Last Songs in Paradise

[Don Det, 4/11/23]

After 20 days in Don Det, I'll leave tomorrow for Pakse. I've just booked a $9 room, with AC! for ten days. Hotel owner is Vietnamese, and there are pho and banh mi joints nearby. There's an outside chance I'll return to Vietnam via Attapeu. My great uncle, Hoang Co Minh, had to commit suicide there in 1987.

Hoang Co Minh and his band staged their reentry into Vietnam from Thailand. The American media hyped him as the new Ho Chi Minh, an expat repatriated to liberate his country. They even pointed out that HCM and Ho shared the same initials. Clearly a tool of American and Thai intelligence agencies, he’s barely a farcical footnote, with his forgotten Bay of Pigs, but don’t laugh too hard. The man was willing to die for his beliefs.

Since I'm allowed to stay in Laos until May 22nd, I may also come back to Don Det, or travel further north. If I go to Savannakhet, I can take a bus to Khe Sanh. Site of a 1968 series of battles where roughly 10,000 people died, including Lao soldiers fighting alongside Americans and South Vietnamese, it’s still not clear what anyone was trying to achieve. History is a litany of human sacrifices.

For my last evening in Don Det, I’m sitting in Datta Banana Leaf, of course. It’s a great place to type during the day, when it’s quiet, but since it’s dusk, the same nine songs have come on, George Michael’s “Careless Whisper,” Bryan Adams’ “Look Into My Eyes,” Richard Marx’ “Hazard,” Lionel Richie’s “Hello,” Eagles’ “Hotel California,” Stevie Wonder’s “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” Elton John and Dua Lipa’s “Cold Heart,” Lionel Richie, again, with “Say You Say Me,” and Bryan Adams, again, with “Everything I Do.” Tony is clearly a gentle sap.

Soon, customers will trickle in, all foreigners. Leana, “Lao can’t eat this food. They never finish.”

Since remote places are bastions of local cultures, they’re also leery of exotic food. On this island of 400, there are at least two hundred cows, roaming freely, but no one milks them, for most Laos don’t care for dairy products. Cheese makes many retch, and milk usually means super sweet and condensed.

As if knowing I was about to leave, Toto came to my door this afternoon, something he had never done. So well-behaved, he didn’t dare to enter, even after I had called him in. Later, even Sahana dropped by to say goodbye.

Tony, “When I go to Vientiane or Pakse, and I stay two or three days, Toto, he cries.”

“How do you know?”

“He cries before I go!”

“Amazing.”

Liberated, Sahana got pregnant at nine-months-old. Her litter of five was given away.

During a trip to the market in Nakasong, Tony pointed to a girl who didn’t look older than 11, “She worked for me, one year, then she left. She got pregnant at 14.”

In East Asia, only Burmese die younger, so it’s understandable, sort of, that Laos tend to get it on early.

Lao New Year is less than 48 hours away. Knowing I’m never without my cameras, Tony warned me about having them out, “You must be careful. They throw the water. They don’t care if you have a phone or a camera, but in the evening, they stop.”

Tony’s Lao workers call him papa, which led me to believe they were his stepdaughters. They’re 12, 13 and 13 years old. Two are from Don Sang, where I spent two nights last week. One of the 13-year-olds is clearly smart, so Tony and his wife, Leana, only have her work half a day, so she can go to school in the morning. The girl’s mom is always nagging her for money. Her stepfather barely works.

Leana is a bit annoyed. Yesterday, a guest checked out from one of her rooms at 5:30PM and, complaining of faulty light bulb, only paid her $3 for 1 1/2 day!

Recounting this, Leana and Tony told me about other outrageous antics. Two women ate then disappeared. A man ordered lots of food, then said he had no money after eating. A woman ordered a salad, then showed Tony a bone that clearly could not have come from his kitchen. A man ate half of a chicken biryani, then complained there wasn’t enough chicken.

A man said he would work for food, but not after 8PM, because he had to go to bed early. Fine, but on his second day, he said he had to stop to look at the sunset, on the other side of the island. Two days later, he showed them a bloody forehead as an excuse to stop working. Still, he wanted his food. One of the teen workers had seen him scratch himself with a nail, however, so he was sent on his way.

Since my father ran several restaurants in California, I’m familiar with these tricks, but it’s gotten worse, I tell Tony and Leana, “There’s a new term, dine and dash. Dine and dash.”

Two days ago, a French woman tried to not pay for her visa extension, a service Leana had arranged. She hadn’t paid before it was sent out, and now, she wanted her passport back without paying. “Oh, I forgot my money again! I’ll go get it now.” Not stupid, Leana hung on to that document.

Many crazies from the West show up in Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos, with the last particularly attractive for its cheap drugs and easy-going locals.

Six or seven years ago, a black councilwoman in Philadelphia wanted to ban bullet proof plexiglass in ghetto stores, because it was insulting to black people, she said. Ghetto commercial measures are spreading, however.

With increasing lawlessness and more Americans starving, anything that’s ready to eat will be locked away, so no more easy access to canned tuna, Spam and nuts. The homeless can’t readily cook. More cashiers will be shot. More stores will close. Electric fences will appear. Walls will rise.

To glimpse America’s immediate future, book a flight to Johannesburg then, ah, walk around a bit.

If you’re young and in relatively good shape, you’re in danger of being drafted soon, so have an escape plan, unless you want to be minced and smoked in your own Khe Sanh.

Since it’s night, mayflies are all over my laptop screen. Lionel Richie is moaning again. At 11AM tomorrow, I will board a boat out of here. Though life is one long goodbye, you don’t quite realize this until you’re really ugly and stinky, but the sooner you know this, the better, actually.

On a dark, desert highway… So stupid! All around me, young people are laughing, and why not? They’re the last to splurge on this much degraded planet.

They stab it with their steely knives, but they just can’t kill the beast. Steely? Poetry for the masses, it’s America’s epitaph.

[Nakasong, 4/11/23]

[Nakasong, 4/11/23]

[Nakasong, 4/11/23]

[Nakasong, 4/11/23]