Abstract

Infrastructure engenders temporalities that ripple with different implications across a range of landscapes and lives. This chapter unpacks the lived experiences of waiting, delay, and suspension for people living in the shadow of the construction of the Laos–China Railway. It identifies variations of waiting, suspension, and stasis as modalities of infrastructure time and contrasts them with notions of speed, progress, and promise. This disrupts linear notions of ‘China speed’ and planning or project time. Through an examination of this uneven temporal terrain across the villages and homes affected by construction between 2018 and 2020, the chapter finds that people living in the shadow of infrastructure have a particular temporal orientation that is organized around waiting, the unevenness of which exposes and further entrenches ethnic and class differences. For Lao residents directly affected by the railroad, waiting and uncertainty are coupled with hope, which bleeds into a sort of ‘cruel optimism’ as they anticipate benefits from the object responsible for their dispossession and await a promised future from which they are likely to be excluded.