house for dinner-to show us his life and to introduce us to pregnant young Noi.
“We met at school,” Keo had said of his wife. “I always liked her. She is somewhat younger than me-only nineteen years old now. She is very pretty. Although it’s odd for me now that she is having the baby. She used to be so tiny that she barely weighed any kilos at all! Now it appears that she weighs all the kilos at once!”
So we went to Keo’s house-driven there by his friend Khamsy the innkeeper-and we went bearing gifts. Felipe brought several bottles of Beerlao, the local ale, and I brought some cute gender-?neutral baby clothes that I’d found in the market and now wanted to present to Keo’s wife.
Keo’s house stood at the end of a rutted dirt road just outside Luang Prabang. It was the last house on a road of similar houses, before the jungle took over, and it occupied a twenty-?by-?thirty-?foot rectangle of land. Half of this property was covered by concrete tanks, which Keo had filled with the frogs and fighting fish he raises to supplement his income as an elementary school teacher and occasional tour guide. He sells the frogs for food. As he proudly explained, they go for about 25,000 kip-$2.50-a kilo, and on average there are three to four frogs in a kilo because these frogs are quite hefty. So it’s a good little side living. In the meantime, he also has the fighting fish, which sell for 5,000 kip each-fifty cents-and which are breeding happily. He sells the fighting fish to local men who bet on the aquatic battles. Keo explained that he had begun raising fighting fish as a young boy, already looking for a way to make some extra money so he would not be a burden to his parents. Though Keo does not like to boast, he could not help but reveal that he was perhaps the best breeder of fighting fish in all of Luang Prabang.
Keo’s house took up the rest of his property-that which was not overrun by tanks of frogs and fish-which meant the house proper was about fifteen feet square. The structure was made of bamboo and plywood, with a corrugated metal roof. The one original room of the house had recently been divided into two rooms, to make a living area and a sleeping area. The dividing wall was just a plywood separation that Keo had wallpapered neatly with pages from English-?language newspapers such as the Bangkok Post and the Herald Tribune. (Felipe told me later that he suspects Keo lies there at night, reading every word of his wallpaper, always working to better his English.) There was only one lightbulb, which hung over the living room. There was also a tiny concrete bathroom with a squat toilet and a basin for bathing. On the night of our visit, however, the basin was filled with frogs, because the frog tanks out front were at capacity. (Here is a side benefit of raising hundreds of frogs, as Keo explained: “Among all our neighbors, we alone do not have a problem with the mosquitoes.”) The kitchen was outside the house, beneath a small overhang, with a dirt floor, tidily swept.
“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.
