Untold Stories #1

Here’s an essay from my time in Thailand that didn’t find its way into the book…the events it describes took place while I was in Chiang Mai to experience the country’s famous Songkran New Year’s festival…

 

I had shown up alone and but quickly became part of a collective, unpunctuated celebration. I had immersed myself in the crowd. Our unchoreographed parade of bodies flowed along the road that lined Chiang Mai’s square-mile moat. We alternated between wet and hot as we were cleansed with murky moat water by revelers and slowly roasted by the tropical April sun. The mood was irresistible. Under clear skies, music blasted from promotional displays, a rainbow assortment of plastic pails and Super Soaker-style water pistols colored the streetscape, and smiles were everywhere.

Together, we transcended social restrictions. Beneath us, the mores faded into specks. Nobody was spared from playful splashes of water or a smear of dampened talcum powder. Not the uniformed policeman monitoring the madness. Not the elaborately costumed and made up woman marching in the processional. Not even the saffron robed monk whose band followed behind her. And certainly not the lone, unarmed foreigner taking it all in.

Together, our impulses went unchecked. Booze flowed and booties shook. Women and men alike managed to make me feel wanted. Alas, I had no phone number to give out, I still wasn’t gay, and I wasn’t taking you to my hotel room. On another day, maybe the propositions would have been off-putting, but today they were benign and titillating at best.

Maybe you are hoping that this is the part of my story where I lead a Thai girl someplace private and come of age, or where a latent bi-curiosity opportunely awakens within me. If so, then I’m sorry to disappoint you.  I can at least offer that this atmosphere did eventually lead to a partial cure of my lack of attraction to Asian women. (I hadn’t considered it much of an affliction, until I happened to bring it up in conversation with male Westerners I met. In these instances, I experienced an immediate distancing, a kind of subdued bafflement I would expect had I claimed to be a eunuch.)

At one point the traffic slowed and our parade stalled. One of the cars or trucks nearby was belting out a pulsing techno beat. In front of me in the street, some young thing found it dance-worthy and was putting her back into it, as they say. Between the sway of her hips and the bounce of the beat, I was mesmerized. My eyes practically crossed and a switch inside me flipped. Was it drunken exhibitionism? No, it was easy to look past the 20 oz. beer bottle in her right hand. There was a purity present, a genuine joy through movement. It was practically mystical. My nineties-era network television upbringing forces me to compare myself to a Saturday Night Live host being entranced by the gyrations of Chris Kataan’s “Mango” character, while Everything But the Girl’s “Missing” loops in the background. Sorry if the allusion eludes you. Mango was an exotic dancer whose magical sex appeal overwhelmed all who experienced it, regardless of gender, age, or orientation. Observe:

Such was Songkran. Such was Thailand’s annual baptism and communal renewal.

As we rounded a turn and hit a straightaway, something about the mood was gradually changing. The most recent set of speakers faded away. And suddenly our flow divided around a disruption.

There was yelling. A man was on the pavement. Half upright. Two younger men stood on both sides of him. But he wasn’t looking at them. One of them ran up to him and kicked his head like a soccer ball. If this had been a fight, it wasn’t exactly a fight anymore. This dazed man lay silent, as if to get a grip on himself. A woman screamed and ran to his side. The yelling was too angry and too fast. I couldn’t understand the words. But their tones were clear. They taunted him. She pleaded for mercy.

She crouched over her man and tried to shield him from the attackers with her frail body. She cradled him like a child and protectively asserted “mine.”

One of the men, not ready to let go of their triumph, continued yelling. Perhaps encouraged by our collective gaze, he made another run and added another kick to the head.

Together, we watched. We looked away. We turned our backs. We continued on.

As I walked away, I felt an uneasiness in my stomach. Whatever I might have believed about the desensitizing effects of violence on TV and videogames didn’t mean much anymore.

As my thoughts moved past the quiet shock of witnessing brutal violence, I slowly sensed my own regret that we hadn’t done anything. Why didn’t we do anything? I imagine most of the crowd was like me. We hadn’t seen the entire episode. We didn’t know who said what, who hit who first. But at a certain point, isn’t there some obligation to intervene in a thing like that? Perhaps this man was the instigator, the antagonist. But now he was now just a man on the ground having his brain knocked around in his skull. Those attackers were likely powered with adrenaline and possibly emboldened with alcohol or other substances. Still the two of them would be easily subdued by a willful crowd.

It changed my perception of the whole event, and of what it means to become a crowd. One minute, all you see is liberty, passion, communion, and harmless hedonism. And right around the corner lies excess, rage, conflict, and wanton violence. The crowd helped me step outside of myself and experience the moment. But while it dampened by inhibitions, it also diluted my individual instincts.

Together, we were bigger than ourselves. Together, we were smaller than ourselves.

Asian American Press interview

http://aapress.com/arts/books/austin-outhavong/

Vientiane Yen

(from 50% Falang: 50 Stories from a Half-Breed Abroad in Southeast Asia)

It didn’t register at the time, but stepping onto that airplane in Dallas was like a kind of death. But not like some linear Christian death to be followed up with gnashing of teeth, eternal harp-strumming, or Purgatory, but more like a cyclic Buddhist death that redirected me straight back to the womb. Only instead of the womb, I gestated within the fuselage of a Boeing 777. And after three connection-delimited trimesters, I emerged onto a jet bridge leading to Wattay Airport in Vientiane and was born again in the baggage claim. An immigration officer certified my birth with a passport stamp and life started over.

The next hour blurred with new experiences: meeting my Uncle Wa outside the airport, the hordes of motorbikes puttering through the streets, the candy cane-style paint job on the curbs, the controlled chaos of the traffic, the dust and the noise and the heat, the truck bed loaded with young factory workers that I mistook for a joyless school bus, the bumpy dirt alley road that led into Uncle Wa’s urban neighborhood, the decommissioned Citroën sedan aging in his driveway, the tour of my new home, meeting everyone who lived in the house. Finally, Uncle Wa delivered me to a silent room and left me there to rest from the flight. Once I was alone, the world slowed down again. I tried to rewind and absorb everything that had happened so quickly.

The household. I now shared a home with Wa, his mother, his sister, his nephew, his niece, and his two housemaids. I’d never met this family before, but through my father’s second marriage, I was living with my step-aunt, step-uncle, step-grandmother, and step-cousins. Five step-dogs patrolled the gates.

The house. The house was like no place I’d lived be-fore. The bathroom was an oversized shower that contained the toilet and sink. The lawn boasted a gazebo and a small fish pond. The living room window presided over neighboring rice paddies. There was no central heat or air conditioning. The entire house was elevated on cement stilts. Were we on the shores of the Mekong, I would have assumed the stilts were employed solely to avoid flooding. I later gathered that this traditional aspect of Lao homes was also incorporated to avoid insect infestations, catch breezes, and create a storage space for grain and animals. The shade created by this house helped preserve the Citroën parked underneath. The car maintained a lingering aesthetic appeal, but functionally, it was as abandoned as the French colonial ideals to which it alluded.

The city. An hour before, my mental image of Vien-tiane was little more than a starred word on a map. Now Vientiane had become a real place with dimension and texture. The Lao capital (pronounced in Lao as “Vieng-chan”) was the first city I’d ever visited for which a motorist truly benefited from having an SUV. The unpaved road we traversed was more a dirt bike course than an urban alley. Beyond the visual smorgasbord of Lao, Vietnamese, English, and French signage, there was something else giving Vientiane a distinct feel. It was the first post-socialist, pre-industrial city I’d ever seen. It juxtaposed the heat and dust of an Arizona ghost town with cosmopolitan civic bustle.

Graham Greene reflected on landing in Saigon in his fifties-era Indochina War novel, The Quiet American. He wrote, “They say you come to Vietnam and understand a lot in a few minutes. The rest has got to be lived. They say whatever it was you were looking for, you will find here.“ My first few minutes in Laos passed by and my second life as a Lao began. I had a new home to settle into, a new family to bond with, a new city to navigate, and even a new moniker. I promoted my middle name and became Saysana, “victory” in Lao.

50% Falang is done!

The book is currently available on Amazon.

The book is available in paperback and in Kindle format.

One Man NGO

(from 50% Falang: 50 Stories from a Half-Breed Abroad in Southeast Asia)

On my most recent recruiting trip to the university with Mesa, I was waiting outside near the campus border when a middle-aged man stepped off of the road and began to speak English to me.

By his dress, accent, and features, I knew he had to be a traveler from Korea or Japan. This was quite unusual to me, as we were in Dong Dok, about eight miles from Vientiane’s tourist center. And he was the first foreigner to actually talk to me. All the others hardly managed a nod or a response to my smile when passing me in the streets.

He was in search of the nearest restaurant and I was able to lead him to the cafeteria. In transit, I had to offer an apology, as I had just eaten at the cafeteria and it was an awful meal. Honestly, they served the worst bowl of Vietnamese noodle soup that I have ever had. Unless I just don’t know what pho is supposed to taste like. Or hell, maybe it wasn’t even Vietnamese noodle soup.
But my mysterious new friend was not in a discrimi-nating mood, it seemed. Once he had ordered his meal, I began to hear his story. His voice was so raspy and his intonation so oriental, I felt like I was having a conversa-tion with Master Splinter, himself.

“I am one-man NGO,” he declared with a smile. NGO stands for non-governmental organization and the term is associated with poverty aid programs, environmental programs, and the like.

He explained that he was a retired Korean professional who received a government pension of $180 each month.

“$80 I spend on myself. The rest I give to the poor people.”

On that day, he had visited a nearby elementary school, where as I understood, he made balloon animals for the children. After that, he met a street vendor and offered to cut the man’s hair. His offer was accepted and he gave the man a haircut right there on the sidewalk, using the kit he carried with him in his bag. He also mentioned occasionally distributing medicine.

“This is my duty,” he affirmed.

I looked at his bag. I imagined the balloon assortment, the haircutting kit, the unlabeled pill bottles. What else was in there?
He had come from as far as Sri Lanka, passed through India and who knows where else in between. He told me briefly about the tsunami-hit areas he visited: “No houses, just flat.” He extended his hand and cut a line through the air.

Despite the ambitiousness of his travels, I was under the distinct impression that he spoke no languages other than his native Korean and his endearingly choppy English. He confirmed this, and I quietly wondered how he got around a country like Laos. But he did, and did it blowing balloons and cutting hair all the way, it appeared.

But with much regret, I only spent those five minutes speaking with him. I had to return to my duties assisting the private school salesman. So there I left him to finish his meal and continue on his way. We hadn’t even had time for a proper introduction.

I wanted to go with him. To join him. I wanted to leave my little cage in Vientiane and watch him wander, to hear more stories. My mind played a video montage of my future adventures as his sidekick: trekking into a remote village and being greeted by a rapturous mob of barefoot children, blowing up balloons and handing them off to him for transformation into elephants and giraffes, listening to him introduce us with, “We are two-man NGO,” translating his halting English sentences into my halting Lao sentences. Perhaps once I would get ill after eating an exotic dish and then watch him dig deep into his bag for a magical Korean elixir. Oh, the times we would have!

After all, this roaming philanthropist was exactly the kind of person I had looked forward to meeting in Laos. Not offish, unshaven backpackers. Not my wannabe MBA boss running some crackerjack academy. Not the vendors and taxi drivers who saw me as a dollar bill with arms and legs.

But I didn’t go with him. It probably wasn’t a good idea. I wasn’t wearing comfortable shoes. My shirt was too formal. I wasn’t carrying much money. I wouldn’t have made it very far before eventually returning to my room.

So here I am.

Meanwhile, somewhere, some delighted and confused Lao is holding a balloon and receiving a free haircut from the Korean One-Man NGO.