After she’d seen to him, she turned her soft, wrinkled face to me, laid the next string across the back of my hand, repeated the blessing, and tied it off, rolling the knot against my inner wrist, rolling and blessing, rolling and blessing. I lay back to receive, too exhausted by the hours of labor and months of anticipation of this moment for anything other than being cared for.
Schyla called my mom back in Maine. Cam called the cousins down the street. Dtaw’s sister called us. Schyla lifted Chan into the sling of her fish scale to weigh him: six pounds, eight ounces. Dtaw’s mother hugged Schyla, and thanked her with tears in her eyes. Then all at once everyone was ready for bed.
How can they be tired? I thought. Things were just beginning. It was close to one a.m. Dtaw and Chan and I were alone together. Dtaw brought me a bowl of soup. I had a bath. We brought the baby into our clean bed, a thin mattress laid next to the open front doors to take advantage of the cool night breezes that wafted through. We lay and admired our new baby until just before dawn. He was four hours old when we all finally fell asleep.
* * *
After Chan’s birth came the age-old tradition of the “mother fire” which would heal me and my baby. I lay on my bed of smooth strips of bamboo, sweat dripping down my shoulder and across my breasts. My belly slumped unevenly, no more the great round thing that it had been a few days before. Now only a lump of extra flesh as my uterus slowly contracted to its original size. The heat of the glowing coals in the fire close by soaked through my skin to my muscles and blood and bones, warming away the aches of a body stretched to its limits by the process of birth.
Over the mother fire an earthenware pot sat atop three stones set into the dried mud base of the low fire table Dtaw and Cody had built for me months before. Inside the pot, tea prepared specially for every new mother simmered: pink from the red sticks of wood Tong placed in the water early in the morning. The tree had been taken from the jungle by Cam with a prayer of thanks and dragged home and cut into pieces short enough for the pot. Then Tong and Mei Ya peeled off the bark and bundled stacks of the tea wood by the fire table for me and all the people who came to visit.
In those first days after Chan was born, I loved to lie with my belly close to the bamboo railing, built to support me, soaking in the fire’s heat, watching the steam curl up and away from the handmade tea bowl. I loved to walk into the bathroom to find the aluminum basin filled with hot water for my bath, green from the herbs floating on the surface. I reminded myself each time of the effort Tong and Cam and my husband and mother-in-law had taken in carrying the heavy buckets of boiled water from the fire to the bathroom, four times each day, and in gathering the special leaves from farm and jungle. Every morning before I woke, Tong had started the fire, steamed the rice, started a fresh pot of tea, and heated a basin of bathwater over the fire. Quiet and strong and gentle, she was always there, smiling, soothing, supporting.
Everyone expected me to stay like that for three weeks at least. They were quite prepared to take care of me and Chan and not even allow me to get up. What a difference from the US. There, after the birth, you’re sent home with no support. The parents are on their own. It’s taken for granted that they will be utterly exhausted and miserable for the first month at least. In Thailand, in a tradition still followed in the more remote villages, after the birth, the mother is entirely cared for for two to four weeks. All the neighbors and friends and family help with holding and bathing the baby, washing diapers, sweeping, cooking. Aunts and cousins spend the night on mats on the floor to be with the new baby while the mother recovers.
My mother-in-law sorted and bundled the sticks for the tea, and with too much worry poured out three bowls at a time for me to drink, believing if I didn’t drink enough I wouldn’t have enough milk for Chan. Perhaps the right tea in copious amounts really was necessary to produce enough milk back when a woman followed tradition by eating only rice, galingale (a fragrant root like ginger), and salt for the first few weeks of her baby’s life.
But as an outsider, I was able to pick and choose what traditions to follow, and in that more modern town, most women no longer followed such restrictive dietary practices as in the villages. Dtaw prepared special food for me each day. Black duck simmered in Chinese herbs, poached fish ordered specially from a market two hundred kilometers downriver, chicken steamed with lemon grass and shallots.
As Mei Ya held her new grandson that first day, she marveled at this tiny, incredible being, and crooned, “Now you see the sky. You’re out here with us, and you finally get to see the sky.” To me it sounded like she was saying to this newborn child, We’ve been waiting for you. We’ve been wanting you, and now you’re here with us. The world is huge and it’s all yours.
Keeping
The day after the birth, Dtaw came inside and called to Cody, “Pai, Codte!” (Come with me!) Two-year-old Cody jumped up from where he’d been playing with one of his plastic trucks to follow his daddy outside. I carried Chan over to the window and looked out to see the two of them at the back stairs, each with his own digging stick, a long handle made of a stout limb tipped with a rusty, rounded blade. Dtaw had made a small one, just right for Cody, and now, beside his father, he stood poking the dirt with it. They chatted like companions as they took turns stabbing their sticks into the deepening hole, levering up small heaps of rich brown soil. I loved this about Dtaw, the way he included Cody in his tasks in a way that allowed even a two-year-old to feel he was doing meaningful work with his father.
Dtaw and Cody leaned their sticks against the railing before they came inside. Soil sticking to Dtaw’s sweaty face, he picked up a thick section of bamboo from the corner where he’d set it weeks before. Big around as his arm and two feet long, the bamboo was hollow but with a kind of floor at the bottom, like a giant test tube. In the jungle, these sections of bamboo, with stoppers of wadded-up leaves, served as water jug, cooking pot, or container. Tall thick stands of bamboo were so common in the jungle that a hunter usually didn’t have far to walk to find a convenient container for whatever food he or she might need to carry home: fresh meat or grubs or ants.
Dtaw walked back to the kitchen, Cody following, and opened the refrigerator. From there he pulled out the plastic bag that held Chan’s placenta. Carefully, he poured the placenta onto two sheets of thick handmade paper, rough and fibrous, bits of the bai pu tree it was made from still visible on the surface. Rolling the paper into a neat tube, he slid it into the section of bamboo Cody held up for him. Walking back through the house, they paused to smile and talk to Chan before heading down the steps, Cody chattering at his daddy as they walked. At the back steps, Dtaw leaned down and carefully set the bamboo section into the bottom of the hole. Together they pushed the soil over what had given Chan life while he was growing in my womb. Then, upending their sticks, they patted the dirt firmly into place with the round ends. This tradition of burying the placenta under the steps of the family home ensures that wherever a child goes, his spirit will always come home.
Busy
I was more exhausted than i expected to be, mothering Jew and the boys in heat that brought on my asthma. But with Tong and Cam and the omnipresence of neighbors always happy to watch a toddler, things began to get easier. Every day my pleasure grew as I watched Dtaw parent our children. Watching him seemed to fill the hungry space I’d always had for a gentle, devoted father. He cooked for them, clowned with them, invited them to help him with his work in the garden and house. But what pleased me more than anything was seeing the way he was so clearly delighted by their presence. He held Chan especially close and spoke to him with quiet words.
Life finally felt good. I loved to watch Jew and Cody, now three years old, running in the street with their gang of friends chasing a ball or playing some complex game of tag. I loved standing at our gate at sunset when the shadows had lengthened enough to make being outside possible. Watching the children speed up and down while Tong held Chan, I stood at the ready with a bowl of rice soup f
illed with nutritious tender greens like the tiny ivy leaves I gathered from the garden. As one of the children raced by, I would lean down with a spoonful of good soup, saying, “Time to fill up with gas,” and they would laugh, pretending to be race cars at the pump.
My favorite time of day was bedtime, when we all crowded in under the big mosquito net and the children shrieked with laughter while their daddy read an English picture book to them in his native Laotian, making up his own words and story. Even I, who had heard him tell the same stories dozens of times, could not help but smile as I watched their uncontrollable mirth and the way the four people I loved most in the world clutched each other in sheer love and joy as they fell off the pillow laughing. Then, finally, Jew’s grandmother would come into the garden and call Jew home. I hated to give her up, but I knew that was the custom. She was a girl. She had to sleep with her grandmother, not her boy cousins. So we each hugged her goodbye until the early morning when she would come in through the garden gate and our day with her would start again.
* * *
When I became pregnant for the third time, we were delighted. Even so, I began to worry about our choice to live such simple lives. Knowing I would soon be a mother of three children, I started to think about our financial stability. Living as we did, we had little income. Teaching and running our guest house brought in only enough to buy food and the bare essentials. Leading bike trips, though it was a profitable business, always involved the risk that marketing costs would outweigh income. The trips were infrequent, and we could only make deposits into our small savings account when we happened to have clients.
I thought it was time to be more responsible. And I wanted my children to learn to read and write in English. We had been playing long enough, I thought, living the easy life of a half-US family in small-town Thailand where our days were spent biking, visiting farms, stopping to pick mangoes and papayas to slice open and eat right there. It was time to engage in what I imagined as “real” life for adults: jobs, savings accounts, education. And soon Jew would be going to live in Bangkok with her mother and father to start kindergarten.
With a new baby on the way, Dtaw and I talked often about what would be best for our children. We wanted them to live in a place where racism would not damage their sense of themselves as strong and smart and rich in cultural heritage. At the same time, I wanted the privilege I knew an American education would give them as adults. We could have sent them to an international school, but the idea of moving to a big city like Bangkok or Chiang Mai, where our schedules would be dictated by traffic patterns and where we would be far from trees and soil, didn’t fit our vision for our family. Also, we worried, perhaps unfairly, that international schools served people who were in Thailand for work or profit, not people who were deeply connected to rural culture. Moving to the US would provide an American education while giving us what we hoped would be a more diverse community for them. Living in the US would be a huge change for all of us, but we were optimistic that we could be happy. I looked forward to giving birth where I knew it would be easy to find a home-birth midwife. I also looked forward to not struggling with asthma as I did in the tropical climate.
And I still missed my own culture. I had loved my elementary school teachers, and as Cody was nearing school age, I hoped he and Chan would have the same experience. We chose Seattle because we knew it had a robust Asian population and our Thai-American kids would not stand out as different. Its location on the northwest coast of the US made it feel close to Thailand.
Seattle
When we moved to Seattle, we arrived in a city where we knew almost no one, with three duffle bags and $3,000 we’d saved from my salary teaching English and running the last bike tour. Coming from a Thai economy, that amount seemed like a fortune. We soon found how quickly life in America pulled money from our pockets. We wanted to live in a safe neighborhood with a good playground, so we could only afford a basement apartment. We shopped at garage sales and found a couple of futons and a coffee table, the extent of our furniture. We put the coffee table in the middle of the living room floor where we sat for meals. We didn’t mind. In Thailand we always ate on the floor; that was the custom. We only needed the table to raise the food above the level of the shabby carpet. And who needed furniture with little boys? All the more room to run, we thought.
When the weather was nice, we’d carry our basket of sticky rice and whatever delicious dish Dtaw had cooked out onto the grassy strip between the apartment and the street, and eat there, enjoying the light and fresh air. It gave the boys a chance to run and play between the bites we’d pop into their mouths until the meal was done. We were always surprised that no one else was outside. How, we wondered, could so many people live in a city, yet we rarely saw any of them? So different from Thailand where we saw and heard our neighbors all day long.
We had to make money, so I started searching for a job. I was afraid no one would hire me because I was pregnant, so I looked for short-term employment. I taught summer school, worked as an on-call medical interpreter, and tutored. Whenever I came home from work, the boys would run and jump into my arms. The apartment was always fragrant with the smells of garlic and rice and curry or ginger from the meal Dtaw had ready for us. While we ate, the boys told me about their day, and we reveled in our good fortune of being a young family in love with one another.
Dtaw’s first mission after finding an apartment was to procure bicycles for the boys. Chan was determined to be able to ride a two-wheeler by his third birthday, two months after the move. So Dtaw combed the springtime garage sales till he found bikes that were just right for both boys.
A few days before Chan’s birthday, Cody and Dtaw took the training wheels off Chan’s bike, and by the time he turned three, he’d mastered the skill of biking without them. As I watched Chan ride up and down the alley behind the apartment, he yelled, “Hey, Mom, look at this!” With that wonderful delight of a small boy first discovering his own skill, he lifted his little right hand high overhead and steered the bike along half the length of the alley with his left. When he whizzed past, bike wobbling slightly, his face shone with a smile just for me.
Only a week later he was saying, “Look, Mom, no hands!” And when we went to the park near our house, he and his brother rode down the long wheelchair ramps with the hairpin turns as easily as if they were flat wide roads. When they tired of that, they rode down the two dozen wide cement steps into the park.
People often commented on Chan’s surprising agility and strength. It was clear even to strangers he had a special gift in the way he used his body. “You’re too little to be on a bike without training wheels!” one woman’s voice, friendly and amazed, called out as she slowed her car and craned her neck back to stare at the little boy on the red bike riding down the sidewalk in front of me in the sunshine. At a picnic a week earlier, Chan had been running around in the grassy park with only a shirt on, so that the muscles in his thighs were visible. A man nearby commented on what amazing grace and speed he had and how sure-footed he was for such a young boy. “How old is he?” he asked, with the same disbelief as the woman in the car.
“He turned three a month ago.”
“Wow. That boy is going to grow into one fine athlete.”
* * *
When Cody started kindergarten, Chan missed him every day. I bundled them both up in gloves and jackets to take the walk through the quiet neighborhood and down the hill to school. At the door, Cody and Chan kissed and hugged goodbye before Chan and I walked back home. As soon as we got home, Chan would ask the same question he would repeat throughout the day: “When do we pick up Cody?”
And I would answer, as I did every day, “After we go to the playground and eat lunch and you have your nap.” Later, when we picked up Cody at school, Chan would play with Cody and his friends in the schoolyard before we all came home.
I asked Cody, after a few months of kindergarten, when he’d had time to make some friends, if he ever wanted to go pl
ay at their houses or have them over to our place after school.
“No, I just want to come home and play with Chan,” was his unvarying reply.
* * *
As my due date approached, it became clear that Dtaw would have to work. His English was so limited that the only jobs he could find were cooking in Thai restaurants. It was hard work. Standing over the huge woks, stir-frying hot chilies and steaming foods, burned his nasal passages, already irritated from the allergies he’d developed from the unfamiliar air of our new home. His arms and hands would go numb at night from the repeated motion of his job, and his bad back ached. Knowing the welfare of our family would depend on him, he came up with a plan to support us in a way that his minimum-wage job would not.
He convinced me to accept one of the offers from the credit card companies to take out a loan. I had never done so, and the idea scared me, but I put my faith in his abilities and filled out the short application. Soon we had $5,000 to invest in Dtaw’s business idea: selling Thai food at festivals around the state. We bought a beat-up yellow van, tore out the seats, and filled it every weekend with the heavy equipment Dtaw had picked out from the huge restaurant supply store downtown—steam table, portable gas burner, enormous wok, a tent with sandbags to weigh it down when the wind came. It got so full that there was nowhere to sit, so the boys and I followed behind in our little blue Toyota every weekend morning at four a.m. as Dtaw led us out of the city and around the state of Washington to sell food.
Now You See the Sky Page 5