Another Quiet American

by Brett Dakin

  For my part, it felt good to talk as well. I had already been at the NTA for months, but I felt I hadn’t accomplished anything. I was accustomed to drawing up objectives, completing projects quickly, and pointing with satisfaction to concrete results. At the NTA, this approach clearly wasn’t going to work. When I had proudly presented a work plan to Desa—whom I’d adopted as a surrogate boss, though he had known nothing of my plan to work at the NTA prior to my arrival—he had regarded it with his usual bemused nonchalance. “Good luck, Mr. Brett,” he said. “Bon chance.” Work plans, I quickly learned, meant little when the only resource you had to offer the Lao government was yourself.

  My English program was going nowhere. On top of the usual problems with attendance that you might expect to accompany an instruction program that took place during office hours, my heart just wasn’t into it. I seemed to spend most of my time editing the flurry of faxes that surrounded General Cheng’s frequent trips to meet with his counterparts in neighboring countries. I would encourage whoever had written the fax to sit down with me and follow along as I re-wrote it . . . but who wanted to bother? I hadn’t even come close to confronting the issue of how tourism in Laos could be developed successfully without destroying the country’s unique beauty.

  The main problem was that no one at the NTA really knew what to do with me. One day, I had arrived at work only to find that my desk in the ICU was gone. My chair was still there, perfectly positioned behind the neat pile of dust that had accumulated over the years in the spot where the desk had been. But the desk itself had disappeared. After some investigative work, I learned that it had been moved to another room. Overnight, the minister of commerce, General Cheng’s boss, had decided to transfer a few of his employees to a room in our building. They needed more desks, so mine was the first to go. After a few days, the desk had miraculously reappeared, and I could sit down again. It seems the Commerce bureaucrats had grown weary of their re-assignment, and the NTA had reclaimed the office space. It wasn’t the best working environment, and it certainly helped to have someone around who was willing to talk. My conversations with Mon always made me realize that, in the end, any concerns I had were inconsequential.

  Mon and I were alone in the office that morning, but as we talked, one of us always kept an eye on the door. We had an unspoken agreement: if anyone should enter, our conversation would come to an abrupt end. What Mon had to say might not please her boss.

  In the early 1980s, at the height of Soviet influence in Laos, Mon had won a government scholarship to study Russian language and literature in the Soviet Union. Of all the programs available to Lao students back then, scholarships to study in the USSR were without doubt the most prestigious. It was a time when Laos’ revolutionary leader and president, Kaysone Phomvihane, was consulting regularly with Soviet leaders. Stocky Russian technical advisers to Laos—or “Soviet!” as they were known to children in the streets of Vientiane—were among the few patrons of the city’s nightclubs. When Mon had applied for the scholarship, she had expressed interest in the fields of political economy, international law, and medicine. She hadn’t the slightest desire to study Russian literature. But when decision time came, the government informed her it was Russian literature or nothing, so she spent six years struggling through Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov at the University of Kiev. Ultimately, she wrote a thesis comparing Lao and Russian literature.

  “In Russia, I had no Lao books,” Mon explained, “so I just tried to remember the stories my mother had told me as a child, and wrote about them.” Mon was one of a handful of staff at the NTA who spoke excellent English. Although she was in her late thirties, and by now a mother of two, her cherubic face lent her a refreshing air of youth. She possessed a playful spirit that managed to shine through even in the stifling environment of Laos’ bureaucracy. Each day, she came to work dressed impeccably in a sin and silk blouse, in accordance with a dress code enforced to encourage traditional customs. Whenever we met outside the office, however, the sin was replaced by blue jeans and a T-shirt.

  Many Lao of Mon’s generation had left home during the Cold War to study alongside their socialist brothers and sisters in Eastern Europe. Most of them would have much rather gone to the US to study English, but considering the geopolitics of time, that was out of the question. As a result, many Lao returned home saddled with all sorts of languages they would never use again—Hungarian, Polish, Czech, Bulgarian—and ended up having to learn English anyway when the Cold War finally sputtered to an end. Very few came back convinced that the socialist path suited Laos. After all, by the time many of them had arrived in Eastern Europe, students there had already begun to challenge the very system that the leaders of the Lao PDR were attempting to emulate.

  After Mon returned to Vientiane in 1987, she was luckier than most, quickly finding a job as the project manager for a privately funded reproductive health project at the Lao Women’s Union, the organ of the Party responsible for women’s issues. Within a year, she was married, though to hear her tell the story, it was hardly love at first sight: “I didn’t think he was so bad looking. And my mother felt it was time for me to get married. So I agreed.”

  I had met Mon’s husband, a doctor, a number of times at NTA gatherings. During these encounters, he had barely uttered a word or cracked a smile; his personality made for a sharp contrast with Mon’s indefatigable effervescence.

  When her husband won a scholarship from the Australian government to study medicine in Sydney in 1993, Mon dropped everything and went along for the ride. She spent her time in Australia learning English and looking after their only son. The scholarship allowed the family to save a great deal of cash in Sydney; money that they would ultimately use for a new car when they got back to Vientiane. Did the Australian government envision its scholarship awards being used for family automobile purchases? Not likely, but the money meant a great deal to Mon. Every morning during my time at the NTA, Mon would drop her son off at school before driving to the office in her bright red shell of a car, which wasn’t much larger than my Honda Dream.

  Before she had left Australia, Mon had tried several times to contact the reproductive health project back in Vientiane to ensure that she’d still have a job when she returned. But she never received a response. When she arrived home, she found that someone else had moved into her office. Her boss had simply given her job away, claiming that the correspondence had never come through.

  ___

  A gust of wind rushed through the windows of the ICU, and the door swung open. Mon swung around and looked behind her. “Oh, it’s only the wind,” she said, relieved, as I stood up to close the door. When she knew it was safe, she continued. After her job at the reproductive health project fell through, she again lucked out and, through the help of a college friend, secured a position at the NTA. At first, things went well; the work was interesting, and she even had the use of an office motorbike. She soon became the head of the ICU and received nothing but good reports from the then chairman, Souk. He summoned her to his office numerous times a day to ask for her advice and to assign her major projects.

  Then, one day, the calls just stopped.

  Mon was removed from her position as director, and Khom, a bureaucrat from the Ministry of Information and Culture, took over the ICU. In the Lao PDR, Khom had two things going for him that Mon didn’t: he was a member of the Party, and he was Vietnamese.

  Since its earliest days, the Lao revolutionary movement had been fostered—you might say controlled—by North Vietnamese communists, and political ties between Vietnam and the Lao PDR remained tight through the 1990s. Although Khom’s English skills were hardly up to the job of directing international co-operation activities, the fact that he was Vietnamese was highly valued. Soon it was Khom who was getting all the calls, while Mon waited for her phone to ring. However, all the ICU files from Mon’s tenure as director remained locked in her file cabinet—and she held on to the key. Whenever Khom wanted to access an old memo or
project report, he had to ask Mon first. In the game of Lao politics, this was one of her chips. She had few others.

  With the arrival of a new chairman at the NTA in 1997, Mon had hoped for a change. But when General Cheng came in, the old chairman, Souk, simply refused to leave. He was demoted, but hung on to his position as the head of the People’s Revolutionary Party organization at the NTA. This meant that he was responsible for all major personnel decisions. At each office of the Lao government, there was a structure for the recruitment and training of new Party members; at the NTA, of a staff of forty, 13 were members. This select group met once a month to set the NTA’s agenda. The Party functioned in much the same way as a private recreation club might in the US. You could only become a candidate for membership if a current member proposed your name to his colleagues in the Party. If the entire group agreed, two Party members would be assigned to closely follow your progress over the course of one year, keeping track of your working habits and personal lifestyle.

  If, at the end of that year, you hadn’t made any serious mistakes, you just might be admitted to the Party. Your acceptance would be followed by a year of training, during which you would attend the monthly meetings and go through intensive instruction on Party doctrine and government policy. The Party did not often expand; existing members were likely afraid of newcomers who might upstage them and threaten their hold on power. In all, Party members made up less than two percent of Laos’ total population. Mon remained stuck in the other 98.

  At first, she had some luck with General Cheng, meeting frequently with him on issues related to international co-operation, and even traveling to conferences abroad with him and his wife. She had the ear of the new chairman—but, always the professional, she failed to exploit it to her own advantage. While she worked as hard as possible to get the job done, her colleagues spent their time and energy cultivating the right personal ties. As the general was so often absent, he had little idea of what actually went on inside the NTA. Far more than previous chairmen, Cheng relied on his closest staff to guide his decisions about assignments and promotions, and Mon was out of the loop. By the time she returned from a month-long tourism-management training course in Tokyo, the requests had stopped coming, and she was once again isolated and without work.

  “I don’t understand what happened,” said Mon. “There was no problem with my work.” It just didn’t make sense.

  ___

  Suddenly, the door to the ICU flew open and a short, pudgy man strode in, stomach first. It was Souk, the ex-chairman. Immediately, and according to plan, Mon and I turned our attention to the intricacies of the computer operation manual, and I pretended to be giving her a short seminar on the joys of file management in Windows 95. Souk poked around for a few seconds, perhaps checking to see if Khom was around, and then left without a word to either of us.

  “Do you think he heard us?” Mon wondered aloud. “His office is just next door, you know. The walls here are quite thin.”

  Talking with Mon taught me that you had to play the game, and play hard, if you wanted to succeed at the NTA. Mon had yet to fully understand that pure ability counted for little in the Lao government. She hadn’t played hard enough, and as a result she wasn’t sure where she stood. That week, she had been informed that she would be sent to an all-expenses-paid ten-week English-language course sponsored by ASEAN, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. She would study English in the context of Laos’ integration into Southeast Asia’s regional forum. Most NTA staff would have been overjoyed at such an opportunity. Imagine, two months of English training, absolutely free! But Mon wasn’t happy at all. She knew why she had been chosen over staff members who were in far greater need of language training: she had nothing better to do at the office.

  It was definitely risky, but Mon seemed to find a certain relief in discussing her situation with me. The product of a culture that frowned upon openly expressing personal frustration, perhaps she saw in me an outlet for her true feelings. I was an outsider, disconnected from Vientiane society, and thus there was little risk that I’d ever discuss her story with a family friend or relative. Using a language that wasn’t her own, speaking about her life in Lao society with someone who was safely removed from it, was for Mon a liberation of sorts. For me, on the other hand, talking with her was problematic. Our conversations led me to question my own motivations for living in Laos. What was my role here? What were my responsibilities to her? Shouldn’t I take some action on her behalf? Listening to her story, I found myself wanting to storm into Cheng’s office to tell him the truth about the office, about who was competent and who wasn’t, who deserved to be commended and who should be fired. But I knew that Mon would never allow me to do such a thing. It would only reflect negatively on her if I, a Westerner, were to criticize the NTA on her behalf. As was so often the case, I had to contain my own outrage in order not to worsen the situation into which I had stepped. If I couldn’t teach people English or shape the development of Laos, at least I could listen. Sometimes that is contribution enough.

  “It’s good to talk to you, you know,” Mon said once again, before suggesting that we have lunch at the small noodle shop next to the office.

  ___

  At the very moment we left the ICU, Souk stepped out of his adjoining office. He followed us down the stairs and out into the parking lot, never uttering a word. When he finally got into his car, Mon laughed uneasily. “Why did he leave right now?” she asked. Together, we wondered: was he keeping an eye, and an ear, on the two of us? Was he uncomfortable with the idea of one of his employees spending too much time with the only foreigner at the office?

  Mon was worried, but not enough to cut off our conversation. If Souk had heard her complaints, so what? In a way, she wanted him to hear. She needed him to acknowledge the frustration he had caused—praising her abilities and contributions one week, then simply ignoring her the next. He needed to realize that it wasn’t right to run an office based on personal whim, making personnel decisions without regard for ability. How could the NTA ever hope to accomplish anything, let alone in a professional manner, if each member of the staff was constantly worrying about where he stood—and where he might be standing next week?

  ___

  Over a bowl of steaming feu, Chinese noodle soup, Mon kept talking. As always, the soup was served with a plate piled high with fresh greens—cilantro and mint, bean sprouts and lemon—that one added for taste. On the table sat an assortment of Lao and Thai condiments like fish paste, chili peppers, and hot sauce. I usually stayed away from these deadly bottles. Mon, on the other hand, dumped a healthy dose of each into her bowl. Just one whiff of the spices caused my nose to run.

  Mon was thinking seriously of leaving the NTA. She was looking for a job in the private sector, and had already applied for a position at the UNDP. It looked as if the Lao government was about to see another of its most capable employees walk out the door. In fact, brain drain was a dilemma that had faced the Lao PDR ever since 1975. It began with the escape of most of the educated elite across the border to refugee camps in Thailand. And it continues to this day, as the government loses its best and brightest to the private sector and the international development community, or to university programs and jobs abroad. Why work for peanuts in an organization that clearly doesn’t value your skills?

  If Mon had quit the NTA for the private sector, the professional rewards and the security—not to mention the money—would have been far superior. Still, she was reluctant to leave. She liked working for the government, helping her country to develop, if only in a small way. Her reluctance to leave was not motivated only by altruism: she also liked the perks associated with civil service work, like international travel. Working for the UNDP, Mon would have made nearly fifty times her NTA salary, but would have had little opportunity to leave the country. The same went for the private sector: she would make more money, but she’d be stuck.

  In the end, I knew, the main factor that kept Mon a
t the NTA had little to do with free trips abroad. It was a matter of pride. If she had resigned, it would have been an admission of defeat. Already, I knew, people at the office were beginning to talk about Mon behind her back. Why was she being passed over for major assignments? her colleagues wondered. She must have done something wrong to deserve this treatment, right? Mon could only imagine what they’d say if she had left: “See, I told you so—she couldn’t stick it out. She’s leaving after all.” She would have had to admit that she had been forced out due to the machinations of a few washed-up Party cadres. And since she couldn’t bring herself to do that, Mon stayed, waiting patiently for the phone to ring.

  But not, I thought, forever.

  Revelations

  _____________

  One mercifully cool evening in mid-January, I set out for Ying’s office to pick her up for our weekly dinner. My Chinese friend’s company was located in a series of rooms on the second floor of the Ministry of Information and Culture guest-house. The MIC was the least expensive hotel in Vientiane—and, without a doubt, the most dismal. It was the kind of place that appealed only to backpackers for whom finding the cheapest and most miserable accommodation possible was an almost all-consuming challenge. Even if the price was right, why anyone would put up with the dark hallways, dirty walls, and surly employees that were the hallmarks of the MIC experience was beyond me.

  Whenever I dropped by to pick up Ying, I always encountered a small crowd of hotel employees lounging in the lobby, watching TV. They were all intensely curious about my affairs with the young Asian woman who worked upstairs, and—no matter how engrossing the particular Thai game show or soap opera—all eyes were on me the moment I entered the building. By the time January had come around, I’d taken to marching into the lobby, bellowing, “Sabaidee, tuk kon! Hello, everybody!” and, without missing a beat, heading upstairs to Ying’s office. While my bravado certainly left them speechless, it did nothing to satiate their curiosity. Relations between white men and Asian women were always cause for wild speculation in Vientiane. Even the most innocent of interactions was interpreted as a sure sign of romantic involvement. Considering the depth of our friendship, I’m sure my friends at the MIC figured that Ying and I were already married—or at least that we should have been.