Another Quiet American

by Brett Dakin

  Our host at the lunch was a well-fed man, clearly of some stature, who turned out to be the vice-governor of the province. As if by magic, he produced a case of French red wine, which he began to pour as his staff laid out a lavish meal of fresh fish, stir-fried vegetables, and sticky rice. It was clear to me that the NTA would not have been received with nearly so much fanfare if General Cheng hadn’t been the chairman. He may not have been much of a manager, but Cheng did lend a certain prestige to the idea of tourism development. Whether he was driven by the prospect of personal gain or by the desire to help his province develop, the vice-governor tried his best to impress.

  As we ate, we were entertained by another Vientiane official who had somehow made his way up to Sainyabuli: the inimitable Ounkham, a singer and songwriter who had worked for the Pathet Lao since before the revolution, and was a legend among Party members. In the early days of the Lao PDR, he had written songs for the Ministry of Information and Culture to help cultivate in the populace a spirit of patriotism for the new regime. Today, he continued to compose music for the government; it was Ounkham, in fact, who had written the tune I’d come to know so well, the theme song for Visit Laos Year 1999-2000.

  Ounkham was a jovial character, and his face glowed with excitement as he downed yet another glass of wine and broke into song. His voice was beautiful, almost ethereal. As General Cheng and the vice-governor clapped in time with the familiar tune, Ounkham sang a cappella of the glories of Lan Xang, the beauty of Laos’ provinces, and the power of the Pathet Lao—all in one breath:

  Laos from North to South has many wonderful things to see:

  Mountains, water, and wind.

  Forests with abundant unspoiled nature,

  The sound of waterfalls falling on rocks.

  ___

  That night, back in the big city, a few of us went out to the Sainyabuli Nightclub. It didn’t take long to get there, as the place was right next door to the Sainyabuli Hotel. It was housed in a small wooden building that had inexplicably been decorated with Christmas lights, and brought to mind one of those ranch-and-steakhouse tourist traps in the Rocky Mountains. Inside, it was filled to capacity. A lone female singer had just taken the stage, and she began to grapple with a set of Thai imports, traditional Lao songs, and distant approximations of Western pop hits. At first she seemed uncomfortable, but the crowd soon put her at ease; she was just about the only entertainment for miles around, and they were easy to please. When she embarked upon a particularly upbeat version of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On,” I hit the dance floor.

  Dancing in Laos was an odd affair indeed, a confused melange of three entirely distinct traditions. There was the traditional Lao lam vong, which involved very little movement save for the graceful twisting of the wrist and hands. Then there was the relatively fast-paced Thai-style disco, during which the crowd would jump up and down and swing their arms about, each according his own personal rhythm. Finally, there were the slow dances, or saloh. The saloh were painfully reminiscent of seventh-grade co-ed dances in the school gym, when boys shuffled their feet next to girls who towered over them and, braces glistening in the light of the revolving disco ball, patiently waited for the song to end.

  At the Sainyabuli, when a saloh began, men and women silently paired up, held one another at a comfortable distance, and avoided eye contact at all cost. As soon as the song was over, the partners gave each other a polite nop and excused themselves from the floor, disappearing into the shadows as quickly as possible. Romance was completely missing from this picture.

  Sex lingered heavily in the air in most Lao nightclubs. It hung in the double entendres that peppered conversation, the knowing winks young men threw to the women across the room, the intentional brush of a girl’s hand against my thigh. But it was nowhere to be found on the dance floor. These people talked about sex all the time but, to see them dance, you’d wonder if they were actually capable of doing it.

  As I surveyed the men and women dancing—not a difficult task as most were about a foot shorter than I—and pondered this question, an older woman suddenly jerked me out of my reverie. With a grin she yanked me over to where her girlfriends were dancing in a circle, and pushed me into the center. I soon found myself dancing face-to-face with the most glamorous woman in the house. I must admit I’d noticed her the moment she’d walked in the door. She wore a slinky dress that was coated in gold sequins and hugged her body, and a pair of dangerously high stiletto heels. Her face was caked with heavy make-up, her hair highlighted with blond streaks. This girl was definitely not from Sainyabuli.

  “So, where are you from?” she shouted to me over the blasting music, in perfect American English.

  Say what? It had been days since I’d heard a word of English, and my shock was further compounded by the fact that this young woman spoke with a thick Southern accent.

  “America,” I replied, taken aback.

  “Yeah, but where?”

  “Washington, D.C. And you?”

  “North Carolina.”

  “North Carolina?”

  We tried to escape from the dance floor to talk, but the women surrounding us, tickled by the sight of one of their friends dancing with a foreigner, would not let us leave. So, over the music, we continued our conversation. I learned that she was visiting Laos for the first time since emigrating to the US as a child in the late 1970s. For this southern belle from Charlotte, the return had been eye-opening.

  “So how do you like Laos?” I asked.

  “This place is really undeveloped. I was really surprised.”

  “Don’t you find it beautiful?”

  “I guess so. But I’m bored. There’s nothing to do.”

  She was clearly underwhelmed by her return to her native land, and nothing I could say could convince her otherwise. Luckily, she’d be heading back to the US in a few days.

  After saying good-night to the restless North Carolinian, I went to use the facilities out back. Crouching over the hole in the ground that served as the Sainyabuli’s only working toilet, I imagined how happy she’d be to return to the comforts of Charlotte.

  On the way back inside, I noticed Khit and Oudon, who worked in the NTA finance section, heading in the direction of the hotel. Oudon was a walking ATM, ever armed with a briefcase stuffed with freshly printed stacks of kip. I rushed after them, glad to see that they were calling it a night. I’d begun to tire of the Sainyabuli, and was exhausted. Just then, however, Noxay appeared beside us in the NTA van, and Oudon and Khit pulled me inside. Evidently, this night wasn’t over yet.

  “Are you tired?” Khit asked.

  “Yes, I am very tired,” I replied, forgetting myself for a moment.

  “Ha! He has a lot of pubic hair! Did you hear that, guys?”

  We were soon speeding down Sainyabuli’s Main Street and out into the empty countryside. How Noxay was able to find his way was beyond me, as nothing but darkness surrounded us. Eventually, he took a sharp right and we pulled up to a small wooden shack—the only light for miles around—and entered what appeared to be a makeshift watering hole. Inside, the few remaining guests were quietly drinking themselves into oblivion. A man with unusually long hair and a bright orange blazer stood in the corner before an electric keyboard and, head down, crooned into a microphone. He seemed to have been standing in the same spot for years. Not once during our visit did he look up. After so long, what was there for him to see?

  We sat down and Oudon ordered a few beers and some fried pigskin, a traditional Lao “drinking snack.” After the drinks arrived, a woman emerged from behind the bar, sidled up to me, and began to pour my beer. Once, perhaps, this woman had been beautiful. But tonight she seemed weary of the world—though the appearance of an American in her nightclub had sparked her interest. She began to run her fingers through my hair and comment on my “beautiful white skin.” Before I knew it, she had set about seducing me. “Koi mak chao lai. I like you a lot,” she cooed. “Chao ngam lai. You are so beautifu
l.”

  Oudon, Khit, and Noxay lost no time in negotiating, on my behalf, a price for the night with her. But where would we stay? I wondered aloud. No problem, according to Oudon, I could just take her back to the hotel . . . where the rest of the NTA staff was sleeping.

  I demurred, but not after finding out her asking price. For me? Ten dollars for the night.

  The truth was, prostitution was rampant in Laos, and cheap. Lao men regularly visited brothels, both before and during marriage. In places like Sainyabuli, drinking and screwing were the main leisure activities; there wasn’t much else to do. NGOs in Vientiane feared that prostitution would lead to an explosion in AIDS cases in Laos, as the HIV virus spread through unprotected sex in the provinces. One group had developed a condom—Number One brand—for production and distribution in the country. But in its AIDS-prevention material, the government liked to associate the problem with international visitors, labeling the disease a foreign import. A UN-funded project at the NTA had even been established in order to address the problem of unprotected sex in the tourism sector. But nasty falang men looking for a good time weren’t the problem.

  What would my colleagues really have thought had I accepted their offer of a night with the girl at the bar? It wasn’t clear that their enthusiasm for my enjoyment was sincere. Perhaps they were simply testing me to make sure I didn’t slip up. I found myself in a strange position at the NTA: certainly I had nothing to worry about regarding my long-term future within the Lao government—I had none—but at the same time, I was constrained by my position as a foreigner. My ability to stay in Laos for as long as I liked depended on the NTA, which had to initiate the process each time I renewed my visa. Without the support of my sponsors at the office, including General Cheng, I would have to leave the country, so I was particularly careful about my behavior around my colleagues. The NTA rumor mill was notorious, and had I slept with this woman, everyone at the office would have known about it within hours.

  But more important than all this, what would I have thought of myself? This was the closest I had ever come to paying for sex, something I had never imagined I would do. Until then, prostitution had been something I’d thought about only hypothetically. It was an idea confined to the realm of fiction, far from the reality of my life. When confronted with it directly, however—with her skin and her breath so tangible—the act seemed eminently possible. A few more drinks, and perhaps I would have said yes. Eventually, Oudon, Noxay, and I stood up to leave. Khit, on the other hand, decided to stay behind. As we made our way out the door, the Sinatra of Sainyabuli nodded his head. But still he didn’t look up.

  Back at the Sainyabuli Nightclub, I collapsed into a seat at a table in a dark corner, only to find myself sitting next to the vice-governor. He brandished a bottle of Johnnie Walker and demanded that I partake, while a woman approached the table from behind the bar and sat down beside me. In short spurts of English, the vice-governor ordered me to have fun. “You turn left, and she turn right. I appoint her your partner! Ha!” After one awkward saloh dance, free as usual from the slightest bit of sexual innuendo, I didn’t see much more of my designated “partner.” Maybe she had been frightened off by my falang strangeness.

  Just then, Khit glided in, a smug grin plastered on his face. As he began to dance provocatively around the floor, I thought of his wife and son back in Vientiane, whom I’d met on a number of occasions. Khit, like most Lao men I knew, was a mess of contradictions. On the one hand, he was tremendously kind, physically close with other men, and at times even quite feminine. On the other, he was crude, obnoxious, and fiercely sexist, obsessed with proving just how much he could drink and how many women he could lay. And it seemed he wasn’t yet done for the night.

  In Sainyabuli, the provincial government had imposed a strict midnight curfew. And since the city’s generator stopped running at exactly midnight, it wasn’t difficult to enforce. As soon as the clock struck 12:00, the club cleared out. With nowhere else to go, people went home. On my way back to the hotel, I ran into Ounkham, who had once again appeared out of nowhere. Together, we stumbled back to the hotel, singing about the beauty of the Lao countryside:

  In the land of frangipani,

  Luang Prabang is a world famous city.

  The Plain of Jars of the Jeuang People,

  The ancient heritage of Xieng Khouang.

  Ounkham wielded his cigarette lighter to lead the way up the stairs of the majestic Sainyabuli Hotel. He held it near the door to my room just long enough for me to fumble with my key and get inside. The light from the moon shone through the window and fell on my bed.

  My roommate Khit was nowhere to be found.

  Lonely in Laos

  _________________

  When I first arrived in Laos, the only available tourist guidebook about the country was the Lonely Planet. For the backpacker (not, lest we offend, the “tourist”) whose goal was to spend as little money as humanly possible, Le Lonely was indispensable. As a result, its author had acquired an almost god-like power over the tourism industry in Laos. Single-handedly, he could determine the fortunes of a restaurant or guest-house. For any aspiring restaurateur or hotelier, a mention in Lonely Planet was the key to survival in Laos’ quickly developing tourism industry; if you didn’t make the book, you hadn’t a chance.

  In fact, with the stroke of a pen, this writer had put an entire village on the map:

  Vang Vieng had the good fortune to be located at a bend in the Nam Song River just 160 kilometers north of Vientiane. Here, the breathtaking limestone karsts concealed a vast network of caves to be explored. In 1998, the town boasted a handful of guest-houses and two restaurants. A few travelers would trickle down from Luang Prabang on their way to Vientiane, or vice versa, but not many. In the town itself, people moved around slowly on foot or by bicycle. By dusk every night, the place was dead. Once Vang Vieng was mentioned in Lonely Planet, however, it was converted overnight into a backpacker’s mecca. Throughout Southeast Asia and beyond, travelers knew about the wonders of the town and its environs—where, soon enough, the food wasn’t the only thing that was cheap. Curiosity fueled an explosion in the town’s tourism industry.

  By the time I last visited Vang Vieng, nearly every house had been converted into a guest-house or restaurant, each offering the same services: banana pancakes in the morning, and tours of the nearby caves in the afternoon. There appeared to be more tourists in Vang Vieng than actual residents, traipsing around town in their tank tops and cut-off jeans, dreadlocks and matted beards, guitars hanging from the straps of their backpacks. The sweet smell of marijuana smoke lingered in the air around them, and Lao teenagers would hang out on the street until midnight, singing along with garbled versions of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” Honda Dreams were everywhere; the town had been turned on its head.

  The Lonely Planet author didn’t have much regard for the NTA: “The LNTA’s top officials organize endless meetings and seminars to discuss the future of tourism in Laos but in actual fact they wield very little power and as a governing body the office is ineffectual,” he wrote. “The bottom line is that you’re better off going just about anywhere else in Vientiane but the LNTA if you’re seeking accurate, up-to-date information on travel in Laos.”

  I would have loved to have taken offense at this harsh assessment of my office, but, alas, it was largely true. The folks at the NTA were usually the last to know about the wholesale transformation of towns like Vang Vieng, underway all over Laos.

  Sometimes, in fact, I wished that travelers would heed the Lonely Planet’s advice regarding the NTA. While they seemed to slavishly follow every other instruction in the guidebook regarding where to go and what to see, many travelers would persist in stopping by the office. They would come in to ask for everything from maps of the city to Beer Lao T-shirts; from advice about road safety to bus schedules. One day, a blond Swedish backpacker, as friendly and handsome as he was filthy, straggled in off the street. It was clear that he had quite a pro
blem: he had lost his girlfriend. Not his backpack. Not his passport. His girlfriend. As my colleagues and I tried our best to stifle our laughter, we listened as he explained how this could have happened. The two had last been traveling together in Thailand, where they had split up. He headed for Japan, while she went up to Luang Prabang. According to the plan, they were to meet in Vientiane, but she was nowhere to be found. Had anyone at the NTA seen her? We dutifully put her passport photo on file, and notified the new “tourist police” office upstairs. The Swede went on his way and traveled up to Luang Prabang himself. By the time he passed by the NTA again, a week later, there still had been no word about his girlfriend. We could do little to cure his loneliness.

  I had difficulty relating to the travelers I met in Laos. Even though most were about my age and from the West, I usually felt a far stronger connection to Lao friends like Bing and Kham. I was hardly a permanent resident, but neither was I merely passing through. I had made an investment in Vientiane, however haphazard and unplanned, and to me it felt like home. For most backpackers, Laos was simply another stop along the way; a laid-back stopover with cheap accommodation and good beer. When travelers would ask me, “So what should I do in Vientiane? I have just one day—what should I see?” I had no idea where to begin. What did I do in Vientiane each day, anyway? Despite my best efforts at the NTA, I didn’t really consider Vientiane a tourist destination. It was where I lived.

  There was one way I could get a sense of what tourists felt about Laos without actually talking to them. As part of Mr. Kawabata’s consulting program, the Statistics Unit had begun surveying travelers at the airport and at the border crossing with Thailand. Each morning and afternoon, Seng, Mani, and anyone else who could be cajoled into participating would pile into the NTA van and head off to hand out written questionnaires for tourists to complete. I wiled away many an hour sifting through the old surveys that had piled up in the corner of the Statistics Unit, reading the comments.