Beyond Beauty and Death
My brother is pregnant. it started with seasickness without the sea, then a hunger for pickled guava followed by a wistfulness for bunting and booties.
“I told you not to drink the water here.”
“I didn’t! All I’ve had is Coca-Cola.”
“Coke all day—that explains it.”
When his tummy grew, he ached with a blend of pain and pleasure. Finally, I took him and my Thai phrase book to the E.R. After two hours of bad translation, we were taken to the ultrasound room. The radiologist looked at my brother, his big bump and then my bloodshot eyes (from Johnny Walker and no sleep).
“You sure no eat bad thing? My cousin big tummy after eating food with maggots.”
I didn’t think she was helping as my brother cringed and replied, “It feels more soulful than maggots.”
Together we watched the cold metallic head of the ultrasound sensor glide across the roundness of my brother’s belly. Together we heard the heart thumps, saw the rhythmic rise and fall of a granular shape. This child—this fold of arms and short scrappy legs—this silhouette of thinly ribbed life. I laughed as tears fell from my brother’s eyes. Together we sighed in fear and utter gratefulness.
I wonder if my brother had known or at least suspected something long before the ultrasound. Six months ago, I’d just broken up with my beau of three years. We’d met as tech analysts in the same company. It was the longest relationship I’d manage to sustain. When I showed my beau the pregnancy strip, he made me take another test and another; then he said he’d been considering moving to Silicon Valley with some programming buddies. He didn’t extend the invitation. Instead, I received a text a week later.
“I’m sorry for everything. I’m not worthy.”
I texted back, “I would’ve disagreed once. Now, not so much.”
He responded, “To be a parent, one must be worthy. One needs wise hands for this Tabula Rasa. It’s like being God and I’d mess up badly.”
I’ve never viewed parenting as godlike. If anything, I assumed it to be like entering college, where child professors brought out our worst neuroses. Yet more than anything, I wanted something to cradle, a gentleness to put my name to; perhaps in a way, parenting is a type of selfish giving.
“You’ve looked after Bosco for years.”
“He was never difficult.”
“You saw him through dysplasia and blindness,” I added.
“I love you Anna, but raising a Labrador is a moot correlation.”
That was the last time I heard from him.
In my brother’s excitement, he’d pulled out names from his favorite movie. I told him that Neo or Trinity would have a few challenges in high school. I myself had been caught up with the idea of extending our family beyond the two of us and I’d begun googling baby bonnet knitting patterns. Later when I had a miscarriage, no one was more disappointed than my brother.
“I will make it up to you,” he promised.
So far, we’d been in Bangkok for two weeks, exploring musky markets filled with eels, salted fish, and lemongrass, some mornings burning prayer notes in a nearby temple, most evenings enjoying the low sun glazing the watery horizon. On hot days, we spread our limbs and float in the sea. On cool evenings, we visit the gravesite where my grandparents were buried.
Fifty years ago, Pu (Grandfather) left a relentless construction job in Bangkok and arrived in Canada with one suitcase and feet full of bunions. He came to work at a friend’s Thai restaurant as a dish washer. This was where he met a Singapore woman with a slight lisp. She was the prep cook and cleaner who spoke a limited sing-song type of English.
Apparently, the first thing they said to each other was “how long have you slaved here?” As he spoke in Thai and she in Cantonese, they mostly gestured with fingers, eye blinks and head nods. Yet there was something in Yai’s (Grandmother’s) aura that drew my Pu to court her. Yai was a good cook and made us weekend dinners of home-made wantons, spring rolls, and crispy-skin chicken. At the café, she chopped garlic and galangal while he was the dish washer. This went on for a decade until two waiter friends persuaded him to use his life savings and become a business partner in their own cafe. The cafe had many hiccups and one day, the two partners withdrew all remaining funds and disappeared into the ether
It was hence when Father was nine that Pu started drinking endless rice wine. By the time Father was fourteen, Pu would drink himself to a stupor. Sometimes the police would call to report his napping in the Walmart washroom.
When Father shared his memories about his drunken phâaw, I understood his drive at eighteen to apply for a scholarship to leave his Chinatown hovel and pursue his future in the world of microscopes and elateroid beetles, particularly the bioluminescence of fireflies. His focus on the molecular shape of things kept his mind safe and sound from the struggle of others.
My brother and I had come to Thailand to absorb the essence of my father and my father’s father. My secret hope is that giving homage to the birthplace of our paternal genetics would appease the lostness of my brother. For affordability, we stay in Kanchanaburi, a region on the outskirts of Bangkok, near to the rice fields and handy to the food stalls and stores. We download a Thai translator app and begin memorizing touristy phrases. After spending a grand on an FBA course, my brother had proposed living on cheap rent while starting an online gig selling Amazon products.
“What about your literature degree?” I asked.
“Like I’ll become a millionaire writing poetry!”
Over here, it’s hard to know who is whose protector. Half the time when Thai locals show us their beach ware or invite me to a nightclub, my brother flexes his biceps protectively which does nothing more than bring in a bevy of younger Thai of all orientations, all of whom I shoo away maternally. His broad shoulders like the precipices of K2 and his slow deepening voice give me pause and a constant reach for my Ativan bottle.
Pregnant. I couldn’t even imagine my brother kissing anyone. Too often his shyness bloomed a pink flush on his cheeks and too often I’d drag him to the women’s section of the mall to help me choose a blouse or skirt from the bargain bin.
We were like sisters, secretive and impossibly proprietary and there is reason for this.
My brother was born Malee Somsri. As a baby, she was feisty and fretted whenever she was held too long. I recall how quick on her feet she was as a toddler, how she loved nothing more than to feel the bare ground with her running feet. Malee climbed trees the way a coconut harvester would. She made lassos out of vines pulled from wispy Willow trees and rode her bicycle “Phantom” around while wearing a menacing eye-mask.
It was Yai that tried to get Malee to wear dresses and to sit still at the dinner table. But Malee fidgeted so much that Mother would send her off to play Zorro in the living room. Father liked her tomboyishness and the two would go hunting for stag beetles or crickets in the coolness of the night. It was when Malee turned nine that Mother had enough of her rambunctiousness, not just because she’d broken flower vases from running into everything, but because she’d cut up her sundresses and made them into Robin Hood tunics. When my grandparents moved back to Bangkok so that Pu could start over again and be with his old friends, Mother became more stringent.
“Maybe we need to do what other Canadian parents do and just bound Malee.”
“I think you mean ground her,” I clarified.
“Whatever it is, we must teach her to be a proper girl.”
Mother would only practice her hardier methods when Father was out of town. The problem was when Mother went off to finish some mural painting, I was left to play prison warden. This never quite worked as Malee would ask me to make her macaroni and cheese, and then climb out the window, hop on Phantom and disappear into the glowing sunset. This running-away business spilled over into school, where my sister got into trouble for truancy. This meant more grounding at home which meant more prison warden time.
One day I sat Malee down.
“I’m done with this. Start going to classes and stop cutting up your dresses!”
“I’m done with this too! I just wanna be me, not you.”
“So I’m to blame.”
“Of course not, I just don’t feel good in my skin.”
“What are you saying? Do you want better clothes?”
“It’s not that. I just don’t feel I’m the real me.”
I was miffed; I had been a tomboy once, but I’d always felt real.
“Is it because Ma doesn’t like you playing Zorro? The hero’s journey is overhyped.”
She shook her head, “I don’t know. I just don’t want to be a girl!”
“So you want to be a—”
“I don’t know—I don’t!”
When I brought up our conversation with my parents, Mother was adamant that it was just a phase.
“She’s only nine. What does a little girl know about being real?”
I wished I’d worded my sister’s feelings better, but something told me Mother would have resisted no matter what.
Father was quiet for a long time and then he suggested we let Malee play the boy until she got tired of it or until it confirmed she was meant to be one. Mother protested but finally agreed as long as we kept the name Malee. This went against the spirit of the trial, but I told Malee to allow our parents baby steps.
Initially, I wasn’t sure if I should have said anything. My parents used to discuss the foibles of their work in muffled laughter. Soon all I heard, when I passed their bedroom, were voices of contention.
Soon, Mother started treating Malee with forced patience laced with loaded meaning, “You have such delicate hands, don’t ruin it hammering like that.” “Look at how the male sparrow builds the nest; see how nature has given roles to every little thing.”
Father did not use any nature versus nurture rhetoric. Like a scientist, he placed his thesis on observing how things played out.
The following year when I turned sixteen, Mother handed me the housekeys and gave me the bus directions so that I could accompany Malee home from school. Mother had just gotten a big gig from a restaurant to paint their accent wall with her signature lotus pond and floating turtles. Armed with paint brushes, cans of acrylic and her whisky hip flask, she’d be gone from dawn to dusk. Left as minder, I’d make Malee ramen noodles and help her with her homework. Then she’d force me to read Captain America and debate ‘what-if ’ scenarios with her till she fell asleep.
“What if we were stuck on an island, would you prefer Phoebe and Rachel or Wonder Woman and Captain America for company?”
“It really depends if we want a laugh or if we want to be saved,” I told her
“Aren’t they the same thing?” she replied. “Would you rather be the dreamer or the butterfly?” I asked another time.
“That’s like asking who is Superman? Clark Kent or a Superhero? Choosing limits us.”
Sometimes, when she threw lines out like that, it seemed that she had a glimmer of a certain non-duality, a blindness towards all edges.
One day, I visit the town grocery store. There are bags of rice, chillies, dried mushrooms, and shelves of pickled condiments. The store smells of basil, lemongrass and incense. Pranee, a tiny storekeeper with big eyes and a cherubic smile gives a big hello. She had a bowl of mangosteens on the counter and passes me one before I even speak. I had my phone out ready to translate my grocery list, but she nods and speaks immediately in English.
“I see you many times walking around. You— new tourist?”
I suppose my constant app reference had been a dead give-away.
She points to the mangosteen in my hand. Out of courtesy, I put my phone on the counter and squeeze the thick purple skin. I exert too much force and the fruit splits as its juice runs down my wrists. I quickly lick my arms and then suck on the broken white flesh.
“Your boyfriend cute; he always carry your bags.”
Mouth full of sweet sour, I shake my head for clarification.
“He’s just my brother.”
She suddenly nods and draws a circle round her tummy.
“I have seen boy mama before.”
I am impressed by her matter-of-fact response and soon learn that Pranee had been a mid-wife to some of the rural couples who had no desire to deliver a child in a modern hospital. She had also delivered two babies from two trans mothers before. I probe her more but am not able to understand the depth of her experience due to our language limitations. She encourages me to feed my brother well. I tell her that I want to cook him something special. He hadn’t been eating due to the heat
“Tonight I shall feed him the love of a hundred mothers.”
“Such love is good, but not all the time,” Pranee says while helping me gather the right ingredients. I pick a handful of mangosteens, their fresh piquant taste still lingering on my tongue.
Returning home, I chop some ginger and meat to prepare a thick vinegar stew.
“What are you doing?”
“Brewing nourishment.”
My brother bends over the pot, takes a spoon and stirs it curiously.
“What is this? It smells good.” “Pig’s feet.”
“W-what?”
“It’s full of protein and fat.”
Later when I serve him the stew with a big bowl of rice, he eats ravenously. I explain to him how right after his birth, Mother made this stew as it was filled with young ginger which was not only an anti-inflammatory but also helped with bowel movements.
“Can you please stop?”
“It’s just a biological function.”
“I mean can you stop talking about Mother!”
“It’s good to talk through things.”
“I’m not ready yet,” he replies.
“You never are.”
“I don’t know if I’ll ever be.”
“Have more vinegar sauce,” I say softly, not telling him that it was good for depression.
“Okay but stop babying me.”
I keep quiet, not knowing how to respond. Both our parents had passed away many years ago. My brother was eleven and I, seventeen.
It was a Friday night in November and I had gone over to my friend Claudia’s for a sleepover. Dad had come home exhausted from a day of lecturing and Mom was upstairs reading in bed and sipping her usual whisky nightcap. It was already around ten o’clock, but Malee could not sleep. As she sometimes did when restless, she went downstairs to watch television and snack on some Cheerios. It was a cold night and I remembered watching some snow flurries while Claudia and I were gossiping in bed about some boy she’d been stalking. Meanwhile back at home, Malee had put on the space heater and placed it right next to the sofa to warm up her feet. Apparently, she barely watched TV for half an hour and felt sleepy enough to go back upstairs—without turning off the heater.
Sometime later, the only thing Malee remembers was a burly man in yellow carrying her out as she coughed her lungs out. One of the neighbours had seen the fire through their window and called the police. When the firetruck came, he quickly shouted that he’d rung the doorbell to no avail. The police later said they believed our parents had likely passed out from smoke inhalation. When the firemen carried them out, they could do nothing to resuscitate them. I initially didn’t comprehend Malee’s tear-filled phone call and almost fainted when I did.
Normally the smoke alarms would’ve gone off but a few days before, Father had taken them out as they were going off at all times in the night and interrupting his sleep
Initially, my brother claimed he’d turned the heater off. Then at times he believes he had the heater on low and not that near the sofa, while there are other times he curses the cold November night and himself for the carelessness. I can barely make out the truth and the imaginary. It is enough that his hiccups of emotion fill my gaping mouth to the brim, and I forgive him because he is all I have.
My therapist had long encouraged me to bring my brother in for a session. Because he was already going for gender dysmorphia therapy, he refused to go for grief counselling. Why would I want to rehash something that has been rehashed in my mind a zillion times he’d say. Hence in each session, I mimicked my brother’s private laments to learn the language of help. My brother’s guilt had closed his heart shut and so every nightmare I shared with her were borrowed from the sorrows he carried. Whenever he moaned or sang wistful R.E.M songs, I took notes, marched into ‘our’ therapy session with similar moans and song-lines. In therapy, I was told I (my brother) needed to free myself (himself ) as I (he) had a phobia of happiness. I hadn’t told anyone how I’d often peek into his room and see him talking to his Grimlock plushy. For a long time, I could feel his bone of loneliness. It was such that it collapsed every happiness of my own into a deflated diaphragm, a sort of emptying out before the last breath had even been drawn. My therapist advised replacing my (brother’s) fears with more magical thinking. And so, I began reading him Madam White-Snake, The Talking Fish and other tales where gods and spirits become men and men become earthly creatures, variations of existential transformation.
There’s a Chinese proverb—a child’s life is like a piece of paper on which every person leaves an imprint. With our immediate family cut in half, I did not know how to shape the paper, how to fold the edges neatly and leave the best mark. When social services took us under their wing, they contacted our relatives in Asia and debated our consequence. My parents’ siblings knew little about us. They all said yes, we will take them but when they learned about my sister’s desire to be a boy, they buckled. The decision was to ask my father’s cousin, Aunt Boonsri, who lived in wintry Newfoundland and who finally said I’ll try but I know nothing about children.
In our first year in Corner Brook, there were many nights we’d take long walks in the dark, saying very little and thinking too much. Sometimes, my brother would take my parents’ urn and hike up to the windy slopes of Three Bear Mountain and lay there under a tree sketching the townscape. Aunt Boonsri, a retired librarian, would share her thoughts on her favourite wordsmiths most especially Mary Oliver, Arundhati Roy and Nicole Krause. After our evening homework, she would fill us in on the illicit love of Ammu, Baby Kochamma’s lies and the reunion of Estha and Rahel. My brother loved the fraught coping mechanisms and the heightened melodrama which implied interaction that our family had invariably lacked.
Slowly we learned how to cook pineapple fried rice and my aunt patiently taught us how to make Tom Yum which oddly went well with fish and brewis. In the span of the four years we lived with my aunt, we had more conversations of depth with her than we ever had with our mother. Sometimes when she helped Malee pick out something at the boy’s store, she’d utter “Sombun!” All those years together in one of the coldest regions in Canada, Aunt Boonsri never looked at the clock, never once missed a family evening meal. For the first time, I saw the wisdom of presence and when she suddenly passed away from a heart attack, I could not eat for days. However, inspired by my aunt’s acceptance of Malee as her nephew, I became my brother’s guardian at twenty-one and helped him apply for hormone therapy. I suggested the name Mee Noi meaning “little bear” as he was strong, yet deceptively vulnerable.
One morning we visit the nearby temple where the head monk gives us shreds of white prayer paper. The monk points at my brother’s belly curiously.
“It’s not maggots,” my brother assures him.
“No, it is the stars; it is fullness from emptiness,” the monk says with an odd smile just before disappearing into the misty crowd. I am beginning to think this may be the case. Many times, I have asked my brother who is the father. Was it our old neighbour Simon Lee who shot baskets with him? Was it the suave Ronny Koslo, his high-school crush, who taught him how to plank? Each time, he would shake his head, like he had received an immaculate conception.
When we step outside the temple, I buy a few packets of munchies from a street vendor selling dried fruit. Sandalwood incense is still lingering and as I bite into the tanginess of a pickled nutmeg, I taste the sweet and sour of being alive.
“I’m having nightmares again,” my brother says.
“Perhaps we should leave Thailand.”
My brother shakes his head in disagreement. I do not suggest this because of my brother’s casual existence with solitude; I say this because the more time he spends in meditation amidst incense, the more he remembers too much. Quite often, he gives remorse for unnecessary things: apologizing for oversalting the chicken stew even though I was the one who threw in the salted mustard; contrite about using up the hot water in a building that is as old as the hills; taking the blame for our missing a Thai kickboxing event which was due to my outdated bus schedule.
It is hence that I can never share with him all my midnights in bed devising a spreadsheet of luck to pull him out of his shell. Somewhere in time I buy a lottery ticket and announce we have “won” a large screen TV (courtesy of VISA); I bribe our neighbours to repeatedly tell him how ethereal his singing is; the little kitten he thinks we saved from the garbage bin was given by Pranee who, so far, takes delight in all my secrets.
Sometimes when I am walking along the rice-fields and farms, I see young boys threshing rice with their fathers; families sitting on mats eating together and talking in the warm tropical wind. Then I see Father, who knew as little about me as I of him, packing his bags for yet another conference, while Mother sat at her canvas as if mildly disturbed. Perhaps their eagerness to explore and express the world came from an unconscious awareness of their own limited continuance.
“I don’t like it when you tell me about their noncommittal parenting. Sometimes, I think you never loved them,” my brother says one late evening.
I want to throw the salted mustard at him. I could not understand how he’d forgotten Mother’s resistance to his coming out.
“Which love is greater, the one that sees icky spots and still holds warm visions, or the one that is totally delusional?” I reply.
He takes the mustard and does what I’d hesitated to do. Then he walks out and leaves me cleaning the mess. Later that evening, when I scour the nearby beach, I see a drunken silhouette walking mid-torso in the water. I yell and run into the cold blackness of sea; I wrap my arms around my brother’s waist as he struggles further into the water. I’m about to tell him about fetal alcohol syndrome when he blurts out, “There is an evil within me. One time, after Mother yelled at me, I’d wished her dead and look what happened!”
“Do you think you’re that powerful? I’ve lived longer than you. Do you know how many times I’ve wished her dead?” is all I can scream.
That is a falsehood. At the most, I might have imagined running away with my brother to let him live his truth. But I’d been slowly running out of steam with him not knowing what words to emote or filter. My brother stares at me his arms pushing away mine as he shouts, “It’s like Chacko said to the twins, they’re pointed in the wrong direction, trapped outside their own history and unable to retrace their steps. That’s how I feel. My footprints have been swept away. The country of me doesn’t exist.”
“Mee Noi, we may be orphans, but you have Father’s curiosity in your blood and Mother’s artistry in your hands. You can be any shape of land you want to be. The only difference now is there will be another little country to mind.”
He drops his arms in surrender and whispers, “Arundhati Roy would have made a good father” as we walk home as wet as rain.
One evening, Pranee takes us on a water tour along the Mae Klong. We eat from night market long-tail boats filled with papaya, grilled chicken wings and mackerel. When our boat rounds the curve of the river, we see thousands of pin-prick lights. As we draw closer to the bank, the bow is surrounded by eighty-feet tall mangrove trees flashing on and off like Christmas trees. This love language emitted by the males in courtship has its own pattern, a secret language for each species, a code which the female responds to in kind. The boat passengers murmur in awe, but I’m silenced by my own thoughts as I take the moment in. The Mae Klong was one of the places Father would spend weeks by himself, collecting various species of fireflies. Sometimes I wonder which is better, to entangle with the pulse of the collective or pursue a more singular path?
“The village boys have caught one or two fireflies. They found that their light was not as beautiful,” Pranee explains.
“The individuals flash irregularly. They only flash in rhythm like this when they are with other fireflies.”
I think back to my own failed pregnancy and recall how my brother had promised to make it up to me. In that moment, while peering at the waves of rippling illumination, I weave one arm around my brother’s and the other around Pranee’s to let them know, we have light, we have rhythm.
Weeks pass. Slowly but surely, my brother’s spine and shadow bend softly to the shape of the maternal. It is impossible to ponder if this is magic or madness. I recall the monk and agree that this is fullness as I watch my brother singing a lullaby as he cleans the apartment and carefully irons our laundry. Soon his breasts are full and his lips as well, from sucking endless pickled limes. A few times, when I’m in bed with a cold, he buys lemons and makes a soothing toddy, then rubs my feet with Vicks and reads one of Father’s papers on the wisdom of bioluminescence.
Unexpectedly, the head monk had mentioned a supposed immaculate conception and invariably, my brother accumulates endless visitors. Old village men come to him with harvest prayers while young women rub his belly in hopes of future fecundity. He wears the delicate folds of the Thai sinh, normally reserved for women. My brother is still as flawed as our rickety kitchen table and I want to shout it on the rooftop. But we’ve had fewer fights and the villagers seem more buoyant. Some come with odd offerings— a house gecko, baby pig and spiny turtle. Some bring steamed fish and pots of Tom Yum. We release all living gifts and share the cooked ones. Instead of recounting magical tales, we cross our legs, root ourselves to the ground and share with the help of Pranee’s translation, the story of loss. We listen to farmers and their money woes and fear of chemical pesticides; we hear their wives tell tales of sickness and still-born babies. This is against the flow of mai pen rai, the common Thai response which translates to never mind or so be it, a verbal acceptance of karma. As we all sigh together, we are rebels who move in crepuscular fashion. As night falls, we switch on and off our torches in unison with unseen fireflies, signalling to the skies the salt of our sorrows.
Meanwhile, through the waning warm weather, red rose finches gather in flocks on the nearby magnolia trees. After weeks of vinegar stew, my brother exclaims, “Get me some pickled limes. . .Oh never mind, it’s time!”
Word spreads and the farmers and their wives scour the rice fields, gathering water bugs and snails for a celebratory feast. Meanwhile as Pranee chants by the side of the birthing tub, I kneel by my brother’s side and curve the fold of his hand into mine. I feel faint and see his skin is glistening and softening into the slip of the water as he moans and yells, “What the hell was I thinking?!”
“Shut up Phâaw and breathe,” I whisper.
Sublimely defiant, his eyes open and close like a fish out of water. Together we inhale the magnolia aroma as feathers flutter outside the window and with fifty deep breaths, he births a world beyond beauty and death.
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