Pilgrimage to Thailand: A bridge of memories

This is a journey back to where my parents started their own journeys from Thailand, 40 years ago. This journey, a pilgrimage to a place of beginning, is not one to be taken alone.

Along with my family, my parents are coming, making what they say will be their last trip back. My aunty is on the flight with my parents, as always, right there with them. My sister and her husband and daughter are in the row in front of us, having just met up with us in San Francisco.

I had been to Thailand three times as a child: with my mother at 4, again at 5 with my whole family, and at 10, just after my grandfather died. Now, at 35, my husband and young children with me, I am taking advantage of a rare chance to see my relatives in person, and it is a deliberate act. I am aware of the faces of my aunties and uncles -- all of them older than my mother, who just a few years before I feared I might lose to cancer. I notice their eyes, their expressions, their voices. I hold onto all of this, and it is hard. I fear that I will not be able to recall the sound of their laughter or their exact expressions when I have returned home.

So when Aunty Pi Ti, Aunty Pi Ta, Aunty Pi Ann, Aunty (I have always called this one who helped raise me simply that) and Mom decide we should go see my grandmother's bridge after dinner, I try to find that bridge in my foggy memories of past trips. It is not there.

A gift of love

The driver skillfully navigates the narrow streets and alleys of Chiang Mai. They make no sense to me and seem to follow no rules. Through crowds of people at the market, around a tight corner, he pulls up alongside a river. My aunties take us up a flight of crumbling concrete stairs. This is the bridge, they say.

It is a footbridge, made of concrete, painted white, but badly peeling. Below we can see the murky Ping River, small boats still floating on it in the evening light. On one side, the lights of the market glow brighter and brighter as the sun sets. On the other side, my mom points out the pointed spires of the Sikh temple, the one my grandfather, an immigrant from India, walked to every day, there being no Hindu temple in Chiang Mai yet.

"He built this bridge after my mom died," explains my mom. "For her."

The bridge is one of several that cross the Ping, and it had been rebuilt a few times of teak or bamboo before my grandfather donated the money for the permanent concrete structure. It is a quiet bridge, just for foot or bicycle traffic. I imagine it was a path my grandfather, who never drove, might have taken often, connecting the bustling outdoor market with the quieter neighborhood across the river, where he would worship at the temple; connecting his new life in Chiang Mai as a textile merchant with his earlier, but not forgotten, life in India.

The aunties stand around the most lasting piece of the bridge, a marble sign, engraved with letters painted gold that read in English and in Thai:

"Chansom Memorial Bridge, Built by Motiram (Montri) Koslaphirom, Owner of Chiangmai Store, in Memory of his wife Chansom Koslaphirom (Built in 1966)."

I hear a collective sigh emanating from my mom and my aunties, perhaps the sigh of missing a father and mother now gone. Maybe it is also a sigh for their own younger days, when they were just daughters and sisters, rather than wives and mothers and grandmothers. But I also sense a sigh of longing, for a life and love that seem perfect, in their idealized memory of their parents. My grandmother has been gone for 40 years, my grandfather for 26.

Standing here over the Ping River, the paint chipping, the concrete showing its wear, the sisters huddle around the tribute to their mother, made by their father. They sigh again, together. A warm breath of air mingles and floats with the water along the murky river.

Buddha's blessing

We make our way to our family's Buddhist temple and enter through doors already open to the cool morning air. Inside, a large golden Buddha shines down on us. We sit on the floor, and I watch my mom and my aunties hold their hands in prayer position, eyes closed, and bow before the peaceful being glowing before them. The image is easy on my eyes, not like the dying Christ nailed to the cross that I try to shield my boys from at church, afraid to explain the complexities of good and evil, of us and them. Here is something to aspire to, a state of peacefulness to carry us through any day, not just a day of final reckoning. I find myself falling in love with the relaxed and supple legs, the graceful hand, the slight Mona Lisa smile, the closed eyes looking inward, not out at the reactions of the world.

Even though we aren't all together, as I sit in the stream of sunlight coming through the open doors, I feel the connections of my family. My pink-cheeked 3-year-old plump with young blood, alongside my mother, with cancer cells taking up unwelcome residence in her body. Others of us are across town, opening eyes to morning. My father is wheezing in his hotel bed, not far from here, hooked up to a giant oxygen tank he jokingly calls the bazooka, tethered still to our world. Some, my brother and his family, are on the other side of the world, ready for sleep. My grandfather, long gone from this world, is somewhere here, floating about us in memory. My grandmother is in this place, too, and my oldest aunty, both dead many years, and others I have never known, except in stories growing out of memories.

Flights of compassion

The sun begins to heat the day as our van climbs the winding road to the temple at Doi Suthep, in the hills around Chiang Mai. As the van passes the small villages outside Chiang Mai, I imagine my grandfather, making a similar trip, traveling a dirt road on foot trying to sell his cloth to the villagers. The tall trees that look down on us now could perhaps tell me of the many walks my grandfather made along these roads, his legs straining, his back aching under the weight of bolts of cloth.

When we reach the top, the driver deposits us at a small commercial center, lined with tour buses, crowded with vendors selling carved Buddha images, beaded purses and miniature toy tuk-tuks, the three-wheeled open-air taxis that motor all over town.

One elderly woman approaches us carrying tiny cages woven from twigs and grasses holding little birds, chattering with panic. Aunty, always drawn to birds, relents easily to the woman's hawking and buys one. She explains that we release the bird for good luck.

She lets my niece Maddie open the cage and away flies the little bird, leaving the others cheeping behind. The old woman knows a good customer when she sees one, and points to the boys standing there watching the scene. Aunty buys two more. Each boy unties a cage door. Again the birds fly away.

Only three cages remain and the woman is quick to point out their sadness at being left behind. Aunty buys them all and soon all the birds have flown off, maybe far away, maybe to a nesting place where they will be caught again to have their freedom purchased by some willing tourist. Our purchased luck, our practice at compassion has, at the very least, given this leathery woman, dressed in the colorfully embroidered black clothes of a local hill tribe, some income for the day. Would that compassion follow us into other situations, real rather than staged, with higher price tags attached?

Following his footsteps

We are silent for some time as the van winds back down the mountain road. Then Aunty speaks up suddenly as she looks out the window at the lush forests, the sunlight glinting on dark leaves.

"Your grandfather traveled up here all the time," she says, always referring to him as our grandfather, always speaking directly to my generation, not her sisters, who sit on either side, nodding their heads in agreed memory. Nor does she address the great-grandchildren, contentedly gulping down sweet drinks. It is us she addresses, my sister and me, as if it is our job to know this now, as if the generation before is preparing to be finished with holding these stories for themselves.

"He knew the hill tribes that lived here, and even when he worked mainly in Chiang Mai, he would come up to see them. He even had a school built for the hill tribe children somewhere around here." Her voice trails off and it becomes clear that she does not know exactly where, but has entered the world of imagination.

I come into that world, too, gazing into the shadows and light dancing through the trees as the van continues its descent into the city below.