When your very religious mother slings the Buddha around your neck at the tender age of 8, you do not protest. Even though you were going to a Catholic school that would frown upon it at best and bully you at worst for it—especially then, considering your mother squints at you disapprovingly from the rear-view mirror when you tell her how your peers mock you for being Asian. "You have to learn to stand by your own legs," she says irritably. She means "stand your ground". You don't correct her.
I don't know why I still wear it. Good luck? I don't think I'm that superstitious. Sentimental value, maybe, but my mom is thankfully still with me and I have no need for a trinket to remember her by. I touch it again as I walk to class. One other person I know—biracial, too; American-born, too—wears a necklace like this one. Neither of us are connected to our mother's culture as well as we would like; both here in the great melting pot where everything your parents left behind gets mixed into the soup and re-emerges as something different when it's your turn for a serving.
It's hard to know that had circumstances been tweaked just slightly before you were born your entire way of life would be completely different. Instead of being a kid in suburbia I could have grown up with mango trees in the yard, white sand beaches a stone's throw away, speaking my mother's tongue and eating her food. As it is, any five-year-old trotting down the streets of Bangkok has a better command of this language, is more comfortable in this culture that is mine by birth.
My fingers slide up and down the gold edges. Am I clinging to this necklace, this culture, this desire to belong to a world that I only have one foot in, because I truly want it? Or is it just because the fun snippets of Thai life I have lived during long summers in the house that could have been my home are desirable and exotic in their elusivity?
We land at night in the fluorescent glow of the airport, so unlike the inky black sky over our country house. One step out of the plane and the air already feels thicker here. As we roll through baggage claim, a sign above sways slightly, warning of arrest or death if anything you own depicts the Buddha in a disrespectful way.
Arrival at the house is a slow and bumpy ride along winding roads out of the city. Halfway between Bangkok and Maneeya my eyes shut to the rhythmic bouncing of the heavy gold charm against my chest. The house is nestled between others just like it, blocked off by fences peeling gold and topped with cracking shingle roofs.
When our car finally pulls in through the gate it is suddenly a bright noisy affair all over again as friends and family pour out of the house to welcome and feed us. It is a routine welcome that goes on for hours into the night. Only when predawn light starts to creep up over the leaky-roofed houses do the guests finally filter out to their own homes, leaving us in silence in the small kitchen, sitting at a table laden with food.
My brother, mother and I sit eating the gifted fruits in the semidarkness. Juice from the mangosteen and lychee and rambutans dribble down my fingers and chin, eyes wandering between the basket and the ants marching up to take a share. As we sit, the heavy wet darkness presses upon us in a way it does not even on the hottest Virginia day, and I meet my mother's eyes between bites of fruit. She touches my necklace—sticky with juice—as we sit in this house that is not quite a home, and her eyes tell me: This is how I know you are Thai.
