June: Kinship

of barbed nitwittery in the wild

This month’s newsletter, read aloud.

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“Does anyone speak English there?” my nephew asked.

“Not really,” I said via video call, days before he departed for Thailand—specifically, Mom’s village—for the first time.

Silence.

“Well, what about AC? Is there AC?”

“Not in your room,” I smirked. “There’s AC in the bedroom Mom and I will share, but nowhere else.”

“Does the house have WiFi?”

Sure, I said. There was last time. But as it turned out, two years ago is like a lifetime in Asia, so there was no internet. Instead, he used the neighbor’s ~ with permission, of course.

D and me at Wat Po, Bangkok, 2026

I tried to anticipate what the trip would be like before I joined them, but I failed on all accounts. I knew there would be bonding time between Donovan and me, but that’s an abstract thought that sits as coldly, and yet as comfortably, as a blinking cursor.

Out of all my nieces and nephews (my brother has five children: two boys and three girls, the youngest of whom is four), Donovan shows the most interest in his Thai side. He wanted to make the journey, and when I was out visiting Tennessee a few years ago, we spoke the most, too.

But this was the two-year-old that I remembered from a family holiday to Austria, who pooped his pants while we were out sightseeing, causing my brother to hail a taxi with him back to the hotel unbeknownst to the rest of us. This was the kid whose arm was in a cast because his older brother pushed him out of the top bunk bed. And I was convinced he was going to be a psychopath when I walked into the hotel room and saw him gleefully tangling his grandma up with a telephone cord.

When I arrived in Lamphun, D was in dire need of a rescue. He had endured country living with a bunch of geriatrics by watching snakehead fish in the dirty canal behind the house. He leaned heavily on a translation app. There were a couple of day trips, but little else. Both my brother and I had warned it would be boring.

And it was boring, but we tried. He eventually waded into the canal—daily—armed with a jury-rigged fish net. D stared at the murky waters hoping to nab a snakehead. He caught a smaller one.

The humidity was just as oppressive as the fruit flies hovering around the food left out in the living room, the outdoor kitchen, and on the picnic tables in front of my aunt’s beauty salon. The plastic on the seat cushions in the living room stuck to the backs of my legs while Thai TV played in the foreground. Donovan designated one of the toilets “the scary bathroom” due to its all-maroon color scheme.

Notable events were Mom’s family and friends congregating around large vats of kuai tiao and khanom jeen nam ngiao. Meanwhile the main events for D and me were cleaning the concrete fish pots and him finding a toad in his trainers.

If we were in town, we could walk somewhere. Instead, we relied on my cousin or her husband to take us somewhere. Anywhere.

Mom and sister up front, then from L to R, D, my cousin’s husband Guide, Uncle Noop, Great Aunt, Aunt Sanglaa and cousin Ung…

We got along. It was easy to fall into a kind of camaraderie born out of circumstances, more out of culture than of blood. He started by insulting my intelligence, to which I responded in kind. It became our own language then, of barbed nitwittery. We snickered like Beavis and Butt-Head.

He played every Asian stereotype, drank all the sugary drinks, and pushed the limits of decorum through belching and farting. I wasn’t so much interested in being the cool aunt (as I was already familiar with the demeanor of teenage boys at school) as I was in observing these creatures in the wild. It was an opportunity not to be missed.

Yet for days, I’d have vivid nightmares about my mom and Donovan. I’m sure it was my mind trying to make sense of the different dynamics between my 79-year-old mom, me, and my brother’s 18-year-old son. If it was just my mom and me, I know exactly how the visit would have gone because we’ve been doing it for years.

But with Donovan, I had to get out of my familiar groove. I could show him sights that I knew, but I also had to try new things and make an effort. It was very different from showing my husband or entertaining a friend. I was also sharing with my nephew this outsider experience that I’ve endured as an American in my mom’s family. And now he knows where Grandma comes from: the poverty, the world she escaped.

When we laughed the hardest, it was after we discovered my cousin had booked us a hotel in Bangkok that was notoriously haunted. I happened upon this during a Google autofill search. But we weren’t cracking up from hearing that guests saw an apparition reading a book on the bed, or that sobbing could be heard from the bathroom ~ it was the one-liner we came up with: “At least we’re not in Lamphun.”