Page 2 of I Never Said I Love You

“Laos?” I repeated. “We don’t have any programs in Laos.” I articulated the statement slowly, hoping she might catch my meaning.

“Yes, but I heard from a friend that you helped her find a way to study in Sri Lanka, where there were no programs either. This is important to me. See each of my parents left as children…”

Laos. Her face flickered, her words animated, her hands fluttered near her eyes, but I was no longer with her.

∞ ∞ ∞ ∞ ∞

“Nao Kao. NaoKao Inthavong.”

I had spent my life being packed around the world on my parents’ various sabbaticals, befriending locals in all the far-flung corners of the world, but even to my globally-attuned ears, the name was unusual. I turned to look. Like me, he was younger than most of the other students in the class. Pan-Asian, relatively non-descript, save for wearing blue jeans and long sleeves despite the mercury hovering around ninety degrees. Kind eyes behind thick glasses. Thin. No, more like wiry. Or scrappy. Unsmiling, but then the international students often were. Flashing the pearly whites at every opportunity is a decidedly American trait.

“Say that again,” the professor asked.

“Please call me Nao Kao.”

I hated these first day of class exercises, the name, rank, serial number monotony of it, and never more so than when the professor projected such obvious earnestness for us to amalgamate ourselves into one big, happy family. Unlike some students who wanted to share their life story from the first day, who were already speaking of happy hours to come, I sat quietly, hands folded into my lap, just waiting for this exercise to end.

“And where are you from, Nao Kao?”

“Laos.”

The professor flicked her eyebrows quickly, but moved on.

I have often wondered if it might have all been different if, like the rest of them, I had not known Laos from Latvia. In another life, I might have been the one to ask whether Laos wasn’t one of those countries near Russia, the ones that used to be part of the Soviet Union. Or, at a minimum, I simply might not have cared, absently filing Nao Kao’s homeland in my mind as another obscure land to be named and forgotten.

But whether from a forced march through the frigid ooze of North Sea mud at low tide, my hosts determined to show me a good time despite myself, or my encounters with man-eating mosquitos and man-hating monkeys in South America, my identity as a globalist was already forged by the time I entered grad school in the fall of 2000. Whether it was the cumulative effect of these hijinks, the international hallmates I had befriended all through college, or merely how I was wired, I can say only that if ever the stars foretold eventual friendship, this was it.

Not that I had many friends that year. Never mind that I had grown up in Ann Arbor just a few miles from campus, that I had spent four years haunting the stacks and study spaces of the UGLi, or that I had spent more hours laughing and lounging in the Diag than any other first-year grad student. I had, in fact, once been hired to give a private tour to the daughter of an A-list celebrity who was contemplating exchanging the sunshine of California for the zest and zeal of the Maize and Blue.

Now I was a graduate student, and the friends I made through undergrad were all graduated and gone; my future was waiting for me to find it, surely elsewhere, and I felt like a transient. I kept my nose in my books and staked out the farthest corner of the law library. The law library was a far cry from the relative hustle and bustle of the undergraduate library, where laughter often reverberated and joviality reigned among the volumes. No, the law library was a place so quiet, but into whose high vaulted ceiling every sound reverberated, that even a whisper echoed, and you could hear the person three tables over scratching notes onto a legal pad. I worked there one summer in high school, wearing heels for the first time simply because I delighted in the click of them bouncing off the flagstone floor and through the cavernous hall.

By the time my first semester of graduate school ended, I had succeeded in distancing myself from my cohort such that they didn’t even invite me to the end-of-semester bar crawl.

“Are you coming?” Nao Kao asked, before he realized I was unaware of the plans. He and I often sat together in class, sometimes lingering after to finish our conversations. Those snatches of conversation before we vacated our seats when the next students arrived were the extent of my social life. Despite the fact that he wasn’t even a full member of the cohort, that he was only taking education courses as a cognate, he was eager for the opportunity to socialize with the others, even if some of them thought he was born in the USSR. Nao Kao bore no grudges.

I thought back to my twenty-first birthday a couple of years earlier, the surprise∞party a handful of well-meaning if misguided friends had thrown at Pizza House, my strident opposition to so much as a mention of my birthday that ended with me stalking out onto Church Street on the coldest night of the year. I had timed my exit poorly and collided with the waiter bearing the large tray of sticky pink daiquiris to our table. Sweet, alcoholic lava flowed over my friends, across the table, and pooled under their feet and on the floor. Months of repentance followed.

“You’ll have more fun without me, I promise.”

“You won’t do it just for the show will you? Because you really do not care what the others think, is that right?”

He looked at me quizzically, as though truly seeing me for the first time.

That might have been obvious from my parries in class, my aversion tocollegialityas the faculty so often referred to the need to pretend we all liked one another, from the way I rolled my eyes when a classmate suggested balancing a departmental budget by purchasing fewer pens and less copy paper.

Suddenly it dawned on me what a revelation this must be. What a revelationImust be. Asian societies are collectivist: the good of the group supersedes that of the individual, full stop. The squeaky wheel might get the grease here, but in Asia, it is the nail that sticks up that gets hammered down.

“No, no, it’s just, I mean, I’m not interested. It’s not my thing,” I stammered.

“Other people, you mean. We are not your thing,” Nao Kao teased me, and I smiled—laughed—despite myself.

He moved his hand and a flash of light caught me by surprise. Our many conversations during and after class had hewed entirely to the academic, I realized, not the personal, and despite the months of shared classes, this was the first time I noticed his wedding ring, that simple band of gold that delineated a bright line in relationships all the world over.

“I miss them.”

I had stared a beat too long; perhaps Nao Kao had misinterpreted my surprise at my own obliviousness for surprise at his personal life. But now I met his eyes. Waited.

“My wife. My kids, twin babies,” he smiled slightly, as though remembering something. “Turning one next month. Ah, but this was the only way though. A better life for all of us in the end and it’s only a short time.”

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