talent and destiny are apt to feud.
You must go through a play of ebb and flow
and watch such things as make you sick at heart.
Is it so strange that losses balance gains?
Blue Heaven's wont to strike arose from spite."
—The Tale of Kieu
I'd changed my ideas about the region after reading Norman Lewis' A Dragon Apparent and watching a succession of brutally anti-war Hollywood war movies. From Lewis, I'd learnt that Vietnam was full of French colonisers who went about exterminating the wildlife, and that if you took it into your head to go up the Mekong you'd likely meet drunken tribals and religious exotics capable of mingling orgiastic fetish-worship with the harshest form of Puritanism. The film-makers led me to anticipate a land of orchestral Hueys, weed, gratuitous violence, prostitutes with denaturing but charming come-ons ('I love you Joe!'), steroid-inflated bullet-resistant Italian-Americans in headbands, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, and fat bald men reciting T. S. Eliot in the darkness of Khmer ruins—not so different from what Lewis had said, really. There was also a BBC cooking show, in which a laconic New Yorker had toured the southern half sampling its fry-ups.
In Régis Wargnier’s Indochine (1992), Catherine Deneuve’s character, Madame Devries, owner of a rubber plantation, adopts Camille, a local Annamese girl, whose aristocrat parents have just died in an airplane crash.
The cosy symmetry of this arrangement—colonising wealth providing sanctuary for colonised wealth—is shattered when Madame Devries has a fling with Jean-Baptiste, a young naval officer. In the best traditions of the romantic novelette, Camille also falls for the handsome young officer when he rescues her from a bloody incident involving the French police and a fleeing native convict. The film explores the complications against a backdrop of insurgency, the independence movement, and increasingly precarious French rule. Camille joins the nationalist and liberationist Popular Front. She has a son, but after her separation from both Jean-Baptist and the child, and Jean-Baptist’s mysterious death, the boy is raised by the ever-nurturing Madame Devries. When the narrative finally exhausts itself, with the surviving protagonists all in Europe, and with Camille now a delegate to the 1954 Geneva conference, the boy rejects any maternal claims his mother might have in favour of those of Madame Devries. At the conference, French Indochina becomes independent from France; it is divided up into North and South Vietnam.This ending turns a domestic idyll into a national ideal. Rather than showing Vietnam in the throes of independence, divided or not, it posits France as the First World postcolonial refuge for the victims of a Third World family break-up. It makes no attempt to look outside its perceptual world. You won’t keep the wolf from the door with the lower-order’s point-of-view. The film is aimed at well-bred city folk, not rice farmers; it peddles National Geographic images and Asian mood music: diminutive brown beings in black fisherman’s pants and conical straw hats planting rice; water buffalo; karst scenery; junks with red sails drifting on jade-green seas accompanied by sleepy zither music; epiphytes and ropes of crystalline rainwater; glint of tiger; teak-wood mansions, each spacious room filled with antiques and graceful Europeans in white ducks; tangos; Hmong tribal masks; the yellow smoke of opium; nouvelle cuisine; theatrical performers with pancake make-up, dead eyes and 6-inch fingernails; more anonymous figures in fisherman’s pants, this time sneakily planting grenades in missionary bicycle baskets; white herons suspended above the mirror-flat surface of the Mekong which ripples with implication.
Indochine, the name resonates in a way Indochina does not. The latter boringly refers to Southeast Asia cultures—those of Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos, primarily, and also sometimes Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Myanmar—which have been influenced by the cultures of India and China. The region is Buddhist, we gather, intercalated with Hindu belief and Confucianism. Indochine suggests something more transversal, or less transcultural. Its meanings are fugitive, personal, expensive. It speaks of a poesis of travel, available only to outsiders, or to the wealthy acculturated, a speech half musical and half visual. It makes the French colonial period look and sound glamorous: not in the sense of a return of the repressed (imperial nostalgia) but in the lighter sense of sublimation (escapism). Like the French colonialists, we travel to Southeast Asia because it offers an aesthetics of diversity, a claim on the senses not to be found in metropolitan Western life, grace and freedom from care.
When Norman Lewis visited the Moi people in the late 1940s, staying in longhouses which could accommodate entire villages, he thought that the people lived ‘idyllic lives’. Although at the time he didn’t much care for lying awake at night listening to the ‘bi-syllabic cry’ of geckos, or sucking up toxic rice-wine through bamboo straws from immense ceramic jars, in retrospect the experience seemed ecstatic. The longhouse way of life, Lewis adds, was bombed to extinction by B52s in the 1960s. Not much evidence of B52s or the French, in 2008. A different kind of invasion. A giant multi-chimneyed factory hovered over the rice like that spacecraft in District 9. The road was solid concrete, not a trace of asphalt or tar. The word 'quaint' cannot be applied to the city that appeared at the end of it. The houses looked like a toast rack. Each was the width of the door that provided entry. There appeared to be no shops selling food, and no telegraph wires.
A taxi tout sprinted towards me, his matt-black eye—the other was staring off to the left—unreflecting and unseeing. He grabbed my bag and arm. ‘No,’ I yelled, shocked by the violence of the manoeuvre, the fact that he was giving me no choice at all. Another man, on my left, was trying to twist my other arm from its socket. I made an ineffectual attempt to bargain—wasn’t that the protocol? didn’t you come to a mutually satisfying arrangement, after several feints and pretenses of indifference?—but no one was listening. Some 30 or more taxi-drivers were now bellowing offers or orders. One had my daughter in a head-lock. The original tout kept an iron grip on my bag. He wasn’t going to let go of it, whatever the others tried. He hauled me off, screaming at my laggardliness. He managed to jam my bag into the tiny boot of his car, by stamping down on it. Then he backed the car up, the rear fender bruising my shin. ‘You arsehole,’ I told him. Then I said to what remained of my daughter. ‘I think we’d better get out of here.’
We’d been to Nin Binh to look at the water buffaloes, karst scenery and emerald green paddies.
Tombs stuck up out of the paddy like enormous stone armchairs. The Perfumed Pagoda lay at the end of a flight of steps littered with blackened objects and burning cardboard animals. The canoes that took us to see the pagoda were not made out of wood or vinyl or some other passenger-friendly material but what looked and felt like recycled boiler-plate. At the half-way point, a child gave us a plastic lotus flower and posed expertly for her picture. The National Park at Cuc Phong, which Ho Chi Minh had taken time off to dedicate, looked as caged in and pampered as the gibbons in the Primate Center, and just as vulnerable and fragile, like a fashion or a Cornish biosphere. The rain-forest walk featured chameleons, striped arthropods of prodigious size and number, cicadas, stick-insects and, deep inside, about two hours from the entrance, a 500 year-old tree with four attendant plastic waste-bins. We’d taken the bus back to Hanoi. On the way, we passed pyramids of motor-cycle helmets and shops filled with painted coffins. (If you were to overfly the area in a Huey helicopter-gunship—wup-wup-wup—you'd see one or two narrow dark-green parallelograms squeezed in amongst the paddies, quarries and cement-works. Not quite what you'd expect after Platoon, Apocalypse Now, Rescue Dawn and all those other lovingly crafted emblems of desire and longing.)
Hanoi seemed to be centred on a lake filled with effluent and stone terrapins. The lake at least was what we, the tourists, were being channeled towards, before being thrust over a narrow bridge and made to inspect a shabby temple. Then we were driven back along an esplanade where one-eyed women sprawled obscenely on benches. Then, still in single file, we were marched to the Temple of Literature where the mandarins had been educated in medieval times, and where present-day wretches in stained underclothes tried to evade the plain-clothes cops and beg for dollar bills.
Then, now frogmarched at speed, to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum Complex, where genuine Uncle Ho t-shirts could be excitably bought—though more for the rare clinging nylon than the sallow wispy bearded image on the front. Taxis and motorized rickshaws shadowed us throughout, thuggish drivers hanging out of the window bawling abuse.If Thailand is the land of smiles, then Vietnam must be the land of laughs. This laugh is invariably shrill and prolonged, affording you an unusually detailed insight into the appearance and attributes of the epiglottis. You may also take in the various kinds and degrees of decay the human tooth can be subjected to, provided you have the stomach for it or chronic anosmia. Neither your attentiveness nor your disgust seems to disturb the laugher, however, especially when he's just finished billing you for a simple, slightly repellent meal of cha ca.
The Botanical Gardens was notable for its caged monkeys, sculptures, musicians, snogging couples and walkways that led straight into brick walls. There were too many ducks on the ornamental lakes. The trees were overgrown. There were benches round the lake, each taken up by a snogger. We looked back at one pair of dry-humping sweethearts. Probably, they would be living in small two-room apartments with their families. No room even for necking in the entrance. This must be the only place they could go. On the grassy knolls, wedding-couples posed for photo-shoots, the brides in white wedding-dresses with the trains arranged behind them like posh restaurant serviettes, the grooms in natty coats-and-tails. It made me think of Singaporean or Moonie mass weddings. It was more Guangzhou than Hollywood at any rate, a reminder that influences here are not quite so comfortably Western as postcolonistas like to think. Everyone looked blissfully happy.
Noi Bai airport looked like a gigantic ballroom or the venue for an X-Factor show. High vaulted ceilings, good lighting, chandeliers and lots of classy looking squeeze holding neatly printed signs. All the time I was there I had the feeling I was about to witness some grand televisual event that I had been made unaware of, perhaps through drugs or brain surgery. The departure lounge, with its high counters loaded with treasure and such curiosities as pith helmets and opium pipes, and its unexpected concert-hall dimensions, only prolonged the delusion. The passengers circulated with dazed expressions, some even staggering with stiff outstretched arms like zombies. One of them, I saw from a passing mirror, was me.
Siem Reap-Angkor airport was not a total contrast. Although it didn’t suggest talent shows and the same kind of glittering otherworldiness, it also seemed to have little to do with airports in the conventional sense of the word. We were funneled into a hall via crimson VIP ropes and multilingual signs. Our hands were shaken by smiling men in dark uniforms with gold braid on the sleeves. With its ATM machines and desks for visas on arrival, the arrivals lounge looked like the anteroom of a casino. The machines only dispensed US dollars. The men stamping our passports appeared to be proficient in the art of subtle but sustained fleecing. It was no different outside. It was impossible to find an ATM machine that didn’t dispense dollars or a taxi-driver who would accept anything else. The mere mention of riel, the local currency, caused one man to bay with hilarity. ‘Where is your national pride?’ I wondered feebly. The man clutched his knees and laughed till the tears ran down his face. Later on, it would seem as if every entrance—to hotel, bar, boat, bus, tourist site, Angkor itself—operated like a ticket booth to one of Disney’s theme parks.
Angkor and its temples could only be reached through a heavily fortified portal. It cost 40 US dollars to purchase a 3-day pass. This pass was usable between the hours of 5.30 a.m. and 5.30 p.m. To make sure it could only be used by one person, the purchaser's mugshot adorned the lower right-hand corner. Like an airplane boarding pass, it had to be torn in two along a perforated line, the larger section being retained by a uniformed entity behind a smoked glass screen. Above some official's illegible vermiform signature, the surviving docket stated: 'This portion to be kept by visitor and shown on demand during its validity.' What was this place? Theme park or secure facility, perhaps for the criminally insane? Anything was possible. Whatever it was, this wasn't the Angkor of my imaginings.
There are glorious picture books by Kenro Izu and Osbert Sitwell, films starring the pneumatic Angelina Jolie and the exquisite Mam Kanaka with Angkor as romantic backdrop, and a slew of gorgeously produced guide-books—none of which mention monopoly capitalism and tickets for 40 bucks a pop. We had to hire a tuk-tuk and be driven to the important sites, with their catchy consumer-friendly names, Angkor Wat, Angkor Tom, the Bayon, the Terrace of Elephants, the Terrace of the Leper King. (No need for guerrila-marketing or product-placement here.) But where were the porters who had stumbled after Geoffrey Gorer's peering and frantically leaping figure in the 1930s? Where was Sandokan and his pirates? Where was the threat of blowpipe dart and man-trap? Where were the tigers? What were all these paved roads, public toilets and ticket inspectors doing here? We might as well have gone to the Natural History Museum in London. They could easily turn up the central heating and pipe cicada song into the display rooms to simulate the jungly atmosphere. There are lots of homeless children they could employ to badger the visitors.
So we followed the others, dutifully scrambling through each pile of stone, photographing the faces on the Bayon,
wowing over the vast roots and trunks growing through and out of the masonry at Ta Prom where (forget King Jayavarman VII and the celestial nymphs) Lara Croft had faced off the Illuminati. We stopped at the food stalls, drank chilled water at the kiosks, and jested with the urchins who pestered us for dollar bills, each keening the same tragic formula, 'Two for one dollar!' (the last word given a tremulous and faintly decrepit intonation, as if spoken by some decaying southern belle in a Tennessee Williams play). Then, as 5.00 p.m. drew near, we added ourselves to the human snake that wound up the hill of Phnom Bakheng to view the sunset over majestic Angkor Wat.The climb to the top of the temple was not easy. We watched with our hearts in our mouths as rickety old people and parents with babies on their backs mounted the near-vertical wall, taking it in turns to swing up over projecting ledges. At the top, which doubled as a viewing-platform, the people sat or leaned on balustrades, steadying their palpitations.
A few, less winded and more devout, photographed the sunset. We had come here, one after the other, not once asking why, just following in the footsteps of a precedent. Faces straining, eyeballs distended, hands reaching to steady stumbling bodies, plump buttocks rotating stolidly behind the pink fabric of holiday shorts. No one spoke. The atmosphere was hushed and reverent. Angkor Wat, like three sandcastles before an incoming tide, began to crumble and melt into the dusk. And then it hit me. There was no Indochine, no Vietnam, no Cambodia, no Laos, and certainly no Angkor Wat. A worse realisation followed: perhaps there never had been. The whole panoply of forest, fisherman and frog was a phantasm.
'Two for one dollar', the child at my elbow said, dolorously.
Twenty odd years ago, the American Marxist critic Frederic Jameson wondered if non-Western culture (or as he called it ‘the Third World’) would have gone its own way, as he hoped, or been hoovered up by ‘some global American-led postmodernist culture’. Other critics scoffed at this not just for its perceived condescension but for its seeming ignorance of so many resistant counter-cultures and subcultures both within non-Western nations and within the West itself. But a look around Siem Reap-Angkor shows that Jameson’s fears were justified.
Angkor is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Like so many other places in South-East Asia, it has been preserved in aspic (or hydraulic renders and Portland cement), it's authenticity restored and eternalised, for the bourgeois classes. We want nothing less. Pilgrims, we travel half-way around the world to view the embodied confirmation of our cultural and educational attainments. Jameson spoke of 'libidinal investments'; middle-class desire needs an expensively produced object, on which to salivate and feast. The museum-piece is unanchored, bereft of its cultural history, invested with new significations which actually, even as they answer the viewer's private longings, depend on 'older' or 'received' ones for their continuing pulling-power. Angkor is likewise unangkored (sorry); its cultural value has little to do with the Khmer people who built it, and even less to do with the ones who live nearby.
I saw one of the latter—distantly, on the lake Tonlé Sap, doing something ancient and interminable with a net. In Siem Reap, the people who weren’t tourists were also fringe-players: migratory workers (crafts-makers, chamber-maids, tuk-tuk drivers, stall-holders, Internet café proprietors, masseuses, kids selling water or roses) scratching a living from recreational cash, loose change. The Khmer builders had been something else, which, whatever it was, had long ago melted into Thai culture elsewhere. I thought of the farming communities I’d glimpsed all over Asia, too far from the UNESCO World Heritage sites and the media outlets to matter. Occasionally the subjects of holiday snapshots or well-meaning Earth Report TV documentaries, they disappear behind generic soubriquets like ‘the common people,’ ‘sons of the soil,’ ‘peasant small-holders,’ ‘peons,’ 'native informants,' and ‘the backbone of the Asian Tiger economies’: ghostly beings, ankle-deep in paddy and buffalo shit.
Things got better after that. Boarding the local home-made ferry, we headed south across Tonlé Sap to Phnom Penh, where the scenery abruptly changed from EuroDisney to American History XXX. A horde of taxi-drivers fell upon us. Most were dressed rather unimaginatively as Dawn of the Dead extras, though one or two seemed to have made the extra effort, modeling themselves on Magwitch and Bill Sykes. This time we were nimbler, sprinting up the road, bags clattering our shins, and bolting into a restaurant, where we took an early lunch, fending off the waiters’ over-attentive hands while debating whether to wait till nightfall before legging it.
4.15 p.m. Sisowath Quay. A sepia-washed urban landscape, scrofulous shop-fronts, rotting temples and verminous hotels overlooking bars that could have been lifted out of the Saigon of The Quiet American; the lake-front was decorated with fake-looking palms—plastic fronds hanging at right angles—that might have come off the set of Full-Metal Jacket. There were also one or two amputees on trolleys, some beggars exhibiting the signs of stigmata, troops of bare-chested kids in the filthiest imitation Fila shorts I’d ever seen eager for banter (‘Hi Johnny! Wanna spliff?’’), and lots of very small, very brown, very young women in spray-on clothes attending to the romantic needs of a few very large, very ugly and very old white men. This was more like it.
The film to reference here is neither The Quiet American nor Full-Metal Jacket; it is Matt Dillon’s impenetrable yet weirdly compelling City of Ghosts (2002).
A group of insurance scamsters, or something, on the run from the FBI, or someone, gather in a decaying villa in Phnom Penh to draw up plans for a casino with the bloated local ganglord—or something like that. Dillon’s love interest is supplied by Natascha McElhone. A depraved Thai prostitute is Stellan Skarsgård’s. In the background, Gerard Depardieu does his oafish but heart-of-gold barman routine. There is a brief interval of gorgeous sun-dappled temple-touring—McElhone is an archeologist—half-way through, but not enough to thrill the viewer into insensibility and only enough to prepare him for the picturesque carnage to come. (On this showing Dillon will make a canny director.) The viewer is treated, variously, to a murdered woman (Skarsgård’s ho) dumped into a tub, a severed hand delivered to Depardieu’s bar by a warbling child, a sordid torture-and-execution scene straight out of Guantanamo Bay, and a prolonged beating-up. The Phnom Penh my daughter and I had been gang-planked on to was as seedy and obscurely horrifying as Dillon’s testosterone-drenched fantasy. Out on the town that night, I saw my first tattooed white man since Bangkok. He wore a sleeveless leatherette vest, curvilinear Maori rank insignia on each fleshy deltoid, and sported a freshly shaved blue head. He looked like a character out of a Viz cartoon, or a Sky news report. I asked him if I might take his photograph. He declined graciously, surprising me with his gushing Vicarage tea party tone. 'Dear me no, I'm simply not prepared!' There were lots of elderly Hannibal Lecter-lookalikes strolling through the bars with young transexuals attached to one arm; they were so alike they seemed to be competing for a prize. Rubber-lipped beings in wraparound shades lounged in nearby cane chairs, staring at my daughter. She held her nerve, where others, the young backpacker couples and second honeymooners, put their heads down and scurried by looking shocked, or frankly took to their heels, calling upon the mother of Jesus and other supernatural interventionists for assistance.
The daytime was fraught with greater danger.
To get to the Royal Palace and Silver Pagoda you had to negotiate an amputee on a sort of three-wheeled barber’s chair, which he could maneouvre into your path at speed. If you got past him with wallet intact, there was a convoy of tuk-tuk drivers, one of whom possessed a voice of such stentorian power and penetration it could turn corners, go up hills and even for all I know follow you down into the bowels of hell itself. ‘You want ride? See Killing Fields? Only fifty dollaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaar!’ If you got past him, then there were the map-sellers, water vendors and lepers, all of whom seemed to be gifted athletes, capable of putting on a sprint that might have embarrassed Usain Bolt. Perhaps the best way to survive in this place, and pass unmolested, was to become one of Matt Dillon’s unpleasant characters or a pedophile.
Choeung Ek. The Killing Fields turned out to be an acre of land with a chicken-wire fence round it. The fence was to keep out the beggars and grubby children. Inside, there were signs in English, French, Thai and Khmer explaining the history of the place. The circular pits covered in lotus leaves were the mass graves. Owing to the scarcity of ammunition, executions were performed with clubs, machetes and pickaxes. More signs told us which trees had been used as stocks. The glass-sided stupa of skulls was much smaller than I’d expected. A notice urged visitors to show respect and tact by removing their footwear and not taking any photographs. My guidebook said that if the shady trees, butterflies and mooching gardeners diluted the impact of the site then the stupa would send you ‘reeling back with horror.’ A white man was busy reeling back in horror as we approached. Still wearing his Nike sport-shoes, he was standing nose to the glass, angling his digital camera for the best shot.
Tuol Sleng Museum stands on the site of Security Prison 21 (S-21). This was where Pol Pot’s security forces interrogated soldiers and government officials associated with the previous Lon Nol regime, bourgeois or educated people (who might hold seditious ideas), or simply people who wore glasses, before sending them on to Choeung Ek. About 17,000 people were incarcerated at different times. These included academics, doctors, teachers, students, engineers, factory workers, monks, as well as the odd foolishly intruding foreign journalist. Waterboarding was one of the methods of torture. The Khmer Rouge wanted their prisoners to write confessions detailing espionage activities and identifying fellow conspirators. In practice this meant calling upon unusual powers of invention in the most harrowing circumstances and implicating family members. The confession of Hu Nim ends with the words: 'I am not a human being, I am an animal.' As many as a 100 people died each day. The rest were executed at Choeung Ek.
Some of the ground-floor rooms looked like the sorts of place the makers of the Hostel and Saw franchises would feel at home in. Others, disconcertingly, had the look of abandonment and ancient melancholy more usually associated with ruined country cottages or the farmsteads of eighteenth-century English poetry. Bare concrete floors, peeling walls, cracked windows, a single rusty bedstead, dust-filled rays of light—the bars on the windows and shackle-bar at one end of the bed struck the only jarring notes. There were countless photographs of the dead in the second-floor rooms. Our disquiet was heightened by the recognition that these buildings had once been a high school. Outside where morning assembly would have been, there was a tall gibbet, a heavy chain depending from the crosspiece. Back at the entrance, back on the road, just past the ranks of mutilated beggars, an emaciated kid in a stained red t-shirt that said I LOVE LA on the back was rapping to his friends’ clicking fingers.
September, 2009, Luang Prabang, Laos. Lewis came here before us, when the rebellious Issarak and Viet Minh were exciting interest and a great deal of inaction in the French colonial administration. I read Lewis’ account of his Laotian adventures closely for signs of pleasure or excitement, but it was a thankless task. Lewis'd had a pretty dreadful time generally, the only blips on the radar screen of his misery being an agreeable dinner with the Conseiller of Luang Prabang and a visit to a slaughterhouse in Vientiane. For the rest of his trip he seems to have endured ‘a slow, progressive and hardly perceptible decline in health’ and ‘a seeping paralysis of will.’ This seems to have had something to do with the difficulties of getting to and from Luang Prabang. Particularly from. The local doctor said that Lewis' vital fluid was obstructed, that he must avoid oily seeds and rock salt and that his spirit needed refreshing through the contemplation of white flowers. The doctor said that the illness would abate in the natural course of things anyway. Lewis seems to have got better when he left.
Our own journey to Luang Prabang was as seamless as a Star Trek jumpsuit. The plane banked over a landscape that could have provided the setting for one of the Lost World movies (Lewis, still caught up in the toils of modernist metaphor, compares the view from the porthole to ‘one vast Tahiti’), then settled itself down on the terrestrial equivalent of a Slumber bed.
Accordingly, I must now descend into brochure-speak. Luang Prabang is built on a peninsular formed by the Mekong and the Nam Khan.
An early capital of Laos, it is today a town of heritage hotels, all identically varnished and shuttered, with tiger-skins in the lobbies and deer heads mounted on the walls. The French colonial past puts in an appearance at breakfast in the form of baguettes, treacly coffee and the waiters’ starched white aprons. There are terracotta steps leading over the spine of the peninsular, intersecting with the three narrow streets that run along the length. Every other shop is owned by a German or Australian remittance man, and specialises in arts and crafts, antiques or essential oils. At dawn, the monks parade with black rice bowls, and are fed and photographed by gaping Japanese teenagers and TripAdvisor reps. It doesn't take a war for some global American-led postmodernist culture to leave debris behind.Nothing much happened during our visit. I lost a book I was reviewing, which later turned up at the airport. We strolled round the temples, ate the noodle soup, drank the Beerlao, and listened to the monks chanting in Pali and the ‘mild booming’ of the gongs Lewis mentions. In the evenings we visited the night market, fondled the silver hairpins, sampled the whisky Lao, and then sat in the cafés watching the new age hippies wandering up and down smiling at the telegraph poles. Lewis says that Luang Prabang is ‘the hometown of the siesta and the Ultima Thule of all French escapists in the Far East.’ Nothing much had changed, just the personnel. The town was still a place of rehab, but not so much laid back as comatose. The white people here—and there were many more than I’d seen elsewhere in Indochine—were of the dreadlocked and fisherman-panted kind rather than the potbellied and tattooed species. Clearly this was a classier kind of Shangri-La than Phnom Penh. The evening air was sweet with hashish smoke, and the faces of the passers-by shone with psychotropic joy.
The film for this place is actually a TV series—The Prisoner, conceived, written by and starring the coiled and brooding Patrick McGoohan.
Luang Prabang is as hemmed in as the series’ fairy-tale setting, and just as hard to leave. If you ran down one of the flights of terracotta steps, you’d probably be intercepted by a giant white balloon or a man on a penny-farthing. It was also just as cut off from disease and malnutrition. Only a mile or so away to the north and east were hundreds of square hectares of minefields and subsistence farming. The halt and maimed were kept out of sight.We got onto a boat bound for the caves at Pak Ou where hundreds of Buddhas had been left perched in ranks on dusty shelves like fetishes or sports trophies. We stopped to take on petrol. The river was the colour of milky coffee, the current in the middle muscular, surging, fast. We hugged the bank. The engine kept up a faint insect whine under the great broad-leafed trees and spatulate root-systems. De-forestation hadn’t hit the banks of the Mekong this far north. But between the trunks, we had glimpses of shorn slopes, newly planted with maize; there were plantations of the quick-growing golden badu trees which are used for scaffolding and mass-produced furniture.
The hills began to steepen into rocky karst the farther north we got. Creepers hung down. Some trees had anchored themselves in perpendicular fissures of rock. The water bubbled and sweated under the overhangs like a volcanic mudbath.We diverted up the Nam Ou to watch the boat races at Hatgna—a sort of Henley regatta for rice farmers. The oarsmen screamed as they rowed—Ha! Ha! Ha!—the prows of the canoes standing clear out of the water above the short stabbing strokes. A man commentated unintelligibly into a loudhailer. A girl stared open-mouthed at something over our shoulders. There were families picnicking in the mud, bare toes plucking voluptuously at the ooze. Dogs copulated in a corner of the canvas.
On the way back, a canoe passed us, a boy in the bows aiming a toy gun at me. I was struck by his unembarrassed squint along the barrel, its video-game calculation. When we reached Pak Ou, we had to wait a bit while another craft loaded up and left the jetty. As we moved in I felt a stinging sensation between my eyes. A pellet had shattered against my forehead. ‘What a way to welcome visitors,’ I remarked, when we got out. I saw the culprit skulking behind a petrol drum. His plastic rifle, which I was free to examine, had a spring-loaded barrel. ‘You could have blinded me, you little shit,’ I told him, and tousled his hair. ‘And now your ma will want to charge me to see the Buddhas. Where’s the justice in that?’ The ticket sellers, who had made inroads into a crate of beer, tittered and swayed. ‘Yah! Yah!’ they agreed, not at all offended.
I thought this was nicely ironic: patronising white man getting his come-uppance and paying for the privilege. But it wasn’t just that. I thought the kid showed a certain disinterest—a blitheness, a coolness—in the face of strutting postmodernity and its seductions. You often have the feeling that these places—Buddha caves, rain forests, temples, torture museums, gibbon enclosures—disappear when you aren't around. Nice to find some kid shooting clay pellets through your pretensions.
Capitalism, not socialism, is the great leveler, flattening everything to the same flimsy gold leaf.
The Internet is a place of paper-thin dioramas in which Viet Minh and American, the naked and the clothed, pillar-box red and olive-green, bactrian camel and Volvo, temple and chain hotel, Paolo and Francesca, Alp and tulip, Kalashnikov and wand, share the same banner headline. Nothing behind, just unreadable hyperspace.Jameson’s cultural machine has been and gone, leaving very little other than a whiff of engine oil and a mild pounding in the temples.
