1. My mother, the moon

Welcome to the second installment of Misfortune Cookie

Teenage mom, circa 1963, Northern Thailand

My mother was born in 1947 and raised in Thailand, before Thailand became the Hail Mary pass of travel destinations for barefoot poets and digital nomads. She grew up poor, the kind of poor that I assumed were exaggerations in order to teach me a lesson, or something equally lame.

She’d hold out her thumb and say, “this is how much meat we had,” and me being the flippant first-generation American that I am, would nod, pat her hand like she was an old dog that we kept around out of love and pity and say, “sure, Mom, sure.”

Her parents were both middle children from large families. They met at a rice farm not far from where Mom was born in Lamphun, which is in northern Thailand. Her birth wasn’t even recorded, unless you count the coconut leaf they used.

When she told me this, it was 2015, and we were in Ubon Ratchathani flipping through massive amounts of marriage records in an effort to find evidence of her existence for the Thai government. It was hot, tedious work, and she couldn’t remember the exact date, so we were looking through years and months of ledgers in a language I can’t read.

But the coconut leaf bit. I had heard her story many times, and only now she’s telling me this? I stopped and looked up at her.

“What? You’re kidding me.”

“I am not.”

I imagined coconut leaves and shook my head. “Are you sure it was a coconut leaf? I mean, they’re so skinny. Why not a banana leaf?”

Mom grew up not knowing her birth date. She’s only a girl, after all. Our singular clue is in her Northern nickname “Ping” which means full moon day. (Thais have an abundance of nicknames, or at least my mother does.) Based on this, the family believes she was born when the moon was full, and during a festival, but since many Buddhist holidays take place during full moons, our only lead isn’t that great.

It certainly didn’t help that her father was out cavorting and getting drunk while her mother was giving birth to their first child. Seven more would follow.

Yet, whatever astrological sign she was born under, it was undoubtedly an auspicious one since she was the only child out of eight that lived in a house. The rest of the family lived outside, where they moved from farm to farm for work. No one knows why, or how this arrangement was made, but I’ve thought about this a lot and have decided because Mom was the first, her mom was able to beg her mom to take her in. But after that, the door was closed.

My mother attended school until about the fourth grade because that was all her family could afford. When a fortune teller told her that she would move far, far away, she didn’t believe it. She was angry, actually, believing the soothsayer was having a laugh at her expense. She was too poor to go anywhere except Chiang Mai which is about 16 miles away.

She grew up caring for her aunt’s water buffaloes and working on other farms harvesting rice, peanuts, and garlic. Later she became skilled at sewing, which helped her earn extra money. And while the rest of her family seemed content to live and die in little Lamphun, Mom couldn’t wait to escape.

Another trait that set her apart was she was a picky eater, rather remarkable considering that her family didn’t have enough to eat, so they resorted to asking neighbors for leftover rice. The key is to wait until everyone has eaten dinner already, so that they can’t refuse. As if that wasn’t bad enough, she didn’t like the way animals were treated, so she sometimes wouldn’t eat meat either.

Since Dad died when I was five, I used to ask Mom how they met. I wanted to know the man I barely knew, whose memories I held on to because I had so few. Other children ask to have their favorite story read to them again and again, but we didn’t have those, so I asked her about Dad, Thailand, and her life before I was born.

Then this discovery happened when Mom thought I was old enough to know.

“I was married before I met your father.”

“What?!”

When she was around 21, she met a police officer who was visiting from Bangkok. He was handsome and charming, but too charming and too handsome as the easy-on-the-eyes tend to be, but she married him anyway.

Mom always refers to him as “the policeman” and not by his name. Maybe this is where I got the idea of referring to my ex’s as Mr. Angry or Mr. Sensitive. Maybe for Mom saying his name hurt too much since after all these long years, she still refuses to answer his phone calls. And even after she told me his name, she still doesn’t use it.

During their early years, he worked security at a hospital in the city. Sometimes Mom stopped by to bring him lunch, or a snack, but since her visits were unexpected, she didn’t always get a chance to see him.

One day, after she was told by a hospital staff that the policeman was not around, she happened upon him and a pretty nurse intimately talking in the hallway. Quickly, she ducked into a corner and watched them. Her thoughts jumped like minnows in a net.

She thought about his absences, and her excuses for him, and the memory of returning home after a holiday to find that he had had someone over at their apartment. There was half-eaten food, garbage piled up, and the sense that a small social event had taken place.

Moving her anger around, as we like to do before we figure out the action we’ll take, she left the hospital, picturing the handgun the policeman kept under his pillow.

So when the policeman finally returned home, he opened the apartment door to his wife pointing a gun at his chest.

“Are you cheating on me?

“W-what? What are you talking about?”

“Are you cheating on me?”

“No, of course not, baby. Give me the gun.”

She didn’t give him the gun, unless you call pulling the trigger “giving him the gun.” Thankfully, she missed (her aim with cleavers was much better, I hear), and the gunshot cleared out the tenants in the building, as gunfire has a tendency to do.

Whenever Mom tells the story, she giggles with self-satisfied glee over how everyone screamed and ran out. How her ex-husband looked so terrified. And I’d look at her with the kind of wonder that a daughter does at her hot-headed gun-slinging mother.

Quickly, their brave landlady (and good friend), Malee, ran into the room and prevented Mom from firing off another shot.

During the next few days the policeman apologized (good), stopped talking to his favorite nurse (better), and hid the gun in a new place (best). Mom ignored him, and cried when she was alone. There was no way she was going to forgive him.

Instead, Malee and her came up with a plan. She’d run away to Ubon and meet up with Malee’s sister. As far as funds, she solved the problem by gradually selling off their household goods. Whenever the policeman asked where her sewing machine was, or the iron, or winter blankets, she’d reply, “Malee’s borrowing it.”

It was a miracle he didn’t notice that everything in their apartment was slowly disappearing.

On the day she walked away forever, she took all of his pants and cut a hole where the crotch had been. Then, she left.