CHAPTER FIVE
TODAY THE PROBLEM THAT HAS NO NAME IS HOW TO JUGGLE WORK, LOVE, HOME AND CHILDREN.-Betty Friedan, The Second Stage
During our last week in Luang Prabang, we met a young man named Keo.
Keo was a friend of Khamsy, who ran the tiny hotel on the Mekong River where Felipe and I had been staying for some time already. Once I’d fully explored Luang Prabang both on foot and bicycle, once I’d exhausted myself spying on the monks, once I knew every street and every temple of this small city, I finally asked Khamsy if he might have an English-speaking friend with a car, who could perhaps take us around the mountains outside the city.
Khamsy, thereafter, had generously produced Keo, who had in turn generously produced his uncle’s automobile-and away we went.
Keo was a young man of twenty-one years who had many interests in life. I know this to be a fact, for it was among the first things that he told me: “I am a young man of twenty-one years who has many interests in life.” Keo also explained to me that he had been born very poor-the youngest of seven children in a poor family in the poorest country in Southeast Asia-but that he had always been foremost in school on account of his tremendous mental diligence. Only one student a year is named “Best Student in English” and this Best Student in English was always Keo, which was why all the teachers enjoyed calling on Keo in class because Keo always knew the correct answers. Keo also assured me that he knew everything about food. Not only Laotian food, but also French food, because he was once a waiter in a French restaurant, and therefore he would happily share his knowledge with me on these subjects. Also, Keo had worked for a while with the elephants at an elephant camp for tourists, so there was a great deal that he knew about elephants.
To demonstrate how much he knew about elephants, Keo asked me, immediately on meeting me, “Can you guess how many toenails an elephant has on its front feet?”
At random, I guessed three.
“You are false,” said Keo. “I will permit you to guess again.”
I guessed five.
“Unfortunately you are still false,” Keo said. “So I will tell you the answer. There are four toenails on an elephant’s front feet. Now, how about the back feet?”
I guessed four.
“Unfortunately you are false. I will allow you to guess again.”
I guessed three.
“You are still false. There are five toenails on an elephant’s back feet. Now, can you guess how many liters of water an elephant’s trunk can hold?”
I could not. I could not even imagine how many liters of water an elephant’s trunk could hold. But Keo knew: eight liters! As he also knew, I’m afraid, hundreds of other facts about elephants. Therefore, spending a whole day driving through the Laotian mountains with Keo was certainly an education in pachyderm biology! But Keo knew about other subjects, too. As he explained carefully, “It is not only facts and explanations about elephants about which I shall inform you. I also know a great deal about fighting fish.”
For that is exactly the sort of young man of twenty-one years that Keo was. And that is the reason Felipe elected not to join me on my day trips outside of Luang Prabang-because one of Felipe’s other flaws (although he did not mention it on his list) is that he has a very low level of tolerance for being quizzed relentlessly about elephant toenails by serious young men of twenty-one years.
I liked Keo, though. I have an inherent affection for the Keos of the world. Keo was naturally curious and enthusiastic, and he was patient with my curiosity and my enthusiasms. Whatever questions I asked him, no matter how arbitrary, he was always willing to attempt an answer. Sometimes his answers were informed by his rich sense of Laotian history; at other times his replies were more reductive. One afternoon, for instance, we were driving through an immensely poor mountain village, where the people’s houses had dirt floors, no doors, and windows cut roughly out of corrugated steel. And yet, as with so many of the places I’d seen in rural Laos, many of these huts had expensive television satellite dishes tacked onto their roofs. I pondered in silence the question of why somebody would choose to invest in a satellite dish before investing in, say, a door. Finally I asked Keo, “Why is it so important to these people that they have satellite dishes?” He just shrugged and said, “Because TV reception is really bad out here.”
But most of my questions to Keo were about marriage, of course, that being the theme of my year. Keo was more than happy to explain to me how marriage was done in Laos. Keo said that a wedding is the most important event in a Laotian person’s life. Only birth and death come close for momentousness, and sometimes it’s hard to plan parties around them. Therefore a wedding is always a huge occasion. Keo himself, he informed me, had invited seven hundred people to his own wedding, just last year. This is standard, he said. Like most Laotians, Keo has, as he admitted, “too many cousins, too many friends. And we must invite them all.”
“Did all seven hundred guests come to your wedding?” I asked.
“Oh, no,” he assured me. “Over one thousand people came!”
Because what happens at a typical Laotian wedding is that every cousin and every friend invites all their cousins and all their friends (and guests of guests sometimes bring guests), and since the host must never turn anybody away, things can get out of hand quite quickly.
“Would you like me to instruct you now with facts and information about the traditional wedding gift of a traditional Laotian marriage?” Keo asked.
I would like that very much, I said, and so Keo explained. When a Laotian couple is about to get married, they send invitation cards to each guest. The guests take these original invitation cards (with their names and addresses on them), fold the cards into the shape of a small envelope, and stick some money inside. On the wedding day, all these envelopes go into a giant wooden box. This immense donation is the money with which the couple will begin their new life together. This is why Keo and his bride invited so many guests to the wedding: to guarantee the highest possible cash infusion.
Later, when the wedding party is over, the bride and groom sit up all night and count the money. While the groom counts, the bride sits with a notebook, writing down exactly how much money was given by each guest. This is not so that detailed thank-you notes can be written later (as my WASP-y mind immediately assumed), but so that a careful accounting can be kept forever. That notebook-which is really a banking ledger-will be stored in a safe place, to be consulted many times over the coming years. Such that, five years later, when your cousin down in Vientiane gets married, you will go check that old notebook and confirm how much money he gave to you on your wedding day, and then you will give him back the exact same amount of money on the occasion of his marriage. In fact, you will give him back a tiny bit more money than he gave you, as interest.
“Adjusted for inflation!” as Keo explained proudly.
The wedding money, then, is not really a gift: It’s an exhaustively catalogued and ever-shifting loan, circulating from one family to the next as each new couple starts a life together. You use your wedding money to get yourself going in the world, to buy a piece of property or start a small business, and then, as you settle into prosperity, you pay that money back slowly over the years, one wedding at a time.
This system makes brilliant sense in a country of such extreme poverty and economic chaos. Laos suffered for decades behind the most restrictive communistic “Bamboo Curtain” in all of Asia, where one incompetent government after another presided over a financial scorched earth policy, and where national banks withered and died in corrupt and incompetent hands. In response, the people gathered together their pennies and turned their wedding ceremonies into a banking system that really worked: the nation’s only truly trustworthy National Trust. This entire social contract was built on the collective understanding that, as a young bride and groom, your wedding money doesn’t belong to you; it belongs to the community, and the community must be paid back. With interest. To a certain extent, this means that your marriage doesn’t entirely belong to you, either; it also belongs to the community, which will be expecting a dividend out of your union. Your marriage, in effect, becomes a business in which everyone around you owns a literal share.