Marco Polo
This essay appears in Silly: Stories in Ordinary Time.
When I was a boy, the city pool was where we played Marco Polo—the only game where you could win by listening instead of seeing. One kid, eyes shut tight, would call “Marco,” and the rest of us, scattered and laughing, would answer “Polo,” voices bouncing off water and sky. You learned to tell who was who by sound alone—the pitch of a giggle, the splash that gave away your cousin’s location.
I think about that sometimes when I’m tracing my family tree—still calling out into the deep end of history, waiting for a familiar voice to answer back. Sean, of course, doesn’t see the need for any of this. His ancestry lives in his memory, his language, and the way he instinctively reaches for oyster sauce instead of salt. His roots are alive, not archived.
Mine, on the other hand, have always felt like they needed excavation—a genealogical dive into abandoned coal mines and old ship manifests. That’s why I keep telling him: if his bloodline is a mountain, mine is an archaeological dig site. Somehow, between the North China plains and the cornfields of Iowa, we met in the middle.
I’ve tried more than once to coax him into taking that Ancestry DNA test like I have, usually while I’m hunched over my laptop, tracing the tangled root system of my own family tree like a man searching for buried treasure. He just looks at me over the top of his glasses with an expression that suggests he’s examining something curious—and possibly vaguely suspicious—under a microscope.
“You never know,” I told him once. “Maybe one of your distant great-grandmothers had a little fling with an Italian merchant on the Silk Road? Stranger things have happened.”
That earned me a long silence followed by the usual reprimand—silly—that says he’s both amused and wondering how exactly he ended up married to a person who thinks like this.
This particular exchange occurred as we were sitting in the restaurant of our hotel in Zagreb one evening—on the first leg of our vacation through my grandfather’s ancestral Croatian homeland. We had just finished dinner when the waiter asked for my name for the room charge. Without thinking, I told him Kauzlarich and began to spell it out, as I always have to anywhere I go. He gave me the slightest bemused look and then off he went without waiting for me to finish.
I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me when he returned with the check—upon which he’d written the proper Croatian spelling of my name: Kauzlarić.
It was almost as if I could hear him saying “Ah, gospodin Kauzlarić—welcome home,” using the Croatian word for “Mister.”
Since moving to Tennessee, I have become resigned to that look everywhere I go—one of blank incomprehension—when I give my surname. It is always followed by the inevitable “Can you spell that for me?” “Is that German?” or the Southern classic “You ain’t from ’round here, are yuh?”
When I respond that no, I’m from Iowa, occasionally the next words out of the interlocutor’s mouth are, “Oh, you mean where they grow the potatoes?”
“No, Sparky—not the potatoes. The corn.”
“Oh, yeah! Now I know where you mean.”
At this point, it’s easier if I pretend to believe them and move on with the conversation.
Now, here I was—six time zones away in this small Central European nation for the first time in my life—feeling the strangest sense of belonging, of homecoming, if you will.
What’s in a name? More than I imagined, as it turns out.
Growing up in Appanoose County, Iowa, I was surrounded by names like mine: Budiselich, Kruzich, Starcevich—on and on they went. My mother used to joke that we lived in a very “itchy” town. It wasn’t until I moved to East Tennessee at the turn of the century that it dawned on me I had grown up in the middle of a Croatian diaspora. I thought everybody’s grandma knew how to make sarma and povitica.
I sipped my mineral water and reflected on all of this as Sean finished the last bite of olive bread. The faint clink of silverware punctuated the low murmur of conversation in the background—in a language I could not speak, yet for some reason sounded strangely familiar.
Hmm… how odd.
In a way, Sean has had a similar experience in the United States, although he already had a fairly decent command of English when he immigrated here. By contrast, my Croatian is limited to the desperate plea of Ne govorim Hrvatski—I don’t speak Croatian. Well, that and phrases like Dobar dan (good day) and Hvala (thanks).
Like me, he describes the same sense of homecoming after living in the US for a while. His experience upon arriving in Tennessee for grad school was at once disorienting and familiar. He has since concluded that he was always a bit unusual for a Chinese person. While it was his country of birth and his home for the first twenty-five years of his life, he always felt a sense of not really belonging there.
I have photographic evidence that backs this up. A group picture taken in the mid-’90s when he was at Kaifeng University shows about a dozen young, dour-faced Chinese men, all dressed in what I call gray “Chairman Mao” uniforms—and then there was Sean.
At nearly five-foot-eleven inches, he was taller than the rest, sporting a black track suit with aquamarine racing stripes as well as a toothy grin. The first time I saw it, I started singing the Sesame Street song: “But one of these things is not like others, now it’s time to play our game, it’s time to play our game…”
Later, when I stumbled upon pictures of him at Tennessee Tech, I saw someone who appeared to be in his element at last—smiling, his cheeks rosy on a winter day—leaning back on his hands, sitting cross-legged, looking utterly relaxed. I realized it’s the same look on both of our faces in the first pictures of us together.
Now, here I am in Zagreb—like Sean, halfway around the world from my childhood. I look over the dinner table at him as I drink the last of my water, wink, and tell him he’s always been my favorite boyfriend. He flashes back that charming grin that still makes my heart melt a little and says the same thing he always does, “Silly.”
I return his grin with one of my own, marveling at how much I still love this man—how at peace I feel in his presence—after more than two decades together.
We both have been playing Marco Polo in our own way for years—each finding home in the sound of the other’s voice.
