Being "Falang"

Nothing says falang (westerner) quite like french fries.  I admit, these little suckers tasted absolutely delicious, complete with ketchup and grease.  At some level, I missed them.  But I felt embarrassed eating them, almost dirty, especially as we sat in a second floor balcony in a French cafe and could see a native noodle "shop" under an unbrella down on the street beneath us, especially as we ordered a traditional Lao dish, laab gai, and it came looking like a traditional Lao dish--except it had absolutely no hot pepper in it.  None.  Basically, the heart had been ripped out of the dish so that the average westerner could stomach it.  Think ordering a hamburger and getting tofu. 

Couple this with the fact that we paid outrageous prices for our food--over $3 a dish, which of course, is completely reasonable but significantly higher than what we have been paying--and you have the complete reasons for my misgivings about being in the Lao capital, Vientiane: too many white people and higher prices.

But why do I feel so jealous/guilty about this experience?  Do I want to pretend that I can hoard this Lao experience all to my little self?  Am I to deny the fact that I could have eaten two pounds of those french fries, that it would have seemed an oasis in the midst of oceans of pho and mountains of dom mach hung? Yea, that my veritable arteries rejoiced at the artery-clogging delight?  What is it about seeing more westerners in one day than we've seen the whole rest of the trip that makes me distrust this place we're staying, that makes me distrust the authenticity of the experience so much? 

Sure, there may be some elitism to my feelings, a certain hoarding tendency, but there's also something almost inherently misshaping about western influence that, I would argue, is what really concerns me.  Flannery O'Connor's statement that humans misshape everything they touch--even God--in their own image could be easily applied to culture: when we come in contact with an "other" culture, our tendency is to misshape it to look like our own. 

Now, of course, I must acknowledge the fact that this is the very nature of culture: many things are shaped and misshaped into something different that then blossoms into a cutlture all its own; this is the wonderful elasticity and hybridity of culture.  Indeed, I've read that most peppers that are now so inherent to Southeast Asian cultures came originally from the western hemisphere.  So we're dealing with something--culture itself--that is by nature hard to--nay, wrong to--fence off, sequester, put in a bubble.  This is how cultures die.

And yet eating a dish that has been significantly misshapen in the heart of the Lao capital gives me pause, makes me wonder what kind of faux Lao culture I'm finding in the heart of Lao culture and why.

But this all begs the question, what does authenticity mean? Who gets to label something as "authentic"? And what is authenticity's value?  Is it really a crime of authenticity to deliver a dish more palatable to white folks that removed just one ingredient?

My feelings on this issue have everything to do with both our experience in Savannakhet as well as the obvious and growing gap between my mother-in-law's way of experiencing Lao culture and ours.

Compared to Vientiane, Savannakhet is significantly backwater, in both good and bad senses.  The internet is an endangered species in Savannakhet; malls are close-quartered markets with individual vendors, stifling heat and dizzying smells--and they sell raw fish.  There are two places that sell hamburgers in the whole town (we saw signs but didn't eat them).  We got used to Savannakhet; it felt like a small town; it could be had for the walking.  And yet, for the most part, it did not cater to our tastes; rather, we tasted of it.

But cultural differences became glaringly apparent in a trip across country yesterday.  Basically, we were divided between two pickups, one with 5 Lao people and luggage in the back; and the other with 10 Americans, including 5 children in the back.  When the Lao people stopped several times for snacks, the Americans got impatient; when the Americans stopped to pee, the Laotians raced ahead.  The longer time went, the crabbier the Americans got--the more backwards the poorly constructed roads became, the more annoying the slow tractors and lack of traffic laws got, the sorrier we felt for ourselves in the heat.  Meanwhile, the Lao truck decided to pull off and stop at a relative's house.  And the Americans went postal--almost.  All we wanted was a nice, air conditioned hotel and a shower--was that too much to ask? 

The answer, of course, became apparent when we finally made it to Vientiane and pulled into yet another relative's house.  Adjacent to the house was a tin shack and a woman wading in the pool that had developed underneath and around her house for what may have been an evening bath:  for most people in Laos, yes, air conditioning is too much to ask.

But that didn't make us want it any less. 

In essence, no matter how crusader I get, I am spoiled by American culture--spoiled meaning changed, transformed, ruined in some extent by the experience I've had of ease which makes me yearn for that ease, makes it my default browser.  And in the fact that when I don't have this ease, I think of myself first. 

The Lao people, including my mother-in-law, had a very different sense: take your time to stop for snacks; monitor water intake to minimize pee stops; stop at many relatives houses no matter how late; move across the land on the lily pads of people experiences.  Nothing could conflict more with our desire to be independent and just get to a hotel.

And yet the eviscerated Lao dish is a separate issue than this difference (even though the above difference may get more directly at fundamental differences in the personalities of Laotians and Americans).  It's an issue of power.  And money.  And blindness.  It's tourism at it's worst, it seems to me, which is tourism that buys its way to "the exotic," buys a misshapen version of "the exotic," but is not touched by the other, does not submit itself to the other in a way that lets the other shape it. 

Perhaps, the way I'm looking at this heroizes my own experience, but for a moment let me indulge my own experience of spicy food as way to illustrate what I'm talking about with this dish, laab gai.  Let's say that instead of getting a westernized version of this dish, people visiting this admittedly touristy section of Vientiane get a more authentic version.  This means it's spicy.  This means they get an uncomfortable burning on their lips and in the corners of their mouth that makes them suck in air around their tongues.  They drink water and it helps momentarily but then they stop and it seems worse so they drink more. They sweat. They may get red in the face, as far as out as their ears. They eat more rice, which is good, that's at least one of the points of flavorful foods--eating spicy allows them to eat less of the expensive meat and more of the staple, the rice.  Already they've taken on a cultural posture without even knowing it. If they're not used to spicy foods at all--as I wasn't when I first started eating Lao food--they've expanded their taste range by probably at least a fifth (counting sweet, salty, sour, bitter, and spicy).  And, if they got really desperate and had to order Thai iced coffee (which is milk-based since the base that is milk will counteract that acid that is red pepper while water and beer, if you will, just fan the flames), they had the experience of that wonderful drink, but no matter what, by the time the sensation stopped up to an hour later, they've survived, and in surviving they have also probably come into contact with that other cultural posture that's so valuable in encountering the other: humility.

Now, no one makes laab gai this spicy, so the above symptoms will not be this exaggerated.  Still, by enabling a faux experience of laab gai, this restaurant that catered to white tastes enabled a certain blindness to what laab gai really means, ennabled buying "the other" without being touched by it.

The place we ended up staying in Vientiane must be tourist row: dozens of white people, ten upscale souvenir shops with antique buddhas and "Lao silk" cloth for sale, three European cafes, no food stands for a couple of blocks.  It's like we've landed on a falang island in the middle of Laos, but we've got our air, we've got our pretty garden courtyard, we've got the internet faster than we've ever had it in Laos. 

And we feel cursed. 

Tonight, we went out and found where the Lao are: cruising a packed two lane road--miles, I might add, from tourist row and the cultural sites of the city center--on mopeds and in Toyota pickups along food stands where you can buy khao biak for a dollar, grilled chicken for two and a quarter, steam buns three for a dollar and change, and a sweet soy milk-gelatin drink--in a plastic bag--for forty cents.

The funny thing is, there's a hotel right on this busy road that costs a fraction of what we're paying now. 

I've never felt like such a sell out.