| Mekong Express Home | - Laos Home - | Editor for Mekong Express |
 |
 |
 |
The Heart Of It
Letter from the Editor
With this issue, professionals in publishing said it's high time I begin a letter-from-the-editor page. This got me to thinking. Where did we come from? Where are we going? I mean the point of such a letter is cohesiveness in presenting Laos to the public.
This issue completes the first three years of there being such a magazine as Dok Champa. Which is to say Lao Aviation and its predecessors never had an inflight magazine. So when we started it the Lao said, "What's an inflight magazine?" They had a point. What did we want it to be?
That was 1992 and we didn't go to print until 1993. From a regional point of view, the US Trade Embargo against Vietnam remained in place. King Sihanouk still resided in Beijing and Pyongyang. Kaysone Phoneviharn, the founder of Lao PDR, still lived. For Lao and foreigners alike, travel passes were required when one set a nimble foot outside Vientiane. Knowing this, in-the-know Bangkok publishers said I was out of my mind to cross the Mekong.
I signed a publishing-editing contract with Lao Aviation in May 1992. Michael D. Mann, then the Australian ambassador to Laos, just happened to know a publisher in Bangkok who might be interested--they use to play cricket during off hours. I met Michael's friend in December the same year, and, together, we got out the first issue of Dok Champa with the April-June 1993 issue. Flag carriers in Cambodia and Burma were still without inflight magazines. Vietnam got one up about the time Laos did.
Like everything in Laos, the project was a struggle--advertisers thought we should pay them! There was a lot of OJT, on the job training. But the pleasure was in seeing the smiles on Lao faces most of all, and on the faces of our passengers. Everyone found it just about impossible to believe that Lao Aviation had an inflight magazine. The magazine grew feet. For sale, copies began appearing illegally in the Morning Market. Security at Wattay operations was tightened a notch.
We had but one editorial policy. We still have it. Publish anything and everything so long as it's about Laos. A close and faithful friend worried that we would run out of material--text and photos--in 6 months, that by 9 we would have to begin recycling everything. Well, that was a legitimate and common view of Laos from the outside. What troubled us was that Laos had been essentially off limits for decades. Our problem wouldn't be Lao material. Our problem would be finding able writers.
Finding writers is still our major problem. Outside, writers have a hard time finding Laos on a map. Inside, few speak or write English, the language-of-preference in international inflight magazines. We are overcoming that with our next issue--the majority of articles will be written by Laotians. Most in translation. This is the fun part, seeing Laos through Lao eyes. A valuable exercise for the reader and the writer. This is what we want Dok Champa to be. A Lao magazine.
Speaking personally, an object of the above exercise is to make myself redundant but readily available before and during retirement. Available? Of course. In Luang Prabang. With my Lao brothers and sisters, the isolated splendor of Luang Prabang is possibly the greatest escape from the weary old world for "Indochina Hands." It's a footnote but a meaningful one: I came to Indochina 30 years ago this year, to the greater Asia 32 years ago when I was 20. It's hard to get the place out of your system when you came to it so young, lost much, and gained more for having stayed the course.