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“Nope. No work experience, no way. For once I’ve run into a rule I can’t seem to talk my way around. The program director has told me definitely that I can apply in two years.”
Assuming I land a job and accumulate the requisite work experience.
Nao Kao poked my ribs, working to elicit a smile, even a forced, half-hearted one.
“Tell me again what happened on the trip to Philadelphia last week,” he said.
I squared myself to face him and drummed my fingers against his chest, then traced a lazy pattern on his stomach under his shirt. I felt his muscles tense under my light touch.
“You already know. I don’t want to talk about it again.”
“I’m sorry, Liss,” Nao Kao’s fingers found mine and squeezed. “You’ll find a job.”
“That’s easy for you to say. Your future is already mapped out for you,” Nao Kao’s face flickered with disappointment at how easily those words slipped through my lips.
“Besides, I wanted that one.” I leaned forward and kissed him, our tongues meeting momentarily before I changed my mind.
“Time for me to go, Nao Kao,” I said as he sighed in resignation.
The job in Philadelphia was the one I wanted above all the others. Assistant Director of International Programs. It consisted largely of extensive travel around the U.S., hitting all the fall and spring fairs to recruit students from other universities to enroll in summer language, internship, and study abroad programs. Yet, almost miraculously, there were no quotas by which one was to be judged, and the salary was surprisingly good.
From the start – when I’d arrived at the ticket counter at 5:00am on Monday morning only to discover the university had not completed the booking process for my ticket – to the finish – when a greasy, leering cabbie returned me to the Philadelphia airport in the midst of a fierce autumn storm that would soon cancel my return flight – the interview had been a disaster. For if my adventures with the airlines weren’t testing enough, the universe had seen fit to install me in accommodations with a broken radiator that roasted me all through the night and ensured I spilled soup literally into the lap of my prospective boss at lunch.
One of my professors loved to remind us of the value and importance of living with ambiguity. At first, I hadn’t understood her meaning. Now that I did, I wanted nothing more than for her to keep her ambiguity to herself – hers and mine. Not that there was anything ambiguous about the job in Philadelphia. Nor, I was increasingly concerned, the predicament that threatened to overshadow even my job search.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
“Would passengers onKorean Air flight 7833 with service to Vientiane please make their way to Gate 256 for the screening process. Boarding will begin in thirty minutes. Korean Air flight 7833 to Vientiane, please make your way to Gate 256. Thank you.”
I checked my watch: 10:00 p.m. I tried to remember whether the time difference between Seoul and Ann Arbor was twelve hours or thirteen, and if that made it 9:00 a.m. at home or 10:00 a.m. or even 11:00 a.m., but my brain felt like soup. The fact that it did not matter what time it was in Ann Arbor landed like a revelation. And to think I had done this twenty-plus time a year for over a decade. I floated through the lounge and down the escalator, the star of my own dream. How appropriate.
“I had a dream about you the other night,” I told Nao Kao as winter faded to spring, the sun setting not only later, but further north each evening in its annual trek across my picture windows. Only at the equinoxes did it set in the dead center of those big, west-facing panes of glass.
No response. I looked at the time, calculating the new difference: we jumped an hour ahead; Laos did not. I wondered if Nao Kao had disappeared into a meeting or just from this conversation.
In for a penny, in for a pound. I forged ahead anyway.
“I was at a food court in Ikspiari, you know, in Tokyo, trying to decide what kind of noodles to order. They had all the usual choices: soba, udon, ramen. And there was something new, something I’d never heard of before, called khmer noodles.”
“Why Khmer and not Lao? Or Hmong?”
“I don’t know. Because it was a dream and dreams are weird?” At least I had gotten a reaction.
I thought about a dream a friend had shared with me recently in which she and I had been flying to Hong Kong only to end up on a cruise ship in Amsterdam. Displeased with the turn of events, I had asked the captain to set course for another port, as the one we were headed for was “inconvenient to my connecting mode of transportation.”
“Anyway. Just as I was ordering them as khmer noodles you appeared and began shouting at me that ‘it's pronouncedk?mae!’ You were plenty exercised about the point and made rather a scene. It was quite rude of you, really, and most un-Japanese. And then you disappeared – poof! – as suddenly as you showed up.”
The laughing reaction popped onto my screen.
“Then what?” Nao Kao asked, shocking me.
“I decided I would rather eat udon.”
More laughter.
“I still don’t understand why I’m in a dream with Khmer,” he said.
“Right. Got it. Well, I don’t understand why in the only two dreams you’ve ever appeared in, you were shouting at me in both of them. I’m not sure why you’re doing so much shouting, but if we ever do meet in person, you’re going to have to promise me ahead of time that you’re going to tone it down. No shouting.”
