Lao Voices

Our company has a cook out today, it’s nice to be able to eat with all my co-workers in the cafeteria, and we only do this about twice a year. I think my eyes must have been bigger than my stomach but it’s typical of me, they often referred to me as a garbage disposal, I managed to eat everything in sight.

We have hot dogs, hamburgers, slaw, potato salad, and baked beans; my favorite American food is hamburger. As we were eating, the plant manger that is in his late 40s started telling us about his time in the Philippine, he was in the marine and was about 18 years old at the time, I’m thinking about 1976. In the evening, there were vendors that’d sale shish kabob, which he thought was really good, ate it almost every night for about a month. Then one day, they were sitting around and started talking, and thought it was a bit odd that there’s not that many dogs around, even the stray one, then one guy said that the shish kabob that they ate every night was dog meat. All of us in the cafeteria at this time was like ‘gross’, I’ve heard the story before and thought it was interesting, not that I eat dog meat. He then went on and said that he started to throw up and couldn’t eat for 3 days, but then thought it was ridiculous because here he had been eating for 1 month and it was darn good, what the heck, so he went back and started eating it again. He said that next year, he’d see if he could get us some dog burger because he missed his dog shish kabob. You can imagine the look on some of the people at my work place; I hope he is not serious.

They all turn around and asked me if I eat dog, I think they ASS*U*ME that all Asians eat dog meat, just for the record; NO I don’t eat dog meat.