Ok, it’s really not that hard to grok.

I’ve said earlier that I don’t care much for traditional tourist activities, I am much more interested in seeing how people live, what they think and how the change their surroundings. I went out one day with a kid I met from the hotel and took a tour of a bunch of universities in Luang Prabang, there was a newer modern campus (ມະທາວິທະຍະໄລສຸພານຸວິງ) which I wasn’t able to talk my way into and could only shoot this one picture from the gates.

These two pictures are from the older campus of the same university, which the campus security was really nice to show me around.

This next photo admittedly isn’t the best image, but I had a really had time capturing the classrooms at the Law university (ວິຈິຕະກຳ) and wanted to including something here.

This last one was one of the most interesting campuses that I visited. It was a small arts university (ວິທະຍະໄລກົດໝາຍພາກເໝືອ), where students slept crammed in un-airconditioned dorm rooms. What stood out for me was the fact that all of the art being worked on, was traditional Buddhist imagery. Not that that stuff doesn’t have it’s place, but more that it often shows a lack of critical thinking in the arts. The work focuses more on technique, producing a Buddha image that is technically beautiful but not using art to make commentary on modern society, thoughts or feelings.

Many of the Laotians students who I spoke with, seemed impressed that I was studying university in Bangkok and somewhat jealous of the quality of education that I might be getting. I do have some classes which are very old-fashioned in their focus on memorizing facts for a test, but more and more I am seeing classes which focus on critical thought. Changes in the arts often lead other areas of society, and if the arts schools have yet to focus on critical thinking, I can guess that more traditional subjects have an even longer way to go.

So I’m back from Vietnam, it took 40 hours via Laos (bus, train, tuk-tuk, walking, etc …). More details to follow, I still have a few things that I wanted to sort through on Laos first. These photos all follow a theme of “interventions”, mostly hints of modern technology intervening into scenes that are otherwise not very modern looking.

The satellite images are especially interesting as they get at the main reason that Laotians likely speak the Thai language so well, all those horrible Thai sitcoms and soap operas are invading Laos. Most Laotians that I met told me that they could speak and understand Thai really well, but couldn’t really read it as it is somewhat more complicated (see my earlier post on the writing systems).

When Ambassador [to Laos from USA] William Sullivan assumed his post in Vientiane near the end of 1964, his assignment was to wage war while maintaining the fiction of the Geneva Accords, which he had personally helped to negotiate. He came to the Lao capital aware of US plans for Operation Rolling Thunder – a sustained carpet-bombing campaign against North Vietnamese designed to go “after the manure pile” rather than simply swatting flies, as the Commander of the US Air Force, General Curtis Le May, eloquently put it. Even before the Vietnam operation began, Sullivan established his own programs for Laos, called Operation Barrel Roll in the north and Operation Steel Tiger in the south.

Sullivan set the tone for the US campaign in Laos – ground troops were kept out (apart from reconnaissance missions and raids on the Ho Chi Minh Trail area) and military planes had to take off in complete secrecy. As British journalist Christopher Robbines wrote in The Ravens, based on interviews with pilots who fought in “the Other Theather”, “There was another war even nastier than the one in Vietnam, and so secret that the location of the country in which it was being fought was classified …. The men who chose to fight in it where handpicked volunteers, and anyone accepted for a tour seemed to disappear as if from the face of the earth.”

From 1964 until the ceasefire of February 1973, United States plans flew 580,944 sorties – or 177 a day – over Laos and dropped 2,093,100 tonnes of bombs – equivalent to one planeload of bombs every eight minutes around the clock for nine years – making Laos the most heavily bombed country per-capita in the history of warfare.

- The Rough Guide To Laos

In Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, the vast majority of the “enlightened” world hangs out taking drugs (Soma) and ignoring reality.

All members of society are conditioned in childhood to hold the values that the World State idealizes. Constant consumption is the bedrock of stability for the World State. Everyone is encouraged to consume the ubiquitous drug, soma. Soma is a hallucinogen that takes users on enjoyable, hangover-free “vacations”.

(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World)

The dominate society leaves little room for its members to have any form of creative thinking, artistic ability or individuality. The government pretty much makes sure that people are kept happy with massive doses of Soma so that they stop thinking and don’t cause problems.

They are told that there is another group of people called Savages who they are pretty much raised to think are stupid people who live off the land, away from technology and away from Soma. There are Savage villages setup for people to go see, kept almost like a human zoo where the dominate society can go see how the lesser-people live. The book goes on with some characters meeting the Savages and their lives being changed by them. That’s not really the point of this post, the point is that when I was taken to a Hmong village in Laos, I totally thought of the book.

The Hmong are a hill tribe who live in the mountains of Thailand and Laos (and a few other countries) and who were royally fucked by the USA government during the Vietnam war.

In the late 1950s, southeast Asia, including Laos, was viewed as an important region to the West. With the fall of China to communism and the rise of Communist rebellion in Vietnam, the US sent elite soldiers, the Green Berets, to train Hmong guerrillas to oppose the Vietnamese and the Pathet Lao communists of Laos. Though the Hmong had no desire to play political roles for other nations, they loved freedom and know that there would be little freedom under Communism. They were threatened by the intrusion of North Vietnamese troops into Laos, so the U.S. then encouraged them to fight and provided training and weapons. With CIA assistance, General Vang Pao became the leader of a secret army of 9,000 Hmong men in 1961. Laos was officially neutral as the Vietnam War broke out, and the US had signed an international agreement, the Geneva Accords, intended to keep Laos neutral and prevent fighting there. In reality, this agreement gave the Communists the upper hand, for they flagrantly violated the agreement. Responding to the presence of active North Vietnamese troops in Laos, the US tried to oppose them without appearing to violate the Geneva Accords by secretly recruiting freedom-loving locals to fight the Communist — and these freedom-loving locals were the Hmong.

…

The loss of 60,000 American lives for a no-win war in Vietnam was a tragedy to the huge nation of America, but it was a relatively small percentage of the nation compared to the loss the Hmong people suffered. In 1969, at the time when Congress first learned of our secret war in Laos, about 18,000 Hmong soldiers had already been killed in battle died, and many women and children had died as well. The Hmong were taking a great risk in boldly fighting for the United States, trusting that we would stand by them. But in 1973, the U.S. began to pull out of Laos, leaving the Hmong on their own to fight thousands of North Vietnamese troops in Laos. By 1975, Laos had fallen completely into Communist hands, and the lives of all Hmong people who helped fight the Communists were in jeopardy. More than 100,000 Hmong fled to Thai refugee camps. Many would be killed along the way, especially when crossing the Mekong River to get to Thailand. An estimated 30,000 Hmong would be killed by Communist forces while trying to reach Thailand. Over 100,000 Hmong people died as a result of the war, and today nearly every Hmong family in the US has terrible tales of loss and tragedy relating to the war.

After taking over Laos in 1975, the Pathet Lao Communists stated that they would wipe out the Hmong. A Vietnamese broadcast apparently called for genocide against them. From 1976 to 1979, there were credible reports of chemical warfare used against Hmong villages. The world tried to ignore these reports, and some influential voices in the United States tried to discredit the evidence, claiming that the “yellow rain” that had been used to kill Hmong people was just natural bee feces, not a chemical toxin. By the time overwhelming evidence had been gathered to shatter the “bee feces” theory, the media no longer seemed interested in exploring charges of genocide by Communist forces.

The United States, recognizing the sacrifice made by Hmong soldiers to fight for the U.S., began accepting Hmong refugees into the United States in December of 1975. By 1990, about 100,000 refugees had entered the United States. Today approximately 250,000 Hmong are in the U.S., and a similar number still live in Laos. Over 5 million Hmong people are in Southern China, also under Communist rule.

(http://www.jefflindsay.com/hmong.shtml)

As we were nearing the Thai border on our boat trip down the Mekong river, we stopped at a Hmong village that was setup along the river bank. The village in many ways felt like the Savage village in
Brave New World. As each boat parked, the big tall white tourists were greeted by dirty, brown naked kids who took tried to sell us handicrafts. I was lucky in that most of the kids seemed to ignore me for the adults, who would easily buy the stuff they had for sale. The village was setup to look very traditional, but to me it felt like it was setup to handle tourists and didn’t really show a traditional way of life. Of course, as I write this, I am wondering that if perhaps dealing with tourists in this fashion has become a traditional way of life; replacing traditional slash-and-burn agriculture and the need to frequently move that comes with it. In a country where there education is still developing and where ethnic minorities often struggle for full recognition, this may be one of the few ways to make a living.

The only photograph that I shot is the one above, of the western ball-cap sitting in a pile of grass. It seemed to sum up the contrast of the whole place, and also leave open lots of questions. Was the ball-cap a gift from a Westerner, or was it made in China or Burma by one of the Hmong and brought back once the factory work stopped.

Anyway, most of the people I met there either didn’t speak Lao or just didn’t want to talk to me. Hopefully I’ll be able to study Hmong language before I head back.

So I’m probably not your average tourist, when I travel I find that my interests are much more about language and contemporary culture than in seeing lots of old buildings. I think that it’s mostly seeing how other people live their lives that interests me, but I strongly feel that it’s impossible to understand a different way of living without understanding the language too. I don’t mean just understanding how to order a plate of rice, but understanding the vocabulary and grammar and how it reflects a way of thinking. I know it’s not possible (for most people) to get a level of fluency in a language before going to every new country, but even just getting the basics down will give you the foundation you need to learn more when you go to that country.

In looking at the way that people live their lives, I love seeing things like small-town nightlife and universities. In big cities, there are separate night clubs for every possible subgroup. I don’t even just mean gay or straight, in big cities there will be separate places for young gay guys, heavy gay guys, lesbians, etc … In small places (like Luang Prabang) there is one night club (well maybe two, I’m not totally sure) … Especially on weekends, it will be full of just about everyone. Young gay college kids, parents with kids at home, a handful (well hardly any really) tourists, teenagers, etc … Everyone will go out to in what in many ways is a form of a community center. Shared experiences bind groups together, I’ve talked before about how different it feels being an outsider in Thailand than it does in San Francisco. When I lived in San Francisco, my friends were from all over the world, we grew up with different foods, different TV shows, different educational systems. This is true even for people who grow up in USA, the experience growing up in Texas is much different from the experience of growing up in Vermont. In Thailand, people generally grew up with the same TV shows, same food, similar education, similar testing, and (for the most part) a common religion and king. When you see small-town night life, it shows you that common shared experience that people (across multiple sub-groups) all have together.

After spending three days in Luang Prabang, we got on this long boat which we rode for two days up the Mekong river to the border of Thailand and Laos. The days lasted about 6-8 hours each, mostly just sitting back and watching amazing scenery pass us by.

Chiang Rai is up in the mountains of Thailand, close to Burma and Laos in what is called the golden triangle (due to the large fields of golden-colored opium poppies which used to be are still grown). I love the mountains … I mean I like the beach and all, but sometimes the water, salt and sand start to annoy me. It’s different in the mountains, seems bigger and quieter somehow.