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“Because they followed the rules.”
I laughed. “Maybe. The girls there do like their rules. But, more likely, they just didn’t get caught.”
“Because they didn’t have the idea to string twinkle lights around the dormer window!” I added after a beat, the full extent of this particular misdeed now revealed.
This elicited the sounds of Nao Kao’s laughter that I so enjoyed, his glee spilling forth a pitch higher than his speaking voice.
“Were you always so naughty?” he asked, mock admonishment in his voice.
“What you call naughty, I call high-spirited. And, yes, of course I’ve always been this way! You can’t learn such impishness – you’re either born this way or you’re not!”
Whether in wonder, disbelief, or perhaps even admiration, Nao Kao could only shake his head.
“What is your wife like?” I asked suddenly, realizing that whatever stories of home Nao Kao shared never included the shy-looking woman I’d glimpsed in the photo.
He looked at me contemplatively, considering, I assumed, which virtues he might first extol. Funny, I expected him to say, or charming or brilliant or delightful or simply lovely. Instead he simply shrugged and said, blandly, “She’s a nice girl. Normal.” I didn’t think to ask until later what constituted “normal.” Not that he would have answered.
Oh, but those story nights were a welcome distraction from the rest of my life that winter, and especially the rapidly deteriorating relationship with which I had limped into grad school.
“Is Jake the one you sneaked onto the dormitory roof?” Nao Kao asked one night over noodles at the Union. Jake Larkin was decidedly not the boy I had sneaked through the dormer window. No, Jake was a sober and stable type, a teetotaler and early bird who yearned for little beyond a quiet life. A rule follower to the last, the mere idea would have horrified him. Easy on the eyes with long, luscious lashes and copious curls to match my own, he was a year older than I was and, wanting to stay in Ann Arbor rather than return home to Evanston, he had applied to the School of Public Policy, where he spent one semester before deciding it wasn’t for him. For another six months, mom and dad paid all the bills and he had all the fun before they ultimately decided that Jake could find himself just as well in the shadow of the Windy City. Had he remained a student of public policy, he and Nao Kao might have taken classes together, an idea that amused me tremendously.
Jake left Ann Arbor without us properly breaking up, though it was clear we were headed in that direction, especially once he accepted a job that would keep him in the city, for the world was my oyster and I certainly was not about to limit my job search to Chicagoland in the name of a mediocre relationship. He and I had been together—in our on-again, off-again fashion, at least— for almost three years, which I was stunned to learn was the same amount of time that Nao Kao had been with his wife. From first encounter to wedded bliss had been a mere matter of months, according to the timeline I’d overheard him sharing with another student, but when I tried to pin down the details, Nao Kao brushed me off.
“We met, we liked each other well enough, we married.”
“And we’d both grown up as refugees, so it was good to have a shared experience,” he added, almost as an afterthought.
A nice girl. Normal.I remembered.
Whether it was love at first sight or merely a desire for the comforts of another body, or some point in between, only Nao Kao could know.
Thinking back to the worn picture he had pulled from his wallet, the wife and babies always at his side, yet, inconceivably far away, I did not raise the subject again. When we spoke of Nao Kao’s life in Laos, we spoke instead of the country’s history, and especially of the Vietnam War, the war’s legacy there, and Nao Kao’s frustration that no one here even seemed to know Laos existed, let alone that it had been bombed to smithereens by American forces intent on punishing the Viet Cong.
“So much war,” Nao Kao would remind me, tracing this history of warfare backwards through civilization. “Always, the factions were warring, especially with those in Thailand and Vietnam, to whom we were a vassal state. Of course, we are dependent on our neighbors, too, for any trade. Laos is landlocked. Either down the rivers or overland, but whatever comes in or goes out must pass through neighboring lands.”
“Tell me about the elephants,” I requested, wanting to know more about the pachyderms, which had leant their name to the ancient kingdom. Certainly, I wanted to hear about them more than the bombs which Nao Kao had so clearly designated as American.Yourbombs, he had said, more than once, and while I knew he did not hold me, personally, responsible, I still felt the sting.
“Ah, the elephant. It is our national animal, you know. It is the symbol of prosperity, and it represents the strength of Laos.” He paused, “Ironic, isn’t it, since we are not so strong.” He winked, as was his habit when he wanted to make sure his listener understood he spoke in jest. With Nao Kao, even the serious could be fun.
“But why is it the national animal?” I asked. “Only because there are so many?”
“No, no, Liss. It is because of Buddhism, la. In Buddhism, the color of the elephant represents luck and peace and wealth. So, it is a very good thing to be like the elephant. If you visit Laos, you can see the image of the elephants everywhere, in the pagodas and the temples, even on the former flag of the country, the one before communism. That was the three-headed elephant, to represent the three former kingdoms that make up the country today: Vientiane, Luang Prabang, and Champasak.”
“And were there one million elephants in Laos?” I asked, incredulously.
“This I do not know, but I doubt it very seriously. The land is too small for quite so many, I think. Maybe a few thousand. Today a few hundred.” Diminished, I understood tacitly, like so much else in Nao Kao’s beloved homeland.
As he spoke of the elephants and Buddhism and the ancient kingdom at the root of the modern-day country, his eyes shone and his hands twirled and spun through space, animating his speech. He spoke with pride, too, of what this American education would bring not only to him and to his family, but to his country. Nao Kao looked forward to his role in advancing Laos’s development, and his passion for good governance and how he might bring such practices to bear knew few bounds.
Although Nao Kao tried to shrug off how many times he was asked to repeat where he was from, how many students – graduate students, no less – asked, literally, where in the world this place even was, his spirit sparked when he spoke of home. In contrast, his shoulders slumped and his brow furrowed when he spoke of the state of education here. It depressed him, frankly, that so many bright, young things had reached the apex of the American educational system without a stronger grasp – arguably, in some cases, without any grasp – on world affairs or geography.
“You aren’t a real American,” he teased me on occasion, taken aback by a knowledge of global events that exceeded not only that of the other American students he encountered – but sometimes that of the professors, too.
I had not visited Laos, but I could find it on a map and that counted for something. I was, Nao Kao told me, the only student – the onlyAmericanstudent – he knew to whom he had not had to offer an impromptu geography lesson describing the location of his beloved homeland wedged between Thailand and Vietnam. Often even that description drew blank stares or embarrassed smiles. When I told him of a friend from undergrad, a girl who had graduated at the top of her class in high school and studied economics and political science at Michigan, who now worked for a think tank in DC, but who did not know Kansas from Kentucky on a map of the United States, Nao Kao could only shake his head vigorously in disbelief.
“Do you know U Thant?” he asked when I told him this, and I admitted I did not.
“He is the former Secretary General of the United Nations. From Myanmar. And he said once something which every boy and girl in my school learned by heart. ‘The truth, the central stupendous truth, about developed economies is that they can have – in anything but the shortest run – the kind and scale of resources they decide to have.’ Such magnificent possibility! For years this idea captured my imagination. But here, in America, sometimes I cannot help but wonder how this is possible – and for how much longer?”
