how Little Rat got his name

It rained the day we arrived in Thailand. And the day after, and then the day after that. It rained the whole first month (July) actually, and most of the second month, too. At first we, my family (a father, a mother, three brothers and a sister) and me, lived in a little bungalow (#7) on the grounds of the resort owned by the proprietor of the school where my parents worked. This bungalow faced a little lake where Chinese ducks paddled in circles and it backed up to a stream running along the bottom of a ditch. The guards (boys with machine guns) who patrolled the property said not to go back there for fear of cobras, but I never saw a single one all the hundreds of times I ran darted across the cement beam, stuck in the mud. The grounds of the resort and the school were greenest green, tended by an army of gardeners who lived in the adjacent village. Craggy mountains rose up around us and at night, when it stopped raining, the sky was yellow.

Every morning my parents set out for the school, through the torrential, defeating rain, to try to get things in some sort of shape and order for opening day. This meant that we (a bossy, dreamy oldest sister, a brooding 14 year old boy, a moody 7th grade girl, and 2 semi-lingual Bulgarian dirtballs, 9 & 11)) were left in the bungalow to drink coke and watch MTV Asia and You've Got Mail. This movie, stuck randomly in someone's carry-on as an afterthought, was the only one not packed and sent in our shipment which was, at that point, still five months from arriving.

At first the five of us kids were homesick and a bit shell-shocked. Soon enough, though, that gave way to a raging case of cabin fever. The maids came and changed sheets everyday while we stood there, pretending we didn't mind their stares. We counted snails and lizards and stood under the sala of the bungalow and threw bread to the ducks on the rapidly rising lake. Before long, littlest brother could say every line of You've Got Mail by heart and we could sing the top ten pop songs from Indonesia. We slammed doors, locked each other out in the downpour and fought on the cold tile floor.

The moody 7th grade girl and the littlest brother went at it the most. She would boss him around and he would buck under her authority and pinch her. She would squeal and push him out in the rain or threaten to put spiders in his hair. His vocabulary was strange and flexible; it expanded at odd angles to accommodate the words rushing through his new life, with us, and in this place. Finally, he decided that he'd had enough so he came up with the worst invective he could cobble together and hurled it at her with all his might: You are a piggish squealing baby rat Queen! You are just a fat pig cow snack! For full effect, you must stop and imagine this fully: these words being shouted across a bungalow in Northern Thailand by a wiry brown boy, in a raspy little eastern European accent, who is crying and who hopes, quite understandably, that this sentence is as mean and damaging as he is furious.

When they came home that afternoon our parents loaded us into a jeep and we drove down the mountain road, lined with black scrawny chickens and mangy one-eared dogs, to the city below. We told them about our day, leaving out the bitterest bits of fighting, and of the new insult we'd learned from P. We are a family that does many things together and that afternoon, we threw back our heads together and laughed and laughed at the oddness of people, and words, and places .

The "Piggish Squealing Baby Rat Queen" caught on like wildfire. We turned it right back around and aimed it for P. and he has never escaped it-- not even now, many years and miles away from that day. For a long time he was Baby Rat Queen, and then just Baby Rat, which has evolved (with one eye towards his American socialization and -- hopefully-- normalization) to the less mortifying nickname of Little Rat. My brother may have started his life in a small village by the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. But Little Rat-- he was most certainly born one rainy afternoon in small bungalow surrounded by the craggy mountains of northern Thailand