The Good Life?

This is Sing’s eldest daughter, showing off her handbag outside the house her father built.

Her name means “Be Loved”. Be Loved’s younger sister is called “Be Happy” and the baby’s name means “General”. Appropriately since, like many youngest children, she isn’t shy about asserting her needs.

Sing chose his daughters’ names before he was married — late for Laos, at twenty-eight. His wife and he were working in business administration in Vientiane, the capital, when mutual friends set them up on a blind date. On their second date, five years ago, they married.

Their eldest is four and a bit. You do the maths.

We spent the last two days with Sing, trekking the Nam Ha protected area near Luang Nam Tha in northern Laos, and he invited junior to his home village to meet his daughters.

“When I was working in marketing administration, I worked six days a week. Out of seven, I had only one day off, the Sunday,” he says. “I never saw my family. Then the company moved to a different province. And for one or two whole months I would not see my daughters.”

So he chucked in the career for which he had studied for seven years. Studied English. And became a guide. He works three days a week, on average, and gets to watch his little daughters grow.

The village he lives in is a largish one. About five hundred families. Several hundred kids. A good swathe of whom, when we visit, are chasing each other in and out of the houses, helping junior in his quest to capture a chicken in a bamboo wicker hen-house, gawping, slightly timidly, at the giant Westerners who have lumbered into their midst, or, in the case of this little one, mugging for my camera.

Mademoiselle was totally fascinated by the camera.

Giant and, in my case, rather smelly Westerners. We’ve covered 40-odd kilometres of fairly constant up and down in sauna-esque conditions over the last two days and the baby lasts about a nanosecond in the crook of my arm before mewling politely, if insistently, for her mother.

Sing and his wife are an interesting couple. Both, clearly, very happy with their three young daughters, planning two more, and overjoyed to have found each other so — by Lao standards — late in life. Also both meditative, serious-minded people.

She speaks about as many words of English as I speak words of Lao, so I talk mainly to Sing. Both of them come from the Hmong tribal minority, whose language is similar to Chinese. There are Hmong scattered throughout northern Laos, northern Vietnam, and the Chinese border region. Around Luang Namtha they are one of the larger tribal minorities.

One of the few (by Western standards) possessions Sing keeps in the big and beautiful house he built is a qeej, a musical instrument he translates as a “cannon”. It’s a large mouth organ with six curving bamboo pipes, which the Hmong play at weddings, funerals and New Year. You can inhale, exhale or sing into the mouthpiece, and stop the pipes individually or multiply to produce a tone.

“Did it belong to your father?” I ask.

“No,” he says. “I bought it six years ago. Very few Hmong people play it now. But we need people to play, to keep the music alive.”

There are three different melodies that are played at funerals, Sing says. One for babies, one for people in their middle years, and one for the old. Rather than bring bad luck on the house by asking him to play a funeral song, I ask him to play me a New Year song.

Playing the qeej. An uncanny sound...

It’s an unearthly, very ghostly sound, like a more breathy and hollow accordion, with a tonality that’s other-worldly. It bears absolutely no relation to the pentatonic or octave scales I’m familiar with. Schonberg, I think, would have loved it. Z plays it, happily as Larry.

Communism has been unkind to most of South-East Asia, but here in rural Laos, where it meets agrarian animism and ancient traditions, it seems to work very, very well.

When Sing and his wife married, they left Vientiane province to come here. They identified a plot of land in the village. Sing went to the chief of the village to ask his permission to build there. He bought the bricks, bought some timber, bought corrugated iron and gathered bamboo. And built himself a house.

“You don’t need to buy?” I ask.

“No, no,” he says. “In the city, you need to pay money. In the country, you just ask if you can build a house. You ask if you can farm some land or plant some trees.”

They keep chickens and pigeons. They have no pigs, no farmland. “Farming is a hard life,” says Sing.

The village guide who trekked with us farms. He is up at 2 or 3am to tap his rubber trees, then up to the dizzyingly steep patch of land he and his wife cleared when they married, while his daughters gather forest plants as fodder for the pigs.

Zhang, our village guide, working on his land.

He grows, however, everything that his family needs. From tomatoes, pumpkins, aubergines, melon and papaya through to lemongrass, ginger, culantro, holy basil and chilli, from rice to traditional herbal cures. They sell spare chillis and the occasional chicken at the market, but essentially it is subsistence.

Lemongrass and a herb which is used for strength.

It does seem, from the villages we visit, that more than land is held in common. Everybody looks after the children, who play happily together and run in and out of each other’s houses as if they were in common. Doors are always open. (Laos has one of the lowest crime rates in the world.) Festivals are shared. The village pigeons all share a dove cote.

When Sing talks about the economic benefits of rubber trees, he says, “For my village, the income is 100,000 dollars in one year,” rather than identifying an individual who makes an impressive living from it, as folk would in Thailand or the West.

In the West, happiness, or even contentment, is a struggle. We medicate for the lack of it. Unhappy adolescents take out their rage in crime. We believe we are entitled to a million and one possessions, laptops, HDTVs, hundred-dollar moisturisers… Our children go through lives deluged in streams of plastic crap. To see people living so contentedly with so little is a beautiful thing.

The handbag, by the way, is furry. And a source of intense pride.