I Will Not Be Wearing Flip-Flops Again Tomorrow
"Nah," Yee said calmly this morning, while casually pointing toward my desk in the front of the room. He followed up with another short phrase in Hmong, in which I could pick out "nah" again. "Nah," is the word for "eat" in Hmong, so I was confused. Was he making some comment about my lunch?
"What are you saying, Yee?" I prompted him with a smile. Rather than ignoring their Hmong, I've been trying to get them to translate for me.
"Mou, teach-ah," he said. Accustomed to the way the Hmong drop all final consonants while speaking English, I ran through the words in my head that "mou" could be. Mouth, mount, month, milk (their pronunciation of "milk" basically sounds like "mou" as well)...
"MouSS, teach-ah!" Kia said insistently.
I got it.
"Mouse? Really?" I glanced toward my desk. Yee was smiling, so I guessed maybe he was trying to say that he saw something that he thought looked like a mouse but realized that it was a scrap of paper. Or something like that. I heh-hehhed nervously. Then Yee stood up and walked over to my desk and jostled a piece of poster board leaning up against the space in between the wall and my desk. Like a bad dream, we watched the little brown mouse race across the front of the classroom and into the kitchen, which is next door. I screamed, bolted for the back of the room and jumped up onto a chair, just like in the movies, but I swear, it was total instinct.
Apparently, this is instinct in America. My students laughed and laughed at me, and told me how the mice in Thailand are much bigger than American mice and that their homes were full of mice who sometimes chewed on their toes at night. Kia would kill them by whacking them with her children's toys.
My heart continued to pound for at least another ten minutes, but I tried to play it cool and pretend like I wasn't really that afraid of mice. And believe me, I'll never forget that "nah" means both "eat" and "mouse" in Hmong.
"What are you saying, Yee?" I prompted him with a smile. Rather than ignoring their Hmong, I've been trying to get them to translate for me.
"Mou, teach-ah," he said. Accustomed to the way the Hmong drop all final consonants while speaking English, I ran through the words in my head that "mou" could be. Mouth, mount, month, milk (their pronunciation of "milk" basically sounds like "mou" as well)...
"MouSS, teach-ah!" Kia said insistently.
I got it.
"Mouse? Really?" I glanced toward my desk. Yee was smiling, so I guessed maybe he was trying to say that he saw something that he thought looked like a mouse but realized that it was a scrap of paper. Or something like that. I heh-hehhed nervously. Then Yee stood up and walked over to my desk and jostled a piece of poster board leaning up against the space in between the wall and my desk. Like a bad dream, we watched the little brown mouse race across the front of the classroom and into the kitchen, which is next door. I screamed, bolted for the back of the room and jumped up onto a chair, just like in the movies, but I swear, it was total instinct.
Apparently, this is instinct in America. My students laughed and laughed at me, and told me how the mice in Thailand are much bigger than American mice and that their homes were full of mice who sometimes chewed on their toes at night. Kia would kill them by whacking them with her children's toys.
My heart continued to pound for at least another ten minutes, but I tried to play it cool and pretend like I wasn't really that afraid of mice. And believe me, I'll never forget that "nah" means both "eat" and "mouse" in Hmong.
posted by Anne | 12:03 PM
3 Comments:
Hahahaha!
There are also mice at Holden. But not where you would stay if you came.
Several chalets have mice. They have crawled on people while they sleep. No word on chewing on toes, though.
I haven't seen one yet.
I think we Americans are timid about all sorts of things. I won't go to India after hearing about someone who had a huge spider crawl on her at night. She picked it up and threw it against the wall and hear it crunch. It was that big.
I made Erik kill a little spider this morning. Ick.
- D
One of my students told me that while he was fighting in the jungles of Laos in the 70s, he saw a snake the length of our classroom with the girth of a tv. He shot it with his gun four times before it died. He could tell that it had eaten a large animal because he could see the shape of the bones jutting out of the snake's body.
Okay, that is a snake I would be afraid of. I tend to think I'm not afraid of snakes. Though I did jump on a little hike when I nearly stepped on a tiny little garter snake. Not because I was afraid of it, but because the ground seemed to move right by my foot.
- D
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