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At some pointduring the evening on September 11, Nao Kao left to join the vigil on the Diag. There were fifteen thousand stunned students gathered that night, eyes wide, many with tears falling. It was a crowd into which I could not cast myself. When I asked the next day whether he had reached his family afterwards, he answered in the affirmative. Unfortunately, he added, the news on her end was not good either. One of their girls was deep in the throes of malaria.
That Nao Kao’s daughter was battling malaria in a world where sterilized needles were considered cutting edge medicine is one of the details I have never forgotten. That the woman back home caring for her, my age, barely beyond adolescence, a wife and mother and survivor of wars and refugee camps, tended to all of this while her almost equally young husband secured their future on the other side of the world, was the other. For I have no doubt, had her history contained less pathos, this newlywed woman – the nice, normal girl – left with two infants while her husband pursued an American education, I might have felt less compunction about what happened next.
Nao Kao was ambitious, adventurous, intelligent, and kind. I might have wondered – no, I did wonder, and more than once – what the smartest and most interesting person I had ever known was doing hanging around with the likes of me. We would while away the hours talking about everything from the spread of AIDS in Asia toRoe vs. Wadeto which accents were the most challenging to understand. (Texas, Nao Kao decreed, one hundred times out of one hundred.)
From our early forays into politics and the Vietnam War, Nao Kao broadened my knowledge of Southeast Asia, and especially the Thai-Vietnamese-Cambodian tensions that underscored so many issues in that region. In turn, I did my best to explain the growing divide between what was increasingly being referred to as Red and Blue America. He did his to explain the difference between the Lao and the Hmong and why he felt the Hmong in America struggled to never quite attain the same levels of prosperity and high educational status that defined so many other Asian immigrant populations in the U.S.
The day after the towers fell, a day when the major networks still broadcast without commercial interruption, when the planes punctured the buildings at least once an hour on tv, when the skies over Michigan were blessedly blue and clear – and free of all contrails – Nao Kao suggested we try canoeing.
Years of swimming had given me surprising upper body strength, and I could dig into the water as hard as anyone. As a result, my strokes were strong, yet I lacked a steady rhythm. I hacked at the water more than I plied it. I was, in fact, an exceedingly inept canoeist. Nao Kao, seated in the back of the canoe, struggled to steer a straight course for us.
“Stop, Liss, stop. Just sit. Stop paddling.”
“Don’t be ridiculous. Of course, you can’t do this by yourself. It takes two people to paddle a canoe.”
I was annoyed with Nao Kao, but I was more irritated with the guy at the livery who made me take the front position in the boat, even though, at 5’8”, I was tall for a girl, and easily had a couple of inches – and undoubtedly a dozen pounds – on Nao Kao. Sexist canoe guy!
I dug in harder and felt the canoe begin to veer uneasily into the soft mud of the bank. I pushed hard against the muck and shot us into the middle.
“STOP. Give me your paddle.” It was a tone I had not heard from him before, the tone of a man used to calling the shots – and having them obeyed. Domineering, as it were.
I turned on him, eyes flashing, and rose to do just that at the same moment he leaned forward to grab the oar from me. The boat lurched, rocking from left to right, and again we both shifted our weight at the wrong moment. The canoe flipped just as I thought it might stay upright.
Somehow Nao Kao had managed to keep his beloved camera out of the water. Bracing himself against the overturned hull and treading water to keep the camera dry, I heard him swear for the first time. The Huron River is not so deep or so swift, but one of our oars had sunk hopelessly beyond my view and I gave it up for lost. I swam after the one that was still afloat, then righted the canoe. I dragged myself in. It was not pretty, but it also was not the first time I had faced this predicament. Now was probably not the time to share that piece of information with Nao Kao. I landed with a squish in the hull. Nao Kao gingerly handed over his camera as I thought about the previous times I’d flipped canoes, about the time I’d fallen into a pond when I was certain I could reach the beach ball that had bobbed into the water, the paddle boat that I’d steered directly under a “water feature.” By comparison, Nao Kao had nothing to complain about.
“Put your hands on the side,” I instructed him, feeling the boat wobble slightly as he did.
“Other options?”
He was clearly looking to avoid flopping into the canoe like a dead fish, which is probably what I had most closely resembled.
“You can use that big limb for leverage.” I pointed to a partially submerged tree trunk bobbing in the current. “Hang on and I can sort of shove the canoe in that direction.”
Navigating the canoe in any determined direction was easier said than done in the circumstances.
“This is entirely your fault.”
“So, swim to the edge and slither out, then step back in,” I suggested.
“What? Like I am a monitor lizard? I will be filthy!” Nao Kao was aghast.
His temper was not helped by the fact that his reference to a monitor lizard brought an immediate smile on my part, as I remembered those long, lazy animals sunning themselves on the banks of Bangkok’s klongs.
“It’s not like you’re completely clean here in the river! What? You’re not going to go home and take a shower?”
“I may be wet, but I am not covered in mud, which I will be if I ‘slither out’ there at the edge.”
“Ok, well what better ideas do you have?”
“This is entirely your fault.”
“Yes, you’ve said that already.”
Nao Kao glared, which made me laugh. At least he hadn’t lost his glasses. Our current predicament was amusing, but he was practically blind without his glasses and I was sure getting a new pair would have been an ordeal. Plus, he would have refused to let me buy them, even though this was, and he had just felt the need to clarify – twice – entirely my fault.Or at least mostly,I thought, remembering his tone when he told me to stop paddling.
Contemplating his options, Nao Kao was at a distinct disadvantage in that he was wearing his usual uniform of blue jeans and sandals. The sandals had washed away (possibly an advantage for regaining his position in the canoe, but it would be a long walk once we were back on dry land) and the wet denim constrained him heavily. I scooped one of the sandals from the water as it floated by, then waited as Nao Kao managed to lurch back into the canoe. It bucked precariously, before settling nicely into the water. Gingerly, I proffered our single oar as a peace offering.
