Starving in a New Country

Moving to a new country can make 26 years of life experience feel obsolete. With everything around me foreign, I reverted back to childhood. I depended on others to keep me alive. I was a four month old eating solids for the first time. Only small bits and pieces made it to my mouth as I clumsily maneuvered my utensils. My clothes were becoming more stained each meal as I learned to use sticky rice as a fork to collect saucy meats. Most of the food available around me didn’t fit into my baby food category as it created ants in my throat sensations with uncontrollable coughing and tears. Just too spicy.

With a ride home from the airport and little verbal communication, we were welcomed into a local’s home until we could find our footing here. The food in the fridge was offered to us, but all I could make sense of was the jar of jam on the kitchen table. There were green mangoes in a bowl on the counter we had just seen our friend cut open and eat with a red chili sauce. In the refrigerator, small plastic bags lined the shelves with contents I didn’t understand. Yellow globs with tapioca in one, pork chopped and mixed with parts of its own face in another. A bowl was full of small frogs frozen in time, suspended with sticks over a green soup. The counter was lined with fifteen bottles of dark sauces whose labels were scribbled in Thai. Some smelled sweet, others a variation of soy sauce, and some had me flipping the lid back on before I could take a second breath. On the floor, a fifteen pound bag of rice sat. 

It felt pretty lousy that I couldn´t gather the ingredients together to offer up a simple meal to this family who was housing us. But I felt anxiety and a dab of uselessness when I couldn´t even satisfy the hunger pangs of my small family.

After staring with hopelessness at what lay in front of us, we resigned to sleeping it off. In the morning, our friend brought in a handful of small eggs collected from his chicken coop along with a bunch of bananas that were hanging out the wall ready to be eaten by the neighbor´s cows roaming around. Our next meal was at the mall food court on an excursion to find information about housing and visas. 

If the options in the refrigerator already made me uneasy, it’s easy to understand why I felt overwhelmed and unable to handle all of this. There were maybe fifteen different food stalls along the three walls of the food court. Most of them had similar looking pictures; stacks of rice with blurry pieces of meat on the top or shrimp lining noodle dishes. None of the menus had writing in English and our best choice was randomly pointing at a number on the list and looking at the cook with our panting mouths open while shaking our heads, as though he would understand we were asking him to keep his natural amount of chilies from our food.

I am not proud that I suffered so much during this encounter. Throughout high school and college I lived north of Seattle, the home of a range of Asian peoples with Asian dishes. Yet, I only ventured so far as to eat California rolls…with my fingers, never with chopsticks. I also willingly chose to find my week´s calories in one meal at Little Ceaser´s rather than enjoying the Thai or Vietnamese restaurants that may have eased my entrance over here slightly. Of course it would not have fully prepared me, but I would have at least known that pho was an easy option.

For two or three weeks, we repeated our same pattern, ultimately with more success. Our friend would take us to the market where we would purchase watermelons, bananas, and chicken breasts by throwing out bills of money we had not yet made sense of. We understood the vendors when they typed out the price on their calculators, but the 10,000 kip and 100,000 kip looked too similar and we had to search the front and back to find the numbers written in an readable script. We would arrive back to the house where our host would comment that we had purchased a ton of food and we remained stuck as we considered how to live off of chicken and watermelon for a week.

We shared what we could with our host family. After three weeks in their house, I don’t recall ever seeing any of their five kids eat more than a package of Ramen noodles. Yet we were invited to partake in the catfish smoked on the concrete grill outside grown in a concrete pool in the yard. Or the frogs that our friend would go catch outside and turn into soup. We also tried spicy dog meat, sometimes by accident, sometimes out of curiosity. Once we were even offered beef. Never so excited to eat something recognizable, we tried the meat but couldn´t bite it off. While the taste was decent, it was like an extra hardened piece of jerky. No matter how long I nibbled on it, making drool fall down my face, my teeth were not strong enough to detach a piece small enough to swallow. At the end of each day, we ate a fourth banana to ease the hunger and waited for our salvation to come.

It took finding an American to show us a supermarket and give us the rundown of what products were of use to us. The baking soda came in this certain plastic bag rather than an orange Arm and Hammer box. She explained which yogurt was consumable by most foreign friends and taught us which oil bottles and sauce bottles may be of interest to us as she clarified the labels written in Thai or Chinese. 

Bit by bit we have adapted. In our first three weeks in this country, we were relearning how to survive and although we found food here and there, our stomachs were never satisfied. Now, I can easily run to the market and pick out what I need for a simple dish, although I still bring a Lao friend with me when purchasing to make Lao food.

I never thought that moving to a new place could make me feel so dumb and inoperable. We thought the hard part would be finding our place in our work and setting up a home. But, this place is so different from everywhere we had ever been. People operate so differently and eat so differently that the hardships trickled down into our day to day search for nourishment. While a year and a half later our bellies are full every day, we continue to survive and live in a totally unique way.