Louang Namtha, Laos

The day after the rafting trip, I went to the bank in Louang Namtha to change fifty dollars. The young teller began to count out my 486,000 kip. The largest denomination is 5,000, so it took quite a while. To fill the time, he asked where I was from. I told him. He perked up and said that when he wasn't working at the bank, he was teaching school, and would I come teach his students English while I was in town? That request captured the dual means of my accidental power: to confer my money and my language simultaneously upon a Lao man so poor that he has to teach and work at the bank in order to get by. (Or to be succinct, to be epigrammatically pithy: money talks.) So, hurrying to beat sundown because the schoolhouse had no electricity, a young Englishwoman and I circled up thirty kids in a dusty schoolyard and taught them the song "Head, Shoulders, Knees, and Toes." They pronounced shoulders like "chowders." Chickens pecked all around us. When dusk fell, the two oldest students followed us back to the main street. We prompted them as if we were language tapes. What is your name? "My name is Khué." How old are you, Khué? "I am eighteen years old." What will you do tonight? "Tonight I will go to a [the town's only] disco."

Oh, lord. Je suis nauseux. Il fait chaud. Je déteste Pol Pot. Language tapes for people too poor to play them. I don't want to teach you English; I don't want you to want my gray-green dollars; I don't want this blind worship. I came to Southeast Asia, don't you see, to leave America, but your only demand is that I be more American. An American who buys your souvenir t-shirt, your can of Coke, your child prostitutes and your ancient holy kingdoms.

Even in Laos, a place relatively untrammeled by tourists, they gave me what they thought I wanted. Earlier on the day I taught English, I rented a bike and got intentionally lost in the rice fields outside Louang Namtha. I was hailed by three men on a midday bender, and they took me to their village. Finally,I thought. I'll get to see something that hasn't been aimed at my consumption. But pretty soon we were sitting in a circle on the floor of a hut on stilts, downing eviscerating shots of homemade lào-lào. "I was soljah in Amelikan ahhmy," one of them kept insisting, repeatedly flashing me a clenched thumbs-up and a scrunchy smile. (He must have fought for the US-backed royalists during the civil struggle a few decades ago.) "I can only speak... little Ingriss." And then, after a few more shots, slurring "We are very... poah" three or four times. I took the hint, but even after leading me to his own hut where his subservient wife poured us still more lào-lào, he refused my offer of money; his pride and the alcoholic stupor caught up with him at the same moment, as if he'd drunk himself past cupidity.

Amelika? he asked me over and over, pointing his index finger at me. I'd nod, yet again: Amelika. And he retracted the finger, thrust out another thumbs-up, and grinned like an elf who has just stolen one of Santa's toys from the workshop. Amelika was what he needed to see. I'd hoped my unexpected detour would afford me some unfiltered contact with local villagers. That wish may very well betray some sort of romantic safarism or, worse, imperialist condescension; but in any case it wasn't granted. On the contrary, it seemed that I was the captive in the zoo, and they the visitors. I performed typically male homo sapiens americansis behavior -- getting drunk -- for their benefit, and then demonstrated the species' hallmark trait of trying to pay for it.

page: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7