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He looked at me and shrugged. Maybe it was the continuous years of warfare he’d absorbed from birth until adolescence, the stacks of grenades outside his school, the ones the children had played with, not understanding the realness of the danger, but which they had all survived, or maybe no more explanation was needed beyond an understanding that we – each and every one of us who has tread upon this earth – are who we are, but Nao Kao Inthavong was the most placid soul I had ever known.
On the first day of spring, I cajoled him into spinning the Cube with me.
“It spins?” Nao Kao asked, looking out the Union windows. It took me a moment to realize he was referring to the Cube, such a fixture of the landscape it was to me.
“Ah, the Cube! Yes, of course. You haven’t ever spun it?” I shouldn’t have been surprised that Nao Kao had never spun the Cube. All through undergrad, I’d dragged hapless dates this way. The only one who knew about the Cube was the one who lived in West Quad and passed it on his way to Angell Hall three times each week.
“I used to spin it all the time as a kid. Especially in the summer. My parents would bring us down here, my brother and me, and we’d race round and round until we were dizzy.”
I mustn’t have been more than three or four the first time I reached up and put my weight into making it turn. The Cube was a hulk of black metal that changed with the weather, freezing in winter and searing in summer. On a day like this, the ground squishy, the sky bright, spring just beginning to play peek-a-boo, it would be cold and slick beneath our palms.
As we pushed it around, gaining momentum and growing dizzy as it rotated on its base, Nao Kao began to tell me more about Laos – and how his parents fled from the communists.
“War was not new to Laos, you know. By the time of the American Vietnam War, that is. Always our neighbors were plundering the country, making war in the region. Actually, it is only the French who created Laos as a country, when they wished to consolidate it into a single, governable entity at the end of the nineteenth century. Mostly, it did not matter. We are an agrarian society, even today. Who is in power, the language of administration, it is as the Chinese say about heaven and the emperor. You know this proverb?”
I did not.
“Heaven is high and the emperor is far away.”
“Heaven is high and the emperor is far away,” I repeated.
“Yes. Or, sometimes, and maybe more appropriate to Laos, ‘the mountains are high and the emperor is far away.’ Either way, the meaning is that central authority retains little control over local affairs. For most Lao, especially those living outside of the cities, it did not matter who was nominally in charge. A bowl of rice in the belly, this mattered. Not the rest.”
“Okay,” I said after a beat of silence, unsure whether the story had reached its apogee.
“The Vietnamese began to use Laos as a sanctuary in the early sixties. Of course, the U.S. followed with their bombs. Your bombs.”
Nao Kao let the line he had drawn between us sink in for a moment.
“So. The U.S. began bombing Laos in 1964. This did not stop until 1975. Actually, few people realize this, but Laos was one of the most heavily bombed countries in history, anywhere in the world. Of course, all of this, all of these bombs raining onto Laos, it was a violation of the Geneva agreements, but as they say, all is fair in love and war.”
He stepped back from the Cube, which continued to twirl slowly, its movement governed by the laws of science and the universe, and walked over to one of the concrete benches. He sat heavily, concentrating, I could tell, on what came next.
“No one in Laos was unscathed by so much war, so many bombs. The entire country was the battleground, but at least for us, when the war ended, unlike in Vietnam or in Cambodia, the communists came into power peacefully. But my family, my parents, they were educated. A target for the communists, you see. So, never mind that my sister was not even two years old, that my mom was many months pregnant with me, they fled to Thailand. To a refugee camp. And that is where I was born, just a couple of months later. Actually, today is my birthday. This story that I have told you, it is only twenty-five years in the past. History is still recent in Laos, you see.”
My mind spun with so much information. This was by far the most Nao Kao had ever spoken at once; how anyone with these stories inside himself found interesting my mundane tales about high school in America or summer tennis camps escaped me. And yet, Nao Kao egged me on, my middle class, middle America existence as surreal to him as life in a refugee camp was to me.
I made the only response I could conceive of at the time, the one concrete fact I could latch onto.
“It’s your birthday!” I practically shouted. “Happy birthday, Nao Kao! Now, quick, we should go to Stucchi’s! You get a free scoop on your birthday!”
Whatever he expected me to say in response to the heaviness of what he had shared with me, urging him to indulge in ice cream, and on a day when spring was only still a promise, was certainly not it. Surprise shone momentarily in his eyes before his laughter filled the chilly evening air.
“You are a mischievous one, aren’t you?” he replied. “But, come on, we better go if we are going to have our ice cream before they close.”
∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞
Nao Kao likedthat after so many years on campus, first as a faculty kid and then a bonafide undergrad, I knew every nook and cranny the campus had to offer. I had opinions and advice aplenty, which I shared frequently and adamantly. If he was going to eat on Central Campus, he should eat at South Quad and not West Quad. A quiet corner at Border’s was almost as good as the library and offered the advantage of more interesting reading material if you needed a break from your coursework. Yes, he could take a book off the shelf and read a few pages, as long as he was careful not to break the binding before he put it back.
He laughed when I told him that he could ask to sample three flavors at Stucchi’s before settling on one, but that the fourth would draw condemnation. He must try an omelet at Mr. Greek’s and the raisin toast at Angelo’s and by all means he could not be a proper and respectable Wolverine until he had purchased at least one t-shirt from Steve and Barry’s.
My repertoire of undergraduate misadventures was as far from his experience as dengue fever was from mine. Of all the misadventures, his favorite was sneaking a boy onto the roof of that Virgin Vault, Martha Cook, and making out under the stars to the sounds of the hall director pounding on the door behind us.
“Whatever gave you that idea?” Nao Kao asked with disbelief.
I shrugged.
“The window opened out onto the roof. The question is, why did no one have the idea before me?”
