Dakin '98 chronicles experiences in Laos

Brett Dakin '98 tried to leave suits and ties behind when he graduated from Princeton.

Now a lawyer in New York City, Dakin was clad in traditional business attire when he read from his book in Robertson Hall on Wednesday. The path he took to his current profession, however, was anything but typical. Dakin chose to spend his first two years out of college in Laos, a Communist country in Southeast Asia.

Dakin's experiences in Laos, made possible through the Princeton-In-Asia (PIA) program, is the story of a 2003 book titled "Another Quiet American." While living in Vientiane, the capital of Laos, Dakin worked as a language and marketing consultant for the relatively new National Tourism Authority.

"Tourism was a new idea for the Lao government," he said. The country was virtually closed to foreign visitors from 1975, when the Communist regime took over, to the mid-1990s.

In addition to developing marketing materials tailored to tourists from the United States, Europe and Japan, Dakin taught English to his colleagues in his office. Many of his insights into Lao sentiment toward foreigners, described in the book, were drawn from these colleagues.

"I wrote a lot about what it means to be an American in a place like Laos, where America was the single most important enemy for a long time," Dakin said, referring to Lao hostility toward American intrusion during the Vietnam War. "It was interesting to be an American and see how people reacted to me."

First impressions, he noted, can be deceptive.

"People's reactions to me were always positive, but that was always on the surface," Dakin said. "Whenever I dug a little deeper, I discovered that there always was a little resentment to the United States."

Thirty years after American air strikes, the Lao landscape remains scarred by leftover bombs and landmines.

Laos, then, was an unconventional destination — but that's exactly what Dakin was looking for.

As his peers interviewed for banking jobs and applied to graduate schools during his senior year, Dakin made the unorthodox decision to accept a posting in Vientiane. He credits faculty members in the East Asian Studies (EAS) department with piquing his interest in Asia.

"As an undergrad, Brett looked for challenges in his academic work and his life," said East Asian Studies director Martin Collcutt. "Being placed in Laos is something many undergrads wouldn't think of doing, but in his case it opened up many opportunites."

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Dakin recalls that when PIA coordinators proposed the internship to him — the first ever to be offered in Laos — the details were somewhat vague.

"[The coordinators] weren't sure if the job actually existed," he said with a chuckle. "That appealed to me because after four years of Princeton, I was ready for something different and something that required individual initiative."

Another reason Dakin embraced the idea of working in Laos was its Communist government. "I had lived in Russia before . . . and wanted to compare my experience there to Laos," he said. "Whenever I thought of hard-line Communist regimes, the image of the Soviet Union came to mind and it was interesting to juxtapose that image with Southeast Asia, which evokes images of laid-back life."

Dorian Needham '05 attended Dakin's presentation in hopes of gaining more knowledge about Laos before embarking on a similar internship through PIA.

"I don't know a huge amount about the country," Needham said. "But I want to specifically go to Laos because [PIA] felt that my skill set was most appropriate for that job, and I'm interested myself."

Dakin said during the talk that very little has been written on Laos, a small country of five million people. He wrote "Another Quiet American" to highlight the difficulties of being a stranger in a foreign country.

The title of his book pays homage to an American he met in Laos, and to Graham Greene's 1955 novel, "The Quiet American," which chronicles an American man's experience in Vietnam.

When he entered Harvard Law School after his two years in Laos, Dakin was "struck by how important it is for society to have a legal system that is reliable and that citizens can trust."

"In Laos, they have a very rudimentary legal system — when I was there, people weren't aware of flaws and a lot of laws were not written down in accessible formats," he said.

Dakin, who hopes to return to Laos someday, also gained a newfound respect for his own country during his time abroad. "Every day I'm struck by how fortunate we are in the United States despite all our problems . . . we're fortunate to have a system in place that people trust in."