Impromptu Fancies of a Whimsical Life (or How I Met My Wife) by Donald A. Ranard

For Corey

It might begin, the story of how I met my wife, when I was 7 and my father joined the foreign service and we left Vienna, Virginia, population 2,021, to go abroad, but not to the usual places, not to London or Paris or Rome, but to the far side of the world, to war-ravaged Tokyo, where my father, firstborn son of a first-generation Russian Jewish tailor with broken English, donned top hat and tails for an audience with His Imperial Majesty Akhito, the 125th Emperor of Japan, and then to Malaya, to the tropical island of Penang, where, at a British boarding school on Penang Hill, rainforest refuge for leopards and langurs and Communist guerrillas, there were three Americans — Ranard Major, Ranard Minor, and Ranard Minimus, as my younger brothers and I were called — and finally on to Korea, where in a rare moment of diplomatic chutzpah that still puzzles scholars, my father and his embassy colleagues did what Cold War diplomats didn’t do — supported a popular uprising against a US-backed dictator — because if we hadn’t gone to those places, if we hadn’t gone to Japan, Malaya, and Korea, it never would have occurred to me after college to go to Taiwan, on something of a whim, to study Chinese, and if I hadn’t gone to Taiwan, I wouldn’t have happened to meet an American guy one night in a bar in Taipei who’d just spent a year teaching English with the Fulbright program in Vietnam and I wouldn’t have had the idea of going to Laos as a Fulbright teacher, where I would teach English at a French-medium lycée in a small riverside town of crumbling colonial buildings and old Chinese shophouses until the Pathet Lao communists rode into town one morning in a derelict convoy of broken-down trucks and a World War II Soviet tank, led by an old army jeep with a flat tire, giving a first glimpse of life under the new regime — ka-plunk, ka-plunk, ka-plunk — and ending 20 years of US assistance, overt and covert, to the most lavishly aided and heavily bombed country, per capita, in history, a country Americans knew nothing about — Laos? Isn’t that in Africa somewhere? — and still don’t, despite the unexploded US ordnance that to this day kills and maims men, women, and children, and had that not happened, had the Pathet Lao not taken over and had I not been evacuated to Thailand, I would not have discovered, on my return to the States — after backpacking from Bangkok to Bali and back — that my modest knowledge of a country Americans tended to confuse with Lagos had made me an overnight expert on refugees from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos now pouring into the US, which in turn would lead to a job at the Refugee Service Center in Washington, DC, where I would write monographs and give talks with great if not always deserved authority on the backgrounds and resettlement needs of Indochinese refugees, and if none of those things had happened, beginning with my parents’ decision to join the foreign service, I wouldn’t have found myself sitting in a room in our Manila office one morning with two colleagues, making awkward small talk as we waited for a fourth colleague, to discuss a new project, trying to ignore the undercurrent of tension from a long history of conflict between the DC and Manila offices over issues which none of us can remember today, when suddenly down the hall there’s all this chatter and laughter that gets louder and louder as it gets closer and closer until the door bursts open and into the room she breezes with a big smile and a new do — which, I will later learn, is the reason for all the commotion — and the tension in the room begins to lift and everyone relaxes a bit and hmmm I think what do we have here?

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In addition to Poetose Journal, Donald A. Ranard's writing has appeared in The Atlantic, New World Writing Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, Vestal Review, The Best Travel Writing, The Washington Post, The Road Not Taken, and many other publications. In 2022, his play Elbow Apple Carpet Saddle Bubble placed second in Savage Wonder Theater’s annual playwriting contest. The son of an American diplomat, he grew up in Japan, Malaya, and Korea and after college studied Chinese in Taiwan, taught English on a Fulbright grant in Laos, and worked in refugee assistance programs in Hong Kong, Thailand, and the Philippines. He lives in Arlington, VA, with his wife.

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