0530 hrs., Sunday, 19 DEC 99

Dear Brothers,

In two parts, another "Letter from Laos" has been posted on Mekong Express.

And now to let you in on a little secret as the doors close on this millennium. Five publishers (2 in Thailand, 1 in Australia, 2 in America) have expressed interest in publishing Letters from Laos. But not just my letters. Some of yours to me too. And maybe a few that some of us sent to TLCB/Mission.

A little background. I returned to Southeast Asia 12 years ago and began corresponding fairly regularly with Kingdon W. Swayne (KWS). KWS and my father, both birthright Quakers, had been classmates at a private Quaker prep school (George School) in Pennsylvania. Both were in WWII, KWS in Europe, my father in Burma. I forget whether KWS graduated from Harvard before or after WWII, but at any rate he joined the State Department after the war and served in Asia until retirement in the mid-1960s. I didn’t know KWS until my first year in college--academic year 1969-70--at which time KWS became my pol. sci. (political science) professor. Maybe I was his first student who was a Nam vet.

Albeit subterranean, our intellectual battle began on campus. I kept everything low key because the Vietnam War was still on and anti-war demonstrations were escalating. In the midst of it I ran for student president and lost by a few percentage points. Looking back, I can’t believe I was crazy enough to try it. I guess I still remained an idealist.

Maybe I’ve never understood KWS? Ever, maybe KWS hasn’t understood me? Maybe it’s a generational thing? Looking for a common thread, for a decade we corresponded. The chatter on paper tallied about 1,000 pages before somebody shouted time-out. Maybe we were going ‘round in circles? He says the Asia I know isn’t the Asia he remembers, that now the student teaches the teacher. I’m not sure. As the millennium ends, my conclusion is that his Asia and my Asia are little different. This conclusion was reluctantly arrived at. Especially during the economic crisis in these parts, I came to it by reading, and observing Asians up to all their old tricks--of course we loaned them the money! Yes, in the States you can read the books I did. But the observing part, this you have to do over here.

In a letter midway in our across-the-pond discourse, KWS advised me to try and write a story from three points of view. This is an old literary device and the mere suggestion of it turned me off. (I dislike planning--because it’s introverted? I relish spontaneity--because it’s extroverted?) Well, KWS scores a point after all because that’s exactly what I’ve been doing without realizing it. There’s my outbound correspondence--one viewpoint. There’s another viewpoint, the inbound correspondence--his, yours and that of everybody else. And there’s a third viewpoint--the (combined) voices of the (often academic) books lining the shelves in my livingroom. Many of the authors are dead but their legacy is wisdom. This "stool with three legs" (as KWS calls it) has been my key to making sense out of Southeast Asian nonsense--an Asia acquaintance casually remarked the other day how silly it gets the more northward you travel in my direction from Singapore.

KWS will be 80 next year. He begged off "serious writing" a couple of years back--this was as he moved across the street to a Quaker retirement place. I, of course, was at a complete loss to replace the stool’s missing leg until I discovered TLCB. You know the rest of the story.

A handful of you also know that I originally came over here 12 years ago to immerse myself in some sort of deep background for an experimental novel I wanted to write. This is to say that Letters from Laos is prologue. If you were to read all the letters--something not even a publisher will probably ever do--you would see the path I followed in making up my mind about everything Asian and non-Asian. Looking for clues left carelessly behind, I’ve been known to reread handfuls of them. At times, studying my convoluted footprints is engaging enough to entice me to look in new directions. My biggest problem, however, has been creating credible Asian characters. Well, I’m not all the way there, but I might be half way. Which makes me believe that the third leg of the stool will be as strong as the other two. And which also proves the wisdom in a professor’s instructions.

Your man in Vientiane,

Jim

Clark, PI (64-65)
Torii Station, Okinawa (65)
II Corps, RVN (66-67)
Vientiane, Lao PDR (92-present)