understand and was too busy looking things up. They told me they’d been taking English classes for three months.
“Soon five of their friends arrived and joined the conversation, and I was surrounded by about thirty teenage girls and twenty motorbikes. A few boys joined us. Finally one of the bolder girls gestured to me and said, ‘Come, meet teacher.’ He was in his classroom opening the doors and windows to let in some air. He was a young Lao who had been learning and teaching English for two years, and kept apologizing that his English wasn’t better. He explained that the daytime school was out now but that young people are so eager to learn English that they show up at evening classes. All of these ones were students from a high school nearby.
“I naturally asked him about French class. ‘Finished,’ he said. ‘Teacher gone home — home to France.’ I first thought this meant that the classes weren’t being offered any longer, but later found out that evening classes in French are only held during the regular school year.
“He invited me to be interviewed by the class. Everyone was so helpful, I could hardly refuse. So there I was standing at the head of the class, wearing my Jim Thompson silk T-shirt with the elephant on it, and they asked me questions. I chose ‘build websites’ as my answer to ‘What do you do?’ They understood what websites are (with help from the teacher, who wrote the English on the board). But when I asked them if they used email or went on the Internet — again, the teacher wrote the words on the board — no one put up a hand. He explained that they knew about these things, but didn’t use them themselves.” Mind you, this was a few years ago now; I’m certain the situation has changed greatly.
M continued: “I asked them their favourite singers or TV programmes, but they didn’t have enough English to describe these to me. So after another ten minutes of conversation that, unfortunately, seemed not to be leading anywhere, I thanked the teacher for introducing me to his students and said I’d better let him get on with his class.”
At this point our waiter arrived, carrying some sort of vegetarian plate for me and river eels for M, who is of course braver than I am.
“It turned out that my elephant shirt helped me make a good impression,” said M. “It’s a very positive image. Anyway, I found it satisfying to be on display myself for once as opposed to what we’ve been doing: floating by the local people and peering into their intimate lives whenever possible.”
— THE YOUNG OXONIAN —
At Hong’s Coffee Shop, I fell into conversation with a thin young woman who was exploring Laos, and quite thoroughly, before returning to her studies at Oxford. She was travelling light, on the back of her male friend’s motorbike. We talked about the oddly beautiful riverboats that carry both cargo and passengers up and down the river. They’re long wooden vessels, barge-like, but with high, square sterns like junks, and are painted Mediterranean blue with red trim.
“I wonder how long it would take to go down to Vientiane on one of them.”
I said I didn’t know, but obviously the downward trip would be much faster than the reverse, particularly now, in the wet season. (Later I checked. The passage from the Mail Boat Pier in Luang Prabang to the Kao Liaw Pier in Vientiane is 430 kilometres and usually takes three days.)
“The thing that puts me off the idea,” she said, “is that part at the back.” She explained that she was referring to the outhouse suspended over the stern. “Mind you, we stayed in a hostel where everybody showered together and the partitions only came up to here.” She indicated a spot midway between breasts and stomach. Anyway, she went on, she would be sticking to the motorbike for this trip. Maybe next time, if there ever were to be a next time.
We talked about Xieng Khuang Province and the Plain of Jars, and she told me about her problem. The motorbike had broken down and she and her partner had to locate a mechanic. “Well, not a mechanic actually. He was more of a tinker. He did things like take four old broken electric fans and, using bits from three of them, made one that worked. He had to rebuild our bike, but of course didn’t have the right parts, so he used, what do you call it? An elbow? Yes, an elbow on the exhaust pipe. This is the result.”
She twisted round in her chair and rolled up the right trouser leg. The newly improvised exhaust system was now sending the exhaust toward her, not away from her, and she had a circular burn on her calf the size of a doll’s head. “You see, I was wearing shorts most of the time, and the bloody machine was roasting my flesh.” It was clear that the fearsome-looking burn hadn’t begun to heal. I urged her to go to a Chinese-run clinic I’d spotted the previous day. She shrugged and said that she and her boyfriend had to be off. They were heading straight up Highway 1. I warned her, calmly, I hoped, about its dangerous reputation. I also mentioned the added danger that the government’s assurances that the problem had been eliminated might not be completely reliable, though I had no knowledge of the situation personally and was simply urging caution.
She laughed. “I have to keep moving, you see. It’s an impulse hunger.”
I wished her a safe trip and a happy life. I thought of her again when I got back to Canada and found the following news story from Hua Phan Province, immediately east of Luang Prabang, near the Vietnam border:
The U.S. State Department has warned Americans of new security threats in Laos after five people were killed in an ambush on a bus in the latest of a series of deadly attacks in the country this year. Lao officials said a bus was ambushed on the road between Xam Neua and Vieng Xai, former headquarters of the communist Pathet Lao rebels during the Vietnam War. Radio Free Asia’s Lao service said the ambush was carried out by ethnic minority people angry with the communist regime.
— A ROOFTOP TOAST —
I had a special mission, a private one, not connected to the question of French culture, when I arrived in Saigon. I wanted to honour a late friend of mine. When he died in 1997, I wrote in the Globe and Mail: “The fact that he was rich was the least interesting thing about Charles Taylor.” Charles was the son of E.P. Taylor, perhaps the most famous, feared, despised, envied, and editorially cartooned Canadian businessman of the 1950s. To say the least, Charles went off in a direction different from his father’s, becoming, to quote myself again, an “author, foreign correspondent, Sinologist, bon vivant [and] horse breeder.” When he died, after the most appalling nine-year struggle with cancer, he was sixty-two and had published five books. One of them, Radical Tories: The Conservative Tradition in Canada, which appeared in 1982 (and reissued in 2006), was later named by the readers of the Literary Review of Canada as one of the hundred most important Canadian books of all time.
It’s a book as odd as it is delightful. As he confesses to the reader, Charles had paid scant attention to Canadian politics as a young man, because he was busy with international affairs. He put the Globe’s Beijing bureau on a permanent footing and covered wars, elections, and other excitements in fifty countries, armed with no other language than English, quick wits, a lively intelligence, and an attractive personality (which I seem to have described as “enormous well-scrubbed charm and bonhomie”). He had been everywhere and had known everyone. He once told me offhandedly, without the slightest affectation, that he couldn’t remember whether he’d met the queen or not.
For Charles, as for so many people at the time, the American War changed everything. In his case, it had the effect of turning his attention homeward. In the common view, the war was waged by America’s blinkered technocrats
