I almost began by writing, “My friend Alan Potkin, whom I met in Laos,” but then I remembered that he and I have never met. I left Laos in 1995, just before he arrived; he wrote to me after I’d left. He was a fan of the infamous Vientiane Times parody that everyone in Vientiane believed I’d written, but which, alas, I didn’t. Somehow, after years of dilatory correspondence, I’ve merged his name into my memories of Vientiane, to the point that I now think of him as “my friend from Laos.”
Alan’s a Mekong river conservationist, based now at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies at Northern Illinois University. This is the kind of work he does. He’s also a combat veteran of the Second Indochina War.
“You wouldn’t recognize the erstwhile lovely sleepy charming Vientiane,” he wrote to me not long ago, “now that it’s become Sinicized. Not in a good way.”
I can’t bear to imagine.
Alan’s gone Trump, alas—it happens to the people you’d least expect it—but we’re still friends.
I have to say tha…
