Notes on Lao people picked up over the past two weeks

There’s nothing that Lao people love more than a good bit of slapstick. Sight gags and Charlie Chaplin will send each and every one of them, old or young, into apoplectic fits of giggles. People falling over, being slapped on the bum or shoved is just pure, gold-plated, champagne comedy.

I’ve come to realise here that laziness, or at least the word ‘lazy’, is a multi-faceted, multi-purpose concept. It’s a thought, an action, an emotion, a state of mind, a way of life:
“Why did I do this? Maybe I am lazy.”
“I am lazy to work today.”
“Be careful, or you will be lazy.”
“Today, I am lazy.”

The Lao love to play cards. It’s just the one game- I think it’s actually Vietnamese, but it can go on and on and on for nights and nights. They play with actual money, too. The Island won $100 the other night, although it took him from dusk til dawn.
Unfortunately, as I have pointed out elsewhere on this blog, I loathe cards to distraction, along with all other games. There’s nothing more mind-numbing to me. I can’t see why anyone would voluntarily play cards or board games unless they were holed up in a remote house where there was no TV, where it was raining, and where you’d run out of conversation with all the other people there.
But, cards: everyone here, young and old, loves them.

Postscript
Later in the week, I was sitting in the family living room, peering at a tiny object in the Island’s hand- his mother’s tooth. We flicked through hundreds of photos and watched a DVD of the funeral with his older sister, two older brothers and father. My sister was with me, and with the family we ate fresh, glistening duck’s blood soup- a crimson delicacy!- and watched the past week’s events unfold- again.
[I forgot to mention that bit, didn’t I? A guy with a camera and a professional photographer were on hand throughout to capture each day in minute detail.]
Naturally I stuck out like a retard throughout the whole thing, and not just because of my hair and skin. It had more to do with the perpetually confused look on my face, and the fact that I kept doing things, you know, wrong, drawing gales of mirth from my fellow living room spectators. I even had to watch myself pouring water into the coffin- thankfully The Face was out of the picture- and also giving alms to the monks…with the wrong hand, of course.
There was a lot of laughing during the viewing, strangely, almost as if we had staged the whole thing for our later entertainment.
I did enjoy the bits that I didn’t get to see the first time. The day after the cremation, the family went back to the temple to sift through her remains and pick out bits of bone, teeth and gold, which they put into a pot and carried out on a rowboat to the middle of Mekong.
Before they did that, through, they moved the ashes around into the shape of a person and prayed over it, which looked quite creepy.
They also put a shrine in the temple, and a spirit flag in the temple grounds.
The tooth is now in a matchbox in our room.

Post-post script
On Sunday, I was finally relaxing. Sitting at the Sunset Bar, spending my Sunday evening in the usual way with the usual people, trying to capture the perfect sunset on my camera (see left), my phone suddenly rang. It was the Island. You must come quickly, he said. My sister is getting married in the living room…at this very moment!
Oh for christ’s fucking sake, I thought petulantly, as I made my over there AGAIN. And there they all were- the family, the boyfriend (with whom I share a peculiar bond, as he too was present during the death and funeral), his parents, the village chief and the local Holy Man. The Sister was not, as I had nastily assumed, up the duff. It just happened to be an auspicious day to marry, or something.
It was very fast- a signing ceremony, really, the equivalent of going to the registry. A long, handwritten document read out and signed by the village chief and all present, followed by a raucous baci with lots of whiskey, followed by yet another hefty meal, followed by some very fast-paced drinking which left the blushing bride practically comatose on the couch within an hour, and me practically pouring water down her throat.
As nice as any apparently spontaneous wedding between two people who have known each other for two months, I suppose.

Nobody can stop the music!
This guy in Phnom Penh started selling his downloaded collection of music a couple of years ago, and now runs a full-scale business, with more than 5,000 albums on offer. He’s just opened up a music shop at the Full Moon Café here in Vientiane, which is the answer to my prayers, really.
I used to get all snarky about downloaded music for the obvious, tiresomely righteous reasons, but that was only because I used to hang out with so many musicians who whined so much about never getting enough money/recognition/girls/drugs/happiness. But around the same time that I finally accepted that I never really fit in with that crowd anyway (quite a recent revelation, I’m sorry to say), I also read an interview with Patti Smith who gave such types a dressing down for not getting a job and getting on with it. It made me feel better- go Patti, you old grey lovely punk, you!
And anyway, my friend Patrick and I used to argue about it- he downloaded freely despite being in a band and being a dedicated music-head, and he said it was a dead issue.
He’s right: it’s a dead issue, and I can’t live without new music, every day, all the time.
Make that new and old. Without the benefit of high-speed internet at my fingertips, since the Boom Boom Room opened in Vientiane, I’ve bought at least 20 albums (70 cents each) of all kinds of stuff. Stuff I’d missed the boat on the first time round (Morrissey, Joni Mitchell), stuff for nostalgia’s sake (David Bowie’s greatest hits, my long-lost copy of XO by Elliot Smith, the Royal Tenenbaums soundtrack) and surprise new hits (Broken Boy Soldiers by the Raconteurs, the Babyshambles album- why do I even like it? It has nothing to do with my life-long love for Kate Moss, I swear. It’s just grubby and good.)
[Incidentally, Brooke Glorious Brookie did one of her monumentally rare updates recently, with her best of 2006 music list, and I must confess I am humbled. Humbled! I’ve hardly heard of any of it! Well-played, my dear, well-played.]
Even without my usual balance of nerdy obscurities of the sort I usually favour in my downtime (my laptop is already chokkers), I feel almost whole again.

Now all I need is for a branch of Boots to open in Vientiane so that I can get my monthly moisturiser, hair product and mid-priced cosmetics fix without having to cross the border, and I’ll be totally and completely at home.
It’s becoming alarming. I ride around town in the balmy evenings, on my way to dinner/cocktails/movie nights/home, and find myself thinking, like, I could actually live here! As in, for some time! When did this happen?

Speaking of movies- or rather The Movies- Academy season is upon us, and we the Vientiane Academy are once again taking our role VERY seriously indeed, make no mistake.
But before we can sit down to watch the films and ponder our choices, it’s the Aus day reception tonight, and I am NOT going in a sinh- I wear them every day for work! I’ve taken my one and only Black Dress to be cleaned, ready to perform its all-purpose duties once again. It’s a great dress- I had the tailor here copy it from Vogue- and always draws admiring comments, (especially when I say it’s Prada, which is only half a lie).

It's just a day
I never thought it would happen, you know? I never thought I would find myself in the vast, bewildering second-floor jewellery section of Thalat Sao bargaining over a ten-karat gold chain. But then I never thought I would be dating an Asian man either.
It was the Island’s birthday yesterday, and although he swears he turned 24, his birth certificate and passport tell a different story. And that story goes like this: when his family moved from rural Luang Prabang to Vientiane in the early 90s, they suddenly had to apply for birth certificates for all the family members. His parents simply forgot his birthday, and came up with some random date- November 3, 1982. But it was his grandmother- his recently-bereaved, blind, 75-year-old grandmother who remembered the real date- January 24, 1983. As good a date as any, I suppose, but maths has never been a strong point here in Laos. I even had an argument with one of the Island’s brothers the other night, who was adamant that, as he was born in 1977, of course he was only turning 29 this year!
I gave up on that one early on.

The chicken and the egg
A hen has been laying its eggs in a grubby old piece of tarp outside our back door. I got annoyed at first- I hate those fucking chickens- until the Island got excited and told me that having a hen lay its eggs at your door is- you guessed it- lucky.
So, what? Will my misplaced tax return finally turn up? Will I find the perfect hair conditioner at the local supermarket? Will I start sleeping properly like an adult? Will the inspiration hit so that I start writing at last? Is this about me and my luck or not? No, actually. When the Lao talk about luck and luckiness, they mean peace, health, prosperity, success, and winning the lottery. It’s not very subtle.

Ashes to ashes

Saturday came. The boys shaved each other’s heads in the garden, using soap and pink plastic razors. They laughed and whooped as they checked out their reflections, mainly to hide their devastation at losing all that careful coiffure.

The eyebrows came off as well, in accordance with tradition, leaving a bunch of ghostly aliens rubbing their heads in confusion and rushing to put on baseball caps.

We discovered the source of the Island’s persistent dandruff, after all. Big dry patches across his skull, which I rubbed tenderly with Nivea Body Intensive Milk (available at any minimart).

Good, good boys. Good sons. One of the brothers, the one who lives in Thailand, told me that just before he left to return home on New Year’s Day, his mother told him she was going to die, and begged him to shave his head and be a monk for the funeral.

Meanwhile, inside, as I let half-a-dozen women adjust my white sinh and tie a white rag in my hair, I couldn’t help thinking that a lot of it was just empty tradition, if only because no one seems to ever consider doing it any other way. And also because no one seemed to find it strange or wrong that I should be participating in something that has no connection to my culture.

We all walked, barefoot, to the temple, a long line of girls in white and boys in saffron,
holding a white rope attached to the coffin truck, which had Lao funeral music blaring through tinny speakers.

There were three cremations on that day, and as it happens, they do them all at once. There was a real festival atmosphere in the temple grounds, which were teeming with monks and nuns and hoards of relatives and friends.

[Having watched the family’s men shaving their heads and eyebrows all morning, it was easy to separate the real monks from the grieving surrogates: the bona fide monks had slightly darker heads, a three-day growth on their skulls.]

Being one of the nuns meant I had to go up to the open coffin with the rest of the family to pour coconut water on her face. By then, she had been dead for almost four days, and part of her face had turned black and yellow. Her lower lip, which in life had always exposed her lower teeth when her mouth was open, had sagged on one side, showing her gums, which had also turned yellow.

Now I can’t shake this final image whenever I think of her.

I was one of the last to go up, and the coconuts were all empty. The father, waiting to replace the lid, seemed distraught that I couldn’t perform this ritual. “Child, you have to!” he said, and someone passed me a bottle of perfume, which I sprayed on her dead face. He always calls me ‘child’.

It was all I do not to grimace at the sight of her, but it was a day of following, not thinking. Deep down, I was thinking how gruesome and barbaric it all was- forcing everyone to look at face given so completely over to death- an organic entity rotting away, like an orange left for too long on the kitchen bench.

But then, why is it that our culture feels the need to fuss over the dead, to dress them up and paint their faces to make them look they are sleeping? Surely this is just as barbaric. It's ashes to ashes, as they say- death as the great equaliser.

Then everyone climbed up to place flowers and candles around the coffin and walk all the way around it. This had to be done very fast, with a lot of shoving, because the Lao are afraid of spirits, and this must surely have been the point where her spirit was hovering, ready to be freed.

They set off the fuses one by one, a deafening whistle followed by the festive firecrackers. Once lit, the coffins up on their platforms, tall with canopies and covered with flowers, became raging infernos, forcing the crowd back from the heat.

There were individual touches: the coffin next to ours spewed out bright pink smoke. Ours had a man hurling lollies at the crowd. The third one had a massive flare at the front which, when set off, lit up the whole yard and threatened to burn down the canopy under which we were all standing.

They were all burnt down to nothing within about half and hour.

I went to the house the next day for an early dinner, and found the air had a lifted- everyone was relaxed and cheerful. The oldest sister, who has been frowning for months, laughed uproariously for several minutes at my face when she poured a load of uncooked cow’s brains into a bowl. The middle girl, the one who had cried the most, at the death, the head-shaving and cremation, emerged with freshly washed hair and painted nails, and giggled for hours on the floor with her sister. The father perched on a chair outside the house with a serene look.

On Monday, they took the ashes to be placed in a stupa at the temple. Yesterday, I went to the house at 7am to give alms to the monks, followed by a monster baci where I got more strings around my wrists than ever before- I look down at them and feel that I’m choking in white cotton. Actually, the baci was a joyous affair, with lots of laughing and people throwing rice. It was a celebration, I guess, because her spirit was free, finally. And everyone tied strings to all the family members- I got more than anyone else, which, I discovered over the weekend, was because the family has been telling everyone that I am the Island’s wife, to avoid further explanation. The big wedge of cotton around my wrists takes ages to dry, and they keep trailing on my coffee, but I’m sure as hell not taking them off.

The only foreigner for absolutely miles, and wearing a sinh, no less! There’s been too much attention on me to even consider not doing things properly. I think I’ve paid my dues for the next year- praying endlessly like a Buddhist, dressing up as a nun, watching over the dead, and spending a lot of time with bawdy old women, who sat on the floor for hours, chewing and spitting red betel nut, laughing and chopping vegetables. They have a vicious streak, I discovered, when you dare to beg off the booze and the food.

The Lao love to eat raw meat, despite doctors throughout the country warning against it. I ate so much weird stuff on Friday night that I went home and actually threw it all up. Then I was fine.

Today, a week after she died, it’s finished. The boys’ hair is already starting to grow back, and everyone will get on without their mother- that’s the beauty of a big family.

Since then

This post is dedicated to the memory of 4000 Island’s mother.

The day after I wrote that last post, she did die, after all. She was 49 years old, and left behind a husband, eight children, one grandchild and her 73-year-old blind mother. She died from kidney failure.

I was at work on Tuesday afternoon when 4000 Islands called, in tears, asking me to come to the house because she had taken a turn for the worse.

Until Wednesday morning, I had never seen a dead body, much less watched someone die.

The air in the house, when I arrived, had thickened with the smells of illness. The family were around her on the floor where they had been sitting and praying for the past couple of days. Even then, I thought they were being hasty. She was still moving around, and asking for water, and saying their names. I thought, even if she is dying, she could linger for days. I didn’t know whether to stay or go. But the Island wanted me to stay. Maybe he wanted me to see.

So I did. I stayed and sat and cried and slept fitfully and ate and watched her die with everyone else.

Every now and again, the father would smooth her forehead and look down at her. “Come on, it’s time to go,” he’d say, as if to a small child. “We’re waiting for you to go. Don’t worry about us. The children are fine. There’s nothing left for you to worry about. It’s time to go.” Every time he said this, the girls started crying again.

I’m an emotional person at the best of times, and it’s very difficult to be among people who are crying and not join in. So I cried pretty much for 12 hours straight, minus the bits when I was sleeping between the sisters on the floor near the bed.

I wondered many times whether I should stay. Surely they didn’t want me there, sharing in their grief? But it wasn’t just me- all sorts of people came and went that night. I tried to explain to 4000 Islands how different it is in our culture- how death is a private thing, and families don’t want others to see their loved ones in this state. All night she was moaning and vomiting and rolling her eyes in an effort to focus on the voices. In Australia, we keep our faces turned away until we are directly confronted by the death of someone close. We don’t stare death in the face like this, watching it unfold for hours on end.

I think she went into a sort of coma at around 9 o’clock, when we were getting dinner ready. She stopped moving or swallowing. But we still ate and watched Arsenal beat Liverpool on TV, and I kept falling asleep.

I woke up again at around 5am, and she was quieter. She had lifted her arms, and seemed to be trying to grab something in the air or make a sign. Her breathing was shallow, and she wasn’t moaning anymore. Everyone gathered- five of the kids, the father, the blind grandmother, me and seven or eight of the father’s card-playing mates. I looked away, outside at the dawn sky. When I looked back, she had stopped breathing.

“Wednesday,” the men were saying. “It’s Wednesday, 6 o’clock.” Everyone started wailing, and prayed at the foot of the bed.

But within five minutes, they had started to clean her, and changed her clothes. They covered her face and kept crying. They took off her jewellery and cut off her baci strings with a knife, an act that seemed more final than that last breath.

The father went out and returned an hour later followed by the coffin on a truck. The exact same coffin I’ve seen many times- wedding-cake-style and trimmed with gold foil- surprisingly flimsy up close.

I couldn’t help being fascinated by all this. They filled the coffin with sawdust, lined it with plastic, blessed it with flowers, and placed her- skin and bones and silk- inside. The coffin guy then put a drip into her, filled with some kind of embalming fluid- two whole bottles of it. They stuffed the coffin with all her clothes and sealed it up.

They ordered flowers and food- vats of it. Vegetables, rice, noodles, herbs, beer, Pepsi. And then the people started coming, and they’re still there.

It’s all familiar now. No one is crying. The coloured fairy lights are flashing tackily. There’s an enlarged portrait of her propped up under all the incense. There are watermelon seed husks everywhere, because seeds are what people like to eat here when they know they’re in for the long haul. I’ve become an expert at cracking them open cleanly. Women I’ve never seen before are all set up in the backyard outside the kitchen putting together massive pots of never-ending food. There are a dozen rented tables in the yard, and everyone is eating, playing cards or watching movies. There were around 60 people there when I left last night. This morning there were only a few, but they were already trickling in. I ate breakfast there before coming into work. The sisters had stopped crying.

On Saturday, she’ll be cremated at the local temple, with all the usual fireworks. The boys will all have to shave their heads and don the saffron robes, which is worrying me to no end. The Island’s entire identity is inextricably linked with his hair.

The photo I’ve put up was taken on New Year’s Eve, when the brother who lives in Thailand (centre) was home. That’s her in the front. Now, look at that hair on those boys- all gone on Saturday. To me, it doesn’t bear thinking about, but the Island can’t understand my distress. It's a completely normal thing for a Buddhist family to do, and if his hair is important to him, then it's all the more symbolic if he shaves it off.

Sacrifices, and the dud holiday

There comes a time in every young woman’s life where she has to choose between spending the week on a Thai island amid white sand and turquoise water, or flying back to Vientiane to prepare to watch her boyfriend’s mother die. You know?
I guess you don’t, huh.

I can’t help wondering if the debacle of the past five days has been my comeuppance for even considering spending a whole week lying on the beach. I mean, it’s just not something I would normally do. For starters, I’ve never been very good at lying still. And I don’t lead a stressful life- any stress I have is purely self-induced, and I’m too organised to fall under the weight of work. So choosing a tropical holiday isn’t really me. Holidays for me usually have something to do with visiting people, shopping and/or Seeing Another Culture. But sand and snorkelling? No ma’am.

But then, once you’re there for a couple of days, and you start to settle into the environment (as we did, however briefly), swimming with the beautiful Nemo and his friends just metres off the beach and finally tasting the almost-forgotten tang of fish from the ocean, it can be quite bewildering to be suddenly wrenched away from it all. Back on the speedboat to the mainland, waving forlornly at our friends on the shore, getting a bus for two hours to the airport, trying unsuccessfully to argue my way into cheap airfares, taking the expensive ones instead, then two flights back to Vientiane, 12 hours later.

But I really don’t think I had a choice. When 4000 Island’s dad contacted him and advised him to get home quick smart if he wanted one last look at his mum, there was no question of getting home as soon as possible, even if it did cost me an arm and a leg. All I could think about was my own father, and how, many years ago, before I was born, he too was summoned home from overseas for the very same reason, and he didn’t make it in time. He even missed the funeral, something that even today is too painful for him to talk about.

[Her name was Wilma, but everyone called her Willy. She was one of the few women in Australia at the time to have a university degree. She wore tweeds, drove a VW and smoked like a chimney. Everyone says I look the most like her, although, unlike my sisters, I didn’t manage to inherit her generous bosom.]

4000 Islands was a mess anyway, and the night before we left he was wracked by nightmares, in which his mother, standing with a whole lot of people he didn’t know, told him she was already dead. A bad sign- the Lao take dreams and signs very seriously.

[She had asked to be brought home from the hospital because when Lao people die in the hospital, the body has to go straight to the temple, rather than being brought home for the Buddhist rituals. For this reason, families often pretend their dead relatives are still alive, covering their faces with oxygen masks and attaching them to drips, in order to get them out of the hospital and back home.]

Anyway, as it transpired, she was in some kind of hallucinatory state when we finally got home, shouting and screaming and swearing, spitting food back in the faces of her kids who were holding her fragile limbs to the bed and trying to feed her. She was clearly going nuts through fever and hunger. Or, possessed by an evil spirit, depending on which way you look at it. From the point of view of the Island’s family, there was no doubt about what needed to be done.

Now, during this time, I was slouched bitterly in a corner of the room, which, by the way, was filled with relatives, friends and neighbours, who were all just sitting around and waiting for her to die. I watched the family holding her down, shouting at each other and talking about spirits. I wondered how many people in Laos died prematurely because of these whacko beliefs. I thought about white sand and turquoise water and striped fish. I asked the Island to take me home.

He returned home the following morning, exhausted, and told me that at 2am the witch doctor had finally arrived, done his stuff, and by morning, she was eating, remembered everyone’s names and had no memory of the night before.

So what’s a good atheist like me supposed to think, do or say?

Speaking of atheism…
When I said before that I don’t lead a stressful life, I was leaving out the part about work (training non-English speaking journalists at a Communist newspaper), and Christmas.

I came to the conclusion over the festive season that I am a terrible entertainer, at least on the inside. Helping to organise our Christmas Eve party was quite the most stressful thing I had done all year. What with ordering 8 kg of roast pork and bouche Noels (‘from the French bakery Mon Petit Cochon near Simuang Temple, bloody hell!’), procuring six cases of beer with ice (the tuk tuk driver’s brother sorted us out) and trying to persuade one of our male friends to be Santa (“Why me? Is it because you think I’m fat?” “No, it’s because you have a three-day beard and you’re wearing a red t-shirt” “And because I’m fat! Oh yes, let’s all laugh at the fat guy being Santa!” “Ok, ok, you can be the Tequila Elf then.”)

Anyway, what with all the alcohol, it all went so well, with everyone eating cold roast on tables outside, Aus-style, and later a Kris Kringle, with every person taking a shot from the Tequila Elf before receiving a gift. Great fun- and that was only boozy Christmas Eve.

Of course, the Lao don’t celebrate Christmas, but they do get quite in to NYE.
This year’s unfolding wasn’t half bad either, considering how crap last year’s was (see vintage post from that period). The prodigal son from the Island’s family had turned up to see his ailing mum and to see in the New Year with us at the Don Chan Palace Hotel Terrace Bar. What with the Island, his trendy younger brother (with whom my previous interactions had only ever involved him checking his hair in the rear-view mirrors on my scooter) and this new personage, I have never seen such a profusion of hair, jewellery and pink shoelaces in my life.

[I think I’ve mentioned before how acceptable it is for Asian men to be obsessed with their hair and skin, and more power to them, I say. There’s nothing more awesome than not having to feel guilty while I peruse the aisles of Boots at the Bangkok International Airport. About being able to say, with glee, that at least half of the products in my bathroom belong to my boyfriend. About instructing my sisters to bring skin products as a Christmas gift for him, instead of them wracking their brains to think of something more suitable.]

Anyway: stressful. Thank God my sisters are both exceedingly laid-back people, for whom Vientiane just such a novelty.

And, New Years Resolution: update blog more regularly, obviously.

Weather update
I’m back at work now, having decided not to waste my week’s holiday bumming around Vientiane, which I already do plenty of. And, ironically, back on the island, the rain started falling the day we left, and still hasn’t stopped. Our friends were forced to leave a couple of days early, and are now shopping in Bangkok. Some might call that a lucky escape for me and my bank account, which is already hurting from the epic rush home.
And it’s cold in Vientiane. Not cold by Canberra/Melbourne standards, of course, but genuinely chilly, particularly on the evening ride home from work. Enough to leave a dew on your scooter seat. A scarf is now de rigueur, as is the light sweater and nighttime doona (or duvet, you Euro fools). It’s genuinely cold up north, with temperatures dropping to 6 degrees on some mornings. But we haven’t seen rain since October.

I might also add that I spent my one-year anniversary in Lao on at least four different forms of transport on Saturday (boat, bus, plane, tuk tuk). I didn’t even realise until Kate sent me a message from Australia to remind me. Thanks Kate, though how the hell you remembered this I have no idea.
I have also just this minute received an invitation from the Australian Embassy to their Australia Day Bash- remember that? All those months ago? Twelve months to be precise.

Six degrees of Kevin Bacon
My housemate Tom works with Kevin Bacon’s nephew. Make of this what you will, but I am lobbying hard for a meeting so that firstly, the aforementioned six degrees will become just two, and secondly, to convince him to invite the family over for a summer holiday, or something, so that I can meet KB and be separated by just one.
Kevin, this post is dedicated to you.