Another Quiet American
by Brett Dakin
Asia Books $90
His days as an Asian studies student at Princeton University rapidly coming to a close, Brett Dakin was looking for a new challenge in 1998. He found it on the notice board of the Princeton-in-Asia programme, in the form of an opening for an unpaid language and marketing consultant to the National Tourism Authority (NTA) of the government of Laos, which was then just opening its borders to lure tourists.
Dakin was intrigued. Despite speaking fluent Chinese and Japanese, he spoke no Lao and knew little about the reclusive hardline communist state.
Yet his book is a fascinating glimpse, albeit through the eyes of a privileged young American, of life as a minor bureaucrat in a country rapidly opening to the modern world amid the fallout from the 1997 Asian economic crisis.
The other quiet American of the title is not the author or a Graham Greene character, but a retired Vietnam war pilot called Joe, a long-term Laos resident who has a love-hate relationship with the country. While Dakin takes to life in Laos, he's reluctant to stay too long, lest he ends up like Joe, 'another quiet, bitter American who has renounced his ties to the US, but had yet to find a home for himself in Asia'.
