The River Is Silent:

March 8, Pak Chom's Transparent Ruin

The scenes from the past few days in the north were still drifting within me, unable to completely escape the microscopic crevices of my body. The chilling tension of border cities, ancient temples steeped in heavy incense, legends entangled with emerald Buddha statues and the coiled Naga² beneath them, rivers and wetlands, and the ambiguous air peculiar to the borderlands—all these layered themselves within me, one after another. Passing through Chiang Rai, Chiang Saen, and Sop Ruak, where the Mekong and Ruak rivers merge, we were not merely consuming the river as a romantic physical landscape; we were first tracing the cross-sections of artificial interventions executed under the slick administrative pretext of 'water management,' the heavy metal pollution of the Kok River, and the devastation of the Ramsar wetlands. However, these heavy truths are lengthy epics that must be recorded separately, with a fierce breath, at a later time. For now, I only wish to state that these strata of ecological damage were cast low and heavy, like a geological backdrop, just outside the scenery of that specific day, March 8. In some journeys, there is a flash-like moment where the brief time of a single day compresses and reveals the rise and fall of a civilization and the persistence of life. For me, that day in Pak Chom was exactly that.

The place where we laid our exhausted bodies was a small, humble accommodation in Pak Chom. Although the sign read "homestay," it was closer to a neat space deeply imbued with the arduous yet earnest life trajectory of an elderly local couple. The night before, after ten hours of tedious travel, we had arrived only when the abyss of darkness was at its deepest. The pitch-black night had completely swallowed the massive flesh of the river and thoroughly erased my sense of geographical location. Thus, the next morning, when I opened my eyes in the faint light, the landscape unfolding outside the window felt like a strange new world that had just upheaved from a sea of nothingness overnight.

What tore through the dawn was not a visual landscape but the wave of sound. Eerie and spiritual bird calls that seemed to belong not to this world but to a myth from B.C., the cry of a rooster slicing through the distant air, and the dry friction of insects were layering upon the cold, deep-blue atmosphere. Through a dreamlike crevice—where one could not distinguish whether these primordial sounds were echoing off the mountains of Laos across the river or if an unknown forest was responding on its own—the heavy tolling of a temple bell from the Lao side drifted over. The geographical topology of Pak Chom is peculiar. The land of Laos rises to the north of the river before us, while the land of Thailand, where we stand, lies prone to the south. Because the river bends eastward here, the sun rises on our right and sets on our left. At that brief moment, when our taken-for-granted modern sense of direction subtly warped within the scale of great nature, I finally began to face this river not through a map, but through existential eyes. Humans try to define space with conceptual lines they draw themselves, but the river has always existed there silently, long before any map. And the morning light drenches both banks of the river fairly and dazzlingly, entirely indifferent to artificial borders.

As day broke, the Mekong in front of our lodging revealed itself, lying long like a colossal reptile. Rather than the dynamic description of 'flowing,' it was a mass of water so overwhelming that the expression 'lying sunken since time immemorial' felt more fitting. In the middle of the river, a fragile sandbar—looking as though it were loosely woven from bundles of papyrus—floated precariously, dotted with colorful parasols. Beneath them, people bent at the waist, silently panning for gold dust. Even though this was labor tied to gold—the most blatant and greedy of resources—it paradoxically assimilated with the air here, appearing peaceful and transcendent. It is utterly impossible to imagine here the gunfire or bloodlust of resource cartels often associated with borderlands on other continents. The immense ripples indifferently reflected the morning light, and humans bent their bodies like seekers of truth within that shimmering glitter. Mother Nature, in her vastness, always indiscriminately embraces even the fleeting desires and livelihoods of humans within her expansive frame.

If you walk just a little longer, treading on the damp, hot soil of the Mekong basin, you realize that the belief system rooted in the inner lives of the locals here can never be fully decoded by the single religious language of 'Buddhism.' Among the stories gathered in the north, there were legends of ghosts dwelling within sacred Buddha statues and boats, alongside anthropological insights that the indigenous animism laid down in the substratum was so deeply rooted that even foreign religions could not completely erase its ecological soil. Imaginary beings like the Naga lurking beneath the deep ripples or the Hong soaring in the sky are not mere iconographic decorations. They are spiritual remnants of the ancient people's worldview—which understood the world through organic connections—that had disassembled into atomic levels and coalesced once again to survive. In the Mekong economic sphere, the Naga symbolizes the water that conceives life, boundaries, and protection, while the Hong, as a messenger connecting the heavens, has cunningly and adeptly seeped into the Buddhist cosmological system. They did not disappear into history; rather, they were constantly 'translated' to fit the language of the times. The myths along this river quietly prove that what survives most tenaciously in the strata of civilization is not a pure form in a sterile room, but human imagination that, despite mingling and compromising grotesquely with the heterogeneous, ultimately never loses its essential vitality.

When contemplating this enduring chain of vitality while gazing at the river, it is a horrifying cognitive arrogance for modern humans to believe they can redesign immense nature to suit the shallow utility of their own generation. The administrative language of efficiently controlling water resources and attracting tourism capital is slick, but behind that transparent rhetoric, the organic home that the ecosystem has built over tens of thousands of years is slowly collapsing. Even at the local rural market, a bizarre phenomenon occurs where people distrust the catch from the Mekong right in front of them, even for a common fish costing a mere 50 THB (approx. 1,900 KRW). The merchants defend their origin, claiming these cheap fish were brought from hundreds of kilometers away—from upstream reaches that keep some distance from the heavy metal-polluted waters of the River here, or from other Mekong tributaries relatively less affected by contamination. This logistical and economic nonsense, inexplicable by the logic of profit, is the most chilling evidence of the ecological crisis. The collective neurosis of modern society, which once laundered the origins of seafood in relief before the terror of radiation, is being reproduced here in the market of this remote hinterland. Lethal toxicity does not take the form of a hideous monster; it wears the face of excessively transparent ripples and silently encroaches upon the DNA of the ecosystem.

The fact that we cannot identify the massive smoke rising over the Mekong proves the ecological catastrophe of our era, where even the signs of Mother Nature have become objects of doubt. As the afternoon deepened, we drove the van toward the skywalk in Chiang Khan. A glass observatory jutting out past a dizzying cliff to offer a panoramic view of the massive bend in the Mekong. While riding up to the entrance in a rugged truck that looked like a modified songthaew, the Four Major Rivers of Korea—groaning as their ecosystems were realigned into straight lines—superimposed themselves in my mind like an ominous déjà vu. Memories of administration where the original purposes of ecological restoration and flood control evaporated, replaced by a frenzy to flaunt landmarks. The initial blueprint's bird's-eye view likely depicted this place as a brilliant salvation that would revive the lagging economy, but what remained at the site, swept over by the initial boom, were closed shops and concrete structures left to age in isolation. Piles of cement dumped along the riverbank made me feel a bitter vertigo—a reasonable suspicion that perhaps, like the 'garbage cement' controversy in Korea, they had slashed unit costs by mixing in ash from incinerated industrial waste. The beautiful curves of the dirt paths, naturally formed by the accumulated footsteps of humans and beasts over a long time, were ruthlessly bulldozed, replaced by uniform promenades hastily assembled with cement blocks and rebar destined to crumble shoddily in a few years. We have fallen into a severe sensory poverty, deluding ourselves into believing that we can only safely 'experience' Mother Nature when we place transparent glass floors beneath our feet and layer artificial ticket booths around us.

On that rattling truck heading toward the observatory, a minor yet existentially threatening accidental incident occurred. A sharp foreign object, perhaps a flying insect, forcefully struck the eye of the visual artist Joe, who was sitting beside me. Soon, the mucous membrane of his eye turned severely red and swelled up. It was a Sunday afternoon, and unable to find a proper hospital in this unfamiliar hinterland, we hurriedly asked around for a pharmacy, applied first aid, and took refuge in a cafe on Chiang Khan street with anxious hearts. For an artist who must capture and translate the world into visual language, eyesight means far more than a physical sensory organ; it is the very interface that connects with the world. A taut tension sliced through the air—the possibility that our journey might be halted amidst the unpredictability of a single speck of dust.

Yet, even in the midst of that sharp pain, what was most intensely engraved in my mind was Joe’s attitude as he clutched his swollen eye. He did not frown or express irritation through the pain. Instead, he was obsessively peering at insect eggs clinging near the parking lot fence where we boarded the van, and the forms of unnamed ferns pushing their way up through the cracks in the roadside cement. Whenever the van driver pointed out an unfamiliar ecological trace, his remaining eye sparkled with a transparent curiosity, as if he had entirely forgotten the pain. It was an intellectual passion far surpassing mere interest—a dedication so profound it made me wonder what it would have been like had he walked the path of a biologist, soaring far beyond the orbit of a layman. This persistent and eternally unceasing observation of biological species has been accumulating within him since childhood. For an artist who must gaze upon and record a crumbling world to the very end, the truly necessary driving force must be this pure spirit of inquiry.

As the medication slowly took effect, the pain subsided, and relief set in, the Walking Street of Chiang Khan finally entered our full view. Surprisingly, this isolated, remote street—over 9 hours from Bangkok and 100 kilometers from Nong Khai, the nearest town with public transit—was overflowing with a sophisticated sensibility and youthful vitality reminiscent of Seongsu-dong in Seoul. The old, blackened teak houses lined up along the river exuded an unreal charm, like a movie set. Although this space, infused with capital, carries the risk of degrading into a flat, retro commodity with a predetermined expiration date at any moment, at least the wooden pillars bathed in that evening light still breathed with the accumulated time of reality and a resistant surface that the speed of capital could not instantly mimic.

At 6 PM, as the sun tilted westward and the atmosphere burned a deep violet, the sublime scene Joe had prophesied unfolded in the sky. Dozens of white birds glided across the red river, maintaining a perfect inverted V-formation. It was a majestic moment, as if the ancient myth—where the sacred bird governing the heavens and the spirit of the abyss divided and commanded the world—was being demonstrated right upon our retinas. A marvel that cannot be fully explained by the dry causality of biological migration. Before cold critique, the foundation of true ecological reasoning must first be occupied by Joe's expression as he traced the trajectory of that flight with wondrous eyes. Without this primal awe for Mother Nature, our anger-laced critiques will quickly crumble into the empty administrative documents of bureaucrats.

However, the world we plant our two feet upon never rolls solely according to the timetable of beautiful myths. Sitting in a cafe blowing comfortable air conditioning and scrolling through our smartphone screens, we were forcibly summoned from the static time of Pak Chom to the cruel center of the World-system, where capital and power collide. The geopolitical crisis of Iran igniting in the distant Middle East and the tensions in the Strait of Hormuz were flooding our news timelines, causing global oil prices to fluctuate wildly. The butterfly effect of this macro-level gunsmoke struck as an existential threat to the gasoline supply for our van, which had to run on the unpaved roads along the Mekong the very next day. Looking at the charts with a grave expression, Joe stepped out into the darkness without hesitation to buy an emergency gasoline jerrycan to guarantee the survival of our itinerary. The chilling sensation that the tranquil breath of the Mekong, originating from the Tibetan Plateau, was fluctuating while sharing veins in real-time with war news from the Middle East. Behind that beautiful sunset, the cogwheels of capital and power were rotating ruthlessly, without pausing for even a single second.

That mix of geopolitical contradictions and sensations reached a bizarre climax at the street restaurant we entered for a late dinner. Though it hung a sign claiming to be a Vietnamese restaurant, the dishes placed on the table had their identities weirdly twisted. In the broth of the pho I ordered, unfamiliar tomatoes floated, and its acidity was a bizarre mutation wandering the borders of Vietnam, Thailand, or somewhere in between. An Tran, who had spent her childhood in the United States, also ordered a Vietnamese shabu-shabu, but tilted her head in hollow dismay, remarking that it was an unfamiliar taste that diverged entirely from the authenticity of her homeland.

When I lifted my head while swallowing this hybridized broth that had lost its origin and nationality, a poster of a woman wearing a glamorous qipao in the style of 1930s Old Shanghai was quietly smiling from the faded wall. It was a typical 'Yuefenpai' (calendar poster) portrait of a beauty mass-produced by the capitalism of the era, inscribed with the seal of a commercial Shanghai painter named 'Mei Sheng (梅生)' in the bottom right corner. Yet, in the alluring and somewhat contrived smile of that commercial beauty remaining only as a sign, I suddenly saw the superimposed phantom of the legendary songstress Li Xianglan¹ (Ri Xianglan), who captivated East Asia during the Manchukuo era. Born in Manchuria to Japanese parents, she had to navigate the complex ideological boundaries of the imperialist era perilously, thoroughly disguised as a Chinese woman. Even if the woman in the painting was not the actual Li Xianglan, this scene—where a mass-reproduced beauty portrait from Shanghai hung on the wall of a fake Vietnamese pho restaurant serving tomatoes in a small border town between Thailand and Laos, intersected with my gaze projecting the tragedy of diaspora onto it—was in itself a perfect theater of the absurd. It was a chilling metaphor exposing just how fictional and volatile the boundaries between state and nation, authentic and fake, original and replica are within the logic of capital.

Over that awkward dining table of hybridization, An, who made me feel the generation gap, sharply deconstructed and criticized Vietnam's massive capital, Vingroup, pouring out dozens of words per minute—or more—like a machine minting language. Even amidst her rapid-fire rhetoric, her expression remained continuously serious. Meanwhile, Joe, having endured the pain in his eye, did not even glance at the flashy theme park promotional video playing on a loop on the restaurant’s wall TV; instead, he fixed his gaze solely on the red scars of the forest ruthlessly excavated behind the background of that video.

March 8, the day in Pak Chom and Chiang Khan, deepened as we each gazed at the multi-layered contradictions of the world in our own ways. In the morning, there were bird calls that seemed out of this world and the contemplative silence of the massive river; during the day, the artificial structures attempting to sever the curves of nature and the dark side of garbage cement coiled around us. In the afternoon, there was the artist’s wondrous ecological curiosity that never cooled despite an accidental injury, and in the evening, the majesty of birds flying like a myth intersected with the chilling reality of the 21st century, where we had to worry about Middle Eastern wars and filling a jerrycan with gasoline.

Because this river has flowed for an incalculable amount of time on human calendars, it renders the arrogance of humans, who try to control tomorrow right now, infinitely insignificant. However, the great circulation and resilience possessed by Mother Nature is by no means an indulgence issued for the ignorant destruction caused by modern humanity. Beneath the tranquil surface of the river, shining transparently as if nothing had happened, the greed of civilization and the infinite biological memories engraved in this immense water system lie latently fishy, like magma yet to boil over. Sensing the massive weight of those numerous strata compressed into the short capsule of a single day, I could not fall asleep for a long time beside the sound of the Mekong's water as darkness fell.

<Notes>

¹ Li Xianglan (李香蘭, Ri Xianglan / Yamaguchi Yoshiko) / 이향란: A legendary actor and singer who was active in Manchukuo, Japan, and China before and after World War II. Born to Japanese parents, she was thoroughly disguised as Chinese and consumed as a star in Manchukuo propaganda films. She is a figure who dramatically symbolizes the ideological contradictions and diasporic identity of modern East Asian history. The era in which she drew her breath—those shadowed years of the Second World War—wove us together in secret yet unbreakable threads within the deep, geopolitical currents of history that bind Thailand, Vietnam, and Korea. Her signature song, “Ye Lai Xiang (Night Fragrance),” along with her other melodies, was reborn through the golden voice of the legendary Taiwanese singer Teresa Teng; it drifted across the screen in the film "Comrades: Almost a Love Story", brushing gently against my own 1990s. And the quiet revelation that it was in Room 1205 of Chiang Mai’s Imperial Mae Ping Hotel where Teresa Teng spent her final moments has rearranged the lives of every one of us—those who have walked this research together—into delicate new patterns of destiny, strangely and beautifully, along the silent banks of the Mekong.

² Hong and Naga / 홍(Hong)과 나가(Naga): Spiritual symbols representing the multi-layered cosmology of Southeast Asia. 'Hong' means a sacred bird and messenger of the sky, while 'Naga' refers to a giant spirit that rules beneath the waves and governs the rain. Even after the introduction of Buddhism, these foundational beliefs did not disappear; they firmly survived within temple architecture and daily life, becoming the archetype of ecological imagination.