There's Nothing Like the Smell of Southeast Asia in the Morning

There's nothing like the smells of southeast Asia.  First and foremost is the air, heavy with humidity and so sweet it's always bordering on past ripe moving into rotten.  It's good, and even when it's not good it's strong, which is its own strength. 

Our internal clocks had us all awake by 5:30 this morning, so my wife and set out on the town.  Out the narrow gate of the hotel wedged, we were confronted by one of the icons of this world: a unused lot or corner of a lot littered with plastic bags, cups and other refuse.  Down a one lane alley is another: bright pink flowers blooming from plastic pots, flourishing in the already humid air.  Street vendors are readying their foods, the flourescent pink of roast pork featured in a glass compartment.  We turn left at the main road, startled at the already maniacal traffic.  The people out at this hour are all uniformed: women in what look CNA uniforms--though I know they're not--in variations of gray and blue; a monk in signature orange robe; men in security guard uniforms complete with caps.  This is another signature; every place that is any place has a night guard, many have day guards.

We cross a canal whose water is black and tepid; a pink baby shoe lays forlorn on the shore, more plastic litters the water.  Here the sweet smell has gone rotten to the point of morbidity. 

We've come to the shopping center, we predictable westerners, looking for coffee.  Nothing besides a McDonalds and a convenience store, both 24-hour, are open at this hour.  We enter the convenience store and are immediately confronted by some of my children's favorite fruit--lychee and rambutan, the latter of which we buy a handful of for about twenty cents. 

On the way back, the food stands are ready, and we get four bowls of pho at $1 a bowl.  I'm sweating through my hat already, and the sun is still behind a scrim of clouds.

We go back for two more bowls of pho, plus two iced coffees, at fifty cents each. 

In many ways, my expectations for this trip are already fulfilled: the sensory overload of  heat, and street food. 

FAQs

Tomorrow morning by this time, we will have woken up three children, ages 11, 8, and 6, and we will have traveled to the Sioux Falls airport to board a flight for Chicago where we will board a connecting flight to Shanghai, China, and then to Bangkok, Thailand.  We will fly for a total of just short of 20 hours, leaving in the morning of one day and landing in the evening of the next. 

The flying should be the easy part.  Barring weather and other flight delays, once we check our luggage and board that plane, the chain of events that will take us to Bangkok is in someone else's hands.  When we touch down in Bangkok is when the real work of travel begins. 

"Got your trip all planned?" someone asked me in the weeks leading up to tomorrow.  Apparently, the blank look I gave in return said enough.  "How does one go about planning a trip like this anyway?" she appended. 

Yes, how does one? 

Through the internet.  Sort of.  While we had initially planned to take a train from Bangkok to the Thai border, through a facebook contact in Bangkok we reserved a car--and, we think, a driver--instead.  After spending one night in a hotel in Bangkok, a car will pick us up from the hotel and take us to Mukdahan, Thailand, on the Mekong River.  This "car" was competitive in price and, most of all, was preferred by my mother-in-law who, for some reason, seems to fear the trains in Thailand.

"Will you be staying with relatives?"  This is the most frequently asked question about our trip.  The answer is, it's doubful.  My wife has two half-sisters in Laos, from her father's first marriage.  By the time everyone gets there, we'll be a big group:  11.  Who has the means to put up 11 people?  Probably not Sy's sisters.  There's also some story of some relative along the way building a sort of guest house there for when they visit Laos.  Will we stay there?  Again with 11 people, it's doubtful.

Then there's the issue of air conditioning.  My mother-in-law has insisted that, absolutely, we'll want to stay in a place with air conditiong.  That if we don't we won't last long.  She also insists that we don't need to make reservations ahead of time.  "Just go there and do it," she says, waving us off.  So, yes, we've looked into possibilities and have them bookmarked on our computer should we have internet access, but beyond our arrival on Tuesday evening in Mukdahan, the schedule is wide open. 

"Does Sy have family over there?"  This question is simply a variation of the one above, and yet not simple to answer.  Where does family begin and end?  If one of my distant Schelhaas residents from the Netherlands were to land here, would they have family here?  Probably at least 60 distant relatives.  In Lao, there are separate words for all kinds of family relations:  older and younger brother and sister, maternal grandparents, fraternal grandparents, maternal uncles and aunts older and younger than your mother, paternal uncles and aunts older and younger than your father.  So, yes, I expect that Sy has family over there, that there will be little end to family, and most of it will fall under the broad category of "cousin."

"Will you be doing any sightseeing?"  No doubt we'll do some.  So far, the major interest is for Sy and her siblings to see personal history sites:  where they were in camp in Thailand; where they lived in Mukdahan for a time; where they crossed the Mekong; where grandma grew up. 

Again considering the size of our group, I'm expecting a lot of our activity to focus around being.  What will we do while we're there?  We'll be there.  We'll procure food, we'll travel to someone's house, we'll watch as it's being cooked, we'll eat it, we'll talk--or I'll listen and try to pick out the 20 Lao words that I know--we'll help clean up, we'll go back to wherever it is we're staying, we'll walk in the street, we'll get on each other's nerves.  By this time, it will no doubt be time to procure food again.  There will be dispute about how to do it and where.  I'm especially prepared for our kids to probably hate it, to be board within the first day.  But that's okay, this trip isn't about them. 

And so we'll spend some time in Mukdahan, cross the river and spend more time in Savannakhet, where my mother-in-law lived most of her life.  Depending on how we like Savannakhet, we'll go up to the capital city, Vientiane, where we'll also find a place to stay, visit "cousins," procure food.  In Vientiane, we have made plans to visit a family that works for CRWRC, a family we met while they were on homestay. 

Then, barring a real phobia of trains on my mother-in-laws part, we'll train back to Bangkok and begin the trip back. 

Even as I write this, it sounds naive, it sounds like we're flying blind.  And we are in some senses.  And that's intimidating and invigorating at the same time.  The amount of borders, boundaries, and barriers we have to cross or navigate is stunning:  umpteen borders, language barriers, cultural misunderstandings, class lines with different rules within a different culture, and family grudges--which exist even before we leave.

And yet we're counting on still being among people, other human beings that use language to build relationships and--what else--procure food.  Sure, we'll be westerners with that passport in our pocket that is said to make the world go round--cash.  But still, there's something larger at work here than just a spendy vacation that we've been saving for all our married lives:  we will travel half the world to return to my wife's place of birth in order to consider world and family upheaval as well as the wonder of culture and diversity, and, in a myriad of ways, we'll depend on the humanity of others to do it. 

Staying Put: Blossoming Weigela

We've lived in the same house now for eight years, located on the downhill slope of the northern edge of the Rock River valley as it cuts through the last vestiges of the Prairie Coteau that stretches all the way from northern South Dakota through southwest Minnesota and into northwest Iowa.  We've come to expect a few things living here, some of them typical:  every spring a robin nests in the arbor outside our sunroom door every spring and baby rabbits are birthed somewhere in the vicinity and eat off our beans.  There's the problematic--a plague of slugs grows like gooey warts on all varieties of plants  come high summer--but also the wondrous: in fall, monarch butterflies gather in bounteous blessing in the sheltered corridor between our house and our neighbor to the east. 

We've somewhat put our stamp on the yard that we inherited.  The bed out front has been transplanted with tall grass prairie plants--little blue stem and black-eyed susans, Russian sage and purple coneflower, but the plants in the backyard remain problematic: a purple-leafed tree sends up succors by the hundreds; two red shrubs filled with prickers simply annoy us; the grapevine over the arbor has never produced like it should, at least partially due to happenstance pruning on our part.  This year, I didn't trim any of those backyard shrubs and they're looking wild and unkempt, though the added foliage has apparently created the perfect love nest for the rabbits who are off to a prolific start propagating their kind. 

But perhaps due to my inattention, one of the unknown shrubs behind the house is blooming like I've never seen it bloom in eight years, producing small pink, trumpet-like buds up and down its long-armed extensions.  As my wife watered the garden--so that the teeming rabbits will have something to eat--and I cleaned up some rotten wood on the back patio, a whirring in the bush caught our attention.  There, darting in and out of the tiny blossoms just inviting enough for their small beaks, was a hummingbird so small that I doubted what I was seeing.  It was no bigger than a large moth, the like of which also proliferates around our house.  As if to confirm that it was indeed a hummingbird, just then an adult showed up momentarily, a male with dark hood and brilliant ruby throat in the dying light, absolutely stunning.  In a moment, he was gone, but the size comparison between the feeding bird and the adult male made clear what we had here:  these were baby hummingbirds, only a fraction of the size of their parents, and they were absolutely feasting on these flowers.

As we watched, we saw a second bird, then, ever more improbably, a third, fourth and fifth--an entire nest of hummingbird babies, hovering at each flower, darting in and out, high and low on this bush I'm note sure ever bloomed before because I'd always over-trimmed it.  Children came from playing in the neighborhood to see the phenomenon, some of them mightily unimpressed by the glorified moths in the bush, all of the babies unremarkable in their brown color except for a slight striping on the mad rush of their wings.  It's something they might never see again, I want to tell them, but just let them watch for a minute or two before they run back to their game. 

This morning, a google search lands me as close as I can get to the bush type: I think it's a type of weigela, a plant native to east Asia, either a Weigela Florida or perhaps even the poetic Wine and Roses Weigela.

In either case, it's beautiful, one of those unexpected gifts of nature that, as Annie Dillard has noted, surprises you with its wonder and extravagance, makes you catch your breath, was under your nose all the time and yet failed to arrest you with its wonder until, voila, it's glory shines forth in blooms and hummingbirds.

It's enchanting; it's entrenching.  We've got a thousand reasons to leave here; between us, we literally put thousands of miles on  driving to jobs further down the coteau.  Further down the coteau, too, we could experience wonders such as these.  And yet, as the memories and moments of wonder stack up in this place, it becomes harder to leave, even against what many would call "common sense."

Laos and the Dalliance of France

In the opening of The Unsettling of America, Wendell Berry asserts that, as Euro-Americans, we are never where we intended to be. We're always headed for somewhere further on, some Eldorado or Promised Land, and this quest, really, has become our landscape so that the real landscape we find ourselves in becomes disposable, not-it, the landscape of discontent--to the dearth, as one might imagine, of that landscape.  I'd always thought of this as a distinctly American illness, as distinctly symptomatic of Euro-American treatment of the American landscape.  Of course, some people would trace it back to Judeo-Christian heritage itself.  No, scratch that--to distinctly Christian heritage:  the Jews know where there promised land is and it's a geographical location, the cause of more local and immediate conflicts.  It's the metaphorical Promised Land, the Distant Shore, the City on a Hill that many people blame for the environmental ills of our time: if the only purpose of life is escape from a ravaged earth, then what good will it do to clean up my neighborhood?  That sort of thing. 

However, after reading a bit of Martin Stuart Fox's A History of Laos, it's clear that there's a distincly European influence in all this placelessness.  The imperialistic impulse that emerges from Europe-- which may or may not be traceable to, but is at least a severe mutation of, the evangelistic impulse, but which is definitely given steroids by Enlightenment visions and ideals--becomes the driving force of displacement in many places in the world, and Laos is one of those places. 

The French came to Laos driven by the idea of empire, after a loss on European soil and on the rebound so to speak. "In the period following the humiliation of the Franco-Prussian war of 1870," writes Stuart Fox, "French imperialists sought to rebuild national prestige through the pursuit of empire."  The way in was through Vietnam, where they already had a foothold; now the idea was an Indochinese empire: expand their influence in Vietnam, spread that to Laos which looked like easy pickings, but don't start a war with Britain who was firmly planted in Siam (Thailand).

As imperialism goes, French Laos is a typical tale: use corvee (forced labor) to build infrastructure, use pre-existing ethnic hierarchy to excise taxes, export resources over the infrastructure and hierarchy to Europe, and all the while look down on the people native to the country. In the case of Laos, the French actually had plans to displace the Lao--or at least make them irrelevant--by importing a higher species, the neighboring Vietnamese.

Stuart Fox writes, "The Vietnamese were seen as an active, expansionist people whose historic destiny, now inherited by France, was to extend their control over the weaker, less 'fit' (for this was the age of Social Darwinism) neighboring peoples" (Stuart Fox 27-28)  Even more overtly, the explorer Jules Harmand had declared that

we can count on the Annamites [Vietnamese], when they will be our subjects, to colonize to our profit a large part of the valley of the great Indo-Chinese river [Mekong] where they will rapidly supplant the debris of decrepit races which inhabit it.  By ourselves, we cannot attempt any enterprise in this country, so rich but so unproductive due to the fault of its actual possessors.  It is necessary first that the Laotians be eliminated, not by violent means, but by the natural effect of competition and the supremacy of the most fit (qtd. in Stuart Fox 47).

This is rhetoric typical of the time.  During this same era, diatribes in U.S. newspapers against Native Americans called for their outright extermination on basically the same Social Darwinist grounds: "decrepit" races didn't deserve to continue; it was the "natural effect of...the supremacy of the most fit." 

Not surprisingly, the French also took care of uprisings in typical imperialist fashion.  In one instance, a distinctly messianic leader arose in Laos who convinced his followers "that they were invulnerable and that bullets would turn into frangipani flowers" (Stuart Fox 35). The result?  They were massacred, and the spiritual leader was detained and "bayoneted to death by a guard while allegedly trying to escape" (Stuart Fox 36).  The similarities between this event and the treatment of Native Americans is spooky:  the Ghost Dancer at Wounded Knee was said to protect the Lakota from bullets--they were massacred; both Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were detained and killed under questionable circumstances, Crazy Horse similarly bayoneted while trying to escape.

With the "superior" Vietnamese to the East and British-controlled Siam (Thailand) to the west, Laos was a bit of an afterthought, a buffer, an expendable.  The French plan to consolidate Indochina was carried only as far west as the Mekong, which became the border between Laos and Thailand, but which divided ethnic Lao people:  the Lao lived on both sides of the Mekong but, again typical of imperialism, became divided by European politics which saw the Mekong as an obvious if arbitrary border between the interests of Britain and France.

As Berry also notes, there's always another narrative in opposition to the narrative of conquest and rootlessness--the impulse to "stay put."  However, the impulse of the French in Laos was not really to stay put; it was, I think, a more simple kind of envy.  As Virginia Thompson put it in the 1930s,

For the rare Frenchman who sees in the Lao a silly, lazy, and naive people, there are hundreds who are charmed by their gentle affability and their aesthetic appearance...For the European wearied with Western greed and strife, Laos seems to be the answer to all his problems...Laos is in itself a passive reproach to the futility of Europe's bustling activity and soul-searchings" (qtd. in Stuart Fox 41).

While the envy may be simple, however, no doubt this is also an example of "orientalism" at its most dangerous:  because the Lao were "other" enough to envy, Laos was not treated as a real place but as an exotic and unreal place--too tropical to mistake for even a secularized "promised land," too plain to outright rape, but simply an exotic dalliance that was ultimately disposable. 

The Moon of Spawning Crappies

When it comes to spring fishing, I get all existentialist: Nothing seems as important as that fish are caught.  Now. This urgency is part self-concocted mania, part seasonal reality: the wonderful flurry of spring fishing will necessarily give way to the mosquito plagued doldrums of summer.  No, if one is to catch fish, one must catch them when they can be caught. 

To catch them when they can be caught, of course, involves some sleuthing.  Part eve's dropping--I overheard two men at church yesterday say that "everyone had fish" at Lake Benton on opening day, walleyes--and part insider connections--got a text from a friend that said jumbo perch were on the bite at Summit Lake--the best way to find out is to find the bite yourself, to know enough about nature's tea leaves to show up when the bite begins and then ride it until its done.

So, on the impulse of a glorious afternoon, I showed up on the dikes of Lake Shetek.  That first day, the fish could seemingly be caught only adjacent to one specific rock in the shoreline, and fortunately the fishermen that found the spot were from my hometown: once they had enough, they allowed me and my children to squeeze in next to them.  That first day we took home ten fish, crappies.

But that meant urgency. 

The next time they bit in a new place, on the other side of the road, and at a more rapid pace: 17.  The third time, it was farther up the road and in the middle of the afternoon: 20.  The next time, they bit back on the other side of the road, still further up: 17.  Then it scattered and diminished: 8.  And because I couldn't leave it alone: 1.  An almost perfect bell curve. 

The old adage, "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day; teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime," is a nice philosophy, but it leaves out the ebb and flow of days, weeks, months, seasons.  The part that it misses might be phrased something like this:  "Teach a man to fish and that will mean he'll need to know about 'the bite,' about keeping his ears low to the ground to hear about 'the bite,' or, better yet, will anticipate 'the bite' by reading nature's tea leaves and then invest significant time in order to ride the crest of 'the bite' until it's finished.  Coupling this insistence with some cultural knowledge of food preservation to ensure the fishes that he catches during 'the bite' will last him through the fish-famine of high summer, and he'll eat, day-by-day, for a lifetime." 

Of course, I'm not convinced it's done.  This bite had everything to do with both the seasonal spawning habits of crappies: at first almost all the crappies were females stuffed with lobes of buttery gold eggs; recently, they've been almost all smaller males, but I've caught no fish that are "spawned out."  Despite the recent hiatus, some sort of bite should continue for the near future.

Now, of course, it's tempting to try to hit the crest of other bites.  We were lured to the perch bite last night and found it a false positive: the ratio of four-inch perch to jumbos was about 40:1.  Then there's always that king of fish, the walleye.  Plots are already forming in my subconscious as to when I might sneak away.

What's really bewitching in all of this, however, is the seasonality of it all, the sense of something larger going on than even a man-made calendar.  We're in "the moon of budding plants" for the Ojibwe, but for me we're in the "moon of spawning crappies."  This year, despite the false spring that threatened to false-start the spawning state wide, "the bite" has come relatively late, but it's just one more season in a memorable string:  the mid-fall walleyes at Benton; the spring perch at Hadley; the winter Perch at West Twin; the fall northern pike in the Rock River ; and the list goes on. 

But always the crappies in the spring.  It's the beginning of the year, the first fish you catch with the year's new license. 

At school, one of the first verses my children are taught is Genesis 8:22:  "As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night wil never cease."  I'm perhaps naive about the degree of stocking that keeps fish populations stable in southwest Minnesota, but the DNR doesn't control the spawning impulse of crappies, the urge that pushes them to the rocks along the dikes of Lake Shetek, laid out by the WPA so many years ago.  I'm confident in the process, in the seasons, in the faithfulness of God. 

But I'm also confident in the sinfulness of man.  We've been eating a lot of fish lately, contra what "they" recommend--pan fish once a week, game fish once a month, lest you want to injest enough mercury to make your blood silver.  The balance of nature is a wonderful, delicate thing, larger than us and yet something we dare not disrupt.  While Genesis 8:22 let's us go forward with confidence, lets us build a calendar around seasonal change, it's not a license to the environmental recklessness that some Christians have made it. 

And so while I stand in awe at the crappie spawn and what it represents, I also must consider what the disruption of these processes would look like, what that would mean for human life, how realistic the possibility is.  Cormac McCarthy ends his post-apocalyptic novel The Road with a sobering vision of fish:

Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.

Reading this horror makes me reconsider fish yet again, breaks me off of the urgency of catching fish now to the larger meaning of spring crappie fishing: to read the larger "map" that lies before us in nature, a map infinitely more intricate and significant than we will ever fully know, and to teach even a part of that map to children. 

A Mother's Day Story

The story involves the death of a child.  The first.  From diarrhea-related complications, probably Typhoid. 

The story involves three more boys, born during a time of war.  It involves anxiety over those boys' survival.

The story involves a husband who one day decided to go live with a different woman.

The story involves grandparents who are well-connected to the government, the party in power.  They are more well off than the mother is, even though her in-laws treat her kindly.  The mother remains anxious about losing another child.  When the grandparents can take the two oldest boys in with them, the mother sees to it or agrees to it.  When the war is lost, the grandparents are no longer safe.  When it becomes possible for the grandparents to leave the country with the two boys, the mother acquiesces.  One boy will not forgive her for this for a long time.  The boys and grandparents leave for France.

The story involves a second husband, an army man, worse than the first.  He drinks and is violent.  The mother later tells a story of standing in the way of a beating meant for a two-year-old child. 
The story involves defiance.  Once, at a demand for food at an unreasonable hour, the mother uses her voice on the man.  She tells him he coerced his first wife into her grave.  She tells him she'll piss in his food.  She leaves with two daughters, returns to her mother's house, eeks out a living somehow.

The story involves communism.  When the second husband is taken to re-education camp, he sends a letter, asking the mother to come and join him.  He hints that she can be made to come.  The mother makes plans to escape, to flee the country. 

The story involves a great escape.  The remaining son and grandmother go "fishing" on the Mekong, transfer to another boat when no one is looking, cross to the other side, elude the patrols on the Mekong that try to prevent escapes with machine guns.

Two weeks later, at night, the mother and two daughters, four and two, run along river paths to get to the boat for an escape at night.  Another family with a baby is there.  The baby cries all night.  The boatman does not dare to try the crossing.  The process must be redone several nights later.  Again running paths along the river at night.  Again the boat.  This time the crossing is successful.

The story involves refugee camp:  powdered milk, ration lines, and "wiping butts with sticks."  The story involves waiting, sponsorship, Kentucky Fried Chicken, twenty-below weather. 

The story involves the mother learning a language and learning a trade--sewing.  The story involves her taking a trip to France to reconcile with the angry son.

The story involves time. 

This story involves courage.

This is a story about survival, adaptation, happy endings, grand children. 

This is a Mother's Day story.

Visiting the Healer: Inoculations

It was a preemptive strike, I decided.  A couple of Mondays ago, we prepared ourselves for the deadliest combat to come out of any country, communist or capitalist, developed or undeveloped: germ warfare.  We struck at--or were instructed how to strike at--blood-borne, food-borne, and water-borne illness. 

Let the first world paranoia begin.

We had been instructed to go to this special "travel clinic" by our kids' pediatricians.  "We don't keep all these specialty inoculations on hand," they told us.  Okay then.  This is serious. Specialists. 

It turns out there are two travel clinics--competitors (when businesses compete for your business, the price goes down; this is the truism I'm counting on.  Of course, whose to say they won't compete in painting the most horrific pathogenic vista that they can?  Do I really want to shop around for this sort of thing?)  However, at one of the two we can get the whole family in to one appointment, 8:30 Monday morning--and we're advised to take it because this doctor's usually full-up weeks in advance.  Okay then. 

We leave for our appointment--may wonders never cease--a fraction early.  We've decided to pick up breakfast as an enticement for this trip, leaving in the background of the early morning fog the reality that there may well be shots as part of this otherwise family excursion for which they get to miss school, another carrot. 

Carrot-shmarrot, we bypass the hometown coffee shop for McDonald's drive through, where my kids order the works.  (Note to self: I can no longer get by on the cheap with my family at McDonald's.)  On top of this, the window-worker (what kind of place is this?) tells us to pull ahead to wait for some fresh hashbrowns.  So we do.

Hashbrowns.  Those golden brown oil lollipops.  Those crunchy on the outside, starchy on the inside human salt licks.  How long could it take to fry one of these pre-gridded beauties up? 

It could be long.  It could eat up my precious fraction.  Only when my wife searches out our order and finds out they'd forgotten about us--how could they, I felt such a connection with that window-worker?--can we get back on the road, now not just a fraction but whole numbers late.  We open the bags to find we still don't have hashbrowns. 

Thirty minutes later, we find our spot in the parking lot outside the magically named "Medical Building Two" 11 minutes late for our appointment, wrecking horribly our 6-minute late average.  What would they do to us for this crime?  Send us and our virgin immune systems to face the hordes of tropical viruses unprotected? 

"You're not late, the doctor's not even here yet," the receptionist tells us.  "You can't be late if the doctor's not even here."  I wonder if she's trying to assuage my guilt or simply complaining about this doctor's habits.  Both possibilities are enough to make me question this whole charade. 

However, in little time we're ushered to an exam room:  two chairs, a twirly chair at a plastic desk built into the wall with a computer, an exam table, a window high up in one corner that lets in no light.  It's not white-sterile and asylumesque; it's mauve-sterile and suburbanesque. 

A team of nurses descends on us, taking pulses and temps and blood pressures.  Three for the price of one?  Doubtful.  I'm paying for three nurses to see my children at once.  In five minutes, they flutter away. 

All it takes for the doctor to show up is taking the boys to the bathroom.  I take them; she shows up; my wife looks annoyed. 

We start reviewing the immunizations records, which are faithfully up to date.  Except we never got the second Hep A shot for my daughter.  Except I seemed to have never gotten any shots ever.  But that reflects bad on my parents, not me, and this is what this trip is about:  are we good parents or not? 

As we get past the outer rings of protocol, diseases with powerful names arch across the room, cloud the air above us, make the already tight confinement of the exam room feel even closer:  hepatitis, malaria, typhoid, Japanese encephalitis, tetanus, tuberculosis.  These names are ancient, Latinate (maybe), undefeatable.  "Doctor, can't you do something?" I want to yell. I feel like the narrator of Don Delillo's White Noise, who finds that death has entered his body in just such an exam room in just such a shiny building.  

With three healthy children sparking throughout the room--examining stolen rhino horns in National Geographic, lounging in tween lethargy on the papered exam table, headlocking big brother--it's enough to make one question the sanity of even going to this deadly place, where even one sip of the wrong type of water could mean a protracted dance with death. 

After questions and instructions and warnings--no tap water, no uncooked seafood, no uncooked anything; emergency diarrhea pills for all; an emergency strategy if any of us get bit by a stray dog--I need something to cut through it all.  "Excuse me.  Can I ask you something?  Do you go back to..."  I'm trying to proceed with caution, and I manage it without saying, "You're not from here are you?" but it's still some leading question like, "When you go back to India"--the "home" country I had managed to apprehend--"don't you indulge the food culture?  Are you really this careful about all you eat?" 

I'm look for--I'm not sure what I'm looking for. I'm looking for subtext, for an aside that says, "Between you and me this is all White Noise paranoia.  If you come back here and you haven't eaten some street vendor food, and you haven't eaten something right off the tree that someone hands to you without washing it, and you haven't eaten something in someone's house that you don't know how it's been cooked--then I'm going to tell you you wasted your trip..." 

Nope.  I've watched too much Anthony Bourdain.  What I get is pretty much party line.  "When I go, I make sure what I eat is fully cooked..."

Turns out, too, that I'm the only one to get a shot, a Hep A and B combo pop, and I play it up for the children.  "Tell me, tell me when it's going in," I say, turning away in angst as she is already done.  I'm such a clown, such a good father; yes I am.  I've taken them out of school--for nothing but just in case.

The rest is prescriptions for pills.  Although there's been mention of some different pills that cost more or less, there is no tally of the cost of all this on paper and therefore there's certainly not any real numbers floating around my head.  It's all just necessary; it's all just part of being a good parent, first-world style.

And as we exit "Medical Building Two" and enter our Toyota Sienna, I have another feeling prevalent in White Noise, the feeling of being well-insured.  I'd been to see the healer, and she, with her incantations and ceremonial instruction, had done what she could for my whole family.

On the way home, my wife's sister calls:  she's been to see the doctor in town and gotten all she needed.  That doctor is exactly a one-minute drive from my house.

"Should we stop and get our hashbrowns?"  I ask my wife.