The Wolf

Dusk blends skeletal trees with the sky. The roar of Interstate 285 rushes through the empty spaces. Light pours from the porch light over the front lawn. This little brick house is not mine, but it feels so familiar. It is not strange that I am here, yet I do not know where I am. I step over the curb and walk into the yard. There are two cars in the driveway and a woman standing on the porch who must have just arrived home after a long day of work. She calls to me and I am unsurprised, but cannot make out her words.

The dogs, all puppies really, scamper about the yard playing with one another like little kittens. There is a brown dachshund, a beige cocker spaniel, and a gray one with icy blue eyes that glimmer in the porch light. The little dog with blue eyes looks directly at me. His gaze lingers sending a sudden shudder of fear through my body. “I think that one…” I start. Then he lets out a piercing high-pitched howl. He looks away and then his eyes meet mine again. I am captivated by the clarity. His pure blue eyes like translucent pools, his bark crisp and clean like a hymn, yet with a hint of what he might become if nothing gets to him first, which surely nothing will while he is being swaddled like a newborn by these people, in this house.

“My God,” I mutter under my breath. I try to speak again and say, “Not that one! I think that one is a wolf!” The woman is unfazed and opens the screen door, holding it open with her large backside, accentuated by her puffy black winter coat. I want to look her in the eyes and talk some sense into her before it is too late, but I cannot even see her face. It is as though she refuses to look at me. Her pudgy cream-colored hand turns the doorknob and the dachshund and the cocker spaniel race into the dark house. The little wolf turns again to look at me from the cement porch and lets out another yelp, slowly crossing the threshold as the woman coaxes him.

My eyelids slowly open to the darkness of my bedroom. Dawn diffuses through the purple and red batik curtains. I roll over and pull the blanket over my head, drifting carelessly back into oblivion.

Something came over me as I left Comer after the Thanksgiving holiday: a deep gratitude and a sharp sadness, yet a sadness one can take delight in, a sadness within the realm of joy. What an awesome relief to move away from the coldness of heart, the numbness of depression which has hung over me these past couple years. The whole ride back to the city, in the quiet of my car, I wondered at the warmness, the feeling of inseparable connection: the assurance that without any vows or monthly payments that I will always share a special love with this energetic family of six, soon to be seven, perhaps even eight. It may be a queer love, but I know it to be real.

Jesus teaches with clear and offensive words because he is not restrained by fear. Fear is what moves us into relativism and indecision. Surely, easy answers do not meet the complexity of suffering, but neither does language that mystifies its causes. For too long I have allowed myself to become lukewarm like the water around me. We live in a world governed by fear itself. Life is found in the visions that freeze and boil, which embrace the dynamism of ecstatic love.

On Sunday night I knew with a clarity I have not known in a long time, that I must go to Comer next year to continue this journey and that I must now finally out of love for my Karen brothers and sisters seek employment at the poultry plant. I tremble with fear at the thought of taking this step alone, but know this thought to be a fear-driven lie, which denies the reality of the spiritual friends I already have who are putting down roots in this bizarre little town where I find my search for God taking me. I will leave behind some of my best gaw lah wah friends in Clarkston by making this move, but I am subject to a spirit of exodus larger than myself, and know proximity can be motivated by fear just as much as love.

St. Francis of Assisi once stayed in the town of Gubbio where everyone feared a wolf that was terrorizing the town, killing animals and even people. Francis went out into the forest to meet the wolf one day. When the wolf saw Francis, he charged at him, but Francis calmly made the sign of the cross and he ceased. He spoke to the wolf, saying, “Come to me, Brother Wolf. I wish you no harm.” The wolf laid his head at the feet of St. Francis like a lamb. Francis negotiated peace between the people and the wolf and the wolf placed his paw in Francis’ hand in agreement. Then they walked through the town together while the people looked on shocked. From that day forward the people fed the wolf as he came to their doors. He lived the remaining two years of his life peacefully among the people of the town, loved by all.

While staying with Hei Nay Htoo and Baw Baw’s family in their new house over the Thanksgiving holiday, I was reading Dorothy Day’s autobiography, The Long Loneliness, one afternoon in the bedroom with the door closed. The door opened rather suddenly, and unsurprisingly, there stood Blay Blay Htoo with a slightly mischievous smile on his face.

“What you doing?” he asked, coming into the room.

“Reading. Do you want to read with me?”

He sat down on the floor next to me and leaned in to look at the page. I started reading out loud to him, “Body and soul constitute human nature. The body is not less good than the soul. In…” I stopped for a moment to cough and clear my throat.

Without pause, he helped me to the next word, “MOTORCYCLE!”

I glared at him as he offered me his usual flamboyant smile. The text continued, “mortifying the natural we must not injure the body or the soul,” but I decided to heed his suggestion and continue reading: “In MOTORCYCLE the natural we must not injure the body or soul. We are not to destroy but to transform it, as iron is transformed in the fire. Most of our life is unimportant, filled with trivial things from morning till night. But when it is transformed by love it is of interest even to the angels.”

Halloween

The Holiness of No

“I cannot bring myself to say congratulations when I see one of my friends get married, because they haven’t done anything yet!” Chico preaches flamboyantly under a big tulip poplar at Jubilee Partners on a brisk November day. My friends Corey and Lauren sit at the front of those gathered, listening to this challenging wedding sermon. “Marriage is a call to suffering! It does not save us from ourselves as our culture supposes, but rather is a school for conversion in which to learn the way of love in a world so filled with violence.”

The monastic impulse can take on a variety of expressions, but it is something we all possess. Feelings of anxiety are often described as feeling “unsettled,” and what truth this speaks to our physical life and our need for stability and limits. The monastic impulse is a response to the unsettled feeling we all hold inside when things do not quite line up in our lives, when we functionally believe that we are without limits. This creed is so much a part of the culture in which I was raised. Parker Palmer captures it well when he writes, “Like many middle-class Americans, especially those who are white and male, I was raised in a subculture that insisted I could do anything I wanted to do, be anything I wanted to be, if I were willing to make the effort. The message was that both the universe and I were without limits, given enough energy and commitment on my part. God made things that way, and all I had to do was to get with the program.”

How often my thinking has fallen in that track and misplaced my agency as a human being. The monastery is the place where we settle. “Our hearts are restless until they can find peace in you,” St. Augustine writes in his Confessions. By placing the limits of place, people, and practice upon one’s life the voice of God, our vocation, becomes gradually clearer. The monastery is the place where we learn that our freedom comes from the confines of orthopraxy, the holy drone that becomes the foundation of the creative project of God speaking into our lives. The psalter sings to us: “Be still and know that I am God.”

Later in the afternoon I take Hei Nay Htoo and Baw Baw to look at a house in Comer, the small town where Jubilee is located. They have been eagerly anticipating moving here for months. A man from the local Baptist church is the landlord and comes over in his pickup to opens up a little white house behind the Kangaroo, the largest gas station convenience store in town. It is small but nicely finished inside with new carpet, freshly painted beige walls, and not a cockroach in sight. They look around for barely two minutes before nodding at me.

“Na hso ga mo dee leh—What do you think?”

“Ya hso ga mo bah—I think it is right.”

They sign a yearlong lease the next day and we plan the move for the next weekend. A deep joy unfurls inside of me knowing that my brothers and sisters will be in this quieter, safer place where they will be seen as people. Just the previous day I thought there would be no housing options here for them to look at as I had promised we would this weekend, but here they are to my surprise committing their lives here for the next year. Just a few blocks away in Comer, my friend Eh Kaw and his family recently purchased a home where they will soon move.

We often deny ourselves the things we need most. It is my Karen friends who are signing leases and putting down roots, while I wrestle with an eternal spiral of questions regarding vocation and relationships. Yet I desire to discern these things in community with my Karen friends working in poultry plants, most of who are married with several children, and offer a much different perspective. I want to crucify this white savior complex I possess and vanish into obscurity, embracing the holiness of “no.” At what point are we ready to say enough already, leave the world of the mind, lay down on the earth, and let the Kingdom rise out of our hearts and come into consciousness like a cloud shape?

I am staying with Lesley, a gracious friend who opened up her house in Clarkston to me while we are figuring out the next step.  Bernard and Amber, my friends from Jubilee who recently moved back to Georgia are staying there also. There are quite a few of us former Jubilee volunteers, now in the vicinity wondering what we are doing with our lives, most of us jobless, yet knowing there is life in our connection with the Karen people whom we know, knowing that there is something true growing in the places we inhabit.

I made the decision not to move to Comer with Hei Nay Htoo and Baw Baw at this time because of my own limits—my need for fellowship with my cultural peers, as unsettled and frustrating of a bunch as we might be. I am not the same person as when I moved in with Hei Nay Htoo and Baw Baw five months ago. I have learned courage and hope in the face of uncertainty from the love of their family. Baw Baw speaks much more English and I much more Karen now from countless hours of joking and conversing.

The first week living with gaw lah wah again, I purchase my first ever package of monosodium glutamate. Bernard and I go into Kroger together dressed in our Karen longyis. I will never be Karen, but my life speaks the desire to commit to this obscure ethnic group, to bring meaning to such jargon as “Christian” and “American” through a life together. 

Simple Living

“This month Georgia Power is too much!” Baw Baw says showing me the paper statement that just came in the mail. I look at the bill and am surprised to see double what they usually pay for one month. “Weh… too much!” I agree, “We did not turn on the heat or air.” There appears to be a remaining balance from the previous month.

“Did you pay last month?”

“Yes!”

“It says you didn’t pay last month.”

Baw Baw rummages through the file box I gave her and produces a money order receipt for the exact amount. I brace myself for another phone adventure of talking to robots, holding to fuzzy elevator music, and arguing with inept employees.

“Press two for billing…bawp…Press 1 for your current account balance, Press 2 to make a payment…Press 9 to speak with a representative…bawp. Doo boo dee bop shoo boo doo dee bop bop. Dee doo wop shop mop wee woo wop…”

“Hello, can I have your name please?”

“Yes, Zachary Cooke, but I am calling on behalf of your customer Hei Nay Htoo.”

“Can I speak with him?”

“He is not here, but his wife, Baw Baw, is here. She cannot speak very much English though.”

“I am sorry, but her name and your name are not on the account so I cannot discuss anything with you. You will have to call back later when he is available.”

“Really, his wife can’t speak with you?”

“No, he is the only name on the account.”

“He can’t speak English. Do you use language line?”

“Yes.”

“Ok. Thank you.” Click.

“GRAAAAAH! They can only talk with Wonderful Pa.”

“Mayahh?—Really?”

(Two days later)

“Press two for billing…bawp…Press 1 for your current account balance, Press 2 to make a payment…Press 9 to speak with a representative…bawp. Doo boo dee bop shoo boo doo dee bop bop. Dee doo wop shop mop wee woo wop…”

“Hello, how can I help you?”
“I am calling regarding my friend Hei Nay Htoo’s account, but I believe you have his name as HEL Nay Htoo.”

“Is he present, sir?”

“Yes, but he does not speak much English.”

“Ok. What language does he speak?”

“Karen. K-A-R-E-N. Not Korean.”

“Hold on just a minute while I get an interpreter on the line. Doo boo dee bop shoo boo doo dee bop bop. Dee doo wop shop mop wee woo wop… Ok, sir. I have the translator.”

I pass the phone to Hei Nay Htoo and he says hello. The faint murmur of the interpreter’s voice travels across the room. A perplexed look slowly encroaches upon Hei Nay Htoo’s face. The wrinkles intensify across his forehead as he shakes his head and passes me the phone.

“Na may pwa ga nyawahh—Are you Karen?”

“Sorry sir, this is Korean,” the woman’s voice says, “I’ll get a Karen interpreter on the line. Please hold.”

The interpreter evidently encountered this situation often enough that she could understand this Karen phrase. A Karen interpreter finally gets on the line and the Georgia Power agent confirms Hei Nay Htoo’s identity and gets permission for me to speak regarding the account. I explain that they paid last month, but were charged again this month.

“The payment was never received. It must have been lost in the mail. They have to send their payment before November 17^th or their power will be cut off.”

I turn to Hei Nay Htoo and Baw Baw who are looking at me intently.

“They never got it,” I say sullenly, “The mail man must have lost it. You have to pay again before November 17, or no more electricity.”

“Mayahh—really?” they say in unison. They discuss this in Karen for a while before Baw Baw to ask, “In Comer the same Georgia Power as here?”

“Yes. I think it is the same.” They discuss again.

Hei Nay Htoo slows his speech to ask, “Du pa leh luh Comer, pa duh a thaw a meh oo ta oh bah thayahh—When we go to Comer, can we not have electricity in our new house?”

A smile creeps across my face as I imagine them living in a carpeted and enclosed Western home as though it were a bamboo hut—the primitive occupation of our overly complicated society, an integral demonstration of simple living, Occupy Wall Street as second nature. Baw Baw says she can cook over a fire outside; they did like that in Thailand “No problem. We don’t need,” she says, looking somewhat defeated.

“I guess you could not have power out there. You really don’t want electricity anymore? Na meh oo may ta oh bah na tha ku nay meh oo ohahh—Are you happier without electricity than with it?”

They seem perplexed by this question, which was perhaps expressed with strange syntax. Hei Nay Htoo is looking very serious and says, “I don’t know.”

“Do you still want a car?”

“Ya da tha law gah luh bah. Ya ga pghay ga boh yoo—I don’t want a car anymore, I will buy a plane!”

“Na ga leh peh leh—Where will you go?”

“Ya ga gay luh ya gaw—I will go back to my country.”

“Ya gay tha goh na thayahh—Can I go with you?”

“Uhh. Na ga noh gab oh yoo—Yes, you will drive the plane!”

“Pa ga thee—We will die!”

A couple days later I see Pa Saw Paw, a good friend of myself and Hei Nay Htoo and Baw Baw.

“Wonderful Pa told me he hasn’t slept in two days because you told him they can’t have electricity anymore after November 17^th.”

I break into laughter, unable to believe what I am hearing.

“I told them if they don’t pay the bill again before then, it will be cut off. I thought they didn’t want electricity in Comer?!”

“Haha. I told them that it is no problem; they can still have power. But Wonderful Pa was very worried.”

Refuge

A young man holds up a colorful zippered case. “Maybe they thought there was money inside,” he says, opening it to reveal the crisp white pages of a Karen Bible. His sister was carrying this, walking home from a worship music practice at a neighboring apartment with another young Karen woman, when three men attacked them. Thorns snagged their flesh as they fled from their aggressors into the woods. They went to the hospital later that day for their injuries.

“Thara, aw may—Teacher, eat rice,” the brother tells me.

“Ya aw may wee lee—I’ve already eaten.”

The mother, father, and younger brother sit at the table eating rice with some kind of fried meat and bamboo shoots. I recognize the younger brother from the guitar class I sometimes assist with at the Community Center.

“You went to the guitar class on Friday, right?”

“Yes. I saw you there,” he says smiling.

“Do you go every week?”

“Yes. Every week.”

I gradually realize that I know the older brother as well. He taught me a Karen praise song just last week while I was visiting another friend’s apartment, but at the time I had thought he was a relative of that family. He talks quickly and calmly in Karen with Tha Htaw, my friend who brought me to their house, I listen attentively as though I can understand. Waiting for a pause in their conversation, I interject,

“I am sorry about what happened to your sister. Let me know if you need anything. Especially a ride to the hospital.”

“Yes, yes. Ok. Thank you.”

I follow Tha Htaw out of the apartment and thank him for leading me there. We walk together towards his apartment several buildings over and I say goodbye to him at the base of the stairs before commencing the ten-minute walk back to the apartment complex where I live. The sun is lazing behind the trees creating a soft white glow in the sky. The temperature is dropping and the cool evening air nips at my exposed arms. I pass by the unoccupied wood and red plastic playground adjacent to Tha Htaw’s apartment, and stroll down the hill towards the gate.

By the mail pavilion at the bottom of the hill there is a large gathering of children. In the center of the circle, a Karen boy stands across from an African-American boy roughly the same age. They are no older than ten or eleven. A slightly taller African-American girl stands between them, asking the Karen boy in slow and simplified speech, “Do you want to fight him?” I slow my pace and watch them conspicuously from the sidewalk, stopping at the corner feeling a sudden sense of responsibility to prevent this from escalating. I fiddle with my phone there for a couple minutes and then decide to take another lap around the building in order to pass the gathering again. As I approach a second time, a bold woman arriving home at her apartment shouts to them, “Go home all of you! You are too smart for all of this! You think you’re too young to go to juvie?”

The children slowly disperse. “Go on! You’re too smart for all of this!” She looks my way for a moment and shakes her head. I watch the Karen boys walk away towards the gate of the complex and the African-Americans in the opposite direction. I walk slowly behind the Karen along the drive leading to the exit. I feel this burning in my heart to dissolve distinctions, yet feel utterly apart from all of this as a silent observer, an outsider.

The white experience is characterized by a particular uncertainty. It is a search for ethnicity. In a town like Clarkston, for me it is an experience of otherness. In the past two generations, my family gradually migrated further and further outside of Baltimore city. As distinctive European ethnicities dissolved into a racial label, white became a unifying color, the absence of color. Thus my people fled the ethnic infusion of the city to seek refuge in a more homogeneous environment.

This is a natural tendency, which becomes perverted when we think in terms of race. The word, “discriminate,” literally means, “to make distinctions.” Author and journalist Christopher Hitchens states, “It especially annoys me when racists are accused of 'discrimination.' The ability to discriminate is a precious facility; by judging all members of one 'race' to be the same, the racist precisely shows himself incapable of discrimination.” Our brains automatically create distinctions between people because of superficial differences. It is part of our instinct for self-preservation. We are meant to know and love our own distinctive ethnicity, and in so doing recognize that this is a universal human experience.

I recognize in myself the need to recover this healthy psychology, to know myself as an ethnic person, a German Catholic American. It is only from this distinctive place that I am able to enter into the human arena, to carry on a corporate desire for preservation. I enter with a desire to do something positive in this place of interethnic tension and to engage in the recovery of my own ethnicity as I am immersed in Karen culture. I seek the knowledge that I am not blind.

A boy on a bicycle calls out behind me, “Here they are!” Several other children on bicycles follow them. I turn to him with a stern face and say, “Leave them alone.” I hear the woman call out from the distance, “HEY! GO HOME!” The children gradually turn back down the drive, and gravity carries them down the hill and they glide away into dispersion among the trees and brick buildings.

My cell phone goes off in my pocket and I look at the screen to see the name of the brother of the girl who was beaten. I am surprised he is calling me already, but assume they need a ride to the hospital or something. I flip open the phone and say, “Hello?”

“Hello. You left your bag at my house. If you have free time, you can come and visit. Next week we will have thanksgiving, worship God at my house, if you can come.”

Searching

The rush of traffic on North Indian Creek mirrors the pulsing anxiety in my chest as I scan the pavement and grass for my keys. I retrace the steps of my morning walk in the opposite direction. As I turn the corner onto quiet Rowland Street, the fallen auburn leaves in the gutter crunch beneath my feat and I imagine the millions of places my keys might be hiding. The beaten dirt path alongside Jolly Avenue not surprisingly reveals nothing. If my keys fell out of my coat pocket along the cracked asphalt of Debelle Street, I doubt they would still be there. My searching is in vain.

I return to the apartment and open the unlocked door, pacing around the kitchen one more time, lifting up bags on the floor and dirty dishes on the counter. Fuming with frustration, I storm into my bedroom and feel around in my coat pockets for the tenth or eleventh time. My bed stands before me with a plethora of hiding places in the bags and shoes stored underneath. I seethe for a moment before flipping up the mattress and hauling it to the other side of the room followed by the bed frame. Rummaging through the bags reveals nothing. I need to take a Karen woman and her daughter to collect forms from DFCS and the Labor Department to apply for financial assistance for a $1500 medical bill at Grady Hospital, yet after an hour of looking, I cannot find my keys. I retrieve my spare car key and call Lay Moo and Aye Be Wah to see if they can watch the apartment while I am gone, since everyone else left already to apply for their green cards.

“Ya thaw ta oh bah, bah hsa ya ga bah leh ta. Thoo gwa pa duh thayahh?—I don’t have my key, but I need to go somewhere. Can you watch our house?”

“…thay thay—We can.”

I cannot understand about 90% of what he says but hope that these two syllables mean that the apartment will not be burglarized while I am gone. I rush out of the door and hop in my car, annoyed that I cannot remotely unlock it.

Many Karen people upon their arrival in this country are surprised to find that they feel less free than they did in the camps in Thailand. While they have access to employment, wealth, and services that were unavailable in the refugee camps, the bureaucracy of everything, the stifling urban landscape, and plethora of anal regulations offer little of the freedom to live the simple life many desire. While Baw Baw and others have told me that they are very grateful to be in this country and never think about turning back, many people easily slide into depression and wish they could return to life in Thailand.

The stories I hear about Karen State before the arrival of the Burmese army paint it as paradise. People lived in friendly villages in the mountains where they were free to build and cultivate the land to their desire. Everyone would help each other with farm and construction work regardless of differences in religion or background. There was abundant tropical fruit to forage in the forest. And the fish paste in Gaw Thoo Leh was very pungent, but so delicious that even someone who did not normally like fish paste would find it very beh.

If all goes according to plan, Hei Nay Htoo and Baw Baw’s family will soon relocate to rural Comer, Georgia—the same town where Jubilee Partners is located. It is about one hour closer to Hei Nay Htoo’s workplace, the cost of living is a bit lower, and the quality of life much higher, with quiet and safe outdoor spaces for the kids to play and the opportunity to grow food. More and more Karen people are moving to this rural area because the landscape reminds them of their homeland. There is a Karen children’s song that goes; “Hsaw pah oh oh gaw geh ray goh, gaw geh ray goh—The rooster crows cock-a-doodle-doo, cock-a-doodle-doo.” In Clarkston, Lay Moo and Hei Nay Htoo often sing a parody of this: “9-1-1 oh oh gaw geh ray goh, gaw geh ray goh,” lamenting the replacement of roosters with sirens.

The Georgia Department of Labor is full of people. We are lucky to find three seats after checking in with the receptionist. The older Karen woman I am accompanying looks wearily at me as she leads her disabled daughter to the chairs, “Pwa ga nyaw oh ah ah—There are many people here.” We brace ourselves for a long wait, ears attuned for a mispronounced name. As we wait, they call for anyone filing for unemployment insurance. At least half of the people in the sterile waiting room rise to their feet and walk to the back. They call us to the desk and we quickly receive the paperwork and then depart for the Department of Family and Child Services. The DFCS customer service office is filled with three unmoving lines of people standing and waiting to be served. We stand there helpless knowing that once we acquire the necessary documents we are only going to have to wait in another waiting room another day. We squat on the floor and I pull out my Karen-English flash cards to pass the time. “Gaw la wah ah baw may luh hsay naw oh koh ah ah a hko—Americans are fat because they sit and wait a lot,” I tell them.

It is strange helping people to navigate this system, which offers support they might not otherwise receive, yet feels like it drains the essence out of life. What is the generative result of all of this paperwork, all of these people waiting? What hope is instilled, what will to live? I have the bureaucratic fluency to walk through all of these obstacles, yet I cannot help but wonder whom is being served by these tasks which no one seems to find life giving. I am assisting people to live in a world I myself do not want to live in. What is the legitimate reason to defer our dreams of Gaw Thoo Leh, of Eden?

I return to the apartment exhausted after four hours of waiting in offices and lounge on the floor. Wonderful reclines his head on my outstretched arm. Baw Baw, also weary from filing the family’s applications for green cards, hands me my keys.

“I find under Paw Ga Pu Blay’s diaper box in the room. I think she take,” she says. We both laugh as I remember the absurd frustration of my morning. I walk out to the balcony where two-year-old Paw Ga Pu Blay is squatting, drinking from a juice box. Her big eyes glance up casually at me, towering above her.

“Ga puuhh, ya tha htaw daw na!—Ga Pu, I am angry with you!” I say. Her brothers and sister laugh and she breaks out into a smile as I bend down and plant a kiss on her forehead.

Becoming Karen

“When something like this happen, Karen people boil this one…” Baw Baw holds up a dried brown pod from her dresser drawer.

“Bean” I say, handing her the word.

“Yes, bean,” she repeats, “together with yellow, not powder… root. Then washing your hair.”

“Turmeric? You wash your hair with boiled beans and turmeric root?” I look at her in disbelief.

“Uh. Will you do together us?” Baw Baw inquires.

Sometimes I forget that we come from completely different worlds. The reality of my house washes over me suddenly like an indigenous cleansing ritual. Language is a small barrier to communication and cohabitation. There are always creative alternatives: acting, facial expressions, and shared meals are perhaps even more effective in evoking a common understanding than a dialogical conversation. But here we stand at the gulf, where the empire of reason encounters a world animated by spirits.

 “Umm,” I say barely holding back uncomfortable laughter, “Ya ga gwa hso ga mo luh a ghay—I will think about it.” The features of her familiar freckled face suddenly seem harsh and primitive. I imagine a concoction boiling over a fire on muddy earth next to a bamboo house, a woman in a colorful sarong with horizontal stripes squatting next to it, stirring. The steam rises like a dancing ghost.

There are currently three fifty-pound bags of Eagle Brand jasmine rice stored in my closet, as it is now the primary component of my diet. Most days I keep to oatmeal, grits, or something else bland and Western for breakfast, but the rest of my meals are thoroughly Karen. Occasionally I will prepare pizza, pasta, or some kind of soup for dinner, but usually I am the only one who will touch it and so my motivation to cook is rapidly waning. The typical Karen meal consists of some form of deep fried or stewed meat possibly including organs and bone shards, broth, leafy greens, pounded chilies or spicy fish paste water, and sometimes fried eggs or vegetables, all of which are served over rice like condiments by American standards.

The Karen diet appeals to me because of its stability. I know what to expect when I sit down at a meal. Food in American culture is so sporadic it leaves your stomach confused just thinking about it: rice one night, pasta the next, bread the next. We are eating ourselves into cultural oblivion. My friend Angela tells me that we are supposed to eat the foods that are traditional to our region; our bodies are wired to thrive on these foods. If we are immigrants, which most of us in this country are, we should be eating a combination of the foods native to our homeland and to our locale. However, I have not yet migrated to a diet of sauerkraut and boiled peanuts.

To eat is to remember, as in the Seder meal and the Eucharist. We remember our journey, our sufferings, our joy, and ingest our identity. Yet who is able to partake? Where are the boundaries? They are certainly porous, permeated by proximity, yet must be drawn for the sake of subsistence. To forget is to spiritually starve, to slip into cultural depression. I need to eat cheese, not only to pay tribute to the rich European traditions of cheese making but also to remember who I am, to move forward in the world.

To partake of fish paste for breakfast is to enter the idyllic mountains of Karen State, to remember a painful and terrifying journey through the jungle, and to live in the hope of life in America. As I eat rice with my hands, I partake of foreign food. I am brought to face with a concrete suffering I cannot understand. Like a defiant protestant at Catholic Mass, I go forward anyway. I pray with my right hand resting on the steaming rice piled on the plate, and in the recognition of difference, renew my membership in the cult of humanity.

I arrive at Lay Moo’s house one evening to use the open wireless network in his building. Erin emerges from her room after I sit down.

“I need to tell you what happened last night,” she says. “I woke up in the middle of the night and there was this darkness. I don’t generally think much of that sort of thing, but I had this strong feeling of something bad in the house. I went to the door of the room and Aye Be Wah was standing right there, also looking scared. I later found out that she had been on the phone with someone and wasn’t sure who it was, and it left her feeling scared. Then several hours later I got up to go to the bathroom and felt the same darkness and then as I was in the hall walking back to the bedroom I heard a loud voice shout, ‘DIE!!!’ I quickly ran into my room and shut the door and heard Wah Lay Soe start crying.”

I stare at her in disbelief. “Was it a man’s voice?” I ask.

“Yes, definitely,” she replies.

“And it wasn’t Lay Moo?” I ask, barely able to imagine this as a possibility.

“He was at work.”

“Oh. Of course,” I say remembering his night shift. “I am pretty skeptical of this kind of thing also,” I tell her, trying to excuse my facial expression.

As a child, I remember cooking mud soup in the backyard. I would forage for nuts, sticks, leaves, and other precious ingredients in the woods, collecting them in a red bucket, mixing them with city water from the garden hose, and then stirring with a branch. At some point I learned that this was useless play.

With a sudden wave of certainty, and a faint laugh at the thought I say, “I know exactly what we need to do. We need to boil beans and turmeric root and wash our hair with it.”