Family History

Putting up with peculiarities in parents may be one of the hardest things we have to do this side of heaven. 

I can’t believe I just said that; it’s so American teenager of me.  Still, as we travel and live in close proximity to one another on this trip, the friction between mother and daughters is a constant undertone.  Early in the morning yesterday, for example, my mother-in-law woke up before the rest of us; she’s brought American coins along as gifts and she was counting them, letting one clink noisily against the next, waking the rest of us and drawing her daughters’ ire.  At the giveaway in the village, she was too flippant for the daughters’ liking; perennially one daughter scolds her for losing track of valuables. 

This is the perfect time to travel with our children in many respects.  They’re still amazed enough by the geckos and butterflies and chickens of Laos to keep them occupied a great deal of the time, and they still like playing card games with us to fill much of the rest of time.  They are, in other words, pre-American teen stage, even though we can see it on the horizon with our daughter, age 11—the eye-rolling has begun.

The hyper-sensitive judgment about parents may have another side, though, a wiser sort of discretion and appreciation, of which I have also seen the blooms and fruits on this trip.

My wife has multiple families: brothers from her mom’s first marriage who are close family; her full sister who is closest family; sisters and brothers from her dad’s first marriage who are peripheral.  All of these siblings but two are in the US or France.  Yesterday, after a long trip to the country, we decided to swing by the house of one of the two siblings that remain here, a woman about fifty who lives mere blocks from where we’re staying.

We pulled up to what looked like a garage with the door shut, a metal door like those used to close a store in an American mall, but dark metallic green.  Someone stepped out to rap on this door, but as she did so, a woman hallooed us from an approaching scooter.  It was Sy’s sister, apparently just home from work.  We followed her around to the side of the house into a clay yard that seemed still a mess from construction.  Apparently the conversation went something like this:  “We just dropped by to see you, your sisters are here from America.”

“I work seven days a week; I don’t have time to entertain you.”

“Well, maybe you could take us to see your dad’s ashes.”

“Okay.”

After this interchange we got back in our van and followed the sister on her cycle to the wat, perhaps a mile distant, the sister speeding ahead to the point where I thought she was making her getaway.  Of course, we lost time because we stopped at a roadside stand to buy a lighter.  Eventually, we pulled into the compound of a wat, and there was her cycle and the sister, ready to lead us.

The “compound” of a wat is walled, and inside the compound are assorted buildings, including central shrine and more minor shrines and perhaps simple barracks for monks to sleep in, though we’re unclear on this point.  The sister led us through the neatly tended grounds of this wat, complete with perfectly trimmed shrubbery and tropical flora.  A Buddhist cemetery consists of upright sepulchers stationed near the outer walls of the compound.  A given sepulcher may hold the ashes of a number of people, not so individualized like American cemeteries.  It seems slightly more impersonal, though from what I’ve seen Lao people visit these sepulchers more religiously than Americans visit cemeteries.  Wedged into a corner, we found the sepulcher that contained my father-in-law’s ashes, the like of which was replicated all around the wall of the wat. 

The sun was setting and there seemed to be some urgency to complete the rite, so my mother-in-law produced the lighter and passed out incense punks to her daughters and grandchildren.  These were placed in the ground near the sepulcher and someone said a few words as if to Sy’s dad.  Sy’s been crying, Ly joins her, crying for a man they didn’t know but who nonetheless casts a long shadow into their lives.

By this time, Sy’s sister seems to have realized we will not be placing any burden on her, and perhaps the tears have broken the ice completely.  She smiles and I take a picture of the three daughters near the sepulcher.  As we move back toward our vehicle, they bring up the rear, filling the sister in on our children’s names and ages, her commenting on a few of their characteristics.  The wind is still, the air temperature as cool as it gets in Laos during this season; somewhere on the compound the monks are chanting an evening prayer that matches the beauty of the hour.

On the ride back, my daughter snuggles in next to me in the back seat.  She has questions.

“When did Grandpa die?” she begins. 

“About two years ago.”

“What did he die of?”

“Liver cancer.”

 A pause, then, “Why didn’t we see him?”  I’m surprised by this question, the answer to which I thought was self-evident, reminding me again of the gap between the concretized world of adulthood and the tenuous wonder-mystery of childhood.

“Because he was here, in Laos.”  And suddenly I know the next question.  But why was he here in Laos?  Why didn’t he live with Grandma?  Why did he get left behind?

So I rehearse the story for her, privately, cloistered as we are by this back seat, by speaking English, by the adults ahead of us lost in their thoughts; I give her as much detail as I think she can handle.

“Grandma’s first husband left her, we don’t know why, for another woman.  Sometimes men just do that, and it’s not right but it happened to grandma.  That left her with three boys, your uncles Ting, Teng, and Pong.  Grandma was poor then, so Uncle Ting and Uncle Teng went to live with their grandparents and later they went to France. 

“Then Grandma got married to Grandpa Douang.  He was in the army and sometimes men in the army do things like drink too much.  Men in the army often see things no one should see, people dying and things like that.  Uncle Som—remember Uncle Som?—he was in the army and he saw a lot of bad things and he smoked and drank too.  Some times when Grandpa Douang drank too much he was mean.  One time mom did something that made him mad, she was just two years old, and he was going to beat her with a stick, but Grandma stopped him and so then he beat her.  That’s when Grandma left and went back to live with Grandma Mouth.  She’s a strong woman, isn’t she?  Then when the new government came, Grandpa Douang had to go to a camp which is not like camping but it’s kind of outside with a lot of people.  Grandpa wrote a letter to Grandma saying that she had to come live with him there, but Grandma didn’t want to; that’s when she crossed the river and left Laos.”

She’s crying softly; I put my arm around her and she sobs into my chest.  I want to ask why she’s crying, which may be the stupidest question I could ask.  Initially, I thought she was asking questions because,seeing her mom cry, she felt sad about not seeing Grandpa Douang.  But her tears come now, no doubt, because of the story that is Grandma Keo’s life, a story she could never have guessed.  Yet I know it’s bigger than this, too, that she cries for the shattered world which now lies before her, a world that this story has begun to pull back the veil on.  I regret needing to do this, to pull the veil back, yet it was the perfect time and place to do it, here, through the story of someone close to us, in an intimate moment, with her close to me.  It’s all I can hope to do as a parent.

And yet there’s more to be done.  I’ve given some of the imperfect details as I’ve come to understand them, left out even darker realities, but it’s a story she must share with her mom.  Later, with the boys showering, I tell Sy about our conversation; she and Sommer lie on the ground and share a hard cry.  Then, when Grandma comes in, Sommer hugs the real person, standing firm and in the flesh. 

“I’m bitter because my mom didn’t deserve that,” Sy’s sister tells me in the kitchen, referring to her dad’s treatment of her mom, tears coming once again.  And here are the two sides of parental love, of parental awareness.  She who is most critical of her mother, who lives with her day-in and day-out, also wants to confront her father beyond the grave because of her deep love and respect for her mother.

There’s one more sister to see yet, a sister who’s had a particularly hard row to hoe, we’re told, who now lives in the country, somewhat impoverished.  This is the sister, we’re told, who lugged Sy around on her hips until they were red.  That will not be an easy visit, either.

But easy is not what we’re after.  What we’re after is just what we’ve gotten, confronting a story that makes my children part of who they are, citizens of a shattered world still prismatically beautiful for all of its brokenness because of the possibility implicit in life, in children themselves, because we can learn and pass on stories that can end in a hug between granddaughter and grandmother here in the fluorescent light on a tile floor of a tropical evening in Laos.