During the week Dtaw experimented with recipes for Thai iced tea, the perfect pad thai sauce, and marinade for the satay. These he prepared in huge pots. He often stayed up all night cooking and stirring before a festival. During the week he threaded carefully cut chunks of raw chicken breast onto endless skewers of bamboo that packed the freezer. He was sleep-deprived, his back ached, but he was determined to succeed. We did well at the festivals. The food was amazing and soon people were lining up. The boys helped at the busy times, running back and forth between me at the cash drawer and their daddy at the stove, conveying orders and grabbing plastic forks or bags or food as instructed. The work was exhausting, but we were doing it together, and by the end of the summer we were able to pay back the loan.
* * *
“But Mama, why can’t I go with Cody to the birthday party?” Chan looked up at me, his brow furrowed. Never in the nearly four years of his life had he been excluded from an experience that his brother was part of. In Thailand children played together as a pack. No one was ever singled out for something special like a party. Whenever Dtaw started up the rumbling engine of our 1966 Land Rover, Cody and Chan and their cousins and neighbor children came running, climbing and tumbling into the benches in the back, ready for adventure.
“Things are different in America. Little brothers are not invited to birthday parties, I guess.”
“Maybe you could call and see if they made a mistake,” Chan suggested.
“Okay, I will, sweetie.”
There was no mistake. It was a birthday party for five-year-olds. No, they gently replied, they couldn’t make an exception for Chan. Three was too little.
This would be Cody’s first birthday party. In Thailand birthdays were celebrated quietly by a morning visit to the temple with offerings for the monks. No gifts, no cake, no parties. People who celebrated the day of their birth (and many did not) did so with the much-practiced act of giving rather than receiving.
The day of the party I buckled Cody and Chan into their car seats and carefully followed the directions Cody’s friend’s dad had given us over the phone. When we pulled up to the house, I let Chan walk Cody to the door, hoping the parents would see the absurdity of their choice, see what a well-behaved and charming child he was, standing hand in hand with Cody, then relent and invite him in. But despite having been born and raised in this culture, I underestimated the strength of its social norms. I had lived in Thailand for the better part of a decade. I had done all my mothering there, so now my own American ways seemed almost foreign to me.
Chan came walking back down the steps alone, a little slower than usual, a mix of resignation and bewilderment on his face.
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry they didn’t let you come in.”
He sat silent in his seat as we drove away, leaving his brother behind.
* * *
Luckily for Chan, I was six months pregnant when Cody started school. Each time the baby began to move inside me, I called to Chan, “Hurry, Baby’s moving!” and Chan would jump up from his blocks or train set and come running across the living room to put his small hands under my shirt, waiting to feel the next movement. Then his face would shine with wonder as he looked up, wide-eyed, at his miracle-making mama.
As the due date approached, I noticed that Baby was especially active when I took a bath, so at night while Dtaw cooked beef curry with coconut milk or chicken soup with galingale or pork fried with pepper and garlic or any other of his delectable meals, the boys and I would crowd into the tub of our small, subterranean apartment and wait. With their hands on my belly, and the warm water quieting around us, we watched and felt the coming life in the strange movements tunneling across my flesh or the bump rising and falling almost before we saw it.
“Cody! Cody! Did you see that?” Chan would call out.
“Yeah,” Cody would shout back, his ragged voice echoing off the walls of the tiny bathroom, “keep looking! Baby’s gonna move again!”
From the moment Baby was finally born, at home in our bed, Chan wanted to be by his side. When friends came to visit, Chan would reach up to where I held the new baby in my arms and, tenderly touching his brother’s feet, say, “Look! Look how tiny his toes are!” smiling as proud as if he had fashioned them himself. “I love his toes!”
At Baby’s first checkup, Chan accompanied us into the examining room saying, “Don’t worry, Baby. Dr. Ben is really nice. You will like him.” The young doctor came in and chatted with Chan about his new brother. Then, pulling up Baby’s shirt, Dr. Ben said, “Let’s have a look at that stump. I want to see how it’s healing.”
“It’s called an umbilicus,” came Chan’s small voice, clear and firm, from where he stood, fingers resting on the edge of the examining table.
Dr. Ben smiled, looked at me, then back down at Chan. “You are right. I’m sorry. I’ll try to use the correct terminology from now on.”
* * *
It was two weeks before we settled on a name for the new baby.
“I think you should name him Chan,” Chan told me.
“But honey, that’s your name.”
“I know. I still think his name should be Chan.”
This conversation was repeated several times each day. We settled on Tahn. In Thai it means water or stream. Because the Mekong River was so significant to Dtaw and me, having fallen in love at its side and biked into Tibet, following its course as much as we could, it seemed a good name. And I hoped because the sound of the name was so close to his, Chan would be satisfied.
Chan, in Pali, means enlightenment or calm awareness. It is also the Chinese word for Zen. Zen was the name we gave the first thing Dtaw and I made together, the guest house for foreign backpackers in Dtaw’s hometown.
Cody’s name came from codte, an archaic Laotian word for roots of a tree or roots of the family, ancestors. When Dtaw explained the meaning of his first-born’s name to friends in Thailand, they invariably laughed, not out of disrespect, but more from admiration tinged with fear. They grew up with Thai as the dominant power language. The language of their homes and families, Laotian was to be hidden, forgotten in the quest for education, betterment, progress, Westernization. But Dtaw never believed in all that. He always held a deep respect for the elders in his family and community. And he honored their history as indigenous people.
Home
Dtaw’s sister Jum and six-year-old Jew stood waiting at the front of the crowd in the Bangkok Airport. Taller and thinner, dark hair longer, Jew beamed at us and then her mother when she saw us. Jum looked more tired than before. The boys began to run when they spotted their cousins and aunt, respectful wai’s first, then hugs all around. Jew laughed at seeing Cody’s long hair and new clothes. Each of us held the hand of someone we hadn’t seen for too long as we made our way to Jum’s little car. Squeezed into the front with Tahn on my lap, I turned to watch Cody laughing with Jew, the smile I had almost forgotten shining again on his face.
In Seattle, the strain of raising young children without extended family, working to pay rent, and getting food on the table had taken such a toll on Dtaw and me that a year after Tahn’s birth, we had decided to return home to Thailand. Stress had become a part of Cody’s daily fare too, hurrying to school, being wary of strangers, watching over his brother—it was as if a shell had begun to cover Cody’s light. And now I watched it crumble away in that first moment of contact with Jew, his cousin, his almost twin. I could have cried with relief and pleasure. Until that moment, I hadn’t realized how hard Cody had worked to be American.
* * *
We traveled on the overnight bus the next evening to our house on the river. Back at home on our little street, the boys fell right back into playing with all the zest they’d always had. Cody quickly became the leader of his small pack and there was always a spot for Chan at his side. Still quiet, but funny and sly and always ready to make a joke, Chan was a typical middle child, a settling presence for all of us. The two older brothers and Jew doted on
Baby Tahn with as much devotion as they’d received as infants. I finally began to feel a sense that things were right, that I could release the tension I’d gathered living in the US. I had the distinct sense that I could stop worrying that some disaster was about to unfold, that I could relax and simply enjoy the goodness of family life without worrying about paying rent or finding work or being isolated in a small apartment in the suburbs. At last things felt as if we were finally where we belonged.
Between organizing bicycle tours and tutoring English, there was plenty of time for biking and playing soccer, for taking drives to visit friends, for walks along the river. Dtaw and I had bought a second bike trailer in Seattle, so now the five of us could take rides through the rice fields and hills around our village. Jew and Cody giggled and talked together in one trailer behind Dtaw’s bike, while from his trailer behind mine, Chan clowned with Tahn in the plastic seat on my rear rack.
Whatever the combination, we all loved our early-morning rides through the countryside where Dtaw would stop in the middle of a village when he saw something that he knew would interest the children and me—an old couple shredding tobacco leaves, a blacksmith and his apprentices forging steel into sharp blades for the upcoming rice harvest, or a family loading wood into a hollow mound of dry mud, their kiln for transforming trees into charcoal.
Whenever he stopped, we always knew we were about to meet some interesting people and learn something about the traditions of his culture. The boys and Jew would climb out, sometimes sleepy from dozing. I would lift Tahn from his seat, and the residents of the farm where we had stopped, whether friends, cousins, or strangers, would immediately lead the children off to the shade for cool water or chunks of fresh papaya or coconut they’d pull from a tree.
Dtaw began the conversations in no hurry to learn anything in particular, with plenty of room for silences to listen to the breezes rustling the palm fronds. He would ask the old man or woman he was talking to about their farm and children and hometown. Inevitably, though never in any hurry, the person would ask Dtaw about his family and would discover that Dtaw was the son of Gla the tailor. Whether the man was a stranger, old friend, longtime customer, or a distant cousin, there were always exclamations of admiration and warmth at hearing that Gla’s son and his family were among them. When the realization came of who Dtaw’s father was, we would be embraced with even greater welcome and pleasure.
I felt at these moments that there was no question about the reality of karma carrying past us into the future. Gla’s easygoing manner put people at ease. Half a century after his good works, his integrity and kindness still ensured a warm welcome for his grandchildren throughout the province. Eventually Dtaw would ask the host about the work at hand. We were able to touch or taste or try whatever we were seeing. Any concerns I might have had about taking Cody out of school to come home to Thailand vanished on these outings.
PART 2
Learning
In May of 2002, Cody and Chan joined their friends and neighbors in starting school. Chan was delighted with his custom-made uniform, his name neatly embroidered in Thai lettering in blue thread over his left chest pocket. I took a job teaching English at a school a few miles down the road from their schools so I could drop them off on my way to work and we could ride home together each day on the city bus. On the long ride, I would lean back in my seat, exhausted, while the boys giggled from behind me as they pretended to “wash” my hair for me; their motive: messing up my teacherly look. I didn’t care about my hair. The sound of their happiness in one another was all I needed.
Chan attended the lab school at the teacher’s college in the provincial capital. The bus dropped us off on the side of a highway teeming with speeding cars and song teows, converted pickup trucks with long benches where students crowded and hung off the back, holding the bars as the vehicles careened around corners. In front of the college, an overpass for pedestrians spanned the highway, and each morning Chan and I climbed the long cement staircase to the top, then walked high above the traffic to the other side. In the distance back toward home, blue mountains melted into morning mist. At the end of the bridge, we climbed down and walked a couple hundred yards along the shoulder and up the drive of the shady campus to the entrance of his school.
After a few weeks, Chan, not quite five, insisted he didn’t need to be walked to school. He could get off the bus and walk over the highway and into the campus alone. I resisted. He was still so young. The cars were so dangerous. He persisted. He also knew that after I left him, I then had to go back across the highway to wait for a song teow to carry me the last miles to my school. Maybe he wanted to save me the trouble. After several mealtime discussions that involved the whole family, he agreed that I would get off the bus with him and walk him halfway over the bridge, and from there he’d walk to school alone.
The day arrived to carry out our plan. When he let go of my hand in the middle of the bridge and turned his face up for a hug and a kiss, I held him a long time. Pulling away, he looked at me intently, “Don’t worry, Mom. I’ll be fine,” he said with a firm tone. I watched his small figure, new backpack bobbing behind him, as he walked away and disappeared down the steps. Once he was safely inside the low walls of the campus, I hurried to the far end of the bridge so I could get a clear view of him heading up the driveway, hoping he wouldn’t glance back to see me cheating on our agreement. He walked steadily away, not looking back, and I felt the tears slide down my cheeks as I, too, turned and walked into my day.
* * *
Six weeks later, in July, I was working to harness the wild momentum of a hot roomful of energetic students in their bright white uniforms, trimmed in navy blue, nearly fifty of them rearranging themselves for another raucous game of English Occupations. I was concentrating every bit of my teaching mind on containing their enthusiasm and mischief before it turned to chaos.
Five minutes before the end of class, something made me turn my head toward the door, where I was surprised and delighted to see Chan standing hand-in-hand with his father. He smiled happily, if a little shyly, at his loud, busy teaching mother. A rush of some brain chemical suspended the clatter of the chairs and chattering students the moment I saw him, my funny, sweet middle child.
I’d forgotten they were coming into town that day for what we thought was an unremarkable doctor’s visit. Chan, normally healthy, had been exhibiting strange symptoms since the tetanus shot he’d had in December. First a cold with sores on his throat that took weeks to heal, then a pimple on his nose, odd for a four-year-old. And recently he’d been throwing up just a little bit before school each day. I waved it all off as new-student jitters, but when a small sty appeared on his eyelid, Dtaw insisted he see a doctor.
I motioned to Dtaw that they should wait a few minutes on the bench outside the classroom while I finished up with my students. As I turned my attention back to the class, a newly familiar sense of warmth and gratitude spread through me. Recently this strange sense of calm had been coming to me. My life seemed to have settled down. After the stress of living in the US, I was beginning to relax. I was noticing for the first time in my life that I was surrounded by people I loved and who loved me. Even my cheeky students with their dirty fingernails and loud, ungrammatical English brought out a sense of motherly love whenever I saw them.
I hurried to finish the lesson, so I would have time to introduce my son to my students. But when I stepped outside to invite Chan and his father into the room, they had disappeared.
“Chan! Dtaw!” I called out. When no answer came, I hurried down the smooth wide hall searching for them. They were neither on the landing nor the stairs, nor resting in a vacant chalk-dusty classroom.
For no reason I could imagine, I felt an alarming sense of dismay. I rushed back and dismissed my class, gathered up my papers, and, in a daze, hurried to an empty classroom. I shut the door and let my sobs escape with a vehemence that surprised me. It wasn’t like me to fall apart in the middle of a workday. I’ll
see him after school, I told myself. It’s not as if he’s gone forever. I cried as if my heart had suddenly broken, though I couldn’t imagine why, then dried my eyes for my next class.
* * *
That day the doctor ordered a blood test for anemia. The results provided a diagnosis of thalassemia, a common condition in northeast Thailand, and we were told to give Chan iron pills and to prepare for the possibility that he might not be able to play sports in high school or have children. I needed to know more, so over the course of the next few weeks, I visited several doctors, learning to match their patronizing brush-offs with patient but stubborn insistence. Finally I found one who told me it could be aplastic anemia, leukemia, or thalassemia, and that Chan should be seen by a specialist in another city. All those words sounded alike to me, but leukemia was more familiar. “What’s leukemia?” I asked.
“Bone marrow cancer.”
* * *
Eight of us—the boys, Jew, Dtaw, Mei Ya, Jum, and I—arrived at the university hospital in Khon Khaen, a four-hour drive from home. After hours in the waiting room, crowded with whole families, we were finally seen by a doctor. She explained that Chan would be checked in and later given a bone marrow aspirate. It was late afternoon before the surgeon sent for us. Most of the family went to a cousin’s house to spend the night. Dtaw, Chan, and I moved into his room.
In our hospital room, empty except for the small table and bed, iron bars half-coated in chipped white paint, the surgeon addressed Chan: “You’re going to have to hold very still, do you think you can do that?”
Chan nodded, face solemn, matching the doctor’s expression.
“It’s going to hurt, but not for long. I’m going to insert a long needle into your hip bone and draw out some marrow so we can look at it,” the doctor continued. “Your mother and father will be right here with you, so you can hold their hands if you want, but it’s very important that you not move before I take the needle out.”
Now You See the Sky Page 6
