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Grand Prize Winner,
spring 2008 Contest
Nancy Penrose
The Warp of Memory
I am returning to Laos. It is 1993. I lived here as a child, a ten-year-old
transplant from an Oregon farm. It was 1963. As the wing of the plane dips
right, I press my head against the window. I see the silver snake of the Mekong, see rice fields of dry gold, see coconut palms that cluster near
villages, see roads of burnt orange. I am home.
I have loved Laos since I left—since before I left, when I galloped my pony on roads above the Mekong—and yet I have not missed it until now. War and revolution closed the country
for years. Then the realization I could return reached me and drew me back.
•
According to the transcript of President John F. Kennedy’s statement on Laos before television cameras on March 23, 1961, he said: “My fellow Americans, Laos is far away from America, but the world is small. Its
two million peaceful people live in a country three times the size of Austria.
The security of all of Southeast Asia will be endangered if Laos loses its
neutral independence. Its safety runs with the safety of us all—in real neutrality observed by all.” Laos as a domino that must not tumble to the Reds, the Communists: that’s why my family was there.
•
My father’s work in Laos led to noble ends—he oversaw the building of a dispensary, a waterwheel, a school—but it was all a cover for the CIA’s secret war; not that he worked for the CIA. In July 1962, five months before
our family arrived, the U.S. signed the Geneva accords that declared Laotian
neutrality. The American and North Vietnamese soldiers were to withdraw. My
father’s employer—U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID—stayed to help steer the country, brought in more Americans to run programs of
good works, modernizing agriculture, for example, with free rice seed, sweet
potato starts, water buffalo to poor villages in rural areas. Some USAID
colleagues worked secretly—training, arming, paying Lao soldiers. All this designed to keep the country
pro-American.
•
The word Laos is like any other word: it feels strange when it falls upon the
ear with a sound other than the familiar. Kennedy called it lay-awss. The
French spoke it as lah-ohss, abnormally pronouncing the ess at the end. I call it louse, which summons the music of my parents’ voices and those of the other Americans there in the 1960s. Today it is the Lao People’s Democratic Republic. Many Laotians and the young Western backpackers who visit
the country call it simply, and correctly, lao.
•
Smells are Proustian pockets of memory: frangipani, mango, dried fish, dried
frog legs. There is the smell of rain (the first after the dry season), the
smell of my pony’s neck, the smell of burnt coffee beans in the streets of Paksé, the town where we lived.
•
Laos emerged from French rule in 1953, the same year I was born. In my
fifth-grade year at the Lycée de Paksé I learned geometry and geography in French from Madame Chaume, a Parisian professeur who spoke no English, who still clung to the colony. Six hundred years before
the region had been Lan Xang, Million Elephants. This ancient land, mother of modern Laos, reached a
pinnacle of power in the 1600s. Wars with Siam tore the territory into pieces
that the French collected for a colony in 1893. During World War II the
Japanese invaded and declared Laos free of Western imperialism. The French
returned at the end of the War, but not for long. The impulse to independence
led to full sovereignty in October 1953. When my family arrived in 1962, the
diadem was divided by a king and three princes—a communist, a centrist, a rightist. This division defined Laotian neutrality
and was constructed on the cold shores of Lake Geneva by diplomats of Cold War
superpowers—the Soviet Union, the United States, Red China.
•
On the front page of the January 7, 1965 Tigard Times, our hometown newspaper, there is an interview with my father. We are newly
back from Laos. My father is the local expert who can explain the grumble of
war from the jungles of Southeast Asia: “Laos lies between Vietnam and Thailand with Vietnam very unstable and with a
strong Red China influence while Thailand is quite stable and pro-Western. A
change in Vietnam would have a direct effect on the situation in Laos.” Later, neighbor boys join the Army and go to ‘Nam, but for now Southeast Asia is still far away from Tigard, Oregon. My father
predicts that: “The loss of Vietnam and Laos would mean the eventual loss of Thailand.” But he was wrong. Laos became communist after the Pathet Lao revolution in
1975. Still is communist, as is Vietnam. Never colonized, never communist
Thailand remains an independent monarchy. And then, in the article, my father
tells a lie, the one told by our government and by all the Americans who lived
in Laos: “… while the U.S. is providing Laos with military supplies there are no U.S.
military instructors or combat troops stationed in that country.”
•
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