Mr Hinsom — Vientiane, Laos | February 2003
“Falang ao nyang? ”
I’m at a local market, looking for coffee. I’m always looking for coffee, it’s my fuel. I’m also here to practise my Lao though. I made Vientiane my home a couple of months ago and so I figure I should at least try to learn the local language. The market is the perfect training ground for this.
Scanning my surroundings, I make my way over slippery little alleyways created in the space between the numerous stalls. Every stall seems to specialize in different products. Some sell fruit, vegetables and spices, others have large lumps of meat spread out on rickety tables lined with cardboard or fresh fish, still alive splattering wildly in shallow aluminium basins.
Butcher’s stand at a market in Vientiane, Laos. Yes, that is a pig’s head.
My least favourite stalls are the ones that sell padaek, a freshwater fish sauce made from cured fermented fish. The thick sauce is displayed in black plastic buckets with large chunks of fish floating on the surface, a strong smell reminiscent of Époisses de Bourgogne perminates the air. Padaek is like a stinky cheese, a traditional Lao condiment used in many dishes. It’s an acquired taste but it’s not for me. As I’m trying to back away from the padaek stalls, I spot a coffee corner at the back of the market. When I reach the small tent-like shop, a middle-aged woman energetically jumps up from a heavily stained white plastic chair.
“Sabaai dee,” she says, pressing her palms together just above her chest in a prayer-like fashion.
“Sabaai dee,” Hello, I reply, acknowledging her greeting with a similar nop. A good start, I made contact with a native.
“Sabaai dee baw,” she continues, How are you?
“Jao, sabaai dee,” Yes, I’m fine, I answer, then duplicating her question which she answers in the same manner. This is cool, even though we haven’t done much more than repeating the same phrase six times, I just had a casual conversation in Lao!
I think back to the disaster that was my first conversation in English with a native speaker. I’d met a guy from the North of England on a train from Paris to Venice, back in 1989. As fellow travellers, we were eager to exchange stories, but it didn’t go very well. I didn’t understand a single word he said and he looked at me as if I was speaking something like Russian. Five years of high school English, a nine out of ten score for my final exams, and I wasn’t able to have a basic conversation. No, this first effort in Lao was definitely more successful. Feeling confident, I take the next step.
“Mee kafé dam baw,” Do you have black coffee? I ask with a smile.
“ບໍ່ມີ,” she responds, looking confused. What!? What does she mean “baw mee,” don’t have? I know the traditional Lao brew consist of a small class for a third filled with thick sweet condensed milk and topped up with ultra-strong coffee, but I don’t like the condensed milk. I just want the coffee, no milk, no sugar.
“Noy, Noy ma nii, ma nii. Mee falang!” the woman calls out to a younger girl a few stalls away. The girl quickly makes her way to the coffee tent and quietly exchanges a few words with the owner. Then she gives me a puzzled look and asks, “Ao nyang?” What do you want?
“Ao kafé dam,” I want a black coffee, I say slowly, emphasising each syllable. Another puzzled look and more whispering. Why don’t they understand? I’m aware Lao is a tonal language and I’ve probably mispronounced all the tones, but it’s just three words: want coffee black. All they sell at this place is coffee how difficult can it be? Even if all the tones are wrong, they must be getting the context. “Ao kafé dam!” I say again, louder.
“Falang ao nyang?” What does the foreigner want? a fishmonger asks the two women as he walks over from his stall, curious about the commotion, slimy fish guts dripping from his apron.
“Baw hoo,” Don’t know, the women answer in unison. More people, traders and customers, join the scene. A heated debate ensues.
“Excuse me mister, what are you wanting?” a young man, dressed in the uniform of the National University of Laos, hesitatingly asks.
“Coffee,” I say, feeling frazzled. “a cup of black coffee.” This has been going on for more than ten minutes know and there are at least a dozen people staring at me, “I just want a cup of coffee without the milk.”
“Oooh, kafé dam,” the shop’s owner shrieks. She runs back to the counter and pours hot black coffee through a sock-like filter into a small glass, no condensed milk.
Well, so much for trying to speak Lao. Last week, students complained to the director at the school I work because I was trying to speak Lao in class — “Teacher should speak English not Lao”— and now I’ve raised my stress levels trying to order something as simple as a coffee when English proved to be the better option.
No, the Lao language (ພາສາລາວ) may have a very cool looking script, but the tonal thing is just not working for me. It’s mostly one or two syllable words, each with five different meanings depending on the subtlety of a tone! Nope, I think I’ll stick with English, it’s the global lingua franca for a reason.
Overdance – Mr Hinsom on Overdance Urban Band [CD]. Vientiane, Laos: Indee Records. (2005)
This autobiographical sketch comes from my bundle In the Moment: A Disjointed Audiobiography which is available at Amazon.com. (USD 9.50 for a paperback or USD 4.50 for the Kindle version)
