44: Duck egg omelette

Hello, I hope you’re well.

Welcome to Border Crossing. Thank you for your time and a big hello to new faces, pleased to have you along.

Also, a nod of appreciation to Caro in her houseboat, whose kind advice has helped me think more clearly about what I want to write here, as Border Crossing grows.

Today, I can’t stop thinking about a dinner date in south-east Asia.

Please look after yourself and your people. Spring is coming.

gems

1

Erin Thompson’s Twitter thread gathers evidence that Christie’s (the auction house) sold stolen ancient Burmese artefacts with fake provenances, as recently as 2016.

2

Lego has released an avant garde album of ‘white noise’ (Spotify link) consisting of the sounds of someone quietly rifling through Lego bricks to piece them together.

3

The ludicrous world of the super-rich: check out ShadowCat Haven, new bespoke Covid-barrier luxury support boat for the world’s super yachts, to protect owners and crews from coronavirus. ffs.

4

I don’t especially agree with Catherine Anne Davies’ conclusions in her Quietus essay challenging the presumed connections between creativity and suffering, however it is excellent, thought-provoking writing.

5

If you struggle to keep house plants alive, terrific ongoing podcast series On The Ledge may be for you. I discovered it through its producer Kelly Westlake. Thank you Kelly.

6

With a new Adam Curtis series incoming, a reminder that you can watch much of his older work on YouTube for free. Also, more recent films The Century Of The Self and the outstanding All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace are on Prime.

7

Moe Tkacik writes on Slate about Washington’s restaurants putting up with four years of the Tr*mp admin being incredibly bad tippers.

8

Jacqui Polumbo’s CNN story (with Tomás Karmelo Amaya’s beautiful photography) about First American ‘two spirit’ dancers challenging gender prejudices with ancient peoples’ open-mindedness.

potato gem

This week, Greg Daugherty’s fascinating investigation for History.com about who gets credit for inventing the potato chip.

•  

44: Duck egg omelette

We go for dinner in the home of the farm workers. This is near the end of our trip and I’ve started to feel hints that I’m sick. It won’t emerge, fully fledged, for another week, until after we fly home. Cycling to the farm, it’s only a vague, unusual taste in my throat. I’m more tired than I’d expected to be — but that’s hard to gauge when you’re on the road.

The two lads Blong and Lauj — the farmers — are men of unadorned laughter. Experts in the animals they keep, not labourers. They’d travelled down from Hmong communities up on the highland slopes along the border, to work a legit job that might get them papers (even a passport) and earn enough cash to carry some home, each visit to their families. Westerners here casually call the ethnic groups ‘hill tribesmen’. The pejorative term brushes over more than seven distinct cultures and languages, not to mention a century of epic violence, yet it’s casually used.

Here, the two men live under a corrugated iron roof, in a solid but open-ended wooden shack, on the near side of the farm plot. It is divided into two rooms; a living space and a workshop strewn with tools that brings back a vivid memory of when I first saw tools in my Welsh grandfather’s garden shed. There is a mezzanine floor above, for sleeping. It has a homemade ladder but the mezzanine is low enough, they can haul themselves up and swing over the edge without it.

There is wifi. Their home butts up against the adjoining land of the restaurant, cultural centre and school, owned by a minor royal. The farm supplies food and hosts classroom visits. An ancient TV in the corner stays on, playing local news and entertainment the whole night, at low volume. There is a microwave and a rice cooker. Later, drunk, we jam American country songs, banjo and guitar and percussion, all at once and taking turns, we sing together. One of the guys giggles constantly and films us on his phone. We mess around with the limits of the language barrier, finding jokes in the effort to understand. They are kind and silly and serious.

The Hmong and Mien people are ancients: they were the first people on the Yangtze. They have their own family of languages. For centuries they fought hard against Han incomers, until the Qing Dynasty threw down oppressive laws to quell them. At some point they would divide themselves in two: the ‘raw’ and the ‘cooked’, meaning that the ‘cooked’ had given their loyalties over to the Han, while the ‘raw’ remained fiercely opposed and independent.

In more recent history, the Hmong were caught up in the vicious outspill of the twentieth century’s colonial mire, whereby in the Indochina wars, the CIA and the French manipulated that historic antipathy to recruit many Hmong people (like, thousands of them) to fight on the front lines against the Vietnamese and communist Lao People’s Liberation Army. They carry a vast trauma cost, as a backbone of Kissinger’s Secret War. Whatever your views on the Vietnam era, it was a shadowed road: it’s easy to hear the facts cerebrally, yet near-impossible to comprehend at heart, the multi-generational impacts of those ferocious wars, imposed from outside by the machinations of a collapsing colonialism, soaked through people, affecting how a region interacts and its people perceive their place there, to the present day.

Just north of Bangkok (far to the south of here) there’s a temple, Wat Tham Krabok (the Temple of the Bamboo Cave) that became a focal point of refuge for Hmong people fleeing Laos after the Secret War, at the end of the 1970s. The temple was founded by a nun, Luang Por Yai, so it’s not quite officially ‘Bhuddist’ per se but follows her teachings. Its first Abbott was her nephew Chamroon, who’d previously been a cop. This temple actively supported the armed struggle in Laos, providing a safe temporary haven and jumping off point for thousands of refugees afterwards. After legal and diplomatic wranglings between the USA and Thailand, many went on to emigrate to north America.

Resourceful immigrant Hmong communities on the American west coast (as eulogised in Anna Lowenhaupt-Tsing’s 2015 book The Mushroom At The End Of The World) went on to build the energetic, quasi-legal foraging businesses in the fucked up forests of Oregon, gathering matsutake mushrooms for export ‘back’ to China.

Meanwhile, having journeyed in the opposite direction, here comes Ryan, the American volunteer who hooks us up with the farmers. He shows up with a bag of beers and his banjo, meeting us first in a rough-hewn pagoda beside the lake as the evening darkens. He brings Juan, his wirey but sweet-faced Spanish friend, who is a solid guitarist but isn’t sure if he likes me very much. Ryan is loping, genial, a bit of west coast jock to him, handsome like a minor character in a teen drama. Not a hipster. Though he’s ecologically sound and deceptively nuanced, with a masters degree in something to do with leaf-cutter ants. Between Buddhist monastery and manicured lawns, Ryan stumbled into a farm volunteer gig. Soon, he was promoted over the heads of our hosts, though they’re far more experienced farmers. He is paid more, though not as much as the teachers. He tells us himself: it’s a dual economy constructed to mollify foreigners. Each week he wheelbarrows piles of spare produce up to the village.

As we laugh and chat around the edges of three languages, gossiping about the other westerners, Lauj walks out into the evening to wrench out of the ground an enormous cabbage, beautiful green leaf, onions, vegetables, tiny dark chillis, holy basil, more herbs. He steals eggs from the ducks, all sorts of unfamiliar bits and bobs, rinsed off at the sink in a big red plastic colander. Blong had mostly finished pounding some kind of paste, as we arrived. Now he cups out rice from a huge sack leant in the corner. There is meat — pork I guess — that goes into a broth, which I won’t have.

Without thinking about it, we brought a bottle of wine. What a stupid thing to do; wine is pricey here even for comfortably off city dwellers, because of heavy import duties. It feels as if I’ve ostentatiously carried a cheesy status symbol into their space. Forgive the foreigners. We hand it over, say not to open it now and instead we drink beer and bottled water, then later far too much of the lao khao, locally fermented sticky rice whiskey.

Lao khao was illegal as recently as 2005. Half a bottle in, I get why.

The farm has water buffalo, goats, chickens and ducks, horses I think, a small lake of fish and other creatures. A fortnight earlier, I’d visited in the daytime, accompanying a group of school children, searching for mini beasts for a class project. Me and these tiny children wrote a song together about a tadpole with super powers and we performed it in assembly, later that week.

Up in the still chaotic corners of the Golden Triangle, ethnic communities struggle for breathing space and perilous legitimacy — regularly stomped on with administrative or actual jackboot by nearby governments and cultures, whether Yunnan, Lao, Myanmar, or Thai, not to mention the intersecting talons of corruption and organised crime. Lines blur ugly, where national governance fades and regional security is ceded to the mob boss. Around the same time and not so far away from where we sit eating duck egg omelette; Myanmar’s potentially genocidal oppression of its Rohingya people floats to the surface of western public awareness. Suddenly, there was the biggest refugee camp in the world. The border is just a river and if they’re shooting at you, you swim.

As I type, Myanmar’s military junta has suddenly taken back power, at least for another year, it says. It instigated a coup to overturn November’s democratic elections, spreading fake news to undermine them. Sounds familiar. Aung San Suu Kyi is once again a prisoner, facing an odd array of charges like ‘breaching export law’ and ‘possessing unlawful devices’. Laughably trivial, so at least they’re just designed to prevent her holding office again, rather than creating a pretext to kill her. She’d won a landslide.

The Burmese democratic majority wasn’t that bothered about the oppression of the Rohingya, either disbelieving it, or disinterested, or actively supporting it, thinking of it as a battle against terrorism. During her initially courageous but in the end dismally flawed time as a democratic leader, Aung San Suu Kyi failed to erode the influence of the army and, worse, bears a chunk of responsibility for that mass murder and ethnic cleansing in the north. Yet, that’s a privileged view to hold: at the same time, once again, in the end, it is us. Wealthy western governments and globalised industry that finds the new opportunities for profit too tempting to wait. How quickly the violence was shoved out of view again, in service of corporate relations.

Meanwhile, up where official borders — Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, southern China — are widely ignored, a swathe of the world’s artificial drugs are manufactured, money laundered in vast, sprawling, half-empty luxury casino resorts, cut out of the landscape by ghost construction firms, bosses paid in portable wealth and favour.

•

The following evening, we were collected early from outside our apartment, by a spotless, air-conditioned silver minivan. Sinking into black leather seats, we were driven out across the valley, to have dinner at the resort hotel, with the Headmaster and his wife. Set on another lake but this time mirror-flat, impossibly still waters, lit by evenly shifting colours in digital light display, the whole shebang was stunningly tidy. The restaurant came Michelin-recommended. Alan and Mary are great company: very well travelled, with the unusual combination of appearing to be conventional Brits of an earlier era, yet at the same time they exuded a worldly glee. Genuine, even slightly anarchic, globalism that belied the first impression. Alan has a great story about a terrifying dinner party with Pinochet — but that’s for another time. I’ll need to get his permission.

I stared at the menu. I realised that I could order a meal built from the exact same stuff I’d eaten the night before. They had duck egg omelette with holy basil. They had a similar mix of rice and vegetables, with the same fiercely hot, wet salad. The only thing I couldn’t really order was the rice hooch. I’m sure they have it under the counter for when you’ve got no shits to give — but not now. I had a shirt on.

Obviously — otherwise I wouldn’t be writing this — the inevitable pay-off is that the first night’s food was superior to the second night’s food. It was, far better. Piled up high on unmatching plates, the overwhelming mix of flavours, of lemongrass, basil, the effortless fierce high of heat thrown in without concern for a western palette, all done with soul-deep kindness. Pure, rough-hewn joy. Bourdain would’ve approved. Meanwhile, the posh resort ran to keep up: obviously working their kitchen staff hard and skillfully on precise, delicate arrangements. I’m not saying it wasn’t also delicious, just not the same.

Sadly, there’s a romantic falsehood in a comparison like that, which I’d not acknowledged to myself, until I tried to write it down: the anecdote can be a straightforward kind of ‘authenticity brag’. But the truth is, the farm itself was as upmarket — or inauthentic — a place to acquire food as anywhere the posh resort hotel bought supplies. It wasn’t a ‘real’ farm — a dusty northern smallholding surrounded by paddies — rather a sophisticated, experimental section of a bigger Royally-endowed development project. All organic, with the educational set-up too, supplying produce to its own sibling upmarket restaurant up the hill. The same chap owns a pricey resort on one of the paradise islands. So really, I’d built a phoney culinary contrast.

But over the following days in the school canteen, when we mention visiting the farmers for dinner, I’m taken aback by the ambivalent reaction from many (white) teaching staff. I’ve assumed that people here — who often take classes of kids down to learn about nature with the volunteers — must know the farmers socially, at least to a casual extent. At least to drink with. But some were aghast at the notion.

Some lived on site, in sweet air-conned apartments that I coveted, between a cricket field, tennis courts and an olympic swimming pool, less than 300 metres from the shack with the corrugated roof. Some had been there for over a decade. They’d lived and worked alongside Lauj and Blong, yet socialising — the mere thought of wandering down to the farm after dark — stretched credulity. Accidentally, we’d clumped across a rock solid class divide. For a long time I felt casually superior and worldly about this. Of course, it suits how I paint myself. I told the story a few times, until one day someone said, ‘well, when you had an office job, did you hang out with the cleaners?’

After we got home, I was as sick as I’ve ever been. It’s the only time a doctor has ever been angry with me, because I’d left it so long before going to him. It was a pneumonia that could’ve done real harm.

• 

soundtrack

Miles Davis — Ascenseur pour l’échafaud (Decca France, 1958)

In the French TV series Dix Pour Cent (Call My Agent! on Netflix) veteran actors’ agent Arlette Azémar puts on old vinyl records in her office. This is one. It’s the soundtrack album to the 1958 Louis Malle film of the same name. I’d not heard it before — I’m not really a Miles Davis fan but this is the quieter, less ostentatious end of his work. It’s haunting music. I noticed it because the opening riff sounds so strikingly similar to a heartbreaking trumpet pattern on Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Meeting Across The River’ (on Born To Run) that surely it was a knowing nod by trumpeter Randy Brecker? It seems feasible: Brecker was brought up on Miles, plus the upright bassist on that Bruce session, Richard Davis, who’d played on Astral Weeks, had also played with Miles.

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Loads of love, as always. Comments welcome. Stay safe.

Chris
xxx