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“I’ll try. But if you come, you will have to promise not to mix me up with those Cambodians.”
I sent him a laughing sticker.
Try as I might, as an American, I found it difficult to appreciate the seriousness of the rivalries and tensions between the countries of Mainland Southeast Asia. We might blunder on our foreign policy, we might have had a president who tried to stare down Angela Merkel and the rest of the G-7, but our place in the world was never truly threatened. Other countries were unlikely to send tanks rolling down our highways or to arbitrarily redraw our borders. Our territorial waters were not in dispute. If there was a river to be dammed to the detriment of those downstream, we were the ones doing the damming, not the ones whose lives and livelihoods were threatened as the fish stocks diminished and the riverbeds ran dry.Red Brotherhood at Warwas not hyperbole.
In grad school I had tried to make a comparison between the rivalries in Southeast Asia to those between Texans and New Yorkers. It seemed fair to me; after all, there had been a Civil War here, too. I had already told Nao Kao about the time I heard a couple of cops cursing the ‘damn Yankees’ over coffee at a North Carolina Waffle House, as though the cars driving south from Rocky Mount had all originated north of the Bronx.
From the amount of time Nao Kao contemplated his response before replying, I knew he thought I was off the mark.
“I suppose it is similar,” he said carefully, “if Texans and New Yorkers had been rivals for centuries. Or if they fought their long and bloody war within the lifetime of most of their current populations. And with tanks and machine guns.” Indirect to the last, he would force me to infer that he agreed to disagree, even on such an objective topic. What the textbooks say is true: direct people frequently feel they have to work very hard to understand indirect people, and that can be an exhausting endeavor. Amen.
That old conversation had come back to me as we worked on our current course. I sent him a passage fromBrother Enemy, about the war between Vietnam and Cambodia in the 1980s, which concludes with a final observation from the author that, effectively, Cambodia is a child with Thailand and Vietnam as the parents, though he quickly acknowledged that Cambodians would bristle at this suggestion. I asked Nao Kao what he thought of the analogy.
Of course, they would bristle at the thought, he wrote, and I could almost feel his irritation coming through the screen. Cambodia and Laos had been yoked together by France during that country’s forays into colonialism in Southeast Asia. Nao Kao might have preferred a dream featuring Lao noodles to one starring Khmer ones, but it was immediately clear whose side he would take in a larger geopolitical debate.
If the Vietnamese wanted to position themselves as the Big Brother of the former colonies of Indochina and had used their relative might to ensure a generation of schoolchildren had learned by heart a tune of their devising that praised the “brotherhood” of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia, Nao Kao’s disdain for the Thai rang through just as clearly.
“Now the Thais,” he explained once, “they always feel they are the smarter, superior race. Just because they were never colonized, even if they weren’t entirely free of European influence. But then, nothing here ever is.”
His words rang in my ears as the barrage of announcements filtered through the terminal around me, gate changes, mechanical troubles, and last calls for boarding for destinations from Sapporo to Xining, Colombo to Kuala Lumpur, every last one of them imparted in English.
………………
September and Octoberare the glory months on college campuses, nowhere more so than in the north. They are the months the music permeates: the brassy notes of the marching band, the crowd noise and hip hop pumped into, and subsequently out of, stadiums while linebackers and running backs vie for starting positions. From the open windows of dorms the length and breadth of campus come the notes of Mozart and Bach, Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, Eminem and the Backstreet Boys, the Beatles, and Simon and Garfunkel, boy bands, hip hop, rap, and jazz, music of every genre and every age. In the later afternoon, when even the nightiest night owls have ventured forth, traffic begins to build on the main thoroughfares, windows open, the last warmth of fall breathed in, the bass thumping out.
Even in the shadow of September 11, there was a misty magic to those months. After a lifetime of autumns in Ann Arbor, the final six as a student, I knew this was the last, and I reveled in it, savoring every trip across the leaf-strewn Diag, every steaming cup of joe from Espresso Royale, every trip up the great, white steps of Angell Hall. Nao Kao never did make it to a football game, but for the rest of it we checked the boxes: an afternoon at Elbel Field watching the band refine their footwork for game day, more than one heaping ice cream cone from Stucchi’s, sticky pitchers of warm beer on the patio at Dominick’s, and always theMichigan Dailycrossword.
“What is a five-letter word for piles of wood?” I would message Nao Kao late at night, when I was supposed to be working on my portfolio.
“How would I know? Why don’t you look it up online?”
“That would be cheating.”
“But asking me is not.”
“No, phone-a-friend is totally legit.”
My mind went back to the lecture halls of my undergraduate years, statistics and psychology and economics and the rows of students surreptitiously filling in the little squares, half-an-ear to the probability of withdrawing one red marble from the bag of forty-eight black and twelve red, half-an-ear to the kid next to them mumbling his guess for fifty-two across. Nao Kao reminded me almost every time I asked that he was no fan of this game, but on this, I did not give in, even if he never did acknowledge knowing the answer to a single clue.
“Have you ever been to a fraternity house?” Nao Kao asked me one afternoon.
I laughed.
“More times than I should admit.”
“What’s it like?”
“Disgusting.”
“I mean really.”
“Me too, Nao Kao. They’re filthy inside. They reek, the floors are covered in decades of spilled beer and god knows what else, and – if they’re having a party, which, c’mon, these are frat houses, they’re always having a party – they’re so loud you can’t hear yourself think.”
“Sounds enticing.”
“Nao Kao! Don’t even think about it! They’re the purview of undergrads, not geriatric graduate students like us.”
“Anthropological research. Just from the outside.”
