world.
The first eight years of his life were a blank and a mystery. His early recollections were of an aunt: a stiff-backed, broad-nosed woman who told him nothing of his parents. And he knew nothing about her. She’d been a rare educated woman, and, between tending her rice and her livestock, she schooled the boy in her rattan hut.
She was a humorless hag with as much love in her as a dag on a goat’s backside. But Siri had a huge appetite for learning. He’d wondered since whether he’d tried so hard to study because he wanted the woman’s respect. If she did respect his hard work, she never let him know.
His home then had been Khamuan, a lush forested province that leaned against the mountains of the Annamite Highlands. But when he was ten years old, the woman set off with him on an unannounced two-day trek. It took them to a paved road, a sight he’d never before seen. There were to be many more spectacles. A truck took them along that marvelously potholed road all the way to a city. It was called Savanaketh, and it stood on the east bank of the Mekhong.
The woman must have told him a dozen times to close his mouth as she dragged him around that city; but to a boy from the bush, it was a wonder. She found a temple she’d been searching for, and he sat on a wall in front of it while she talked to the abbot in the refectory. As she walked past Siri on her way out, she muttered something about being good, and that was the last he ever saw of her.
The boy, who knew nothing of Buddhism, was shorn, draped in itchy saffron robes, and turned into a novice. He studied the scriptures until they oozed from his ears like sap from a bloated rubber tree, but he also discovered another world of knowledge. There was very little written in the Lao language in those days, a situation that hadn’t improved much since. To really become a scholar, he had to fathom the mystery of the shelves of thick books that filled a small room behind the abbey. They were all written in French.
Madame Le Saux was a missionary with the tiny Église St. Étoine, who had come to Laos for the very purpose of rescuing third-world children from poverty and ignorance. Like a large number of upper-class French spinsters, she didn’t possess many skills that poor, ignorant Lao children would find useful. So, in Siri, she suddenly had her raison d’être. He was her boy, her apprentice, her justification for being there.
She had the ego to believe that Siri’s rapid grasp of French was of her doing. He took to the language like a lizard to a fluorescent lamp, and by the end of two years had consumed most of the books in the temple library. She gave him the tools, but the labor was his alone.
He scored top marks on the entrance test for the exclusive lycée, and his mentor gladly paid all the fees. By the time he was eighteen, he’d absorbed everything the school had to offer and was still hungry for more. Strings were pulled, documents of noble birth were forged, and Siri had a scholarship to a reasonable medical school in Paris. There he met, wooed, and wed Boua.
In 1939, with Hitler already making reservations for the trip to Paris, Siri and Boua boarded an airplane belonging to the fledgling Air France Company that took them to Bangkok. He held his new medical certificate. She held a nursing diploma and a letter of introduction from the French Communist Party to one of its founder members: Ho Chi Minh.
So, there it was in a nutshell. Poverty led him to religion, religion to education, education to lust, lust to communism. And communism had brought him back full circle to poverty. There was a Ph.D. dissertation waiting to be written about such a cycle.
Through the scratched window, he saw the sun reflect golden from half a dozen temple stupas. Two rivers converged, and a white shrine, like a delicious meringue, sat on top of a hill overlooking the old royal palace. This had to be Luang Prabang.
Carbon Corpses
In a small dark room behind
The first eight years of his life were a blank and a mystery. His early recollections were of an aunt: a stiff-backed, broad-nosed woman who told him nothing of his parents. And he knew nothing about her. She’d been a rare educated woman, and, between tending her rice and her livestock, she schooled the boy in her rattan hut.
She was a humorless hag with as much love in her as a dag on a goat’s backside. But Siri had a huge appetite for learning. He’d wondered since whether he’d tried so hard to study because he wanted the woman’s respect. If she did respect his hard work, she never let him know.
His home then had been Khamuan, a lush forested province that leaned against the mountains of the Annamite Highlands. But when he was ten years old, the woman set off with him on an unannounced two-day trek. It took them to a paved road, a sight he’d never before seen. There were to be many more spectacles. A truck took them along that marvelously potholed road all the way to a city. It was called Savanaketh, and it stood on the east bank of the Mekhong.
The woman must have told him a dozen times to close his mouth as she dragged him around that city; but to a boy from the bush, it was a wonder. She found a temple she’d been searching for, and he sat on a wall in front of it while she talked to the abbot in the refectory. As she walked past Siri on her way out, she muttered something about being good, and that was the last he ever saw of her.
The boy, who knew nothing of Buddhism, was shorn, draped in itchy saffron robes, and turned into a novice. He studied the scriptures until they oozed from his ears like sap from a bloated rubber tree, but he also discovered another world of knowledge. There was very little written in the Lao language in those days, a situation that hadn’t improved much since. To really become a scholar, he had to fathom the mystery of the shelves of thick books that filled a small room behind the abbey. They were all written in French.
Madame Le Saux was a missionary with the tiny Église St. Étoine, who had come to Laos for the very purpose of rescuing third-world children from poverty and ignorance. Like a large number of upper-class French spinsters, she didn’t possess many skills that poor, ignorant Lao children would find useful. So, in Siri, she suddenly had her raison d’être. He was her boy, her apprentice, her justification for being there.
She had the ego to believe that Siri’s rapid grasp of French was of her doing. He took to the language like a lizard to a fluorescent lamp, and by the end of two years had consumed most of the books in the temple library. She gave him the tools, but the labor was his alone.
He scored top marks on the entrance test for the exclusive lycée, and his mentor gladly paid all the fees. By the time he was eighteen, he’d absorbed everything the school had to offer and was still hungry for more. Strings were pulled, documents of noble birth were forged, and Siri had a scholarship to a reasonable medical school in Paris. There he met, wooed, and wed Boua.
In 1939, with Hitler already making reservations for the trip to Paris, Siri and Boua boarded an airplane belonging to the fledgling Air France Company that took them to Bangkok. He held his new medical certificate. She held a nursing diploma and a letter of introduction from the French Communist Party to one of its founder members: Ho Chi Minh.
So, there it was in a nutshell. Poverty led him to religion, religion to education, education to lust, lust to communism. And communism had brought him back full circle to poverty. There was a Ph.D. dissertation waiting to be written about such a cycle.
Through the scratched window, he saw the sun reflect golden from half a dozen temple stupas. Two rivers converged, and a white shrine, like a delicious meringue, sat on top of a hill overlooking the old royal palace. This had to be Luang Prabang.
Carbon Corpses
In a small dark room behind
Similar Books
