Love in Vientiane...and other stories

Ok, it’s time to reclaim my sense of discipline. Sure, I might spend all day in front of a computer, in conditions that hardly inspire me to keep working when I get home. But that’s nothing compared to the tyranny of…my conscience.

Cracking up
I’ve been going through a rough patch. Coming up to the six-month mark, and I’ve finally cracked the shits. I’m losing patience and have stopped finding things funny in the office, a state of affairs that spells doom for me.
I also haven’t had a holiday yet, which is ridiculous. I was more or less ordered by my supervisor to take the day off today. But my filthy mood has been so palpable in the office that when I said I wouldn’t be coming in today, the office heart skipped a beat and the editor looked at me with an expression of resignation. “Will you ever come back?” he asked, probably rhetorically.

I’ll go back, but to a lost cause.
My office is basically a microcosm of Lao society. Filled with lovely and generous people, but under-resourced, dysfunctional, governed by misguided communist philosophies, too heavily reliant on foreign aid and basically just steeped in incompetence. Every single day, I marvel at the notion that someone must have thought this or that innovation was a good idea.
I also tear my hair out day after day trying to explain the concept of an acronym, the difference between a comma and a point in numbers, and the reason why its important to spell someone’s name, not only correctly, but also consistently, the same way in each paragraph.
But there’s no point in getting frustrated, is there?
I am sponsoring 4,000 Islands at an English college. He had a test the other day on countries and capital cities and languages, and got almost every single answer wrong, as did everyone in the class.
Puzzled as to how he could not know the capital of Italy, Kate and I drilled poor 4000 Islands the other night about what the hell he actually learned in school. What he told us horrified us, frankly, but explained a lot. Lao History (there was a war, but then the country became free. Today we are On The Road to Socialism), Lao Geography (North, South, Mountains, plains, wet and dry seasons etc), the Lao alphabet, 2 weeks of English, and basic physics and chemistry. There might as well not be any other country, culture or language.
I can't help wondering how much worse it was here before television and the Internet came along.

I feel like I’ve lost heart. So forgive me if the all round ‘tone’ of this blog has suddenly shifted, and is no longer chirpy and naïve and fun-loving as it was when I first arrived here.
But still, a thousand things keep happening, almost every day, that would be perfect for this blog, and I’ve just been letting them go by, unrecorded. It’s a travesty, a crime.
I’ll just have to do it in snapshot form, again.

Ashes to ashes, rocket fuse to coffin doused in petrol
I went to a cremation the other day- my first.
The big wedding cake coffin was paraded through the streets behind a long procession of monks and family members dressed in white. It was then set down in the grounds of a temple and painstakingly dismantled, and the lid was wrenched open so that the family could gather round to check that the deceased (a lady of 90) was, in fact, dead. They even poured coconut water on her face to make sure. Some of them sobbed in despair- dead, even after three days in there!
Then the whole thing was put back together and the long funeral rites were chanted. During this time I, along with my office and several dozen other guests, sat around chatting, drinking cold beverages from an ice chest.
Then, the piece de resistance: the coffin was doused in petrol, and the dead lady’s things were placed all around it. A long wire was attached to the top of the coffin, a rocket fuse was lit with sailed through the air and hit the coffin with a massive explosion, setting off all the fireworks and sparklers that had been placed earlier on it earlier.
The whole thing just really freaked me out, but I was reassured that an identical procedure is carried out at each and every funeral. Young or old- the coconut water is poured, the fireworks go off, and everyone leaves as quickly as possible to escape the smell of burning flesh.

Sweet communism
Not only are funerals all identical, like weddings, bacis and other rituals, but also every one of them is meticulously documented through photographs and video footage.
Someone put a slideshow of this particular funeral on one of the computers at work. As I watched, repulsed, as the images flashed up of the coffin lid being ripped off, and a poor young monk captured reeling in horror with his hands over his face at the sight of the body, I wondered aloud why the hell you would want to photograph such an event.
No one understands why we don’t document funerals in a similar way in Australia. “How else will you remember?” they asked me.
Well, I guess because every one is different. People speak, say things about the person who has died. Maybe the coffin is pine, or oak. Some people are buried. Some funerals, like my grandfather’s in 1998, are completely non-religious.
Here, there is no concept whatsoever of individuality. No question of a bride choosing a standout dress, or a party being an innovation. No, every dress is the same, every coffin a carbon copy of the next, every painfully loud songlist a standard.
And it’s not in the Lao character to question why this might be.
I blame communism, obviously
So this post is also dedicated to the newly ‘elected’ President of Laos, Mr Choummaly Saysone, whose god forsaken name I find myself typing and retyping about 50 times a day, at least.
Thankyou, Mr Choummaly, for contributing to this never-ending cycle of sameness. It means, basically, that I don’t need to go to any more weddings, funerals, death offerings or bacis. Been there, done that. So thanks, I guess.
Except, the fireworks on the coffin were kind of cool.

‘Threatened Species’
Anyway, speaking of standout parties, we had a cracking one at our house not long after my last post. Everyone was there, and everyone agreed it was the best party ever, which is ridiculous- we didn’t even have a jumping castle! We did, however, have catering, live music and 20 crates of beer. And at least 100 people, Lao and foreigners. And security. And, god help us, a theme.
The theme was “Threatened Species”. Sophie put her hair in curlers and was a housewife. Kate put gold foil on her front tooth and was Sporty Spice. Tom put a green bucket with the bottom cut off around his neck, and was an opium poppy. I scrawled ‘Modern Life is Rubbish’ on a t-shirt and was Britpop. 4,000 Islands drew the Lao letter ‘R’ on his t-shirt- a letter than was banned after the Revolution, but is slowly making its way back into common parlance. Paris Hilton was there, as was Courtney Love, Keith Richards, Whitney Houston, a straight cowboy and an Al Quaeda terrorist.
The village chief had warned, in the days leading up to it, that the party had to be over by 11.30pm. By 11pm, the President’s guards, who we had paid $10 to watch the motorbikes, we hovering nervously at the gates. Just five more minutes, we kept saying, thrusting bottles of beer at them willy nilly. By midnight, they’d had enough beer. “Eem laew,” they said, significantly. "We're full."
“Five more…dollars?” we begged, passing over three more beers. Suddenly they weren’t so full.
Anyway, the party still ended abruptly.
The whole thing cost just under $400. And the next day, we got our maid to come and clean up.
Plus, the rains have started. I think we had the last outdoor party of the season. Ha!

The Island
One of the most pressing questions I have been asked in the past couple of months is what I call 4,000 Islands for short. The answer to that is…The Island. Sounds enigmatic, no? When really it’s just because the derivative of most Lao names comes from the last syllable.
Another particularly pressing question was put to me just last week by The Island’s 6-year old nephew, Christmas. (Because he was born on Christmas Day, silly!)
“Do you think Ronaldino is ugly?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Very ugly indeed.”
“And how about David Beckham- is he handsome?”
“Yes, although less and less so.”
“But he can still play, no?”
“Yes. Yes he can.”
A very serious boy, that Christmas, but I feel I bonded with him at that moment. I have also bonded with the Island’s sisters, who love to sit and compare skin tones with me.

"On Monday Night it became apparent why call soccer 'The World Game', because it, like the world, is cruel and unfair, with the end often determinede by a terrible mistake."
That's from an email sent around last Tuesday morning by James, a fellow youth ambassador who, during his quiet moments at work, has been running an elaborate World Cup tipping competition.
You might also have guessed that the Lao are completely obsessed with the Cup. Most barrack for Brazil, and some for ‘Yerrman’ (Germany). No one cares about Australia in the least.
I’ve been getting quite down with the Cup this year, and I’ve been especially enjoying the commentary in the Guardian, especially the daily G2 segment called “The Ethical World Cup”, which tells you who to barrack for based on ethics and your own conscience- eg Italy, not Aus, as Italy recently ousted its conservative redneck government, while Australia has yet to do so.
I especially enjoyed this gem.


Down with royalists
What I haven't been enjoying of late is that newspaper I once loved so much, The Bangkok Post, which gets a very dishonourable mention this time because of its lame-arse pandering to the royal family over the past month. It’s something like the 60th anniversary of the King of Thailand’s ascendancy to the throne, and not a day has gone by without some pathetic story about how much the country loves the king. “I love the King t-shirts a sellout! Crowds flock to buy photos of the jubilee!”
I thought the BP would be more cynical, for some reason.

Break it down
On a lighter note, we went to a breakdancing competition recently. The kids were great! Many were asking where the hell Lao kids learn to breakdance. We have the answer: at the bottom of our street every evening. On the hard, bare road with the their hard, bare hands.

Revlon True Colour
I forgot to mention, in my list of Highly Visible Products last time, Revlon. There are several entire shops devoted to Revlon here, which has been ‘developing its products for the Asian market’. Which means only one thing, of course: bleach.
Also: dentists. There are SO MANY dentists in Vientiane, all signified by a sign bearing a great big comical tooth, with a red bit in the middle. One on every street, I swear. Ironic, really, because there is absolutely no way IN HELL that I would ever set foot inside a dentist’s surgery in Laos.
Same goes for hospitals, although I did visit one recently. Just when I thought nothing more could shock me here…
I know health care here is substandard, that doctors are not properly trained, that hygiene is not a priority. Why else would we all have been issued with our own set of syringes upon signing our AYAD contracts in Canberra last September?
I know all that. It’s just that I thought a hospital would at least have fans, sheets on the beds, doctors and nurses walking around, water coolers, even, you know, natural light?
No. The orphanage in Annie was the first thing that came into my mind. That and the fact that a few dozen sick, emaciated eyes were staring at me curiously, and there didn’t seem to be any doctors anywhere.

Ok, that's it. I'll try to update more regularly, although at this rate it could all depend on how many more times I have a mental collapse and take a day off.

What Sarrie is reading and listening to at this moment

This post is dedicated to the writer Patricia Highsmith, in whose biography, Beautiful Shadow- A Life of Patricia Highsmith, by Andrew Wilson, I am currently immersed. My friend Annie gave it to me two Christmases ago, and I’ve only just got around to reading it.
There’s nothing I love more than a good biography, especially one about a writer. PH has a special place in my heart, because I wrote my honours thesis on her in 2001. Or rather, on a series of films based on her work. Back then, she had only been dead for six years, and there wasn’t much written about her, which made discussing her work both difficult and strangely liberating.
There was one copy of a book about her written work, strangely enough, in the military library at Duntroon in Canberra. Obviously, I did not hold a membership in this library, so I spent many an afternoon there, pouring over this book among the heavy tomes on warfare and, like, weaponry and stuff.
Anyway, it’s all coming back to me, reading this biography, which is only two years old. I’m actually terribly glad it had not been written while I was struggling through my thesis, because I would have just had to give up right there. The book is that good.
Plus, PH was one crazy messed-up lady. I would have felt pathetic and presumptuous, not to mention a little afraid, analysing her work.
As it was, the semester I spend writing that thesis remains one of my happiest academic memories. There were two albums I played over and over again in that time, as I was churning out 500 words a day. One of them was called A Camp, by Nina Persson, the lead singer of the band the Cardigans. I am listening to it right now to get me inspired.
PH was very disciplined when she was writing, which has inspired me in the past week. But she was also crazy.
Maybe that's what you need to be a writer- batshit crazy.
When she died in 1995, she left a vast archive of personal papers- diaries, letters, manuscripts- that nobody had ever seen before. She wrote all the time, everyday, stuff she never expected anyone to read, at least not while she was alive.
Maybe this is my problem- I haven’t kept a diary since I was a teenager, because I can’t bear to write stuff that no one will read. I write with someone looking over my shoulder constantly. I have a pretty organised mind- I no longer need to analyse myself on paper.
Whereas PH was constantly asking Who Am I? Her work was an existentialist dream of self-awareness and nihilism.
And while Who Am I? is a question is rarely feel the need to ask myself anymore, I recognised her themes pretty quickly, and wrote about her work in exactly those terms, and dammit, I got a High Distinction for my efforts.