Here in Vientiane, we get two TV channels that play English-language movies. Star Movies generally shows shoot-‘em-up action flicks or slash-‘em-up horror films. HBO also leans to more violent offerings, but occasionally it shows a classic. On a recent evening, the HBO selection was the original Superman from 1978.
Times like that make me almost numb with the surreal quality of our lives. Here we sat, curled up on comfy sofas we had made in Shanghai and using my giant nutcracker barstool from Germany as an end table. Tony leaned back on the pillows from Turkey, munching on Lao-labeled Oreos and drinking Diet Coke. I sipped red wine from Italy, resting my glass on a tray from the Chatuchak Market in Bangkok, as we listened to Lex Luthor plot to steal kryptonite from Addis Ababa.
The first eight or nine times I saw this movie, I had no idea where Addis Ababa was. Last year, I applied for a job there (International Community School of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia).
A similarly surreal moment happened a few months ago, when we sat in a Chinese dumpling shop here in Vientiane, waiting for our to-go order. It was Halloween weekend, but the restaurant’s TV blared National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation. We seemed to have passed through a hole in the time-space continuum.
The fact is these “surreal moments” happen all the time. We see children in the most remote Southeast Asian villages wearing Mickey Mouse T-shirts and Nike shoes. Tuk-tuk drivers crank their radios and jam to Beyoncé. We get take-away “Hawaiian Pizza” from the Swedish Baking House, located about four blocks from the Mekong River. My black-and-red “ethnic-looking” dishes from a tiny shop in China are stamped with the logos for Target and Kohl’s, so I could just as well have bought them in Detroit.
Maybe “surreal” is the new “real” for us.
