in Laos more than a few days, my ears would begin to recognize the patterns of substituted consonants and tonal shifts that largely differentiate Lao and Thai. The Lao unfailingly take delight in hearing Westerners try to speak their language, so it was always worth the effort.

  Unlike her husband, Madame Tui spoke flawless Lao and could always be found reclining beside her lamp in the upstairs room of her shophouse opposite the newly opened Tai-Pan Hotel. The shophouse door was always open, and the number of flip-flops at the threshold gave an idea of how many smokers Madame Tui was entertaining. I used to walk in and softly announce my arrival saying, “Mae thao yu baw?” (“Is grandmother home?”) to nobody in particular while heading through the room on the ground floor to reach the stairway. Muffled sounds coming from the ceiling—the bump and scratch of bodies shifting on the floorboards in the room above—confirmed that Madame Tui was awake and tending her pipe.

  The upstairs room was always dark, the windows tightly shuttered even on sunny days. I don’t remember seeing any furniture—at least none as far as the circle of lamplight extended. The rectangle of floor set aside for guest smokers was covered with a thin, musty mattress that was off-putting at first, but which became more and more accommodating with each pipe smoked.

  At the time, my interest in smoking opium was nothing more than enjoying an exotic thrill every couple of years, a bit of Tintin-esque adventure whenever I was in Vientiane. Opium takes some getting used to, and those initial attempts to smoke always made me dizzy and nauseous, but I was doing it for the experience, not the intoxication. While doing research for The Rough Guide to Laos in the late 1990s, I was in Vientiane more frequently and made it a point to spend an hour or two at Madame Tui’s every time I passed through the capital on my way to and from Bangkok. By then I had learned to avoid the nausea by not smoking to excess, and I began to enjoy opium’s subtle effects. I always tried to time my visits so that I arrived just around dusk. It seemed like the right time to be visiting an opium den.

  Since there was only Madame Tui preparing pipes, the den could not practically accommodate too many smokers—unless they were content to wait their turn. A pipe of opium took about five minutes to prepare and smoke. That meant if there were five smokers including Madame Tui, there was approximately a twenty-minute wait between pipes. This was not usually the case when I first began visiting her, but as Laos caught on in popularity with backpackers in the late 1990s, word about Madame Tui’s soon got around. And since she was the one opium den proprietor in town who allowed entry to foreign tourists, it soon got so crowded that instead of a pair or two of rubber flip-flops neatly parked at the front door, I would arrive to find a mass of dusty, oversized Tevas piled atop the locals’ smaller, tidily arranged footwear. Madame Tui charged foreign visitors the equivalent of one dollar per pipe, and she was making too much money to turn the backpackers away. However, more than once she complained to me that the novice smokers vomited in her den, and she asked me to translate her pleas that they stop being so greedy. On the one occasion I did this nobody listened.

  About that time I began avoiding the scene at Madame Tui’s and instead visited the den of Mister Kay, whose freestanding wooden house on stilts was closed to the backpacking hordes but allowed expatriate Westerners, most of whom were French. The smoking at Mister Kay’s den took place in a large room facing the street, and the pungent smell of opium was noticeable long before one arrived at the front door.

  The room was devoid of decoration or furniture with the exception of woven reed mats on the creaking wooden floorboards. Mister Kay’s paraphernalia was rustic, and in many cases crudely repaired with such incongruous materials as cellophane packing tape. During a typical visit I would recline and smoke a few pipes prepared for me by one of the elderly Chinese smokers who were fixtures in the place. The cost was fifty cents per pipe if I paid the smoker directly, less if I bought a pellet of opium from Mister Kay’s wife, a bawdy old Lao woman who kept the pellets in a pocket in her brassiere and dispensed them to patrons with a merry cackle.

  About a two-hour drive north of Vientiane is the town of Vang Vieng—a popular stop for backpackers traveling through Laos. There, too, opium could be found, but unlike the long-established dens in the capital, the opium dens of Vang Vieng were only a couple years old and little more than shacks. Cobbled together from wood scraps and roofed with corrugated tin, most were bare rooms about ten feet square. When not in use as a venue for opium smoking, the typical Vang Vieng opium den served as a living space for the den proprietor and his family. All of the dens had some sort of business operation out front—which was nothing more than a front. These tiny shops were manned by the woman of the house so she could keep a lookout while her man made pipes for the tourists inside. Surely every Lao in town—including every cop—knew which of these shanties were serving up crudely rolled pills of opium to be inhaled by wide-eyed backpackers, but to the uninitiated the dens were not so obvious.

  A couple of the more brazen local addicts—and all the den keepers of Vang Vieng were addicted to their offerings—employed touts to bring in customers. The touts, usually teenage boys, could sometimes be seen loitering around Vang Vieng’s restaurants and guesthouses, and were most active at night when crowds of backpackers settled in at the open-air eateries to watch the latest Hollywood fare on pirated DVDs. If a tout was around when you got up to wander outside to stretch your legs or have a cigarette, he would try to strike up a conversation—which might lead you to an opium den.

  But for the most part you had to look for opium in Vang Vieng—it didn’t look for you. Those who wanted to experiment could quite easily find it, of course, but for every tourist who did seek out opium, there were perhaps ten who were oblivious to the scene—and were just as happy to be sipping margaritas from plastic cups as they floated on inner tubes down the lazy tropical river along which the town of Vang Vieng gently sprawled.

  In March 2001, I was in Vang Vieng with Karl Taro Greenfeld, who at the time was based in Hong Kong as second in command at the Asian edition of Time magazine. Karl was researching a story about the resurgence of opium smoking in Laos due to its popularity among backpacking tourists. Although he hired me to be something of a fixer, Karl had been kicking around Asia almost as long as I had, and he didn’t really need my he
lp getting most things done—except to translate now and then. There was, however, one thing that needed doing that Karl himself could not do: He needed me to smoke opium. Karl had at one time been hooked on heroin while living in New York City, and although he had been clean for years, he still harbored a strong fascination for drugs—opiates in particular. This seemed a little odd to me at the time, but I didn’t waste much thought on it. I was getting paid two hundred dollars a day plus expenses. My mission was to get myself and Karl into a working opium den, and then for me to smoke some opium so Karl could observe and later work the details into his story. It was the sort of assignment that one prayed for.

  I had worked for Karl on a handful of occasions and always enjoyed myself as much for the opportunity to hang out with him as for the unusual subject matter of the articles he researched. Karl had one foot planted in Asia and the other in America. His ethnic background—Japanese mother, Jewish American father—and the years he had spent living and working in Asia meant that our conversations weren’t limited to the predictable questions about the continent that newcomers always needed answered. Indeed, Karl knew much more about some parts of Asia than I did.

  Karl’s article for Time magazine was going to be about Vang Vieng, a small town whose stunning scenery—it was surrounded by those impossibly vertical limestone mountains that one associates with Chinese scroll paintings—and easy accessibility to cheap liquor, marijuana, and opium had made it a must-stop destination on the Laos backpacker circuit. It was an economical place to party and relax amid gorgeous vistas, where rooms could be had for a couple dollars a night, and the amiable locals would smile tolerantly if you spent your entire vacation stoned and swaying gently in a hammock beneath the mango trees.