Pho sho

What more appropriate place to spend Thanksgiving than in Saigon? Well...any. After snaking through a gallery of photos of American GIs torturing small Vietnamese children, watching a "documentary" that described our soldiers pouncing on unassuming villages "like a wild pack of wolves", and gagging at jars of preserved fetuses mutated by Agent Orange, one only really wants to give thanks that she's been around enough kiwi backpackers to fake an Australian accent when she orders her pho.

Though even American history records the mistakes of the Vietnam War, to see it from the Vietnamese perspective is jarringly different: it is the American War, and Vietnam triumphed proudly.

I've never pledged allegiance with feverish pride, or welled up at the sight of the bald eagle. And I rarely dissented with the trendy armchair cynicism that accompanies a young liberal education (you know what I mean: wittily bashing W. and America's imperialism, while smoking cigarettes that bought the last election and feeling solidarity with countries whose GDPs are a fraction of our tuition bills and trust funds...). But I've also never thought America evil. To see the absoluteness of that perspective made me step back: in the narrative of the Saigon museums, the war in Vietnam had none of the complicated tensions or frustrating ambiguity that marked it in America. From the start, the American War was a straightforward match between good and evil. And we were the bad guys, coming in to ruin this country just to prove we could--making sport of burning villages, sniping babies and raping old women. What is real of it is horrifying: the chaos that we suddenly created, punishing places and people who deserved no greater concern than the yield of their rice paddy; the devastation that perpetuates itself even now, in villages stunned to see entire generations of babies born with severe defects. But what isn't real...well, that's frightening too, to see how easy it is to incubate hostility and how hard it would be to cultivate a more nuanced perspective. Sobered by all this, what surprised us more was that we didn't feel any of that resentment from the locals. No one seemed to care where we were from, really--the expat population in Vietnam has swelled with its economic growth, and tourism has surged, so our white skin didn't incriminate us.

Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City) struck me as a more modern Phnom Penh. (And indeed, the Cambodian government follows Vietnam's progress closely, trying to simulate the latter country's recent growth.) When the bus made its way over the Cambodian border, into Vietnam, the landscape noted the switch immediately: the same lush green, but now peppered with a swarm of antennae, popping out of every visible surface. As we rumbled closer to Saigon, the stilted houses and mango and coconut grooves gave way to multi-floor concrete buildings and the thick black bunting of powerlines. The city had taxis, ATMs, and real showers, oh my! It was bustling, and clearly still negotiating the duality of an emerging market, straddling both avenues of luxury shopping and dirty alleys of delicious pho.

Before meeting Peter (who jetted over from Hong Kong) for Thanksgiving, Tara (who flew in from Tokyo) and I rendezvoused for a weekend honeymoon on Phu Quoc, a small, undeveloped island in the gulf of Thailand, off the southern coast of Vietnam. It was exactly the same white sand, clear water and fluorescent sunsets I picture when I imagine a tropical paradise, but...real. After inadvertently betraying the receptionist at our first hotel by booking our own flights ("Why you no care for me?!") we hastily moved down the dirt road, to a sweet, quiet garden bungalow. There wasn't much more to do than lie on lounge chairs under bamboo umbrellas, swim in the warm Pacific, or walk along the beach to find the next plate of fried rice. It was heavenly. We spent one morning riding around the island, past the short string of hotels, to the villages on the other side. The red of the dirt road, the rich green of the palms and grasses, the strip of pristine white sand and the stretch of deep blue beyond it patched together a vibrant, clear tableau. Fishing boats casting large, triangular nets dotted the water’s horizon. Thatched fisherman's huts punctuated the coast, and cows sought shade under palm trees. And every small child we saw ran after us, waving and shouting "Hello!" excitedly. (These children--in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos--melt me. I feel too ridiculous to coo about them here, especially since I have so repeatedly avowed my disinterest in anything that crawls, but I am beguiled by them all. I've suppressed my Angelina instinct thus far, but make no promises that I won't come home with a newly adopted brood.)

Our week in Vietnam only whetted my appetite. Culturally, the country is diverse, from the many native populations still living undisrupted along the Mekong Delta, to the French colonial charm of Hanoi (mostly missing from Saigon), to the hill tribes that live up north, in Sapa. Vietnam is also the poster child for the southeast Asian economy; its own is expected to surge 9% this year, and it opened a booming stock market in 2000 that would send Uncle Ho into convulsions. This is the act that the region’s other emerging powers--Cambodia, Malaysia and the Phillippines--hope to follow.

(…And more importantly, yes--they really do wear those cone hats.)

Picture credits to Tara & Peter: the dutiful tourists underneath Ho Chi Minh's scraggly beard, the dregs of the sunset over Saigon, seeking haven in the city's cathedral. Unfortunately, our Phu Quoc photos were victims of a camera malfunction.

Probably not the next history textbook addendum...

Back in Cambodia, headed to Laos, after a week in Vietnam.

It's so easy to be whisked away by the warmth of this place that I catch myself forgetting where I am. Thirty years ago, these were mangled countries. It's hard, here, to reconcile that recent history with what I see--I don't know how this laughter and lightness ever pushed its way through, how it sprang from physical fields of corpses. When reminders of those skeletons come, they are by way of casual conversation, all the more jarring for their unassuming entrances.

'How do you know how to swim like that?' I laugh (yes, so can you): 'We had a pool in my backyard, and we always went to the lake or the ocean in the summers.' My Lao friends cling to the wall of the pool, only daring to take their hands off for a few seconds at a time: 'Can you teach me?' I laugh again, shake my head: 'You never tried to learn, with the Mekong right there?' They shrug, venture a few splashing kicks and are neither self-righteous nor abashed: 'No one did--it was forbidden, so we wouldn’t escape.' The Mekong separates Vientiane from Thailand but is narrow near the city, swimmable. This was the easiest way of escaping the oppressive Communist regime that controlled the country in the 70s and 80s, mirroring Vietnam's. Easy, but not effective: many drowned or were shot halfway; those who made it were often torn from the river by men on the other side and sold into the sex slave trade before their clothes had dried. Though it is the epicenter of their diet, for years no one in Laos ate fish, for fear of coming across a human tooth or ringed finger.

For a while here, every deeper conversation with a Laotian or Cambodian felt like its own minefield (excuse the, uh, pun)--I never knew what question would accidentally tap into a war memory or a painful explanation for the benefit of me, the ignorant foreigner. M got married to a man from a distant province (so never saw her parents again) because Khmer Rouge forced her to, in an effort to weaken familial loyalties. P spent years pretending to be illiterate, holding books upside down and suppressing any gleam of cognizance of street signs, to evade Pol Pot’s brain hunt. L’s friend received a letter in the post written in French--when all foreign languages but Russian were forbidden--and was seized from her home the next day, and never heard from again. Everyone had parents or siblings or children who were killed.

(I have never spoken to anyone who told me of the brutalities of their time in the concentration camp, or the tortures they endured under police interrogation; none of these people survived. Around the corner from our Phnom Penh office is S21, a high school that was turned into a concentration camp under Khmer Rouge. It is a museum now, not curated but eerily preserved with crude cells still standing and blood-stained chains anchored to the floor. From 1975-1979, 20,000 people passed through this prison--of those, 12 are known to have survived.)

These are their stories, as much as summers on the Jersey shore or Lake Winnipesaukee are mine. And unless I delve (as I have, inadvertently, to the point of making these strong women cry), that is how they are told--quietly and not angrily, as something that was there and was bad but has past. I, meanwhile, am left stunned and sputtering by the closeness of their horrors: these are the same tales I read about the Holocaust or slavery, but this is the first time I am hearing them. I recognize it as sheltered, but I can't comprehend it--not really. My understanding of the modern world doesn't have space for this kind of oppression to prevail. And so at the end of another gentle account of another unclaimed death, I, the naive American, exclaim, 'you have to write a book! Your stories...' And this is what finally triggers a reaction--the wide eyes, the slow backing away, the guarded chuckle. In Cambodia, some villages are still Khmer Rouge strongholds--many of those men are still in power. But this wariness resonates even more strongly in Laos. Laos is still a Communist country; the harshness of its regime faded but was never punctuated with a shift of power and was never condemned. Though peace today is stable, even I--melodramatic as it sounds--would not feel comfortable relaying those personal tragedies here.

But at this moment, we are wrapped in sarongs, eating fried rice under palm trees by the pool and comparing freckles (they "pity me" for mine, considering them ugly). The cloud passes, and it is again impossible to believe the fear that stifled these sweet people in this sweet country.

This is how I feel throughout Cambodia, Vietnam and Laos. Over and over again, I am staggered by the same two human phenomena: our capacity to be profoundly evil, and our inconceivable resilience.

Baby's First Bribe

The last time I ran an obstacle course was fifth grade, Joshua Eaton's field day. In that one, I think I had to carry an egg with a spoon. This one was a little different: three separate police stations, two trips to the embassy, frantic calls to the home base (thanks, Mom & Dad), a fruitless search for my tuk-tuk driver, accidental Khmer glamour shots ('passport photo' was lost in translation), and a minor obsession with "official" stamps.

It was about the time I was sitting in front of the district police chief, karaoke on mute behind me, thumbs inky blue from vigorously stamping my prints on Khmer police reports I couldn't even read, trying to explain to my translator why a MasterCard had been in my stolen wallet ("No, it's not a very special card for a master, it's just like a Visa....No, not like a visa to get into a country. Like an American Express--you know American Express?...A money card. A card with money!...No, from a bank, but...You know what, just don't worry about it, it's--...Yes, exactly like a calling card."), that I began to wonder why I was on the other side of the world in the first place. The police station had more cots than desks, and two televisions with karaoke machines but nothing close to a computer. The chief wrote laboriously, seeming to relish the chance to use his white-out stick. We were almost done when noon hit and he promptly capped his pen--lunch time; we'd have to come back later. And later and later still, until it finally became clear that I'd keep running in circles until I greased the appropriate hands for that elusive Official Stamp, without which I wouldn't be able to leave the country. I'm trying to rationalize it as paying $50 for the privilege of experiencing an authentic piece of daily Khmer life (just like Plymouth Plantation, right?). Poorer, but triumphant, I now have both a new passport and the Stamped letter that ordains my exit from Cambodia.

Where the police station was frustrating, going to the embassy was touching, in a wrenching kind of way. The building is brand new, and something of a fortress--it's palatial and heavily guarded, betraying no signs of life. When I went, I was ushered quickly through the American Citizen line; the other door (slower to open) was the immigrant visa line. To get an American visa here is to win the lottery, quite literally. In that line, the Cambodians were dressed up despite the heat, waiting anxiously for their appointments to make their pleas. Across the street, in the shade of a big banana tree and with Wat Phnom looming behind them, clusters of relatives knelt waiting, all eyes trained on the door in anticipation of their sister or husband or son re-emerging with their verdicts. Projecting their dramas from the flickers of emotion rounding their faces triggered a surge of platitudes that I know to be stale, but that feel sharply fresh to me in this moment. I got through the embassy quickly, before a new visa case was even called. Feeling irrationally guilty, I caught myself hiding my head a bit; when the exit door opened, I darted out and quickly away from the gently hopeful stares.

The ants go marching one by one, hurrah...

I developed an affection for the house geckos, once I got used to the shadows they made as they skittered around the walls of my room at night. I learned quickly to watch for snakes when traipsing through the higher grasses in flimsy flip-flops. I use the stray dogs as a (totally legitimate) justification for not going running. I skirt the cows in the road on my bicycle, and I even spare the big beetles by gently plucking them off my pillow and letting them scurry out the window. Though I won't ever pretend to be hardcore, my threshold for squeamishness is rising considerably.--I learn to deal with it. But oh, oh!, the ants.

If it were just an ant game of tag on my floor, or a few playing connect the freckles on my arm, I wouldn't mind. But where there's one, there are six hundred. It was my fault when they found their way into the foil-wrapped energy bars. And when I found them coating my rain jacket, that was on me too--I'd left a candy wrapper in the pocket. The next morning, I sleepily dumped some vitamins into my palm and realized the fish oil tablets were moving; the ants had found their way through the child-proof top. I stashed anything that had ever been exposed to any possible derivative of a food product in my fridge. When I got back to the hotel, the flash mob was newly congregated on the ankles of a pair of pants; I blame it on the organic cotton. I quickly overcame nobler impulses and got more liberal with the aerosol can of carcinogens. Oh, but the ants are smarter. As I slept, they seized my laptop, pouncing on the stale crumbs between the keys, testament to many desperate paper all-nighters. As I typed at a cafe the next day, little red bodies crawled out from underneath the keys. Apparently, I'd interrupted lunch at the new hot spot, QWERTY. A waiter walked by, did a double-take, and walked back. He pointed to the ant-covered plate next to me, and was about to apologize when he broke into laughter, waving over all his waiter friends: these ants were crawling out of the CD drive, blazing a trail right to my melted chocolate chips. They were in the fan, in the USB port, in the battery. They didn't just want that old sprinkle; they wanted everything. Short of killing my computer with poison, I was at a loss: my limited Lao lets me say 'turn right', íce cream' and 'not too spicy'; 'can you fumigate my laptop?' is a little out of my league. I hopped the nearest tuk-tuk to the office, and dumped the computer on the IT desk, wildly miming the motions of dismantling the laptop and sweeping out the ants. The shy IT manager smiled calmly and said blushingly in Lao--to a colleague who whispered the translation later--that the ants must have come because I was so sweet.


And speaking of pests...
I am back in Phnom Penh, happily absorbing more of the city than I got a chance to see last visit. I've been indulging in tuk-tuks to get to work--here, they are small chariots, strangely ornate and a lovely way to zip around. Yesterday morning, rattling by the Royal Palace, I was thinking just that as I reached into my bag to grab my sunglasses when--poof!--in the space of a blink, two boys whizzed by in a moto, reached in and yanked my bag right out of my arms. I shrieked and pointed, but no one else seemed particularly surprised or interested in giving chase. I've been warned about the drive-by snatchings, but still it was the brashness of it that took me aback--in the middle of the day, in slow-moving traffic, right out of my lap.

So at the moment, I am a bit of a floater: living on borrowed cash, phoneless, and without any form of identification. In an unnerving way, it's strangely liberating...there's nothing left to lose. At the same time, I hate my sudden suspiciousness, especially in this place where so many people are so warm. I walk now with my backpack on my front, arms wrapped around it like a pregnant belly, eyes darting around. But even in my guardedness, people are open. My tuk-tuk driver was so upset that he he told the others outside the hotel, so they've now formed a small posse that watches out for me. Instead of walking out to "Killing Fields, lady?", it's "you take care today, madam."

*

It's more than just that, but for reasons I can't yet identify--and in the face of the theft of roughly 2/3 of my worldly possessions--I am startled to find myself close to loving it here.

Phnom-enal

(Clever title, I know. Refers mostly to the Russian Market --pictured-- which I cannot begin to talk about here for fear of being unable to stop.) Back in Vientiane, after a week in Phnom Penh. In the flurry of company meetings and client dinners, I didn't see much more of the city than the road from the hotel to the office, but it took hold of me still. Cambodia seems to be the kind of place that winds its way into your system and never quite lets go (not unlike their fermented fish, my naive effort to "eat local"). Every expat I met, it seemed, had come to Cambodia meaning to casually hop on by, but instead found themselves sending for their pets and bargaining for silk drapes six months later.

After the relative calm of Vientiane, Phnom Penh is jarringly rambunctious. In the new construction and glossy billboards, set against dirt roads and carts peddling sugarcane, it is clearly churning to modernization. The juxtaposition is fascinating and feels a bit absurd, as if I walked in on the country in the middle of a drastic costume change. The healer's cell phone rings in the ancient temple, an oxen-drawn cart parks outside an internet cafe. I can sit on the guesthouse balcony with a latte and read the Times from my wireless laptop, while watching baby-slung women across the way wash their sarongs in large tin tubs that collected last night's silty rainwater.

Defining these changes is hard. As a culturally sensitive tourist, it's trendy to cluck what-a-shame over the strip mall where the rice fields used to be, or the concrete that sucks the charm out of the riverside, or the fluorescent lights that compete with the full moon. But that's growth! It's ugly and it pollutes and sometimes it wrecks your view. And it's reviving this shattered city. Even more, it seems to me that this jerky evolution is the difference between a country that devours just enough foreign aid to squeak ahead, and one that is beginning to move of its own momentum--the progress isn't as pretty, but it's more sustaining.

What nags at me more than those lost kodak moments is growth's companion gentrification. Prices are rising faster than wages. The impact doesn't seem to have started its real hit yet, but it's looming. In conversations with Cambodians, foreigners are the most easily indicted for this crowding out. What's new, though (and selfishly refreshing), is that barang--the bad guys, coming in with their foreign money to push the locals out--no longer means Americans. In fact, around here no one seems to be paying us much mind; we're tired news. It's China and South Korea that have taken notice and are being watched in turn.

Even for all this, Phnom Penh isn't hostile to foreigners in the least (unless those emerging powers just render my whiteness that much more harmless). Vientiane is warmly welcoming, but Phnom Penh was positively bold. To get to the office, I walked down a few back roads, between rows of houses. Children yelled 'hello!' then burst into shrieking laughter when I smiled hello back. Women shouted 'hi' and coaxed their babies to wave. Young girls and boys bent around the sides of their motos to hail me jubilantly as they passed. I almost felt guilty, worried that they mistook me for someone famous. In school, children are taught English by rote, so many offer the same packaged salutations, a "hello-are-you-well" or "hello-what-is-your-name". And the small boys selling water by the tourist sights have been trained to use a few pat phrases heartbreakingly well, in a sing-song cadence: "will-you-remember-me-madam?"

The awareness of foreigners and eager attempts at English are a piece of the larger sense I got of Phnom Penh as self-consciously international. Much of the place is named for other places--the Sydney Hotel, the Mount Everest Restaurant, the New York Standard--and English or international schools are ubiquitous. Gratifyingly, though, this new, global identification seems to come not from an envy of other cities but a curiosity about the wider world in which Cambodia is finally able to take its place.

Lao P.D.R. stands for Lao People Don't Rush

...Or so goes the joke, as they proudly tell foreigners here.

This week the boat racing festival takes over Vientiane, marking the end of the Buddhist Lent. Teams come from all over southeast Asia to compete on this stretch of the Mekong. I watched them practice, and it's startlingly ferocious--long, narrow boats with a few dozen people, two per row, growling and thrashing in unison. This is the first year of mixed teams, half Lao and half foreigners. (I wish I had known; you might remember that I was, in my time, an accomplished five-seat on the Andover JV2 practice boat.)

The normally calm riverbank is frenzied, now, with a ferris wheel and a blue-tarped labyrinth of market stalls. The street is lined with simple carnival games, but they had me baffled until a Lao friend confirmed, with a shrug--they are all the same. Truly, one after another--strung down the road more than half a kilometer--each is a board with brightly colored balloons tacked on and a small pile of toys you can win if (I think you see where I'm going) your dart pops a balloon. Even now, my amazement outweighs my embarrassment at reacting to something so trivial: not one person thought, hey, maybe I'll get a few more kip if I target the throw-the-ball-at-the-can market?

The lack of innovation (and the indifference to it) is a by-product of Laos's untroubled pace. I see it everywhere: Unnamed homefront shops boast identical glass cases, proffering the same phone cards, whitening soap, moto tires and dried banana peels. Generic internet cafes, each claiming the fastest connection in town, each charge exactly 100 kips per minute. Linguistically neurotic English speakers teeter on implosion to see the glut of "so unique lao crafts! ".They are so indistinguishable that I can only justify going to one instead of another by making sure to alternate each day. It horrifies my capitalist sensibilities, but I seem to be the only one bothered. And as long as I'm happily buying into the rest--meandering without being hounded by tuk-tuk drivers or shop owners, taking leisurely lunches, preempting the slightest symptom of stress with a post-work massage, and spending hours unproductively padding between the pool and the sauna--I'm not in much of a place to judge.

What's a vientiane?

Good question. Let me back up...

Laos (rhymes with 'cow', for those in the know) is a landlocked country in the heart of southeast Asia. It's small, about the size of Utah, with 6.5 million people. Officially known as the Lao People's Democratic Republic, the country is poor. On the U.N.'s human development index--a bundle of indicators that measure standard of living--it ranks 133rd out of 177 countries. The average life expectancy is around 55 years; GDP per capita is roughly $2200. (To put that into perspective, the U.S. life expectancy is 78 years, and our GDP per capita is $43,800.)

In the 70s and early 80s, Laos was ruled by a harsh Communist regime that mirrored Vietnam's. Though Laos declared official neutrality during the Vietnam War, the Vietnamese ran the Ho Chi Minh trail directly through the country, making it a prime target of U.S. bombs. Per capita, Laos is the most heavily bombed country in history--the U.S. dropped more bombs here during the Vietnam War than they did in total, worldwide, during WWII. The country is still reeling from this devastation--not only is recovery slow, but more than 30% of those bombs did not explode on impact, and so are still active. Hundreds of people are dismembered or killed each year by land mines. Valuable land is left untouched because villagers are too scared to cultivate it, and infrastructural advances are stalled because only half of the country's land is known to be clear of unexploded ordnance.

Laos is still officially a Communist state, one of the few remaining in the world. Though it has liberalized since the end of the war, privatization is sluggish and most of the country's income is a product of subsistence agriculture. Enter DDD. With its fair trade outsourcing model, DDD trains and employs poor and disabled workers here and in Cambodia. The Big Idea is to sustainably support a new corps of leaders while cultivating the growth of the local economies. Enter Me: I am here to figure out how DDD can best expand--within each office and in new countries--to maximize its social impact.

Next to the dire picture the statistics paint, my life here is unreasonably pleasant. I live in a small hotel on the banks of the Mekong--from my window, I can see Thailand across the river. Each morning, my tuk-tuk driver picks me up to drive me to the office. Carts, bicycles, motos, tuk-tuks and cars share the road, closely weaving around each other with little regard for their differences in size. The concept of lanes or one-ways is fluid. To me, driving seems like a perpetual game of chicken, but it works, in typical Lao ("Why worry when it'll work itself out?") fashion--the bus brakes at the last second, or the moto swerves with aplomb.

All of my colleagues are native Laotians, but even the entry-level data operators know at least a word or two of English. They are universally warm. Without knowing how to ask, they gesture for me to sit with them and share their breakfast; everyone delights in introducing me to Lao food. And, oh, the food! Lao cuisine is akin to Vietnamese or Thai--lots of noodles, rice and vegetable dishes with beef, seafood, pork and chicken. Because Thailand, China and Vietnam are so close, they are well represented among Vientiane restaurants. And the lingering French influence fills the only significant gap I find in Asian food: bread and cheese. I eat everything, love it all, and pay next to nothing.

The exchange rate here is 10,000 kip to the dollar, qualifying me as a millionaire each time I exchange a benjamin. Most meals are between one and two dollars. The round-trip tuk-tuk ride is $2 a day. Internet cafes charge one cent a minute. At the local market, DVDs are a dollar each and my new "Gucci" watch was a splurge at $5. After lunch last week, I bought a double-scoop cone from the ice-cream cart for eight cents. I shudder now, to think how many pennies on the ground I have passed in my lifetime--if I'd known there was chocolate at stake...

The city is safe, but lively--there seems to be no tension between the large expat population and the Laotians (despite the many, many retired white men who come here to land beautiful Lao brides). Add to that the fact that a number of people (2) have said that they wished they were as tall as me, and I can't ask for much more.

You can take my bread away.

(This is the Lao interpretation of that classic Enrique Iglesias tearjerker, Hero, which has the lover crooning, "You can take my breath away." Seems to me the Laotions have it right, though--isn't bread the better gift? Jack, the song's for you.)

I don't quite know where to begin here, but if I let many more days accrue in my pipeline, I'll give up this travelogue before it's begun, so here goes...

Before I came, I was warned repeatedly (by my reproachful Travel Clinic doctor) that "Laos is not a developing country; it's undeveloped." As I struggle to get a sense for this place, I do feel that distinction, but I can't figure out on which side Vientiane lies. It's poor by our standards, certainly. The air is visibly polluted, the water not potable. The roads are rutted and unpaved; the concept of public transportation is ludicrous; there are few cars (and fewer that work). Most restaurants are open-air or three-walled, with cracked cement floors and a few rusty fans that the mosquitoes learn to work around. Nice, new houses (for expats) have spotty electricity and a gas tank, but no stovetop or oven. Cable and Internet access are not to be had, except along the main street of town--it's too expensive to run the wires any further out. Voyeuristic glimpses of Laotian homes yield images of bare open rooms, mattresses on the floor, dirt illuminated by swinging fluorescent bulbs. It's hot and wet but despite the rain (or maybe thanks to its wind), everything is coated in dust.

Even now, though, I squirm to present it that way--being here, you don't get a sense of desperation. Everyone is laughing, everywhere. No one has asked me for money or even pushed to give a tuk-tuk ride (and if you were going to beg, my reflectively white skin makes me prime pickings). The people are poor, but they are content. A grand generalization after one undigested week, I know--but it's discussions with colleagues here that reinforce my superficial conclusions. Strong, unusually (for Laos) educated women, they shake their heads and laugh--ruefully, almost--to talk about how people here feel when they see the wealth and advances of their neighbors, like Thailand: "They don't care! It doesn't bother them." I think I'm being gracious when I say, isn't it refreshing not to need the restlessness of Bangkok or Saigon--Lao people are as mellow as rumored. No, mellow, it means they don't get stressed, they take what comes and are always relaxed. "Yes, but too much. They just want enough to eat and drink and live, then they stop--that's it! No one works to get more, so we all stay the same." But--I falter--if they don't want more, they must be happy, right? Crows of laughter: "Ohh, yes!" So...

To whatever extent that it's all true, I am left feeling abashed--the flushed hero who sees the dark from above and swoops in for the rescue, only to realize these "victims" have happily formed their own party by moonlight.

I guess it's that broader paradigm that characterizes what I've seen of this place so far: splashes of sweetness where there shouldn't be. Electric sunsets reflected in the dirty Mekong; lush green springing from dusty streets and tangled powerlines; merry, spiky-haired schoolboys nested three-deep on a rusty motorbike; a bobbing train of orange umbrellas, as the monks maintain their deliberate pace in the monsoon. I laugh, but it's this sly whimsy that keeps Vientiane alight. That's the coyness of the city: it frustrates me with its anarchic traffic and alienates me with its indecipherable codes, but in the next breath winks and reels me back in with a jungly maze of temples, or a sudden army of fifty jerkily choreographed old women, doing step aerobics to thumping Lao pop on the banks of the river.