“Are you Burenang?” the burly plainclothesman asked, referring to me by my pen name.
“No,” I lied.
He sensed my fear. From his pocket he pulled a pamphlet I had written and stared at my picture below the text. “You chose,” he hissed, “your life or your writing.” A few feet behind, stood his partner. Under his loose shirt I could see the outline of the gun in his waistband.
Bounthanong Xomxayphol’s first brush with the royalist authorities, came when he was only 20. He was certainly intimated but not deterred. He continued to write, changing his pen name or moving from house to house whenever he sensed danger, or a sympathizer in the police tipped him off. The war was going badly for the royalist government and though the pressure eased, he was always a target.
The Vientiane of the 60s and 70s was a frontier town. The American War on Vietnam flooded across Lao borders and the capital filled with foreign soldiers, merchants and mercenaries, who played alongside the French colonials and their local supporters. Anything and everything was for sale, especially guns, girls and drugs. The majority of the people remained mired in deprivation and exploitation.
Bounthanong was passionate about books and words came easily to him. So, the decision to become a writer was inevitable. It was the best way, he felt, to catalogue the injustices he saw all around him.
He told Champa Holidays that he was probably one of the few Lao, who as a child, had his own library at home. An avid reader from an early age, he was profoundly influenced by the works of the short story writer, Outhin Bounyavong and the poet Panay (Pakien Viravong). Later, it was Guy de Maupassant, Victor Hugo and O. Henry.
After high school, he went to the Royal Institute of Law and Administration, becoming an active member of the Lao Progressive Students Association. He wrote a series of articles in the student newspaper denouncing CIA activities in Indochina. In 1973 he had printed 1,000 copies of The Bright Side of Darkness, his first collection of political articles, essays and short stories and sold them outside schools and theatres. This resulted in that first visit from the secret police with the warning to choose between his art and his life.
“I am not a fly that travels around collecting news of other people to report to the powerful in the hope of collecting a reward…I have no wish for this land to have any more cowards than it already has.”
- A Bar at the Edge of a Cemetery
Gorbachev’s glasnost sent ripples beyond the Soviet Union, and this eased some of the restrictions But, the more things changed, the more they remained the same. Writers, by the very nature of their profession, are outsiders and if they wish to remain objective, they must stand aloof from the society they chronicle. This brings on its own set of problems and to avoid these, some collaborate, while others adapt or allegorize.
“Oh you men! What a life a poor bird has! I harmed no one. All I wanted was for to live.”
- Oh! Men….May I breathe
In 2011, Bounthanong received the Lao Top Artist Award from the government. Three months later, he won the SEA Write Award for his short story Kadook America (American Bones), a powerful anti-war tale of a Lao-American team searching for the remains of U.S. servicemen missing in action during the American War in Vietnam.
There was no medicine that could cure his anger whi8ch had remained a lingering disease in his mind. During the past few days, however, he had been forced to suffer the imaginable. Here he stood digging up and sifting through the dirt, not to search for gold, but rather the bones of American soldiers, the same people who ten years earlier had arrived in Laos to murder his own parents and relatives.
- American Bones
Earlier this year, Bounthanong earned another laurel when he won the Mekong River Literature Award (MERLA) for his novel Fai Noom (Young Fighter). Champa Holidays asked Bounthanong about his writing schedules. Despite having written about 150 short stories, over 100 poems and 4 novels, he has no fixed routine. He reads a lot and writes only when he has an idea. Otherwise, he spends his time sipping freshly brewed coffee, puffing on strong cigarettes, and observing, in the way writers do.
(Published in Champa Holidays – May-Jun 2014)
© Percy Aaron
Wow Laos 