S P O RT
F O O D
Lao hit ball
The real thing
Robert Cooper
S
imon Creak’s Embodied Nation extends the work of the most frequently referenced experts on the making of the nation of Laos: Grant Evans, Martin Stuart-Fox, Soren Ivarsson and the only Lao, Vattana Pholsena. Creak acknowledges his debt to these and others, while qualifying that debt. “None of these scholars pay serious attention to [physical culture]. Instead, they … focus on the abstract dynamics that create national sentiment — language, literature, cartography, print media, historiography, and so on.” Thus, Creak knowingly steps out on an academic limb. Creak argues “that sport and related physical activities are among the most important strategies of substantialization through which abstractions such as the nation are materialised in everyday action.” I agree that sport and physical activities play a role in defining Laos and the Lao, but would argue that one of the most widespread sports of Laos might actively impede the materialisation of nation and nationalism in the everyday. Creak analyses attempts by Vichy France and post1975 socialists to use athletics and sport to ‘make’ Laos and to make an appropriate type of citizen for that nation. The Vichy attempt failed with the failure of the Vichy regime, while Socialist Man was overtaken by the ‘post-socialist’ era. These failed attempts all tried to manipulate sport at the macro level of nation building and the individual level of body building. Village-level sport in Laos is at a level between the individual and the nation: the temple community. I would like to focus on what Creak left out: small-community sports that have a history longer and stronger than the concept of nation. That said, Embodied Nation is a worthwhile addition to Lao Studies for what it covers, not for what it leaves out. A large section of the book is given over to the game of tikhi (dti-khi), one translation of which is ‘hit-ball’, which is similar to hockey. Along with his own observations of the game, now played only once a year during the That Luang festival in Vientiane, Creak cites Raquez, the Frenchman who did much to promote a ‘renovation’ of Lao culture, and two highlyreputed French anthropologists: Paul Lévy and Charles Archaimbault. All describe a type of free-for-all hockey with two teams of equal number but no clear rules other than getting the khi (ball) through the opponent’s defence to score a goal. Raquez magnifies the significance of the game to a national sport that survived the Siamese destruction of Vientiane (and the French renovation). He describes several hundred players in a game and suggests tikhi might be the origin of polo. Anthropologists at the time often used functionalist interpretations and tikhi is presented as ritual, functioning to maintain social structure. One team represents the governors and one represents the governed (people). All accounts suggest the people always win, making the game a ritual of rebellion: theatre, rather than competitive sport. Creak considers that tikhi is not a theatrical set-up, leaving a mystery over how the people always win a theatrically competitive event. Lévy provides an ‘ethnological’ description of the game: one team represents the Lao Loum, one represents the kha, a quasi-pejorative term for Khmu and other Mon-Khmer minorities. The kha always win. Whether one team was actually composed of kha or of ethnic Lao representing kha is not clear. 22
Tikhi in 1900. Reproduced from Alfred Raquez, Pages laotiennes: LeHaut-Laos, Le Moyen-Laos, Le Bas-Laos (Hanoi: F.H. Schneider, 1902)
Archaimbault witnessed the game in Vientiane and in the former Phuan ‘kingdom’ in Xieng Khouang, and suggests the game was also played in Lao-speaking areas of northeastern Thailand and northern Cambodia. Creak makes the salient point that all observers overlooked the presence of French and Lao flags at opposite ends of the field of play and extends the ritual aspect of the game to Laos v France, with the Lao winning. Although all players were Lao and none French, the ritual-game functioned (somehow) to support French rule by ritual reversal of the norm. Nonanthropologists might be excused for finding all this a bit Alice in Wonderland. Tikhi survived independence in 1954 and regime change in 1975, with Lao bureaucrats playing Lao ‘people’. Creak notes ‘the people’ won in the game he witnessed in 2008. However, Evans noted two teams distinguished only by different coloured shirts, with no apparent ritual significance attached to winner and loser. I witnessed the game twice and my view is the same as that of Evans. If tikhi is not a rite of reversal, it remains an interesting annual event, worthy of note, but loses its mystical magic. I am left wondering if Lao spectators appreciated that they were witnessing a ritual to maintain the macro social order. Creak presumably made tikhi his case study because it does not exist in other countries and thus lends itself to the status of national sport, even if the status of the game as ‘competitive sport’ is compromised if one side always wins. Creak is understandably cautious about giving national-sport status to any activity, particularly one that is played only once a year, in one place, even if that place is the national symbol. Tikhi is played in month twelfth on the traditional Lao calendar, which is November on the Gregorian calendar, a month that follows the rains and the two sets of boat races (before and after the end of Buddhist Lent). At this time of year rivers are full, rice and fish stocks are ample, and there is little agricultural work to do. If tikhi serves to consolidate the rulers in power by ritual reversal, the boat races (boun suang heua) could equally serve to maintain the social order by the observance, not the reversal, of norms. It is these norms of cooperation within units and competition between units, I would suggest, which are essentially ‘national’, in the sense of being found throughout the land. But they
Simon Creak, Embodied Nation: Sport, Masculinity, and the Making of Modern Laos, University of Hawaii Press, 2015, 327 pages
Connla Stokes
do not lead to a materialisation of the political concept of nation as a unity of individuals and families who do not know each other. There is a religious element to the boat races that is not evident in tikhi, which, in spite of its ritual aspects, is as secular as the Miss Laos contest that follows it. In Laos, the local spirit world is conjoined with the ‘national’ religion of Buddhism in most activities, including boat racing. Boats are carved from the tallest trees in each village, and receive animistic offerings both as community ‘protection’ trees and as boats. Such boats are kept within temple grounds and are blessed by the abbot. Before any races take place, the spirits of the water are consulted. Thus, boats and boat racing incorporate the animist and Buddhist essence of being Lao, the same essence that pervades the nation. Boat race days begin with women’s races, with the winner declared well before the noon break. It is the men’s races that attract the most attention. Boats race with the current over a two-kilometre course; it is a great spectacle. Each race is between two boats, or two temples, with the loser dropping out. Winners then race winners until only one is left. The local population gravitates to the river on boat race days. For most spectators, the races are a background to eating and drinking. Few among the spectators know who won each of the many races and few care; some do, particularly if their village is doing well, but most people attend because most people attend — it’s the Lao way: nobody wants to be left out. The crowds at boat racing drew the attention of early French expeditions mapping the Mekong, particularly that of Francis Garnier in 1866-68, when expedition-artist Louis Delaporte painted boat racing, the ruins of Wat Pha Keo and an imagined That Luang. These paintings were used in twentieth century ‘reconstructions’ of an imagined nation. Could boat racing ever become a truly national sport in Laos, with national competitions between its main centres of excellence? Why not? One can imagine a ‘National Boat-racing Association’ on the lines of football in England, where every team is named after a city, much as Lao boat teams represent templecommunities. Could Laos ever take part in international boat racing? Maybe, if longboats with short oars were introduced … While the chance of Laos competing internationally in boat racing is low, it is certainly much higher than that of tikhi being admitted as an Olympic sport. At the moment, it looks like boat racing is happily going nowhere other than where it has been for centuries: in temple-village communities. Perhaps that’s enough in itself. An analysis of sport in Laos could benefit from a focus on the micro-level involvement of family, temple and village. This is not Creak’s focus, however. His focus on the ‘national’ aspects of sport and physical culture leads him to his pessimistic macro-level conclusion: “With the single, if highly notable, exception of the 2009 SEA Games, Laos has failed by any conventional measure to achieve sustained success on the sports field. Indeed on one register it might be possible to read this book as a catalogue of failures, in which the enfeebled Lao body and athlete represents the sorry political and economical state of the nation and of the race.” Does it matter if Laos, still a least developed country, has not progressed far on the sports field? Probably not, as long as there is water in the rivers. ☐
I
can’t say what makes us fall in love with Vietnamese food. That one life-affirming, nourishing bowl of pho in particular, or even just a chilled, ripe mango, plucked fresh from a fridge after a night’s carousing. It drugs you. That ‘everything’ — colours, flavours, textures, sounds, situations, is so intense. In spite of the Hanoi humidity, or scorching Saigon sun, you don’t care your shirt is straightaway a sodden rag because you’re slurping down what might be the greatest noodle soup of its kind in the universe, or devouring a tableload of tasty morsels, all washed down with whatever local brew is to hand. However, or whenever, it happens, just as Thomas Fowler in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American foretold, though he wasn’t actually referring to the food, there comes a point for us when we realise nothing can ever be the same again. Where were you, when you felt ‘it’ — this awakening? Perhaps, on a return trip home, you found yourself getting claustrophobic in a restaurant of the most generic, international kind, staff in head-totoe black clobber, music set to ambient house, menus, wine lists, napkins, conventions, formality, and you could not help feeling insulted by a life-long friend proclaiming, nose in menu, “I’m having the lamb chops, what are you having?” In this instant, you saw the restaurant for what it was: a business, an investment, a cold, calculated move to tap a market, and you longed for the fuss-free family-run eateries of Hanoi, Saigon, Danang, Nha Trang, and your favourite fractious materfamilias, dressed in her best “I’m not leaving the house today” clothes. Who doesn’t care about compliments, or Trip Advisor. She knows what they cook is delicious. Everyone in this whole city knows. Because it’s not just the food, or even the context, that makes us love Vietnamese food. It’s the informality of it, the commensal spirit of the place. Even if you are on your own, you’re never alone; it’s knowing the ‘owners’ are never not there. They welcome you, cook for you, serve you, and consistently, day in, day out, year after year, they nail it. Sure, be my guest, go check out the new Italian joint, if you like. I hear the risotto has a sixty per cent chance of being edible. “It’s still pretty true in Hanoi that the grimier the place, and the more refuse underfoot, the better the food,” says Australian Mark Lowerson, the co-founder of Hanoi Street Food Tours. “The uncomplicated nature of street food — one vendor, one dish — and the level of mastery and expertise they have over their ingredients and techniques, make those kind of food experiences the best in the city. Occasionally I make a pact with myself to give a ‘slick’ or ‘cool’ restaurant a try, but invariably I come away disappointed, having had a mediocre meal at best.” Lowerson first travelled to the Vietnamese capital in 2001, curious to eat street food, but not knowing ‘how’. “I stood in front of one stall by Dong Xuan Market, behind a full bench of local customers, watching proceedings for a few minutes,” says Lowerson. “I realised everyone was eating the same thing and there were no menus. It seemed that, if you sat down, you’d be served her dish.” So he sat. Minutes later he was served pho tiu, a southern Vietnamese dish with Chinese heritage — fresh rice noodles, bean sprouts, lean thinly sliced pork shoulder, garlic vinegar, thickened pork broth, sweetened nuoc mam, crunchy deep fried shallots, a handful of coriander and mint, all topped with crushed
Morgan Ommer
peanuts. “I added some chilli sauce, mixed it all up like the other patrons were doing, took a mouthful, did a little bit of a good food moan, and that was it. I was converted.” Lowerson still brings clients to this stall. “That one little experience opened up a whole world of pleasure to me and ultimately changed my life.” The biggest celebrity evangelist for Vietnamese cuisine is Anthony Bourdain, who also claims Vietnam changed his life. At one stage, he even threatened to move to a village near Hoi An, one of many, many food meccas in Vietnam. He never did but he has been able to live out this fantasy, somewhat, by publishing the writer, and erstwhile Vietnam expat, Graham Holliday’s memoir, Eating Viet Nam, under his line of books with Ecco, an imprint of Harper Collins, now available in paperback. Holliday is a man after Bourdain’s heart. While living in Vietnam, his recipe-free blog, Noodlepie, championed the kind of restaurants where everyone sits on low, blue plastic chairs, eats with well-used chopsticks, and nobody cares about grimy walls, or litter-strewn floors, because the food is just too bloody good. It may or may not have been the point of the blog, but it had the power to make you feel like an utter dolt for having just eaten another chicken tikka sandwich for lunch, when you could have been ‘out there’, eating out of a bowl filled with egg noodles, char siu, wonton and dumplings … my van than in Hanoi, mi hoanh thanh in Saigon … or gobbling barbecued pork-patties and pork belly dunked in a sweet dipping sauce served with cold rice noodles and a hedgerow of aromatic herbs, bun cha, a dish as addictive as nicotine. Through Eating Viet Nam, a food-focused paean to two times and two places (turn of the century Hanoi, early twenty-first century Ho Chi Minh City), Holliday is also understandably preoccupied by ‘the future’, and there is undoubtedly a creeping fear for many of us that development, growing affluence, internationalisation, town planning measures (based on the dreaded ‘Singapore model’, or a desire to ‘clean the streets’), are all one day going to destroy this way of eating as we still know it. And truth be told, that may come to pass. Some day.
Indeed, if we were to send a fictional Fowler to report on Ho Chi Minh City today, and ask him to look into the present state and possible future of Vietnamese street food, he might come away with a fairly grim view, especially if he wandered out of Graham Greene’s favourite hotel, the Majestic, and strolled up the pedestrianised Nguyen Hue Boulevard, where eating and drinking in public has recently been banned. They’re all there now, those symbols of impending homogenised doom: the Golden Arches, the Starbucks’ mermaid, a host of other fast food outlets, and ‘fancy’ could-be-anywhere-in-the-world-restaurants. Walking toward Ben Thanh Market, perhaps, Fowler would find a newly created courtyard promising ‘authentic street food’, where punters eat off paper plates with disposable chopsticks, and the likes of Bruno Mars and Taylor Swift can be heard screeching through the speakers. But if Phuong can coax Fowler away to the fringes of District 1, or beyond, where the restaurants have no names, no waiting lists, and no menus, where much of the city is still a riot of old school, al fresco, informal dining, what would strike him? The smell: that’d be the first thing that hits him, promising everything in exchange for his soul. The heat? He’d just have to ignore it. His shirt, yes, straightaway a rag. Soon, he would hardly remember his name, or what it was he came to escape, because he has just been served a bowl of bun thit nuong cha gio, succulent chunks of grilled pork and slices of crab spring roll served on top a bed of cold noodles, fresh herbs, bean sprouts, all doused with a sweetened, chilli-laced fish sauce dip that is just-so, and after one glorious mind-blowing, life-changing mouthful, we would be able to forgive him for not caring what the future may bring. Sure, you can come to Vietnam and learn a lot in the first few minutes, but at some point you will realise the immediate future, and the rest has to be eaten. ☐
Graham Holliday, Eating Viet Nam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table, HarperCollins, 2015, 352 pages 23