soc.culture.laos

Long-form reference · 3,415 words · about a 15-minute read

The group and its era

soc.culture.laos belonged to the national run of soc.culture.*, the Big Eight’s atlas of country groups, and like the rest of that run it was unmoderated. What made it unusual was that its readership had been assembled by a single event. The war ended on 2 December 1975 with the proclamation of the Lao People’s Democratic Republic, and in the years that followed a large part of the country left. Estimates of the number who crossed into Thailand run as high as 300,000; from the camps there the movement continued outward.

The destinations still shape the Lao diaspora. In France, where estimates begin around 140,000, it is concentrated in Paris and the Île-de-France. The United States resettled the largest number, placing lowland Lao and Hmong families on the west coast and in the upper Midwest — the San Francisco Bay area, Sacramento, Fresno, Minneapolis–Saint Paul and the industrial towns of Wisconsin; Australia and Canada took tens of thousands between them. About 30,000 Hmong had reached the United States by 1978; the 2000 census counted 186,310 Hmong Americans and 167,792 people of Lao ancestry.

Inside Laos there was almost nothing to post from: the country had a single internet service provider in 2000, serving about ten thousand users two years later. For the group’s whole active life this was therefore diaspora conversation and very little else, written from California, Minnesota, France, Australia and Canada about a place most of the writers could not reach.

The dates behind that last point are on the public record. The country-code domain .la was entered in IANA’s root database on 14 May 1996, and is administered by the Lao National Internet Center under the Ministry of Technology and Communications. Public access followed: the internet was introduced in Laos in 1997, and commercial provision began in 1999, with PlaNet Computers and GlobeNet. The World Bank’s series for individuals using the internet puts the country at 0.01 per cent of the population in 1998, 0.11 per cent in 2000, 0.36 per cent in 2004 and 1.17 per cent in 2006. It did not pass ten per cent until 2012, by which time the figure was 10.75 per cent.

Against a population that the 2015 census counted at 6,492,228, the number of people inside Laos who could have reached a news server during the group’s working life was measured in thousands rather than millions. The machines, the accounts and the connections all sat abroad.

A record of dates

What follows is a list of dated events drawn from the published record, offered as a record and nothing more: no party is characterised, and no question of cause or responsibility is settled here.

• 1964–1973 — more than two million tons of ordnance were dropped on Laos in some 580,000 bombing missions. This predates the newsgroup by decades.
• 1975–1992 — the Ban Vinai camp in Thailand operated; its population reached a peak of about 45,000 in 1985. On closure its residents were moved to other camps and centres, notably Wat Tham Krabok.
• 1986 — the New Economic Mechanism, a programme of economic liberalisation, was announced at the fourth congress of the Lao People’s Revolutionary Party.
• April 1994 — the First Thai–Lao Friendship Bridge opened, the first bridge across the lower Mekong: 1,170 metres, built at a cost of about A$42 million funded by the Australian government as development aid.
• 14 May 1996 — the .la country-code top-level domain was entered in the IANA root database.
• 1996 — UXO Lao, the national clearance programme, was formed. In the same year the United States Board on Geographic Names, the British Permanent Committee on Geographical Names and the Commission Nationale de Toponymie jointly established a romanisation system for Lao; there had been no national system in Laos, and none in the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, before it.
• 23 July 1997 — Laos and Myanmar were admitted to ASEAN on the same day; Vietnam had joined on 28 July 1995 and Cambodia followed on 30 April 1999.
• 1997 — the internet was introduced in Laos; commercial provision began in 1999.
• 2004 — Legacies of War, a United States advocacy organisation concerned with the unexploded ordnance in Laos, was founded.
• 2004–2005 — a final group of more than 15,000 refugees was resettled from Wat Tham Krabok to the United States.
• 3 December 2008 — Laos signed the Convention on Cluster Munitions on the day it opened for signature in Oslo, having been adopted in Dublin on 30 May that year; Laos ratified it on 18 March 2009 and it entered into force on 1 August 2010.
• 9–18 December 2009 — Vientiane hosted the 25th Southeast Asian Games, the first edition of the Games held in Laos.
• November 2010 — the first Meeting of States Parties to the Convention on Cluster Munitions was held in Laos.
• 2 February 2013 — Laos acceded to the World Trade Organization.

The later entries are given because this page is reached by readers looking for the country as much as for the newsgroup. They postdate the gateway this directory documents, which carried Usenet to e-mail between 2000 and 2004; the earlier entries predate it entirely.

What was discussed

A standing genre was connection. Families had been divided in 1975, and again by the camps and the resettlement that followed, so the group carried the traffic that produces: enquiries after anyone from a particular district or camp, questions about who had ended up where, requests passed on for relatives with no connection of their own.

Language was a technical problem as much as a cultural one. Lao script was encoded in Unicode from version 1.0, in the block U+0E80 to U+0EFF, but encoding is not support: fonts were scarce, Windows carried no official Lao support until Vista, and Phetsarath OT was authorised as the standard national font only in December 2011. Transliteration, vocabulary and the teaching of the script to children born abroad were recurring subjects.

Behind the spelling threads lay a genuine divergence rather than simple carelessness. Lao orthography was simplified in the 1960s, when letters used for words of Pali and Sanskrit origin were dropped in favour of a phonemic spelling, and it was reformed again in 1975 towards a shallower orthography in which the main vowels are written out explicitly. Some communities have gone on using the older standard. A readership that had left the country at different dates, and whose children were being taught by teachers trained under different rules, therefore held more than one defensible spelling of the same word.

The calendar was steadier ground. Theravada Buddhism is the tradition of about two-thirds of the population of Laos, and it travelled with the refugees into temples founded in American and French suburbs. Pi Mai Lao, the new year, runs from 13 or 14 April to 15 or 16 April and is kept with water poured over Buddha images, monks and elders, sand stupas raised in the temple grounds, and the release of animals; the That Luang festival was another fixed point. Announcements for these and for the fundraisers around them came round every year, as did food — one of the few subjects on which a dispersed community can be exact.

Another recurring subject was the generation that had not been there: children raised in the Midwest or the Paris suburbs, holding a language and a country at second hand. The hardest material was the war’s unfinished legacy. Of the cluster submunitions dropped on Laos between 1964 and 1973 — usually counted at some 260 million — about 80 million failed to explode: figures given by the Lao government in 2017 recorded 29,522 deaths and 21,048 injuries from explosive ordnance during the war and since. Clearance and responsibility were argued at length, as was the position of Hmong communities after 1975 — those who left, those who stayed, and the terms in which each should be described — on which lowland Lao posters, Hmong posters and outside readers held sharply differing views. The group aired those differences without resolving them.

Writing Lao on a network built for Latin text

Usenet’s article format was specified in RFC 1036, the Standard for Interchange of USENET Messages of December 1987, which requires printing ASCII in header fields such as From and Message-ID and otherwise defers to the Internet mail standard. Software of that generation assumed seven-bit Latin text throughout, and every non-Latin script had to be fitted around the assumption. Some scripts were fitted early because a national standards body had done the work: Thai had TIS-620, first set as a national standard in 1986 and raised to ISO/IEC 8859-11 in 2001; Microsoft’s Windows code page 874 extended it, and Apple shipped a Macintosh Thai encoding of its own. Lao had no equivalent. No part of ISO/IEC 8859 was ever allocated to Lao, and no Windows code page carried it.

The consequence was that eight-bit Lao text on the network of the 1990s was font-dependent rather than standard: a byte meant whatever the sender’s font said it meant, and a reader without the same font saw Latin gibberish. The reliable alternative was romanisation, and romanisation had its own difficulty. There was no romanisation system for Lao in the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, and no national system in Laos until 1996, when the United States Board on Geographic Names, the British Permanent Committee on Geographical Names and the Commission Nationale de Toponymie jointly agreed one. The American Library of Congress system, which marks vowel length with macrons, was used in catalogues alongside it, and French-influenced spellings inherited from the colonial administration ran alongside both. One place, one temple or one surname could therefore appear in an archive under several spellings, none of them wrong.

Unicode had encoded the script from the beginning. The Lao block occupies U+0E80 to U+0EFF, 128 code points of which 83 are assigned and 45 remain reserved. Version 1.0.0 of 1991 carried 70 characters; five were removed in version 1.0.1 of 1992 during unification with ISO 10646, leaving 65; two more were added in version 6.1 in 2012, fifteen in version 12.0 in 2019 to support Lao Pali, and one in version 15.0 in 2022. The block is sparse because its characters are allocated so as to sit opposite the equivalent characters of the Thai block immediately before it, which leaves gaps wherever Lao has no counterpart to a Thai letter. A font has to cover 27 consonants, 33 vowels, seven consonantal ligatures and four tone marks.

For anyone searching the archive now, two properties matter. The first is that Lao is traditionally written without spaces between words, spaces being reserved for the ends of clauses and sentences, so a search that assumes whitespace word boundaries will not behave as it does in English. The second is that a great deal of the traffic was never in Lao characters at all but in one or another romanisation, so a query typed in the Lao script may miss the very threads it is aimed at, and a query typed in one romanisation will miss those written in another.

Ordnance, clearance and the institutions that followed

The unexploded ordnance question has a documented institutional history that can be set out without adjudicating anything. The bombing of 1964 to 1973 delivered more than two million tons of ordnance in about 580,000 missions, a rate often expressed as one planeload every eight minutes, around the clock, for nine years. About 30 per cent of the cluster submunitions used are estimated to have failed to detonate, which is what left the contamination rather than the bombing alone.

UXO Lao, the national clearance programme, was formed in 1996 — that is, in the middle of the newsgroup’s working life, and at the point when the first Lao internet connections were being made. In the United States, Legacies of War was founded in 2004 to press for clearance funding. The funding series is a matter of public record: United States appropriations for clearance in Laos stood at roughly $2.5 to $3.0 million a year before 2010, with $2.7 million in the 2009 fiscal year; the figure was $5 million for 2010, $9 million for 2012, $10 million for 2013, $12 million for 2014, $15 million for 2015 and $19.5 million for 2016, followed by a pledge of $30 million a year for the 2016 to 2018 period.

The treaty history runs alongside it. The Convention on Cluster Munitions was adopted in Dublin on 30 May 2008 and opened for signature in Oslo on 3 December 2008; Laos signed on that day and ratified on 18 March 2009. The convention entered into force on 1 August 2010, and the first Meeting of States Parties was held in Laos in November 2010. Readers who followed these arguments on Usenet during the 1990s were following them before any of that machinery existed.

Where the readers actually were

The published figures give a shape to the readership. Estimates of the whole Lao diaspora run to something on the order of 800,000 people. In the United States the census series records 47,683 people of Lao ancestry in 1980 and 147,375 in 1990, before the figure quoted above for 2000; the Census Bureau count for 2022 was 245,220. Hmong Americans were counted at 260,073 in the 2010 census, the largest state populations being California with 86,989, Minnesota with 63,619 and Wisconsin with 47,127. Outside the United States, the French foreign ministry gives 140,000 for France; the 2016 Canadian census counted 24,580 and the 2011 Australian census 12,372; Japan recorded 3,859 in 2023.

The camps that produced those numbers are themselves dated. Ban Vinai, in Thailand, ran from 1975 to 1992 and peaked at about 45,000 residents in 1985 under a Thai camp commander appointed by the provincial government and the Ministry of Interior. When it closed, its remaining residents went to other camps and centres, chiefly Wat Tham Krabok, from which a final group of more than 15,000 was resettled to the United States in 2004 and 2005 — three decades after the movement began, and after the newsgroup’s busiest years had passed. Only about a thousand Hmong were evacuated to the United States in the first instance in 1975.

A readership distributed like that has no shared working day. Laos keeps Indochina Time, seven hours ahead of Coordinated Universal Time and without daylight saving; in the northern winter France is six hours behind that, the American Midwest thirteen, California fifteen, and eastern Australia three ahead. A group whose regulars sat in Fresno, Minneapolis, Paris, Sydney and Canada had no hour at which most of them were awake together. Usenet’s store-and-forward design absorbed that better than any synchronous medium of the period would have done: a message written after work in California was waiting when Paris opened its mail, and a thread advanced in relays rather than in conversation.

Food, music and the argument about names

Between the crises, the ordinary business of a culture group is food, music, books and the calendar, and in the Lao case the food carries a documented dispute about naming that a diaspora group was well placed to have. Sticky rice is the staple: consumption in Laos averages about 171 kilograms a person a year, and an attachment to it is commonly described as the essence of being Lao. With it go larb, a spiced mixture of minced meat or fish, and tam mak hung, the green papaya salad. The naming argument follows from demography: there are roughly six times as many ethnic Lao in the Isan region of north-eastern Thailand as in Laos itself, and dishes of Lao origin are widely presented abroad as north-eastern Thai, so that a diner in a Thai restaurant in an American city may be eating Lao food under another label.

The music has a firmer international standing. The khene is a mouth organ whose bamboo pipes are set into a hollowed hardwood wind chest; it is the national instrument of Laos, and is played to accompany the solo singer of mor lam, often alongside the plucked lute called the phin. In 2017 khaen music of the Lao people was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Players carried the instrument into resettlement: among those who performed it in the United States was a blind Laotian-born master who arrived as a refugee in the early 1980s.

The calendar, the manuscripts and the sporting year

The festival calendar that the existing account describes as steadier ground has a fixed shape across the year. Pi Mai is gazetted as 14 to 16 April; Boun Bang Fai, the rocket festival, in mid-May; Boun Khao Phansa, the beginning of the Buddhist rains retreat, in mid-July; Boun Ok Phansa, its end, in mid-October, kept with boat races; and the That Luang festival in early November, a pilgrimage to the stupa in Vientiane that King Setthathirat ordered built in 1566 and which serves as a national symbol. Lao National Day falls on 2 December. For readers in the northern-hemisphere diaspora the lunar dates had to be converted afresh each year and then reconciled with school terms and working weeks, which is why the announcements came round annually rather than once.

The written tradition behind the temple year is old and materially fragile. Most Lao literature survived by continuous copying on to palm leaves, the leaves stored in wooden caskets in monastery libraries. The classical repertoire includes Phra Lak Phra Lam, the national epic and the Lao telling of the Ramayana, and the epic Sin Xay, composed by the poet Pang Kham during the reign of King Sourigna Vongsa. Buddhist texts were written in Pali or transcribed into Lao using the Tham script, a separate letterform from the everyday script and one that Unicode did not accommodate at the same time.

The preservation record is dated and countable. The National Library of Laos was established in 1956. In 1988 the Toyota Foundation, with the Lao Ministry of Information and Culture, began the first serious attempt to catalogue and digitise Lao primary sources, addressing more than 300,000 phuk — palm-leaf books — held in over 800 monasteries. The later Digital Library of Lao Manuscripts has preserved more than 86,000 texts and microfilmed 12,000.

The largest sporting event the country has hosted fell after the group’s busiest years: Vientiane hosted the 25th Southeast Asian Games from 9 to 18 December 2009, the first time the Games had been held in Laos, the country having declined to host the 1965 Southeast Asian Peninsular Games on grounds of cost.

Context

Smallness was the group’s defining quality and, for its regulars, part of its value: traffic was thin enough that the same names recurred, that a question was usually answered by whoever had answered the last one, and that arguments ran between people who expected to meet again next week. Google’s archive of the group lists on the order of thirty-five thousand messages, spam included.

It sat in a busy corner of the hierarchy: soc.culture.cambodia was the nearest neighbour in circumstance as well as in the alphabet; soc.culture.thai carried the country through which most Lao refugees had passed; soc.culture.vietnamese sat alongside both; and soc.culture.asean offered the regional frame. Readers overlapped, and regional subjects crossed between them.

What survives is modest and genuine: a population scattered across four continents keeping one shared address at the moment that first became possible. Because the country itself was almost entirely offline throughout, the archive is an artefact of the diaspora rather than of Laos — which is the most important thing it records.