Word: lak
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...close to the disgruntled ethnic minorities known as the Montagnards. When journalists are allowed, as TIME was this month, they are so strictly monitored that it's hard to make contact with the local people. The Montagnards understand this all too well. In the Cu Mgar district of Dak Lak province, a middle-aged woman waves as a reporter walks past, forms an X with her two index fingers in front of her mouth, then clenches her fists and holds her wrists together, as if handcuffed. Other Montagnards grant furtive interviews but are too scared to be identified by name...
...early 1950s, newly communist China took draconian steps to rid its population of addicts, but the vice lingered for another decade in the expatriate-Chinese communities of Southeast Asia. Thailand was the last place in the world with licensed opium dens. In 1959 those licenses were revoked; the Heng Lak Hung on Bangkok's Charoeng Krung Road?said to be the world's largest opium den, with more than 5,000 users in residence?shut its doors, and thousands of opium pipes, lamps and other smoking equipment were burned in a massive bonfire at the royal cremation grounds near...
...plumbing noises. Moon, my cleanse guru?his Thai nickname is due to his broad round face?is the only Thai I've met who doesn't think fasting is inane. He's a veteran cleanser who swears by it. His wife, a beautiful, bird-like woman named Lak who works in the spa, doesn't share his sympathies and taunts me with green curries and papaya salad...
...Crackdowns have increased in the past year after some 20,000 Montagnards held a week of protests against religious persecution. One night last year, a 16-year-old named A'Noul (she asked for her full name to be withheld) was at home in a village in Dak Lak province when three vans roared up and two dozen Vietnamese police spilled out. They burst into her house, swept books and clothes onto the floor and said, as A'Noul recalls, "'If you don't give us your Bible, we will take you and put you in prison.'" She adds...
...most people, like Nguyen Van Quyen, merely want to get on with their lives. When he and his wife, Linh, moved to their one-room wooden shack a year ago, just days after they married, they were escaping dismal prospects back home in Ha Tinh province. Here in Dak Lak, he's eager to begin cultivating his leased hectare. "It's hard going, yes, but I knew it would be. I want a good life for my family," he says, pointing to his four-month-old son: a frontier baby who faces the volatile complexities of a changing Vietnam...