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Two years did not seem such a short time to me to be away from a wife and little babies, but for once I held my tongue.
“I’d love to see a picture sometime. If you don’t mind, that is.”
He pulled a worn photograph out of his wallet, and as he passed it to me, I realized how often he must take it out and remember. A young woman with a faint smile and a baby on each hip gazed back at me.
“Boys or girls? Or one of each?”
“Girls, both. What a surprise.” He shook his head lightly, as though remembering the first time he heard that news, maybe, or even the surprise when they were born.
“Do you talk to them often?”
“I try to call every other week. It’s not so cheap, you know,” his nervous laughter hiding what was clearly no laughing matter.
“Well, I hope you get to speak with them over break. Maybe tell them about the snow?”
Oh, the inanity! I could converse for hours if the subject was academic, but five minutes of small talk about anything personal was evidently more than I could handle.
He laughed, though, probably imagining the impossibility of describing snow to little babies whose world was bounded by the mountains and jungles of Southeast Asia.
“Enjoy your break, Liss. And Merry Christmas.”
Only then did it occur to me how lonely he must be. I should make a point to be friendlier next semester.
NAO KAO
Americans often thinkall Asian countries – all Asian people – are the same, but they’re not. We’re not. On an intellectual level, I knew that before I arrived at Chulalongkorn as an eighteen-year-old, but I felt it there for the first time. Nothing in Laos prepared me for the bustling metropolis that was Bangkok. I adapted. I learned to squeeze my motorbike through the least opening, to elbow my way through the crush at the most popular market stalls, to take plain white rice with my meals rather than the sticky rice of home.
Of course, the U.S. would be a bigger adaptation, but exactly how big did not hit me until my flight landed and I encountered my first American. She was a gruff and belligerent customs agent, who shouted and swore liberally. “Fucking students,” she spat in my direction, in response to my question about the customs form. I blushed, certain every other officer in hearing distance was staring at me, the cause of such a fierce rebuke. Glancing around, I realized no one had so much as looked in my direction.
In Ann Arbor, the culture shock multiplied. Professors wore sweatshirts and sandals – even shorts! – to teach class. Living alone for the first time, I navigated warehouse-sized grocery stores with forty kinds of peanut butter and thirty kinds of hot dogs, with an entire aisle of noodles and rice, but none that tasted of home. The biggest surprise, though, was the students, the way they comported themselves with one another, the boys and girls always looking, laughing, touching. They would sling their arms over one another or offer one another an enthusiastic squeeze, akin to a hug, but not quite, in hello and in good-bye, in the middle of story, or walking across campus.
Such casual contact between men and women in Laos was completely unknown. I tried to explain it when I called home, but I could not find the words. In Laos, boys and girls did not touch until they were virtually betrothed. There was certainly no translation for the hook-up culture that pervaded from Thursday until Sunday here. Nor could I explain so much else I did not understand about this place where I had come to succeed at all costs. How quickly I found myself adrift from the friends and family waiting for news at home.
Northwoods was dominated by international students, most of them married, many with children in tow. My neighbors quickly became my friends, but hailing from the likes of Lebanon, Ghana, and the Philippines, they were no more able to puzzle out the quirks of tipping practices in restaurants or why the sales tax was not included in the price marked on the goods on the shelves than I was. None of us could begin to understand the obsession with football or the importance of The Game, which collectively we finally understood referred to Michigan versus Ohio State. We were both a part of America and apart from America.
“Are all of your friends foreigners?” my mom asked once over the crackle of a poor connection.
“Mostly,” I conceded, and it was true.
Melissa Miller, Liss, was an enigma more than a friend. We often sat next to one another and in class she could alternate between stony-faced silence and jolly good humor in the course of a single discussion. Despite myself, I admired the completely unselfconscious way she spoke up in class and how she questioned what the rest of us frequently accepted at face value. She was not above rolling her eyes at particularly insipid remarks, even those proffered by the professor. After class we might linger, and she’d chat happily, her eyes laughing as her words spilled out in irreverent or self-deprecating bursts, a million miles removed from the modest reserve Laotian girls learned from birth. No one would ever mistake Liss for one of those demure women who had peopled my world thus far. Still, it was through these conversations that I first began to understand this new, strange country that was to be my home for the next two years.
All the same, I would not call her a friend. I was pretty sure she didn’t have friends.
LISS
They don’t tellyou about the ice cream cart in first class. All the times you’re sitting in coach, dreaming about what happens “up front,” and you don’t even know the half of it. It is not just the five-course meals or the pillows and blankets by Westin or the bottomless beverage service. It is not even the fact that they let you keep your window shade open if that is what you want. No, the nec plus ultra of first class, the pièce de resistance, at least of Delta One, is the dessert cart laden with all the makings of an ice cream sundae at forty thousand feet, to be eaten, no less, with a dainty heart-shaped spoon.
Too many pandemic-laced nights I had dreamed of that cart rattling up the aisle, the choice of hot fudge or caramel orbothcausing drool to spill onto my pillow as I gloried, however unconsciously, in the before times. A small square of brownie, a scoop of vanilla, caramel, hot fudge, whipped cream, and a wafer straw is as close to heaven as a flight on a commercial airline can take you.
Actually, the brownie comes separately. But in first class, you are allowed as many desserts as you want, and if you ask for the brownie, it is an easy enough feat to transfer the ice cream from its own little ceramic dish before asking the flight attendant to ladle on the toppings. All of this Janelle did happily, ice cream onto brownie, hot fudge and caramel drizzled over the little vanilla mounds, a dollop of whipped cream, and then the wafer drilling into it all. Bliss.
I introduced Nao Kao to ice cream, I remembered. He, a twenty-five-year-old, fully-fledged adult, had never known the pleasure of such cold sweetness. I lost count of how many times I goaded him into indulging in my favorite treat during that golden summer. Stucchi’s was closer, but the Washtenaw Dairy was better – richer and creamier – and it is possible I tasted every flavor at both that summer.
Those ice cream runs, the backdrop of that honeyed summer, were one of the few memories that rang clear in my mind. Of the present and the recent past, I could talk for hours: it was as though everything I had not told Nao Kao for so many years was at last slipped of its surly bonds. I told him about earning my PhD, and the program director who had all but asked me to leave the program after determining that “my disposition was better suited to arguing cases in a courtroom than the collegial exchange of ideas in academia.”
He told me he never liked her since the time she wore a tank top and shorts to teach class, something that still shocked him, and a story which his colleagues in Laos never could entirely believe. He looked forward to gossiping about old professors we had once known when we met, he added, and I realized he took it for granted that we would meet again one day in real life, and not merely as text bubbles on screens. Of the fact that such gossiping should take place under the stars, and that this detail was stated not as an afterthought, but as an integral component of the act, I could make – or chose to make – neither heads nor tails. As I recall, I changed the subject.
I told him of my globe-hopping ways, of how such continual travel simultaneously fueled me and exhausted me. He told me about the rewards of his work, and about his escapes from the demands of it: hikes through the jungle in which he forded rapids and kept a wary eye for ground leeches, those pestilential annelids that could even chew through socks. The hundreds of kilometers he had ridden on a succession of motorcycles, fast and shiny and made for jumping and dirt biking in his younger days, sleeker and more sensible – though still fast – as the years accumulated. The time he tumbled down the side of a cliff, his fall broken only by the vines that snagged and tore the skin until he landed bruised and bloodied, but largely intact in the squelching mud. “My punishment for playing half naked,” he’d texted, and I ignored the temptation to take the bait and ask “Which half?”
