“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 sauteed 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
