Matriarch

The Lao matriarch, I'm convinced, is magic.  No, "magic" is too easy. I could try to follow Zora Neale Hurston and declare her "the water buffalo of the world," but as a white male, I have no business messing around with these titles.  So let me just tell you what she does.

The matriarch of this place is the matriarch of two houses—two large houses. In Laos, the family spills on and on, a great fountain with the great grandmother in the middle and grandparents and parents and nieces and nephews and cousins and in-laws bubbling outwards in a tremendous circle.

The great grandmother here is 100 years old. She lounges during the day on a raised platform; for the evening meal she’s sometimes transferred to a wheel chair and rolled outside near the stone tables to eat with the family. Respect for her is palpable, it’s the undercurrent of Lao morality and the power at the center of the house.

Her daughter, maetaoSang Meksavanh, is the energy behind the household. In between meals, we get the structure of her day, the bass line or drum beat of Lao culture. Up at four, she makes sticky rice for the entire family and for the monks at the wat. After delivering the monks’ rice, she returns to cook breakfast, khaobiak, rice noodle soup with pork, blood sausage, and herbs, on her charcoal stove.

Her charcoal stove.

Her cooking set up, typical of Lao cooks everywhere, is adjacent to the house and under an awning. There’s the charcoal stove, which is a sort of stone pot or tripod for the charcoal fire upon which the pot sits, all set within a simple if sturdy framework that functions as a kind of hood or windbreak. For clean up, there’s a drainage gutter that runs behind the house and a great stone basin filled with water. This is the kitchen sink. Squatting as seemingly only Asians can do—this also explains the bathrooms—she will wash all the family’s dishes here and then prepare for the next meal.

Cooking with the pot also explains the soup-based element of Lao cuisine. Pho and khaobiak can cook all day, the longer the soup bone flavors can disseminate into the broth the better, but also keng pit, an orange broth with young egg plants, green beans, squash, basil, assorted herbs, and pork, and oum khilex, a deep green broth with pork and ant eggs, as well as various curry dishes.

Other dishes are more intensive: in dom mach hung (spicy papaya salad, the signature Lao dish) the papaya must be shredded, usually with a hand held cleaver, chopping into the green fruit and then slicing off the shreds—there food processor in Lao cooking is the mae, the mother, or her sous chefs, her daughters. Laab, too, a ground pork dish with tremendous herbs and spices, is a bit more labor intensive. Then there’s grilled meats, deep fried meats—only fish, I guess—cured meats, steamed meats wrapped in bamboo with rice and herbs, and on and on.

But perhaps I’m also not explaining the extent of the dishes here, as in dirty dishes. These are the people that eat mae Sang’s cooking: the great grandmother, her husband (who’s our connection here), two daughters, a daughter-in-law and that daughter-in-law’s sister, a son-in-law, up to five grandchildren, and at least two “cousins,” plus our party of seven, plus herself. And at any given meal there may be two-to-five new people. Let’s be conservative and say twenty people. Let’s also say that this is primarily the number at dinner, as breakfast is more unpredictable and other arrangements often happen at lunch.

Still, I’m tempted to say that magic happens in getting all those people fed, but I don’t want to diminish the work that it takes. She worksdiligently; she works religiously. But she also works evenly, she also works artfully. What she does she does with grace, without need for acclaim except the brief narrative of her day that we’re told of once so as not to lose sight of that undercurrent of respect that keeps the household afloat. Through the beauty and excellence of each dish—which have themselves, no doubt, grown and diminished over the years, have peaked and flattened out and especially deepened with her knowledge of her craft—her more significant masterpiece grows up around her, as children grow and draw in others to the family unit, as the ripples of her influence extend further and further outward from the center of her calm and artistry.

Dieth is my case in point. Dieth is a sixteen-year-old “cousin,” who, we’re told, is here studying in Savannakhet and staying with the family, though since school’s out for the year, he’s always around. Dieth has an easy smile and short, tousled hair that looks trendy but is apparently just part of his effortless good looks, and he’s quick to serve, perhaps due to his status in the family as boarder. Dieth is often at the wheel of the SUV that carts us around Savannakhet, perhaps because he’s sixteen and likes to drive (even though the legal age is 18), cranking Lao pop music via the CD player, but he also carries a good portion of the chores around the house. Unloading the charcoal truck when it drops off a score of bags, dumping and burning the trash, Dieth is always on the move.

Yesterday at noon, Dieth got his payment, or more to the point perhaps, was beneficiary of being within mae Sang’s circle of influence. A small batch of dom mach tua, a sort of mashed green beans with spice, seemed especially designed for Dieth. He ate it eagerly, voraciously, bending his head to his task intently if joyously. I enjoy dom mach tua, so I decided to elbow my way in to Dieth’s action, but first, the ever important question: Is it spicy? Pit ba? I asked and, predictably, he responded with “Ba pit.”

So far, I’ve had little trouble with spice, primarily because mae Sang is controlling it, flavoring falang (white people) dishes with less pepper than those for her own family. In moving in on Dieth’s action, I was crossing the line. I found that out soon enough.

Though excellent, the dish was very spicy for my palate. Pit li! I exclaimed. Dieth just smiled, his special blessing from mae Sang still intact.

The heir apparent to the title of matriarch is mae Sang’s oldest and married daughter Noi, who runs the house that we stay in. But Noi is a career woman of sorts, keeping a clothing shop in one of the markets that amounts to a thirty square foot cubicle in a low-roofed building of like cubicles, cramped together and close. Still, it’s a matter of some pride to her, as she invited us to see it early on in our stay and we complied. She also declares that she can set her own hours; so far, however, those hours seem very regular.

But this posture to the world raises a question. When mae Sang takes her mother’s position as respected elder, no longer directing the house through her cooking, will Noi step in and fill mae Sang’s role? And if Noi doesn’t choose to fill that role, what will that mean for the circle of influence around these households? And if this is a collective question for Lao households in Savannakhet, what will that mean for the culture?

As in many cultures, as gender roles get passed on or morph from generation to generation, these questions surround the two Meksavanh households of Savannakhet.