After a slow couple of years, reading-wise, I finally finished my Burma reading list in January (only three years and change after I commenced), and then, feeling newly motivated, I motored through Laos in two months. Someday soon I hope to go back and write about all the books I read from Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, and Burma—but just in case I don’t get to it, I highly recommend Malaysian novels The Rice Mother, Evening Is the Whole Day, The Ghost Bride, and The Terracotta Bride, Singaporean literary fiction Ponti and the Crown Colony mysteries of Ovidia Yu (also, Crazy Rich Asians doesn’t really need my plug, but I read the whole series and enjoyed every minute of it), the absolutely brilliant Bangkok Wakes to Rain from Thailand (plus short story collections Bright and Sightseeing and the classic novel Monsoon Country), and from Burma, the charming travelogues of Ma Thanegi, as well as the memoir From the Land of Green Ghosts—but for now, I want to make some quick notes about my Laotian reads while my memory is still fresh.

I started my reading with a book that wasn’t even on my list, and wasn’t written by someone from Laos: Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures. Although I generally try to avoid starting with books by non-native authors, I am glad I made an exception for this one. Not only is it one of the best non-fiction books I’ve ever read, it was also a perfect introduction to America’s “quiet war” in Laos and the repercussions thereof, including the mass immigration of the Hmong people to the US and elsewhere, that gave context to all of my subsequent reads. Although the focus of the book is on the Lee family’s experience attempting to navigate the United States medical system while seeking treatment for their epileptic daughter, a huge amount of cultural and historical background is necessary to understand the tragic communication failure between Lia Lee’s parents and her American doctors. Fadiman manages to make all this background information as fascinating and heartbreaking as the central narrative.

I read two more books that dealt wholly or largely with war and emigration. The Latehomecomer by Kao Kalia Yang tells the story of her Hmong family’s flight from Laos to Ban Vinai refugee camp in Thailand (where she was born) and finally to Michigan. It has huge emotional impact and was a great book to read after The Spirit Catches You, offering a sort of rebuttal to Fadiman’s view of the Hmong refugee experience. While the Yang family’s story echoes that of the Lees’ in many ways, it is always different to see things from the inside. Although Fadiman wrote with extreme respect for her subjects, and although she went to great lengths to integrate herself into the Lee family, she nevertheless writes from an outsider’s perspective, and there are elements of her subjects that remain opaque to the reader. In The Latehomecomer, it is much easier to identify with the Hmong characters, both with Yang herself and with her parents and grandmother. It is an absolutely beautiful work of memoir about the difficulty of making a new home when the home you love is lost.

How to Pronounce Knife by Souvankham Thammavongsa is a collection of short stories about first- and second-generation Laotians in the US and Canada. Like Kao Kalia Yang, Thammavongsa was born in a refugee camp in Thailand, and grew up largely in North America. Many of her stories are filled with a sense of displacement, which provide a background to the interpersonal relationships that are the real focus of the work. My favorite was the story about a former boxer who works in his sister’s nail salon; the relationship between the siblings is subtly and carefully drawn, tenderness couched in insults. There is love and longing at the heart of all of these stories, in a way that was often surprising and beautiful.

Wanting at least one work that predated the civil war of the 1970s, I turned to Laos Folklore of Farther India, which was surprisingly readable as far as these things go. There were clever thieves, greedy wives, humble princesses, and ambitious priests, plus a host of animals and spirits. However, I can’t help but think of this sort of collections as a template. Folktales are meant to be told out loud, with embellishment, and they are written down here as mere plot summaries, necessarily losing something in the process.

It was very hard to find Laotian literature written by people actually living in Laos; I could find only two collections of short stories, which were all written by members of a single family (Mother’s Beloved is a 1991 collection by Outhine Bounyavong, and When the Sky Turns Upside-Down is by his widow, Dok Ked, and her sister, Douang Champa, children of Lao scholar Sila Viravong). I didn’t love either of these collections. Mother’s Beloved I found particularly slight, with a simplistic and obvious morality–war is bad, modesty and generosity are good, it always pays to be kind to strangers. One or two stories attempted an O. Henry-esque twist that was visible from the outset. When the Sky Turns Upside-Down I found a little more interesting. One thing that particularly piqued my curiosity was the fact that, although most of the stories concern women and their place in society, the narrators are almost exclusively male. Without knowing more about Laotian culture, I can only guess why that would be, or whether there is subversive intent. The stories in this collection also tend a little moralistic and sappy for my taste; many of them are prescriptive rather than descriptive, offering lessons about how a woman should behave (mainly, with self-respect), and how women would like men to behave (abstemiously). However, these two collections seem to be the only translated books by native authors that offer a glimpse into everyday life in Laos.

I learned some interesting things about Laos. I had not known about the quiet war, a proxy war in which American CIA operatives secretly trained Hmong men to wage guerrilla warfare against the communist Pathet Lao forces. I didn’t know that when the Pathet Lao won they attempted to exterminate the entire Hmong population of Laos, many of whom fled to Thailand and spent years in limbo waiting to be granted entry into some distant country, where their sacrifices would not be acknowledged and their presence would be resented. I learned about the Plain of Jars, an incredible mesolithic site, every inch of which was bombed by the US during the war. It is estimated that 80 million unexploded cluster bombs remain on the site, making it fairly impossible to conduct archeological research there.

I spent four years reading refugee stories from Burma before moving on to Laos; now I am reading Cambodia, which is much of the same. In the context of the current genocide in Gaza, it makes me feel somewhat hopeless. I am appalled by how the US has funded and instigated so many conflicts in an attempt to protect our “interests,” seemingly without regard to the human cost. In the 1970s it was a futile attempt to prevent communism from existing. Now it’s keeping our toehold in the Middle East—or maybe appeasing evangelical voters so that individual politicians can retain their power—but what remains the same is that people are losing their homes, their lives, their children, people are starving and fleeing and dying, and our leaders are continuing to meddle in foreign affairs and then doing their best to act like it’s got nothing to do with us.