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My thumbs hesitated, frozen, over the screen, the thought already fully formed. Oh, Nao Kao. If only you knew.
I was nominally a responsible party for the reunion; certainly, the people who were truly in charge made sure to recognize and thank me for my work with them as the reunion began.
“So, you’re kind of important,” Nao Kao texted me, as though gauging whether I had lived up to any of the potential I had displayed when I used to spend so many hours in the library, my nose deep in a textbook. Had the game, he was weighing, been worth the candle?
“I am not even a dean,” I protested. For if I had done well enough, there was no mistaking whose career trajectory shot off at the steeper angle.
“But you could be,” he replied.
“Only if I were allowed to rule by Fiat,” I responded, and was rewarded with a string of laughing emojis.
“Didn’t you have your hair up a minute ago?” he asked a few minutes later.
I leaned into my screen, visually sorting through the sea of Zoom boxes. Each was the size of a domino on my laptop, and I was reasonably sure he had connected on his phone, where each attendee’s face would be thumbnail size. I imagined him peering intently at his phone screen, eyes practically crossed, biting his lip in concentration, as he assessed the ways in which the woman in her little square stacked up to the girl in his memory.
My phone buzzed again and a half-dozen pictures popped up. I was struck by how similar he looked, how his face had not changed. Also, that he was bundled up like it was winter in one picture, when in reality I knew it must be one hundred degrees.
“Why are you laughing?” he texted me.
“Because I am looking at the pictures you sent and know you cannot possibly be anywhere that would necessitate a scarf.”
“Send me some of you,” he replied.
The only photos stored on my phone were travel shots. Me with big game in Africa. Me with big tuna in Tokyo. Me atop a big wall in China. I chose a few anyway; this was my life.
“Are you ever home?” he asked.
“I am now,” I replied.
“What’s your favorite city?” he asked before quickly adding, “Let me guess, it’s Singapore. So clean! So orderly! Am I right?”
“Tokyo,” I replied, laughing to myself, “but you get points for methodology.”
“I am glad you like Asia,” he responded. “Too many Americans do not.”
I responded with the sushi emoji and pair of chopsticks.
“You always were good with chopsticks,” Nao Kao wrote. “I remember you could eat M&Ms with them.”
I tried to shake the cobwebs loose, to pry some such memory from the crevices of my mind, but nothing would come and I drifted into other chats. “The speaker said ‘pivot’ – Zoom Bingo for me,” a colleague wrote, and we laughed in our living rooms and bedrooms and home offices at the absurdity of this brave new world, together but yet alone.
“I’ve got another call, Liss,” Nao Kao’s name buzzed on my phone. “Let’s catch up more soon.”
The next time we exchanged messages he asked what I was wearing before signing off. I sent him a selfie so he could judge for himself.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
I popped onmy video monitor and played with the route maps, badly missing the in-flight magazine with its plethora of maps and, more importantly, the crossword puzzle. One more casualty of the pandemic. I noticed how much sparser the maps were than the last time I completed this exercise.
For years, Delta’s Asia flights connected through Narita, a definite perk on the day-long journey to Singapore or Bangkok or Manila. Sadly, as more than one flight attendant had recounted to me, Delta’s difficulties with the Japanese government mounted until they’d been forced to shift their Asia operations to Incheon, and a deeper partnership with Korean Airlines. Now, woe betide anyone hoping to fly Delta to Narita, even on a visit to Japan. A shame, for as far as the airport lay from the city, I preferred it to Haneda by degrees of magnitude.
I thought about the first time I had flown across the Pacific, Detroit to Narita to Bangkok, how utterly foreign it all was, from the wall of heat that hit me in the small hours of a December night when the heavy glass doors slid open past customs to the sounds of the city and the sticky sweet fruits. I was in middle school when my dad accepted a visiting professorship at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok. My memories of our months in the city had gone soft around the edges, but my most vivid memory still remained sharp.
We were trapped in particularly awful traffic crawling for hours through the city one Saturday, me with mangosteen juice pooling in my lap. Even now I was shocked that my mother, whose lifelong quest amounted to,when in Rome, do as the Romans do(also known as: avoid being perceived as the Ugly American, no matter the cost), allowed me to peel open the luscious, pulpy fruit in the backseat of that car. I had wiped my fingers on the pleather seat and been horrified by the vivid purple stain I left on the sticky material. Smearing at it with the back of my hand only caused it to spread.
All of the best establishments posted signs warning “No durian – No mangosteen” and if I understood from the first time I had encountered durian that no proprietor wanted to risk so much as a whiff of that pungent fruit on the property, I had not understood the interdiction against mangosteen until now. As more of the deeply hued juice ran down my leg I realized: I would shortly look like the victim of an attempted murder.
In front of us two scooters crashed, a load of live chickens spilling from the back of the larger one, our driver repeatedly blasting the horn as though the act didn’t merely add to the cacophony. If anything, our horn only excited the chickens, who flapped their wings madly and raced in circles. From the edge of the road a lithe young woman appeared and lifted her skirt in our direction. As the only automobile in a sea of scooters, we were an obvious mark.
