In honour of mother's day, I'm writing a post on my mom. She was born in a village near Ubon, Thailand in 1947. Her father died when she was a young girl (I can't remember now, but I think she was 4 years old). What she remembers most about her father is that he had told her that she would one day live in a far away place. Her mother remarried, to a man who turned out to be abusive but the abuse was secret, as he presented pious face to the other people in the village. In fact, my mom's step-father is what we in the West would call a "witch doctor."Her life is a true Cinderella story. Her step-father wouldn't let her go to school after first grade and made her work in the rice paddies. My mom got tired of seeing her mother abused by this man and her mom was afraid that her daughter might one day kill him, so she sent her daughter to live with relatives in the city of Ubon as a teenager. My mom worked as a housekeeper to various families, including Thai, Chinese, and British. She said that Thai people treat their housekeepers the worst, as she was forced to eat on the floor after the rest of the family ate and her chores were done. The British were the best, because they made her take tea breaks with them and have a conversation.
She was a housekeeper for a group of British soldiers when my Air Force enlisted father went over to the British headquarters as a courier in 1969 (my dad was stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam War). It was attraction at first sight. When he learned that her name was Pon, his first thought was "our names rhyme" (his name is Don). A courtship began, but my mom broke it off because she fell in love with him and knew that he would return to his far away country at some point. After the breakup, my dad was a devastated lovesick puppy. One day his buddy insisted that he come to a restaurant with him. He was hesitant to go along, but figured a night on the town was better than moping around the barracks.
A friend of my mother's wanted to go to a restaurant in town where an Australian singer was performing that night. My mom didn't want to go but her friend insisted. At the restaurant, my dad saw my mother at a table with her friend and went over to them and asked to continue the relationship. My mom's friend told her, "don't you dare say no!" The rest is history. They got married in a Thai court of law in December 1969. My dad's supervisors were dead set against the marriage because they believed that interracial marriages would not work. It actually took over a year for the American government to approve the marriage. In that time, my brother was born in October, in a Thai hospital. He had a traumatic birth experience and was declared dead by the nurse. The next day, another nurse delivered the baby to my mom's arms, and my mom was confused and said that another nurse had pronounced him dead. Because my brother was born without oxygen, he was brain damaged. Who knows how different he might be today if he had been born in an American hospital, with oxygen machine set up for emergencies.
Growing up, my mom often spoke about what life was like in Thailand. Most of her stories were not good stories. Particularly about the Thai government. She said that it was against the law to step on the Thai currency. The reason is because every Thai baht has a picture of the King on it and the bottom of the feet is considered the dirtiest part of the anatomy, so by stepping on the currency, you are supposedly insulting the King of Thailand, which is subject to arrest and imprisonment. My mom has a logical way of thinking, because she thought this law was stupid. She said that when we put money in our wallet and the wallet in the back pocket, whenever we sit down, our bottom is smashing the face of the King...but that is not an arrestable offense in Thai law.
My interest in government probably stems from what my mom told me growing up about the differences between Thai government and American government. There's no question that she viewed the American government much better than the Thai one. Even today when church members complain about our government and accuse it of tyrannical behaviour, my mom knows from personal experience what a true corrupt government looks like. She said that in disasters, the Thai people would be kept in the dark (as we saw with the Christmas Tsunami of 2004) and left to fend for themselves. People in our country who complain about paying taxes truly need to visit a developing world country like Thailand to see what a difference taxes make in terms of infrastructure and quality of life issues. Heck, one doesn't even have to travel that far to see the difference. Just go across the border to Mexico.
Despite not having a formal education beyond first grade, she learned English mostly on her own and her education consists of reading newspapers and magazines. She mostly reads spiritual books. She has more common sense than most people, and that's an important quality to have. One of her teaching lessons that I value the most was that she would not intervene in the intense fights my brother and I had as teenagers. She would simply say, "one of you will end up dead and the other in prison." I didn't like either option. She also said that it was better to be the one leaving than the one being left behind.
When my parents attended a church retreat that was part of the Contemporary Christian Ministries movement within the church, one lady had "taunted Satan" by having the children attack a doll that she claimed represented Satan. Later, someone had supposedly spoken in tongues and several people got physically sick and started throwing up. When my parents told me about the events of the retreat, it was funny to hear my mom say that they shouldn't have "taunted Satan." In fact, whenever I complained about CCM members' obsession with Satan, my mom would tell me that those people didn't understand that if you focus on Jesus, your back would be turned towards Satan. Though she was from a Buddhist country, she was never a Buddhist. Her mother taught a kind of universalist view of spirituality. In fact, in Thai villages, they have spirit houses where people leave food offerings for earth bound spirits. My mother's family didn't participate in that because her mother considered it a waste of food since spirits didn't need physical food to nourish their non-existent bodies. My mom believes that her family was not affected by a lot of the afflictions other villagers had because they did not focus on dead spirits.
She believes that a lot of the bad things that other church members talk about all the time (and attributing it to Satan) are a result of their focus on negative thinking. My mom taught law of attraction before it became a popular phenomenon in recent best selling books. Her view is that you can focus on God/Jesus exclusively or blame things on Satan, but if you blame Satan for your problems in life, then you're only inviting more of the same or more problems into your life.
Though she doesn't believe in reincarnation, she told me a story about a young girl in her village who asked to see her husband. The girl described her previous life and the villagers took her to the person she claimed was her husband, who was an old man. Because of stories like that, I've always been open minded about the possibility of reincarnation. According to my parents, they believe that reincarnation is possible, but that having Christian beliefs would exempt them from having to be reborn. Of course, I believe differently. Am I the only one who wants to be reborn on earth again and again? Everyone I talk about reincarnation to say that they'd hate to be reborn on earth again. Why? There is so much to experience and we get to be part of the process of spiritual and physical evolution. The perfection of heaven would get boring after awhile.
I love hearing stories about how I was as a kid. My mom said that when I was young (before I could walk), I would crawl around the floor and she would sometimes see me asleep in the middle of the wood floor. She said that I could sleep anywhere, no matter how uncomfortable and I'm such a deep sleeper, that I could sleep through an earthquake or a hurricane. Another trait of mine she told me about was that whenever people would hug me as a kid, I would always break away from their embrace. She said that I didn't like being touched. It's actually quite true, even today. Whenever a person touches me (unless I'm interested in them), I instinctively recoil. I'm not much of a hugger, either, and I'm in a church full of huggers. I tolerate it, but I don't really enjoy it. At my last job in Atlanta, co-workers even named a hugging style after me! They noticed that when I hug, I do it in a way that looks like I'm trying to be far away from the person as possible, while still hugging. You'd have to see it to believe it, I guess. I think my life long aversion to hugging is an indication of my strong feeling of not wanting to feel trapped. I always need an escape plan. Whenever I enter any situation, I'm always looking for possible escape routes. Just my personality quirk, I guess.
As a teenager, I went through that phase where I didn't want to be seen with my parents. My mom took it very personally, as I also went through the whole struggle of having Asian heritage and the shame of it (possibly a legacy that the Vietnam War had on the consciousness of black or white Americans). I did deny her part of my heritage as a teenager and it probably wasn't easy for her. It wasn't until Tiger Woods came along in the mid-1990s where I finally felt comfortable owning my mother's heritage as well. Because many people didn't know my heritage, I often got mistaken for being Hispanic, Middle Eastern, and even Italian or Greek. I didn't mind being confused for those heritages because they weren't as made fun of as Asian culture was (which included kids making slanty eyes, talking gibberish in a sing-song fashion to mimick the way Chinese or Vietnamese sounds, and even the moniker "gook"). When I was in YN "A" School, a hispanic sailor started speaking Spanish to me in front of his hispanic buddies. When I told him that I didn't speak Spanish, he got insulted and said, "you shouldn't be ashamed of your heritage, man!" That always struck me, and I laughed about it. If he only knew!
I feel kind of bad that it took multi-racial Tiger Woods (his mother is Thai) and Barack Obama for me to take pride in my own multi-racial heritage. Those two made it cool to be mixed breeds, but it shouldn't have taken their fame and comfortable coolness with their own heritage to inspire me to take ownership of mine. There's always going to be racist people who will accuse me of not being authentically American...but I know differently. I've been to all 50 states and seen more of this country than most Americans, so what defines a true American?
My mom became a U.S. citizen in the early 1970s. The first election she voted in was 1976. She, too, has been to most of the states (I think 49). Since she was young, she loved to travel and she did end up fulfilling her father's dying "prophecy." She's a great woman and I learned a lot from her. I inherited her common sense approach to religion and spirituality. Though she is quiet oftentimes, she is not afraid to start conversations with strangers. She's probably more extroverted than my dad. She's lived a good life and it was because my dad was a good man. There have been many G.I.s who went to Thailand or Vietnam or the Philippines, impregnated a local girl and left the country after their tours of duty to marry "their own kind" at home, leaving behind mixed-race children who never got to know their American father. I often wonder how the life of my mom, brother and I would've turned out if my dad had been one of those kind of men. My mom took a chance on love with a foreigner, gave up the life she knew and all her relatives in Thailand to live in this strange country faraway, and has lived a pretty good life. The last time she has been to Thailand was 1975 and my goal is for one day, all of us to make a visit as a family to meet her relatives. I think my life will finally feel complete when that happens. I will finally know what the Thai half of my heritage means to me.
Happy Mother's Day, mom! I love you.
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