as ruthless as Barnum would ever be, and Coffin, despite his Presbyterian posturing, could hear the ring of bullion at ten miles. Hunter knew he’d spotted a goldmine the afternoon he saw us, as he put it, swimming in the Meklong River like some strange animal with two heads and four arms, and Coffin, having wheedled the affections of King Rama III, knew how to grease the path whether it wanted greasing or not. The king’s permission was secured. We were promised a salary and a chance to see the world. My mother, who would be losing not only her two oldest sons but their income as well, was offered three hundred pounds. She did not say no.
When I think of her now I see her as she was then, as though time had simply stopped in Meklong when we left it. And more and more, I find myself remembering not the person I once knew in life but the one I came to know in dreams. I’d seen her in my sleep, talked with her, scores of times over the years, but it wasn’t until after her death that I realized that those ghostly meetings—without the ballast of flesh and blood to balance them—had quietly taken over the territory of the past. Now, when I thought of her, I found it easier to recall the person I’d seen standing in the moonlight by the tobacco sheds in a dream than I did the distant figure crying on the pier in Bangkok in 1829 as the boat carrying her two boys and their pet python moved off into the harbor.
If someone had told us we would never see her again, we would nothave believed them. But then, how many of us, stopped by some Elijah on the pier when we were young, would have believed that our lives would take the turns they did?
When she was five or six, my Nannie began asking about her grandparents, as children will. She wanted to know about her grandmother in particular—what she looked like, whether she got mad at us when we were boys—and Eng and I did our best. We dusted off the old anecdotes, untangled their strings, made them jump about. We described the Grand Palace in Bangkok, with its blue-and-orange tiled ceilings and gold mosaic walls. We told the tale of King Trailok’s beloved boatman who, upon running his lord’s barge aground on one of the bars of the river, insisted, over his lord’s offers of leniency, on being put to death. We repeated again the threadbare tale of how our mother, a fishmonger’s wife, sent away the king’s physicians who wanted to separate us at birth, how this quietest of women, who often smiled but seldom spoke, had stood at the door of our houseboat, a stick she’d taken from the fire in one hand and the knife my father used for cleaning fish in the other, and told them to leave.
Nannie’s curiosity was limitless; not so my inventiveness. Strangely touched by her interest in a woman she had never met, aware as well of how much it would have meant to our mother to know that a daughter of ours would one day ask about her, I struggled on, filling in the chinks as necessary, tidying up the thatching, feeling all the while that my memory—our memory, for Eng remembered even less than I—had betrayed us all. This was not our mother. In the age-old battle between language and time, I thought to myself, neither wins. Time hurries off with its prizes; our words are all that’s left us.
But then something unexpected happened. As we continued to tell our tales over the course of those two weeks, the inadequacy of our words became less troubling, their failure to capture the truth less obvious. They came to seem, if not true, then good approximations of the truth, and so, our consciences partially salved, we sailed on; we offered them to the children who gathered in the parlor by the old double chairevery evening to listen—stories that had never really happened, about people who had never quite lived—and they, by some miracle of transubstantiation greater than all the breads and fishes, took the stories we told and fashioned them into something very much like truth.
When I think of her now I see her as she was then, as though time had simply stopped in Meklong when we left it. And more and more, I find myself remembering not the person I once knew in life but the one I came to know in dreams. I’d seen her in my sleep, talked with her, scores of times over the years, but it wasn’t until after her death that I realized that those ghostly meetings—without the ballast of flesh and blood to balance them—had quietly taken over the territory of the past. Now, when I thought of her, I found it easier to recall the person I’d seen standing in the moonlight by the tobacco sheds in a dream than I did the distant figure crying on the pier in Bangkok in 1829 as the boat carrying her two boys and their pet python moved off into the harbor.
If someone had told us we would never see her again, we would nothave believed them. But then, how many of us, stopped by some Elijah on the pier when we were young, would have believed that our lives would take the turns they did?
When she was five or six, my Nannie began asking about her grandparents, as children will. She wanted to know about her grandmother in particular—what she looked like, whether she got mad at us when we were boys—and Eng and I did our best. We dusted off the old anecdotes, untangled their strings, made them jump about. We described the Grand Palace in Bangkok, with its blue-and-orange tiled ceilings and gold mosaic walls. We told the tale of King Trailok’s beloved boatman who, upon running his lord’s barge aground on one of the bars of the river, insisted, over his lord’s offers of leniency, on being put to death. We repeated again the threadbare tale of how our mother, a fishmonger’s wife, sent away the king’s physicians who wanted to separate us at birth, how this quietest of women, who often smiled but seldom spoke, had stood at the door of our houseboat, a stick she’d taken from the fire in one hand and the knife my father used for cleaning fish in the other, and told them to leave.
Nannie’s curiosity was limitless; not so my inventiveness. Strangely touched by her interest in a woman she had never met, aware as well of how much it would have meant to our mother to know that a daughter of ours would one day ask about her, I struggled on, filling in the chinks as necessary, tidying up the thatching, feeling all the while that my memory—our memory, for Eng remembered even less than I—had betrayed us all. This was not our mother. In the age-old battle between language and time, I thought to myself, neither wins. Time hurries off with its prizes; our words are all that’s left us.
But then something unexpected happened. As we continued to tell our tales over the course of those two weeks, the inadequacy of our words became less troubling, their failure to capture the truth less obvious. They came to seem, if not true, then good approximations of the truth, and so, our consciences partially salved, we sailed on; we offered them to the children who gathered in the parlor by the old double chairevery evening to listen—stories that had never really happened, about people who had never quite lived—and they, by some miracle of transubstantiation greater than all the breads and fishes, took the stories we told and fashioned them into something very much like truth.
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