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The most positive descriptions of Vientiane, Laos’s capital city, included the words languid and laidback. Lonely Planet called the tuk-tuk drivers sleepy. Academic texts, rather than those focused on driving tourism, tended to be more straightforward. Despite considerable investment and dramatic improvements, significant room for the development of the infrastructure remained. When pressed on life in the city, Nao Kao offered little more than “it’s quiet.” By Asian standards, he wasn’t wrong: the population topped out under a million, making Vientiane one of the least populous capitals on the continent.
The one colleague who truly understood where I was headed was also my best friend, Catherine. She’d traded the bright lights of the big city after graduate school at Columbia for a stint in the Peace Corps and then, drawn by the inexorable pull of our hometown and the prospect of working for our alma mater, returned to Ann Arbor, where she lived only a few streets away from me, just as we had grown up.
Catherine pleaded with me vainly to at least reconsider my stance on malaria medication. Despite having been my partner-in-crime on a West African adventure on which the anti-malarial had left me so ill that the disease itself might have seemed a respite, Catherine’s business was international health, and she could not, in good conscience, let me travel to the red zone without one final plea.
“Even if I fill the prescription, I might not take them, you know. I don’t have to.” If I sounded petulant to myself – and I did – I could only guess how I sounded to her.
“Fine, you don’t like the drugs, don’t take them and just, you know, maybe get malaria. The upside is that you would never need the drugs again. Either because you would now be immune – or because you will be dead,” she tried in a bit of reverse psychology or tough love or both. Her closing argument recalled the words a neurosurgeon flung at my truculent grandfather once in exasperation: dead men don’t need brains.
Still, I was unmoved. After all, this was a woman who, despite her reputation for offering unparalleled health and safety advice, had once pushed her own envelope so far as to have given birth at Salvador Mundi Hospital in Rome.
“You know half a million people die of malaria each year,” she continued.
“But over two-thirds of them are under the age of five,” I countered.
“You know only enough to be dangerous, Liss. Besides, whatever else you may get up to, officially you are traveling on university business. The university won’t sign off until you’ve visited the travel clinic at least.Iwon’t sign off.”
And there it was: official university business.
Oh, sure, I had my stay in Luang Prabang where I would admire the architecture of Wat Xiengthong, that low-sweeping, double-tiered roof that is so recognizable, and the worn dome of Wat Visounarath, standing sentry over Visoun village for more than five hundred years. The Kuang Si waterfalls and the Pak Ou caves figured prominently in my itinerary and I had arranged a day trip to Chomphet and penciled in some seriously needed poolside R & R at the hotel.
But first, I would spend two days in Vientiane, visiting our newest partner institution, the National University of Laos. Meetings at the university and the requisite tour, a few highlights of the city, tea and lunch and afternoon snacks, always food on these visits, so much food, and never more so than in Southeast Asia. Nao Kao the vice-rector, showing off the institution he had almost personally midwifed into being. He had been hired immediately after graduate school, his newly minted American degree a point of pride for the still-nascent university. From that initial faculty role, he had ascended the rungs rapidly, his climb that much higher and faster than mine. Official university business.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
“Sesame noodles, MissLarkin?” the flight attendant, Janelle, proffered a small dish of the cold soba I remembered fondly from the before times. Seven hours to Seoul?
I nodded happily.
“First flight since?” she asked, having noticed, probably, how quickly I scrambled to re-secure my mask after every sip of water or between the courses at dinner.
“First long one,” I replied, thinking of the one, shorter flight I had taken on which I was able to keep my mask securely in place for the duration of the flight. For two hours from Detroit to Atlanta, I neither sipped nor peed. Fourteen hours from Detroit to Seoul precluded such practices.
“I guess it’s like anything: the first one is the hardest,” Janelle noted sagely.
“It’s amazing to think I used to spend each week in a different time zone,” I mused. “I hadn’t gotten jetlag in years. And now I’m just praying I will make it through dinner without dozing off in the soup!”
She laughed and moved along with the little dishes of sustenance.
Larkin,I thought, not for the first time. What was I ever thinking? There had been plenty of time for asking that question, not only during the homebound months of the pandemic, but in all the years before that.
I met Jake Larkin in an economics class my sophomore year when we were assigned to the same study group. Earlier that year I had broken up with college boyfriend number two, Alex, whose crooked smile and mop of blond hair I could still picture. When Jake asked if I would meet him at Good Time Charlie’s, I demurred on the grounds of sticky floors and benches, never telling him the truth. I had not been back to Charlie’s since it had been the scene of the crime, the place Alex chose to call time on our relationship, halfway through a plate of nachos.
After a string of frat boys, athletes, and too many outright players, all of whom recognized that I was both better looking and more naive than I realized myself to be, a genuinely nice guy was a revelation. It was not until later that I realized how much of the economics homework I did for the group, how many times I explained the guns and butter curves that needed no further explanation – if only one had been to class.
Like me, Jake came from an academic family. His parents were on the faculty at Northwestern, his mom at the medical school and his dad in biostatistics, and they shared with my parents the accolades of an academic life, starting with summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, running through federal grants and endowed chairs. Nice, steady families, three PhDs and an MD between them.
Both of our families were bound to be a bit disappointed by our undergraduate academic choices, though the doctorate I would later earn would more than make up for my lack of direction, or more specifically, the disappointing course correction I had made, as an undergrad.
How I ever found the nerve to tell my parents that I was declining my acceptance into the business school was something I pondered well into adulthood. I was, the secretary behind the desk intoned slowly, as she adjusted her glasses to get a better look at me, this oddity before her, theonly studentwho declined admission to the b-school that year. That year was deep in those heady, bubbly days of the late ’90s when a BBA from Michigan could command six figures out of the starting gates. Undoubtedly, whichever waitlisted student accepted an offer in my stead felt that they received Willy Wonka’s golden ticket and, presumably, made better use of their b-school credential than I would have done.
By all appearances, perhaps even to myself, I had renounced all hope of a future in international business when I checked the seldom-used box, “I decline.” For years I resisted the idea of a doctoral degree, that credential of credentials waved before me by my parents. Competitive to a fault, as recently as freshman year they had tried talking me into grad school with the lure that fewer than one percent of American women held doctoral degrees. Surely, I would want to join such rarefied ranks.Investment banking or bust,I had declared doggedly, but when the dream was within reach, I wondered if it had not been the thrill of the chase that motivated me above all.
As I fingered the form, my pen hovering overI decline,a new vision was already forming: grad school and a doctoral degree, but not to teach at the university as my parents did. I wanted to run it. Jake, on the other hand, found no joy in the rhythms of academia, having switched majors three times from sociology to psychology and finally to political science. He applied only reluctantly to the School of Public Policy, and then only in a last-ditch effort to remain in the town he’d come to love. As far as academic awards, cum laude would have been high enough honor for him. I found these attitudes – the antipathy even – perplexing, if not troubling. They were red flags I should have heeded much sooner.
Later, I rediscovered a lifetime of old journals. I read in reverse, beginning with the most recent, and as the references to my doubts mounted, so did my dread of what else I might uncover. When I read of the summer we spent backpacking together through Europe after my graduation that I wasbeginning to feel suffocated under the weight of constant togetherness,the words landed like a punch to the solar plexus. Later I seemed to reconsider, and I turned the pages with the sinking feeling that my younger self doth protest too much. This was confirmed as I read further, until, there in black and white, I confronted the truth:I am afraid I am only going back to Jake because it is easy.
Absent from those fading pages was any mention of Nao Kao, but from across the years I could sense it, that apparition that had wordlessly guided so many of my life’s decisions.
