Thailan *

Hometown:

Sierra Nevada foothills

Background:

Without Solid Testimony

By Thailan

Redwoods with branches that graze the porch of heaven cannot deny their tiny beginning as a seed.  In the experience of birth and birthing one becomes crowned and rooted, celestial and earthly.  At times I’ve awaken from the realest dream and instantly it is washed away by one back turned wave of consciousness, leaving only the pastels of fading foam.  A song floats fog-like, feelings resurface, sinks, as images illuminate just before my recollection.  Birth can be like that dream as a dream can be many things.  It can be a cool stone that is better forgotten, moist and smooth, left for the soul to close around.  A scar without a master to praise it.  It can be a point of inspiration, a bird on the horizon of sunrise, cooing to awaken us after nine months of darkness.  It is the purest act of love for we are all divine accidents.

My brain has mellowed, maybe even sharperned because of this though many parts are dulled and barely usable.  Memories begin their separate, infinite pace along the plateau of age.  Every step takes me higher to the life I’ve already had, and the even longer one I hope to make.  On a Table Top mountain, flat and elevated, Birth and the Unknown morph into the same recurring dream, still, nothing without solid testimony.  I share this cycled story, not authentic in circumstance or perhaps even insight but feel that somehow it’s important for me, for us, to add to the archive of the refugee experience, the human experience.  I think and write from the perspective and conviction of an infant echoing what was heard inside the cavernous mouths of my elders.  My mother was four months pregnant with me when we left Vietnam.  Her name is Chay, Vietnamese translation: Run.

It was the early spring of 1980 and the war was over but within the heart of the people and the bell of the nation, the pendulum to stay or go, declare your loyalty or be silent, continued to beat and sway.  Those that traveled by sea were known as Boat People and we joined this exodus.  Many died in this treacherous voyage simply lost at sea and eventually expiring in their final search of freedom, or for better or worse eaten by sharks or robbed and killed by pirates.  My father had been in the military and his survival planning and navigational skills were put to the ultimate test that would either send us floating towards life or failing into death.  With nothing dear to lose but the trust we gave him, we left Vietnam on a starry spring night.  This was an escape, allotting no time for bittersweet goodbyes or slow nostalgic glances of the life and lives one leaves behind.  A single last photograph of my grandfather’s house, or a petal from the roses that grew in the sideyard would have been sweet to press inside an old book to find later, but alas the windows of opportunity opened and closed quickly, too quickly for a sweet later to created.  No one was told of our departure except our closest relatives, not even our neighbors, for you never know who, under pressure, or slip of the tongue could send  you to hell.  We left behind a house full of things.

In this journey to Thailand I was buoyant in both belly and ocean.  At that time and for some time after, Thai pirates would patrol the waters for incoming refugees to rob, rape, kill, at worst, to direct, help and pull at best.  Our boat was stopped eight times.  If my father had a gun onboard, he never used it.  I suppose he figured as numbered as we were, we were still outnumbered and wielding a weapon of any sort, or exhibiting any signs of resistance might have been quickly punishable in the deaths of one or all of us.  Each time we were raided hidden treasures were discovered, more family pictures and tiny heirlooms, (the only slightly bulky indulgences we allowed ourselves), were sadistically tossed overboard, and more fear must have shot through my mother internally, and in turn, into me, the baby girl growing inside her.  It was during the 8th raid, according to my mother as she actually counted, that our engine was removed.  As we were left to drown, the fourteen of us (my grandfather, grandmother, father, mother, two brothers, two sisters, two aunts, two uncles, one cousin and myself, in utero) were miraculously rescued by a friendly boat.  We moved towards land and minutes later our ghosts watched on in hungry silence as the boat disappeared beneath the haunting shadows of waves. 

During a struggle with a Thai pirate, my mother had lost her shirt and as our clothes were either stolen or thrown overboard, she arrived upon the shores of Thailand visibly pregnant and topless.  This is a detail that she will divulge at times when adding emphasis on the raw state we were left in.  There can be no perfect blame cast in the pursuit of survival and we can go nowhere on a blameless path but to the sky herself to ask…

There is a time of year and time of morning when the sun especially enjoys peering out to nothingness like God’s hot breath rising above the cold earth.  I awoke to water breaking.  My mother was going into labor in a refugee camp.  The Red Cross people weren’t up yet so we hitched a ride in a truck to try and get to the closest hospital.  I was ferociously kicking from inside her belly.  The truck was speeding quite recklessly but my parents were yelling for the driver to go even faster, tires skimming along the rocked road.  In the summer of 1980, I was born.  A hot windy descent into the bowels of Bangkok, caught then cradled in a rusted, roaring pick-up truck.  My father, Ho, always says with a nervous downcast stammer that he nearly dropped me because I came with such a vengeance.  I used to laugh but I’ve heard it enough times to know that he is being serious.  How affected we are to have guilt for something that never happened.  Truth can be silencing.  My mother named me Thailan to commemorate the sea that didn’t forsake us, and the Thai pirates that robbed and beat us being the same people that saved and loved us.  I was a default baby, a bloody signature on a watercolor painting of freedom.

When I began going back to 1980 in thought and mood, it opened up passages.  In the stories of my elders, I am guided through a tour of my own beginning.  I grope around in the dark long enough to find answers then breath and spray them on strangers around me, and push them upon lovers in my arms, answers that cunningly turn themselves back into questions in order to see another year.  These are questions without question marks.  I honor that apparent disinterest in knowing any more than the raw facts: date, time, location, weight and length at birth is by no means a red flag of soulless apathy when I suppose the strongest holders of faith need no outside validation, no first-hand description, no pictures, nothing but the standing proof that looks back from the mirror.

As birth may always remain the dormant memory, the dream, with it’s mark lying beneath our skin, behind our eyes it is lucid, before us, it is just before, and it can be left at that, left alone, but it’s imprint will never fade.

A real child knows not that she is a child, and when the day comes that she learns this simple truth alone, the cord cuts itself immediately and the vault closes forever, gone is the magical element of youth.  Now I live under the manic rules of aging children, extraordinary and typical, clear and shaded, thoroughly confusing and what a trip it is to look at myself as a winged caterpillar instead.  Out of longing I still try to recapture yesterday with a net suspended above a fermented imagination. It is wide in practice, deep in skepticism, earnest but catches nothing. I am too heavy to keep up with this flickering child.  My eyes are slower, desperately following the tail of this shooting star, her bounding light in the orchards, far ahead of me, keeping me entranced, infatuated with who I once was, a stranger to me now  In the default accomplishment of birth one can find solace in having made it out of the tunnel even if it is just to head back towards it once again.  One can die quickly knowing this and perhaps die well.  Yet I don’t want to die for you to acknowledge that I was alive.  The only thing I want out of life is to remember that It is happening now, as I know that Birth has already happened, and that death of the Unknown has not happened yet.