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Published: March 5th 2010
Every few months, a country fair sets up shop here in a big dirt field. The vendors all come from Thailand, and set up their stalls for a week or so, selling during the day and evening, and sleeping in their stalls, to watch their stuff, at night. Lao people call this fair, for some reason, the “market-fair”. I imagine this fair to be every bit as exciting for the locals as the original country fairs in America, back in the late 1880’s.
People come from all over, rich and poor, to walk around the fair grounds, eat, buy, play games and people-watch. They buy cheap drinks, candy, ice cream and noodles and play pop the balloon with the dart or rubber pellet gun. The kids bounce on blow-up castles and ride around on tiny little electric cars on a track. There are no rides for adults as of yet, thank god, as the safety would no doubt be dubious.
Although this fair is five minutes from downtown Luang Prabang, the Lao people here stare at foreigners as if they have never seen them before. Everytime I go I feel like either a celebrity or an alien, depending from
moment to moment, on the variety of stare I'm receiving. This may be because some of the people who come from the countryside only come in to town for these fairs, perhaps once or twice a year, and so do rarely spot foreigners.
Many of the stalls sell cheap t-shirts covered in ridiculous English words and phrases. These shirts are often one hundred of a kind, meaning one stall might have a lot of one design, but you’ll never see that design again in your life. Most Lao people buy shirts with English words because they like the way the words look, not because they know what the words mean. A lot of the shirts have words about love and dating, like “I love you. Look at me. You love me. How much do you love me? Kiss me. I have many mail say I love you. Mail kiss to me. ” There are so many love-related t-shirts and so many grammatical errors on most every shirt. Walking around reading the shirts is just hysterical, and even more so as the Lao people don’t get why the shirts are funny. Each t-shirt costs about $2.
The two games
up for offer are pop the balloon, and a small modified version of roulette, where people place 1000 or 2000 kip notes on one of the squares, each square boasting a different photo, and then roll a dice with matching photos. I’m not sure exactly how it works but 2000 kip is about 25 cents, so it’s a good game to play if you like to bet low. The prizes range from juice boxes, bottles of milk, soda and pink hardboiled eggs to the really classy rabbit and bear stuffed animals.
Vendors sell plates of noodles from 10 kg dishes they have pre-prepared, icky red-bean ice cream and skewers of cartoon-character shaped meats, frozen and imported from Thailand. Dozens of photography vendors displaying framed, washed-out, over-exposed portraits offer to take your portrait and sell it to you, immediately printed and framed. The emphasis must be on speed over quality.
Dozens of underwear, girdle and bras for sale, all bite-sized undergarments, imitation Croc’s, saran-wrapped smoked fish, homemade chili pastes and jams, a hundred varieties of imported candies, a bakery dispensing ham danishes, dumplings shaped like hot dog buns with pieces of hot dog resting atop. A dozen different Lao
songs pumping from each of the CD and fake DVD vendors, stacked thick with products boasting low quality, 1980's computer-generated-looking disc covers. At some market-fairs there's even a fair-trade/female owned/individual artisan generated section. Although, none of the products in this area looked any different than the products in the other areas. I think the definition of products that can be sold in this area includes individuals who came up with the design for products that they then had created for them in factories. Products in this area included underwear, candy, smoked fish, shoes and new US army clothing, really the same products for sale in the regular section of the market-fair.
People buy all kinds of cheap junk to take home, play all the silly games, eat sugary food, the children oscillate between pure delight and tears and then everyone goes home bloated and happy! It's just like in America!
Changing the subject completely, I am constantly hearing unfortunate or strange stories from Lao friends, many of which help to enhance my understanding of Lao society and culture. My friend Gin told me a memorable story two days ago. When Gin was a novice monk in his final
year of high school, his math teacher had told him that for a fee, he knew someone who could secure Gin a government scholarship to attend university. Now this instantly generated red flags for me, but for a boy from the country, with no experience with this sort of thing, he had no idea one shouldn’t have to “pay” to get a “scholarship”. He trusted his math teacher.
Gin’s parents, poor farmers, sold all of their buffalo, basically their bank account, to raise the money for Gin to "pay" to get this scholarship. The fee, shocking by Lao standards, was $800 US. (That amount is so high I feel that there’s a chance something was lost in translation, though I verified the number a dozen times.) Gin gave the money to his math teacher, who gave it to the woman that was to provide this service.
Gin waited and waited and no scholarship to university came. He was offered scholarships to local colleges, schools on a much lower level than university. (Graduation from college results in a “certificate”, equivalent to our high school diploma, while graduation from university results in a “diploma”, equivalent to an US Associate Degree,
despite being a four year course). He tested to qualify for a special college scholarship and was chosen, out of hundreds of kids, for one of the 3 scholarships available. He declined all of the scholarships offered to him because he thought if he took those, he would then be ineligible for the university scholarship that would be coming.
But it never came. His math teacher, and the women who took his money, lied to him. This innocent, inexperienced kid from the country, and his parents who sold their wealth, were duped. After waiting three years, Gin realized he was not getting the scholarship. He tried to get his money back. Gin’s father traveled ten hours to where Gin was living to try to get the money back. They couldn’t get the money back.
During the time Gin was waiting, he had stopped being a novice as novices can't attend the university, and he thought he was about to go to university. He lived as a temple boy because he had no money and couldn’t rent an apartment or pay for food. Temple boys, in exchange for food and a place to sleep, work at the temple, in
the service of the monks and novices. It is not a well respected position. Gin sold ice cream and attended a free English class. One positive was that his English became excellent. Finally though, Gin gave up waiting and returned to live near his village, hoping to begin a new life.
I wasn’t surprised when Gin told me that he had learned a lot from that experience, and felt wiser than other people who had never been in such a situation. But I was shocked when Gin told me that he hoped to trick someone else out of money sometime in the future, the way he had been tricked out of money, as a way to pass the lesson on. I told him I didn't think that was the right way to pass the lesson on. But despite being a novice for 8 years, studying the lessons of Buddhism, and being a very kind and caring person, Gin genuinely wanted to pass on the pain and deceit he had suffered. Although I honestly doubt he would ever actually be able to commit such a cruel act.
Yesterday, another friend told me how he'd been promised an increased monthly
salary for agreeing to expand his work hours to 3 PM - 7 AM, every day of the month. At the end of the month, his boss refused to pay him the extra money promised, instead paying him less. $50 for a month of work, instead of the regular $60, or the promised $70. What was his recourse? He quit. Along with ten other staff members who'd been made the same promise and then denied the money. Did they get the money owed to them? No. Did they have any hope of getting that money? None. The best they could do was walk away, and that wasn't a very good option, as none of them had extra funds saved up for a period of unemployment.
Moving on to another topic, many Lao friends have recently attended “soldier training“, a mandatory seven day military readiness training for civilians. Every Lao citizen must do it once during their college/university years. For some reason the soldier training is a twenty-one day course that has been compressed in to seven days. What this means is that three-hundred young adults come to sit together in one big, hot, stuffy room to listen to political rhetoric from 8 AM-3 PM for three days straight. My friend said he couldn’t count how many people were in the room, as there were so many, but he could count how many fans. Four. There were four fans. The next four days of training were spent standing outside, under the hot sun, doing exercises and listening to more political rhetoric. Everyone tells me they used to practice shooting guns, but now the lessons are mostly just educational speeches. The participants miss school and work for this training, and although they are exempt from their classes and jobs, they are not paid and the classes do not halt.
Moving on to another topic, a major problem for Lao people learning English is the difference between the “ing” ending and the “ed” ending. I frequently hear friends say “I am boring”, when they are trying to say, “I am bored”. Another common mistake is “I am interesting” when trying to say, “I am interested”. There is also much confusion about where to use a question mark, resulting in text messages such as, “I am exciting?”, intended to say, “I am excited!”. Also difficult are words with the letter “r”, as the government took the letter “r” out of the Lao alphabet thirty-five years ago, and has yet to decide whether to bring it back, despite Lao people needing it to say the many foreign words in common usage now. The "r" was originally replaced with an “l” so people will often just say “leady?” instead of “ready” or “Go light!” instead of “Go right!”
And for our last topic of today, also totally unrelated to the last, I'd have to say that Luang Prabang is the most wonderful place to visit if you enjoy eating all day. Everywhere you look, there is food for sale on the roadside. It is fresh, homemade and delicious. This food is also as cheap as can be. Some people worry about eating street-side in a third-world country, but as I and all the ex-pats know, you can eat this food everyday and be just fine. The chances of getting food poisoning from street food here are identical to the chances of getting it in a fancy restaurant here. I've done case studies.
To begin with, the drinks: ten varieties of tea and coffee, waiting in big tupperwares, ready to be poured over ice in little plastic bags, a straw stuck in for drinking. Coconuts ready to be chopped open, and a straw stuck inside. Sugar cane ready to be pressed in to the most delicious, naturally sweet juice. Soy milk, made fresh each morning, ready to be poured over ice and served with a bit of liquid sugar. Everything costing between 3000-8000 kip, or 40 cents-$1. And the cute little bags, ready to be adorably draped on your wrist or bicycle handlebar.
And then the food! Skewers of chicken, whole fish, buffalo and even sticky rice, roasting over coals. Grilled bananas and sweet potatoes. Vegetable filled omelettes served with a spicy sweet sauce and chopped peanuts. Vietnamese crepes filled with mushrooms and pork covered in crispy carmelized shallots. Soup made from a broth simmered for hours, homemade noodles, fresh bits of pork or beef, a variety of fresh greens with spicy and sweet sauces. Little coconut milk pancakes. Waffles. A peanuty sticky-rice paste with a kick, wrapped inside little lettuce leafs.
And different stalls disappearing and reappearing depending on the time of day. The rice congee woman is only at the corner of the museum from 7-9 AM, and then her pot is finished. The best Vietnamese crepes are by the jewelry shop, but only between 2-5, and then the casserole is empty. The best lettuce wraps are by the primary school, and run out by 5 PM. The soy milk by the school is far better than the soy milk by the alley, and can be bought until 7 PM. Get to any of these places too late, and its an empty wooden table or a few scrap remnants on the ground, taunting you. This place, it's like a whole world, just made of food!
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T-Shirt
I would definitely wear the t-shirt that says “Mail kiss to me” here in the US. It makes me mad to hear about your friend Gin. I can’t believe a teacher would take advantage of student’s trust that way.