Another sleepless night. Another blog post about our recent visit to Thailand.
I wrote this note during the long plane ride, crossing multiple time zones, and the vast Pacific ocean. Around me, people were doing all kinds of things to entertain themselves from the ennui of being stuck with 500 other people, in a small seat, for what seemed like an eternity.
The children were asleep, tired from their last day by the pool, full from their first of several airplane meals. Jim, who was sitting on the other side of our four-seat section, looked like he was enjoying a movie. I tried to go to sleep, but thoughts and images ran through my head of the last three weeks in Thailand.
I pulled out the laptop, and wrote down these words:
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
It may be too soon to reflect, and yet I fear that if I don’t jot down some thoughts now, they may disappear with the mundane-ness of every day life, back in the cold, lifeless midwestern city that we are calling home. The whole experience will gradually feel like a dream.
Even now, as I write this from 35,000 feet above sea level, the Thailand visit could have been a dream. Thankfully, I have some proof: over 1,000 photos taken almost every day of our 3 week visit, plus the sore on my neck and back, remnants from the two-hour Thai massage received on our last day of the trip.
“So tight!”, I can still hear the Thai masseuse exclaimed under her breath as she tried to soften away my knotted, tension-filled neck and back muscles. She ruthlessly pressed, rolled, squeezed on these muscles until I let out a vaguely tortured sound. “Hurts?”, she would ask in the normal demure Thai way. “Sort of,” I would bluntly lie. The pleasure-pain experience of receiving Thai massage from a good Thai therapist is too good to pass up. The white lie was worth it. Besides, knowing that I will not be tortured in this blissful yet therapeutic way for a long time, so I sucked it up.
Superficially, this visit to Thailand was not unlike our previous ones (the fourth visit for our seven year old children). We spent most of the time with my family. We spent most every meal together with them, talking, laughing, commenting on the diverse and delicious (and too much) food that lay in front of us. We visited my almost centennial grandmother who always adds a few extra years to her actual age (because she is Chinese); we spent a few days by the ocean where the children lived and breathed the salt water and became one with the sand.
There were also days spent by the poolside, hours looking for the primitive lizards that nonchalantly co-exist with the residents who live or hang out by ponds and lakes in and around Bangkok. There was even the biannual visit to the oldest Stupa in Thailand, Wat Prapathomjedi in Nakhon Pratom province.
Amidst the old and the familiar, the traditional and the familial, we experienced new and different things on this trip as well.
First of all, we had a fully lit and decorated, Christmas tree that my parents purchased out of their love for their grandchildren (growing up, our family never had Christmas trees before). The children even got to decorate for the season with tinsels and shiny balls and ribbons (also a foreign concept in our household). We played Christmas music on Youtube and celebrated Christmas eve and Christmas day with Thai food. The kids discovered presents under their beds on Christmas morning. Despite being in a tropical, non-Christian country, we had a jolly time during the holiday season.
We also experienced the sadder side of life when my uncle, my father’s older brother, passed away during our first week into the visit. It had been a long time since I last saw this side of the family. We all attended the cremation ceremony, the last day of the weeklong funeral process. As I entered the airy outdoor hall of a temple, lined with chairs and attendees, I saw familiar faces that I had not seen since I left Thailand 22 years ago. I was reminded of the last part of “Cinema Paradiso” when Toto also returned to his hometown, also for a funeral (of his own mother). In that scene, he, too, spent some time recognizing the aged faces of the people he used to know so well. They were older now, the older ones much more wrinkled and frail looking. The young ones had become grown ups, some had children in tow.
I remember watching this scene knowing that some day I may experience it myself. And sure enough, there I was, at a funeral back home, finding myself in the same position that Toto did. I greeted everyone with a Thai ‘wai’ as usual, making mental notes of the ones I recognized, all the while fascinated at the reality of life, and death, and the linear nature of time.
There were, of course, questions posed by our curious children. Where do people go after they die? What does it feel like? What came out of my mouth were almost the exact words that I remember my elders told me as a young child when I posed the same questions. I surprised myself that I was not more straightforward in answering their questions, now that I have learned a few more things about life. I didn’t even say, “I don’t know!” Instead, I painted the same picture of a serene, happy place for the dead ones. I told them about heaven. I reassured them that I would be around for a long time, so that they would not worry. They seemed content with my responses, which put me at ease, more at peace with the reality of life than usual. At least, for the time being...
