by Brett Dakin
These days, the American diplomatic presence was very modest. Each time I visited the embassy, the facility itself struck me as almost cavernous, far too large for the needs of a staff that had dwindled markedly since the end of the Indochina War. I pitied the foreign service officers and military attaches, maintenance workers and secretaries who toiled away in the lonely offices. Not much ever seemed to be going on at the embassy. But today was an exception.
Gathered outside the complex were nearly 100 Chinese men and women, loudly protesting the US-led bombing campaign in the former Yugoslavia. The campaign had been designed to force the hand of Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic, but somehow a bomb had landed on the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade, and the Chinese government was crying foul. The US claimed that the bombing had been a mistake, the result of an outdated map upon which the CIA had relied. But the Chinese didn’t buy it, and today they were venting their anger. Large banners painted with black and red anti-American slogans rose above the crowd outside the embassy. The bold strokes of the Chinese characters screamed with outrage. The protesters, on the other hand, were rather subdued. Directed by disciplined organizers—mobile phones in hand—they chanted in unison from time to time. Every major Chinese business and citizen group in Vientiane was represented. The protesters were blocked from approaching the embassy entrance by a single Lao police officer, who didn’t seem particularly threatened.
Another twenty policemen stood off to the side, awaiting further orders. They seemed as surprised by the entire affair as the small group of Lao that had gathered to watch from the safe distance of the ancient That Dam, wary of getting too close to the action. That Dam was Vientiane’s Black Stupa, a crumbling stone structure that was slowly being overtaken by weeds despite a recent restoration. It sat just west of the American Embassy and was said to be the home of a seven-headed naga, or water serpent, which had come to life and protected local citizens during Siam’s invasion of Vientiane in 1828. This morning, the naga showed no signs of stirring.
Finally, the police decided that something had to be done. So, as they usually did when all else failed, they began to direct traffic. Soon the air was pierced by the high-pitched police whistles: the mouthpiece of Lao authoritarianism. The police in Vientiane almost never spoke, but rather substituted toots on the pipe and incomprehensible hand signals for verbal communication. Still, it occurred to me as I watched the protesters that not once in Laos had I ever seen a whistle for sale. When I had played the part of a stuffy detective in the annual Christmas production of the Vientiane Players, a local expatriate theatrical group, our producer had had to procure a whistle from a party shop back home in London. The absence of whistles from Vientiane’s markets wasn’t surprising: the whistle was one of the strongest holds the authorities had over the people. In the wake of the failure of communism, words were empty—no one believed anything the government said. The whistle, on the other hand, was as effective as it had been in 1975. You couldn’t question a whistle. You couldn’t reason with sound.
After an hour or so, the American consular officer emerged from the embassy and sauntered over to the protesters to check out the situation. He didn’t seem worried. I stood in the crowd, joking with the participants, delighting some with my limited Chinese-language skills. Things weren’t so laid-back elsewhere in Asia on this day. In Phnom Penh, in fact, 300 Chinese marched on the US Embassy, armed with an angry protest letter. They broke through two police barricades before the Cambodian authorities opened fire with AK-47s and the crowd finally dispersed. No such disturbances occurred in Laos.
If the Chinese protest in Vientiane was non-violent, it wasn’t exactly popular: it had been organized by the Chinese Embassy under direct orders from Beijing. And the Lao government, increasingly close to its large neighbor to the north, had actually given permission for the event in advance, well before the protesters had begun to gather outside the embassy walls. This was democracy, Lao-style.
___
The next evening, I had dinner with one of the protesters: my good friend and erstwhile Chinese teacher, Gong. Gong, in her late twenties, taught traditional Chinese dance, song, language, and history at the Overseas Chinese high school in Vientiane. The Chinese government had helped to found the school early in the twentieth century, but it was now entirely funded by the Chinese-Lao community in Vientiane. Much more important, Gong worked part-time as a Chinese-language teacher at the Interior Ministry. Most of her students were policemen.
“I think this job for me is very good,” she told me in her halting English. Very good indeed, as Gong was working in Laos without a visa. She didn’t even have a valid Chinese passport. Back in her native Sichuan province, when Gong had been accepted for a job with a Chinese construction company in Nepal, she had been issued a passport that was good only for travel between China and Nepal. When the job fell through, she crossed the border into Laos instead, and now she couldn’t go home. She couldn’t travel anywhere outside of Laos, for that matter, and if it weren’t for her connections at the language school, she wouldn’t have been welcome in Vientiane either.
“What about the Chinese Embassy? Can they help you?”
“No way,” she continued in Chinese. “When I lived in China, I loved my country, and I thought my country loved me as well. But now that I live in a foreign country, I still love my country, but I realize that my country doesn’t love me. Mei you ai. There is no love.”
“Are you worried?”
“Well, there are Chinese police in Vientiane, I know. They come to find Chinese who have left the country illegally and are trying to emigrate to America. They could be anywhere.”
“Have you seen any around town?” I asked.
“No, of course not. If I knew who they were, everyone would know.”
Gong and I met for dinner every Sunday evening. The idea was to speak in Chinese for half the time, and English the other half. But since my Chinese, while limited, was a whole lot better than her English—and since Gong always had a tremendous amount to say—we ended up speaking almost entirely in Chinese. Meeting Gong for dinner was the one occasion in Laos when I had to be on time; if I was so much as a minute late, Gong would simply up and leave. Sometimes I’d arrive exactly on time, and she’d be standing outside the restaurant, pointing to her watch and shaking her head. A woman on the run, Gong did not like to wait.
A few weeks after moving to Vientiane, Gong had converted to Buddhism. For a while, she had made frequent visits to the temple near her apartment, and had even begun studying English with a monk. (For many Lao, the language classes offered in temples provide the only opportunity to study English.) But she soon became bored with Buddhism. Then, one day, she ran into a group of Taiwanese Christians, and, all of a sudden, converted to Christianity. Now she attended church every Sunday, one of only two Chinese in the mostly Lao congregation. Her plan for the future was to attend Bible school in Taiwan or Singapore, but she would have to wait until her passport problems were cleared up before that became a possibility.
“No problem,” she would tell me. “I know that God will help me. I’m not worried.”
As we discussed the situation in Yugoslavia over sweet peanut curry at Just for Fun restaurant—a laid-back hole in the wall run by a Thai woman and her family—Gong’s pointed facial features and thin line of dark red lipstick accentuated her biting arguments. Gong was entirely different from Ying, whose fluent English and worldly manner betrayed her sophisticated urban background. Gong didn’t have much time for manners, and usually got straight to the point:
“Look, I have no problem with the American people,” she insisted as we waited for our food. “The problem is with Clinton and the American government. He wants to take over Kosovo, Serbia, Russia—and then, what next? China!”
That morning, I had sought out a copy of the Bangkok Post only to find a photograph of protesters in Beijing carrying placards that depicted Bill Clinton with a swastika plastered on his forehead. This was a guy who, not tw
o months before, had been fighting for political survival, battling an impeachment offensive that had stemmed from his wayward sex life. Now he was a Nazi? What Gong refused to believe was that Clinton was one of the least powerful “most powerful” men in the world; his hands were tied by an array of political interests and moral imperatives from which the Chinese president was free. Anyway, why would he want to bomb the Chinese Embassy? We had trade interests to promote, global security to protect. It just didn’t add up.
My friend would have none of it. “Look, is Clinton a Christian?” Gong asked.
“Sure, he goes to church every Sunday,” I told her.
“Then how could he drop bombs on Kosovo?”
A Chinese citizen using Christian morality to defend the position of her own government was a tad too much, I thought. All Gong had succeeded in demonstrating to me was the degree to which the Chinese people remained under the influence of an imperial dictatorial tradition. In China, one man alone did have the power to decide, and to destroy. But not in America.
___
When I first mentioned the Chinese protest in English class at the NTA a few days later, my students just laughed it off. Though the state media had been strictly instructed not to cover the event, they all knew what had happened. Vientiane was a small place, and there were very few secrets.
“Oh, that’s just the Chinese,” said Mon.
The protest had been the first to occur in Vientiane since 1975, and yet they feigned nonchalance. Hadn’t they even been over to the American Embassy to check out all the action?
“Oh, no,” said Mani. “I just watched it from my car window.”
But the embassy was only a few minutes away.
“If we get too near, the police might think we are involved,” admitted Mani. The rest of the class responded with a chorus of nods.
Could this kind of activity have been allowed if the protesters had been Lao?
“No.”
But, when the demonstrators are from a foreign country, it’s okay?
“Yes.”
So why were they protesting, anyway?
Throughout the discussion, I had noticed that Suphap—in English, his name meant “Polite”—seemed to want to say something. “So what do you think, Suphap?” I asked.
It was an unfortunate fact that the English-language skills of Suphap—who happily enough was in charge of the NTA’s Tourist Information Center—were nothing short of abominable. He could barely put together a complete sentence, and I often found myself intervening in order to prevent him from politely sending unsuspecting tourists off in entirely the wrong direction. In his garbled response, a mix of Lao and English, the only word I could make out was “bombie.” But with a bit of help from his classmates, he eventually got his meaning across. He thought that the Chinese had protested for one simple reason: because a country larger and more powerful than theirs had harmed a group of its citizens. Suphap took it for granted that the US had bombed the embassy on purpose. And none of his classmates disagreed.
The legacy of the American military effort in Indochina—above all, its “secret,” yet relentless bombing campaign in Northeastern Laos—lived on in Lao society. It wasn’t immediately apparent in the streets of Vientiane. It didn’t always filter through the friendly smiles and shouts of “Sabaidee.” The legacy of the war lay under the surface, but it was there. Sympathy for those who had come under American fire was the most important factor in shaping Lao public opinion about the Chinese Embassy bombing—far more important, even, than a Party-controlled national media that received its international news from the Chinese government.
After Suphap’s contribution, the classroom fell silent. Not wanting the students to leave the room with an awkward feeling, I abruptly changed the subject. “If you could go anywhere in the world, and money wasn’t a question, where would it be?”
Mon answered quickly, “Switzerland. It’s beautiful.”
Mani laughed and said she’d always had a thing for France.
And how about Suphap?
“America,” he replied with a grin.
War
____
Wearing motley clothes makes the dogs bark;
trotting out old stories brings about disputes.
Lao Proverb
Laos does not rank highly on many world records. With a population of just about five million, it isn’t the smallest country in the world, and it certainly isn’t the largest. An annual per capita income of less than 400 dollars means that it isn’t the poorest or the richest either. There is one list, however, that the nation does top. Laos is the single most heavily bombed country in the history of warfare. During the conflict in Indochina, as a part of its “secret war” in Laos, the American military dropped more bombs on the country alone than it did during all of World War II, and three times as many as it did during the Korean War. The bombing cost US taxpayers 7.2 billion dollars, or 2 million every day from 1964 through 1973. Most Americans have forgotten these astonishing facts—if indeed they ever knew them to be true.
I, for one, had no idea until I moved to Laos. And even while I was there, it was easy enough to forget. Although the war in Indochina had ended less than three decades before, the entire conflict appeared at times to have been relegated to the deep recesses of the Lao collective memory. Not once did a Lao friend ever raise the subject of the war in conversation. Lao my age and younger, while certainly aware that a major conflict had taken place, could be vague on who exactly had been involved. And when I revealed my nationality to Lao who had been alive during the hostilities—even to men who had fought against the Americans and their allies—I never encountered a scowl or so much as a strange look. On the surface, at least, I was presented with nothing but smiles and overwhelming approval.
“America?” people would exclaim after I had told them where I was from. “Oh, very good! America number one!” When other expats, European or Asian, introduced themselves to my Lao friends and colleagues, I listened for the reaction. No other country received such a positive response as the US.
If you looked closely, though, evidence of the war and America’s involvement in Laos was not hard to find. A sign for the “Lao American Association”—an organization supported by the US in the 1970s to promote American culture and the English language in Vientiane—still stood outside the complex now used as the headquarters of Laos’ state news agency. US Army parachutes shaded vendors selling fresh fruit juice and beer on the banks of the Mekong. In the countryside, families used empty bomb casings as planters or pylons. By recycling the remnants of this dark period in their history, most people seemed to have moved on. Or had they?
Every so often, the smallest of things would remind me that the war wasn’t such a distant memory after all. Once, toiling away at my desk in the ICU, I looked up to find my colleague, Souksan from the Marketing and Promotion Unit, standing before me, smiling. Souksan’s smile was ever present, and it was contagious. It disappeared in only the rarest of situations, such as when he attempted to formulate complete sentences in English—and even then only for a moment. Though his English was terrible and his computing skills minimal, Souksan had been put in charge of producing the brochures the NTA distributed to tourists. He didn’t mind the job, really, especially since it meant he was able to use the new scanner the office had just acquired through the UNDP. Boy, did Souksan love to scan. Graphics were never a problem in NTA brochures, for Souksan seemed to spend most of his time taking photographs and scanning them into the computer.
As I saw it, my job was to make sure that the text of Souksan’s brochures was readable, and that the design fit into the broader marketing scheme for Visit Laos Year 1999-2000. I had a difficult time convincing Souksan that the NTA should develop a set of uniform marketing materials; each time he put together a brochure, which seemed to be weekly, it had an entirely different look and a new take on the English language. But my frustration hardly had a chance to surface when I was working with Souksan, wh
o was relentlessly upbeat despite the odds stacked against him. Even his name, in English, meant “Happy.”
Happy asked me to look over a draft of a new brochure he had been working on. He pulled a chair up next to mine and, since I required it of any staff member who wanted my help, began to edit the brochure along with me. We made some truly daring alterations, like changing “now clothes” to “new clothes” and eliminating English words that even I could barely understand—terms like “simonize” and “circumambulate.” Heaven knows where he came up with this vocabulary; he certainly hadn’t studied it in my intermediate English class. By working through the awkward language, we tried to make Laos sound as if it were, in addition to being a “unique tourist destination” (as Souksan had put it), a relatively nice place to visit.
Souksan soon lost interest in the task at hand and left me to it. As he played around with the computer, I plowed through a series of incomprehensible descriptions of Laos’ tourist attractions. The brochure took me on a bumpy journey through the country’s highlights: Vientiane, the political capital and home to the majestic That Luang stupa, the symbol of Laos; up north, Luang Prabang, the former royal capital and World Heritage site; and Wat Phu Champassak, the ancient Khmer temple complex in Southern Laos.
Then came Xieng Khouang. This northeastern province was home to the Plain of Jars, a landscape of rolling hills throughout which large jar-like structures, said to be more than 2,000 years old, are scattered. No one has ever been quite sure what to make of these “mysterious” jars. Perhaps humans had used them as sarcophagi, or for wine production or rice storage. Regardless, the Plaine des Jarres, in French—or PDJ, as the US military liked to call it—had also been a major battleground during the Indochina War. The North Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao had numerous camps in the area, from which they launched a major anti-aircraft operation. Residents of Xieng Khouang lived through daily bombing raids by American planes and constant ground combat between US-trained forces and the communists. Nearly every town and village in the province was bombed between 1964 and 1973. In 1969 alone, 1,500 buildings in the provincial capital and another 2,000 on the Plain itself were destroyed. Even today, Xieng Khouang suffers from the legacy of war; more than sixty citizens a year fall victim to unexploded ordnance like land-mines and cluster bombs.