in the window in the bkk dome
(Bangkok, Thailand)
My year-long stay in Thailand holds really strong emotional value. Being in Thailand means trying to connect to a part of my ethnicity that I’ve never been able to grasp intimately. For a large portion of my childhood, Thainess and Thai culture were things that I admired but never claimed to be my own. It's not that I hated Thainess - no, I actually grew up admiring the culture. Growing up, because my hair was so curly and my skin was so light and my eyes were so green, I never thought it was mine to indulge in, you know? In recent years, I think I've grown and now find a bit more... possession in the identity, but where that possession is in constant flux. There's always this sort of panging guilt that hangs with trying to take up Asian spaces; it's been around all my life. That said, this trip presents a chance to finally dip my toes into a hodgepodge of attitudes, morals, arts, laws, capabilities, foods, and the thousand other things that makeup being Thai. Sifting through that do-I-or-don’t-I-belong will be the real incoming emotional meat, you know? Fun stuff.
I haven’t been to the country since I was about ten or eleven years old. Consequently, the memories I have are patchy and disconnected. I can remember little images, little tastes, little smells: only little things. That said, aside from trying to advance my relationship with my ethnicity, I hope to better find those memories. I recall my mom telling me of these grand and wild trips we’d make around the country - hiking in the mountains, visiting waterparks, her brother stealing me away to shoot at ducks. Much to my disappointment, I don’t remember many of these stories my mom recites back to me now and then. Even now as I look outside my hotel window at a Bangkok that is very different from the other that hosted me and my family so long ago, I am eager, incredibly eager to patch those memories. I was eager to do everything and was always bugging my mom for us to leave the house to do something. And as much as I’d love to have the same unapologetic forwardness to explore, as I’ve explored BKK the past couple of days, a cloud of fear - fear that I’m being a clumsy loud American foreigner or that I’ll be seen as in idiot - sets in now and then. I would love to have that boldness back. I’m just a bit scared that without it, I won’t wanna take risks… which is the entire reason I’m here.
All that said, the walk off the plane was not the place for that kind of mental chew. Getting off of the plane, my body was physically the closest it had ever been to total collapse it’s been in, frankly, my entire life.Having spent the last hour of the plane ride to BKK trying to not expel airplane food gunk (literally the saltiest eggs I’ve ever eaten in my life guys I’m not even kidding thanks united) through my mouth hole while trying to distract myself with the new dr. strange movie (which btw, makes no sense - it’s like, campy but also not campy and then john Krasinski shows up and I couldn’t stop laughing at him in a stretchy silly blue suit I’m sorry I’m not sad he died at all) I had no interest in indulging in the deep thought I was prepared to have throughout the Fulbright. I had the rest of the year to do that, and I was so tired, like awake-for-thirty-straight-hours-tired.
My eyes nearly closed. My forehead felt like a bowling ball. I was so physically disoriented, I felt like my brain was pudd that could just fall out of my eye sockets and just melt on the floor. Purely as a means of being able to see where I was going as I exited the connective tube, I widened my eyes and gazed down the BKK airport corridor.
I had been here before. Despite not recalling a single detail about the corridor I was walking in - not its walls, nor its carpet, nor its smell, nor anything else about the physical space, my body felt like it knew this exact spot. It was a strong, unignorable deja vu, and it came out of nowhere. It was haunting. I felt as if I was being watched by something or somebody that I couldn’t find or see. Looking to the right out the window in the BKK dome to see the wet airplane, I was only really just now processing that I had hit the soil. Mind you, I was into around hour thirty-ish of being awake, so there wasn’t much logical thought or mindful cognition happening - the thoughts naturally entered and exited, and I did nothing to produce them. As my eyes focused out from the plane, into the window in the BKK dome, my brain was flushed into temporal disorientation. Not in the sense that my underslept peers and I had begun to lose track of the time due to the changing time zones, although that was very true. For a brief moment, I forgot my age. Within the glass, between the outside rainy air and the inside cool corridor, was where the once unplaceable and unnameable ghost hid.
Typically, I have a fixed and predictable relationship with my reflections - the mirrors and pools and puddles and windows. In my home in Jenkintown, I have routine reflections that I’ve looked at since about seven years old when I first moved there. I love mirrors. Like a lot of other people, I always think I look much more pleasant in a mirror than in a photo. Unless I just got a haircut and was looking at myself for the first time, with mirrors there’s always lovely predictability. I put my favorite shirt on, then I put on a pair of jeans that go well with it, then I snap on my watch and some rings to complete the fit, and… bam! There he is in the mirror. Just as I thought. Go you, Charlie.
For that brief moment, as I trotted along the corridor, my disoriented brain forgot I was twenty-two. In the window in the BKK dome, trotted along a ghost. He was short and had curly hair and green eyes and looked about ten or eleven years old and wore a blue shirt with a white shirt underneath because his parents found that it was a good way to avoid pit stains on the overshirt. I looked and him, and he looked at me, and we trotted just half a step until we passed through the end of the corridor and then he was gone.
I stopped walking and began to tear up. Here I was. I had made it, finally. I was magic and crazy and wedgied and high and moist and sweaty and tired and at that moment, I wouldn’t have wanted it any other way. Honestly, the near-puking was all worth it. Even though this trip was an act of stepping into utter discomfort - I knew almost no Thai, I had nearly no friends or family, and the culture I was walking into was one that I’m still not quite convinced is mine to claim - I was so, so, so happy to just be there.
Rarely do I walk through the plane to airport corridors. There was nothing routine about this reflection; I wasn’t expecting to see him, although now I wouldn’t be surprised if I do see him again. I hope he surprises me again. I don't think I would say I could learn something from him, but I think seeing his bravery in the reflections in the pools and the puddles and the windows wouldn’t hurt. Maybe some of it would rub off on me. A part of me thinks that my zombie, jetlagged, underslept brain wasn’t fast or alive enough to update the visual information from the last time I looked through the window in the BKK dome. Or maybe I’m just a sentimental overthinker that visually imagines scenarios. My therapist once called me that.
I know, as an objective fact, that Thai people love it (or at least, prefer it) when a foreigner actually tries to put themselves out there and learn the culture, so why is it that something holds me back? What is that something?