Passing the Test

"If you're going to eat that, you've got to eat it like a Lao person would," she says to me.  Then again, "If you're going to eat that, you've got to suck it, get all the meat off." 

Obviously, she was talking about a mango pit, so I wasn't worried.  I think I know how to eat a mango pit.  By now.

But the question is, have I learned to eat enough like a Lao person to go to Laos?  I've learned how to eat chicken wings-Lao (get all the meat and crunch every bit of cartilage), snails-Lao (pick them with toothpicks, eat the good parts, drink the shell juice), and perch (deep fried, you can eat fins and the cartilaginous parts of the heads, which become like potato chips). 

To say that I've experienced a food revolution in my marriage is an understatement.  I went from a cuisine with a range of two taste varieties--sweet and salty--to one with at least five:  sweet, salty, hot, sour, and bitter.  Admittedly, hot was the hardest.  It's something to get used to; I got used to it primarily by sweating, sucking air in through my mouth, and drinking that natural solvent of oily spice, milk.  Thank God I grew up on a Dutchman's dairy farm. 

I remember one food lesson, though, because of how it passed down the hierarchy to me, through the chain of command and across languages.  I don't remember what we were eating, but I know there was meat and rice; I also know that the meat must not have been too spicy or else I would've been saved from my gaffe--I would have needed to chow down on rice in an attempt to neutralize the spice.  However, whatever dish we were eating, it was tasty enough that I was, as they say, "going to town" on it. 

But then, two words from Grandma Mouth (pronounced something akin to "moot") changed my life for ever:  gin po.  She said it to my wife, since I hadn't a clue about Lao, what she was saying.  To this day, I'm not sure what the direct translation is, but it's something akin to "he's eating wastefully or selfishly."  My wife caught the spirit of what her grandma was saying and basically explained to me that, in Laotian food tradition, meat is a privilege, not a 64 oz. T-bone:  to eat the way I was eating was childish, inconsiderate, tending towards gluttonous. 

Behind this explanation is a reality my wife remembers from refugee camp: when you have a little bit of meat and plenty of rice, you make the meat go far, you stretch it, you let the rice lead and the meat accompany, you chew and chew on that meat because it's all you've got. 

The Meksavanh women are known for speaking their minds.  I certainly felt sheepish as the matriarch of the family noted my childish eating habits.  In the future, I promised myself, I would do better.  Thus the cartilage of chicken bones and the hoi kang (snails).  But the perch, those are the payoff, those are the blessing of blowing the door open:  we caught them through the ice during the day and savored the sweet-salty crunch of skin and fins combined with the tender white meat and fatty eggs in their bellies on the darkest night of the year one moonless January night. 

So I eat the mango like a Lao person would--or, more to the point, like a Lao person taught me to: bite down through the meat to the pit, pull and suck every piece of world's sweetest fruit into my mouth, the tough fibers around the edges sticking in my teeth, savoring every bit.

"Yes, that's right," she says.  "Get it all.  I can take you to Laos," she says.