The Akha, Part Two

(For the first in this two-part series, click here.)

On the last morning, we left the Akha village and headed down the motorcycle road to the closest Lao village around. Even early in the morning, we ran into Akha women returning up the road to the village, toting long pieces of bamboo or hearts of palm trees on their shoulders, still fully clothed in their traditional garb, despite their labors. As we wound our way up and down the ridges, the Akha presence disappeared soon, and for a good stretch we didn’t run into anyone. Then, gradually, we started running into Lao people, who came up the road and disappeared out into the forest to forage or tend to their plants.

I came around a corner on the road and to my surprise, there was a black mid-size pickup truck parked on the side of the road. I looked at the manufacturer badge; it wasn’t one that I recognized. The license plate was blue and white, with an unfamiliar character on the left side —- I realized this was a Chinese-plated vehicle. As I walked past, peering in, I was startled to see a man sitting inside in a Chinese short-sleeved military uniform, replete with PLA patch on the left shoulder. He did not look Lao or Akha, for sure. He stared at me and I at him, and “What the hell is he doing here?” was surely on both our minds.

Zelow, our guide, noted my surprise and said that the Chinese were inspecting the tall, bent-over grains growing on the hillside in preparation for harvest. I knew of the colonial influence the Chinese were exerting in the development of Laos — the dam and power line construction I’d seen on my way upland were their doing — but I hadn’t realized that their presence stretched so far and into fields as simple as hillside agriculture.  That the world’s second greatest power was farming here, not far from the seemingly remote Akha, was unnerving to say the least.

It was impossible to know what the chief and those in his village thought of the situation. But our guide, Zelow, was more than willing to share his opinion, albeit one perhaps different from what the rest of his people thought.

Zelow originated in Luang Namtha, in the northwest of Laos. He was the first Akha to ever learn English (or so he claimed).  He couldn’t speak it well, but he made up for it in energy. Zelow had studied Lao and trained to be a teacher, but hated the classroom so much that he gave it up and joined a trekking tour company. He loved trekking. And he loved his people. He was a bit of a figure, it seemed, among the various Akha tribes scattered over the mountains of several nations. Zelow told me of visits to Vietnam, Burma, and China to meet with Akha tribes there, ones both planned and already undertaken —- perhaps a liaison between them or some sort of inter-tribal governance, it seemed.

He had big ideas, for sure. Zelow wanted to start a trekking company which would bring more tourists to Akha villages and thus more village fees. But one could sense that it was not all noble-mindedness. A germ of the outside world’s ways had taken root in his head, for he had the language capacity to travel and understand something of foreign ways. Zelow had great things to say about the Chinese and their success in business. “Oh, China, so good. Business, you know? So good! Great money. Very good, China. China help Lao, help Akha, you know? I want trekking business, like China, you know? Good, ha ha!”

Every day Zelow talked about his ideas and aspirations, especially for the Akha. He reiterated how hard their life was.  “Here, poverty everywhere!  Oh, Lao Akha soooo bad.  So poor!”

“What about in China?  How are the Akha there?” I asked.

“Oh, so great!  Very big houses, cars — very good!  You know?  Very good!  Lao Akha, oh, so bad!”

He saw things from one side of the equation: get stuff! bigger houses! cars! cash and more cash!  He was not interested in what the Akha had, but what they didn’t have in comparison to their brothers in other countries.  This was why he viewed the Chinese as a boon to his people.

Did he realize the cost?  Almost certainly not.  He wanted his people to be strong.  But strong in material terms.  He was operating under the assumption that most people have that culture, and its effects on us as humans, is merely a willed thing.  Desire to keep it and you will, no matter your actions.  So to Zelow the Akha would still be Akha even if they drove Hilux trucks, had air-conditioning, and lived in town.  But this is far, far from what actually happens.

For our culture, as I said, affects us.  Culture is not merely art or music or political ideology or any of the trite meanings we associate it with.  Culture is what we do, everything we do to survive in the natural world.  Change the way you act to survive and your culture changes as well.  We change our actions toward our conditions, and conditions in return change us beyond return.

For the Akha to give up their existence would be for them to give up who they are.  They would still be Akha, but a new kind of Akha.  They would be defined not by their old ways, but by how that old culture caused them to adapt to being modern.  They would be merely a different flavor of the same basic modern person.

So what to do if you want to stay Akha?  Well, in short, don’t change.  Keep doing what you’ve always known, and go back to what you’ve given up.

Most of us cannot agree with this.  For we think that such an old culture has no corollary to our own ways, the dominant direction of the world today.  “Give it up,” we want to say.  “You have to change sometime, you know.”

Yet take the words of Andrew Lytle:

“Do what we did after the war and the Reconstruction: return to our looms, our handcrafts, our reproducing stock.  Throw out the radio and take down the fiddle from the wall.  Forsake the movies for the play-parties and the square dances.  And turn away from the liberal capons who fill the pulpit as preachers.”

At some moments, time and space mean nothing.  Lytle here is urging a return to primitive ways, to traditional habits.  He is essentially saying, “If we want ourselves back, go back to the way we actually did things.”  Yet this man was no hill tribe man whose photo would make a nice desktop background.  He came from a line of Tennessee farmers, people we moderns would sneer at as bumpkins and troglodytes.  He is as Western as you and I, but he offers dissent and reproach.

The instruments, festivals, and priests are different, but the situations of Lytle’s people and Zelow’s are the same.  The Akha here are like much of rural America, and especially the American South, through the nineteenth century: subsistence in their farming, self-sufficient in their oikonomia, poor but independent, short-lived but possessing a rich spiritual life.

And what was Zelow looking to?  He was idolizing the same forces that destroyed the traditional life of rural Americans, and would destroy his people.  The same forces.  A rationalist ethic ruthlessly applied, through technology and skill, to exploit, to centralize, to connect and make dependent, inexorably, those who did not wish for such a world, but lacked means to resist.

The Chinese and their Lao puppets build dams, cut roads across hilltops to distant villages, peddle consumables to those ill able to afford it —- their methods are the same as the Progressive ethic of Gilded Age America.  Infrastructure is built, people are dragged into markets beyond their control or understanding; the people adapt to survive, perhaps even believe that these new ways are better.  But their cultural and spiritual poverty is now assured, and their material poverty is not even up to them, not even excusable on grounds of fickle Mother Nature —- their welfare depends on the actions of those far more powerful.  Thus Hu Jintao and Roscoe Conkling, Sinohydro and Standard Oil are no different from each other.  Nothing has changed.

Not one thing.  For all the ostensible advancement and progress of our world, we still operate in the same paradigm as over 150 years ago.  It was in its nascency then, and it has ripened to full maturity now.  And we Westerners, but Americans especially, pioneered it.

That’s the fact that we must face up to, if we care a whit about being honest.  What we do now unto others, we did unto ourselves first.  We destroyed our traditional selves and the world we lived in.  And we, while not the same, were once similar, once closer in our humanity to them.  If similar, then surely we should act in accordance with what we profess to value, that simplicity we feel a gut connection with, which has a corollary in our own past, if we care to look for it.

The Akha, Part One

It is difficult, nay, nearly impossible for modern, and especially modern Western people to conceive how truly different they are from others outside of their own background. We have become incapable of seeing the world outside of a given lens, having lost forever any understanding that we ourselves and our world were once radically different. And, by extension, we do not conceive that the world can (or should) function in any other way than what confirms our predispositions.

Having lived in Korea, I had inklings of this fact, for there parts of the old world lives on under a veneer of modernity. But it was not until I ventured to the far mountainous north of Laos, amongst the Akha people, that I saw a radically different world in full, natural bloom.

The Akha are a hill tribe people, one of the many ethnic minorities in Laos (or the Lao People’s Democratic Republic).  In the past century they’ve migrated from parts of Yunnan, in China, and perhaps from areas closer to Tibet as well.

When you hear hill tribe, you should certainly note the “hill” part.  Because it informs so much about the Akha themselves and also what you have to do to get there.  From the crossroads town of Boun Tai, I took an hour-long ride by songthaew up a road of dusty red clay.  We passed villages covered in road dust, with plastic litter along the sides of the dirt track.  There were spots along the way where construction was going on — some looked like preparations for future dams, others for electrical lines.

From the first village where we were dropped off, to the three others I would visit over the next few days, it was plain that I had stepped into a place distinct from my own world. It was beyond medieval —- it was tribal primitiveness, the crystallized experience of hundreds of years of inherited living in a single environment. We hiked up and down the steep ridges, passing through large swaths of burned land, used for growing dry mountain rice. The smell was incredible —- rich and burnt, yet fresh at the same time, perhaps because it felt drier and freer than the damp, still air of the forested valley bottoms. A family was clearing half-burnt trunks —- they gawked at me in curiosity. Bamboo huts often occupy the middle or periphery of such fields; it seems that they are used for storing tools or perhaps sleeping in during the planting season, since the villages were often a fair distance away from the fields.

The Akha were a tad apprehensive at first, in every village we came to. I’m used to being stared at, but this was a fearful sort of staring, mainly by the women. After long awkward moments, they often became more congenial. This depended on the family, though, a phenomenon similar to what I experienced in Mongolia.

Most Akha houses are made of wood planks, with hard-packed dirt floors, and no chimney. They were long and open inside; some would have an upstairs where the whole family would sleep together, one right next to the other, even wife with mother-in-law. Everything inside had a black tinge from the smoke, which hung in the air and stung your eyes as it wound its way toward the door. There was no electricity, save for flashlights, which they used to embroider in the near-complete darkness inside the house. The men of the house often did some of the cooking. One morning I awoke and found the chief chopping up yellow fruit —- much like a hard, dry-tasting tomato, but more citrus-y —- that he had gathered from the forest, with a machete.

The kids ran around freely, covered in dirt, the very little ones often with no pants. This kid picked a fight with me because I took his friends’ picture but not his.

He slugged me until I took this snapshot, then was content. Later he tried to fence with me using a piece of bamboo.

The last village we were in was the most interesting. There was a lot of trash, especially on the main thoroughfare and far more than other villages. This was almost certain because they had a rough motorcycle road leading to the middle of the village. Other villages were accessible only by footpath and were consequently far more isolated. But the people were also less standoff-ish, especially when I pulled out a phrasebook that had Akha in it. Each group of Akha not only lived close to each other in the villages themselves, but the villages themselves were related in a way. The final village had been established twenty-five years ago with people from the previous village (itself established seventy-five years ago). Starting with fifteen families, they had grown to eighty-seven families. The chief was a very welcoming and generous man. He shared lots of rice whiskey with us, which was perhaps some of the finest alcohol I’ve ever quaffed. Normally any kind of rice liquor is extremely fiery and harsh, but the chief’s was smooth and warming all the way down. The chief seemed to like us and gave my girlfriend permission to photograph his wife and daughter-in-law doing embroidery after the meal. He was delighted when he gave him Korean and American bills and coins. He said he would show them off whenever there was a funeral or clan meeting next.

They live in a totally different world. Up there on the hills, no electricity, squealing pigs running around eating shit (literally), burning up the hills to grow rice, knowing almost nothing but their neighbors and how to survive. They knew nothing about other countries or their location, other than Vietnam, Thailand, and China. They didn’t know about Korea.  They thought the U.S. was close by. They are completely poor in everything material and extremely rich in everything relational. They talked about the ten elephants that came through the village the night before – yes, way up on the ridge, the elephants are even there. This seemed like their greatest worry in the whole world. You could add disease, crippling, widowing, but that’s what they’ve always dealt with, and it is intrinsic to their environment. To them, there are no forces, invisible and sinister and distant, that threaten them. No vast empires, ideologies, or powers are within their comprehension.

In their close-knit life, I could only think about the distinction H.G Wells made, noted by Lord Kenneth Clark, between “communities of obedience” and “communities of will.” The Akha are the former, without a doubt. Their natural environment, the necessity of survival, and their isolation makes it so. There is obviously no room for individuality. Yet as individuals they are perhaps as interesting and varied as we are, maybe more so.

Now the Akha are animists and understand some truths but not others; will is necessary in the search for truth; but so too is peace and contentment in the truths we already know. Obedience to what we know and, more importantly, to whom life, in all its mystery, has bound us, is equal to will.

We totally do not understand that relational aspect of the Akha and, indeed, we deny it in our contemporary modern civilization. We have gone from a prescriptive ordering of civilization’s necessary institutions, powers, and laws, to an activist one. Yet these things are incapable of acting humanly in their activism. But activism is necessary for life, especially life together. We must do things to solve our problems, disagreements, predicaments, shortages of material necessities, et cetera. These things are done best, most compassionately, on a human scale — that is, as close to humans themselves as possible. I am sure that the Akha chief has great power to solve disputes and make commands in his community. Yet he is immediately bound to those people, for he lives with them, survives with them. What better can temper power and guide action than sleeping, waking, eating, washing, talking with the same people mere yards from you for all your life?

What a world theirs is, where people and their life together are the force and the rule for all existence.  Would that it were so everywhere.

(For the second in this two-part series, click here.)

All Is Not Lost

It fades, generation by generation, epoch by epoch.  Our peculiar march as men, tramping down straighter and faster paths toward not being men, watches the deep, the integral, the unrecognized but crucial parts of ourselves cast aside like overcoats by the road on a hot day — we needed them before, but right now, on the brightly lit road that we can see for the moment, we don’t.  So we shed our baggage, our encumbrances, to forge on lighter and faster.

Those who scream and rant about the disintegration of things, reminding others of how much better things were in their childhood and how everything is on the wrong paths, have the wrong perspective.  It is not their nostalgia that is wrong.  Rather, it is their frame of view.  True, things have disintegrated since their childhood.  Yet the golden days of their youth were forged from the disintegration of yet a previous era, the pleasures of the present bought by sacrificing the world of the old and already-passed.  And in the generations before that, the foundation for their family’s gradual mobility was bought by mortgaging, whether by choice or not, their old ways, in which time was not an arbitrary division into past, present, and future, but a living, breathing continuation of what was.

But all is not lost.  For one can venture beyond the screaming artifice of neon and PC rooms and Olleh WiFi and Prugio luxury apartments, and find this:

The grandmother and her granddaughter sit at her house, folding the towels by hand.  Modernity is here, visible or not.  Synthetic cloth; running shoes; machine-woven towels made white with chemical bleach; perhaps even the logs under the house were run through a pneumatic splitter instead of being chopped by an axe.  But the old house is still kept well, as it always has been.  The stones are neatly set, the fibrous paper backing the door free of holes, the courtyard made of crushed stone, not poured concrete.  The two women fold by hand.  No machine nor specialty delivery service does it for them.  They themselves must take up the task and do it completely, do it well.  No technology has stripped away their toil by adapting to them instead of they to it.  The basic physical movements inherent to humanity’s long experience with daily living are still there, protected, at least for now.  Genome revitalizing drugs, robotic enhancements, brain-wave reading digital paper, the Singularity: all these things and their terror are coming.  But they are not here yet.  And so all is not lost, not yet.

All is not lost.  All that is ourselves, our true selves, has faded and many parts disappeared entirely, beyond our recall or care.  But some remains, within us in fact or within our reach, should we choose to stretch out our hand to it.

All is not lost.  That is not hope in and of itself.  Hope is not fuzzy feeling, nor wishful thinking, nor contentment to apprise and merely remark.  There is only hope in acting.  We see hope in the phrase “all is not lost” only because there must be some thing that is not lost and that it is recoverable.  Yet one must look for that thing, find it, take it up again as if nothing had happened, not for the demands of the moment, but for its own original purpose.  We must look to our past, and the intersection of our selves with it, not to satisfy our political dissatisfactions, our societal critiques, our cultural grumblings, our paranoia over the stability of the whirring world.  Rather, we must immerse ourselves in that past as if there was no severance with it, no disruption.  For to use the past merely as criticism is to concede the victory to the world that has occurred.  Nothing is written; things could have gone differently.  Take up what they before us saw as our purpose, take their vision as our own with the full knowledge that it is ours by inheritance, fully, completely, with no justification needed.

All is not lost.  And nowhere is that more true than in a small Korean village, by a river, the smell of wood smoke strong in the winter air.