Vientiane

How perplexing it is to revisit a city you visited before, trying to identify the places you remember. What street runs parallel to the river bank? What was the name of the cafe where I met Natalie for a beer? Which bus was it that ran to the monument visible from the other side of the center city?

The city in question is Vientiane, a minute capital of a minute nation. It is overwhelmed by the turbid brown Mekong that separates it from Thailand. Under the heavy sky of the monsoon season, the city is perpetually drowsy. Only a handful of people are on the street, a couple of bearded backpackers and a few local girls in embroidered silk sarongs. The launderettes and restaurants are lifeless, and the masseuses that normally tout their shops stare dejectedly at the walkway.

A handful of temples grace the riverbank, the sole remnant of pre-colonial Vientiane. Surrounding them, the old city is French: mango trees shade narrow streets, heavy teakwood shutters adorn shophouses, restaurants are named L'Alsace and La Côte d'Azur. The new city to the east is Soviet: massive arches stand alongside dusty concrete boulevards with Communist names: Kaysone Phomvihane (the first Secretary-General of the Lao People's Revolutionary Party), 13 Singhakhom (or August 13th, the date of decolonization). A ten minute walk from center to periphery traverses the complete spectrum of history and ideology.

As I walked into the Musée Nationale, that spectrum is reflected in the exhibits. The history of Laos is a complete reversal of Marx's conception of progress. Tribal and feudal society is suddenly transformed into Marxism-Leninism. Marxism-Leninism rapidly becomes authoritarian capitalism in the Deng Xiaoping mode. Rather than proceeding dialectically, time becomes a chaotic set of accordion folds. We see Lahu fabrics decorated with images of bombs and helicopters, Buddha statuettes carved from the aluminum of downed American fighter planes.

My country played no small part in this process. The poorly blown up photos of Lao intellectuals holding up signs reading "À bas Monsieur McNamara" speak for themselves. And the Mekong River, the artery that gives life to Laos and her neighbor states, is a name associated in the American imagination with bloodshed and atrocity and the slow decline of our national dream.

Slowly, the wounds are healing. The guns have fallen silent in the hills. Laos is still a ragged landscape, marred with landmines. The local people in Xiengkhouang Province have taken to using rusted bomb casings as fenceposts. Vines curl around them now, obscuring the flaking instructions written in English, Russian, and Vietnamese.

I went for one last long walk along the quay at dusk. As clothing stands and food stalls were set up, I found myself walking out beyond the lights to the back alleys in the west of the city.

Beyond the edge of town, a thin veil of mist obscures a set of low mountains that straddles the border. Behind me, I can hear the sound of children playing, the screech of an electric guitar through cheap speakers in the introduction to a mournful luk thung song. Before me is the dark swirl of the Mekong River, a vast volume of water bearing masses of foliage fallen from the jungles that lie upstream. As the sun sets, I turn back, walking alone among the big families congregated around the noodle shops.

As I trudge back to the hotel, I walk past a shop called "Douangdeuane." Roughly translated, it means "Astral Weeks." I get back to my hotel room, and I put on the first track of the album: "To lay me down / In silence easy / To be born again / From the far side of the ocean."

In Memory of Modernism

About a month ago, my attention was drawn to a set of photos by the Dutch photographer Jan Kempenaers.  He'd gone around the former Yugoslavia with an old map to track down the monuments commissioned by Josip Broz Tito to commemorate the nation's suffering in the Second World War.  Battlefields, concentration camps, and other sites of national import were memorialized in one of those high-minded Communist projects that are so often forgotten.  The monuments were built as a material reminder of the victory of ordinary people over the fascist armies that marauded Europe.

They're all rendered in this unearthly, brutalist style that, as Foucault says, "heroizes the present."

Some look like the gears of abandoned spaceships:

Others like the skeletons of prehistoric sea monsters:

And others, like my favorite, near the Kosovo town of Mitrovica, seem to be nothing but a profound and monolithic gravity:

Take away the graffiti and restore the concrete, and you can imagine the little socialist automobiles gathered outside, the Yugos and Skodas and Trabants and Dacias.  Neckerchiefed Young Pioneers are gathered around, posing for photos, shielding their eyes from the Sun while they salute.

The Yugoslavs put so much effort into memorializing the defeat of fascism.  And think how quickly after the fall of Communism the peoples of the old Yugoslavia slipped into a new fascism.  Tito combated the ethno-nationalist impulse with a vengeance, recognizing it threatened the unity of the state and by extension his own power.  1989 saw the flowering of Prague and Budapest, but further South it marked the dawn of a decade of religious sectarianism and territorial revanchism.

Religious and ethnic wars slashed the Balkans to ribbons, and modern monuments crumbled in the hills.

When I was off seeing the world, I passed through the little Cambodian town of Kep (during the Indochine days, it was Kep-sur-Mer), some 10,000 people on a rocky shore a few hours out of Phnom Penh.

In the '60s, this was the Cambodian Riviera.  Squint at the old town, and you can almost see it.  Men in white suits strolling along the quay, lacing their Khmer conversation with French.  Lon Nol's cronies must have sipped Scotch at the nightclubs, where Ros Sereysothea and Sinn Sisamouth sang.

The streets are quiet now.  When the Khmer Rouge marched into Kep in 1975, they torched the modernist seaside villas.  Teenagers in black pajamas, faces covered with red-checked krama scarves, must have gone through these buildings, ripping out velvet curtains and tossing volumes of Victor Hugo and the Reamker into the Gulf.

The black hulks of the old villas loom over the seaside today.  A number of them bear the bold designs of Vann Molyvann, Le Corbusier's Cambodian disciple who imbued fused the International style with design elements from classical Angkorian architecture.

Modernism is annihilated by another modernism.  Two radical approaches are incommensurate: the new architecture of Corbusier and the beyond-Maoism of the Democratic Kampuchea dictat.

Today, the peasants hang their wash on lines strung from the concrete columns.  The Khmers are tough as nails.  Everyone you see over 30 is a genocide survivor.

The government of Hun Sen, the one-eyed former Communist who has run Cambodia in some capacity since 1985, has announced bold plans to sweep away the ruins and restore Kep as the gem of the coast.  Onward marches the new capitalism that dominates East Asia-- the Chinese and Vietnamese and Cambodians have abandoned the anti-Western philippics and embraced the shopping mall.

So much of me still wants to be a modernist, to believe that Schoenberg can save the world, that a liberationist Marxist praxis will lead to a saner, less alienated society.

All I can be convinced of is that anything and everything is temporary and contingent.  We leave traces of our old desires around the landscape.  The old clashes fade into memory.  But in Mitrovica and in Kep, the flowers are still blooming.