“Someday we will invest in a real kitchen floor,” Keo said with the ease of a suburban man predicting that he will someday build a winterized deck off the family room. “But I will need to make some more money first.”
There was no table anywhere in this house, nor chairs. There was a small bench outside in the kitchen, and underneath that bench was the family’s tiny pet dog, who’d just had puppies a few days earlier. Those puppies were about the size of gerbils. The only embarrassment Keo ever expressed to me about his modest lifestyle was that his dog was so very small. He seemed to feel that there was something almost ungenerous about introducing his honored guests to such an undersized dog—as though the petite stature of his dog did not match Keo’s station in life, or at the very least did not match Keo’s aspirations.
“We are always laughing at her because she is so small. I’m sorry she is not bigger,” he apologized. “But she really is a nice dog.”
There was also a chicken. The chicken lived in the kitchen/porch area, with a bit of twine tying her to the wall so that she could wander but not escape. She had a small cardboard box and in this box she laid her one egg a day. When Keo presented us with his hen and her cardboard box, he did so in the manner of a gentleman farmer, with a proudly outstretched arm: “And this is our chicken!”
At that moment, I caught a glimpse of Felipe out of the corner of my eye, and watched as a series of emotions rippled across his face: tenderness, pity, nostalgia, admiration, and a little dose of sadness. Felipe grew up poor in southern Brazil, and—like Keo—he’d always been a proud soul. In fact, Felipe is still a proud soul, to the point that he likes to tell people he was born “broke,” not “poor”—thereby conveying the message that he’d always regarded his poverty as a temporary condition (as though somehow, as a helpless babe in arms, he had been caught just a little short on cash). And, as did Keo, Felipe leaned toward a scrappy entrepreneurship that had expressed itself at an early age. Felipe’s first big business idea came to him at the age of nine when he noticed that cars were always stalling out in a deep puddle at the bottom of a hill in his town of Porto Alegre. He enlisted a friend to help him, and the two of them would wait at the bottom of that hill all day long to push stalled cars out of the puddle. The drivers would give the boys spare change for their efforts, and with this spare change many American comic books were purchased. By the age of ten, Felipe had entered the junk metal business, scouring his town for scraps of iron, brass, and copper to sell for cash. By thirteen, he was selling animal bones (scavenged outside the local butcher shops and slaughterhouses) to a glue manufacturer, and it was partly with this money that he bought his first boat ticket out of Brazil. If he had known about frog meat and fighting fish, trust me: He would have done that, too.
Until this evening, Felipe had had no time for Keo. My guide’s officious nature, in fact, bugged him immensely. But something shifted in Felipe as soon as he took in Keo’s house, and the newspaper wallpaper, and the swept dirt floor, and the frogs in the bathroom, and the chicken in the box, and the humble little dog. And when Felipe met Noi, Keo’s wife, who was tiny even in her advanced all-the-kilos-at-once pregnancy, and who was working so hard to cook our dinner over a single gas flame, I saw his eyes moisten with emotion, though he was too polite to express anything toward Noi but friendly interest in her cooking. She shyly accepted Felipe’s praise. (“She speaks English,” Keo said. “But she is too timid about practicing.”)
When Felipe met Noi’s mother—a minuscule yet somehow queenly lady in a worn blue sarong, introduced only as “Grandmother”—my husband-to-be followed some deep personal instinct and bowed from the waist to this diminutive woman. At this grand gesture, Grandmother smiled just the slightest bit (just around the corners of her eyes) and responded with an almost imperceptible nod, telegraphing subtly: “Your bow has pleased me, sir.”
I loved Felipe so much at that moment, perhaps the most that I have ever loved him anywhere or at any time.
I must clarify here that even though Keo and Noi had no furniture, they did have three luxuries in their home. There was a television with a built-in stereo and DVD player, there was a tiny refrigerator, and there was an electric fan. When we entered the house, Keo had all three of these appliances working full tilt, to welcome us. The fan was blowing; the refrigerator buzzed as it made ice for our beer; the television blasted cartoons.
Keo asked, “Would you prefer to listen to music or to watch television cartoons during dinner?”
I told him that we would prefer to listen to music, thank you.
“Would you prefer to listen to hard-rock Western music?” he asked, “or soft Laotian music?”
I thanked him for his consideration, and answered that soft Laotian music would be fine.
Keo said, “That is no trouble for me. I have some perfect soft Laotian music that you will enjoy.” He put on some Laotian love songs, but he played them at an extremely loud volume—the better to demonstrate the quality of his stereo system. This was the same reason Keo directed the electric fan right into our faces. He had these lavish comforts, and he wanted us to benefit from their greatest possible application.
So it was a pretty loud evening, but this was not the worst thing in the world, for the loudness signaled a festive air, and we duly followed that signal. Soon we were all drinking Beerlao and telling stories and laughing. Or at least Felipe, Keo, Khamsy, and I were all drinking and laughing; Noi, in her extreme pregnancy, seemed to be suffering from the heat and did not drink the beer but just sat quietly on the hard dirt floor, shifting every once in a while in search of comfort.
As for Grandmother, she did drink beer, but she did not laugh so much with us. She only regarded us all with a pleased and quiet air. Grandmother was a rice farmer, we learned, who came from up north, up near the Chinese border. She came from a long line of rice farmers, and she herself had borne ten children (Noi the youngest), each one delivered in her own home. She told us all this only because I asked her directly the story of her life. Through Keo’s translation, she told us that her marriage—at the age of sixteen—was somewhat “accidental.” She married a man who was just passing through the village. He had stayed at her family’s house for the evening and fallen in love with her. A few days after the stranger’s arrival, they were married. I tried to ask Grandmother some follow-up questions about her thoughts on her marriage, but she revealed nothing more than these facts: rice farmer, accidental marriage, ten children. I was dying to know what “accidental” marriage might be code for (many women in my family, too, had to get married because of “accidents”), but no more information was forthcoming.
“She is not accustomed to people finding interest in her life,” Keo explained, and so I let the subject drop.
All night long, though, I kept stealing glances at Grandmother, and all night long it appeared to me that she was watching us from a great distance. She exuded a shimmering otherworldliness, marked by a demeanor so silent and reserved that she really at times did almost disappear. Even though she was sitting right across the floor from me, even though I could’ve touched her easily at any moment with an outstretched hand, it felt as though she was residing somewhere else, viewing us all from a benevolent throne set someplace high up on the moon.
Keo’s house—though tiny—was so clean that you could eat off the floor, and that is precisely what we did. We all sat down on a bamboo mat and shared the meal, rolling balls of rice in our hands. In keeping with Laotian custom, we all drank from the same glass, passing it around the room from the oldest person to the youngest. And here is what we ate: wonderfully spicy catfish soup, green papaya salad in a smoky fish sauce, sticky rice, and—of course—frogs. The frogs were the proudly offered main course, since these were Keo’s own home-grown livestock, so we had to eat quite a few of them. I had eaten frogs in the past (well, frogs’ legs) but this was different. These were giant frogs—huge, hefty, meaty bullfrogs—chopped into big parts like a stew chicken and then boiled, skin
and bones and all. The skin was the hardest bit of the meal to deal with, since it remained, even after cooking, so obviously a frog’s skin: spotted, rubbery, amphibian.
Noi watched us carefully. She said little during the meal except at one point to remind us, “Don’t just eat the rice—also eat the meat,” because meat is precious and we were valued visitors. So we ate all those slabs of rubbery frog flesh, along with the skin and the occasional bit of bone, chewing through it all without complaint. Felipe asked not once but twice if he could have another serving, which made Noi blush and smile at her pregnant belly in uncontainable pleasure. Though I personally knew that Felipe would rather eat his own sautéed shoe than swallow another hunk of boiled bullfrog, I loved him overwhelmingly again at that moment for his great goodness.
You can take this man anywhere, I thought with pride, and he will always know how to comport himself.
After dinner, Keo put on some videos of traditional Laotian wedding dancing, to entertain and educate us. The videos showed a group of stiff, formal Laotian women dancing on a disco stage, wearing fancy makeup and glittering sarongs. Their dance involved pretty much standing still and twirling their hands, smiles cemented on their faces. We all watched this for half an hour in attentive silence.
“These are all excellent, professional dancers,” Keo finally informed us, breaking the strange reverie. “The singer whose voice you can hear in the background music is very famous in Laos—exactly like your Michael Jackson in America. And I myself have met him.”
There was an innocence to Keo which was almost heartbreaking to behold. In fact, his entire family seemed pure beyond anything I’d ever encountered. Television, fridge, and electric fan notwithstanding, they remained untouched by modernity, or at least untouched by modernity’s cool slickness. Here were just some of the elements missing in conversation with Keo and his family: irony, cynicism, sarcasm, and presumptuousness. I know five-year-olds in America who are cannier than this family. In fact, all the five-year-olds I know in America are cannier than this family. I wanted to wrap their entire house in a sort of protective gauze to defend them from the world—an endeavor that, given the size of their house, would not have required very much gauze at all.
After the dancing exhibition finished, Keo turned off the television and guided our conversation once more to the dreams and plans that he and Noi shared for their life together. After the baby was born, they would clearly need more money, which is why Keo had a plan to increase his frog-meat business. He explained that he would like to someday invent a frog-breeding house with a controlled environment that would mimic the ideal frog-breeding conditions of summertime, but year-round. This contraption, which I gathered would be some kind of greenhouse, would include such technologies as “bogus rain and bogus sun.” The bogus weather conditions would trick the frogs into not noticing that winter had arrived. This would be beneficial, as winter is a difficult time of year for frog breeders. Every winter Keo’s frogs fall into hibernation (or, as he called it, “meditation”), during which time they do not eat, thereby losing much weight and rendering the frog-meat-by-the-kilo business a not very good business at all. But if Keo were to be able to raise frogs year-round, and if he were the only person in Luang Prabang who could do so, his would become a booming business and the whole family would prosper.
“It sounds like a brilliant idea, Keo,” Felipe said.
“It was Noi’s idea,” Keo said, and we all turned our attention again to Keo’s wife, to pretty Noi, only nineteen years old and so damp-faced from the heat, kneeling awkwardly on the dirt floor, her belly all full of baby.
“You’re a genius, Noi!” exclaimed Felipe.
“She is a genius!” Keo agreed.
Noi blushed so deeply at this praise that she almost seemed to swoon. She was unable to meet our eyes, but you could tell that she felt the honor even if she could not face it. You could tell that she fully felt how well-regarded she was by her husband. Handsome, young, inventive Keo thought so highly of his wife that he could not help himself from boasting about her to his honored dinner guests! At such a public declaration of her own importance, shy Noi seemed to swell to twice her natural size (and she already was twice her natural size, what with that baby due any moment). Honestly, for one sublime instant, the young mother-to-be seemed so elated, so inflated, that I feared she might float away and join her mother up there on the face of the moon.
All of this, as we drove back to our hotel that night, got me thinking about my grandmother and her marriage.
My Grandma Maude—who recently turned ninety-six years old—comes from a long line of people whose comfort levels in life far more closely resembled Keo and Noi’s than my own. Grandma Maude’s family were immigrants from the north of England who found their way to central Minnesota in covered wagons, and who lived through those first unthinkable winters in rough sod houses. Merely by working themselves almost to death, they acquired land, built small wooden houses, then bigger houses, and gradually increased their livestock and prospered.
My grandmother was born in January 1913, in the middle of a cold prairie winter, at home. She arrived in this world with a potentially life-threatening impairment—a serious cleft-palate deformity that left her with a hole in the roof of her mouth and an uncompleted upper lip. It would be almost April before the railroad tracks thawed enough to allow Maude’s father to take the baby to Rochester for her first rudimentary surgery. Until that time, my grandmother’s mother and father somehow kept this infant alive despite the fact that she could not nurse. To this day, my grandmother still doesn’t know how her parents fed her, but she thinks it may have had something to do with a length of rubber tubing that her father borrowed from the milking barn. My grandmother wishes now, she told me recently, that she had asked her mother for more information about those first few difficult months of her own life, but this was not a family where people either dwelled on sad memories or encouraged painful conversations, and so the subject was never raised.
Though my grandmother is not one to complain, her life was a challenging one by any measure. Of course, the lives of everyone around her were challenging, too, but Maude carried the extra burden of her medical condition, which had left her with lingering speech problems and a visible scar in the middle of her face. Not surprisingly, she was terribly shy. For all these reasons, it was widely assumed that my grandmother would never marry. This assumption never had to be spoken aloud; everyone just knew it.
But even the most unfortunate destinies can sometimes bring peculiar benefits. In my grandmother’s case, the benefit was this: She was the only member of her family who received a really decent education. Maude was allowed to dedicate herself to her studies because she really needed to be educated, to provide for herself someday as an unmarried woman. So while the boys were all pulled out of school around eighth grade to work in the fields, and while even the girls rarely finished high school (they were often married with a baby before their schooling was completed), Maude was sent to town to board with a local family and to become a diligent student. She excelled in school. She had a special fondness for history and English and hoped to someday become a teacher; she worked cleaning houses to save money for teachers’ college. Then the Great Depression hit, and the expense of college grew far out of reach. But Maude kept working, and her earnings transformed her into one of the rarest imaginable creatures of that era in central Minnesota: an autonomous young woman who lived by her own means.
Those years of my grandmother’s life, just out of high school, have always fascinated me because her path was so different from everyone else’s around her. She had experiences out there in the real world rather than settling right into the business of raising a family. Maude’s own mother rarely left the family farm except to go into town once a month (and never in the winter) to stock up on staples like flour and sugar and gingham. But after graduating from high school, Maude went to Montana all by herself and worked in a restaurant, serving pie and coffee to
cowboys. This was in 1931. She did exotic and unusual things that no woman in her family could even imagine doing. She got herself a haircut and a fancy permanent wave (for two entire dollars) from an actual hairdresser, at an actual train station. She bought herself a flirty, kicky, slim yellow dress from an actual store. She went to movies. She read books. She caught a ride back from Montana to Minnesota on the back of a truck driven by some Russian immigrants with a handsome son about her age.
Once home from her Montana adventure, she got a job working as a housekeeper and secretary to a wealthy older woman named Mrs. Parker, who drank and smoked and laughed and enjoyed life immensely. Mrs. Parker, my grandmother informs me, “was not even afraid to curse,” and she threw parties in her home that were so extravagant (the best steaks, the best butter, and plenty of booze and cigarettes) that you might never have known a Depression was raging out there in the world. Moreover, Mrs. Parker was generous and liberal, and she often passed her fine clothes along to my grandmother, who was half the older woman’s size, so unfortunately she couldn’t always take advantage of this literal largesse.
My grandmother worked hard and saved her money. I need to emphasize this here: She had her own savings. I believe you could comb through several centuries of Maude’s ancestors without ever finding a woman who had managed to save money on her own. She was even squirreling away some extra money to pay for an operation that would have rendered her cleft palate scar less noticeable. But to my mind, her youthful independence is best epitomized by one symbol: a gorgeous wine-colored coat with a real fur collar that she bought for herself for twenty dollars in the early 1930s. This was an unprecedented extravagance for a woman from that family. My grandmother’s mother was rendered speechless by the notion of squandering such an astronomical amount of money on . . . a coat. Again, I believe you could pick your way through my family’s genealogy with tweezers and never find a woman before Maude who’d ever bought something so fine and expensive for herself.
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