by You Jin
There was a group of young people standing below the dancing stage watching. They were in high spirits, some singing along with the music, trying their best to keep up. The older villagers were seated along the sides of the square, chatting. The whole area was brimming not only with people of all ages, but also with flocks and herds of animals. The whole village had turned out to join in the festivities.
We found a young man who could speak Chinese. He rapidly told us, “My grandfather’s generation all made their living on opium. Later, the government cracked down on the opium trade, and they gave us this farmland free of charge. Now we make our living growing things like lychees, longan, mangoes, bananas, papayas, rice, corn, and cotton. The land is fertile here. Whatever you plant, it will grow, so we have a good harvest every year.”
I hesitated, but still asked, “Do the villagers use opium?”
He did not answer directly. “To the older generation, it is a part of life, a hard habit to break. The younger generation is very aware of the dangers of opium, so they don’t use it.”
I noticed that Nong’an had both running water and electricity. When I asked about it, the young man said, “Yes, the government helped bring in water and electricity. In the past, the Miao tribes were nomadic. Every time we moved to a new place, we would burn the trees to create a clearing. In order to help us live a more settled, contented life, the government gave us a good deal of assistance in many areas. For instance, the village school was built by the government, and all the children enjoy six years of free education.”
I felt that, compared to the people of Tu’an, the Miao people of Nong’an were much happier. Life in Nong’an was simple and pleasant. They worked from sunrise till sundown. They wore handmade clothes. They ate the rice and vegetables they had grown, and chickens and pigs they had reared. They were self-sufficient in every way, and they were content. But the Miao people in Tu’an were not so simple. They had chosen to enter the world of business and all that it entailed, and their constant interactions with tourists had shaped their view of life. They were much less content, and so were more likely to seek all the joys and sorrows of opium use. Of course, that is only my own observation and understanding. Perhaps, the two things are actually unrelated.
After talking with the middle-aged Chinese man, I made my way out to look at the fields. They had already been harvested, and the next planting season had not yet come. There was not a single person in the fields. The breeze blew amongst the endless stretches of fruit trees, carrying with it a whispering voice. Ah, this was once the site of the poppy fields! When these flowers opened, they would simultaneously bring a ray of hope and the shadow of death. They could make people laugh, and make them weep. The emptiness of these fields and the people who made their living from it seemed dark and barren against the light of hope I had earlier seen in the village of Nong’an, where opium had lost its hold.
Black Rice
ONLY UPON ARRIVING in the Laotian city of Phonsavan did I really understand what was meant by “walking on thin ice”. It was also the only time I really understood the chilly idea behind it.
When we entered the small city, with its population of just fifty thousand people, I immediately felt there was something unusual about it. The streets and alleys, cafés, little restaurants, famous historic sites, and all public buildings had banners hung in front with the word “danger” written upon them. In the pictures on the banners, there were eighteen depictions of bombs in different shapes, serving as warnings to educate the public, stating that if a bomb was found, they must not touch it, but should notify the authorities. The tourist materials also included this warning: Whilst touring in Phonsavan, do not go into any empty fields. There are still numerous explosives, making the area unsafe.
Phonsavan, situated in central Laos, is the capital of Xieng Khong province. Surrounded by impressive mountainous scenery, Xieng Khong was the most devastated, war-torn area in northern Laos. During the war in the 1960s and 70s, nearly every city, town and village was thrown into chaos, especially after US troops intervened in the conflict. Many villages, enduring intense bombings, were levelled, completely wiped from the face of the earth.
Many of the survivors continue to live in the shadow of that struggle. One gentleman of more than seventy years brought up the unhappy era, informing me, “That kind of intensive bombardment is a terrible situation. The bombs dropped without warning, like a farmer scattering seed, and what sprouted from them was the black rice of death.”
Another man who had gone through a baptism of fire during the war spoke of it like a man remembering a dream. He said, “During one air raid, my neighbour was carrying her baby at her breast. It was just a few weeks old. She was at the river washing clothes, and she could not run away in time. After the air raid, I was on my way home when I saw this mother and child lying there like nothing was wrong. Then I wasn’t sure why, but I saw that she was unsteady, as if she didn’t have a skeleton. She looked like a ghost. I walked over and found that I wasn’t mistaken—this woman really had been burned into ash, and the body was quivering where she lay. After that, someone touched the two of them very lightly, and they disintegrated, the ash just dissipating in the breeze.”
Despite how much time had passed since such events happened, when I talked to people about these things, the voices of the elderly people in Phonsavan who had witnessed them first-hand still shook when they talked.
But most distressing were the countless minefields and the large number of unexploded bombs left in Xieng Khong after the war. Many injuries and deaths were caused when these were accidentally detonated after the war, and the death tally rose as many lives were needlessly, cruelly cut short. Amongst the fatalities, the numbers of children and farmers were especially high. Innocent children were often curious about the oddly shaped bombs uncovered in the field, so they explored the “toys” with their hands, or kicked them, only to suffer tragedy in the midst of their joyous play. As for the farmers, landmines were sometimes left exposed after years of erosion by wind and rain, but the farmers mistook them for stones when they ploughed their fields. When they tried to remove the obstacles, they met with accidents. After that, because they had been injured when the landmines were detonated, they were left in extreme poverty.
That night, I went for dinner in a small, busy restaurant in Phonsavan, the Sangah Restaurant. I met several British landmine experts there. In talking with them, I found that five years earlier, the International Monetary Fund had set up a Landmine Advisory Committee for Laos, under the guidance of eight consultants (seven British and one Dutch). There were three hundred and fifty Laotians involved in checking for and disarming landmines and other dangerous explosives. According to their estimations, there were sixty to eighty casualties each year. In 1998 alone, there had been seventy casualties from landmine-related accidents, and what was most astonishing was that they had already discovered over fifty thousand landmines that year.
One of the waitresses in the restaurant chimed in, saying that once, when she was working in a field, she had mistaken a landmine for a rock and had lightly kicked it away. Afterward, she felt something was not right. When she looked back, she realised what it was. Scared half to death, she ran, fearing the whole time that she would stumble over another landmine.
The next day, we went to Tham Piu, a site near Phonsavan where a great tragedy had occurred. I felt I really should watch my step. I trembled with fear, as if there were an enemy under every bush or tree.
Tham Piu boasts many natural caves, and is situated near a wooded area. Many of the caves are more than five miles long. The scenery was once exceptional, but after being devastated by the war, it had turned into a haunted landscape. In 1969, the bombing was so intense you couldn’t tell day from night. Many people who were too poor to flee further away hid in the caves, thinking them an ideal refuge. The American troops fired into the caves, bombing them ruthlessly. Over four hundred farmers were killed.
When we asked the
travel agent to arrange a trip to Tham Piu for us, she said seriously, “The flames of war burned everywhere there, and there are still loads of landmines. If you ask me, it’s better not to go.”
We didn’t want to go to Laos without seeing our goal, so we sought out a substitute local travel agent, a farmer called Akela. For a small fee, he took us there. Before we set out, he warned us three times, “Be careful where you walk,” and “Whatever you do, don’t just walk off the path out of curiosity.”
We walked and walked, following Akela, and we entered a world of all shades of green, set side by side in a lush mountain scene. At the foot of the mountain, we carefully followed in the footsteps of our leader, not daring to venture off the path, and keeping our eyes glued to the trail before us. Sometimes, the narrow path was covered in shadows, and we would have a very difficult time passing that stretch of road. When we had gone about halfway along our path, we came to a small brook. The waters flowed gently across the countryside. When I first heard it, it sounded like the lonely howl of a ghost. Perhaps this brook was made of the tears of many ghosts. When we came to the head of the brook, I took one look and hesitated. There I saw several sacrificial altars, shrines built into the grass. Above was a group of gruesome bones, the longest of which was about six inches. Many were of irregular shapes. There were carvings on the bones, and there were flowers and incense sticks on the altar. The few flowers had long ago wilted. The incense sticks were left carelessly in an empty soft drink bottle and lay on one side. Akela told us in English that these bones were from the caves, what you might call “blood offerings”.
Taking the altar as a landmark, we started our slow ascent. This path was very narrow, a circuitous mountain path, and we also had to worry about explosives. It seemed to take a lifetime to walk that path.
My heart was in my throat as we walked toward the opening of the cave. With the first glimpse, a giant hand seemed to grip my heart. The whole cave still looked just like it had the year it had been bombed by the American army. The irregular caves were covered with blood, filth and tattered rags, a silent indictment of the acts of war. Inside there were broken crockery and upturned wooden tables scattered about. You could guess that these ordinary people had been going about their regular daily duties, preparing their regular meal, without the slightest foreknowledge of the violence that was about to be visited on them and their children. When the bombs fell, old and young, men and women were left with nowhere to hide. Now, thirty years later, only these caves knew the horrors those souls had faced.
The war was over, but the post-war generation was still left with an unknown—but surely vast—number of explosives, like a curse the world had burdened them with. This venomous curse was always hanging over the two hundred thousand residents of Xieng Khong, making them always live in the shadow of fear.
We went to Muang Khun, an ancient city transformed into ruins by the bombs. In this war-ravaged city, there were numerous craters left by the bombs, huge, round, gaping holes like the maw of a demon. The empty shells of the bombs could be seen everywhere, lying scattered by the road, or next to private residences. Each empty shell was about two and a half metres long. It was shocking to see such a lethal show of force. Some of the private homes had used shell casings as part of their structure; the weapons now served as materials for shelter. This town, rebuilt after the war, was home to about ten thousand people, who had streamed into it to get on with life, but the air was stifling, filled with a sense of foreboding. People did not talk much, as if the weight of the world was on their shoulders. War is so much worse than the most horrifying nightmares.
On our last day in Phonsavan, I had one last wish: to see a landmine being disarmed. During the day, in one of the fields, I saw a landmine consultant team carefully conducting an investigation of the ground, inch by inch. All of the workers wore solemn expressions. They were examining a canister that held six hundred and seventy pounds of explosives. They were taking measures to remove the dangerous explosives, but managing these “products of evil” was easier said than done.
Passing Between Beauty and Death
The Danger of Bird-watching
WHEN WE ARRIVED at the entrance of Chitwan National Park in Nepal, the sun was setting in the west, the faint golden glow cooling the air. It morphed very quickly, becoming richer and brighter, changing into a huge dazzling beauty, and whilst I was staring breathlessly at it, it turned blood red before my eyes, heroically setting the leisurely flowing river on fire. From a distance, the river looked like a meandering water snake sticking out its flaming tongue. Then the wind came, and so did the clouds, and the unparalleled setting sun disappeared. The river resumed its tranquillity. Beside it, a herd of water buffaloes was drinking, their hazy reflection rippling in the waters.
Chitwan National Park is an animal reserve 932 square kilometres in size. It has the longest history of any national park in Nepal, and it is the largest. The animals that live in the reserve include single-horned rhinos, tigers, leopards, deer, bears, monkeys, wildcats and crocodiles. Aside from these, there are many species of birds, along with a variety of flora and fauna.
A Nepalese man drove a jeep to the park entrance to meet us. The vehicle crossed many small hills and brooks, bringing us to a grass hut deep in the jungle. We stayed in this grass hut for three days.
The hut stood in the shadow of the trees, with wooden windows and doors, a thatched roof, and walls made up of bamboo tubes, very simple and special. It had no electricity, and we ate dinner each night by candlelight, which was another kind of experience. The only real difficulty I met with there were the mosquitoes that flew around all night. My arms were completely covered with mosquito bites, painful and itchy. It was miserable.
The next morning, our guide Ishan arrived. He said brightly, “Come, I’ll take you bird-watching in the jungle.”
Bird-watching sounded like an ordinary enough activity, but danger lurked everywhere. In summer, the grass in the jungle was as tall as a person, and there was no way to tell what might be hiding there. What was even more worrying was that, in Nepal, the authorities go to great measures to protect the wildlife, including making it illegal for guides to carry guns. In an emergency situation, the guide would have to rely on his own reflexes and experience to escape from danger.
Ishan, who was twenty-seven at the time, had eight years of experience working as a guide. Since he grew up in the jungle in Chitwan, he knew every tree and plant there intimately. In fact, he took the jungle as his family pharmacy and kitchen. He pointed out each tree and plant, telling us both their medicinal and culinary uses. Everything from stomach ailments, diarrhoea and headaches, to more complicated illnesses, had a cure there. Many of the indigenous people who lived in the jungle all year round relied only on natural remedies to cure all sorts of illnesses. Besides this, many of the plants could be used to make different spices to cook all sorts of mouth-watering dishes.
The Bad-Tempered Rhino
Ishan was a very alert fellow. When he was pushing the tall grass apart and walking ahead of us, his eyes were bright, his ears pricked up very, very straight, and he seemed to be holding his breath. As we walked along, he suddenly stopped and pointed to a row of deep animal tracks in the mud, telling us to look. They were an inch long and half an inch wide, with three toes. Each was about the size of a palm. Rhino footprints!
Because of indiscriminate killing by hunters, the number of rhinos was shrinking. According to figures, in the late 1960s, there were about eighty rhinos left in the Chitwan animal reserve. In 1973, it was officially set up as a national protected area, with severe consequences for hunting within the reserve, so the rhino population began to increase again. Today, there are over five hundred single-horned rhinos in the park, and as a result, Nepal has become renowned as the world’s most successful country in the preservation of the one-horned rhino.
The clumsy-looking beast seems to be quite humble, but it is actually a very dangerous animal. Its vision is very poor
, and this natural weakness has made it a suspicious, bad-tempered creature. If there’s an object moving in front of it, it will not hesitate to go on the attack, and its heightened sense of hearing and smell fuels its ferocity. It occasionally wanders into nearby villages at night, and eats the crops. The villages build watchtowers with grass and bamboo and keep watch through the night. If they see a rhino wander in, they will light torches and make noises to scare it off.
Ishan warned us seriously, “If you come across a rhino in the jungle, you must remember: climb the nearest tree as quickly as you can. If you can’t climb the tree, then hide behind it, and don’t make a sound. If you meet it in the open, whatever you do, don’t run in a straight line. Use its weakness, swerving as you run so you can avoid its line of sight.”
“What if—” I swallowed hard, asking anxiously, “What if you’re too scared to move?”
“Then scream, and hopefully you’ll scare it away.”
The rhino has three ways of attacking a human: goring, biting and trampling. Ishan told us that once, a guide was leading some German tourists across a brook when they met some rhinos drinking there. The female rhino’s maternal instinct surfaced, and she charged ferociously at them. The guide did not react quickly enough and fell to the ground. The rhino gored him, and was about to sink her teeth into his stomach, when in the nick of time, he stuck his arm into its mouth, allowing the creature to bite it. At this moment, the tourists let out some earth-shattering shouts, startling the rhino. It let go of the bloody broken arm, then turned and took her calf into the jungle.