Liss Larkin and Nao Kao Inthavong hail from opposite corners of the world when they meet in graduate school; she an exuberant daughter of the American Midwest, and he the reserved survivor of Southeast Asia's wars. Yet their connection is immediate and their bond gradually deepens â right up until the moment Liss walks away without a word of explanation.
Twenty years later, Liss and Nao Kao unexpectedly cross paths again and emotions that seemed lost to time resurface as the pair reckons with the decisions they made years ago. Ultimately, Liss finds herself traveling to Laos, bound toward the one person she had sworn to forget, not sure what, or who, she will find when she lands.
I Never Said I Love You is a story of travel, friendship, forgiveness, and the roads not taken that follows one woman's journey through her past and across the world. From the ancient temples of Luang Prabang to a remote corner of Senegal and through the heartland of America, Liss traces the contours of a relationship that spans decades and continents as she comes to terms with what it means to either shape life or be shaped by it.
Liss Larkin and Nao Kao Inthavong hail from opposite corners of the world when they meet in graduate school; she an exuberant daughter of the American Midwest, and he the reserved survivor of Southeast Asia's wars. Yet their connection is immediate and their bond gradually deepens â right up until the moment Liss walks away without a word of explanation.
Twenty years later, Liss and Nao Kao unexpectedly cross paths again and emotions that seemed lost to time resurface as the pair reckons with the decisions they made years ago. Ultimately, Liss finds herself traveling to Laos, bound toward the one person she had sworn to forget, not sure what, or who, she will find when she lands.
I Never Said I Love You is a story of travel, friendship, forgiveness, and the roads not taken that follows one woman's journey through her past and across the world. From the ancient temples of Luang Prabang to a remote corner of Senegal and through the heartland of America, Liss traces the contours of a relationship that spans decades and continents as she comes to terms with what it means to either shape life or be shaped by it.
PART I: FRIENDS
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âAh, Ms. Larkin, itâs so nice to have you with us again,â said the flight attendant, handing me a warm towel. âJanelleâ her nametag read.
It had been entirely too long since I had settled in here, 2A, my preferred seat on these transpacific flights. I used to travel to Asia six times a year. Now it had been â what? some two full years? Better not to study the question too closely.
I smiled despite myself, crinkling my eyes, all Janelle and her crewmates would be able to see for the next fourteen hours, at least until I slipped my eye mask into place where it would meet the purple polka dot mask that I wore overtop the snug N95. I wondered how I had ever felt like âa little hamster rocketing about inside an empty wheel, thunking and clunking from side to side as the wheel churns through the clouds,â as I had written a friend at the height of my pandemic malaise.Â
Walking down the jet bridge today felt like coming home, and I could not imagine tiring of travel again, not now and not in the future. I would not even mind if the flight were delayed, such was my ecstasy at being back on a plane. Instinctively, I checked my watch and modified the thought. Slightly delayed.
I fiddled with my watch, toggling absently between the calendar, the weather, and the activity tracker. The cabin door was still open. I could yet change my mind, I thought half-seriously.
âIs Seoul your final destination today?â Janelle asked, bringing my attention into focus again.
âNot really.â
Janelle raised her eyebrows; the Asia-Pacific was just reopening and still not too many passengers were headed out on these flights. What few travelers were traveling abroad were giddy with their plans. The couple in the seats behind me had been chattering excitedly about the long-delayed tour of East Asia they were finally embarking on since they stowed their bags, and an older Korean couple in the adjoining center seats was traveling home after seeing their granddaughter here in the U.S. for the first time. She was already two years old.
Since I couldnât believe my own plans, though, I couldnât begin to explain them to a flight attendant. I pinched myself: not a dream.
Janelle took my jacket and continued up the aisle, while I settled in, intent on dulling my mind against the next twenty-four hours, the whole idea of this trip, everything in the past two decades that had led me to take my seat on this flight in the first place.
âLadies and gentlemen, this is Captain Douglas and I would like to personally welcome you aboard Delta Airlines Flight 159 with non-stop service from Detroit to SeoulâŚâ
Even after the longest travel hiatus of my life, I could mouth the announcement along with the captain.
I settled snuggly into the nest I had made, all those glorious pillows and blankets, and dug out the fat, pink notebook that was never far from my reach and rested it against my knees. Something in the action reminded me of the evening I decided to send Nao Kao that first, fateful message. I must have sat in bed for hours that night, legal pad on my lap, a firm, straight line dividing the page into two columns. Pros on the left, cons on the right. The page was blank. After almost nineteen years, so was my mind.
Enough forgetting.
The images flooded my mind: a lighthouse, a camera, an overturned canoe. Books. Little white containers of fried rice and Pad Thai, the ones with the delicate metal handles. Crumbling towers against the unbroken blue sky. Picnic baskets and Shaggy and that smile, always that smile, broad and guileless, the gift of a contented man. All of this I remembered that night, as I had remembered it hours earlier, the afternoon sun arcing low, the shadows creeping across the hardwood floor as I took in the pictures spread before me.
I struggled to reconcile that the bright-faced girl gazing at me from the fading stack of photos was, in fact, me.
For the first time in almost two decades, I thought of him. I weighed my options: pitching the pebble into the pond, or laying it back softly on the shore, where the water might lap gently, but no ripples would spread.
Dear Nao Kao, I wrote.
It was as far as I got. Forget about a shot in the dark. If ever anything could be described as a bolt from the blue, this was it.
I checked again that my seatbelt was securely fastened, as the engines thrummed and the wheels spun. The big bird which would carry me to the other side of the earth roared down the runway and lifted into the air. I wondered again if I had been wrong to ever hit send â a butterflyâs wings, and all that. I inhaled deeply, focusing on the act of breathing; I was, I knew, as ready for this as I would ever be.
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âI want to go to Laos.â
I blinked a few times.
âSorry. I think you were frozen.â
She wasnât. Neither the picture nor the audio could have been clearer, but the words coming through Zoom did not compute. It was the spring of 2020 and for the past several weeks we had been mired in pandemic, those terrifying early days when borders slammed shut without notice and we scrubbed our groceries before shelving them and lowered our eyes and crossed the street when we encountered another human on our morning runs.
My colleagues and I had been working tirelessly as day bled into night, Friday somehow immediately into Monday, to repatriate students and faculty from places a lot less distant than Southeast Asia, although some from there, too, and now this student had somehow finagled precious minutes on my calendar to tell me that she wanted to travel to Laos, to one of the least developed countries in Asia. I adjusted my screen and drew an unsteady breath. This was my seventh Zoom call of the day; maybe I was hearing things.
âLaos,â she repeated carefully. âI want to study in Laos. Not now,â she chuckled, the absurdity of the conversation perhaps catching up with her, âbut when this is over. I know it wonât be easy, so I thought I could start planning now.â
âLaos?â I repeated. âWe donât have any programs in Laos.â I articulated the statement slowly, hoping she might catch my meaning.
âYes, but I heard from a friend that you helped her find a way to study in Sri Lanka, where there were no programs either. This is important to me. See each of my parents left as childrenâŚâ
Laos. Her face flickered, her words animated, her hands fluttered near her eyes, but I was no longer with her.
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âNao Kao. Nao Kao Inthavong.â
I had spent my life being packed around the world on my parentsâ various sabbaticals, befriending locals in all the far-flung corners of the world, but even to my globally-attuned ears, the name was unusual. I turned to look. Like me, he was younger than most of the other students in the class. Pan-Asian, relatively non-descript, save for wearing blue jeans and long sleeves despite the mercury hovering around ninety degrees. Kind eyes behind thick glasses. Thin. No, more like wiry. Or scrappy. Unsmiling, but then the international students often were. Flashing the pearly whites at every opportunity is a decidedly American trait.
âSay that again,â the professor asked.
âPlease call me Nao Kao.â
I hated these first day of class exercises, the name, rank, serial number monotony of it, and never more so than when the professor projected such obvious earnestness for us to amalgamate ourselves into one big, happy family. Unlike some students who wanted to share their life story from the first day, who were already speaking of happy hours to come, I sat quietly, hands folded into my lap, just waiting for this exercise to end.
âAnd where are you from, Nao Kao?â
âLaos.â
The professor flicked her eyebrows quickly, but moved on.
I have often wondered if it might have all been different if, like the rest of them, I had not known Laos from Latvia. In another life, I might have been the one to ask whether Laos wasnât one of those countries near Russia, the ones that used to be part of the Soviet Union. Or, at a minimum, I simply might not have cared, absently filing Nao Kaoâs homeland in my mind as another obscure land to be named and forgotten.
But whether from a forced march through the frigid ooze of North Sea mud at low tide, my hosts determined to show me a good time despite myself, or my encounters with man-eating mosquitos and man-hating monkeys in South America, my identity as a globalist was already forged by the time I entered grad school in the fall of 2000. Whether it was the cumulative effect of these hijinks, the international hallmates I had befriended all through college, or merely how I was wired, I can say only that if ever the stars foretold eventual friendship, this was it.
Not that I had many friends that year. Never mind that I had grown up in Ann Arbor just a few miles from campus, that I had spent four years haunting the stacks and study spaces of the UGLi, or that I had spent more hours laughing and lounging in the Diag than any other first-year grad student. I had, in fact, once been hired to give a private tour to the daughter of an A-list celebrity who was contemplating exchanging the sunshine of California for the zest and zeal of the Maize and Blue.
Now I was a graduate student, and the friends I made through undergrad were all graduated and gone; my future was waiting for me to find it, surely elsewhere, and I felt like a transient. I kept my nose in my books and staked out the farthest corner of the law library. The law library was a far cry from the relative hustle and bustle of the undergraduate library, where laughter often reverberated and joviality reigned among the volumes. No, the law library was a place so quiet, but into whose high vaulted ceiling every sound reverberated, that even a whisper echoed, and you could hear the person three tables over scratching notes onto a legal pad. I worked there one summer in high school, wearing heels for the first time simply because I
delighted in the click of them bouncing off the flagstone floor and through the cavernous hall.
By the time my first semester of graduate school ended, I had succeeded in distancing myself from my cohort such that they didnât even invite me to the end-of-semester bar crawl.
âAre you coming?â Nao Kao asked, before he realized I was unaware of the plans. He and I often sat together in class, sometimes lingering after to finish our conversations. Those snatches of conversation before we vacated our seats when the next students arrived were the extent of my social life. Despite the fact that he wasnât even a full member of the cohort, that he was only taking education courses as a cognate, he was eager for the opportunity to socialize with the others, even if some of them thought he was born in the USSR. Nao Kao bore no grudges.
I thought back to my twenty-first birthday a couple of years earlier, the surprise party a handful of well-meaning if misguided friends had thrown at Pizza House, my strident opposition to so much as a mention of my birthday that ended with me stalking out onto Church Street on the coldest night of the year. I had timed my exit poorly and collided with the waiter bearing the large tray of sticky pink daiquiris to our table. Sweet, alcoholic lava flowed over my friends, across the table, and pooled under their feet and on the floor. Months of repentance followed.
âYouâll have more fun without me, I promise.â
âYou wonât do it just for the show will you? Because you really do not care what the others think, is that right?â
He looked at me quizzically, as though truly seeing me for the first time.
That might have been obvious from my parries in class, my aversion to collegiality as the faculty so often referred to the need to pretend we all liked one another, from the way I rolled my eyes when a classmate suggested balancing a departmental budget by purchasing fewer pens and less copy paper.
Suddenly it dawned on me what a revelation this must be. What a revelation I must be. Asian societies are collectivist: the good of the group supersedes that of the individual, full stop. The squeaky wheel might get the grease here, but in Asia, it is the nail that sticks up that gets hammered down.Â
âNo, no, itâs just, I mean, Iâm not interested. Itâs not my thing,â I stammered.
âOther people, you mean. We are not your thing,â Nao Kao teased me, and I smiledâlaughedâdespite myself.
He moved his hand and a flash of light caught me by surprise. Our many conversations during and after class had hewed entirely to the academic, I realized, not the personal, and despite the months of shared classes, this was the first time I noticed his wedding ring, that simple band of gold that delineated a bright line in relationships all the world over.
âI miss them.â
I had stared a beat too long; perhaps Nao Kao had misinterpreted my surprise at my own obliviousness for surprise at his personal life. But now I met his eyes. Waited.
âMy wife. My kids, twin babies,â he smiled slightly, as though remembering something. âTurning one next month. Ah, but this was the only way though. A better life for all of us in the end and itâs only a short time.â
Two years did not seem such a short time to me to be away from a wife and little babies, but for once I held my tongue.
âIâd love to see a picture sometime. If you donât mind, that is.â
He pulled a worn photograph out of his wallet, and as he passed it to me, I realized how often he must take it out and remember. A young woman with a faint smile and a baby on each hip gazed back at me.
âBoys or girls? Or one of each?â
âGirls, both. What a surprise.â He shook his head lightly, as though remembering the first time he heard that news, maybe, or even the surprise when they were born.
âDo you talk to them often?â
âI try to call every other week. Itâs not so cheap, you know,â his nervous laughter hiding what was clearly no laughing matter.
âWell, I hope you get to speak with them over break. Maybe tell them about the snow?â
Oh, the inanity! I could converse for hours if the subject was academic, but five minutes of small talk about anything personal was evidently more than I could handle.
He laughed, though, probably imagining the impossibility of describing snow to little babies whose world was bounded by the mountains and jungles of Southeast Asia.
âEnjoy your break, Liss. And Merry Christmas.â
Only then did it occur to me how lonely he must be. I should make a point to be friendlier next semester.
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NAO KAO
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Americans often think all Asian countries â all Asian people â are the same, but theyâre not. Weâre not. On an intellectual level, I knew that before I arrived at Chulalongkorn as an eighteen-year-old, but I felt it there for the first time. Nothing in Laos prepared me for the bustling metropolis that was Bangkok. I adapted. I learned to squeeze my motorbike through the least opening, to elbow my way through the crush at the most popular market stalls, to take plain white rice with my meals rather than the sticky rice of home.
Of course, the U.S. would be a bigger adaptation, but exactly how big did not hit me until my flight landed and I encountered my first American. She was a gruff and belligerent customs agent, who shouted and swore liberally. âFucking students,â she spat in my direction, in response to my question about the customs form. I blushed, certain every other officer in hearing distance was staring at me, the cause of such a fierce rebuke. Glancing around, I realized no one had so much as looked in my direction.
In Ann Arbor, the culture shock multiplied. Professors wore sweatshirts and sandals â even shorts! â to teach class. Living alone for the first time, I navigated warehouse-sized grocery stores with forty kinds of peanut butter and thirty kinds of hot dogs, with an entire aisle of noodles and rice, but none that tasted of home. The biggest surprise, though, was the students, the way they comported themselves with one another, the boys and girls always looking, laughing, touching. They would sling their arms over one another or offer one another an enthusiastic squeeze, akin to a hug, but not quite, in hello and in good-bye, in the middle of story, or walking across campus.
Such casual contact between men and women in Laos was completely unknown. I tried to explain it when I called home, but I could not find the words. In Laos, boys and girls did not touch until they were virtually betrothed. There was certainly no translation for the hook-up culture that pervaded from Thursday until Sunday here. Nor could I explain so much else I did not understand about this place where I had come to succeed at all costs. How quickly I found myself adrift from the friends and family waiting for news at home.
Northwoods was dominated by international students, most of them married, many with children in tow. My neighbors quickly became my friends, but hailing from the likes of Lebanon, Ghana, and the Philippines, they were no more able to puzzle out the quirks of tipping practices in restaurants or why the sales tax was not included in the price marked on the goods on the shelves than I was. None of us could begin to understand the obsession with football or the importance of The Game, which, collectively, we finally understood referred to Michigan versus Ohio State. We were both a part of America and apart from America.
âAre all of your friends foreigners?â my mom asked once over the crackle of a poor connection.
âMostly,â I conceded, and it was true.
Melissa Miller, Liss, was an enigma more than a friend. We often sat next to one another and in class she could alternate between stony-faced silence and jolly good humor in the course of a single discussion. Despite myself, I admired the completely unselfconscious way she spoke up in class and how she questioned what the rest of us frequently accepted at face value. She was not above rolling her eyes at particularly insipid remarks, even those proffered by the professor. After class we might linger, and sheâd chat happily, her eyes laughing as her words spilled out in irreverent or self-deprecating bursts, a million miles removed from the modest reserve Laotian girls learned from birth. No one would ever mistake Liss for one of those demure women who had peopled my world thus far. Still, it was through these conversations that I first began to understand this new, strange country that was to be my home for the next two years.
All the same, I would not call her a friend. I was pretty sure she didnât have friends.
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The book is a beautiful read, with a special emphasis on "beautiful". I found each sentence of the book crafted perfectly and curated with much thought. However, this very factor made the book difficult to keep up with. The book felt a bit artificial in certain places and lacked a kind of warmth one would naturally observe when a writer writes from the heart and goes with the flow. This was my personal observation about the style and the overall presentation of the book.
Now to delve deeper into the book, without spoiling it; the book traverses through a relationship between Liss and Nao Kao both coming from different places in life, metaphorically and literally, and how they alter each other's lives when they collide for a brief time. However, I personally found that the author laid too much stress on the "poor" backgrounds of Nao Kao in ways which it did not support the development of the story or the character.
The narrator's own connection and relationship with Nao Kao is explored through recounts of past texts, conversations and significant portions of her memory. This is how we learn about the massive differences between them regarding their culture, upbringing, relationships, dating, and views on familial bonds. They share a beautiful emotional connection built upon intellectual conversations and a shared sense of dry humour and a lot of icecreams. This style allows us, readers to evaluate and learn about them singularly through the lens of the narrator, but also gives us the space to be judgemental of whether what she is doing is right or wrong.
The book holds our hands throughout the journey of their relationship beginning as classmates in a master's program. The relationship goes through ambiguity, tension and other complications owing to the backgrounds they come from.
In total the book was an okayish read, and I would recommend it to anyone who has some time to spare. But unfortunately, I must add that the book doesn't put anything novel to the table.