Blathering Undead on Burning Ark

As published at SubStack, 7/30/23:

[Don Sang, Laos on 4/6/23]

After visiting Laos in 1950, Norman Lewis wrote in A Dragon Apparent:

Laos was considered the earthly paradise of South-East Asia, although Cambodia ran it a close second. So much was this realised by French officialdom that the competition for a posting to either country was strenuous. Many a wily administrator manoeuvred his way to a position in Ventiane or Luang Prabang, where he instantly married a Laotian wife, set up a shrine with joss-sticks to the lares of his house, and spent much of his leisure decking out Buddha caves with fresh flowers.

Both of these oases of decorum and charm were to be devastated and debauched in the Vietnam war, when as many bombs were showered among the shrines and the pagodas of these small countries as were expended in all the bombings put together of the World War in Europe.

Quite remarkable, the willingness of many Frenchmen to go native, complete with the adoption of Lao customs.

To wed a foreigner is to embrace not just her entire family, but culture. Although a divorce from all of your past is liberating, you’re only entering a new set of rules and demands.

Realizing this, many bail out, but not Luis Merand. Born in 1913, Merand married a Lao three years older, so he’s no cradle raider. She also died 16 years before Merand, but he didn’t go home. At Wat Chanthaboury, their ashes share a stupa grave.

[Vientiane, 1/19/20]

Arriving in Don Det in March of 2023, I felt slowed down and becalmed. Occupying a crude cabin without air conditioning, I was content. Each dawn, a hundred cows ambled across open fields to nibble on grass and leaves. Nearly all restaurants had cushions on floors for customers to sprawl on. At Datta Banana Leaf, the teenage waitresses sometimes dozed under a table. As I drifted into sleep at Datta, a yellow dog curled up against my legs. To visit a bustling market, I took boat rides to Nakasong. Among silent islands untainted by signage, I floated.

At the yearly festival which lasted all night, a chubby lady and skinny gay man, garishly made up, sang to a hypnotizing guitarist. Faintly smiling, eight teenage dancers in tutus and braids pranced. Sitting on blankets on the ground, entire families watched without emotion. Though enjoying the show, they never clapped.

In Don Det, I felt restored. Though an alien place, it had features any visitor could recognize as intrinsic to himself, though long lost.

Even before the cellphone, the isolation of Don Det wasn’t perfect, for there was the intrusion of colonialism, communism and Americanism, global forces that couldn’t help but molest the furthest reaches of this puny earth. With the cellphone, though, you can be in Don Det simultaneously with Bad Kissingen, Intercourse, Ashkelon or Philadelphia, etc., so Don Det, or anywhere else, has been diluted and blurred. Further, the people of Don Det demand, or at least tolerate, this, for they, too, must have cellphones to remove them from themselves.

[Don Det, 4/9/23]

Still, Laos heals.

Norman Lewis, “For all the briskness with which its holy places are maintained, the silence in Luang Prabang is only disturbed by the distant, classroom sounds of bonzes chanting in Pali, and the slow, mild booming of gongs. It is the hometown of the siesta and the Ultima Thule of all French escapists in the Far East. Europeans who come here to live soon acquire a certain, recognisable manner. They develop quiet voices, and gentle, rapt expressions.”

And, “Laosised Frenchmen are like the results of successful lobotomy operations—untroubled and mildly libidinous. They salt their conversation with Laotian phrases, all of which express a harmoniously negative outlook. Bo pen nhang, which is continually to be heard, means no more than, ‘It doesn’t matter’.”

When Lewis visited Indochina, the First Indochina War had begun, then came the Vietnam War, Pol Pot’s reign, the Cambodian-Vietnamese War, the boat people exodus and Sino-Vietnamese War. Considering all these, Lewis wrote in 1982 that they constituted “the greatest holocaust ever to be visited on the East. It consumed not only the present, but the past; an obliteration of cultures and values as much as physical things. From the ashes that remained no phoenix would ever rise. Not enough survived even to recreate the memory of what the world had lost.”

The prolonged torture of this region made it “the greatest holocaust.” Though not often acknowledged, a twisted aim triggered these linked traumas. Beyond colonialism and its consequences, it’s the attempt to impose an internationalist design on duped or recalcitrant provincials. This war still flares. You’re in the thick of it.

In any case, the obliteration of the past is an unspeakable tragedy, and not only to Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, but the entire world. This assessment give us a clue to why foreigners considered backward Laos a paradise.  

In A Dragon Apparent, Lewis also asserts, “The Europeans corrupted but failed to barbarise Indo-China, and many of them who lived there long enough were happy enough to go native and cultivate what they could of the patina of the old civilisation.”

Instead of civilizing the East, Europeans corrupted and even tried to barbarize it. This goes against the usual justification. As the apex of civilization, the West has long felt a Christian duty to deliver the East from darkness. With nuclear bombs, napalm, cluster bombs and, now, Jewjabs, the West always saves the day.
[Vientiane’s Khouvieng Road in 1993, as photographed by a Canadian]

Before my first visit to Laos three years ago, a Canadian reader sent me a photo he took of Vientiane’s Khouvieng Road in 1993. Though a main artery, it looked like some leafy country lane, with just one tuk-tuk, one motorbike, two parked bicycles and a few boys lazily walking, in the road.  

Two days ago, I went to Khouvieng Road to photograph a busy bus station and the swanky Vientiane Center. Though often dead, it’s where locals go to buy a Seiko watch, Burberry bag or Oppo phone. There’s a Pizza Company, a Thai chain, and a Dairy Queen. One store is called How R You 2Day? Over two standard fire hydrants in their glass case is this proud pronouncement, “THE ULTIMATE LIFESTYLE FIRE HYDRANT.” At the cinema, young people in Gap styled clothing bought soft drinks and pop corns. Waiting for their movie, they sat on comfy couches to stare at cellphones. A Malaysian horror flick, Blood Flower, was a hit. In our walking dead era, zombies are the zeitgeist. Just look around you.  

[Vientiane Center on Khouvieng Road on 7/28/23]

Three years ago, I was also sent two 1995 photos of Attapeu, a town in southern Laos. With its primitive huts, it seemed timeless. There’s no chance that mode of living is still extant.

The reader who sent photos said he had lost all affection for Vientiane, for it had been ruined. Laos itself was being dismantled, “My Lao wife called Lao the whore of Asia. Everything for sale, even the lands surrounding the national monument.” Coming from places much more corrupt, perverted and devastated, visitors can easily think Laos is still pristine.

On this burning ark, there are compartments already collapsed and under water. Scorched bodies flail. From certain seaview cabins, the ocean appears calm and the moon reassuringly huge, a magical mirror, same as it ever was. Locked inside your budget, interior room, you hear muffled commotion, but it’s probably just your disquiet brain, with its frequent hallucinations, audio and visual. Inside the entertaiment lounge, sumo sized trannies have sex on stage to a hooting audience of soccer moms, babies, academics and clergymen. Bobbing away in the dark, some odd ones may survive.

Smug, oblivious creatures, many can afford to posture and talk tough, as long as their bacon is not fried. With needless deaths all around him, an aging American in Kiev can still reflect, “Ongoing war has its upside. No jabs, no CBDCs, no immigrants and fewer frivolities.”

Always tiny, man has shrunk, so bo pen nhang may sound truer than ever, but, of course, everything still matters very much, for we are ensouled, and this land is sacred. To stoke reverence, elaborate temples in Ultima Thule are built, rebuilt and beautifully maintained. Burnt or bombed, they’ll reappear.

[Attapeu in 1995, as photographed by a Canadian]

[Attapeu in 1995, as photographed by a Canadian]

[Vientiane Center on Khouvieng Road, 7/28/23]