Committed: A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage by Elizabeth Gilbert

Author:Elizabeth Gilbert
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: , Autobiography, Sociology, Social Science, Divorce & Separation, Literary, Spirituality, Gilbert, Comitted, Body, Divorced women, Elizabeth, Divorced women - United States, Wives, Mind & Spirit, Women, Commited, Marriage & Family, Adventurers & Explorers, United States, Family & Relationships, Personal Memoirs, Marriage, Wives - United States, General, Women In The U.S., Biography & Autobiography, Biography
ISBN: 9780670021659
Publisher: Viking
Published: 2010-01-05T05:00:00+00:00

By the way, have I mentioned the fact that Keo's wife was pregnant? In fact, the baby was due the very week that I met Keo and hired him to be my translator and guide. I found out about his wife's pregnancy when Keo mentioned that he had been especially happy for the extra income, on account of the baby's imminent arrival. Keo was enormously proud to be having a child, and on our last night in Luang Prabang, he invited Felipe and me to his house for dinner--to show us his life and to introduce us to pregnant young Noi.

"We met at school," Keo had said of his wife. "I always liked her. She is somewhat younger than me--only nineteen years old now. She is very pretty. Although it's odd for me now that she is having the baby. She used to be so tiny that she barely weighed any kilos at all! Now it appears that she weighs all the kilos at once!"

So we went to Keo's house--driven there by his friend Khamsy the innkeeper--and we went bearing gifts. Felipe brought several bottles of Beerlao, the local ale, and I brought some cute gender-neutral baby clothes that I'd found in the market and now wanted to present to Keo's wife.

Keo's house stood at the end of a rutted dirt road just outside Luang Prabang. It was the last house on a road of similar houses, before the jungle took over, and it occupied a twenty-by-thirty-foot rectangle of land. Half of this property was covered by concrete tanks, which Keo had filled with the frogs and fighting fish he raises to supplement his income as an elementary school teacher and occasional tour guide. He sells the frogs for food. As he proudly explained, they go for about 25,000 kip--$2.50--a kilo, and on average there are three to four frogs in a kilo because these frogs are quite hefty. So it's a good little side living. In the meantime, he also has the fighting fish, which sell for 5,000 kip each--fifty cents--and which are breeding happily. He sells the fighting fish to local men who bet on the aquatic battles. Keo explained that he had begun raising fighting fish as a young boy, already looking for a way to make some extra money so he would not be a burden to his parents. Though Keo does not like to boast, he could not help but reveal that he was perhaps the best breeder of fighting fish in all of Luang Prabang.

Keo's house took up the rest of his property--that which was not overrun by tanks of frogs and fish--which meant the house proper was about fifteen feet square. The structure was made of bamboo and plywood, with a corrugated metal roof. The one original room of the house had recently been divided into two rooms, to make a living area and a sleeping area. The dividing wall was just a plywood separation that Keo had wallpapered neatly with pages from English-language newspapers such as the Bangkok Post and the Herald Tribune.

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