[December 18, 2007 @ Twin Peaks Cafe in Yangshuo, China] reflections on Xishuabanna

"I fantacize about how it would feel to return to where I belong.
A place where everyone speaks my language, looks like me,
and shraes the same history."

I’m sitting here with a stuffy nose cipping on ginger tea.

I just finished reading First They Killed my Father. I can’t help but draw parallels with the stories I’ve heard from mom and dad. Not only that but it makes me wonder how much more similar their stories coincides with her story. This trip and the book has raised even more questions I have for my parents. It makes me want to ask and talk to my grandmother and more to my mom.

I wonder if how Luong had to leave Chou was how my mom felt when she left her twin brother, Na Tham. I wonder how it felt for her to leave him when she was 16 and not see him again until she turned 35… nineteen years without seeing your twin brother, whom you shared an entire womb with for 9 months.

I wonder if I would have been able to survive if I was bron through the war times. If I could live off rats and bugs. If I could stop being a vegetarian. If I could live with lice in my hair.

It makes me actually want to have children just so I could stay up with them and tell them stories about our family, our wondrous, glorious family of fighters and survivors… just the way my dad did with me.

It makes mw want to write things down, hurry up finish school, come back to Xishuanbanna to learn how to write and read in Tai Lue. Bring mom and dad so I could listen to them talk and reminisce with the family about old times. Its great how my great aunts talk about my dad when he was two years old… but I wonder how it would be to listen to them talk to HIM about when he was two years old…

I want mom to come. I want her to sit next to Na Tham. I want to compare their faces. The way their eyes both wrinkle up when they smile. I want to line all mom’s siblings up together and take a picture of them. My mom and my uncle in the United States. The one uncle in Laos. And the two uncles in China.

I want to come here with grandma. I want her to take me to where she was born. Where both her parents passed away when she was eleven. Where she has to raise her younger siblings alone. Where at the age of eleven, she became a mother up until now where she still is a mother and grandmother.

I want to bring Malisa and James. I want to show them the way to all these wonderful places. I want our relatives to see all of us all together. Malisa, born in some refugee camp in Thailand. James, born in some city in Minnesota where my parents were first sponsored to. Me, born in San Diego where my parents ended up settling in.

I want our relatives to laugh at how American we are like how we’d laught at how Chinese our other cousins are. I want them to come and see what mom and dad went through so I wouldn’t look like the only crazy child obsessed with the family history that mom never wants to talk about… grandma cries when thinking about… and dad is so proud of.

Yesterday Nir asked me if I could visit anywhere in the world, where would it be. For the past twenty (almost twenty-one) years, that one place has been Xishuanbanna. And last week I did it and it was wonderful. Absolutely wonderful.