Development, for Better or Worse

Make no mistake, Vientiane is bigger than Savannakhet, despite what Savan folks might say.  Vientiane's got monuments; it's got museums; it's got traffic; it's got a mall.  That nobody goes to.  Our host here says her twenty-something daughter has never been there before.  But it's got one, it's air conditioned, and it can go in the development brochure.

I saw such a travel brochure today, one that creates a brave new world of possibilities for what Vientiane could be.  The brochure included a futuristic vision of highrises along the bend of the Mekong, with an idealistic business travel village built pseudo-traditional with all the amenities for metropolitan visitors from afar.  Basically, it was the skyline of Malaysia or Singapore superimposed onto the bend of the Mekong where Vientiane sits.  It was pretty.  In that abstract, taken from an airplane-sort of way that can't actually see any actual dwellings of where actual people actually live.  In the imagined picture, all those details get swept nicely into the alleyways of the background, slip easily into the cracks and chasms necessitated by the so-called growing pains of the city.  However, it did include a modern shopping center on the banks of the Mekong that included signs for Burger King, Heineken, and assorted other global brandnames.  (You can see their vision, already under construction here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zdbXjMFf_IE) It did not include shop front houses run by anyone and everyone selling their own spring rolls, grilled meats, and soups. 

Still, Vientiane and its leaders are dreaming about what it can be, about how it can join other leading cities in the region.  In short, it's got skyscraper envy.  However, a website notes that currently the Vientiane skyline ranks 386th of 811 Asian cities, nothing to write home about, and, realistically, that's not going to change any time soon. 

But this is about Savannakhet, because Savannakhet is making a bid to become the next Vientiane, and, from internet activity on the issue and the evidences we saw in Savan, it may be well on its way.

The evidences of growth are these: new construction everywhere;  new houses everywhere; large houses in place; higher scale restaurants on outlying streets accessible primarily by car or moped; a hotel-casino--called, I kid you not, Savan Vegas Casino--that daily pipes in Thai from Mukdahan to try their luck and spend their cash. 

All this building and spending, I believe, is rooted in hope for the Savan-Seno Special Economic Zone, a vast acreage of land just off the main drag into Savannakhet that looks like its been strip-mined.  It hasn't; just opened for development.  Significant development.  And, according to the SSEZ authority, companies are signing up left and right, though the development has been slowed by the global economic crisis.  Signed up already are a leading French glass manufacturer and an Indonesian instant noodle maker, a Swiss jewelry and watch manufacturer and a Holland Boeing plant. 

This will mean, we're led to believe, good jobs for the people of Savannakhet.  Schools have already been built to try to train some workers to be ready for those jobs, and the SSEZ advertises that the glass manufacturer is already training twenty-five Lao abroad who will return to train others; no doubt international schools will follow immigrants from other countries who come in managerial positions;  roads have improved and will no doubt be better maintained.

All this should catapult Savannakhet out of its hick-younger-brother of Vientiane status and into the twenty-first century.  It should alleviate poverty and the conditions of poverty. 

We'll see how well it works in actuality.

Savannakhet can certainly benefit from exposure to the outside world.  Power and wealth, it seems, is still concentrated in family and clan ties, creating clear class boundaries that are difficult to cross except by marrying in.  Both from our experience in crossing the border and from comments from Savan people, local officials can still be capricious and arbitrary.  The internet, let me say again, is almost non-existent.

Of course, there's another side to this insularity.  Walking home one evening, the family up the road from where we were staying were all gathered around a large circular table, every chair filled, parents, grandparents, teenage children.  Family still rules to an impressive degree in Savannakhet.  Even the relaxed traffic rules can be thought of as refreshing.  So what if a moped is driving down the wrong side of a road toward you?  As long as you all watch out for each other, everyone will survive.  And as the final boon, let me say again, the internet is almost non-existent.

The poverty around Savannakhet is primaily a rural poverty.  Some shop front homes struggle mightily, you can tell; not every store and cafe can make it; there are beggars who hang around the morning market and walk into it, tugging on your arm and assuming the submissive, hands-together prayer posture to ask for a little money.  Likewise, rural life, as my mother-in-law's cousin says, is "sabbai" (easy going, laid back)--except in rice planting season where the work is labor-intensive and back breaking, and I can't believe harvest is any different.  Also, a "sabbai" life is not food-secure when it's based on serving your own chickens to guests when they come, as happened on our visit there.  People in rural Savannakhet wear secondhand shirts from America; they in some cases have no shoes; they are more susceptible to disease.

Still, what will happen when these people move in large numbers to Savannakhet for jobs?  No doubt some will catch on, no doubt some will fill positions in an enlarged service industry, but some will not.  Perhaps Savannakhet will absorb these people much as it has its current poor and there will simply be more around the fringes.

But one thing that the rural poverty of Savannakhet doesn't have is really concentrated, open-wound poverty.  I have seen one tin-shack slum on our trip here, and it was in Thailand, a collection of squatters shacks on the outskirts of Bangkok.  I did not see this kind of poverty in Savannakhet; I suspect it exists in areas of Vientiane where parts of the city are insulated enough from the countryside or the culture has broken down enough that people are unable to procure almost anything for themselves.

Whatever the case, whether the SSEZ catapults Savannakhet into the Twenty-First Century or whether it collects the poor from the countryside into ugly, festering heaps and piles, the Savannakhet we left--a sleepy, "sabbai" community, closely connected to its countryside--will soon be no more, for better or worse.

A final image: a couple live in a "sabbai" village; they have one daughter as the father makes wooden doors with handtools, and they raise chickens and pineapple; the daughter goes off to Savannakhet for a job where she gets involved with a Thai boy who gets her pregnant and leaves; the couple takes care of their grandchild from the time she's three days old.  The daughter continues to work in Savannakhet.  At Savan Vegas. 

If this is the model of development, give me the family around a circular table, give me the marginal shop front houses, give me, even, the fugitive internet.

Of course, it's not up to me.  Thank heavens.

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.

Lessons from a Monk

I was headed to the internet café but made it only as far as the second house when west met east: a monk in orange robe and light gold sash surprised me from around a corner. “Sabbai dee,” I said, pressing my hands together in the Lao greeting. He looked slightly displeased and accosted me in English, “You don’t sabbai dee a monk, you don’t know this?”


“No,” I said, “kau todt,” grasping for that other word that was already holstered and ready for slinging: “excuse me.”

He waved me off as a bothersome gnat and I turned, ready to take up my agenda. But my contrition and language had piqued his interest. “Where you from?” he asked.

“Ameeliga.” I tried to say the word as the Lao say it and was pleased with my success.

“America.” He spoke real English and didn’t need or want my pidgin. “And they don’t teach you that there, I suppose.”

“Respect is not high on American lists,” I say, again pleased with my own contrition.

“Respect, yes,” he concurs. “When I first started speaking English, no one said ‘Hi.’ Hi? What is, ‘hi’? It was always ‘How are you doing?’ or ‘How do you do?’” I’m not prepared for this bit of Zen and smile and nod; I’m a hi-er myself; “Hi” is very American.

“So what brings you here, to Laos?” he asks, genuinely interested now. I recount the story in brief, emphasizing that this trip is high on our to-do list, perhaps the number one spot. I’m sure the conversation is winding down now, that he’ll continue his meditative stroll around the house, that I can resume pilgrimage to the internet café. But now he’s found me interesting. “Come, let’s sit,” he says.

My agenda shot, I settle in. I’ve got an audience with an in-the-robe Buddhist monk; I may as well see this for what it is and glean a bit of wisdom for a blog--this, my new agenda. This monk is short, bald and wears an orange robe. So much is obvious. This monk has the hint of light gray stubble appearing around the rim of his shaved head, and his eyes, too, have grayed, but are intent in their gazing if wrinkled in what can only appear to be a wizened way. Then, too, his ears are large on his head, the lobes especially heavy and almost squarish.

It turns out this monk is a capitalist: he was a businessman for most of his life in Chiang Mai, Thailand, where he has one daughter and seems pro-business in his political outlook. Now, however, at 70, he’s returned to his home country to slow down his life, to walk the path of Buddha, to dedicate himself to truer things before the end. As he tells me this, it doesn’t sound as if he’s bragging about an individual choice so much as following a prescribed order for life. He might be saying, “So the wife and I bought this place here in this community in Florida.” Not that they’re the same; it’s just much more understood as a life stage. He lives at a wat seventy kilometers away from this house, his sister’s.

“Now, I eat one meal a day, read, pray—that’s it,” he says, and even he seems to be feeling that he’s forgetting something, that there must be something else.

“In Catholicism, you have 10 common mans,” he says, and by my perplexed look, he knows he must try again. “You know this? In Catholicism, you have 10 common mans, and nuns—you know nuns?—they have eight common mans.” He’s plowed through, but it’s only beyond the immediacy of the conversation that I’ll realize he means “commands.”

“But do you know how many I have to follow?” That’s rhetorical set up, of course. “Two-hundred-thirty-two commands.” And east and west collide. I’ve had to make up the number he quoted; it was somewhere between two hundred and eight hundred. One never remembers a braggart’s stats, and at that point I couldn’t help but feel a little bullied by his holiness.

However, this man is certainly a well of knowledge and I dig in my heels: as a boy he learned French because everyone in Laos did then, he insists, and that was a good thing. Then he had the opportunity to go to Thailand and learn English, and he did. The revolution swept in behind him, and he found himself locked out of his country, so he made his life on the Thai side of the border, a good one, it seems, if he’s voluntarily renounced his wealth.

“So how do you like it here in Laos?” he questions, and now I’m on the spot. I like it, of course, and try to illustrate the difference between Laos and Thailand in what I saw in the countryside: the part I saw of the Lao countryside seemed more organized, tidy, disciplined. “I will tell you,” he says, not getting my drift, “the Lao people are lazy. They think only about today. And that’s Lao speaking about Lao.” Well, it may be everyone else speaking about the Lao: in the Lao history I read, the French said this of the Lao and then the Americans said this about the Lao; but the Lao are still here and the French and the Americans—and the Thai, which seems to be more of the perspective of Lao critique, here—are not. Perhaps the Lao remain an anomaly, even to this Buddhist-capitalist-Thai monk.

Language is a favorite topic for him. It turns out both Lao and Thai stem from a Sanskrit language via Bali; Vietnamese, however, comes originally from China and then was westernized by the French. Ethnically, too, Lao and Thai are closely related even though Vietnam has been the major political influencer of Laos for forty years. This influence is economic as well: the family where we’re staying saves their bottles for a Vietnamese recycler even though Vietnam is an hours-long trip over poor roads to the east; Thailand, meanwhile, economically light-years ahead of both, I can only assume, is ten minutes to the west.

Language is also the key to the future of Laos for the linguist-Buddhist-capitalist-Thai monk. Laos has the opportunity to play a greater role in ASEAN, an association of Asian nations that would help to bring Laos out of its isolation, and in order to take on that greater role, the monk insists the Lao should study English.

“Isn’t that the language of the imperialists?” I ask. It depends on how it’s used, he suggests. Americans, he argues, use it very imperialistically, creating a “Secretary of State” rather than “Office of Foreign Affairs,” making “Congress” instead of “Parliament,” hoarding the language for themselves and their own constructions, as it were, rather than using it in a more metropolitan way.

“But weren’t the British the original imperialists—and isn’t it their language?” We can trace it farther back is all I’m saying, though I don’t have evidence readily at hand. We’re at an impasse; suffice it to say that this is one progressive monk, a man living a simple life who would encourage Laos to follow Thailand in joining the world community.

“When do you return?” I ask.

“This afternoon,” he says. “There’s a lot of nature there, snakes, scorpions, frogs.” It seems to be one of the conditions he was missing earlier: eat, read, pray, be one with nature. “We eat just one meal a day,” he says again.

Crisis

“I know the night is not the same as the day: that all things are different, that the things of the night cannot be explained in the day, because they do not then exist…”

Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms

When you’re in another country, on a mud road with cattle crossing at their leisure in front of you, headed to yet another relative’s house, and your son is back at the village hot with fever, you begin to worry.

When, back in the village, you are entreated to sit down and enjoy chicken soup and sticky rice before heading back to town, perhaps the simplest meal you’ve been offered in Laos by the simplest people, and the chicken is the tall skinny rooster your children were chasing through the sawdust and around the pineapple plants yesterday, and you realize this meal represents a significant portion of this family’s wealth, but your son is laying lethargic on the woven mat sat on the floor near you, you want to say, “Thanks very much for killing your chicken for us, but we must get back to town.”

When you finally do load up your family in the back of the truck and head out over the mud roads that seem to have developed new washes and bumps from the day’s rain, and when you cross the one-lane, plank bridge heading out of the village and pass the two-wheeled tractors and carts heading home for the evening, you just wish everything was paved and had clear yellow center lines and speed limit signs progressively increasing, 30, 45, 55, because your wife has your son covered in wet rags in the backseat and he’s starting to ask questions that don’t make that much sense or is it just that he’s eight and sick in a foreign country and afraid?

When you finally make it to the main road next to the special economic zone and you see the acres and acres of cleared land, like a strip mine, just waiting for foreign companies to swoop in and bring modernity to Savannakhet, and as you’re trailing aging diesel trucks with black smoke that cause motorcyclists to wear masks and would be choking you right now were you in the back of the truck and not in the air conditioned cab, and though your son has grown more lucid and cool, you still wonder if anything matters besides getting back to the safety of the hotel and putting your son in the cool sheets where you hope all will be well.

When night sets in, everything goes mythical. You wake at midnight to your wife saying, “Howie, Micah is burning up, the Motrin’s not working,” and you’ve never heard that western drug cocktails don’t work so you come out of slumber to all your subconscious fears in the dark and the first thing you look for is your computer to diagnose what’s going on. The internet is not your friend at night because it’s then that its information stacks against you and you cannot interpret it lucidly: all the symptoms of malaria are your son’s symptoms, mainly because his body is entirely a fry pan. When you tell yourself that the incubation period for malaria barely overlaps with your length of stay, meaning he’d have had to have been bitten right off the plane by a mosquito with a strain of the disease that he’s not already covered by with the malaria pills your wife makes him takes religiously, full blown malaria is still the only explanation for the way he shakes in the bed.

Unless you turn to the Japanese encephalitis page, the one disease you didn’t get inoculated for, though a local doctor recommended it. If you turn to that page, you’re sure he’ll be dead by morning, and by a slow, tortured destruction of his nervous system. Even when the self-same internet page says that the odds of getting it are one in a million, all that matters instead is that the places to get it are among the rice paddies and farm animals, with fat sows trailing suckling pigs among bamboo fences and mud roads, all of which you saw the self-same evening your son came down with the fever that won’t let him go despite the west’s best over-the-counter children’s medicine.

As the night drags on and you can’t stop the cycle of paranoia and you keep getting up to check your son’s forehead and its unchanged, you think back on the ten days behind you and wonder if it’s been worth it; you look ahead to two more weeks that seem interminable, that seem like a prison sentence in a country not your own with oppressive heat and wild traffic and dangerous foods and massive poverty.

When your son wakes and begins asking things like, “Do you consider me a tough boy, mom?” you’re sure this is the end. But he’s not done. “I want to be as strong as Uncle Pong and Daddy,” he says. Then he goes Biblical. “You know what I say when I feel this way, ‘Be strong and courageous. Do not be discouraged for the Lord your God is with you where you go,’” and you know that this is the end, that hear you have a child-saint and you’ll go down to the Catholic church of Savannakhet and begin the canonization as soon as funeral arrangements are complete.

The night has now moved from mythical to mystical.

You yourself pray a desperate, I’ll-do-anything prayer, and it feels good to pray that way, cathartic, in the middle of a country where you’ve seen three churches total. You even wonder if the country that your wife fled has become a monster that demands your eldest son in payment for returning. Then you realize this is all entirely your fault for dragging your family to a country you didn’t have to go to, and you curse yourself for tempting fate and blame your son’s death entirely on yourself.

With dawn and a few hours—you can’t tell how many—of tortured sleep behind you, your son’s fever has turned to uncontrollable shivering, another symptom you read in the night, and when your wife suggests you get your sister-in-law the RN you walk immediately down the hall to wake her up. She joins you and asks about symptoms and you convince her that this is malaria and you all decide you must go to the hospital and when your son starts talking his visionary talk, she too gets weepy.

Now Grandma and Grandma’s friend come in and the consultation continues; Grandma calls another relative who’s a Lao nurse and who will come and take him to the hospital.

***

It’s 6:59 when you’re all in the Lao nurse’s pickup and you drive through streets that are largely empty, down a thoroughfare that runs two blocks off the Mekong. The world is forming in the light around you, now, and some of the night’s paranoia is melting away, but now you face dealing with a medical institution you know nothing of and distrust deeply simply because it must be primitive. On your right you see one of the nicest buildings you’ve seen in Savannakhet and hope it’s the hospital but it’s a government building with a fancy picture of a former president with a couple of flags, one of which you recognize as the international symbol for communism, and you are not heartened.

Soon you pull up to an extended building which fits well enough your view of what a hospital should be. The warm red stone arch looks professional enough, and the building’s white concrete framework is warmed by yellow walls that look professional enough. The parking lot is cramped, however, and you’re sure this means a wait akin to Soviet bread lines. You carry your son, beings as this is crisis mode, and you must wade through the humidity up tiled steps that are dingy blue. At reception you have not reached air conditioning and some young receptionists direct you to another building: pediatrics. You wind your way around buildings, following your Lao nurse-friend who’s dressed formally in a type of native sin and, briefly, you wonder why but not for long.

Up a flight of stairs a young woman who is a nurse or receptionist takes you almost immediately back into an exam room where there’s a scale and a table. She weighs your son, puts a mercurial thermometer under your son’s arm, and asks about his name and age. Suddenly an older women, her graying hair done up formally in a bun, comes in the room, she’s got a stethoscope and you realize this is the doctor. She listens to his heart, asks some questions about how long he’s been here, what we’ve been doing, when the symptoms started. She has him stick out his tongue, which is white; he’s been complaining of cold sores since we’ve got here, and this seems the key to everything for the doctor. Though he doesn’t have a sore throat or overly swollen glands, there’s an infection here, she’s sure, and writes us a prescription. Someone asks about malaria; she says this isn’t malaria, not severe enough, and that western children are so well inoculated, there’s little to be concerned about, but if we want to get a blood test, she’s amenable to it.

I’m so assured by this grandmotherly presence that my mental ship seems instantly righted, and I feel sure we don’t need a blood test, feel embarrassed that we paranoid westerners have come here seeking one, but my sister-in-law nurse reminds me that this is what we came here for.

Back in the first building, we grab a sterile plastic syringe in a bag and take it up a flight of stairs where we find the phlebotomist who looks surprised to see us in a sort of open cubicle. Carrying what looks like two old metal tea pots, he takes us to an open area and seats us at a dirty table with wooden benches. When he ties off my son’s bicep with a rubber band and begins swabbing his arm, Micah tightens up. I try to encourage him by reminding him of the “strong and courageous” line and tell him to look away. He settles enough for the phlebotomist to be successful on the first try, who in a moment he disappears with the vial.

We wait ten minutes, then the Lao nurse seeks out the results. When she returns ten minutes later, she and grandma seek out the doctor to read it; I send the American nurse along with them to make sure I get an English translation of events. When they return, they have a printout that is entirely recognizable with categories such as RBC, WBC, and HGB; the American nurse looks through them, all of them reassuringly normal with WBC “a little elevated”; there’s the infection.

All that’s left to do is get prescriptions at a window in the first building, but now there’s some debate: the first prescription, we’re told is the Lao version of Tylenol; the second is Amoxicillin, but we’ve already got Z-Pac along, a short, powerful dose of antibiotic we were directed to bring along in case of emergency, and the question is whether we can allow one antibiotic to stand in for another. Collectively, the two nurses and one physical therapist decide we can, so we pick up several packets of something like pedialyte to try to ensure our kids are getting enough fluids and electrolytes.

This feels entirely recognizable, entirely familiar, and reassuring in the way that a scientific worldview is reassuring: by taking you through a baseline process—hypothesis, experiment, and computer printout with recognizable terms from a larger medical community that I trust are accurate enough to ensure that what is wrong with my son can be taken care of with the magic pills we’ve taken along.

We leave the hospital in under an hour, out 43,000 kip for the doctor’s visit and blood test: about $5.33. Suddenly, Lao medicine seems more progressive than what I’m used to.

But what’s truly comic is my western paranoia, the feeling of homesickness that becomes overwhelming in a hotel room in a foreign country when one of my children is sick, and the fact that we already carry all the drugs we need in our backpack. And yet at the merest sign that our layers of insurance aren’t working, I’m ready to pack up and head back home, distrustful of medical professionals in Laos and feeling a different reality press in on me.

Perhaps that’s the most valuable thing here: for a good portion of the world, when a fever presses in on a child that you can do nothing about, when there is no help, when your reality changes forever by loss, you realize that you inhabit a world that is not friendly, that is not safe, that you are powerless in the face of. It’s no wonder that fate predominates in most places in the world, while self-will carries the day in the west. 

Still, I'm thankful for medicine the world over, for people who care and can use their knowledge for healing and blessing.  In the dark of night, I’m glad for my son’s scriptural reassurance and for the ability to cry out in fear and anxiety to a God whom I know heard my cry, even if he chuckled, perhaps, at what in the light of day looks a lot like paranoia.  That's also a major difference:  the light of day.

The Road to Donghen

The road to Donghen is the road to Vietnam. This becomes apparent when tour buses printed with “Da Nang” and the names of other Vietnamese cities speed past us. We wend our way in a Ford pickup between shock-killing potholes and seams where the pavement has simply buckled and left scars a foot high or higher, but apparently the bus drivers have these pitfalls memorized and know when to pass.

Actually, our caravan is two pickups, our numbers swelled to sixteen, the standard posse size these days as friends and relatives join our adventures. The road to Donghen is a celebration. We stop along the way and are mobbed by salesmen offering various goodies, from green mangoes with spice to fruits to grilled chicken. We load up; we look for a place to picnic.

The road to Donghen is a road through the Lao countryside of forests and rice paddies, and this is planting season, when men and women in straw hats plow and sow the wet clay fields, the brown seed arching up in a dust-like cloud. Then, when the young rice has grown up thick in an improbable, bright green, they uproot the rice, bunch it in groups of three shoots, and replant that new plug, spaced inches apart. The process is age-old, labor-intensive, and still the way of the peasants in fields outlined by mud ridges. Big operators, I’m told, plant the rice once, by machine, but the Lao countryside to Donghen is still the road of the classic rice paddy.

The road to Donghen, then, is a road to the past. It’s the past we’re going to visit. Sy’s brother Pong has joined us, and Donghen is his birthplace, as well as the site of the glory of my mother-in-law’s youth. As if to confirm this, at one point there’s a detour down a mud road. It’s the rainy season, which means a layer of brown water covers a good portion of the road, masking wash holes that are deep enough to scrape the bottom or our vehicle.

Oddly enough, the road to Donghen—for Sy’s family—runs genetically through China. Sy’s grandfather, a Chinese immigrant, left his family in China and came to Laos for economic opportunity; he met Mouth Meksavanh, Sy’s grandmother, in Savannakhet, and began a new family, never to return to his family in China. In the fledgling country of Laos in the early 1950s, Donghen had both a military base and officers’ training school, and that meant hungry, moneyed men. Sy’s Grandpa Chung moved here with Sy’s grandma and their seven-year-old daughter Keohomchay and opened a restaurant-store, one probably not unlike many that still line the roadway.

As I said, the road to Donghen is in some ways a glory road. Keohomchay grew up in Donghen, her mixed Chinese-Lao heritage giving her a light skin and fine nose. In short, she was a looker. With a couple of her friends also working the restaurant, business boomed. “We were young and pretty,” Keo states matter-of-factly, “so business was very good.”

Donghen today is a busy small town. Locals drive their tractors and carts to town to buy supplies and sell produce. Street-front businesses sell motorcycles and new tractors. Just off an open space that once might have been a town square, the locals hold their dalaat sao or morning market, a tidy, compact market compared to the sprawling bustle of the Savannakhet equivalent. But the specter of war and the military still hang over the community. Keo points to what looks like a concrete water tower and says, “That’s the base.”

The road to Donghen is a road to a different time, a different standard. Our company of sixteen commandeers a rice paddy shelter along the side of the road about a mile from town. No one’s worried that we have no ideas whose shelter this is. This is not the way of things, of worrying who owns what. When we spot a farmer working nearby, we invite him to the party. “Hey, come and eat,” one of the women hollers to the man chopping down weeds with a machete along the edges of his fields, a command that is also a request to use the shelter.

As Pong and I return to town for Beerlao to complete our meal, he says, “Hey, look at this. You seen this?” He points to a small plant at his feet with tiny oblong leaves off a middle stem. “We played with these all the time as kids.” He touches one of the leaves and it pulls itself together, creating a withering effect, a withdrawing into itself.

“The boys will love this,” I tell him. And they do, for at least twenty minutes they go around, finding the plants and making them transform.

After lunch, we drive the mile or so left of the road to Donghen, parking across from the market. Being here, Keo remembers someone she might look up, just two doors down from a market. Approaching an older woman under an awning, a stalwart woman with long, graying hair and square jowls, Keo accosts here, “Do you remember me?” The woman pauses for the briefest moment as the past comes almost instantly back.

“Keohomchay!”

As the older women catch up and think of others they might fetch, we take the kids through the market. As always, westerners attract attention and soon someone is asking Pong to whom we belong. Who’s our mae? When we take her to the house next door, she too had known Keo and her cousin Bounsom when they lived here. The past comes alive under this awning.

Keo cut quite a swath in Donghen, it seems. When some of her friends formed a band, Keo sang. It was at one of their performances that a young man from the officer’s training school fell in love, smitten with the young siren. He first wooed her with a letter, declaring his admiration. An educated officer-to-be and a member of one of Vientiane’s most powerful families, Khamla Sananikone was about as close to gentry as one could get in Laos. Combine these qualities with overpowering good looks—Khamla was tall and light-skinned due to some French blood—and there was no reason—or way—for Keo to resist his advances. “Oi, he was tall and light, and so handsome,” one of the women remembers, sounding smitten with him still.

Keo landed him. The couple was married in 1962; war broke out in the region in 1965, on the road to Donghen which is the road to Vietnam which is where the energy for the war came from. Keo and Khamla’s first child would die in Donghen of a diarrhea-related disease. Keo would give birth to three more boys, the last one, Phouang—Pong—was born in Donghen in 1969. With the war in full tilt, Khamla would leave the marriage without explanation shortly thereafter, and Keo would send the two older boys to live with their grandparents in Vientiane who would take them to France as the government fell apart.

Keo’s father had died of colon cancer in 1967, but Keo returned to work alongside her mother in the restaurant, along the road to Donghen, the road to Vietnam. It was there that she met her second husband, a marriage that, coupled with the war and the regime change in Laos, would lead her back to Savannakhet, then to Thailand, then to Edgerton, Minnesota. And much of Donghen would be lost to the bombing of the war, so that today the restaurant where Keo worked and the house where Pong was born are no more

But for a day on the road to Donghen, along the rice paddies and water buffalos, along the pagodas for resting during fieldwork time, through the runny brown mud of the countryside, we’re once again on the road to Donghen that is a road to youth, a road to earlier, better, simpler days, with the darker clouds of the road to Vietnam still an unreality.

Family Picture

We’re the only people I’ve seen with cameras here. That in itself seems to be a major ethnographical observation. What does it say that we’re trying to freeze time? To preserve it in a two-dimensional form in order to take it back with us and lodge it deep within the recesses of a computer to be called forth in the future, when nothing remains as it is in the pictures? We’re voyeurs, certainly, tourists of the exotic, like visitors at a zoo.


Nowhere does this become more apparent than when photographing the poor, even when the poor are blood relatives through marriage.

We had been warned that the economic condition of Sy’s sister was not good. The story of how she’d come to this position we heard ahead of time. She’d had a job in the city of Savannakhet at a police office and had had a nervous breakdown, a shattering--due, some say now, to a curse that someone put on her, but at least due to the curse of modern existence that can make life feel nasty, brutish, short. Her family did all they could in terms of doctoring, but the final solution of the sister and her husband was to sell all they had and buy a piece of land, a rice processor, and an ice cream machine. Now they live in a house off a road to Savannakhet on less than an acre of land that they’re clearing from forest; she gets pennies to husk the rice of local farmers; he works the road somewhere selling ice cream. They have one child, a boy, four years old.

“House” needs to be qualified here, too. It’s a shanty-shed combo, the shanty made up of long thin trees bound together under a tin roof. When we arrive, Sy’s sister is working in this shed, pouring brown rice into one of the funnels or chutes of the rice processor. The first round seems to sift or winnow the chaff from the rice; then Sy’s sister takes the filled pail and pours it into the other chute, where the rice is finally husked, pouring out two valuable products: the bright-white grains that connote that this is glutinous or sticky rice, and a brown flour apparently made from a part of the rice plant I'm not aware of. The chaff blows out the back of the shed to a pile where the chickens scratch.

The shanty holds the rice machine; it also holds Sy’s nephew’s few toys amidst some duck eggs and a cooking fire. The chicken “kabobs” we picked up from a roadside vendor are not sufficiently done for the women in our party, so we finish cooking them over this fire. We take these skewered chickens on a path alongside the sister’s land fenced with bamboo poles and holding a pig sty as well as newly planted papaya trees and plants I don’t recognize.  On a path just behind the sister's house, mats have been spread.

This is a Lao picnic: grilled meat—savory and well-cooked to the point of almost being jerky—sticky rice, dom mach hung from a bag, fruit, and water, except today our American offering is Sprite and Coke to supplement the water. However, a couple of the people in our company are not looking pleased; this is no picnic when poverty is the view. Couple that with the fact that Sy’s sister refrains from joining us—perhaps someone is expecting their rice or perhaps it’s sheer embarrassment from not having anything to offer or from clear and apparent class distinction—and we really seem like misplaced tourists.

So the lunch festivities are rather somber. When we’re nearly done, she and her son join us; she urges her son to eat but in the end they only accept a bag of mach kaam, dried tamarind. We walk up toward the house; a new customer is here delivering his grain for processing.

We linger around the shed, waiting for something to happen, a time to sit and take off our hats for a bit, but nothing happens. We walk around to the house part of the shanty, hereto off limits—if we want to see how she lives, then why pretend, anymore, that we’re not here to look? Sy is one of the first, at the sister’s urging; our kids each look; I look. It’s one room with three Asian mattresses, which are really just well-stuffed cushions, some blankets, some clothes, a TV and a fan. That’s the extent of the sister’s simplicity, but though this is all an intended step back from stressors of city life, this is no Thoreauvian experiment. This is poverty.

Before we leave, we get pictures of the sisters standing together. It’s then that we get what she has to give: the smiles she offers seem as genuine as they can be under the circumstances. The real history between the two shows through: this is the sister who carried Sy around on her hips until they were red; this the sister who Sy remembers playing with her ear until she fell asleep.

We leave, and we’re relieved to leave. We’ve left something to help, but we’ve no idea how it may help, how big a band aid it may be. It’s all wrong somehow, American money in exchange for a morning’s visit, a look into “poverty” firsthand, and yet it’s more than nothing, more than sitting in a lovely house in Edgerton, Minnesota, and not knowing, more than not even wondering.

Still, I’m wondering about the pictures. Yesterday, I tried to capture a young mother selling mangoes along the highway wearing a straw hat and black mask. It’s an image I need to explain something about life here, I tell myself, though the woman seemed to want to pull her mask down when she saw my picture, wanted not to be anonymous.

Then, last night, with our kids in the back of a truck, I saw some international businessmen, not just with a camera but with an iPad, when they stopped and took a picture of my children. Though they took for reasons only known to them, I was uncomfortable. What were they capturing about my children? And what were their motives? If a picture is worth a thousand words, what did this picture of my children say?

And what am I saying in the pictures I’ve taken of Sy’s own sister, a woman who treated her tenderly? Can I honor her in what she gave us, a look into her hard life and a genuine smile in the midst of poverty?

Family History

Putting up with peculiarities in parents may be one of the hardest things we have to do this side of heaven. 

I can’t believe I just said that; it’s so American teenager of me.  Still, as we travel and live in close proximity to one another on this trip, the friction between mother and daughters is a constant undertone.  Early in the morning yesterday, for example, my mother-in-law woke up before the rest of us; she’s brought American coins along as gifts and she was counting them, letting one clink noisily against the next, waking the rest of us and drawing her daughters’ ire.  At the giveaway in the village, she was too flippant for the daughters’ liking; perennially one daughter scolds her for losing track of valuables. 

This is the perfect time to travel with our children in many respects.  They’re still amazed enough by the geckos and butterflies and chickens of Laos to keep them occupied a great deal of the time, and they still like playing card games with us to fill much of the rest of time.  They are, in other words, pre-American teen stage, even though we can see it on the horizon with our daughter, age 11—the eye-rolling has begun.

The hyper-sensitive judgment about parents may have another side, though, a wiser sort of discretion and appreciation, of which I have also seen the blooms and fruits on this trip.

My wife has multiple families: brothers from her mom’s first marriage who are close family; her full sister who is closest family; sisters and brothers from her dad’s first marriage who are peripheral.  All of these siblings but two are in the US or France.  Yesterday, after a long trip to the country, we decided to swing by the house of one of the two siblings that remain here, a woman about fifty who lives mere blocks from where we’re staying.

We pulled up to what looked like a garage with the door shut, a metal door like those used to close a store in an American mall, but dark metallic green.  Someone stepped out to rap on this door, but as she did so, a woman hallooed us from an approaching scooter.  It was Sy’s sister, apparently just home from work.  We followed her around to the side of the house into a clay yard that seemed still a mess from construction.  Apparently the conversation went something like this:  “We just dropped by to see you, your sisters are here from America.”

“I work seven days a week; I don’t have time to entertain you.”

“Well, maybe you could take us to see your dad’s ashes.”

“Okay.”

After this interchange we got back in our van and followed the sister on her cycle to the wat, perhaps a mile distant, the sister speeding ahead to the point where I thought she was making her getaway.  Of course, we lost time because we stopped at a roadside stand to buy a lighter.  Eventually, we pulled into the compound of a wat, and there was her cycle and the sister, ready to lead us.

The “compound” of a wat is walled, and inside the compound are assorted buildings, including central shrine and more minor shrines and perhaps simple barracks for monks to sleep in, though we’re unclear on this point.  The sister led us through the neatly tended grounds of this wat, complete with perfectly trimmed shrubbery and tropical flora.  A Buddhist cemetery consists of upright sepulchers stationed near the outer walls of the compound.  A given sepulcher may hold the ashes of a number of people, not so individualized like American cemeteries.  It seems slightly more impersonal, though from what I’ve seen Lao people visit these sepulchers more religiously than Americans visit cemeteries.  Wedged into a corner, we found the sepulcher that contained my father-in-law’s ashes, the like of which was replicated all around the wall of the wat. 

The sun was setting and there seemed to be some urgency to complete the rite, so my mother-in-law produced the lighter and passed out incense punks to her daughters and grandchildren.  These were placed in the ground near the sepulcher and someone said a few words as if to Sy’s dad.  Sy’s been crying, Ly joins her, crying for a man they didn’t know but who nonetheless casts a long shadow into their lives.

By this time, Sy’s sister seems to have realized we will not be placing any burden on her, and perhaps the tears have broken the ice completely.  She smiles and I take a picture of the three daughters near the sepulcher.  As we move back toward our vehicle, they bring up the rear, filling the sister in on our children’s names and ages, her commenting on a few of their characteristics.  The wind is still, the air temperature as cool as it gets in Laos during this season; somewhere on the compound the monks are chanting an evening prayer that matches the beauty of the hour.

On the ride back, my daughter snuggles in next to me in the back seat.  She has questions.

“When did Grandpa die?” she begins. 

“About two years ago.”

“What did he die of?”

“Liver cancer.”

 A pause, then, “Why didn’t we see him?”  I’m surprised by this question, the answer to which I thought was self-evident, reminding me again of the gap between the concretized world of adulthood and the tenuous wonder-mystery of childhood.

“Because he was here, in Laos.”  And suddenly I know the next question.  But why was he here in Laos?  Why didn’t he live with Grandma?  Why did he get left behind?

So I rehearse the story for her, privately, cloistered as we are by this back seat, by speaking English, by the adults ahead of us lost in their thoughts; I give her as much detail as I think she can handle.

“Grandma’s first husband left her, we don’t know why, for another woman.  Sometimes men just do that, and it’s not right but it happened to grandma.  That left her with three boys, your uncles Ting, Teng, and Pong.  Grandma was poor then, so Uncle Ting and Uncle Teng went to live with their grandparents and later they went to France. 

“Then Grandma got married to Grandpa Douang.  He was in the army and sometimes men in the army do things like drink too much.  Men in the army often see things no one should see, people dying and things like that.  Uncle Som—remember Uncle Som?—he was in the army and he saw a lot of bad things and he smoked and drank too.  Some times when Grandpa Douang drank too much he was mean.  One time mom did something that made him mad, she was just two years old, and he was going to beat her with a stick, but Grandma stopped him and so then he beat her.  That’s when Grandma left and went back to live with Grandma Mouth.  She’s a strong woman, isn’t she?  Then when the new government came, Grandpa Douang had to go to a camp which is not like camping but it’s kind of outside with a lot of people.  Grandpa wrote a letter to Grandma saying that she had to come live with him there, but Grandma didn’t want to; that’s when she crossed the river and left Laos.”

She’s crying softly; I put my arm around her and she sobs into my chest.  I want to ask why she’s crying, which may be the stupidest question I could ask.  Initially, I thought she was asking questions because,seeing her mom cry, she felt sad about not seeing Grandpa Douang.  But her tears come now, no doubt, because of the story that is Grandma Keo’s life, a story she could never have guessed.  Yet I know it’s bigger than this, too, that she cries for the shattered world which now lies before her, a world that this story has begun to pull back the veil on.  I regret needing to do this, to pull the veil back, yet it was the perfect time and place to do it, here, through the story of someone close to us, in an intimate moment, with her close to me.  It’s all I can hope to do as a parent.

And yet there’s more to be done.  I’ve given some of the imperfect details as I’ve come to understand them, left out even darker realities, but it’s a story she must share with her mom.  Later, with the boys showering, I tell Sy about our conversation; she and Sommer lie on the ground and share a hard cry.  Then, when Grandma comes in, Sommer hugs the real person, standing firm and in the flesh. 

“I’m bitter because my mom didn’t deserve that,” Sy’s sister tells me in the kitchen, referring to her dad’s treatment of her mom, tears coming once again.  And here are the two sides of parental love, of parental awareness.  She who is most critical of her mother, who lives with her day-in and day-out, also wants to confront her father beyond the grave because of her deep love and respect for her mother.

There’s one more sister to see yet, a sister who’s had a particularly hard row to hoe, we’re told, who now lives in the country, somewhat impoverished.  This is the sister, we’re told, who lugged Sy around on her hips until they were red.  That will not be an easy visit, either.

But easy is not what we’re after.  What we’re after is just what we’ve gotten, confronting a story that makes my children part of who they are, citizens of a shattered world still prismatically beautiful for all of its brokenness because of the possibility implicit in life, in children themselves, because we can learn and pass on stories that can end in a hug between granddaughter and grandmother here in the fluorescent light on a tile floor of a tropical evening in Laos.