After we sealed up my maternal grandmother’s ashes on that hot November day, I wondered what I actually knew about her, someone I’d only seen 6 times in my life. I thought about the category of grandmothers generally and how mine compared specifically.
Nakhon Ratchasima, also known as Khorat, is one of the North Eastern provinces. It’s the place where my grandmother was born, grew up as the youngest of many, and eventually married a monk-turned-teacher and had children. It was also the place where she finally died, and where just one of her children (my mother) and her only grandchild (me) came to lay her ashes to rest.
My grandmother’s given name was Chawb. Many Thai names are poetic words; hers was, simply and unaltered, the everyday verb, ‘to like’ or ‘to enjoy.’ In life, Chawb wasn’t like any other grandma I’d heard about: her mouth was a straight line, her first love was money, and she relished scolding people.
As I write this I mildly fear she’ll reconstitute herself and reach for me. Never speak ill of the dead–particularly those who have already left a toxic legacy.
*
My grandmother made manipulation her life’s study. The long letters she sent to England in beautiful handwritten Thai were chapters from her thesis, But I’m Your Mother; the occasional international phone calls she made, the ones which made our household tense for days afterward, were follow-up seminars. It’s a blessing that my grandmother never learned to use Skype.
Illness and death were the only things that had the power to quiet my grandmother. My mother had the chance to give her something that wouldn’t be met with a rising harangue: a truly excellent funeral and a final resting place. My mother always believed one day she’d finally be able to please my grandmother.
The funeral had happened months before, overseen by a trusted friend in Thailand. As it’s traditional for North Eastern Thai Buddhists to take the ashes of loved ones and inter them at a temple, my family and I traveled to a tiny subdistrict of Khorat, Nong Ngu Lueam, Python Marsh, so named for the many pythons winding through its rice paddies.
I took photos of the following things before the ash interring ceremony:
1. Newly harvested rice spread out to dry in the temple courtyard.
2. A baby pineapple emerging from a mass of spiky leaves.
3. Young, nubbly jackfruit.
These were for my food blog.
Everything else—my relatives animatedly chatting in Khorat dialect, the colourful temple murals–seemed too important to capture. Perhaps I was enmeshed in the fallacy that recording means you’re a gawking observer rather than a true participant: it seemed vital I was completely involved in the moment. Also, I’m a shit photographer, particularly of living, breathing subjects with actual faces and personalities.
The monks chanted in Pali, the liturgical language of Theravada Buddhism, their voices deep and rhythmic. One of the temple cats clambered over one of the monks before sitting on the platform, leg cocked, licking its balls with magnificent unconcern.
Neatly in black I looked the part yet felt a fraud; I felt no affection for the person we were honouring, few memories, and only a grudging respect. Yet I felt a strange, humble gladness for this moment, performing my part as a grandchild by carrying the framed photo of my grandmother as we walked outside to put her ashes away in the temple wall.
‘It’s so good of you to do this for grandmother,’ my mother said, ‘I’m so glad. Thank you.’
I thought, No, I wanted to do this for you, only you, swallowing down all my feelings like a whole jackfruit.
We took lunch in the hall sitting cross-legged on the floor. I could understand lunch. Lunch is always my friend. The dishes had been cooked in the temple kitchen, with portions offered to the monks before the attendees. I noted that the rice plates were the same sort of blue and white enamel tins used in trendy London cafes.
There was rice (there is almost always rice), fresh herbs and vegetables, noodles in white coils, clear soup with bitter melon, eggs in five-spice stew, and nam ya, a wonderfully hot, salty, aromatic sauce eaten with noodles. I snapped a picture of everything, set my camera down, and ate. The relief of having completed my duty and the bright feeling of knowing my mother was satisfied awakened my appetite. Save for one mouthful of nam ya containing what I suspect was someone’s tonsil stone, lunch was delicious.
(The tonsil stone was swallowed with haste before I could completely realise its horrors; perhaps I should have savoured its ripeness with Bourdainesque grit, but I just wasn’t ready for it to taste so bad.)
‘The food’s very Khorat,’ my mother explained, ‘Grandmother made food like this for us. Well seasoned. Not too much coconut milk. She was such a good cook.’
*
Grandma’s home cooking is such a cosy, delicious phrase, like warm cookies eaten straight from the baking tray, or a rich red stew made with dried home-grown chillies.
My first cousin once removed, my grandmother’s niece, wept with joy upon seeing my parents and me at the ash-interring ceremony. Because we live so far away she feared she’d never see her luk-lan, the younger generations of her family, before she died. After the ceremony she took us to her garden and brought down young coconuts from her trees, cutting them open for us to drink. There were young banana, too, and she gave us fistfuls of chillies she’d grown and dried herself.
I thought, back then, that this was how grandparents–grandmothers in particular–were supposed to behave. Grandparents are meant to be old and kind, sharing their knowledge, the years giving them wisdom and a measure of harmless eccentricity. They repeat the work of parenting their grandchildren from the comfortable distance afforded by age.
Grandparents seem closer to history, to How It Was Back Then In My Day, holding within them a source of cultural authenticity. Lineage is more than flesh: it’s the soft things which lodge themselves in the soul. The preservation of a culture and history that’s been repeatedly insulted or endured destruction becomes an act of resistance. It’s important to know who you are.
What is it about a grandmother’s cooking, though? The words evoke huge portions of comforting dishes which have been in your family for generations. I’d always slightly envied people with family recipes; they’re probably no more well fed than I am, only their forebears had the proscipience to shut recipes up in the safety of notebooks which one day might be opened by their kin. What filled the stomachs of your grandparents fed your parents and then nourishes you.
This wholesome image is, of course, rooted in the role of the unpaid home cook which is still considered a part of idealised femininity in both my cultures. It’s part of the generative aspect associated with the role of a mother. Grandmothers are, in popular narrative, supposed to behave with a concerted nurturing affection towards their grandchildren, their posterity.
*
I’m told that my grandmother and I had a brief relationship when I was 2 ½ years old.
My parents and I stayed in Thailand with her for a couple of months. Chawb thought I was cute. She’d gently touch my eyebrows, recommending an application of milk to help them grow thick and strong. She had the Yakult delivery girl come by each morning so I could have my favourite drink every day. In return, I fed her cats, doling out leftover rice and fish before stealing a handful for myself. As I wasn’t actually her responsibility she was able to play the role of doting grandmother before handing me back to my parents.
Time had, at least, mellowed the physical aspect of her rages.
My one taste-memory of Chawb’s cooking was during a 2005 visit with my father (my mother had refused to come). After an hour’s lecture on how everyone in particular had wronged her, Chawb interrupted herself to hand me a plate of rice topped with a tomato and onion omelette. I ate it as she continued her address, consuming the food anent her displeasure. It’s with some guilt that I remember being grateful for the meal while not finding it particularly enjoyable: being fed by her felt weird.
It seemed to me back then that Chawb’s abrasive personality and life ambitions didn’t quite mesh with her reputation as a highly skilled home cook, each aspect apparently existing in spite of the other. I hadn’t yet questioned the assumption that cooking was immutably bound with the role of being feminine, maternal and grandmotherly in my two cultures. Eventually I realised my own androgynous gender identity and how being raised as a girl affected me. I thought carefully about how that sat with my knowledge of unpaid and invisible work that’s carried out by and culturally associated with women.
At least some of my desires, then, came from a narrow pool of wants. What I knew about my grandmother was bound up in the ways she’d apparently failed in her roles as a parent and grandparent. I couldn’t really tell you about her as an individual person. She was never not a mother and grandmother to me. Perhaps, then, I should be kinder to her in my memories.
But there legacies which repeat themselves not in kindness or hot meals but in rage and control.
There are certain ways which we’re supposed to publicly remember our families, particularly mothers and grandmothers.
Once, I felt a twinge of envy and sadness on seeing a blog post featuring a photo of a prettily embroidered biscuit cloth which belonged, the author said, to her grandmother. So charmingly specific! How nice to have had a grandmother who gave you things like biscuit cloths, meals, kindness.
That’s the sort of thing readers long for when they look at those kinds of blogs—not only the authors’ perfect kitchens, but their apparently perfect families, the kind where people still talk to each other and where the young remember the old with a measure of fondness.
Food blogging combines several things necessary for my absurdly coddled life: food, internet, and writing. In food blogging, recipe posts sometimes become not only instructions but evocative stories (and product placement). It takes a dollop of effort to do that well, setting aside time to test the recipes, choose the right words, how much of which details to share, how to set up photos. It’s a very personal piece of media. By sharing delicious things online I give the impression I’m slightly less of a miserable bastard. It’s all about editing: I tend to leave the good bits in.
These are the bits I want to leave in when I write about my family: a grandmother who taught me how to cook the food of my heritage, a person who enriched my life not only by virtue of being my forebear but actively nourishing me with food and knowledge. She made me more Thai than Thai-ness itself. She had the same fluffy white hair framing the same stern face, and her brown hands had the same deftness to them, which she used to make the same good food but not for hurting my mother.
She cupped my face in her hands when we visited, took me to the market with her and told me the things she enjoyed, sat patiently with me as I worked at the mortar and pestle, learning her ways.
And then—then, I can blog about her. Yes, I can tell people about her, about my family, without shame.
This is not what happened. As it is, the relationship I had with my grandmother is a subject probably only suited for a food blog if it was a place for culturally displaced grandchildren trauma-bonding over intergenerational pain and meals that were never made for them.
My memories of her can’t be edited to show only the good parts because there are none. I only remember how sad she made my mother.
*
When faced with a certain character, there’s always the temptation to investigate their deepest childhood, as if those explanations will make us better understand their behaviour.
It’s cold comfort or simply none at all when we eventually learn that individuals behave differently in the same situations. It becomes If only and What if we or She or He or They had…
The facts about Chawb’s early life are scant. We don’t know the names of her parents or siblings (they were estranged). What’s certain is this: she had aspirations, was disappointed, and spent the rest of her life taking her feelings out on other people. Her husband, Vijit died early, when my mother was just a teenager. Chawb burnt their wedding photographs.
My grandmother continued to feed, clothe, and shelter her children, ensuring they were decently educated. This happened alongside being emotionally unsupportive, threatening and violent, sometimes calculatedly destroying their belongings. As soon as her children got to working age, Chawb demanded increasing payments from them. This wasn’t just basic living costs: she wanted to be generously looked after by her family, a worldview that was dated even in her generation, though not unheard of.
In her generation, women of Chawb’s background–rural and working class–were expected to work hard in the rice paddies. Many of my oldest relatives have backs bent double from labouring in the fields all their lives. Some of them are also illiterate as schooling beyond 8 years old in those very rural areas was considered unnecessary for rice farmers; thumbprints sufficed as signatures.
Social mobility depended on the usual soul-killing things: if you moved to the capital, Krungthep, your ability to look for jobs which didn’t involve manual labour would be limited by your ability to speak Central Thai, prove you had basic letters, and conduct yourself in the manner of a city person.
Despite these hardships, Thai women have always been able to own and inherit land and property. There’s still a matrifocal and matrilineal family structure and Thailand has always had many businesswomen (there’s even a goddess of commerce, Nang Kwak). In these circumstances, Chawb could have flourished: she was hard working, had an excellent command of written and spoken languages, and kept herself highly groomed. (And this, right there, is my what if and if only she.)
But what remained her lifelong goal was to receive money from her children. She was always convinced they were withholding pots of money from her in a most unfilial way.
By the time I was born my mother had settled in London with my father. Ever since I can remember, the point of any communication from Chawb was to request money. She poured words into us as if we’d produce coins in an amount proportionate to her volubility. My grandmother, you see, knew all Thai people living overseas were rich. This was news to us; we had to deal with a dodgy landlord to keep a roof over our heads, and I received financial aid as a low-income university student. We still supported her as generously as we could.
She still lied to distant relatives and said we gave her nothing, rewarding them with money pulled from the air when their loathing of us pleased her.
Eventually I realised that money was the form of love that Chawb found most reliable. She never really communicated any joy or need that wasn’t to do with money. I don’t know what her favourite smell was, or the books she liked.
At some point during the last century, Chawb largely dispensed with expected niceties like small talk. Instead of the usual, ‘Hello, how are you, have you eaten?’ that heads off many conversations in Thailand, she’d immediately announce that her next door neighbour had a face like a one-eyed gecko and was probably a krasue (a floating, flesh-eating ghost with the head of a woman attached to trailing viscera).
I was 21 when she last saw me. We hadn’t seen each other for 5 years. She snapped at my mother, barely acknowledged me and my father. Chawb wanted us to know she was deeply irritated by an incident where her cousins in Khorat snubbed her, an incident which happened literally half a century ago. Descriptions of these cousins’ various physical deformities and levels of emotional inadequacy filled the entire afternoon.
When I became visibly upset at how she was treating us, my grandmother stopped. She was surprised and confused–she wasn’t personally giving me any abuse, she said. She’d never done nothing wrong, it was just other people who’d betrayed her.
My parents felt that making me sit next to my grandmother, pose for a photo with her, and give her a roll of cash was the best thing to do in this situation. Family, you see.
Chawb blessed me with sai sin, a sacred thread bracelet. She rolled the thread against my wrist and wished me well, hoping that I would be happy.
She was ash and bone next time I saw her.
*
My grandmother performed all of her housework and some of her parenting with unsmiling competence. She had the capacity for violence. She rejected her role as an unwaged nurturer and guardian, demanding payment for work that’s usually unrecognised. As an old woman, she refused to submit to being looked after. As far as my grandmother was concerned, her work on this poor earth was done: she had given life.
In my two cultures, if mothers refuse to be nurturing and don’t participate in emotional work, they’re viewed as inadequate, unnatural, cruel. (We tend not to judge fathers so harshly—in popular cultural narratives, the worst he can do is not exercise his authority properly.)
What mothers and grandmothers are expected to create, in addition to all the practical tasks they complete, is a particular mood in their family. It’s much more than the secure emotional base to which all humans are entitled; it’s excellent home-cooked meals on the table made and served with a smile just because she loves you, patiently doing all the figuring out and explanations of difficult feelings, a mother’s love, a mother’s care. It’s work, even if no touchable item emerges from the other end.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on her, then, considering she had a punishing standard to live up to.
But even when attempting to reconsider my grandmother through a fairer lense, I can’t bring myself to think of her as my family’s proto-feminist working class heroine. It’s one thing to be a surly, authoritative, and excellent old woman; it’s another to be verbally and physically abusive while actively despising your family.
There also remains the obvious fact that parents hold significant institutional and emotional power over their children. Parents and parent-figures of every gender, culture and class are capable of abuse. The exact amount of anger, control, and contempt may vary somewhat because of these factors, but all the ingredients are there, and their potency isn’t lessened by delicious home-cooked meals or a nice word now and then. In fact, swinging between solicitous affection and cold, harsh punishment often produces its own kind of damage.
Unless you’ve lived it firsthand or secondhand, you’ll never know what it’s like to live in a family like that, how your idea of normality is re-written. You know the signs and symbols: the quiet question that lies coiled within the spoken one, and what will happen to you if you can’t be a child who’s mild and good–
(but they can’t control whether they scream at you or turn away from you with the crimp of loathing in their face, what do you expect when you’re a bad child?)
–you’re still alive and that means it’s alright, you have food in your belly so it’s fine, it’s not so bad, and you’re meant to love your mothers, anyway.
My mother hates cooking as she associates it with pain: she’s both chilli-sensitive and took her first cooking lessons from Chawb. She fed me perfectly well throughout my childhood but was always apologetic about her food, setting meals down before me while saying Well, this is all I can do for you.
These are also the words she’s used to explain and justify her parenting decisions towards me, her only child. Where her own mother was neglectful, my mother wanted to keep me as close as possible. Our relationship improved immensely when I packed up my things and left home one day when I was 22. My audacity startled both my parents into self-reflection. I, in turn, had therapy. We made our decisions.
When we see each other, we bring each other things we’ve cooked, interesting ingredients we think the other will enjoy. If we’re meeting at the Thai temple, my parents gently boast about me: ‘Look! Our child made this cake for us!’
My father cooks Thai food professionally and is glad I’m taking a sincere interest in the food of our heritage, though getting exact recipes is a little difficult (‘So, how much fish sauce, Daddy?’ ‘Oh, you know—enough.’ ‘Right. And how much palm sugar?’ ‘Yes.’). My mother is content that we can both feed her well. She, in turn, makes us excellent drinks: perfect Thai tea with milk, sweet soya milk fresh from the pot.
Some things are your birthright, but you must find and wield them yourself. Learning to be Thai in Britain is difficult. My parents always spoke Thai to me and gave me Thai meals; while there were certainly moments when they bemoaned my acquired farang-ness, they also acknowledged that my two-passport Thai-ness was going to turn out differently.
For all its joys I don’t–can’t ever–think of Thailand as my permanent physical home, while I find dominant British culture to be one of the world’s most polite poisons. The cure for cultural displacement and fears of inauthenticity means constantly working on my hyphenated identity, tempering one aspect with the other.
This is why I keep my food blog. Because I’m a blogger and a millennial, you can accuse me of possessing a double-concentrate of all the purported faults of my class (narcissism, lack of emotional depth, oversharing), and I’ll just nod and do the shame dance. Undoubtedly there’s truth in those statements.
What’s also true is that I record the food I like to eat, interesting techniques, and the recipes my parents have given me. The internet is forever and it may as well be in my favour: this way, my family’s recipes will be retrievable, easily shared, and well-preserved. I don’t have the legacy of a soft-palmed grandmother or a firm cultural identity, but that doesn’t preclude a future of being proud and well-fed. It suits me well. I have made my decision.
