4th Anniversary Issue of Cha

The fourth anniversary issues of CHA has arrived.

It's hard to believe it's been four years already, but a big congratulations to all of them in Hong Kong. This issue was guest edited by Robert E. Wood (poetry) and Royston Tester (prose).

 This issue, they have poetry from Christopher Barnes, Robert Masterson, John McKernan, Tristan Coleshaw, Chris Santiago, Sonia Saikaley, DeWitt Clinton, Kenneth Alewine, Dena Rash Guzman, Samuel Arizpe, Judith Toler, Rheea Mukherjee, David W. Landrum, W.F. Lantry, Mia Ayumi Malhotra, Anuradha Vijayakrishnan, Nicholas Y.B. Wong, Bernard Henrie, Mike Ladd, and Louis Marvin.

 In Fiction, they have pieces from Alzo David-West, Gun G. Ayurzana, Matthew Davis, John David Harding, Sharon Hashimoto, Shivani Sivagurunathan, and Genevieve Yim.

They are accepting submissions for Issue #16, which is scheduled for February 2012. Ankur Agarwal (poetry) and Mag Tan (prose) will act as guest editors and read the submissions with them. Deadline is set at 15 December.

Lao Civet Coffee?

A few weeks ago we talked about the growing range of Lao coffees being offered to the market. Lao forests are facing significant reduction by a wide range of development projects and illegal lumber harvesting reducing the habitat for any number of creatures, including civets.

We often associate civet coffee with islands such as the Phillipines, or Sumatra and Vietnam where a pound can cost as much as $600. But these little guys are certainly plentiful in Laos, too, and maybe we should pay a little more attention to its choice in Lao coffee berries. 

Personally, I'm not in that much of a hurry to drink civet coffee, but there are certainly many others in the world who are, and this approach might be more ecologically sound than, say, making a massive hydroelectric dam without taking anyone else's opinion into consideration. But it's just a thought. 

Lao theater: Court Forms

In 1993, James R. Brandon's The Cambridge Guide to Asian Theatre discussed the different forms of Lao theater, noting that there were three key forms: proto-theatrical indigenous forms, court forms that emulated Khmer-Thai models, and modern popular genres from the 20th century combining folk forms and popular Thai theatre elements such as the likay. Lao American theater is taking some different directions and inspiration. It will be interesting to see what the next forms will be when these communities get an opportunity to connect for an extended period of time with adequate resources to create a meaningful exchange.

According to Brandon:

"Court forms of dance theatre were established as Lao kings copied customs of powerful neighboring monarchs. Tradition holds that Cambodian (Khmer) court dance, along with the Ramayana and Jataka repertoire were introduced to Laos by Prince Fa Nguan in 1353. During the 14th century the Lao kingdom of Lan Sang ('Million Elephants') was established and in this time the Khmer monarchs with their troupe of female wives-dancers were the epitome of potent kingship in the region. Keeping up with the Khmer meant establishing female court dance with movement and repertoire modeled on Khmer practice. The Lao kings were never as rich as the rulers of Angkor. Nor could the Lao compete later in the 15th century with Thai rulers who, first at Ayutthaya and later in Bangkok, emulated Khmer practice... Just as Lan Sang in the early period aped Angkor, the small courts established by partition in 1700- Luang Prabang, Wiangjun and Chapassak - imitated Thai models: Thai female court dance LAKON FAI NAI, male masked dance drama KHON and shadow play NANG yai were taught and performed at court. The Lao chose not to alter the forms: the Royal Lao Ballet of the 1960s in Luang Prabang included only female dancers, the best of whom had trained in Bangkok. Rather than staging full dance dramas like the Thai and Cambodians, this smaller court favoured solo and small group dances" (Brandon, 191)

This entry is obviously approaching 20 years old, but it's an interesting start to consider how we discuss the journey of Lao theater and where we might see it go in the years ahead.

Lao American Steampunk: Decolonizing Space and Time

Silver Goggles recently posted a great commentary on the need to decolonize geography within Steampunk literature, and I would argue we should do so within both historical fiction and speculative literature as well.

As an applied example, when I wrote my Lovecraftian historical horror story "What Hides and What Returns," there were questions I had to address as a writer in order to bring a reader into Laos, minimizing confusion with a minimum of compromise.

To that end, I set the story just after 1893 when Vientiane and Champassak had been bundled together with Luang Prabang to create a state that was a French protectorate called Laos, and a Lao narrator who worked often enough with the falang that he might reasonably refer to it as Laos. For stories set earlier than 1893, we have to be even more aware of anachronisms that take us out of a story, that suspension of disbelief.

In fiction, when we write place names, do we employ French or US/English romanization to keep it authentic?  It's not always cut and dry. For a historical example, many Americans secretly stationed in Laos during the civil war in the 1960s commonly referred to the Plain of Jars as the PDJ, an abbreviation of Plaines des Jarres.

When we're using an ethnic Lao narrator, one might argue, it may not matter and you could even use a non-standard romanization instead of Long Tieng (Long Cheng), or Luang Prabang (Luang Phrabang).

Radically, there could be great power in this: Lao names and geography written by Lao the way Lao themselves feel it should be spelled, and not just the way some falang missionary or policy wonk decided we should write the names of our cities and landmarks.  That would be significant step towards decolonization.

But we also need to decolonize time. Not everyone uses the solar calendar, after all.

For Lao, the year 2011 is mostly 2554, at least since April (Deuane Si or Mesa), depending on the system we're using. These days, we're following a system that figures 543 BC as Year 1.

The Lao calendar has elements of Sino-Vietnamese and Thai-Khmer calendars, and are based on a solar-lunar mix.

Lao years are reckoned by solar phases, but our months are determined by lunar phases. This is different from European and American calendars where the months are also determined by the sun. There is also reportedly an earlier Lao system in which year one would correspond with the year 638 BC, just to complicate things.

It's not just a case of calibrating a time machine by simply setting a dial + or - 534 years.

As a further example of the complicated nature of Time, especially in a decolonized Steampunk setting, bear in mind the traditional Chinese time-keeping system. Here we see the hours associated with different creatures of the zodiac. Chinese hours are actually about two Western hours:

23:00 – 01:00: 子 Rat
01:00 – 03:00: 丑 Ox
03:00 – 05:00: 寅 Tiger
05:00 – 07:00: 卯 Rabbit
07:00 – 09:00: 辰 Dragon
09:00 – 11:00: 巳 Snake
11:00 – 13:00: 午 Horse
13:00 – 15:00: 未 Goat
15:00 – 17:00: 申 Monkey
17:00 – 19:00: 酉 Rooster
19:00 – 21:00: 戌 Dog
21:00 – 23:00: 亥 Pig

Talking about time in a truly multicultural Steampunk world should take this into account. Time travel a la H.G. Wells' classic 'The Time Machine' now becomes interestingly complicated when we consider whose sense of time applies. The visitor, or the visited?

But let's look at an additional challenge for the role of time in Lao fiction: In Laos, we can run into big headaches because time is not homogeneous among the 100+ cultures who live within its frequently shifting borders.

To elaborate on the importance of this question, consider that in the mountains and jungles of Laos, highlanders such as the Hmong used time as the measure of distance. "It's two days of walking to the next village." Miles, kilometers, etc. are very abstract concepts to them in the old days, let alone 20,000 leagues under a sea to people born in a landlocked nation.

This is, of course, just the tip of the temporal iceberg, but I think it opens up some very intriguing questions for better Steampunk set among Southeast Asian cultures. And I hope it raises the bar for anyone who decides to use a English protagonist using a modified Mayan time travel device to visit ancient Mayao in the highlands of Annam to discover the secret to immortality or some other fantastic scenario.