Recommend: Yes (if you have travelled to Laos)<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Many years ago, so many years ago in fact that the unit of accounting stretches more accurately into decades, Mum bought me Christopher Kremmer\u2019s non-fiction The Carpet Wars<\/em>. This was an ambitious Christmas present for a Coffs Harbour high school student. The Christmas prior I was probably unwrapping the high literature of Cecily von Ziegesar. The Carpet Wars<\/em> had an exotic cover dancing with Asian iconography that alluded to places that existed far beyond the Big Banana. Having never ventured out of Australia, and barely having made it beyond New South Wales, it\u2019s safe to assume I wasn\u2019t ready to venture into travel writing. I never read The Carpet Wars.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Times have changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Whenever someone would ask me where I holiday\u2019d most recently, they would look a little disorientated, like they were recalling a dream that someone in their dream had told them about. There was something familiar to them about Laos but nothing specific. Responses that come back: \u201cI\u2019ve been to Thailand a few times\u201d; \u201cI\u2019ve been to Thailand and Vietnam\u201d; \u201cI\u2019ve been to Thailand and Vietnam and Cambodia\u201d. Then they\u2019d pause, a little confused about how to proceed. Having never themselves desired to go to Laos \u2013 and they could have, they had essentially been at the Laotian boarder on multiple occasions on their own holidays \u2013 how to engage with me about this country they actively declined to visit?<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s a fair reaction. If an overseas tourist told me they were visiting Lismore on their annual leave I\u2019d be uncertain of how to react as well.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWell, how was it? Was it fun?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n No, I didn\u2019t have fun. It was actually really sad.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cUh, it must have been pretty then?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n Well, it did seem that the country was once pretty, before the rush to plunder its natural resources, which is often the only supplementary income its citizens can find to rise above the country\u2019s subsistence farming economy.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cOkay, well, welcome back to work.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n It was the perfect time for me to pick up Kremmer\u2019s non-fiction account of the final years, and the subsequently tarnished modern history, of the now-deposed Laotian dynasty, Bamboo Palace<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kremmer\u2019s book has two halves.<\/p>\n\n\n\n In the first half, Kremmer gives an account of how to Laotian royal family, who had ruled Laos with spirituality and modesty for hundreds of years, lost favour with the Laotian people. And that ends up being less of about the royal family themselves and more about the rise of communism in South East Asia. There were two political \u2018failures\u2019 that lead to the royal family being forced to renounce power in 1975. The first, and the most direct, was their cooperation with the United States during much of the Vietnam War. The climax of this involvement was the Laotian-sanctioned US bombing of the Ho Chi Minh trail that snaked from Vietnam through Laos before eventually rejoining Vietnam. <\/p>\n\n\n\n This period of time was a tragic civil war in Laos. Many Laotian tribes were joining with the communist Vietnamese, while the official party (and the royal family) were allied with the US, leading to internal conflict that pitted \u2018Laotian against Laotian\u2019. The second, indirect, failure of the royal family was their inability to recognise that this instability needed to be resolved, and would not just organically resolve itself without significant political change. Many Laotians still loved the royal family but, in essence, they were lazy, maybe na\u00efve, and thought that they could work with the Vietnamese amassing in the north-east jungles and the increasing number of the communist Laotians. It was not to be. Royalism and communism could not coexist in Laos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The second half of the book follows the royal family after the communists have usurped the monarchy and the king has renounced power. There are some years of a charade of the king advising the communist party. Then they disappear. Some have found refuge in the far away countries of France (and even some in Australia). Others, more loyal to Laos, stayed and in payment for this loyalty found a much worse fate. All are stripped of their assets, which were never that impressive to begin with. Many are placed in \u2018re-education\u2019 camps. Here, in the re-education camps that Kremmer asserts still exist today, the second half of the book unfolds. Kremmer visits the areas of these camps and manages to speak to some of the political prisoners that spent many years in their confines.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Throughout both halves Kremmer lightens the tone by including asides about modern Laotian society. These \u2018travel writing\u2019 interludes are usually darkly comic. Kremmer bemoans his government \u2018helper\u2019 who intermittently joins him on his travels and is surely intended to censure those that talk to Kremmer. He also routinely finds himself cursing the terrible Laotian road surfacing. I particularly enjoyed the sardonic tidbits about how disorganised and haphazard Laotian business is, and how subsequently unbothered Laotians are by the stresses of Westerners. At one rural town, Kremmer must buy his own ingredients for dinner from a morning market and drop them off to the restaurant in which he will dine hours later. Moments like that are just classic Laos.<\/p>\n\n\n\n This balance between past and present convinces us of the relevance of the premise of the book. Even with the benefit of having been to Laos I was fearful that the history and legacy of the last royals of Laos would be too niche a corner of history to spend a whole book. I am not even interested in the royal families of the world that still reign. But Kremmer\u2019s frustrations with modern day Laos show why he is interested in this history. The refusal of the current ruling party (the only party) in Laos to acknowledge the fate of the last king speaks to the countries disrespect for values of truth and accountability. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The country Kremmer sees, and that I saw too twenty years later in my limited time there, is one that is starting to try to reckon with its past. But without the resources or encouragement from its leaders to do so, it is stuck. If modern Laotian society was more developed, if the country was freer and in possession of some wealth and independence, Kremmer\u2019s investigation would not be as interesting, as it would tell us only about what has already happened. But the country to this day is not free, it is not wealthy and as a result it does not have true independence from its neighbours, which makes this book also about what is happening now, and why.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Would I have read this book if I had not been to Laos? Unlikely. And if I had read it, would I have recommended without the experience of being in the country myself? Even then, probably not. But I have been to Laos. I have been to the Royal Palace (now a museum) where there are descriptions of the fireplace the royal family used in their \u2018Winter Roon\u2019 and the on-site petrol station that fuelled their nice but not luxurious American cars and not one mention of why they are no longer a ruling family or what happened to them after they abdicated. I have been to Laos and I\u2019ve been in cafes where for hours I am the only customer. I have been to Laos and I\u2019ve seen the villages that really are completely separate to the cities, where they speak different languages and have different gods and different traditions and therefore it is easy to see how they accept different ideologies to Vientiane.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I have been to Laos and I got a lot out of this book.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Travel will make a history student out of me yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Thank you Stephen for a stellar gift, as always.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Even during the war Vientiane had been a soporific city, utterly out of touch with the war that that slowly and inexorably was destroying the old order, supplanting it with a morbid legacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2061,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,10,14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2054","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-reviews_books","category-recommended_cait","category-reid-all-about-it"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2054"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2062,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2054\/revisions\/2062"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/2061"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2054"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2054"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mountaindevil.aerowalsh.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2054"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}