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.