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and its capital, Hanoi. By the 1870s, the Ho, operating on their own account once again, had concentrated their villainy in modern Laos, including Luang Prabang and Vientiane.
Neighbouring cultures joined in the fighting, which was sometimes conducted from atop special war elephants. The one enemy common to all parties was disease. As a Lao historian puts it, the troops “died off like leaves” due to malaria. In the end, after a series of wars lasting into the mid-1880s and a talent for diplomatic deception and manipulation, the French were in full possession of Vietnam, consolidating their control by the usual steps, as the seized territory became a protectorate (as had been the case in Cambodia) and then a full colony. This still left Laos as a more complicated problem, for it was controlled by the Thais and coveted by the ever-dangerous British, who had colonized Burma, which was right next door and bordered India.
M and I began our assigned legwork. She called at such places as the Centre de la langue française, which she reported didn’t seem especially well-used and was more or less indistinguishable from every little Alliance Française branch anywhere outside the Francophonie. She brought back the monthly programme. Language classes of course, a number of new books, and quite a few comics added to the library, the schedules of La Radio Nationale Lao (all the offerings in French) and Radio France Internationale (seven hours in French every day and one hour in Lao). Then she visited local elementary and secondary schools, where teachers told her that French was popular, but students said it wasn’t.
For my part, I was oddly curious about the Victory Gate, but everyone I asked about its history had a different set of facts to offer. So I resorted to the official guidebook of the municipality published by Inter-Lao Tourisme. For a government publication it was jarringly frank in its tone: “At the North-Eastern extremity of the Lane Xang Avenue bears a structure resembling a big exquisite monument built in the form of Paris Arc de Triomphe [but which] hardly competes with the original’s turbulent history and from a close distance, appears even less impressive, a monster of concrete.” The booklet claims that the structure was built in 1962, but I’ve seen archival photos that show it surrounded by automobiles from the 1930s or 1940s. Maybe the booklet was correct and the city was once full of ageing cars. Old postcards also reveal that the avenue encircling it was well-paved, whereas now it is macadamized only with sticky red mud or a dusty crust of reddish dirt, depending on the season.
— CAPITAL SPLENDOURS —
M and I found a room in a Russian-built hotel with a view of the river’s south channel, with the Thai shoreline in the distance. This was when the dry season was still playing itself out, though the monsoon rains of late afternoon and early evening brought temporary relief from the humidity while softening the rugged clay soil for tilling. The water still being low, the bank was planted in corn, which was about chest-high despite not being well-hoed. We saw no commercial or passenger traffic whatsoever on the river.
We strolled the length of the town, the river on our left, the commercial strip — with the inevitable massage parlour, mini-mart, and open-air Chinese restaurant — on the right. More subtly so than the Patuxai, the buildings reveal the long war between opposing traditions that never quite reconciled, but only declared a truce. There are ornate French grilles on windows that have never looked out on France of course, but only on what their builders must have seen as the steady encroachment of native ideas. M, who has spent time in West Africa, said that the streetscape would fit perfectly into the Côte d’Ivoire. But the faces, of course, are Asian, except for the French faces, which are the same on either continent.
The hotel room had a strange piece of old wooden furniture about four feet high. The top third of it was a glass-fronted box with a decorative handle for opening the glazed door. It suggested a cabinet of curiosities or perhaps a place to exhibit a wreath made from the hair of a deceased loved one, or some other proof of lachrymose nineteenth-century sensibilities. In fact, it turned out to be the primitive forerunner of the mini-bar, an amenity supplemented by a daily bowl of fruit. This one bit of charm aside, the room was true to its roots in the period of a decade or so when design and construction projects in Laos were undertaken routinely by experts from the Soviet Union. By bombing Laos and Cambodia to keep them from following North Vietnam down the primrose path to communism, the Americans succeeded only in opening the way for government by the communist Pathet Lao forces, who enjoyed Moscow’s support, and the regime of Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge, which carried genocide to new extremes.
When M and I were in Laos, the Soviet way of doing things was still being preserved in the system of vouchers, chits, and receipts employed at every opportunity, such as in what should be the simple matter of getting breakfast in the auditorium-like dining hall (“Performance from 0600 hrs,” with riverfront roosters to ensure that we were there with time to spare). But then, to be fair, there were still everyday French cultural traits to observe. Yes, yes, baguettes — everybody always mentions the damn baguettes. More telling, because they indicate a style of administration rather than a quirk of cuisine, are the small red speed-limit signs, exactly like those in France. While I wandered about, M was trying to grapple with such matters as the carefully guarded minor distinctions between the programmes of, on the one hand, La Maison du Patrimoine and, on the other, those of L’ecole française Hoffet, which in this city of perhaps 160,000 people has 230 students enrolled in French-language classes. Both institutions are supposed to be operating at arm’s length from the French embassy.
My desire was to go north to the Plain of Jars, which is said to be the most heavily bombed spot on Earth: not in terms of lives lost or the level of destruction, as in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, or Dresden, for it is a sparsely populated place, but rather in terms of the sheer tonnage of ordnance that the United States dropped there between 1964 and 1975 — on a country that was officially neutral, mind you. I was eager to see it, not merely because I remembered when it was very much in the news, but also because it is an important archaeological site, the most tangible reminder of a lost (and therefore mysterious) civilization, which French ethnographers and other scholars had studied for generations. What’s more, it is a centre of one of the best-known ethnic minorities of Southeast Asia: the Hmong. Like their fellow mountain people, the Montagnards, the Hmong were fierce warriors who, while seeking autonomy, fought on the side of the French, first against the Japanese, then the Viet Minh, and later still on the side of the Americans against the North Vietnamese: an integral part of the CIA’s famously “secret war.” Their commander, Vang Pao (1929−2011), once a sergeant in the French army, later a nominal general in the Royal Lao Army, built and trained a guerrilla force of about forty thousand. William Colby, who headed the CIA in the mid-1970s, went so far as to call him “the biggest hero of the Vietnam War.” When he died, in exile in the United States, the Economist labelled him, without complete accuracy, the “Montagnard Moses.”
While still in Vientiane, waiting for our connection upcountry, M and I found a tiny so-called antique shop named Indochine, its name another proof that the term has become current again after shucking off decades of negative connotation, at least when divorced from France in particular. We had little doubt we’d find much detritus of French colonialism and thus benefit from a few minutes’ tactile understanding of the old empire. No, the shop was chockablock with broken picture frames and purported silver flatware made of aluminium. And there was a bin full of cigarette lighters: replicas, shall we say, of the sort purchased by uncountable numbers of American soldiers and marines during the Vietnam War. They were universally called Zippos, after the Zippo Manufacturing Company of Bradford, Pennsylvania. During General Douglas MacArthur’s occupation of Japan after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, zippo actually became the Japanese word for cigarette lighter, but the things were even more ubiquitous among the next generation of U.S. troops in Asia. Such lighters were available at every PX (post exchange) at $1.80 apiece. Ten million American military and naval personnel served in the former French Indochina during the American War. Many hundreds of thousands of them carried Zippos, which curbside artists would engrave for them with regimental crests or, more commonly, with protest slogans, to be kept in one’s pocket, out of sight.
The wording on these ranged from bellicosity to bravado to well articulated fear. Examples include: GIVE ME YOUR