Morning started with a blood orange slick of light that crept up the river, spackling the flotsam that bobbed in the wake of the first boats crossing from the eastern bank. We were on the Thai side, in Chiang Khong, south of the Golden Triangle. In a few hours we would cross the Mekhong River into Laos.
A large furry thing ran across my feet, startling me from my sleepy trance. I let out a shriek. My son shone his trusty Maglite onto the path.
“Mom, it’s just puppies.” Three or four of them playfully attacked our ankles as their mother looked on, unconcerned. A haiku crystallized:
The first light gleaming
In his handsome young man’s face
Fearless little puppy
We would leave after breakfast to cross the river and enter Laos in the village of Huay Xai. There we would take a longtail boat south to Pakbeng and stop one night. Then we would carry on down river to Luang Prabang. After that, uncertainty.
We had been in Thailand for two weeks. In that time, my son, on his first journey outside North America, had ripped out of his itchy adolescent shell and emerged a fully formed traveler. A new quality of openness drew people to him. The night before, he’d gotten lost on the dark road running from town to our guesthouse on the river. When a Thai police car pulled over, he impressed them so much with his Thai – more than most foreigners learn in a year – they rewarded him with jokes, cigarettes, and a ride back home.
Then my son, who generally goes to bed at five a.m. and sleeps fourteen hours a day, rose with me to see a sunrise.
A short time later, we ferried across the river and passed customs without incident. I changed a small amount of Thai baht and was given a huge pile of kip in exchange. I didn’t count it until seated on our longtail boat. For such a tall stack, it turned out quite short. But since the customs official was also the banker, I didn’t see the sense in complaining.
Laos is a long, green stretch of mountains wedged among Thailand and Myanmar to the west, China to the north, Vietnam to the east, and Cambodia to the south. The Mekhong River cuts straight down from the northwest. Just past the capital Vientiane, it forms the south border where it bumps through Cambodia and finally washes out in the Mekhong Delta near Ho Chi Minh City. The Mekhong is a mother river – it has spawned empires, glorious and gone, whose descendants live as they always have along her slow-changing banks.
Laos has always been a buffeted nation. From the mid-19th century until 1953 it was a colony of France, and after gaining nominal independence underwent a decade of violent struggle between the France-propped royalist government in Vientiane and the insurgent communist Pathet Lao. In 1964, the United States began bombing the hell out of eastern Laos in a vicious campaign to wipe out Pathet Lao, Viet Cong, and any civilians unlucky enough to find themselves on or near the Ho Chi Minh Trail. No one in the west minded: by 1974, Laos had become the most bombed country in history. Most of its eastern population was dead or displaced. In 1975, the Pathet Lao finally gained control of the capital and installed a communist, Soviet-friendly government. Since then, little has changed – but the verdant hills of Laos continue to reveal, in dreadful staccato, the world’s largest concentration of unexploded ordnance.
I had no real conception of this place outside a sepia-toned mental image of French colonial rule and the ensuing brutality of its collapse. For me, traveling down the Mekhong in a longtail boat induced a dreamy jasmine perfume spiked with bursts of depravity, the smell of a Hollywood war movie. My son arrived with a head full of Kurosawa films, street culture and hardcore punk. These were our Asian romances, about to be transcended.
Much of the Mekhong is wide and slow, with great sandy turns. Palm-choked mountains push up from either side. Life scatters on its banks; in Laos, a country the size of Great Britain, but with only eight percent of its population, the Mekhong is still the main highway. Cargo-laden longtail boats ply the river, mooring overnight at isolated villages or on seemingly empty dunes. Bananas, radios, heroine, and tourists come from the north. From the south come coconuts, bicycles, shoes and gasoline. Extended families live aboard; many longtails feature two stories piled up like Lego on a slim wooden slipper.
Ours was packed with young falang who spread their packs, legs and dreadlocks over the seats and into the aisle. Linn and I wedged into the stern near the engine – an eight-cylinder Toyota truck job, rigged out for riparian life. A young Lao man in a Linkin Park t-shirt straddled the engine, poking at it as he deemed necessary. We inhaled diesel and sweat and watched the countryside roll on. A tiny hamlet loomed out of the forest – six stilted huts in a clearing, thirty feet up the bank. One hut had crumbled and started to slide. It tipped into the bank, a bent-legged bird, drinking.
We passed naked young boys bathing and waving. Around another bend, orange-robed monks fluttered among huge, shiny-smooth boulders. They waved too. Water buffalo grazed at river’s edge, some of them a lucky pink.
Mostly due to China’s huge upriver dams, the water level of the Mekhong gets lower every year. Yet change in Laos fails to seem inevitable. People live in those riverside huts because they can, because they have a life to live, exactly where they are. It seemed to me that along the Mekhong, the key offerings of the twentieth century have been diesel and plastic bags. There are no ATMs or Seven-Elevens. There is no CNN.
This was just fine with Linn and me. We were being slowed down. Sun pounded the tin roof of the longtail; drifting under its thin shade you could feel the journey going more and more inside, into the heart, not of Conrad’s darkness, but of quiet, persistent light.
*
We spent that night in Pakbeng, a true frontier town with a friendly if somewhat lawless feel. Pakbeng is at the halfway point on the river between the northeastern Thai border and the large Lao town of Luang Prabang. It clings to a thick-forested mountain; there’s one road in and out. The longtail dock is at the foot of a mountain of sand, with a ribbon-wide stair running straight up for forty feet. At the top is the dusty village with all its houses and amenities butted up against the hillside and each other.
We had no trouble finding a room; in Laos, a room easily finds you. We were collected from the mountain of sand by a young Lao girl who brought us to her family’s home and installed us in a small bedroom. Our guesthouse, like every other building, had garage-style doors opened to the road during the day. People live in the open; as you walk up the road you look right into their living rooms and private lives, and they look right back at you. As we ate rice with curry and drank Beer Lao at the massive teak dining table that pushed into the street, the town came by to smile and wave.
When night fell, the family pulled down the corrugated metal garage door, lighting candles in anticipation of the nightly power outage. Linn pulled out a deck of cards and dealt a hand of a Thai game he’d recently learned. The guesthouse owners, a husband and his shy, pretty wife, looked on. Through our basic Thai and their few words of English and French, it was conveyed to us that they knew the game, so we invited them to join us. They won quickly and decisively, laughing as they slapped down card after card. Several hands later, we all went to bed.
In the morning, the daughter brought us Lao coffee, wonderful strong stuff mixed with gobs of sweetened condensed milk. A minah bird, caged and hanging in the street, begged us in English for breakfast: “Ex-cuse me! Bananas!” The family made us sandwiches from fresh baguettes – a rare happy memory from French rule. Linn thanked them with a wai, a little bow with hands pressed together under his chin.
“He good boy,” the guesthouse wife told me as we left to board our longtail. I nodded in agreement. On this journey, my son – his bright blue eyes brimming with courteous curiosity – inspired almost every woman we met to tell me something good about him. As if they intuited what I most needed to hear.
We’d had a pretty tough go over the last year or so. I have been mostly a single parent and, as often happens, we were probably closer than most mothers and sons in a two-parent family. We’d scraped through years of relative poverty, me going back to law school and working two or three jobs at a time. At times, I played in rock bands and lived outside the mainstream in a challenging, creative universe. My son grew up with very different kind of mother than the ones he saw on TV. I wasn’t any good at math homework, but I taught him to think critically about the world, to relish difference, and to refuse conformity. Until he hit puberty, this seemed like a good strategy. Then he launched the rebellion and outmaneuvered me at almost every turn. He waged open, brutal confrontations, sneak attacks, campaigns of attrition and scorched earth. When had he read von Klausewitz and Sun Tzu without me noticing? I couldn’t get my head around it. How could he rebel against me? I was the coolest thing going.
I now understand that he was just doing his job, which was to get out from under my influence, by any means necessary. Because I had been such a liberal parent, he had to work very hard to piss me off. And he was equal to the task. The year before, he’d quit high school and fallen into a turbulent relationship with an angry, manipulative young woman whose addiction to high drama exhausted us all. This went on for a year, until they finally split up in a whirl of cursing and broken pottery. A few days later, Linn disappeared. I called the police and filed a missing person report. Then I sat in my living room and cried for a week until he returned. He’d hitchhiked to Montreal to see Iron Maiden. He’d had a wonderful time. He didn’t call because he thought I would freak out. We got through it, but I came out feeling drained, dreamless and defeated, just as I had when he was an infant waking to be fed every two hours.
My parenting goal had been to raise a son who would be independent, freethinking, and hungry for ideas and radical experiences. After the pain of that lost week died down, it hit me: I had gotten exactly what I’d paid for. I knew then that my son would soon be gone from me. The last stage of his childhood was now. But before I could let go, I needed to witness his first steps into the wide, waiting world. Perhaps out of selfishness and insecurity, I needed to know that I had done an okay job.
So I did what seemed to me to be both radical and eminently sensible. I bought two tickets to Bangkok and invited him to go for a walk on the far side of the world.
*
Luang Prabang is a large town at the confluence of the Mekhong and Nam Khan rivers. Once an administrative center for the French, its crumbling colonial architecture harmonizes with teak houses and dozens of gold-and-scarlet temples. The biggest market for the many tribes and towns of northern Laos, Luang Prabang brims with farmers, fishers and artisans. Popular with backpackers and older tourists, Luang Prabang by virtue of remoteness escaped much of the ugliness of Soviet-influenced architecture as well as the social repression promulgated by Laos’ communist government. We found a big, clean room and decided to stay a few days.
At night, my son went out on the town while I wandered through the crowded street market. The beatific, white-toothed smiles of giggly young girls induced me to buy their lovely, if badly sewn garments. I got caught up in pentatonic reels played by bowed old men on two-stringed violins. Inhaling the fumes from burning cedar, diesel and grilled chicken, I ate dried riverweeds speckled with sesame. Linn came home late.
We slept like the dead until the old man of the house began his Olympic throat-clearing exercises at five in the morning. He horked like he was bringing up phlegm from the soles of his feet. In the pitch dark of our room, Linn and I started to giggle, one-upping each other with colour commentary. “Ahoy, Cap’n Horksalot!” “He’s horking for Laos!” “If he were a scientist, he’d be Stephen Horking!” By the time we stopped laughing, dawn was nigh and the roosters had started in. (In Southeast Asia, every room has a voluble, diligent rooster stalking at ear level on the other side of the wall.)
We spent a day on a small longtail boat owned by a man named Deth. Deth ferried us upriver to the Pak Ou caves, which house thousands of statues of the Buddha. I spotted a German tourist standing on a prayer mat with his shoes on. I spoke to him in broken German: “Sie müssen die Shühe.. abnehmen? Abliften… offtaken?” Linn stepped up, indicating with a wave the Chucks in his hand. The man stepped off, and a Thai woman sharing the tour gave us a wai in thanks. Later she would tell me, “Son good boy, you good mother.”
At the end of a brutally hot, smoky afternoon, we decided to climb Phu Si, a steep temple-topped hill that rose from the center of town. Many other tourists had done the same; there was a chatty, tea party atmosphere along the temple walkways that look westward onto the river. But when the sun slid behind the blue-grey hills, everyone became quiet. That’s the effect of a sunset over the Mekhong on a Buddhist mountain – flaming orange rays illuminated the smoke that hovered on the river, creating Nagas of light in the water. The monks rang silver bells. Linn breathed it all in, silent. When the light died, he turned to me.
“Let’s go eat. Tomorrow’s my birthday.”
It would have been easy to find noodles to eat together on a faraway Southeast Asian street. But instead, we fetched up in a tiny café-bar that was home to a flock of beautifully coiffed ladyboys. They drank with us, asked us questions, laughed behind slim, manicured hands, admired my son, admired me, and assured us in so many words that life can and should be beautiful. As we toasted Linn’s eighteenth birthday, the loveliest of ladyboys said with shining sincerity, “Your son good luck, good life. You no worries.”
Hours and hours later, my now eighteen-year-old son and I straggled back though unfamiliar streets. I was blinded with dust, sleepiness, hunger and wine, but Linn held my hand, somehow knowing the way home.
