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“My parents lived here when they were graduate students at MSU, and my dad’s parents before them,” I told Nao Kao, oddly proud of something over which I could claim no credit. “Actually, I lived here, too, for the first few weeks of my life. Until they moved to Ann Arbor.”
“I thought your mom was from New Orleans?”
My mom. Rachael Zick. The last person I wanted to think about right now. Especially with him, the man at the heart of the mother-daughter rift. I groaned inwardly. Why had I brought us here?
“Yes, she is. But one of her professors at Tulane encouraged her to apply to the graduate program at Michigan State. It’s where she had earned her PhD. So that’s what my mom did.”
“Did you say your grandparents lived here, too?” Nao Kao asked, changing the subject. Perhaps he had picked up on the tension in my voice.
“Yes, my dad’s parents. Actually, my great-grandfather also studied here. I broke a long chain of green and white by attending U of M!”
“I hope in several generations, there will be such a chain for my grandchildren’s children,” Nao Kao said thoughtfully. He squeezed my shoulder, drawing me to him.
“Thanks again for coming, Liss. For making this tour. For everything.” For once I allowed him a quiet moment of contemplation, my hand resting gently atop his, my fingers curled around his index finger.
We ate dinner at Hobie’s, broccoli and cheddar soup out of Styrofoam cups, while deciphering the signatures that covered the walls. I handed Nao Kao a Sharpie and encouraged him to add his name to the tangle of those who had come before.
“Only if you write yours, too,” he said, hesitant, I think, about the impropriety, although clearly this was the thing to do. Liss Miller, I scrawled, in big bold letters, then, feeling naughty, added a heart andGo Blue.
“Always the mischievous one, aren’t you?” Nao Kao asked, shaking his head, but his eyes were smiling.
“Guilty as charged. I am a terrible influence,” I deadpanned, and, to prove my point, kissed him hard on the mouth as I handed him the marker.
Later, in the darkness of the planetarium, I let him return the kiss as an imitation Milky Way sparkled overhead.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
I lifted mywindow shade and took in the cloud formations below. Once, I knew the difference between cumulous and cirrus clouds, but like so much else that I had forgotten, now I had to settle for simply knowing that once I knew. In the course of the thousand generations that separate me from that first human, Lucy, so few of us have been allowed to assume this seat in the heavens. Today’s sky was no riot of reds, oranges, pinks, or purples, but still the privilege was not lost on me. Flying remains the best and most magical elixir I know.
I thought again about the absurdity of what I was doing. My first international flight in two years and it was not bound for London or Tokyo or even Dubai, but a city that few outside ofJeopardy!circles could pronounce or locate. A site visit to the university and then a few days of vacation in Luang Prabang. Business and pleasure. Like everything else connected to Nao Kao. Working with him to develop a collaborative online international course on the competing interests of the United States and China in Southeast Asia, we are eminently professional. Reputations are lost far faster than they are made and neither of us, I am certain, wished to endanger theirs. Methodically, we worked through the process of integrating the course he was teaching in Vientiane with the course I was teaching in Ann Arbor.
More than once as we worked, he accused me of being too serious, too regimented, too concerned about the small details that he knew would work themselves out.Loosen up, la. I was the tightly wound one, he the calming presence, old patterns repeating themselves after so many years. I could practically picture him removing his glasses and rubbing his eyes, his knuckle massaging the pressure points, yet managing to laugh despite himself.
Thus was our dynamic and, as more than one colleague noted, most people just don’t have that much fun when they are debating the merits of the Sino-Laos Railway or the damming of the Mekong River and the resulting cratering of the downstream fish catches, to say nothing of the makeup of the Mekong River Commission. Such topics were, I knew, more esoteric than that which many undergraduate courses covered, yet the students immersed themselves in these joint lectures as I’d rarely experienced. Whatever our relationship, if the energy we brought to the classroom served to engage students more completely, to help them see Asia in a new light, to find the topic interesting and fun, I was all in.
Students often struggle with whether to travel to Europe or Asia if they know they can only study abroad once. One hundred times out of one hundred, I push them toward Asia. I am not, as a student once accused me of being, anti-Europe. Watching the morning mists rise off the Danube from the heights of the Buda Castle, or wandering Rome at Golden Hour, or the sight of Paris’s cobblestones glistening in the rain – all of these are singular pleasures in life. As the pandemic closed in, my world shrinking in inverse proportion to the havoc the virus wrought, I frequently took solace in the memory of a stroll past thebouquinisteswho line the Quai Voltaire, or of a breakfast of buttery croissants and strong, black coffee in Florence in sight of the River Arno. I reveled in the memory of early morning swims in the Aegean against a backdrop of Greek ruins, and of St. Petersburg’s White Nights, the golden spire of the Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral gleaming through the early hours. What these experiences have in common, all of them, is the past.
Asia, on the other hand, is where we are headed. Oh, there is history aplenty, and stretching back thousands of years rather than hundreds, but history there is more fluid, as anyone who has visited an ancient temple adorned with what appears to be a giant disco ball in Vietnam can attest. History adapts, but does not constrict the way it can, say, in Paris, which has known building height restrictions since the seventeenth century.
In Singapore, I ran out of shampoo and when I called the front desk for more, it arrived by way of robot. I needed toiletries; I met the future. Likewise, for the multilingual robot called Pepper who has sized me up and helped me with my shopping in Tokyo’s vaunted mecca for the sport, Ginza. Don’t even get me started on the subway in Seoul or the laser light show along Shanghai’s Bund. Europe is lovely. But if you want to see what is in front of us rather than behind us, we denizens of this rocky, watery orb called Earth, you have to go to Asia.
Much the way I had once felt he made me a better student, now I felt as we played to our strengths and bantered about the end of agricultural collectives and the funding of irrigation loans that Nao Kao made me a better professor. Whether he was in front of me or behind me, remained to be seen. To know that, I, too, had to go to Asia.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
“I just don’twant to be an imposition.”
“Liss, please consider something,” as ever, my therapist, Stacy, was a source of sanity all through this pandemic life. I loved how she made me stop and take a step back from whatever issue I brought her.
“I want you to consider how easy it would be for him to – using your word – ‘disappear’ if that were what he wanted to do. If he wasn’t interested in talking to you, he wouldn’t. Period.”
“But why text me at midnight to say ‘Happy New Year’ and then be all cagey and weird when I reply? It’s like you’re always telling me about being able to recognize when a guy is just not that into you. I mean, he probably had, what, twenty chats going, but here I am thinking he has something to say beyond ‘hey, it’s a new year over here.’ And then he thinks I’m clueless. I don’t need more people in my life who think I’m clueless.”
“Don’t think I’m going to let the fact that you believe the world thinks you are clueless slip by. We’ll come back to that, but –”
She paused. More than once this therapist of mine had acknowledged the challenge of helping me make heads or tails of a man whom I had not seen in nearly two decades and whose background and culture were so far removed from anything she usually encountered. Still, it was her observations that helped me truly see the extent to which I had not only been hurt, but inflicted hurt as well.
“Liss, I don’t know this man. But that won’t stop me from saying, and with as much conviction as I have ever said anything, that you are the most jarring thing that has ever happened to him. And not once, but twice. Imagine you are him, in the middle of a happy weekend morning, and receive a friend request with your picture. What does that do to a man? To his heart?”
