DURING MY YEARS studying literature I was told what makes a writer, although I can’t really see how the list of formative ingredients is any different to what makes any person who she or he is. A writer, I was told, is what she or he reads or believes in, the sum of his or her experiences, including those that happened before popping out of the gourd, learning to read and write, absorbing the cultural traditions of his or her country.

     The last of those pieces in the jigsaw was the most problematic for me because, compared to the great nations of the world, Laos seems little more than an empty space. My own province, which had been a kingdom in its own right long before I was born, is not even mentioned as one of the first seven kingdoms in the origin myth of the Lao people. At first, I thought it a disadvantage not to have centuries of national and literary tradition to inspire me. Now I know it is an advantage: I can come from anywhere, go anywhere, be anyone and write anything. I am free … well, almost … and I can sum up my traditions, as lived and as remembered from my education, in a couple of pages. And here they are – in my words, not those of my teachers.

     One day in 1890, France noticed an empty space between China and Siam and Vietnam and Burma. All the surrounding countries had picnicked in this space from time to time, but none found it healthy, or worthwhile, to hang around too long. ‘Alors,’ said the French, ‘Le Laos, c’est nous.’ It wasn’t so much wanting Laos, as they called it, as a possession; more a case of not wanting ‘les Anglais’ having their paws on a geographical construct they almost certainly would have called Laoland. And to be frank, nobody else much wanted the place, not least the Lao, because ten times more of them lived in Siam than in the empty space without a name. Why the French called the country ‘Laos’ is lost somewhere in the Quai d’Orsay; maybe they just couldn’t bring themselves to translate into the world’s diplomatic language of that time the old name for my country: Land of a Million Elephants and a White Parasol. The French kept the name Viang Chan, writing it ‘Vientiane’, which was said to be the capital of the empty space – although how you can have a capital without having a country I don’t know. Vientiane had just a few jungle-covered ruins to indicate a million elephants had ever been there. The French saw it as a nice, quiet place and when they needed a rest from frenetic Vietnam went lotus-eating in Laos and nobody came along to say, ‘Excuse me, but you’re sitting in my country.’

     ‘Credulous, mendicant and incapable of either initiative or hard work’ – that’s a direct quotation on the nature of the Lao from a report home by one of the first French colons, the same guys who invented diplomacy. Actually they wrote it in French. At the time the Lao didn’t understand French, or English, so they were not offended. In fact, some of us welcomed the French with open arms and other parts of the anatomy, causing them to write yet more accounts for a French public that was at the time into the ‘noble savage’ and still held to their hearts Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins and Foundations of Inequality Among Men and The Social Contract, describing us Lao women as ‘adorable, soft and playful’. That’s a little bit better than credulous and mendicant, but we can be almost as bitchy as our French sisters … when appropriate.

     Lao life was not much affected by the French presence. We didn’t have to worry about ‘liberté, égalité and fraternité’; such notions did not extend to the Lao, to whom the honour of actually once having had a country was bestowed so it might be taken away from them. The French did not trouble us in 1907 when they signed a treaty with Siam giving Laos to France. We didn’t even know about it until ten years later, when some Thais, Chinese and Hmong in the north informed the French in no uncertain manner that they did not need civilising. And even then, us lowland Lao, it must be said, did not exactly jump up from our sleeping mats to kick out the invaders, particularly those of us in the south. We even thought we had our own little kingdom – Champassak – which had less to do with Luang Prabang or Vientiane and more to do with Siam. So if it didn’t bother Siam, what harm was there in having a few Frenchmen around? I suppose we were indeed rather credulous, and when the French told us they were here only to protect us we just shrugged and thought them a bit odd. There was plenty of land to go around, so live and let live and never mind; I imagine native Americans felt much the same way when they served turkey dinners to Puritan exiles from England.

     Much has happened since then. Before I was born, Pierre Ngin wrote the first modern Lao novel in 1944 (Phra Phouthhahoup Saksit, or The Sacred Buddha Image). He wrote in Lao, when the French had their backs turned and Japan was preparing to lock them up, and when, anyway, Champassak was divided between Thai control of everything on the west bank of the Mekong River and French control of everything on the east, a situation that lasted until November 1946. That was more than a year after the Japanese had popped in to liberate us and popped out again. Then Champassak became a province of a larger kingdom and was ‘returned’ to France by Thailand. ‘Pierre Ngin’ doesn’t sound like a Lao name, but he has a road named after him in Vientiane, and Karl Marx does not; nor does Charles de Gaulle, for that matter. Then, in 1957, Maha Sila Viravong wrote History of Laos. Don’t bother looking for it in the shops – history is always changing in Laos, and even if you manage to pin it down between covers, characters, pages and even whole chapters can fall out or be rearranged. In the 1960s, while the rest of the world was into flower power and a cold war that grew pretty hot around here, Maha Sila went on to write The Lao Language Dictionary and The Rules of Lao Grammar. Although these opuses are still great hits at the Lao Language and Literature Department at the National University of Laos, where I studied for five years, neither is much read outside its walls. I have racked my brains, but I can’t explain why this should be so. After all, these seminal works are about our thirty-three written consonants and thirty-nine vowels, and the handful of vowels written nowhere but existing in the ‘inner’ minds of literate Lao. And like most, his books start at the beginning and go on to the end, then stop. Lao writers have been following that formula ever since: logical, informative, correctly spelled, straightforward and in the Lao language. What more can readers possibly want? Perhaps we Lao lack a good agent.

     Maha Sila’s daughter, Douangdeuane Viravong – Dok Ked to her friends – started DokKed Publishing, printed her own works and married the other writer of the day, Outhine Bounyavong. Language and literature follow the usual Lao way of getting things done and undone, and are very much a family business.

     While I was busy with the grammar of Lao poetry in university, in Champassak my dear Dad and Mum, a couple not at all credulous, and certainly not mendicant, were hard at work in the rice fields and, thanks to Dad’s initiative, plucking profits from his coffee plantation up on the Bolaven Plateau. Dad didn’t steal the coffee plantation so much as just find it, much as the French had found Laos: overgrown, untended and deserted, and because nobody told him otherwise he presumed that if he cleaned it up it was his. Mum and Dad knew nothing of what I have said about literature; it is no disrespect to them to say that neither had ever read a book, and they didn’t realise that the Lao language, which they used every day, had a dictionary and a grammar to inform Lao how properly to use their language. They were a bit surprised when I was accepted by the National University of Laos, and even more surprised when I decided to join the few who, with absolutely no coercion, elected to study in the Lao Language and Literature Department. It wasn’t easy explaining to Dad-Mum what Lao literature was, partly because Dad had been struck deaf the day I was born, though I am assured the two events were unconnected. It was fortunate for me that before leaving the village electricity arrived and, hot on its wires, maybe even as the posts and pylons were still going up, came an agent selling televisions on a pay-by-the-month basis. My going to university and the arrival of television were all part of the great mystery of development, and the Party said both were good and we all agreed. I think my Mum connected the two and expected to see me on TV. Before I left home we did the traditional ‘basi’, with the untraditional TV making a racket in the background, to put my thirty-two ‘khwan’ in order so they could function as one soul and protect me in my learning of Lao literature, a hazardous occupation if ever there was one.

     I almost forgot: there was a long war in Laos that didn’t affect me much because I had the sense to be born well after it was over and the current regime is the only one I have ever known. Mum and Dad support it; so does everyone. You will not find a single house in our village that possesses three elephants, the symbol of the old royalist regime. But everyone has a least a hammer or a sickle, sometimes both.

     Such are the vagaries of history; it amuses me that, but for a twitch of a French cartographer’s pen nib, my village would have been in Cambodia – in which case I’d be writing more about ‘killing fields’ than tilling fields.

     Even the super-literate French, when Laos was theirs, never wrote much about my country outside of the Paris journal Le Tour du monde, in which the locals were either ignoble savages attacking the brave explorers looking for Laos or noble savages being civilised by paternal colonists. Among the colonists there certainly were people who could read and no doubt some of them had good intentions. In the heyday of French Laos, before the Great Depression bit into budgets and stopped such frivolities, the French in Laos had even sent seven Lao to university in Hanoi. None of the magnificent seven studied literature, and they probably learned more about France and Vietnam than Laos. One can’t blame the French for that. They clearly wanted to show the Lao the example next door of what could be done with a little hard work. And the Lao did learn. Before you could say ‘sacré bleu’ the Indochinese Communist Party was born and the great seminar of Dien Bien Phu rather put a cap on French teaching. The French had never really found Laos. I’m not sure they truly looked that hard. Anyway, after they were gone it was the Lao’s turn to look for Laos.

     One thing that seemed sure was that the Lao would not find Laos in its literature. Laos, let’s face it, is not internationally acclaimed for its literature. And that is not because only Lao can read Lao, although I admit it is hard to like or dislike a book if you can’t read it. Like most countries, Laos, by which I mean the one with a million elephants and a white parasol, had its Golden Age. That was at least 450 years ago, when Lan Xang moved its capital from Luang Prabang to Vientiane to catch up with most of the other Lao, who lived across the Mekong in what has become Thailand. At that time it was allied closely with Lan Na (which means ‘Million Rice Fields’), Chiang Mai after the Thais renamed it. Cultural, religious and literary exchanges were so frequent that the two allies developed a special script, which they called ‘Tham’, although some linguists say that Tham is nothing more than the Yuan script used in old northern Thailand.

     To bring us right up to date, by delving a little more into the past, an internationally funded project had, as of January 2010, made more than 12,000 palm-leaf manuscripts available on the internet. These manuscripts took years to collect from all over Laos. Well, you can imagine my relief, and the relief of all students of Lao language and literature – 12,000 manuscripts to wade through would have certainly changed my five-year course at the National University of Laos into a post-graduate vocation. Imagine also my excitement. Laos has a written past. ‘Laos found!’ It would have been nice to end my journey there. But one little problem: it’s all in Tham script, I can’t read a word of it.

     So, I continue looking for Laos. And if it doesn’t exist? I’ll just have to invent it. After all, isn’t that what writers do?