Moving upland, we next encounter the Lao Thai, a name as appropriate as it is confusing, since the hereditary line between Lao and Thai is generally a very fine line, indeed. The Lao Thai cultivate both wet rice (paddy grown) and dry rice (mountain grown), and likewise practice both spirit-cult animism and their own primitive variation on Buddhism. The stockade where our three Americans were temporarily imprisoned (more temporary than their captors had intended) was located in a Lao Thai foothills village.
Should we keep climbing, eventually reaching the high mountain valleys, we’d find ourselves among the Lao Theung, an impoverished, animist society descended from slaves and servants of the nobility. The Lao Theung farm dry rice, cotton, and tobacco, employing only wooden tools and bamboo implements; settle near mountain streams in huts with dirt floors; and believe that the human body is host to somewhere between 30 and 130 spirits (to what degree obesity or anorexia determines the size of the spirit habitancy is unclear).
At last, continuing upward, we reach the distant, cloud-hatted mountaintops, where live those tribes known collectively as Lao Sung (High Lao). The Lao Sung tribes—which include the Lisu, the Mien, and, most predominantly, the Hmong—are the most recent immigrants in Laos, having migrated from China, Burma, and Tibet probably no earlier than the end of the nineteenth century. Even though conditions for agricultural success are poorer at those lofty altitudes, the Lao Sung (particularly the Hmong) are much better off than the Lao Theung, with their wider and deeper deposits of topsoil. Why? Because Hmong farmers concentrate on one cash crop and one cash crop alone: the opium poppy.
(There was a Hmong village not much more than an hour’s climb above Fan Nan Nan, and with the horticulturalists of that village, Stubblefield and Foley were to establish a mutually rewarding relationship. We’ll touch on that later.)
Okay, we have just passed through the Michener zone, and, assuming that narcolepsy hasn’t leadened our lids, that we’ve not been Lao-this’d and Lao-that’ed into a comatose state, we’re now in a position, as we rejoin the narrative flow, to conclude that Fan Nan Nan was a Lao Theung community. Are we not? Rest assured that the government in Vientiane, even the inhabitants of surrounding villages, would support us in that conclusion. Ah, but we’d all be wrong.
At this juncture, the curious are fated to be told a little story: not much more than an anecdote, really, but as steeped in romance as a Krispy Kreme doughnut in grease.
It seems that around the turn of the last century, say 1900 or 1899, perhaps a few years earlier, when Fan Nan Nan was, indeed, a tiny Lao Theung outpost, several young men from the hamlet were conscripted into the royal army. Due to the Lao Theung history of indentured servitude and reputation for industriousness, it’s not surprising that their draftees were spared the battlefield and instead billeted at a garrison adjacent to the palace in Vientiane, where their propensity for manual labor would be at the easy disposal of the court.
At a Pii Mai Lao festival to celebrate the new year, one of the soldiers met a young woman from a prosperous village near the outskirts of the capital. Shyly, they held hands during the elephant parade, cheered together as the full moon rose, and threw water on each other, as is the custom during Pii Mai Lao. By the end of the three-day festival, some inaudible, inexplicable chemical dialogue between hormonal transmitters, male specific and female specific, had caused them to fall hopelessly in love.
Although they would have much preferred she marry another Lao Lum, the girl’s parents declined to forbid the union. The soldier was well-spoken and handsome, strong and honest: they could understand their daughter’s attraction, and as she was stubbornly determined, they gave their consent. A few days after his discharge from military service, a wedding was celebrated at the girl’s home.
Now, the groom had been sorely missing the pure mountain air of Lao Theung country, missing the abundant wildlife, missing the waterfalls and rocks (and spirits that inhabited them), missing even more the affection of his own family. He was tired of slapping mosquitoes. He knew nothing of farming wet rice, and the paddy stink was offensive to his nose. When he announced that he was taking his bride upcountry, her parents were overcome with regret and woe. You see, they were innocent of blind parental bias when they boasted that their daughter was no ordinary girl. She was pretty (perhaps as pretty as Miss Ginger Sweetie); she was dignified (maybe as dignified as Lisa Ko); she was the best dancer, the best singer, the best seamstress in the town; and, on top of that, no one had ever heard her break wind. Her father and mother and sisters and brothers couldn’t bear to be separated from her—so, about a month after her new husband took her away, they sold their water buffalo, packed up, and followed her to Fan Nan Nan.
A few months later, everyone of the bride’s relatives, including even distant cousins, decided that life was meaningless without that most talented, most delightful girl, not to mention her pious and generous family, and so the relatives, as well, set off for the hills and Fan Nan Nan. Their departure tore a hole in the fabric of the community; there was an abiding emptiness there. “They were our finest citizens,” the villagers lamented. “And that pretty girl, she was the best dancer, the best singer, the best seamstress in town. And never in her life has anybody heard her break wind.” Within a year and a half, the whole damn population had abandoned its native village on the fertile plain and resettled many, many kilometers away in a high-valley hamlet nestled between a turbulent stream and a daunting abyss.
Well, by this time Fan Nan Nan had become severely overcrowded. Some new homes had been built, but space for new construction was limited by natural obstacles. Three or four families were forced to occupy houses intended for one. Sufficient rice could not be grown on the hillsides to adequately satisfy demand, and the infrastructure, such as it was, was under considerable strain.
Eventually, one of the Lao Theung elders thought to inquire of one of the Lao Lum elders what had become of the houses and paddies the group had left behind in the lowlands. “Oh, they stand empty,” replied the Lao Lum. “We abandoned everything we couldn’t strap to our backs.” The idea of those nice unoccupied dwellings, those fertile fields left fallow, began to play on the Lao Theung imagination. When they factored in the proximity of the deserted village to Vientiane, with its wealth, employment opportunities, entertainment, and prestige, temptation proved irresistible. One dawn, the new Lao Lum residents of Fan Nan Nan awoke to see every last Lao Theung household (save one, the mixed one) filing down the path with their belongings strapped to their backs.
The two villages had swapped places. It resembled a game of municipal musical chairs.
Pure mountain air whistled in the ex-soldier’s receptive nostrils. His ears registered contentedly the familiar pounding of waterfalls, the shrieks of wild peafowl, the husky coughs of leopards, the squeakings of half a hundred species of bats. In the marriage bed, his bride’s dignified facade gave way to growls and squeals of her own, to raw demonstrations that rattled the crockery and caused chili paste in comparison to seem as mild as porridge. Life appeared to be good. Yet, the young man’s heart had a warp in it. He felt isolated, alien, dissatisfied.
The day he informed his bride that he was leaving to rejoin his clan (now firmly established in her former village), she was not surprised. Nor should we be surprised to learn that she supported his decision, telling him without hesitation that she would accompany him there. “No,” he said. “You cannot. If you accompany me, your family will again be distraught, and in no time at all they will move back down to their old town to be near you. Then your other kinfolk—and soon everybody else—will follow them, leaving Fan Nan Nan deserted. Our living conditions will again become miserably cramped, prompting my people to return to this place, compelling me to sooner or later go along, and starting the whole shuttling mess all over again. This is madness. It cannot continue. You must stay where you are. I love you. Good-bye.”
After she watched his figure disappear down the mountainside, the girl—swollen with ch
ild—walked with dignity and determination to the edge of the chasm. There was no wire across it in those days, no big house on the other side; nothing but the open yap of the planet, yawning as if bored by the pace of evolution. Wistfully, she gazed once more at the path her husband had taken, then threw herself over the brink.
The horrified (and later awestruck) firewood gatherers who witnessed her leap agreed on this strange fact: midway in its plunge into the gorge’s interminable bird-drilled void, the girl’s body suddenly ceased falling, reversed direction, and rose in the air almost back to the lip of the canyon. Then, just as abruptly, it lost its lift and went hurtling downward into the final mists of oblivion.
Some thought that a crosscurrent, a powerful updraft, had momentarily caught her and carried her skyward. Others believed that the love of the Lao Lum girl for the Lao Theung boy was so strong that it actually interfered with the force of gravity. There were a couple of less sentimental onlookers, however, who, claiming they heard a loud report just before she began her short-lived ascent, reasoned that the girl, after a lifetime of holding it in, had finally farted—and the built-up pressure had been so great as to blow her three hundred feet in the air.
Whatever happened, if anything beyond an ordinary suicide leap happened at all (the girl’s levitation might have been a mirage), the truth is that Fan Nan Nan was from that day forward a Lao Lum village pretending to be a Lao Theung village. The national census counted it as Lao Theung, it was listed as Lao Theung on taxation rolls. Villagers dressed and spoke as if Lao Theung. They maintained their Buddhist shrines but concealed them behind closed doors, paying at least token homage to magic gods who lived in tree trunks and to those spirits (30 to 130, though they usually went for the low number) who supposedly were conducting spirit business in various parts of their bodies. After two or three generations, their very features became Lao Theunglike. Yet, it was all a masquerade, a ruse adopted in shame and sorrow, and perpetuated—who knows?—maybe just for the fun of it.
In any event, it is probably not far-fetched to characterize Fan Nan Nan as a tribe of imposters, a burg behind a mask, a village gone incognito.
If Fan Nan Nan’s eccentric identity fraud influenced the Smarty Pants crew’s decision to linger for a while in Laos once the war was over; if, indeed, the airmen were even aware of the deception, it was not alluded to when they—almost unintentionally—confessed to one another their vague intentions to tarry.
By the autumn of 1973, very few American troops remained in Vietnam. Despite a succession of cease-fire agreements, however, the conflict between the North and the South raged on, with the U.S.-backed South getting by far the worst of it; and finally, in April, 1975, Saigon was overrun, the U.S. hurriedly evacuated the last of its military and civilian personnel, and the South surrendered unconditionally. A mighty superpower slunk home with its red-white-and-blue tail between its legs; this most needless of needless wars had ended. News of the surrender took more than a week to reach Fan Nan Nan.
At that point, Foley, Stubblefield, and Goldwire had been in the mountain village for two years. Although technically prisoners, they’d had the run of the place for most of their time there, moving about freely, helping with planting and harvesting; sharing meals, rice whiskey, and the occasional opium pipe with their wardens; engaging the elders in lively discussion; giving English lessons (even to some who didn’t request them), participating in bird hunts and festivals, enjoying regular sexual intercourse with any number of compliant girls and women. Their original captors had long since lost track of them, and the Fan Nannies, as Stubblefield had dubbed them, lacked any motivation to report them to responsible authorities.
The peace news from Saigon elicited an all-night celebration in Fan Nan Nan, a whiskey, cannabis, and flesh-flavored dance party in which both natives and Americans participated merrily, though it was never quite clear who was celebrating what. Early in the evening, Stubblefield—who, thanks to his size, intellect, and verbosity, had become a prominent, even dominant, figure in the community—delivered a long oration, the tenor of which nobody, least of all he, could afterward recall. In any case, the mayor seized the opportunity to officially grant his prisoners their freedom, and it was generally accepted that they would be leaving without delay.
The next day, however, none of the foreigners so much as packed a button. Dickie assumed Dern and Stub were too hung over to pack, they assumed the same of him and of each other. All three were right: they were in a mutual state of dehydration and gastro-neurological shock. But then a second day passed, and a third, and not one of the trio, though healthy enough by then, cleaned out his hut. Each seemed preoccupied, just noodling around, performing unnecessary chores, basking in the sunshine, avoiding eye contact with his countrymen.
On day four, Stubblefield, as ranking officer and aircraft commander, called a meeting. Seeking privacy, the men assembled at the edge of the gorge, not far from the spot where decades earlier the young wife, propelled by heartache (and perhaps repressed flatulence) had ejected into nothingness. Recognized by everyone who’d ever met them as relentless practitioners of combative discourse, they were at this meeting oddly reticent. For a long time, they made only small talk and admired the clouds. Uncharacteristically, it was Dern Foley, the most introverted of the three, who broke the ice.
“For a while now,” Dern said, squirming nervously on his rock, “I’ve been having a kind of hankering to crack open the, uh, the giant mysterious pearl of Asia. You know. To find out if there’s anything besides an oyster’s itchy morbidity inside. Is this Eastern wisdom we’ve always heard so much about just another more esoteric and equally fruitless attempt to explain the unexplainable, to hang a bell on the God of Smoke and Mirrors, or is there something ultimately more . . . well, ultimately more effective, ultimately more profound, ultimately more, uh, ultimate about it?
“For example, this so-called animism that not so much the Fan Nannies but everybody else around here subscribes to. Can we really just write it off as primitive superstition run amok? Do only human beings have souls, or is that a narcissistic, chauvinistic piece of self-flattery? I mean, can’t we look at that great old teak tree over there or at this gulch, and see as much of the divine in them as in some ol’ anthropomorphic Sunday school Boom Daddy with imaginary long gray whiskers and a platinum bathrobe? Are we capable of entertaining the possibility that there may have been a holy entity in the cross as well as on it?
“Lately, I’ve been getting more and more fascinated by these notions of a multitudinous deity, of spirits and demons and inorganic intelligence and non-human souls, all that stuff, and . . . I don’t know . . . just when I’m starting to connect with it, to penetrate it a little bit, it seems a shame to have to leave. You hear what I’m saying? There’s some open-minded, scholarly work to be done in this area. Before the shills of monotheism come back and try again to turn the whole rich and juicy and vibrant extravaganza into a tight-assed little one-man show.”
Foley stared at the grass around his feet, as if, indeed, monitoring sentient activity in its stalks and blades. Then, Dickie spoke up. “Well, Dern,” he said brightly, “if you want to hang around for a while longer and pursue your scholarship, I’d be willing to stay with you for a time. I miss North Carolina, obviously, but when I get home, I’ll just have to go back and finish school and then go to work at my daddy’s car dealership. I’m in no hurry for that, I’ll freely admit.” Dickie glanced in the direction of the village. He smiled anxiously. He shrugged. “It’s a pretty sweet life around here.”
Dickie and Dern looked at Stubblefield. It was his turn, and they expected nothing less than a torrent of verbiage from the man who frequently spoke as if his brain was a rodeo champion and his tongue a bucking bronco. To their surprise, Stubblefield merely shook his large, voluptuous head and mumbled something. They thought they heard him say, “Vine ripe tomatoes.”
“What was that?” In Dickie’s mind there was a rush of images: Wonder Bread and Best Foo
ds mayonnaise. Was Stubblefield dreaming of those fine things, as well?
“Vine ripe tomatoes.” He pronounced it more clearly. “You’ll see that sign—which, grammatically, ought to say ‘vine-ripened’—in every produce department in every supermarket in America. You’ll see it in the winter when the vines are under a foot of snow. Yet even in July and August, the tomatoes in the bin aren’t really ripe. They’re pinkish and hard and bereft of flavor. Not only did they not ripen on the vine, they’ve never ripened at all. But does anybody object? Does anybody shout, ‘Who are you kidding—these fucking tasteless tomatoes were picked when they were green!’? Or do they rip their menu in half when it says ‘farm fresh eggs,’ knowing, as even the dimmest ignoramus must, that the eggs in that restaurant have been in cold storage for weeks and that they’ve never been anywhere near an actual farm? A country that practices and condones such blatant, systematic fakery is a country capable of anything—even of nominating Henry Kissinger for the Nobel Peace Prize.” He sighed, and it was a thick, wet sigh. “Those who willingly accept being conned are as corrupt as those who con them. Umm. Yes. Just as my wife was as culpable as I when I mouthed my counterfeit vows. She was my accomplice.”
Though they didn’t quite know what to say to that, Dickie and Dern were getting the impression that their major might not be inclined to make a speedy beeline for Nebraska. Sensing their discomfort, Stubblefield grinned and gestured toward the French Colonial–style edifice whose roof peaks were visible on the opposite side of the chasm. “Before I get me back to the land of the falsified egg and the betrayed tomato, I want to have a closer look at that deserted house over there. That is, if I can find a way to do it without either breaking my neck or becoming a temporary and gratuitous link in the food chain of indigenous fauna.”