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The Land of Charm and Cruelty
by Stan Sesser
The following is an excerpt from Stan Sesser's book: The Land of Charm and Cruelty. Sesser has written extensively on Southeast Asia for the New Yorker and has reported for the Wall Street Journal. He has also taught at the Graduate School of journalism at the University of California in Berkeley, the city where he lives. The history of Laos offers some insight into why the Pathet Lao leaders were willing to cast aside traditional Communist economic doctrines.
For centuries, tiny, landlocked Laos has been a pawn in the hands of far more powerful countries, which coveted it for its strategic location, bordering China on the north, Vietnam on the east, Thailand and Burma on the west, and Cambodia on the south. As a result, Laos, which itself has never launched a war, has known hardly a moment of peace over the years. Although it has historically been a battleground between the Siamese and the Vietnamese kingdoms, it was also conquered by France in the 1880's and by Japan in the Second World War, and then underwent the final, climactic struggle with the forces of the United States and Thailand on one side and the Vietnamese and their subservient allies the Pathet Lao on the other.
Modern-day Laos is a French creation, not a Laotian one; the French colonialists, who brought in Vietnamese to run the country, set the borders of Laos in consultation with neighboring powers, allowing the Laotians themselves no say. The result is a nation of at least sixty-eight ethnic groups, many of them traditionally at odds with the lowland Lao, who live on the Mekong plains and make up about half the population.
The Hmong, one of the sixty-seven other groups, were ready recruits for the CIA's secret army; young men who had never seen a car or an electric light were plucked from primitive villages and put into jet fighters and helicopter gunships. When the Pathet Lao took over, Vang Pao, the leader of the Hmong, fled to Thailand-with his six wives and twenty-nine children, according to an extensive report on him in the Fresno Bee in July 1989. Tens of thousands of other Hmong also left, and today there are more than a hundred thousand in the United States many of them living near Fresno, in California's Central Valley.
The Laotians have the ability to live with contradictions in a way that Westerners can't, an American who lives in Vientiane told me. And everywhere in Laos contradictions, paradoxes, ironies abound. They can be seen in little things. At one of the bustling outdoor markets, a Laotian teenager walks down the street wearing a grey T-shirt stencilled "U.S. Air Force." In Vientiane, every day at dawn and dusk, loudspeakers blare out the broadcasts of the municipal radio station, but now instead of urging people to fulfil their day's production quota the announcers read commercials for soft drinks, soap, textiles, and beer. Although Vientiane may not have fulfilled the vision of French colonialists who dreamed of a European-style capital, it does have considerable charm. In the evening, the sun is a fiery red ball as it disappears into the Mekong, and then the twinkling lights of Thailand appear in the distance. Every morning, side-walk food stalls offer basketfuls of freshly baked baguettes, which are one of the few French influences remaining; the Laotians eat the baguettes with fish sauce sprinkled on them. Many of Vientiane's neighborhoods resemble self-contained villages, with rutted dirt roads and traditional bamboo-and-thatch houses on stilts.
A Western visitor who leaves the commercial and government areas and walks through these neighborhoods is mobbed by curious children, and adults extend greetings with shy smiles. Visitors to Vientiane before 1975 saw a wide-open city, where brothels and drugs were as readily available as they were in Bangkok, but today Vientiane displays a puritanical innocence, which seems much more in the Laotian character. Laotians are delighted to respond when a Westerner approaches them to start a conversation, but no one will come up to you outside your hotel to lure you with the prospect of taxis, guides, cut-rate merchandise, or hinted-at pleasures; such aggressiveness, common in almost every other Third World country, is alien to the Laotian temperament. I never saw a beggar in Laos, and no child ever asked me for candy or money. "They're the ultimately tolerant people - they never get upset," a World Bank official in Vientiane said. "If you give them something, they say 'Thank you.' If you give them nothing, they also say 'Thank YOU."
What was once a torpid Colonial capital had been further sedated by a Communist government that made individual initiative a potentially dangerous activity. As late as 1988, residents say, most of the stores in the central commercial district were shuttered and unoccupied. But suddenly Vientiane sprang alive, and now almost all the stores are active. The biggest market, which covers acres of ground not far from the Presidential Palace, is overflowing with the latest Japanese electronic goods, Thai clothes, and Thai foods; it is called the Morning Market, but that has become a misnomer, for it's now jammed throughout the day. A few years ago. there was no such thing as a Laotian restaurant in Vientiane. Now Laotian food is served at dozens of places, and new ones are opening almost every week.
Lao's economic reforms would impress the most unrepentant capitalist. In agriculture, farmers can now own their land, and, provided only that they pay taxes on their earnings, they can dispose of their crops in any way they want, at free-market prices: if a state agency needs to buy rice or any other crop, it has to compete with private traders on the open market. As for the state-owned agricultural cooperatives that still exist, they must either show a profit or go out of business. The same applies to state-owned businesses and factories, and they now make their own decisions on production, investments, and pricing. Banking has been liberalized, and the first commercial bank, 70 per- cent owned by Thai investors, opened its doors in 1989. A new investment code, enacted in July 1988, authorizes both joint ventures and wholly owned foreign-investment projects. Foreign investors can repatriate their profits and, under the code, are protected against nationalization. This liberalized investment code lured a significant, if unlikely, participant when the Hunt Oil Company - owned by a Texan whose family is known in part for its militant anti-Communism signed a contract to explore for oil in southeastern Laos.
"Privatisation" is a word frequently heard; the government has leased its cigarette factory to a Thai investor, and a sheet metal plant to a Thai Laotian joint venture. The fruits of these economic reforms can be observed all over Vientiane. To buy gasoline a few years ago, for instance, it was necessary to wait in a long line at a state-owned station and present a ration coupon; but now there are several private gas stations, and a big Shell station in the center of town - one that would look at home in the United States - stays open until midnight. The gas stations are getting new business because, though Vientiane has yet to witness its first traffic jam, cars and other motor vehicles are being sold in increasing numbers. For example, the owner of a wool factory who sells his cloth to Thailand told me that he has provided his extended family with two Toyotas, a Volkswagen, and two motorbikes. All over Vientiane, teenage boys in blue jeans, with hair over their shirt collars, zoom around on motorcycles or motorbikes, causing havoc on streets where drivers are normally so polite that they stop with a smile for the most brazen pedestrian. Just a few years ago, the hair length of those teenagers could have landed them in a reeducation camp.
The government's new policy includes putting out the welcome mat for anyone who wants to participate in the economic rebirth-even those Laotians who were interned in reeducation camps in 1975, or who fled the country. A few years ago, Souban Sritthirath, the deputy foreign minister who is in charge of relations with the West, made a trip to the United States to tell Laotian-Americans precisely that. "I said to them that if they want to contribute to the development of Laos they should move back to start a business, " Souban told me. "We'll give them all their property back if they stay six months and abandon their new citizenship." The American embassy in Vientiane has reported that hundreds of Laotians who are now American citizens have returned for visits without incident, but so far only one has moved back to start a business.
I met a returnee from France one night while I was eating at a place called Somchan's Pub & Restaurant. Seeing a Western face, the Pub's owner, Douane Siharth, sat down to tell me his story. "I lived in Paris for seven years, and before that I lived in the United States and Australia but I'm a Laotian, and I missed my country," he said. "So three years ago I returned, and now I have this restaurant, an export business, and a computer center. I also started a night club called Feeling Well - I had to argue with the government for three months to get that name approved. I started Somchan's, which is named after my wife, because foreigners who came to Vientiane would ask for Laotian food, and there were no Laotian restaurants. I set this up for foreigners." The menu at Somchan's attracts foreign visitors with such specialties as 'grilled small intestine', underdone grilled' and 'very spicy delicious bowel salad'.