Opium Fiend

by Steven Martin

  In 1996, a mere five years before Karl and I were there for his story, I had overnighted in Vang Vieng and found little more than bowls of pho (Vietnamese noodles) available for a transient to satisfy his hunger. The town was poor and lacked electricity and refrigeration. There were no restaurants other than the handful of noodle joints that ringed a flyblown market where every morning at dawn the locals came to buy the ingredients necessary to prepare that day’s meals.

  A few years of tourism had changed all that—the accommodations and food had improved hugely. As often happens in Southeast Asian tourist boomtowns, a number of the foreign visitors had decided to stay and try their hands at entrepreneurship. Usually an Italian would start up a restaurant, a Brit would open a bar, and if there was an ocean nearby and the possibility of diving, Scandinavians would quickly corner that market. Vang Vieng was different, however, in that the predominant foreign nationality, both as visitors and expats, were Canadians.

  The most popular nightspot in town—Hope’s Oasis—was run by a Canadian named Alfie, a strapping and permanently ballcapped guy in his late twenties, who seemed to be genuinely enjoying himself. He had a good rapport with the Lao staff, and had one or two Canadian girls working for him for free—hipsters with nose rings and obvious crushes on the young proprietor—who were content to make salads for a week or two before the dwindling days remaining on their visas forced them to move on. The menu, music, and décor of Hope’s were sophisticated, and the place was packed nightly with young backpackers.

  It would have been impossible for me to imagine a place like Hope’s Oasis when I first passed through Vang Vieng less than a decade before, but parts of Southeast Asia were like that. The years between 1990 and 2000 saw great change in what was formerly known as French Indochina, a region that had been embroiled in decades of civil war, stunted by fifteen years of Communism, and then suddenly forced to embrace tourism after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.

  Karl and I found accommodations in the form of a small collection of bungalows on the riverbank, and then walked around the town. Vang Vieng was small and it didn’t take us long to notice Hope’s Oasis. Within an hour of arriving, we were sipping Cokes at Hope’s, where the after-dusk scene was reminiscent of a popular restaurant and bar near a typical North American university. Alcohol was by far the intoxicant of choice with a discreetly passed bong making an appearance now and then. The opium dens we had come to report on seemed as far removed from Hope’s as they would have from a Señor Frog’s in Waikiki.

  Later that evening, Karl and I took a stroll to see if we could locate one of the dens. Once we were off Vang Vieng’s main tourist street the town resembled a typical lowland Lao settlement in which the inhabitants are in bed and asleep by nine. Nothing I saw looked like a place where opium was being smoked, and I couldn’t detect the smell of it in the cool night air. After walking around for half an hour, we decided to call it a night and head back to our bungalows. On the way, we passed a small cinder block building that stood out because lights were still burning inside. It was the telephone exchange office. Karl mentioned that he wanted to go inside and ask about long-distance calls.

  Waiting outside, I was approached by a young Lao man with larcenous eyes. “What you want I help you find,” he said with a cadence so flat that I knew the sentence was simply a series of sounds he’d memorized. I answered him in Lao. “I’m looking for the police station.”

  He laughed and replied in Lao, “Asleep already!” He held a small plastic bag up to his face and breathed in and out of it, causing the bag to rapidly collapse and inflate with a brittle crackling noise. I saw then that his eyes were not those of a petty thief as I had initially thought, but the restless eyes of a glue sniffer.

  “Where’s an opium den?” I asked in Lao.

  “Closed already,” he replied. “They’re asleep.”

  “I’ll come back tomorrow then. Which way is it?”

  The young man rubbed his stomach through a rag of a shirt. “Brother, please help. I haven’t eaten yet.”

  I pulled a wad of kip from my pants pocket and gave him a five hundred note. I’m so bad at calculating exchange rates in my head that I wasn’t sure if the amount was a prize or an insult. The young man pocketed the bill and pointed toward the river. “Ton’s place is at the fork in the road. He won’t cheat you. He’s Lao. All the others are Vietnamese.”

  When Karl came out of the building, the glue sniffer was still hanging around, perhaps hoping for another handout. “What’s up?” Karl asked.

  “Our friend here just pointed out a den to me.”

  “Excellent. Should we go have a look?”

  “He says it’s closed, but at least I know where to look tomorrow.”

  The Lao language has two ways to say goodbye, one of which implies that the person being spoken to is staying behind. I used this on the glue sniffer lest he follow us all the way to the bungalows.

  The next day Karl and I set out after lunch to find an opium den. Ton’s place was a cabin-like structure of rough planks fronted by a mechanical press for making sugarcane juice. I poked my head into the doorway and asked for Ton, but an old woman told me he was out and wouldn’t be back until evening. Feeling confident now that I had identified at least one place where I could come back and smoke opium, I suggested to Karl that we look around for another den. It didn’t take long to find one.

  A few yards up the road was a hut-like shanty that served as a tiny shop, its display of snacks in brightly colored foil packaging and cans of warm soft drinks lined up with their brand names visible. The cans of soda struck me as odd, and I remarked as much to Karl. “Who’s going to buy a warm Coke?” I asked.

  “Unless this stand is just a front for an opium den,” Karl said with a sly smile.

  Karl was right. No sooner had we approached the display of snacks than the shopkeeper—a wan-faced Vietnamese woman—leaned toward the bamboo wall behind her and spoke a few short words through it. Her husband—or a man I assumed was her husband—came from around back and hissed at us. Karl laughed. “Did you hear that? If that hiss wasn’t an Asian cliché, I don’t know what is.”

  The Vietnamese proprietor looked about forty and was half naked, wearing nothing but a pair of ragged shorts. He spoke no English but by using sign language—a mimed hit on the pipe—told us what Karl had already surmised. The man seemed very impatient to get us into the hut, and perhaps due to his pushiness, I felt we should first agree on a price. He spoke almost no Lao, so again he used sign language to indicate that he wanted one dollar per pipe. I thought the price was exorbitant and tried to talk him down, but Karl was eager to get started. “Just make him happy. At most you’ll smoke, what, five pipes? I’ve got a five-dollar bill right here.”

  A door made of woven bamboo led into the boxlike room behind the snack stand. Once we were inside, the proprietor locked the door by twisting a length of wire around the door’s frame and fastening it to the bamboo wall. As my eyes adjusted to the gloom, I took in the tiny room, barely twelve feet square. There were no windows. A handful of meager household items had been pushed into a corner, clearing the dirt floor so that a straw mat could be spread out upon it. The den keeper produced a blob of opium sandwiched within a piece of wax paper. The sticky mass looked something like tar.

  He motioned for us to sit down on the mat as he began arranging a crude brass lamp whose glass chimney had been replaced by a perforated Pepsi can. The opium pipe was a simple bamboo stem, one end of which was stuck into what looked like a small porcelain vase. The vase had a tiny hole in its side, and this is where the opium would vaporize. I watched as the den keeper pulled the vase from the bamboo stem and used a wire to scrape out the opium ash that coated the vase’s inner surfaces. Known in English as “dross,” this black residue is a by-product of the vaporization process and, depending on the humidity of the surrounding atmosphere, can be sand-like and dry or moist and sticky. While the den keeper was cleaning and preparing the pipe, w
e could hear a conversation through the thin bamboo walls. Two Australian women—youngish from the sound of their voices—were trying to buy something from the Vietnamese woman manning the “snack shop” in front:

  “How much for the Pringles, darl?”

  There was what seemed like a long silence before the same voice spoke up again.

  “I want to buy some crisps. How much?”

  Another long pause followed, and then the same voice was heard again, this time raised and with some exasperation.

  “Look. We give you kip. You give us Pringles.”

  Yet more silence ensued. Then a second Australian voice piped up.

  “Bloody stupid, isn’t she? How’s she expect to make any money?”

  Karl and I struggled to keep from laughing out loud. After the frustrated Australians left, I found that Karl was thinking the same thing I was. “Those cans of Pringles are probably empty. What do you want to bet they were picked out of the trash behind Hope’s Oasis?” he said.

  My eyes had adjusted to the darkness inside the den. Karl eschewed the mat and was instead sitting in a corner as far away from the smoking as possible. He had his arms around his legs and his chin resting on his knees, and he was watching me and the den keeper with a famished look. “I’m jealous,” he said.

  Karl loved to tempt the devil. His morbid fascination with narcotics reminded me of those combat veterans who spend their lives trying to relive the rush of past battles.

  “Don’t even think about it,” I said. “You’ve got a wife and a kid, remember? That’s why you’re paying me to do this.”

  After I had smoked a few pipes, we departed the Vietnamese-run den to go back and see if Ton had returned. Karl needed to get some quotes from a den keeper but we were unable to communicate with the Vietnamese beyond hand signals. When we arrived at Ton’s den he was there and hosting three college-age Italian men. The inside of Ton’s was larger than the Vietnamese den and the floor was made up of wooden planks instead of dirt. The Lao, like the Thai, will not tolerate a dirt floor, and they traditionally construct their homes raised up off the ground. The plank floor had been covered with wide plastic sheets printed with a tile-like pattern, and a thin mattress covered with a cloth was laid out for guest smokers. Ton’s was a class act, and his fee per pipe was half what the Vietnamese had charged.

  After the Italians had left, I introduced myself and Karl to Ton and we got the interview that Karl needed. Ton told us that he came to Vang Vieng specifically to sell opium to tourists, and that his Vietnamese competitors were also recent arrivals to the town. He said that the police did a sweep every few months and locked up all the den proprietors in the town’s tiny jail, a shack made of corrugated steel. Ton went on to explain that the police always let them go after a couple of days, when opium withdrawal caused the prisoners to have diarrhea in unison, horribly fouling the one-room cell.

  Back at Hope’s Oasis later that evening, Karl did a few more interviews. After several hours talking to backpackers, he said he almost had enough for his article. “If we could just talk to some authority figure like a cop or something. I need to know what the official take on this situation is.”

  “How about the village headman?” I suggested. “I think we’d be better off avoiding the police. They’re likely to throw us in that little jail before deporting us.”

  “You think?”

  “Yeah, we’d better not. Give me another day to find the headman and I’ll also look into hiring a car to take us back to Vientiane,” I said.

  The village headman was accommodating, and the interview went well. A shirtless old man with talismanic tattoos across his back, he had nothing but good to say about Vang Vieng’s tourist invasion. As for opium, however, it didn’t even exist. “There’s no opium here,” the old headman corrected me when I asked how many dens were in operation.

  Karl and I had to spend the night in Vientiane in order to catch the early flight to Bangkok the following morning. This left us with half a day to kill. I suggested that we go to Mister Kay’s den to see if I could get both of us in, but Karl said he’d seen enough opium smoking. “I hope you never have to find out what being hooked on opiates is like,” he said without further explanation.

  Instead, I took Karl to a no-name antiques shop, just opposite the old Hotel Constellation on Samsenthai Road. A couple years earlier I had spent half an hour in this very shop looking over old medals that once adorned the uniforms of the military and police of pre-Communist Laos. I found the Hindu iconography appealing—especially the three-headed elephant that was once the official symbol of Laos. The Hindu symbolism was a reminder that, culturally, Laos was on the farthest eastern reaches of Greater India. I also remembered there being some opium pipes in a display case, and this was the reason I thought Karl might find the shop interesting.

  “What a great idea for a souvenir,” Karl said as the old Vietnamese couple tending shop opened a glass case and began laying opium pipes on the countertop. “Do you think I can get one of these through U.S. customs?”

  “That’s a good question,” I said. “I mean, they’re antiques, right? I guess if you tried to bring in ten of them you might have some questions to answer, but not just one.”

  Karl’s enthusiasm for the dusty relics prompted me to give them a closer look. The pipes were more elaborate than the simple bamboo-and-vase rigs used in Vang Vieng. These were the classic Chinese design of opium pipe that I had smoked from in Vientiane. Perhaps they once belonged to some of the old smokers who frequented Mister Kay’s. I asked if the pipes were genuine antiques, knowing full well what the answer would be whether they were or not. The shopkeepers did not disappoint me. “Old,” said the man in Lao. “Very old,” said the woman for emphasis.

  Karl chose a pipe with jade end pieces and I offered to haggle a good price for him. I reminded the woman that I’d bought some medals from her a couple years before, but she didn’t seem to remember me. No matter. When I asked the price, I was surprised by how reasonable it was—and I decided to buy a souvenir pipe for myself as well. The pipe I chose was a simple bamboo stem with end pieces carved from water buffalo horn. The pipe bowl was shaped like a discus, about three inches in diameter, and made from a terra-cotta colored clay. Tiny Chinese characters had been pressed into the clay when it was still wet, and these I surmised were the chop marks of the artisan who had crafted the bowl a century or so earlier.

  The shopkeepers wrapped our pipes in newsprint as Karl and I counted out dollars onto the glass countertop. Back at the hotel and exhausted, we turned in early to our respective rooms after making plans to meet for breakfast the next morning. Before going to bed, I opened my travel bag and began rearranging my clothes so that I could fit the two-foot-long opium pipe inside. The pipe was still wrapped in newspaper with small red rubber bands around the stem at two-inch intervals. At first I had no intention of unwrapping the pipe until I got back to Bangkok, but I became curious to see it under the warm incandescent light of the hotel room.

  The rubber bands were so thin that most broke and dropped to the floor as I tried to remove them. I almost changed my mind about unwrapping it, seeing that I’d need to come up with more rubber bands or perhaps some tape. But then I thought, what the hell, the smudged newsprint wrapper was already halfway open. I pulled off the remaining paper and then held the pipe in both hands at arm’s length. Its smooth, unadorned stem gave it a streamlined look, and the discus-shaped bowl added to this effect. It looked nothing like a pipe for smoking tobacco. Without any obvious decoration to identify it as Chinese, this opium pipe could have been mistaken for a highly evolved war club or even some species of musical instrument. Yet it was neither. This was an opium pipe, a potential instrument of self-destruction that was technically illegal in most countries. To me, it was also a symbol of the old Orient—as archaic as rickshaws, Chinese junks, and man-eating tigers.

  I put off rewrapping the pipe until morning and instead put it on display atop a chest of drawers n
ext to the television set. I was smitten with my new souvenir. While reading myself to sleep, I many times looked up to admire the pipe’s crisp lines. The following morning I was delighted when my new opium pipe was the first thing I saw upon waking. Then and there I had a collector’s epiphany: Why had I never thought to collect opium pipes? The pull on my interest was so strong that I wondered how I could not have noticed their collectibility until that very moment. An opium pipe was a rare thing—it evoked all the mystery of the old Orient. There was an aspect of outlaw chic about it. It was a decidedly cool thing to collect, too, perhaps the coolest thing I had ever considered collecting. And in that instant I knew I had to have more of them.

  As vague and incorrect ideas of the immediate and remote effects produced by opium-smoking are held by the people generally as there are regarding the kind of pipe used and the manner of smoking.

  —H. H. Kane, Opium-Smoking in America and China (1882)

  Usually when collectors first take notice of something, when some object catches their fancy and they want to see, learn, and acquire more, there is a book on the subject—all the collector has to do is read up on it. For collectors of Asian antiques in particular there is no shortage of books, no matter how arcane the subject matter: Chinese snuff bottles, Indian betel nut cutters, even Japanese tsuba—the intricately crafted hand-guard fittings found on samurai swords. For potential collectors of these and sundry other artifacts there are illustrated guides ready to educate and advise. But my efforts to find anything published about opium pipes turned up next to nothing.