Lifestyle
Green Eggs and Kao
I thought I would teach my son’s Laotian friend about everything American from Dr. Seuss to mashed potatoes. But he ended up teaching me.
ADAM CAME TO SEE MY NEWBORN SON just a few days after we brought him home from the hospital. He was so excited about Sam’s birth that he jumped up on the crib rail and pitched forward, tumbling in so that he was nose to nose with him, the cardinal violation germ-conscious health care professionals had so gravely warned us about. The die was cast: Adam was almost three years old, Sam was a little more than three days; their friendship—and my lessons in the modern melting pot—had just begun.
Adam is the son of a Laotian woman who worked for me intermittently before Sam was born; she had been recommended by a friend who called her Chanh Pheng, which I assumed was her whole name. In what would be the first of many cultural misfirings (and many mysteriously cashed checks), she waited a year before delicately informing us that her last name was actually Lianekeo; “Chanhpheng” was just her first name. During those early days, she arrived at our house shy and accommodating and cleaned the place with a dizzying swiftness—before I really knew she had been there she was gone. In snatches I learned the outlines of her history: She and her husband had left Laos in 1980 while that country was swept up in the tumult that still defined Southeast Asia. The communist takeover of their home deeply concerned Chanhpheng’s husband, Thinnakone—“If I had stayed there, they would have either taken me to jail or killed me,” he says—so with his new bride, he swam the two-mile-wide Mekong River and found refuge at a camp in Thailand before moving on to the Philippines, Philadelphia, and then, finally, Houston. Thinnakone the surveyor became Thomas the carpet layer; Chanhpheng supplemented their income by occasionally cleaning houses. They had three children: Annie, born in 1981, Anna, born in 1983, and then Adam, five years later.
Before meeting the Lianekeos, my knowledge of Southeast Asians was pretty much confined to Vietnam War protests and one Thai restaurant on the Westheimer strip. I was, from the beginning, inspired and comforted by their story. They seemed to me brave and hardy, proof that the American dream still existed: They had come here with almost nothing and, within a decade or so, mastered the language and purchased a small home; they could boast that all their children were honor students. It was easy to view them through the lens of cultural stereotypes—those ambitious Asians—and I could see myself playing my own stereotypical role: I would be the benevolent American who would help the family find their way in their chosen country. It seemed a fair and impeccably correct exchange in this, the multicultural age. I taught Chanhpheng about mortgages and health insurance; she brought me spicy noodle dishes and “lucky” plants from her garden. It would not dawn on me until much, much later—when Adam came into my life—that the culture she and her family were really teaching me about was my own.
Ever resourceful, Chanhpheng swiftly used the occasion of Sam’s birth to promote herself from occasional housecleaner to afternoon baby-sitter—at her house. I was a work-at-home mom, she lived only a few blocks from me, and she had to be home with Adam in the afternoons anyway. The deal was struck before my husband had time to quibble over her salary. Soon enough, Sam was speaking a smattering of Laotian and even asking for kao (“rice”) at mealtimes. (“If you sing at the table,” he told me, quoting a lesson from Chanhpheng’s school of table manners, “you’ll have an old wife.”) When he began going to preschool several mornings a week, the teachers praised his sharing skills, a quality I immediately attributed to his exposure to the Lianekeos. American kids seem to learn (and claim) property rights almost before they learn to talk, but Chanhpheng and her family were, for cultural and economic reasons, more communal and less acquisitive. I congratulated myself on my instinct to hire Chanhpheng and gladly accepted the one small price for my success: Given a choice of social contacts, Sam almost always chose Adam.
Wiry and athletic with, for many years, an abbreviated fade haircut, Adam was a far cry from his two older sisters. Where Annie and Anna were the archetypal Asian children—poised, articulate, inquisitive, and self-effacing—Adam was unruly and, well, a bit of a slob. As a toddler he stained the upholstery with his milk bottle and broke items that were not placed beyond his reach. As the only male child in the family, he carried with him an air of privilege. He was, in short, a typical boy—which made him an early and primary object of Sam’s adoration. “How about a trip to the zoo with Natalie?” we would ask him. “Uh-uh. Adam,” Sam would reply.
“Frederick?”
“Adam.”
“Cody?”
“Adam, Adam, Adam.”
How could we object? They had been together for most of Adam’s life and all of Sam’s. When I was not hovering over the two of them, they played quietly together at whatever game a two-year-old and a four-year-old, and then a three-year-old and a five-year-old, could dream up. They buried treasure in the back yard. They floated feathers over the air conditioning vents. They opened a restaurant on the front porch. If Adam was shy with us, he was patient and kind with Sam, willing to share the finer points of Super Mario ad infinitum. When Sam had to get allergy shots for his asthma, it was Adam who cried the most. When Sam jumped into a swimming pool after being forbidden to do so, Adam swam for him as fast as I did. Sometimes I thought of him as Sam’s bodyguard. “Sam looks weird with glasses,” the child of a friend of ours taunted. “No, he doesn’t,” Adam insisted. In short, he won me over. And, not so coincidentally, he increased my opportunities to play the benevolent American.
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