by Brett Dakin
I watched the trucks drive off, and behind me the lights that had illuminated the Culture Hall all evening were shut off. As I walked home, I thought of the president’s daughter and her shopping sprees, her father and his new White House, and General Cheng and the clear-cutting of Laos’ forests.
What would Sithong have thought of all of this?
Thank You Very Much
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Open wide your eyes and ears, but know how to remain discreet and to respect secrets.
Lao Proverb
The chocolate cake at Just for Fun was the best in all of Laos. That may sound like an exaggeration, but it is a claim I feel I can make with some authority; I’ve tried every chocolate cake for sale in the country. The dried coconut curry and drunken noodles at this little Thai restaurant were, of course, extraordinary as well. But I really looked forward to the chocolate cake, of which I partook only on special occasions. And so it was that I found myself at Just for Fun on a Thursday evening in March enjoying a cup of coffee and cake with Ying. I was leaving Laos soon, and this would be one of our last dinners together. Although it was already nine o’clock, and the restaurant was about to close, we savored our dessert as we sat outside, talking about what the future might hold. Neither of us were sure where we’d be in a year, and what our experiences in Laos would mean for the rest of our lives. Who knew what might happen?
All of a sudden, our ruminations were interrupted by a tremendous explosion. The sound was deafening. Our table shook, my coffee spilled. The big bang had come from down the street, near the Fountain Circle. At first, I thought it might have been an old car, or perhaps some falling scaffolding. But it was far too loud for that. After a few minutes, a stream of residents and tourists alike began to move toward the apparent source of the explosion. Ying and I quickly paid the bill, left our half-eaten cake on the table, and joined the crowd to find out what had happened. Children in pajamas, women in towels—virtually everyone in the neighborhood had emerged from their homes. They were all walking in the direction of a restaurant named Kop Chai Deu, or “Thank You Very Much.”
Kop Chai Deu was a small outdoor drinking garden just off the Fountain Circle, opposite the Namphu restaurant. Opened a few months before, it was the sort of innovative establishment the Lao tourism industry desperately needed. The owner, Chanti Deunsavanh, was a well-known Lao writer who had recently been awarded the Association of Southeast Asian Nations literature prize. The backdrop to the restaurant was the façade of an old French villa, which had been lit with soft floodlights. Rather than renovating the villa itself, the owner had decided to highlight the beauty of its crumbling façade by opening up a restaurant in the garden. The Kop Chai Deu quickly became a popular hangout for tourists, young expats, and the occasional Lao customer as well. The food wasn’t great—the menu was limited to simple items like fried rice and grilled meat—but the Beer Lao was cold and the atmosphere unbeatable.
That Thursday night, however, the atmosphere was deeply unsettling. While policemen were already in place, shooing onlookers away, I was able to get close enough to see that a large hole had been blown through the side of the villa. Shards of glass were scattered around the garden. I could hear a few cries emanating from the site, but there was no ambulance to be seen. For the aftermath of what seemed to have been a great explosion, it seemed oddly quiet. Ying and I said good-night and I drove home, wondering what could possibly have gone wrong.
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When I drove by Kop Chai Deu the next morning, all traces of the incident had been erased. The hole in the villa façade had been patched up, the glass swept away. By dusk, a new batch of tourists was already enjoying the beer garden. As for the government, which it seems had forced the restaurant to re-open, it simply chose not to acknowledge that anything had happened. The national news service refused to address the subject for days. Across the border in Thailand, the event had already made the nightly news, and even the international press had taken notice. But from official Laos, there was not a sound.
Of course, by now the entire city knew. The rumors had begun to fly almost as soon as the glass and debris had settled the night before. It had been a grenade, some said. No, said others, it was a gas explosion. No, it was just a broken transformer. Maybe it had something to do with the water pipes? Nine people had died. No, only two. No, six people had been injured, and none had died. Only foreigners had been injured. No, hang on, a Lao waiter had been hurt. At the office later in the week, Seng even told me that a Japanese tourist had been split in two, his body parts strewn about the restaurant.
When the government finally acknowledged that an explosion had in fact taken place, it claimed that it had been the result of a gas leak at the restaurant. The government tried its best to keep all reliable information about the incident out of Vientiane. For days, delivery of the Bangkok Post and The Nation was interrupted. An Australian Broadcasting Corporation reporter and cameraman who had been at Kop Chai Deu at the time of the explosion—and who had been able to film the aftermath—were detained for four hours. The police confiscated their camera and videotape.
When we were once again granted access to the Thai newspapers, they weren’t much help. The reporting was based almost entirely on rumors, obtained from all sorts of “informed” and “highly placed” sources in Vientiane. Everyone—from the vice president of the Lao Writers' Association, who thought the attack was the result of a business dispute, to a Western diplomat who saw the blast as “a direct challenge to the powers-that-be” in Vientiane—had something to say.
I pieced together an account of the evening by talking to friends who had been at the restaurant at the time of the explosion. On the evening of March 30, two men had been driving their motorbikes along Setthathirath Road past Kop Chai Deu. Just after nine o’clock, one lobbed an explosive device over the fence and into the garden. The object first landed on the canvas awning above the grill, then fell to the seating area below, where it exploded in the middle of a group of customers. At that point, chaos ensued. Tuk-tuks, which as usual were parked at the Fountain Circle nearby, substituted for ambulances and were summoned to drive the wounded to the hospital. Some drivers demanded fares of up to two dollars to make the five-minute drive. At the hospital, the staff was entirely unprepared, and victims with no medical experience performed operations on themselves. Luckily, Australian Embassy officials arrived at the scene and convinced government authorities to re-open the Friendship Bridge to Thailand—which was only open during the day—so that the seriously wounded could be taken to a hospital in Nong Khai.
In the end, at least 13 people, including at least six foreigners, were injured. Tourists from the UK, Germany, Australia, and Denmark were among the victims. At least three foreigners were hospitalized in Thailand due to shrapnel wounds. A waiter at the restaurant was the most seriously injured.
To this day, why the attack occurred remains unclear. After the gas explosion theory was ruled out—the restaurant had only a charcoal grill—the government began to characterize the incident as a terrorist attack. The official daily, Pasason, reported that the Party Central Committee had “asked the general public to co-operate with police in the investigation to safeguard the peaceful life of the capital residents and to foil terrorism.” Some officials claimed that the terrorists intended to sabotage the Visit Laos Year campaign by discrediting Vientiane’s ability to provide a secure environment for tourists just when the government was banking on the sector as an important source of revenue. An implied connection was drawn between the bombing and the continuing unrest out in the provinces. The wave of irrepressible insurgent movements had washed up in the nation’s capital.
But no one I talked to really believed that the incident had been the work of terrorists. Many thought it had something to do with an emerging rift within the Party, a division along multiple fault lines that threatened the current regime’s hold on power. Younger Party members against their elders. Reformers versus hard-line
socialists. Southerners against northerners. And those who were allied with Vietnam against those, like the ascendant foreign minister, Somsavat Lengsavad, who were close to China. Perhaps the struggle to shape Laos’s future was spilling out onto the streets. I wasn’t immune to conspiracy theories; as soon as I heard about the bomb, I thought of the mysterious Saigon restaurant explosion in The Quiet American.
Then again, maybe all of this was just the result of a personal vendetta against the owner of the Kop Chai Deu. Did he really deserve to succeed as an entrepreneur even after winning the prestigious ASEAN literature prize? To me, the most plausible explanation was one no one around town had given much thought to. I figured that the two men on motorbikes weren’t men at all, but teenage boys, gang members high on amphetamines, who had nothing better to do that Thursday evening than to throw an old grenade they had found into a restaurant crowded with falang.
One could understand why the government wasn’t eager for people to explore this story. The timing, after all, couldn’t have been worse. The Party had just completed its grand anniversary celebration. The National Assembly had just convened to discuss the criminal code and measures to increase social stability. And reliable reports of Vietnamese troop movements in Xieng Khouang—designed to help the Lao security forces suppress the rebels, the Vietnamese presence had risen to at least 10,000 troops—were appearing in the international press. Now someone was causing trouble right in the capital, where the government’s power was strongest. For the first time since the communists had taken power in 1975, bringing welcome end to decades of civil war, Vientiane seemed to be getting less, not more, secure.
Whatever the real explanation for the Kop Chai Deu bombing, it was nothing but bad news for the Party. Vientiane’s peaceful existence had been shattered, and whatever faith its residents had ever had in the government had been severely diminished. The city would never be the same again. And a new era in Laos’ history had begun.
Forgetting
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Leaving Laos wasn’t easy. I had arrived in Vientiane with no language ability, no experience living in a developing country, and no local contacts. But somehow I had been able to craft a life for myself that I truly loved. For the first time, I had found a place to live, made the most of an often impossible job, and found some good friends—all from scratch. My house, sitting just around the corner from the Mekong, was far larger and more graceful than anything I could afford in the West. My job had been filled with frustrations, but the occasional productive day had made me feel as if I was contributing something worthwhile to the country. And the extraordinary individuals I had met, from places as far away as China and France to as close as the house next door, had enhanced my life in ways I’d never imagined possible. Conversations with Ying at the Liao Ning and Mon at the noodle shop next to the NTA, with my next-door neighbor Bing over iced coffee, and Michel over confis de canard, were at the center of my daily life in Vientiane. Never again would I be able to structure my life so exclusively around friendship; free from the constraints of a demanding job or the responsibility of a family, I could spend as much time as I liked thinking about and learning from other people’s experiences—and my own.
Nevertheless, by the time the spring of 2000 rolled around, I knew it was time to leave. For one thing, the Visit Laos Year campaign was coming to an end. While I’m quite sure the campaign itself had very little to do with it (and certainly I had contributed nothing), the number of international visitors to Laos had exploded during the period I lived in Vientiane. Among backpackers in Southeast Asia, Laos had become a destination they couldn’t miss. Newly refurbished colonial-era hotels and restaurants in Vientiane and Luang Prabang attracted high-end travelers like the American tour group that flew by private jet around Southeast Asia and touched down in Laos twice while I was at the NTA. Government policy had certainly influenced this change: in the fall of 1998, a visitor to Laos had to go through an arduous visa application process; by the spring of 2000, that same tourist could simply buy a visa on arrival at most entry points. Laos would never be Thailand or Vietnam—thank goodness—but almost overnight, it had become the fastest-growing tourist destination in Southeast Asia.
To say that the Lao government had fully embraced the idea of international tourism would be misleading, but it had recognized the benefits of opening up the country’s doors to foreigners and their dollars. I had worked with my friends and colleagues at the NTA not only to promote Laos and to provide tourists with some advice about what to do once they arrived, but also to consider the potential problems of tourism development, including increased recreational drug use, environmental destruction, and serious cultural disruption. None of these issues had been resolved, by any means, but I did feel comfortable that, perhaps with power of General Cheng behind it, the NTA was in a strong position to influence the course that tourism development in Laos would take in the years to come. In any case, the money from Princeton had run out, and the NTA wasn’t about to start paying me.
Then again, jobs in Vientiane weren’t hard to find. I would have been able to secure a position with an NGO or international organization or, as a last result, as an English teacher at a language school. If I had really wanted to stay, I could have found a way. But that was just it: if I had stayed, I wasn’t sure I’d ever leave. I could imagine myself living in Vientiane for years, applying to renew my visa every few months and holding my breath as I awaited a new lease on my paradisiacal lifestyle. I feared ending up like Joe, another quiet, bitter American who had renounced his ties to the US but had yet to find a home for himself in Asia. The ease with which I’d slipped into a comfortable routine in Vientiane frightened me, for it wasn’t clear where it would lead. Among other things, I’d been entirely unsuccessful in love, repelled rather than stimulated by the difficulties of pursuing relationships with Lao women.
But the main reason I felt I had to leave was more simple: everyone else was always leaving. While I’d lived there, most of my closest friends had left. Michel had moved on to teach French in Korea, Gong had returned to China. Surely it was fun to meet the occasional visiting consultant, to learn from the mishaps of the likes of Kawabata and Nigel as they floated from one poor country to the next. But this was no substitute for the real friendships I’d established, and it was difficult to watch as the men and women I had come to know disappeared. As for my Lao friends, if they hadn’t found a way out already, most were trying desperately to leave. I couldn’t live in a place that people were always trying to escape from.
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In the months after I left Vientiane, I followed the news from Laos as closely as I could, and it struck me that I’d made the right decision. On a Monday evening about a month after the Kop Chai Deu restaurant bombing, another explosion took place near the Evening Market. On the rare occasions when I had actually cooked a meal in Vientiane, it had been to the Evening Market that I’d ventured for ingredients. Fresh fruits and vegetables, handmade egg noodles, and small plastic bags of peanut sauce—these were what I thought of when I heard mention of the market. But now, far different images came to mind. Again, the details of this incident were unclear. Some reported seeing a person on a motorcycle lob a grenade toward the open-air market. Others mentioned a violent confrontation between the owner of a bar across the street and a group of unruly customers. When the owner had asked the drunks to leave, they had refused. He had then emerged from the bar carrying a grenade, which had exploded in his hand, killing him and injuring two others. The Foreign Ministry maintained that a new army recruit who lived near the market had accidentally dropped a small training bomb, setting it off and killing him. He had just returned home from military training.
As I observed Laos from afar, I read in horror as the explosions kept coming. By July, there had been at least five blasts in Vientiane. In addition to the Kop Chai Deu and the Evening Market, bombs had exploded at the central bus station, at a downtown hotel, and on a bus. No one claimed responsibility f
or any of the incidents. Then, on July 3, about sixty rebels armed with assault rifles and grenade launchers crossed into Southern Laos from Thailand. They attacked the border officials, taking hostages before being gunned down by government forces. At least five of the rebels were killed, and 28 were captured after retreating into Thailand. According to Thai reports, the raiders were linked to Crown Prince Soulivong Savang, heir to the Lao throne, who at the time was working to build support in the West for an overthrow of the communist government. The insurgents, a group of inexperienced fighters including an elderly taxi driver, had been promised money and property in a liberated Laos.
At the end of July, seven people were injured when a bomb went off at the post office in Vientiane. The explosion took place at eleven o’clock in the morning, just about the time when I myself would have strolled over from the NTA to check my mail. In January, an explosion at the Friendship Bridge injured a group of bystanders, and in February a small explosion occurred next to a market in Luang Prabang. Again, no one claimed responsibility for these incidents.
In the face of all of this chaos, Laos’ top rulers retreated from view. It was left to lower officials to come up with explanations, and some tried to dismiss the incidents—the first of their kind in 25 years—as nothing to be concerned about. The foreign minister told the international press that the bombs could have been caused by business disputes or personal vendettas. “All countries have both bad and good people,” he said. “Why are these bombs . . . a matter of surprise to Western reporters?”