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“Thank you for inviting me, Dr. Miller. You have a lovely home.” Nao Kao proffered his hand.
“Please, call me Rachael. It’s Rachael Zick, actually. Why should women have to change their names just because they marry?”
I saw the wheels turn, as Nao Kao debated whether or how he was supposed to respond. Rhetorical questions stumped him.
“Mom, Nao Kao is from Laos. Do we know anyone else from Laos?” He looked at me gratefully.
“Now that you mention it, I don’t think we do. How wonderful! Please, won’t you tell us a bit about your country?”
“The ancient name for Laos, Lan Xang, means Kingdom of a Million Elephants,” Nao Kao began. “For hundreds of years, this Kingdom was one of the largest in Southeast Asia.”
In choosing history as a starting point, I knew my mom would be in his thrall for as long as he cared to speak.
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
I would behard pressed today to tell you a single class I took, book I read, or professor who inspired me in that second semester of graduate school. If fall is the sweet brassy sounds of a marching band at practice and the roar of one hundred thousand fans on a crisp Saturday afternoon, the Goodyear Blimp circling overhead, winter in Ann Arbor is a bleak time, when the snows fall early and the ponds freeze hard. If the snows are slightly later now, twenty years ago, the snow was piled at the curbs by December, and a hard, black crust covered the diamond shimmer before winter semester started in January. Leaden skies ruled the days, night falling before one even thought to put supper on, though the blackness offered a welcome respite from the inescapable gunmetal gray of the year’s first quarter. A bluebird sky is a rare sight in Michigan between those long, dark months from November to March.
After my parents’ New Year’s open house, Nao Kao and I began to spend more time together. He reveled in the snow, as only one raised amidst the unbroken lushness of Southeast Asia might. Weather – the wait five minutes and it will change, four seasons in the span of four hours weather – was a novelty to him. He delighted in tromping through the blanket of white, packing his first snowballs, rolling his first snowmen, and admiring the angel-shaped print his limbs etched into the snow. For the first time since I was a kid, I saw the beauty and the magic in the fresh-fallen snow, the miracle that a snowflake represented to one who hadn’t grown up taking for granted that winter meant white.
“Each snowflake is unique,” I told Nao Kao as we rolled snowballs in the Law Quad.
“Each one? Someone has checked?”
I rolled my eyes at his need to question everything I said.
“At least according to the people who know about these things. Or, you can have it your own way and they can all be the same.”
He tried to catch a few on his fingertips to compare.
“You’re supposed to catch them on your tongue, you know?”
“But if you catch it on your tongue, won’t it melt before you can compare it to another one?”
My eyes flashed and I blinked a few times. It never failed: Nao Kao always found the fallacy in any logic – admittedly, mine had been weak – and called it out. Whereas the habit would have been irritating in most people, I found it almost endearing in him.
“I guess, uh, I guess if you wanted to compare them, well, then, yes, I suppose you should catch them on your finger,” I stammered. “But if your goal is only to catch a snowflake – like a kid enjoying winter, Nao Kao, then you should do it my way.”
I stuck out my tongue and expertly caught a flake on the quivering tip.
Nao Kao looked at me dubiously, then tentatively poked his tongue between his lips.
“Not like that! All the way! And point it!” I instructed.
He did so, to no avail.
“It’s not hard,” I chastised him gently, “stand still and a snowflake will land on it. It shouldn’t take more than a minute.”
He pointed his tongue again, glancing at me for approval. Ever impatient, the moment had passed.
“I’m cold, Nao Kao. Let’s go.”
“I will practice,” he promised, solemnly, hilariously. “You will see.”
I laughed at his earnestness and bid him good night. A more thoughtful friend might have offered hot chocolate – or at least advice on drying hats and scarves and especially mittens -- before watching him clamber onto the bus.
Mornings after a snowfall, he would wake early, bundle himself into his warmest layers and trudge through campus with his trusty camera, capturing the tranquility of so much pristine whiteness. Often it seemed that the worse the weather, the brighter he smiled, cheerily leading class discussions on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs or the Morrill Act, which was all the more amazing to me since unlike me, for whom education was my field of study, education policy was only Nao Kao’s cognate.
He reveled, too, in the transition of power that winter, the inauguration of a new president. I neither watched nor celebrated as the man who had been referred to derisively on campus all fall as “the shrub,” swore his oath to preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States of America. Nao Kao both watched and celebrated though, but not because of any special allegiance to George W. Bush.
