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“Fast and aggressive,” I replied, and let that sink in, however he might interpret it.
“No cows or chickens on the roads there,” he responded, an observation I could not top.
“Alright, you, don’t be too reckless now, ok?” Nao Kao offered by way of good-bye, the gentle familiarity of the salutation lodging softly in my mind.
So, it was that we rebuilt a friendship, one anecdote at a time. Mine, long-winded and often sarcastic, tended to rely on humor and wit and repartee, Nao Kao’s responses as succinct as the occasional tale he’d offer me. “Loosen up, la,” he’d reply to one or another grievance I aired. “Not my job to judge, la.”
“Those people just don’t like questions, la.”
And the occasional “oh la la.”
Thus, did our personalities re-emerge across the years.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
On that fatefulsecond Tuesday of September in 2001, I was at work, tucked away in the recesses of the International Institute where officially I worked as a graduate assistant supporting the area studies centers. I landed the job largely on the strength of an internship in the House of Commons when I was an undergrad.
Often in the International Institute we kept a television on at low volume, the posh accents of the BBC providing the backdrop to our work. On September 11, the television was off though, until a harried student rushed in and, his voice thick with the sounds of New York and something else, something I would momentarily place as the sound of shock, and maybe more than a tinge of grief, urged us to turn it on.
We did so as the second plane slammed into the South Tower. We closed the office then and as I walked back to my apartment, I did so with the sensation that the ground underfoot might give way at any moment. Down South U and across State Street, past the Cube and across Thompson, all the way to my little place on Madison, my footfalls were the only sound I noticed in a town gone eerily quiet. The sky overhead was an unbroken blue that belied the rupture all around us. In my apartment, AOL Instant Messenger boxes flashed and pinged on my monitor, a clarion cry from every quarter. All of us, everywhere, trying to make sense of the images being broadcast from every station in the land.
Incongruously, my apartment was filled with sunlight on that bright September morning, as I sat in terror watching the acrid smoke roll through Manhattan. I placed a frantic phone call to Catherine, my oldest and dearest friend, my college roommate of four years, and the woman I missed more than the rest of my friends combined, now a grad student at Columbia. Her voice trembled knowing her boyfriend was at work across the river in New Jersey. He did not need Peter Jennings to tell him the score; he was watching the towers burn from his office windows.
As the south tower collapsed, dozens of IMs flooded into my account simultaneously. Most were a simple, six letter code for a world gone to pieces. OMG WTF. The exception was Nao Kao, who asked simply if it was okay if he stopped by.
Over the course of the past year, Nao Kao had morphed from an unknown classmate into the kind of friend I never knew I was missing. From pedagogy to philosophy, literature to adolescent larks, there was little we did not discuss. “A conversation is not one person talking and the other just listening,” a grumpy date had once scolded me. I was self-conscious then of exactly how much talking I did in comparison to Nao Kao, but when I mentioned this to him, he merely shrugged and said, “I like your stories.”
I imagine no one else shared with him tales of coed life in which a freshman year hallmate performed the Sunday morning walk of shame following a night in which her panties had been lost in a frat house. That Nao Kao would recall almost twenty years later that said hallmate later found them pinned to the house trophy board offered definitive proof thatI like your storieshadn’t been a hollow line.
“Did you call your family?” I asked him when he arrived.
My mother reached me first that morning, calling from her office in Tisch Hall. Rachael Zick was not easily given to panic, but that morning she was nearly frantic at not being able to reach my father, deep in the woods of one or another western state consulting on forestry matters for the federal government. He was in Oregon, I reminded her, where it was not yet 7:00 am. “I left a message for him to call from his cell phone,” she said, and I knew the matter was serious. At thirty-five cents a minute (though minutes were free after 9:00 p.m.), the cell phones we all had were foremergency use only.
Nor had she been able to reach Theo, half a world away and, I thought but did not say, safer and more secure in China than we were in Michigan. We were not a family given to superfluous shows of affection, but she and I had said we loved one another, and spoken in reassuring tones to remind ourselves that we were still solidly here. She ended the call by asking me to call immediately if I heard from Theo or my father, and for once I did not roll my eyes. We could, none of us, ever unsee what we witnessed, the plane in, the bodies out, the towers down, the smoldering remains of it all thrusting skyward in a jagged pile, but we were alive, and on September 11, that was all we could ask.
“It is too hard to get through right now. I tried once, but the international lines were jammed. I will try again tonight. If I call late enough here the connection is usually stronger anyway.”
We sat on the couch all afternoon, mindlessly flipping between the ghastly soundtracks of Peter Jennings and Tom Brokaw, the drone of the news uninterrupted by a single commercial break.
Early fall in Michigan can feel like summer and September 11 certainly did. I wore denim shorts and a strappy, blue tank withMichiganemblazoned in maize letters across the chest. Every time I glanced up, Nao Kao was looking, glancing, staring down my shirt. Fleetingly, I thought to ask him what his wife might think, but ultimately, I let it lie. He was, after all, only a man.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
I honestly didn’texpect to hear back. So much time had passed, so much water had flowed under that bridge. Twenty years later, virtually our entire adult lives, it was difficult to imagine what we would even have to say to one another, and I knew that if he hadn’t been the vice-rector at the National University of Laos, I likely never would have talked myself into hitting send. Even as vice-rector, if I had known that he was also a consultant to the Ministry of Planning and Investment, I would almost assuredly still be staring at my legal pad today. I teased him once about being a “mucky-muck,” but even then, I don’t think he understood how seriously his success since he returned home intimidated me, and how close I came to convincing myself not to send the message.
It was not just one student looking to study in an offbeat location though. In one of those twists of fate, just a few weeks after my conversation with her, I was charged with the development of CLMV programming.
“Not too much V, though, Liss,” my boss added, “we’ve got plenty on Vietnam already. And see if you can find a few alumni to work with. Local perspective always helps.”
Removing Vietnam from the equation left Cambodia, Laos, and Myanmar, as unpromising a trifecta as I could think of in the circumstances. When I had searched out a list of alumni contacts in the region, I received the names of a few expats, whom I was promptly told not to contact. Local, in this case, was more a state of mind than a mailing address.
Presumably once upon a time, someone at the University of Michigan had a record of Nao Kao Inthavong. If nothing else, the university liked to boast of having one of the largest numbers of living alumni in the world. But whatever file might have once existed had long since been thoroughly expunged. If I kept quiet, no one would be any the wiser.
The consummate professional in me could not let it lie, though, this connection to one of the great and the good in Laos. Never mind that I had not spoken of him, let alone to him, in almost two decades. Or that I had every reason to expect that I would be one of the last people on earth he would want to hear from.
I began an informal poll of trusted friends. Maybe they would have advised differently if I had shared all the details then, rather than the vague explanations I offered for my hesitancy. Under the circumstances I presented, the consensus was unanimous. My professional integrity demanded that I ask Nao Kao to be part of anything CLMV-focused. He was the perfect candidate, whatever our personal circumstances had once been.
And yet, given the circumstances as I knew they were, it felt nearly impossible to reappear out of the mists, beating the drum of favors-for-alma-mater. Something would have to give. I swallowed my pride.
