The terrace in front of the stupa is decorated, flowers in planters made from the tail sections of American bombs, fins serving as feet to support cases now full of dirt. I’ve seen a few others around town. Reminders. The map of unexploded bombs in Laos from the Vietnam War is pretty much a map of Laos. Many of these bombs were not even dropped on targets, but just dumped before the bombers returned to their bases. These bombs are still falling, thirty years on. UXO, “unexploded ordinance,” kills or maims on average two hundred Lao a year.
What we do keeps going after it leaves our hand, beyond what we intend, sometimes with dire consequences in a future we cannot know.
Another day I visit the Royal Palace Museum; most of my attention goes to the building and not much to the collection. But near the exit, in a display of diplomatic gifts, I see a boomerang, from Australia, of course. A caution. And from Richard Nixon, who also gave many of the bombs, a little clutch of moon rocks.
For days the quiet citizens of Louang Phabang have been preparing for Lai Heua Fai, a moveable feast that falls on the full moon at the end of the rainy season. Celebrated widely in Laos, it falls on a different moon in different places, depending on the timing of the monsoon in that locale. It’s the October moon this year in Louang Phabang, tonight. The floats that have been going up all over town will be marched along the main drag to Wat Xiang Thong, then carried down on the great stairs to the Mekong and launched into the fast-flowing river.
Made of split bamboo, colored tissue paper, and glue, fanciful as floats are, every one blazes with candles or spirit lamps. To give thanks, to celebrate the end of the Buddhist Rains Retreat, and to pay homage to the river-dwelling nagas. The big floats, twenty feet long and more, are carried by a crowd; they are central to the public festival, but there is a private piety as well. Seemingly the whole town, one person at a time, carries a small offering down to the Mekong or the Nam Khan, to dismiss all that is dark in living, sin and disease, fear and hard luck. Most of these offerings are small rafts made from a banana leaf, cleverly folded into the shape of a lotus blossom. The size of a full-brimmed hat, they are charged with flowers, most with marigolds, yellow and orange, a stick of incense, and a candle.
Before the big floats arrive, I join the crowd descending to the river, serious and light-hearted, and set my offering on the dark water, the incense smoking, the candle lit, a little foil pinwheel spinning in the breeze. I ask that my sorrows be eased and set my little boat to float on the stream.
Only then do I see a darker darkness on the river, long boats, and in them men who, when a candle bobs within reach, cup the flame with a hand and blow it out. My candle! My little pinwheel must now spin the breeze unlit in the watery dark.
But some get by the boats and float the eddies along the shore; others get into the current and go. And still others float down from somewhere upstream, way out, in the middle of the river, racing along.
After I’ve watched the parade of floats, been carried along by the crowd, after I’ve listened to the monks at Wat Xiang Thong, I make my way back to the river, downstream, another stair, the same river, the same pious offerings. Again I carry a float down to the water, this one for Delta B., hand it to a boy in a boat who hands it to another, on out to the stern, where the last boy sets it directly in a fast current tongue. For a second, it resists the pull of the river, heels, then it’s off, the small yellow flame illuminating the marigolds, and higher up, the dim orange tip of the smoking incense. I watch it ride clear out of sight.
Then the news that the bombs are falling. Each one wrapped in words, in ideology. Wrapped by “us,” wrapped by “them,” but exploding nonetheless in a real world where real people live and die. And some won’t explode, will be added to Afghanistan’s already crowded map of UXO.
The effect of these bombs too will ramify in ways we can’t foresee. They are both the boomerang coming back from the hand of Al-Qaida and a new one thrown.
::
The Burden
Mid-November 2001
Danang to Hoi An, Vietnam
Motorcycles and bikes, trucks and cars, walkers, all crowd the road from Danang, a narrow road at that. My taxi goes by starts and stops, horn blaring—it is the custom of the road. I look at the people, so young. Few of them would have been born during the Vietnam War, called the American War here. Schoolgirls all in white, in ao dai, a long slit jumper over long pants, pedal along in twos and threes, talking and laughing, as schoolgirls do. Some of them hold the front panel of their ao dai in one hand, pinned to the handlebars, to keep it out of the chain, letting the back panel stream behind. Boys, some of them in school uniforms, too, others rioting as best they can or working as they must.
Danang to Hoi An is not far, but the trip consumes the better part of an hour. The taxi man drives carefully. We chatter as we go, until he, too, asks me where I’m from. The U.S., I say. Ah, America, he responds, I’m sorry. But I can tell it’s not the sorry of condolences. Sorry? I ask, suddenly glum. Because of the war.
Yes.
So many of my people died. Yes, I know. And then I find myself offering apologies for my country.
I am uneasy. I am a man for whom all identities feel a little assumed, and national identity most of all. I have spent a lifetime in opposition. But I find I cannot deny all responsibility. It hasn’t been my country right or wrong; I’ve made free with dissent and, if called, would not have gone. But however tenuous my American identity feels at home, here, I cannot say, Not me. I say, I’m sorry.
Perhaps because the country has a claim I have bridled all my life at ideological attempts to co-opt it, to make it mean a duty to subscribe, to put aside moral judgment and reason. Better to hate all flag waving, all ideological imperatives. I refuse to jump when our leaders say, You’re either for us or against us, as they have said again recently. That is how evil speaks; I know the voice, the words.
::
The Beautiful Place
Mid to late November 2001
Hoi An
My room in Hoi An, long and narrow and overlooking Tran Phu, is on the second story of a one-hundred-fifty-year-old shop house, now the Vinh Hung Hotel. The room is dark but soothing. Built post and beam, the main uprights are peeled teak logs; the walls and ceiling are paneled with pieced teak as well. From age or stain the wood has turned almost black. The antique furniture, except for a couple of small wicker chairs, is the same deep purple. There are two beds, an enormous four poster hung with a white mosquito net on a frame with bats carved in the apron, and a smaller bed, in which I will actually sleep, a mosquito net tied up like a great white acorn hanging over it.
The room appeals to me. Like the best vernacular housing, the aesthetic feels derived from use, from centuries of responding to locale and tradition. Here, traditions. Hoi An shop houses have roots in Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese, and, latterly, French Colonial architecture. Most of the buildings were built by merchants who lived and traded under the same roof. So the front room on the first floor opens convincingly to the street but can be closed up, made domestic. The buildings have public and private identities.
Many of the old houses in Hoi An, however, are now all public. House museums, or they’ve been converted to restaurants or hotels. I can walk in what were private rooms, and do. I go in everywhere I can, spying out variations and inspired designs. But most of what appeals to me is common: deep, two-story townhouses, a street in front, a street behind. The shop in front, with living quarters above, then a closed garden open to the sky and built against a common wall, balconies on three sides, then another two-story structure, then a garden in the back, then the back gate in a wall. These are townhouses, constructed with buildings adjoining on either side, but they are full of light. The closed garden and the back garden create great plinths of light, and the communicating doors and interior windows allow the light to stand thick and blue in every room. Except for the floors on the ground, originally slate, these houses are all wood inside, floors, walls,