Laos. Any other books from this mysterious country?

25. Bamboo Palace. Discovering the lost dynasty of Laos
Finished reading: 12 February 2011



I could be mistaken, but it seems the liberalism of information on the Internet has penetrated the world of traditional publishing. While in the past most books were written by the more serious type of scholarly or semi-scholarly author, there now seems to be a new large group of journalists or former journalists who have turned to producing books. These books have a different flavour. A fairly large number of these books are written by relatively young, adventurous authors. Perhaps the availability of so much background information through the Internet enables these writers to combine journalistic skills of collecting first-hand information with the otherwise time-consuming task of writing up background to a story.

Their style of writing is somewhat different from earlier authors. Less knowledgeable, less snobbery; more personal, interweaving the object of research, with personal anecdotes, so to speak the process of collecting facts, in an easy-going, free, personal style. In some cases, the writing has a distinctly journalistic flavour of exaggeration and typifying descriptions. On the whole, the reporting also seems less neutral.

One such a new type of author is Christopher Kremmer, who has written books about Central and Southeast Asian countries, such as Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran, India, and Laos. Bamboo Palace. Discovering the lost dynasty of Laos is his second book about Laos.

Rather than a thorough description and analysis of recent Lao history, the book is a racy detective story, trying to uncover the fate of the late royal family of Laos. Photos of and visits to derelict buildings, sites in the jungle, chasing witnesses, seeking out survivors, adventure and a pinch of danger are typical. The author is prominently present in the text, and in photos as the agent uncovering the facts.

The book is very readable, giving us a glimpse of contemporary life in Laos, and lifting a tip of the veil on Laotian history. The author is indeed able to lay bare quite a considerable part of the mosaic of that part of history concerning the last months of the royal family, and how they perished in concentration camps.

However, the style of the book is very confusing, especially in the beginning. It is a mish-mash of journalism, travelogue and personal reflections. The description of the author's dream, and the peculiar cycling accident, which the author claims was caused by a "cursed" stolen buddha sculpture are peculiar and undermine the sanity of the author and credulity of the book.

Laos is a country not much spoken of, and little known. This book is an interesting contribution to our knowledge of that country. It has whetted my appetite to know more about this country.

Het Bun Dai Biun-Laos: Sacred Rituals of the Luang Prabang by Hans Georg Berger.

posted on the thailand thread, but Colin Cotterill wrote a series of detective novels set in laos that are pretty enjoyable, breezy reading.

i read Kremmer's Stalking the Elephant Kings which i remember enjoying

I Little Slave is actually by a Laotian author

There are two new books, released on May 31, 2013, about the secret war in Laos. One is non-fiction, voices from the Plain of Jars, and the other is a novel, The Plain of Jars. Check them out.

Here is a free copy of the newly translated Rice in Laos:

http://books.google.la/books/about/Rice_in_Laos.html?id=k3bLVNvzWcQC&redir_e...

*The* historian of Laos is Martin Stuart-Fox. Start with his A History of Laos. Some of his books can be slow-going but this was edited well. A smooth read. Stuart-Fox, an Australian, arrived in Laos in the early 1960s as an agricultural adviser to US AID, I think. Then went on to become a historian.

Some of his other books cover earlier periods. Look him up on Wikipedia. This essay collection, Laos: Buddhist Kingdom, Marxist State, published in 1996 is a harder read than the recent history. However, this was published at a time when poor Laos was finally opening up to the West, emerging from the Vietnamese occupation, the long, massive refugee exodus, the re-education camps, etc. You get a sense of how the monks were politicized during the war, how confused Laos's leaders were about ideology, etc.

The other leading expert on Laos, a bit younger, is the anthropologist Grant Evans. He has written a recent-ish, short history of Laos too. Also some 1990s essays, The Politics of Ritual and Remembrance. He is an academic, and can be a difficult read but if you have been to Laos, many of the themes he touches on will make sense.

In an earlier incarnation, Evans was a Marxism theorist and was one of the few Western profs--certainly the only one who was not a fellow traveler--be be invited to research in Laos in the early/mid 1980s. Of course, his movements were restricted a lot but he was able to observe how collectivization efforts in a pre-capitalist society dissolved very quickly. That's covered in Lao Peasants Under Socialism and Post-Socialism. Not an easy read--unfortunately, not much of his personal interactions--but especially the post-socialism part is worth looking at if the book is in your university library. Very, very few Laotians ever had much grasp of Marxist or communist ideology and the Vietnamese could only push things so far, tho to this day Laos is something of a Vietnamese satellite, tho becoming more of a China satellite.

An important point that Evans, Stuart-Fox and any expat or academic often make: Laos would never have gone communist if it hadn't been forced on them by the Vietnamese. From the early 1960s onward, there were 10,000 then 20,000 and ultimately 40,000 Vietnamese troops in this tiny country. And sometimes 10,000 Chinese advisers and assorted Russians. I dunno, it just makes Laos's story so much more tragic. It's not like Cambodia or Vietnam where everybody can put a good part of the blame on their fellow countrymen. Ten percent of Laos's population fled between the mid 1970s and early 1990s, so there anything in the "Indochina refugees" includes a lot about Laotians, especially Hmong. There are a few memoirs of re-education camps but published by very small presses, probably in the US.

This is the best book about the so-called secret war, the Hmong, CIA, Royal Lao Army, Thailand: Shooting at the Moon:The Story of America's Clandestine War in Laos, aka Back Fire. Written by Roger Warner, a journalist. Reads well, is deeply researched, strives to be objective.

Re the royal families, I'd also suggest Grant Evans over a foreign travel writer who doesn't even speak Lao: The Last Century of Lao Royalty. Read one of the aforementioned general histories first. I read that first Kremmer one. One problem is his European conceptions of what royalty and nations and kingdoms were in this region. Another is a preposterous tale involving faxes in mid-1990s Northeast Laos. He made that part up.

This is a revealing personal window on Laos from the 1960s until late 1970s: In a Little Kingdom by Perry Stieglitz. Laos's prime minister for most of time from independence to the communist takeover was Souvanna Phouma--of princely birth, but elected, etc. An American cultural attache, Stieglitz ended up marrying Souvanna's daughter. Especially interesting for those who have visited Laos because there is still a lot (if not for long) that is recognizable in Vientiane and farther south. You get a sense of how history and arts and culture might have evolved. (One of Evans's essays also touches on the sudden flowering of literature in the early independence years.)

For those really interested in communism in Laos, the expert on that is or was political scientist Joseph Zasloff. I read Apprentice Revolutionaries: Communist Movement in Laos, 1930-1985 a long time ago but parts of it stuck with me. Co-author is MacAlister Brown.Not bogged down with Marxist jargon at all.

1930 in the subtitle is a little misleading because there weren't any Laotian communists in 1930 or for long after; in Laos, they were Vietnamese. There wasn't so much as a high school for the natives then (nor would there be until the 1950s), so no Laotians in govt positions--maybe a royal or two as an engineer. But the French used Vietnamese for lowly govt clerk positions, as they did in Cambodia and there Vietnamese shopkeepers and tailors, etc. Thus the source of the first nationalist communists. They had a hell of a time trying to recruit a few native members. Zasloff was able to rely on a surprising number of period documents and letters, as I recall.