In those days, our oldest was two years old and I was in the second trimester with our second. We rented a house in the suburbs, a psychiatrist prescribed me medication, and I met with a therapist three times a week. We ate food not found in Turkey, we fed cucumbers to elephants, and we browsed English bookstores meant for expatriate student backpackers. I bought fabric from the night market to bring back to our apartment on the Aegean Sea and sew into curtains and pillows. We took advantage of cheap prenatal care and discovered that Reed was a boy. He was twenty-four weeks into gestation when we returned to Turkey; there I survived on antidepressants, memories of Chiang Mai, and occasional Thai-based therapy visits via Skype for the next three years.
In Oregon, I had subscribed to a private e-mail list for expats in Chiang Mai in search of temporary housing for the Thailand leg of our trip. Perhaps we’d find an expat family’s home to house-sit while they visited their home country. We could find a guesthouse if nothing else was available, but there was something endearing about the idea of watching over someone else’s bookshelves, frying pans, and soap dispensers. I placed an ad in the e-mail group.
A woman named Muriel needed what we offered; she was returning to the States for medical reasons and needed a house sitter. She lived in the same quiet suburbs where we had lived seven years earlier. It was ideal, except that she was in her seventies and her house didn’t have toys. I waited for another offer, but when none came, we replied to Muriel and agreed to stay.
Muriel’s house—this will be our home in northern Thailand.
The plane lands in the early afternoon, and we grossly overpay a taxi driver to take us to the house, a savvy entrepreneur who knows the cash value of white-faced travelers fresh off the plane. (“Where you from?” Oregon and Texas. “Okay, I take you because Dallas Cowboys.”) En route, I daydream about dumping the contents of our backpacks into a washing machine. I am eager for coffeemakers and unpacking our toiletries onto a bathroom shelf after our month of nomadically stirring instant coffee into lukewarm water. I want the kids to make progress on their grammar, their math. I want to cook.
Muriel’s Thai friend unlocks the front door, shows us the house, hands us keys, and warns us that her car needs servicing and to use it with caution. Tall ceramic vases ensconce top-heavy silk flowers; a knee-high bejeweled elephant sits next to a lightweight rattan couch; breakable empty tchotchke bowls rest on the fragile glass coffee table. Glass shelves encased with doors hold hefty volumes of Amish fiction, figurines of plump peasant children, and collector’s plates signifying anniversaries of varying importance (the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton; Christmas at Disneyland, 1981). Muriel’s final e-mail to me asked us to please make ourselves at home, but to take note that the dinner dishes are a complete set, and if one should break, we are responsible for replacing the entire imported set.
Everything is also pink. Pink dishes, pink vases, pink silk flowers, pink elephant, pink floor tile, pink bathroom walls, pink bathroom sinks, pink marbled kitchen counters. Everything is some shade of pink.
Thai it isn’t. But it is cheap. Kyle parks the breakables above the kitchen cabinets and refrigerator, and we take Muriel’s car to a nearby big-box store because, oddly enough, the house has no sheets or pillows. Also, we are out of soap. I wander the store that reminds me of a Kmart from my childhood, and I cry because I am so tired and because I cannot find soap I like. Tate begs for expensive turquoise sheets, and we find plastic bowls, plates, and cups to replace Muriel’s dinner dishes we would inevitably break. We gawk at duck beak and pig uterus shrink-wrapped in the meat department, snap photos with our phones, and text them to family back home. The store smells like salty ocean and cheap plastic. For dinner, we eat greasy fried chicken in the dining area.
We drive home, stretch our new sheets across the master bedroom mattress, and crawl onto the plastic, rococoesque bed straight out of a gawdy Caesars Palace bedroom. I glance at my nightstand on the left, jump out of bed, and remove the little porcelain girl staring at me with psychotic eyes. I hide her in the plastic rococo wardrobe across the room.
The next morning, while braiding Tate’s hair on our bed, the slats underneath the mattress suddenly snap and drop us to the floor, into the center of the monstrous yellowed plastic bed frame. Kyle and I drag the mattress to the other side of the bedroom floor, where we will now sleep until we leave this house.
The crimson-colored velour bedspread pills miniscule balls of fuzz in the nooks and crannies of our clothes (which I will still pull from my pajama pants four months later in Morocco). Geckos scamper across the floors, walls, and ceilings—this is the only thing remotely Thai about our bedroom. I can hear their little feet at night, inches from my body where I sleep.
Chiang Mai is the second-largest city in Thailand, the original seat of the Lan Na Kingdom, which reigned in 1296 and for five hundred more years. It’s known for its three hundred Buddhist temples, their roofs like pointed pushpins embedded across the city’s landscape, nestled between trees and cafés, neighborhoods and back alleys. There is an ancient moat enclosing the city center, drawing a seven-hundred-year-old fence around travel agency storefronts, burger chains, massage parlors, Mexican restaurants, dentist offices, women selling smoothies from blenders on wheeled carts, expensive French restaurants, and coffee shops with free Wi-Fi. Motorcycles are ubiquitous, the chosen cheap travel method of the masses. Second in popularity are songthaews, red pickup trucks with benches along the length of their beds and enclosed with tall roofs, the shared taxi system used by both tourists and locals. These, plus tuk-tuks, the three-wheeled motorbike taxis, all vie for space on Chiang Mai roads, their drivers using horns merely to let others know of their presence, not to tell them to move. It’s a jarring practice to a Western driver new to these streets.
Chiang Mai is ancient; Chiang Mai is modern. It is Buddhist monks and smoothies from electric blenders. There are five Starbucks coffee shops in the city of fewer than four hundred thousand people, an impressive concentration outside the United States. The city is a popular respite for vagabonds in need of cheap accommodations and Western creature comforts.
It’s also home to the second-largest concentration of Buddhists in the world, and its streets are filled with pilgrims during the Songkran and Loy Krathong festivals. At night, the old city center beams a fluorescent glow from carts selling mango sticky rice, coconut soup, knockoff Birkenstock sandals, and flowing sarong-style pants bought only by tourists. From makeshift outdoor corner studios, artists sketch portraits of children in photos to be sent home as souvenirs for grandparents. T-shirts are silk-screened with beer logos, Che Guevara, and the phrase “Same same but different,” vernacular used by vendors as an answer to a potential buyer’s question about the validity of the brand-name item for sale. A loose translation is: It is, and also, it is not. This phrase summarizes Chiang Mai in a nutshell. It smells of familiarity, but it also really, truly doesn’t. It feels like home, and yet it always surprises.
I wish I were a more adventurous eater. I will eat spices and peppers with poised composure, but I hesitate at unidentifiable meats even when I’m famished. My plate will pile with vegetables and meats and sauces so long as none of it smiles at me. Edible creatures must also be solidly dead, the overriding reason why I avoided scorpions on a stick on Wangfujing Street in Beijing, still fighting for life and blindly swatting their pincers in the air. Never put things down your gullet that could slash it in final vengeance on the way down—this is my gastronomic philosophy.
Tonight, I am hungry. A novice traveler could write an entire book solely devoted to the foreign cuisine offerings of northern Thailand, beginning in its French cafés and pâtisseries—scents of caramelized sugar and baked croissants wafting out their open doors reminding you of a Parisian boulevard—and ending with its offering of fish and chips served on the back porch of a neoclassical Georgian plantation home, crickets singing in the night air like a southern summer. A traveler can dine on pineapple pancakes
under banana trees for breakfast, green chiles rellenos and margaritas for lunch, and rib-eye steaks with mashed potatoes and pints of German lager for dinner. Our wallets would be empty if we feasted only on foreign food, which is why it is best in Chiang Mai, as it generally is everywhere, to stick to local fare.
Thai food tastes like ocean and timeworn tradition, fields of basil and groves of mango. Streetwise cooks in aprons and flip-flops stir salty tamarind through rice noodles and hand patrons limes to squeeze over their bowls. Paired with glugs of Singha bubbling water, and it is the best three-dollar investment of your life.
There are passion fruit smoothies from street vendors and strawberry ice cream churned along late-night touristy streets; there is the gaeng khae soup with chiles and miso from the cheap diner in our quiet suburb, so spicy it makes me cry. My eyes water as it’s placed on the table, even after my request for no spice. This is Thai food.
Tonight, we find a hovel of a shop with the plain name of Cooking Love, tucked deep into the side streets in the old city center. Guidebooks and travel writers rave over this mom-and-pop eatery, and here on our first visit, the owner brings our children over to watch the kitchen chaos. The three of them tiptoe on chairs and peer over the Plexiglas shell.
“Hey! A ten-minute date,” Kyle jokes. Children are welcome to be children here in Thailand. Their curiosity is well received, and it proffers us a few minutes of adult conversation.
“Don’t you wonder about places like this?” Kyle says. “What’s this family’s backstory? How long have they been running this place? What was the tipping point that made it so popular?”
I watch the mom and son work in tandem in the kitchen, flash-frying vegetables in a wok and stirring milky-green curry in a stockpot. The teenage daughter takes an order from a table of European twenty-somethings. An old wrinkled man with a toothless grin, presumably the owner’s father, welcomes patrons at the entrance, takes their shoes, and meticulously places them on shelves.
“I wonder if that guy was the one who started this place,” I say, pointing to the elderly man. I picture him young and spritely, scooping bowls of rice and welcoming curious new guests. He smiles and nods at me. I nod back.
“I wonder if the whole family lives here too,” Kyle says, just as I was speculating the same thing. I glance at the back of the restaurant, where a curtain hides a mysterious back half, and I imagine a living room and residential kitchen.
Photos of previous customers wallpaper the walls, Polaroids signed, dated, and faded. The four-top next to us speaks Russian, and on the other side are Australians. The cook brings us our orders, and I dip my spoon into the green curry, glide it out between my lips, and close my eyes. The kids eagerly spoon their plates of chicken fried rice, and Kyle buries his chopsticks into noodles. Steam rises from our plates. Our table overflows with bowls and there are leftovers, and our total bill is ten dollars.
I could not lead anyone there, but thanks to Kyle’s innate sense of direction, we dine there ten times over the next month, following the scent of its tom kha gai like hypnotized cartoon characters. The grandfather eagerly takes our shoes every time, welcomes us to his family establishment as though we are old friends. On our fifth visit, Kyle says, “I’m already sorry for my future self who no longer has this food.”
The family that runs this establishment has a special seat in heaven at the right hand of God. I’m sure of it. They welcome us into their home, the most sacred of places, with the taking of shoes and the scooping of rice.
I am overdue for a dip back into the waters of cheap counseling and decide to treat myself to a checkup. The therapist with whom I met for two months during our original visit to Thailand has retired to his home in Michigan, but the center where he worked is still here in Chiang Mai. I’ve never met with a spiritual director before, but a writer friend of mine back in the States swears by regular meetings with hers, and there are a few available at this center as a service.
This afternoon, I sit in the office of a silver-haired, quiet-spoken woman named Nora. Her office is a simple converted bedroom in the corner of a house-turned-well-being-center. A couch and armchairs are centered around a coffee table, icons and paintings of St. Francis on the walls, and art supplies on shelves. From my chair, I watch her walk silently around the office, gathering a legal pad, pens, sheets of drawing paper. She sits down, smiles at me, and doesn’t move. I feel like a teenager on her first job interview, not sure if I am supposed to talk first. Should I have come equipped with a laundry list of concerns? Would she begin by asking about my childhood? This is not counseling, and I have no idea what to expect from an hour with a spiritual director. Do I make the first move? I sit there, smile back, look around the room.
After an eternity of silence, Nora says quietly, “I’m ready when you are.” I shift my eyes back to her, and she hasn’t moved. She is still smiling at me.
I decide that candor is probably best, that I will never see this woman again after this month. “I’m honestly not sure why I’m here, other than I feel like I could use some spiritual direction in my life.” This is the truth.
“Why do you feel that way?” Nora asks.
I sit for a few seconds, because this is a good question. I’m not terribly sure, other than my soul is weary, my usual recipe of prayer and reflecting on passages from the Bible isn’t inspiring me, and I sense a gaping, run-ragged hole in my soul where mature wisdom should be. Also, I don’t know where my home is, where I might really belong.
Years have passed since I last felt poured-into, I tell her, and I have not bothered to seek it out. I have embarked on this year of travel, at age thirty-seven, feeling less confident than I did a decade ago about what I believe to be true, and how that truth intersects with who I am. I am weary from game playing and formulaic answers, and the evangelical-Christian hat that I have worn daily with every outfit since I was fourteen feels too small, headache inducing. I fidget daily in its discomfort, but I don’t know how to exchange it, how it should be resized. Perhaps I can stitch a new hat from scraps I find scattered around the globe, I suggest. Perhaps she could be my milliner, maybe help me find the first scrap, floating somewhere along the sidewalks of old Chiang Mai.
I tell her this, and she only smiles.
Also, I started this year of globe trekking confident that traveling was the right thing to do, but somehow, that confidence hadn’t come with me in my pack. I feel fidgety and lost.
She only smiles.
“I need spiritual direction because I feel like I can’t find my compass, the thing that points me home. Also, the hat I’ve worn for over twenty years doesn’t fit anymore, and I want to find a new one,” I repeat.
Nora nods this time. “You think I can help you find a compass and a hat?”
“I’m not sure. But I’m willing to pay you twenty bucks a chat to see if you can help,” I reply.
“I think it’s good you’re here,” she says. “Because we all lose our way every now and then. Sometimes it helps to ask a fellow sojourner if she can see through the fog in front of you.”
I consider the fog in front of me, how I love writing but itch to break out of my genre into something new. I love the freedom of nomadic living, too, but yearn for the simplicity of home. I grow restless with the humdrum of small, ordinary life, but know it’s in those hours of sorting socks and vacuuming the car where most of life is meant to be lived. I don’t think I am made to do daily extraordinary things, to constantly unearth new sights. The loveliness of wandering, of travel, dangles like a carrot on a stick, but it’s coupled with the heartache of wanderlust, of knowing that there will always be one more thing to see. Chasing the globe’s rotation for more than a few months will do me in. I will come undone. It is not how I am meant to live; I know it.
“You already have the answers you need within you from God,” Nora explains. “I am simply here to walk with you and help you unearth them. I can do that.”
She lights a candle on the table in front of
us and bows her head. I follow suit and close my eyes.
Because we’ll be in Thailand for a solid two months, I can meet with Nora at least six times. There are other things to do in Chiang Mai—night markets to shop for cheap art and phone cases, hikes through the hills to the highest point in the country, elephant sanctuaries to visit. But after my first session, I sense an unveiling—these spiritual direction sessions are a primary reason we’ve been drawn here.
In our third meeting, Nora ends our time together, as customary, with silence, her reading a psalm. To signify our time is over, she snuffs out the candle. The hour is spent as it was the previous two meetings: silence and candle lighting to start, Nora asking me what God is speaking to me today, more silence from me, then an unexpected outburst of tears as I share what comes to mind, usually some sort of frustration with my work as a writer. I pour out details of specific burdens and cultural movements that tie me in knots. Nora is a safe person with thousands of miles between our daily worlds. She will park when there is inward movement, help lift a stone when she senses treasure underneath.
At the end of our third meeting, snuffed candle smoke still rising in the air, Nora says, “Before you leave Chiang Mai, I have a prescription for you. I want you to visit a monastery in town for a day of silence.”
She hands me a brochure with a picture of a labyrinth on the front. I open it and find a smiling priest welcoming me to come for the day, the night, or for a week, to hear from God and get away from the city noise. There is no talking permitted on the grounds.
At Home in the World Page 5
