Crossing the Mekong

How can one hope to say anything more or different about crossing a body of water? The metaphors are already legion: crossing the Red Sea, crossing the Jordan, crossing the river Styx, crossing the water, coming up out of the water. All of these are about departure and arrival, about transformation and transcendence, about moving through and beyond.

None of these, however, are quite right for what the Mekong means to Laos or what crossing it meant for hundreds of thousands of refugees.

To understand what the Mekong means to Laos is to understand how the very term for river is constructed in the Lao language. The term for river in general is mae nam, literally “mother water,” but there is little doubt that the term is referring to The River, to the one river that has given birth to Laos. This parentage becomes even clearer when you come to understand that the Mekong was not originally a border between the Lao and the non-Lao, but that ethnic Lao lived on both sides of the river. The Mekong only became a border when France decided to extend its colonial powers outwards from Vietnam and came up against British colonial power in what is today modern Thailand. In good European logic, they decided the Mekong would make an excellent frontier between them even though it arbitrarily divided a people speaking the same language and sharing the same history and culture, a common people who shared the Mekong as their mother.

In Savannakhet, the main streets parallel the Mekong, but the primary impulse is to turn right off these roads, to be drawn down to the water. And the Nonginthiraths are drawn to it, as children to their mother—to their estranged mother, their maligned and imprisoned mother.

It’s not a beautiful river: it’s muddy, a mid-level tan that matches the tan clays of the rice paddies we see turned by plows in this, the planting season. It’s also dirty: no doubt the cloudy water in the gutters under the cement sidewalks on both sides of the river drain into the Mekong. It’s also inaccessible, especially to us in this, the rainy season, when its roiling waters are high, sweeping branches and detritus seaward in slow if impressive fashion. Yet daily fishermen dot its waters in their long, thin, seemingly-flimsy if poetic-looking boats, and the ubiquitous fishes of the innumerable marketplaces no doubt come from its waters and its tributaries. Its surface is always calm but for the eddies of current, never windblown or frothed. In the evening, to borrow from Langston Hughes, it turns all golden in the sunset. A beautiful river.

But if the river marks the Nonginthiraths as Laotians, it also marks them as expatriates; ethnically, it’s their mother, but familially it was their greatest obstacle. We visit the Mekong to revisit the story, to see the symbol of exodus, of barrier, of triumph.

The first night we stumble upon a tent-restaurant on the banks of the Mekong, a Lao barbecue. We assemble low tables and they bring us two clay pots with burning charcoal and cooking dishes to set on them: one shallow, for fast frying, the other a clay soup pot. Then they bring us plates of meat—squid and shrimp and imitation crab (remember, Laos is landlocked) and pork and liver and tripe—and vegetables—lettuces and basils and herbs I wouldn’t dare name—and bags of noodles. It’s our job to cook these ingredients up as we want them, to add sukiyaki and sugar and soy and lime and pepper. We stumble through, querying and arguing and passing plates and coming out feeling like our mother has fed us something wonderful from her secret cache of good things. We bet on what the bill will be and all overshoot significantly, this being a gracious mother: it was $21 to feed 6 adults, 5 children.

But we can get closer to The River and on night two, we do. A trendier restaurant sits on the Mekong, not simply down on its banks but afloat its waters. But this brings up a question: the barbecue above is proletarian, good, wonderful, cheap food; the restaurant below is clearly pretentious, set on massive floats with a thatched roof, strings of lights, and cross-dressing hosts, and it’s bound to be more expensive. Eating and sleeping proletarian is everything in Laos, not simply because of communism but because with good food on literally every corner and in every kitchen, high prices are for tourists.

We head there for pictures, then stay.  This trip is not just any trip, we decide, this trip is to remember and to celebrate and to retell a story, the story of God’s leading a family out of one thing and into another; this trip is in some sense religious, and therefore we decide to break bread on the river itself, on the mother-water.

And the water is impressive. We sit as close to it as we can, close enough to reach out and touch it, with our backs to flimsy handrails that are the only barrier between us and it. In this, the middle of rainy season, the river is mildly angry, it seems from the way the current swirls around the corner of the platform where we sit, and so, as we wait for our food, the questions begin.

What time of year did they leave? Keo can’t remember; thirty years of seasons are enough to wash the details of one season away. Was the water high or low? Low, she and Pong both remember, not like this, Pong says, looking at the distance, perhaps three-quarters of a mile, between us and the lights of Mukdahan on the Thai side. So what season was that? Probably about November, she says.

The move, the great escape, crossing the mother-water, came in pieces. First, Pong and Grandma Mouth went during the day, under the auspices of fishing with an unnamed someone. Should they be stopped by patrols, they were just a grandmother and a child who, at nine, was clearly old enough to be a great help in the boat. In the middle of the river, they changed boats to one from the Thai side and continued across unabated where they lived with friends.

Younger children, girls ages four and two, could not be passed off as fishermen. Keo would have to find someone and pay them, Laotian coyotes if you will, who, like their modern day equivalents, were not always trustworthy. Keo had heard stories of these transporters taking the money of their passengers and dumping those same passengers out of the boat in the middle of the river.

“How much did you have to pay for the first trip again?” I ask.

“Nothing,” she replies, as we sip water and Pepsi and Beerlao. “I just had to find other people to go,” she says.

But the family she found had a baby, and the baby cried all night on the first attempt so that the coyote was unwilling to try crossing.

Sitting in our trendy restaurant, it takes some work to imagine it. Still, one can imagine them sitting there, sheltered somewhat by the foliage of the mother-water, though trees are not plentiful here on the banks of the Mekong. The baby cries and the nervous mother shushes and rocks him; he quiets enough that the father insists they try it, but as soon as the mother stands, the baby starts in again. The coyote shakes his head, grows sharper with the woman. In the dark Sy and Ly collapse in sleep, Keo nods off momentarily, only to scare awake and shoo mosquitoes off the young girls. It is a torturous night. At dawn, they return home, Keo disappointed and fatigued, wondering again if this is worth it, if she should try again.

The threat, too, is real. As the grown children get more of the story from their mother in Lao, Sy says in English, “So I didn’t just dream that. That did happen.”

“Yes!” Keo says in a sharp rising tone that means, “Of course—what did you think!?”

They’re talking, I know, about bodies floating in the water, dead bodies that Sy remembers and then wonders if she remembers, wonders if they’re not just some scene from some gruesome movie that was emblazoned on her child’s memory. But no. These are real memories, this was the real threat: death at the hands of the Mekong and of her gunboats that tried to stem the bleeding of refugees that fled the country by the thousands. This is why we’ve returned to the water itself—for feasting, for celebration.

The second attempt, nights later, went without a hitch and there are no details. The same people assembled, and this time the baby was better or perhaps the father had simply paid extra, and Keo and her two daughters made the night trek across the river to find refuge with friends in Mukdahan. The coyote did return later to demand ad hoc payment for the trip, money which Keo didn’t have but got from a kind friend or relative, and which begins to explain some of the trail of cash that we leave with people here.

In the restaurant on the Mekong, the food is more expensive but high quality and still not unreasonable by American standards. The kids eat a large platter of fried rice with seafood imbedded in it like Crackerjack prizes; the adults eat prawn soup, sour and salty with large, full-body prawns that we get to peel and eat, our own reward; we get spicy squid salad with cabbage and a vinegary sauce that’s lovely, fiery and acidic; we get a plate of laab gai that’s fairly average and barely makes it down to the end of our table, but we don’t care because we’ve also ordered two whole fish to pun: we fold noodles, pieces of young eggplant and yellow pepper, and forked-off-the-bones fish and into a cabbage leaf, then dip it all into a sweet-spicy peanut sauce that’s surprisingly thin-textured and light and delicious. It is as fresh and as good as I can imagine fish tasting, and it’s peaceful as the current slides by and the sun sets on the mother-water, the Mekong.

But pieces of the story keep turning up, like the debris that floats by from time to time in the current. A woman has been with us since our first visit to Phonesim, a woman who was the first to embrace Keo there, as they both shed tears. This is Keo’s first cousin and a woman who bears an uncanny resemblance to Sy’s Grandma Mouth. Since that first day in Phonesim, she has not left Keo’s side, though we’ve gone on trips and changed cities, gone out to eat and switched hotels seemingly endlessly. She’s always there, just another person to drag along, I thought to myself first.

By the third night on the Mekong, back up the bank at the Lao barbecue, I’ve come to see this woman in a new light. She helps us cook, eats with us quietly, politely, then moves her chair back to give space to our family. “Jep tong”—stomach ache, she insists good-naturedly when Sy insists she eat more. All throughout the trip, including the morning when I woke in a frenzy because my child was sick, she’s been a calming presence, a watchful presence, a guardian angel who just happens to look like a young Grandma Mouth.

On the way back to the hotel, we comment on her calm demeanor, her loyalty and leavening effect on us all. It’s then that I learn something new about the story, something I’d never heard before. “Yeah, she said she was so hurt when my mom left,” Sy’s sister tells me in the back of a pickup. “She said ‘One night we went out together, the next night she was gone. I couldn’t believe it.’”

This story explains her constant presence, explains the ties that bind here in Laos. It also explains the level of secrecy that really did exist in crossing the mother-water—that you wouldn’t even tell your best friend and closest relative, you’d just up and leave one night, inexplicably.

We’re farther up the Mekong now, at the busier Vientiane. The distance to the other side is closer here, I’m convinced, the river narrower, perhaps deeper. We went down to the Mekong last night but the streets are busier here, more trendy, less welcoming.

But that’s okay. We’ve seen the river, been blessed by the mother-water with good things, with old memories and new details, and so we really took our leave of the Mekong at Savannakhet, of the mother-water, site of growth and departure, of fear and triumph, of birth, death, and exodus.

On this trip, then, we’ve missed Grandma Mouth—and we haven’t. Before she died, we asked her if she missed her country, if she didn’t want to go back. “My country is here, now, with my family,” she answered without even a moment’s pause. This, too, explains why three nights on the Mekong are enough, why we can leave without a backward glance. Our family, too, is in some sense, our country. Keo’s cousin, Grandma Mouth’s niece, travels with us to our next destination. We travel together to life’s next adventure, with a little bigger definition of family than we had before.

And yet we will soon travel home to Edgerton to an even larger sense of family. After crossing the mother-water and then crossing the Pacific Ocean, Keo and her family landed in Edgerton, Minnesota, where several families from Edgerton First CRC were waiting with warm clothes and open arms on a twenty-below February day. Later, that church family also welcomed Pong, Sy, and Ly with water, the water of baptism that marked another family membership, that marked them as “heirs of God and coheirs with Christ.”

Back in Edgerton, we will no doubt share with that family this story—of the calm woman carrying the marks of Grandma Mouth who blessed our family wonderfully and mysteriously on the banks of the swelled Mekong as it carried debris forcefully away, but as we remained, watching from the firm footings of its banks.