Ebbing Civility

[Pakse, 5/12/23]

I had a foul start to my day. At the 24-hour Vietnamese eatery, the overnight crowd leaves a mess which the owner only cleans up around 6AM. Arriving before 5:30, I had to ignore all the tissues on the floor as I ate my egg noodles with duck. There was also some wetness and two sprigs of mint on my table, left by somebody. Worst was a smell of dirty dishes in fetid water. I couldn’t wait to bolt.

This explains why pricier Subinh Hotel has become my favorite. It’s still more affordable, though, than a ghetto Chinese takeout with you on the wrong side of the bulletproof plexiglass. Most dishes at Subinh are expertly prepared and artfully presented. A plate of crispy pork with cucumber, tomato, carrot, slivers of cabbage and a sprig of cilantro is just $4.27. A dinner of cashew chicken with assorted vegetables, rice and a pot of tea is $5.64. In this cool and civilized setting, you can linger in comfort.

Just a decade ago, you’d have been hard pressed to find a similar restaurant even in Vientiane. I have an American friend who has lived in Laos for +30 years. In the early 90’s, he could recognize every car in the capital, there were so few. Such perks come and go.

Linear progress is an illusion. Oil gave man a century of extraordinary wealth. With petroleum depleting, there will be not just fewer cars, but chickens, cashews and rice, etc. Ditto, civilized moments, for we’ll see violence of all kinds, not just an unpleasant smell here and there. Already, barbarity is ubiquitous, though mostly masked. Anonymous assholes swarm.

Though smash and grabs have been around for a century, with many instances in the US during the Great Depression, they have become much more common, brazen and spectacular, with countless robberies captured on video. Armed with guns or knives, they barge into stores then smash display cases with crowbars.

Even in safe Japan, smash and grabs have appeared. On 4/29/23, there was a case in Shibuya Ward in Tokyo. More shockingly, another happened on 5/8/23 at 6:30PM in glitzy Ginza, despite dozens of witnesses. Many thought it had to be fake. One woman, though, tried to block the door to prevent the four masked teens, wielding knives and crowbars, from escaping.

A variation on smash and grab is the ram raid, where a vehicle is used to smash into a store front. In Ontario three months ago, a man posed as a prospective buyer of a used car, to steal it. He then drove it through the entrance of a closed shopping mall. Inside, he rammed the car into a shop to steal its merchandises. Done, he smashed his way out.

Without breaking into anything, a mob can just flash rob a store. This happened on 5/14/23 at a 7-Eleven in Foggy Bottom, DC. Near trendy Georgetown and just a mile from the White House, it’s an upscale neighborhood supposedly safe, but as economies crumble everywhere, there will be very few safe streets, especially in the West.

Shoplifting has become such a massive problem, hundreds of stores have been forced to close across the US. The nature of shopping has also changed. Already, many items are locked in cases. Convenience stores in your neighborhood will resemble corner bodegas in the blackest ghettos, and why not? With their music, clothing and even language, your white kids are almost black already. The cooler Orientals, too, are calling each other “nigga.”

Baby faced and plaster white Slim Jesus, “Put his ass in a box, like some take out / Fuck that bitch, then I fuck on her cousin / She give me brain that’s concussion / I been on the map since a youngin.”

Paper white MaxThaDemon, “All these shots be headshots like I’m playin’ Black Ops / Chop his face have him look like a dead zombie / Have him look like a dead zombie / Have his brain on the ground, there’s no fiction, it’s a dead body.”

Originating in Chicago, a once fine city, drill rap has spread across the globe, but luckily, it hasn’t shown up in Laos or Vietnam, though who knows, some scrawny yellow nigga somewhere may be honing his homicidal bars and flow. You fuckin’ wit me, you fuckin’ with VC…

Primitive humans had to band together to stalk large prey, their marvelous source of protein. As we descend into barbarity, the hunting pack is reappearing, but it’s often not after gains, just the exhilaration of a nice beatdown or murder. Not interested in eating of even fucking their victim, they just want to see him or her bloody and prone, thus reduced to the most abject of animals. Only in this can they regain, they think, their long lost humanity. I’m not this bitch sprawled on the ground.

Collapsed economies generate refugees. Desperate, they’ll penetrate even guarded borders. Central governments weaken. Cops and soldiers can be bribed. Floods of people of all colors and nationalities will swirl across this earth. Tomorrow, you may find Nigerians, Bangladeshis or Chinese on your porch, or you may be trudging down a Lao road with a sack of junk on your back, begging for buyers.

“This shirt has a hole but still wearable. My broken cellphone can be used as a paperweight. Here’s a rare, signed copy of Postcards from the End of America. No, no, I’m not the author! I just look like him.”

If you still had your wits, you could try being a conman. There are already so many around. I met one just the other day.

After that last paragraph, I went to the police station to report my drugging and robbery five days ago, not with any wish of recovering my money or them catching my predator, that fake Turk in a baseball cap. I just wanted authorities to be alert to this guy should he show up in Pakse again, three or six months from now.

[Pakse, 5/17/23]

I hadn’t done this earlier for two reasons. I had to get my story down. As a writer, that comes before just about everything. More crucially, I wasn’t sure the Lao police would do anything with my information, as in putting out an alert on this guy.

At the Pakse Police Department on Number 1 Road, the first cop I talked to understood no English, so I switched to Vietnamese. Smiling, he pointed to ethnic Vietnamese cops sitting nearby. To these gentlemen, I told my story in detail. All was going well so far. They took no notes, however.

They did translate my account to a Lao cop, who led me to two more, sitting nearby. What I should do was go to the tourist office bureau at the Public Security of Champasak Province building, they decided. Since I had no idea where this was, one cop took me there on his motorbike.

Entering a room where there were five male cops and one female, I asked if I should speak in English or Vietnamese. They just grinned, shrugged and indicated that I should wait. Sitting down, I pulled up my image of the fake Turk on my laptop. Finally, the detective showed up. Surprisingly, he understood only minimal English, so I was asked to write down my account, in English, of course, so they could figure it out, or not, later. With amusement, the detective looked at what I wrote.

Sitting across from me, the female cop scribbled down my basic info, as shown on my passport. Finally, the detective asked me four or five word questions, such as, “You,” he pointed at me, “in Pakse, how long?”

“A month.”

“You, where stay?”

“Lankham Hotel.”

Sherlock pointed to the Turk, “He, your friend?”

“No, he’s not my friend. I met him on the street.” All this I had written down, very succinctly. My account in large print fitted onto one page.

In that manner, I relayed, in the most basic English aided by hand gestures, that I had met the fake Turk on the street. After having beer with him at L’Ancien Café, we then went by tuk-tuk to a place next to Yes99, where we stayed from roughly 8 to 10PM.

“If you go there,” I said. “They have cameras. You can see him, clearly, on the camera.”

Outside this place, the fake Turk had pushed me from behind. Standing up, I showed them the scrapes on my knees. Including me, we all thought this hilarious. Everyone laughed.

“A Lao did not do this. If I push you, you stand up and fight. You push me, I fight.” I did a full pantomime. “A Lao couldn’t have known I was drugged. Only this man.”

“He push.”

“I think so.”

“You see?”

“No, he pushed me from behind. I do not remember what happened. I was drugged. I was on the ground.”

“He push?”

“Yes.”

“He steal?”

“Yes, my money.”

“You see?”

“No, I was drugged. I saw nothing.”

“He help you?”

“What?”

“He no help you?” The detective mimicked helping someone to get up.

“No, he did not help me. He drugged me, then pushed me down, to steal from me.”

“You see?”

“No, I did not see anything. I was drugged.”

“He push?”

“Yes, I think he pushed me. A Lao couldn’t have done it.”

Every question was asked four or five times, sometimes minutes later, not to check for discrepancies, but simply because the detective had forgotten what I told him. Even after I had pulled up the cover of my Postcards from the End of America, to illustrate that I was, in fact, a writer of books, he asked me 30 minutes later, “You do?”

“Nakkhian!” the female cop shouted.

My only point of going there, I explained, was to alert them to this man, for he may show up again in Pakse, or Vientiane, Vang Vieng or Phonsavan, and rob other people.

“This man is a professional. Next time, he may steal from you,” I pointed to a grinning male cop, sitting nearby. “Or you!” I pointed to the female note taker.

I even pulled up the Wikipedia page for flunitrazepam. As for my poor image of the man, I said they could get very clear footage of him in action from that restaurant, and from L’Ancien Café. Since I had walked past Yes99 just before I was mugged, they can even check a camera from there, if they had one pointing to the street.

“Your wife?”

“What?”

“You have wife?”

“Yes, but there’s nothing to talk about.”

“She beautiful?” Sherlock grinned.

“Huh?”

“You handsome. She beautiful?”

Though this commedia dell’arte performance lasted over two hours, I seriously doubt anything would be done afterwards, not even a visit to the restaurant to check on videos. It’s too much trouble, and Laos prefer ease. For the sake of bureaucracy, irrelevant details had to be jotted down, however, such as the names of my parents.

Still, I’m glad I got that out of the way. Back at Lankham, I found my Irish friend at his usual spot, with his Beerlao. We had a good laugh over this. It was more than incompetence, however.

“Since you’re a foreigner, they don’t give a shit,” he said. “If you were a Lao, and someone important, not terribly important, just mildly important or connected, they would get on this case. In Thailand, it’s the same.”

“They should care, because a foreigner had come into Laos to commit a crime, and he’ll do it again and again.”

“If they followed through, it would cause too much trouble for too many people. They can’t be bothered. If they tell the captain, he might say, ‘Don’t fuckin’ bother me! This is your last warning!’”

“It’s amazing they have a tourist police bureau without anyone speaking competent English or Vietnamese! There are so many Vietnamese tourists in Pakse, and so many Vietnamese in their police department. Why didn’t they assign at least one to that bureau?”

“They didn’t think of it. It’s too much trouble.”

Though I’m not one to say everything happens for a reason, its implications and tangents should be explored, but that’s only possible if one isn’t permanently maimed or traumatized.

There’s a Vietnamese saying, “Hang out at night often enough, you’ll see ghosts,” and I’ve certainly seen a few, but I’ve run into many more lovely people. In Norristown, PA, I was nearly beaten up, and in Cape Town, South Africa, I was nearly mugged by three assholes. There have been other near disasters, but I still have my all my limbs and organs, and most of my teeth, though several are broken. I can still chew.

In Nguyễn Du’s Tale of Kiều, the madame said to Kiều the distressed prostitute, “If you still have your body, you still have your belongings,” meaning you still have everything. Though essentially nonsense, it has helped millions to get by, even to endure and survive.

I write this sitting in Subinh. To get through his 12-hour shift, the receptionist sometimes plays music on his computer. Most often, it’s Lao tunes, but for the last hour or so, it’s in English, mostly crap.

Just now, Julie Andrews emerged, ghostlike, from the ether to sing “My Favorite Things.” “Doorbells and sleigh bells and schnitzel with noodles / Wild geese that fly with the moon on their wings.”

As I child in Saigon, I saw her surrounded by those angelic children. It was a different world.

John Coltrane’s version, though, is my favorite. He spent many years in Philly, but Strawberry Mansion, his neighborhood, is now only beautiful in name.

If you still have civility and beauty, you still have everything.