I am hurtling down a dirt road in a minivan with 12 Israeli backpackers. My seat partner on my left, Steve, asks me how I booked this minivan, I reply that my host booked it for me, and he replies that it is one of the good ones, a trusty Toyota and a trusty driver, it wouldn't break down on the way out of Luang Prabang. He turns and yells something in Hebrew to another one. They are young and fit, I am old and decrepit. At 21 they have swapped their Tavors and drones for hiking poles and GoPros. Steve is the only one who talks to me throughout the 5 hour minivan ride (originally four, but two of the gap year kids overslept).
At 7.30am I strap on my backpack and stroll to Khem Khong Road and find my minivan. I greet the backpacker outside but he doesn't dignify me with a response or look me in the eye. This one I call Ginger, because he looks about as sharp as a bowling ball. The Lao driver is standing outside, perplexed. It's 8.30am now. I chain smoke thick Lao Brand Tobacco in the chilly morning air. The khon Lao languidly set up their stalls advertising sunset cruises on the Mekong while one of the Israeli girls haggles over oranges. In the end we wait for over an hour for the stragglers to arrive. I eat two leaf-packages of pulut hitam and wish I have coffee to wash it down with.
13 backpacks are strapped to the top with tarp and rope. Finally we bundle ourselves into the van. Steve is the last in, one of the stragglers, with his girlfriend Noa. He asks Ginger in Hebrew if everyone there is Israeli. No, Ginger replies, there is a ching chong as well. Ching chong? He notices me finally. Steve smiles, then we make small talk about our travels. Mentally I regret not correcting Ginger: that I am not the only ching chong present, because the driver is a chink as well, but it occurs to me that for him the driver and the Toyota are one entity.
For now, I rank slightly higher in the Israeli hierarchy.
Our skilful Lao driver swerves to avoid a pothole. Finally we are out of Luang Prabang and on the road to Nong Khiaw. We curve around the side of a mountain and descend into the valley. Pha Daeng and Pha Khew Lom come into view, tall and majestic. Separating the twin giants is the Nam Ou river, calm and blue-green, glittering with the reflections of sunlight. Past the river and the karst peaks is the sky, a deep blue, once the home of French and American birds of death.
Steve tells me that the people in the van weren't travelling together, but all the Israelis had a Whatsapp group. That's how they found the "good van". In a flash I recall a backpacker rumour from a Turkish motorcycle chef in a Barcelona hostel. Do you see those three over there smoking ganja, he asks me. They are Israelis, they always have the strongest weed. And did you know that I was a chef in Thailand for six years? Very impressive, chef, I reply. Yes, I was a chef. But I would never cook for an Israeli. He spits on the ground. The Israelis stick to themselves, they have a network around the world. Almost like a cabal. Eres racista, I cry. Eres racista, eres antisemita, la cábala de mochileros israelíes no existe. The Turk laughs at my naivete. Now I know its existence to be real, that shadowy Israeli backpacker cabal that stretches all the way from South America to Europe to Southeast Asia. Its secret had been betrayed by a careless young initiate.
And what an honour it must be to graduate from the Israeli army and go into the world knowing you have the support of your brethren wherever you are. Not in the reactionary, Alex Jones Illuminati sense of course, but in the Goodfellas way, when a young Ray Liotta is accepted into the New York mafia, he gets pinched for selling contra cigarettes, yet he has a beatific smile on his face after his first court case, because he knows they will not harm on his head and he will not go to jail because of his connections, and if he does, he will have pasta al dente and very finely sliced garlic in his deluxe suite of a cell. In the courthouse a throng of his Italian brothers surround him, applauding and cheering and clapping him on the back. He had powerful people protecting him. But this cabal didn't deal in criminal racketeering, they shared in the shady world of WhatsApp minivan deals in Laos and plugs for the best weed in Nicaragua. Connections and solidarity anywhere in the world.
Then I think about a conversation I had with my cousin last Lunar New Year. She travelled to Busan last December and did a great deal of translating for Chinese tourists. Cousin, don't you see? We have a mafia as well, whether you like it or not.
*
The story of my initiation into the Chinese Mafia goes like this. I'm in Cuenca (Spain, not Ecuador) to see the Casas Colgados. The Moors, brilliant and mad in equal measure, built these houses on the edge of a cliff somewhere around the 15th century. As a monument to their engineering prowess, not all of them have fallen off the cliff yet.
I leave the hotel to do my laundry, talk to a Spanish boy about his futbol dreams and smoke a cigarette. Then I realise that I've forgotten my room key, my phone is dead and night is rapidly falling (I'm wearing a t-shirt and shorts like I'm in Koh Samui). I would surely lose a few fingers and my nose to the icy mountain air. The owner is nowhere to be found and my pleas of ¡ayudame! to the local tías bear no fruit. In desperation, I rush to the chino around the block. These convenience shops are ubiquitous around Spain and equally confusing: does el chino refer to me, the shop, the language or the country?
Why there is a chino selling Chinese instant noodles in a medieval Moorish fortress escapes me, but I throw open the door, probably looking like a crazed vagabond. First I ask him if he speaks Chinese. Of course, brother. I ask him to let me charge my phone, in return I'll buy a bottled drink (magnanimous). He asks me what's going on and I relate everything to him. Without a word he unplugs his phone from his Ugreen cable and closes the shop, leading me to my hotel. I should also describe what he looks like in case I forget. He was short, skinny and tanned, a chino from Fujian province. His cheeks were sunken and his nose hair was sticking out from his left nostril and he wore a white T-shirt that had some black stains on it. Right around the corner of the block was the hotel (I think it should be better called a guesthouse, because a hotel would have a receptionist). The chino dialled a few numbers and the owner appeared. The owner asked me if the chino was my brother, but when I turned around he was gone. He left without a word, as if to say, no need to thank me for my help, today the Chinese Mafia helped you, tomorrow you help someone for the Chinese Mafia.
My first assignment came three weeks after that, at the Estación de Atocha. An elderly Chinese woman was struggling with her luggage (the Spanish have not yet invented escalators). The grandma looks at me and I feel a strange compulsion to carry it up for her. I thought you were a foreigner, she says to me. Your skin is so brown. The mafia appeared again in the strangest places. A dive bar in Nishinari. At Frankfurt Airport, a group of lost Guangzhou kids who spoke no English. A family of four from Heilongjiang at Changi airport. The parents were always very impressed. A young man who speaks English, Chinese, Cantonese and Spanish? And educated in Mao Zedong Thought? A shame he has such a useless degree, or I'd marry him to my granddaughter. Of course I kept my Japanese language proficiency a secret. I couldn't help los japoneses either, or had to do so discreetly. There'd be dire consequences with the Chinese Mafia.
I blink and I'm back in the minivan again. The Israeli goodfellas are singing and clapping. I can't make any sense of what they're singing, but Yisrael comes up a lot. I try to think of examples of nationalistic Chinese songs. Only L'Internationale and "Red Sun in the Sky" come to mind. I think that the Chinese psyche is perpetually stuck on heartache. Every single Chinese pop song is about unrequited love, or a love not meant to be. In general Chinese art that is marketed internationally can be split evenly into three categories. One, the endless pop ballads and movies about heartache that captured hearts throughout liberal arts campuses. Two, the comedy movies and actors whose physical comedy trascended language barriers. Jacky Chan, Stephen Chow, Sammo Hung, etc. Third, diaspora art that is critical of the CPC. Some say that if Ai Weiwei stopped doing installation pieces and instead started defecating on paper napkins and selling them, the Thyssen-Bornemisza and MoMA would be lined with these smelly objets d'art.
The van skips over a pothole and the pulut hitam backflips in my stomach. I hold on to the memory of the chino with the nose hair. It didn't make a difference where he was from. North, South, SAR, ROC, PRC, diaspora. They say that the mafia has an iron in every fire. In whatever destination I went to, there would be its associates, and they would repay me not in jingoistic chants, but characteristic material aid. To the Israelis I was but a ching chong, but many chings form an orchestra, and an army of chongs form a horde. I knew in my heart of hearts that they would appear during a time of need. And they would call upon me as well.
I never paid for that drink in Cuenca. He didn't ask me to.