Racial Heritage and Place, Mukdahan, Thailand

My daughter is a thin slip of a girl, more angular and long than her more compact if still thin mother. As we hang around the shops and open air cafes of Mukdahan, Thailand, and look out across the Mekong to Laos, her mother’s birthplace, a part of my daughter’s character seems to emerge, a latentness about her figure that seems perfectly at home in flip flops, lounging in doorways, fanning herself under the awnings on the banks of the Mekong.

On its t-shirts, Mukdahan advertises itself as a laid back place, and from what we’ve seen so far, that fits the bill about right. Walking through the streets of Mukdahan, certainly only a small fraction of the people are what we might call insured. As is seemingly true throughout much of the country, everyone owns a shop, everyone sells food on the street. It’s still unclear who buys all this food besides us, but apparently the people don’t need much and are satisfied with little. Sitting down to a good bowl of beef noodle soup with blood sausage and fresh greens, or peeling a fresh fruit again under one of the awnings that give deep shade even at midday is about enough to make life good.

Oh, there’s money being made as is obvious from the busyness of the business district proper. There’s Toyotas and Motorolas and high fashion aplenty in the shops downtown. Then, too, Mukdahan is a local hub of sorts, no doubt drawing shoppers from a goodly outlying region, and MaKeo was telling us that there’s a long tradition of the Lao from Savannakhet coming across the border to buy their goods in Mukdahan, a tradition that stretches well back beyond communism. “Some people, they just get up in the morning and fish and whatever they catch they go and sell and use the money and come here for shopping,” she tells us. “Aunt Noi’s family, that’s what they do.” If Mukdahan is laid back, then, I expect Savannakhet to be almost totally in neutral.

It’s a kind of false genetic game to suppose that my daughter has a predilection to being laid back due to her racial heritage. In fact, her mom is keyed up, hyper, at times—and I think she’d agree—a control freak. Part of this may be learned: one of my wife’s coping mechanisms for being a minority has been a “pull-myself-up-by-my-bootstraps” kind of determination, an “I’ll show you” kind of mentality.

In fact, my daughter could equally be said to get a certain laidbackness from my grandfather, a patient, relaxed, harmonica-playing man. Then, too, she’s completely an American girl—into fashion, dance, piano-playing, and good grades, a type-A first child.

But my impulse remains. Part of her seems right at home here in Laos, seems to fit—even though she’s falang because of my part in her—because of a certain flip-flop grace and long-haired beauty she has, because of the wider cheekbones she gets from her mother, because of the straight-line smile and dark brown eyes, because of her simple elegance in the laid back streets of a relaxed town on the banks of a large river, because of the way that her willowy body belongs to this place. This place.