Am I Thai? Indian? American? Well, Yes, But Also No
It starts like this: I was born in the US of A. We moved back here—Thailand—when I was six years old. My parents are Thai. Yeah, my mom too, even if she doesn’t look how people expect. She’s Indian-Thai. No, that doesn’t mean half-Indian-half-Thai; I’m half-Indian-half-Thai. It means her great-grandparents emigrated to Thailand from what is now Pakistan. Where in Pakistan? I… actually have no idea. My grandma, my Nanima, speaks perfect, sometimes faintly formal Thai, but often switches into Punjabi mid-sentence—I understand enough to sometimes laugh unexpectedly at a joke, but not enough to always know what a conversation is about. I’ve been to India once, when I was seven; my aunt told me last year that I fit into a Namdhari gurdwara with surprising grace, white cotton chuni bobby-pinned to my slippery hair, but it was only my second time there.
Anyway. I’m half-Indian-half-Thai. I never think of myself as American. Except, I am, legally. Thai-American? I’m not Indian anything. Legally speaking. But legalities and identities travel different roads, and I am far more interested in exploring the latter. I’m Thai before most things—and yet English is the language I’m confident in. I was recently reminded by one of my best friends that I might be convincing myself my Thai is worse than it is.
Thai is a language of flourishes and redundancies. It rolls nimbly off my tongue, shaped by degrees of formality basically defined by how much older than you someone is. Honorifics are not gendered—instead, you have to take a wild stab at whether someone is perhaps too old to be your sibling but younger than your parents (that’s one term), or old enough to be offended if you address them like they’re younger than they are but not old enough to be a grandparent (that’s another)… I’m not exaggerating! People are offended if you speak to them too familiarly, if they’re significantly older than you, because it’s disrespectful. Conversely, they’re also very much offended if you aim too high, age-wise, because then you’re implying they look old!
I don’t fit into Thai social circles. I sound young when I speak Thai, because so much of my use of the language was shaped by my very traditional Thai grandmother. My manners are impeccable, and I can do small talk like a native speaker, but casual and colloquial I am not. It seems to endear me to people, though. Thai, when you’re accustomed to speaking to elders, is deferent without being diffident. It softens you. The restraint to it, though, used to frustrate the Indian side of my family, before I learned to loosen up in conversation with them.
Thailand’s Indian diaspora speaks Thai in a way that is structurally no different from standard Thai and yet somehow entirely their own. The formalities are stripped away. You address an elder the way you would anyone else, without the customary suffixes that show respect, instead demonstrating your respect every other way. It should sound rude, like sitting at the dinner table without any please’s and thank you’s, but it doesn’t. Your body language, word choice, tone, and approach say all that needs to be said. I’m terrible at it.
I’m Buddhist, nominally? Agnostic might be more accurate. I pray every night before bed, more ritual and comfort than faith. My mom was raised Sikh, grew up in a Seventh-day Adventist school. Occasionally I bring up some intellectual curiosity in a concept vaguely theological and I get to watch the teenaged version of her who argued stubbornly and vicariously with her bible teacher rise up to argue heartily with me.
Visiting temples, something my family does regularly if not frequently, always fills me with a complicated little tangle of warmth. They’re beautiful, for one. There’s one close to work that is hundreds of years old, a stunning structure of brick and delicately carved wood. Awe-inspiring detail and fading murals on the walls. I am perhaps less comfortable in these spaces than my parents, but there are things I love about it.
Willing as I am to respect customs and etiquette, I’m not incredibly keen on ceremonies. They often don’t make sense to me; relics of bygone times, steeped in the preservation of traditions that are only remembered and not understood. But we once went to a temple that held a guided prayer—there was a section, more elaborate than any of its kind I’ve ever heard, that was simply this group of strangers being led, in plain language, through wishing good things upon every being in existence. Demons and ghosts. Wayward souls. The lost, the troubled. Family. Loved ones. Your own self. And my favorite—anyone you have ever hurt or wronged, whether you realized it or not. You wish them happiness, peace, and nothing but good things—and then, once they are happy and well, you hope perhaps they will forgive you. So that it will be another bit of peace upon their lives, and the wishing of it some peace for yours.
I walked out of there with a renewed understanding of why it all matters.
I’m queer. This is a complicated one. And not, at the same time. I don’t feel like I came out to my parents as much as I just told them what I’d realized as soon as I realized it. My mom teases me for my taste occasionally while my dad huffs and puffs over how he now has to shoot suspicious protective-dad-looks at EVERYONE, not just the guys. I’m not out to the rest of my family yet, who, now that all my older cousins are either married or engaged, are starting to be very curious about my dating prospects. I would be the first openly queer person in my immediate family. My parents always tell me it’ll be far less of a fuss than I imagine. They, the first intercultural couple in the community, broke through so many barriers, and were revolutionary in a way I still haven’t fully wrapped my head around. That is another story, and their own. But revolution runs in my blood, is my point, as well as firsts, and at this point no one really expects me to be quite what they expect. Regardless, I am holding everyone off at the moment by keeping them at varying levels of concern over my career prospects instead.
I kid. Mostly. But this is where I have to talk about the tattoo artist part—my life would be terribly incomplete without the tattoo artist part.
I work in a tattoo studio. Grew up in one, really. If you happened to be passing by a very specific street at a very specific date, you may have peered through a window and spotted a little girl—probably in a tutu—tucked into a little cranny on our equivalent of take-your-kid-to-work day, drawing with one of the free tattooers or watching Barney on headphones on a little DVD player. I’m told I used to hop up occasionally to dance enthusiastically along to the songs, much to the befuddlement of everyone present.
I am very rarely scared of people. I can be shy and tend towards being quiet, unless I know you or my brain is in work-mode—but regardless of how comfortable I am, I am not often afraid. I was raised amidst scary-looking, leather-clad, big, loud, outwardly-intimidating people, the kindest, sweetest people I know. Everything I know has taught me that the people the world assumes are frightening are the same who used to cook with my mom and pick me up at school with her on Thursdays, who howled with laughter at my gleeful four-year-old antics, who helped us move and came to see us off at the airport before we made the flight across the world. If there’s anything I have learned, it’s that the people the world would have you be afraid of are not the ones who deserve that fear.
After a lifetime surrounded by it and a couple years immersed in the craft, I managed to fall in love with every single aspect of the job… except the actual tattooing. Don’t know how I managed that. I have, nevertheless, so far done thirteen tattoos. The incredible thing about working in a tattoo shop is the sheer diversity of the people I have had the privilege of getting to meet and talk to and connect with, even just for a little while. I’ve chatted with everyone from politsci professors to school librarians, musicians and therapists and animators and computer engineers. I have fallen utterly in love with traditional coil tattoo machines, made stencils and been trained to check needles and disinfect stations, and had my music taste utterly taken over by the 80s new wave I grew up with. And a side of modern indie/folk. Whatever that’s about.
I also grew up surrounded by art glass. I have been making pieces since I was bitty. Have you ever seen Pandora beads? Yeah. What I do these days is like that. It’s a wonderful, fascinating, occasionally infuriating process. Glass as a material has an astounding amount of personality. It is wont, at least when doing lampwork, to explode in your face—sometimes without explanation. It ‘shocks,’ cracking or shattering dramatically, if exposed to extreme temperatures (i.e. your torch flame, or, you know, if said glass was recently molten, air). Every completed bead requires ‘an annealing process to relieve internal stresses.’ Absolute diva of a substance. I have also begun to learn silversmithing, and am beginning to consider a career in jewelry making.
Let’s see. What else makes up a person’s identity? I was homeschooled—or, I DIY-ed my own education, as a friend put it. A few years of primary school, before my parents noticed the slow death of my innate curiosity—and then independent research projects and online curricula, culminating in almost three years of strong-arming my way solo through trig and chem and graduating high school with a 4.0, thank you very much. I have also been a dressage rider, a climate activist; I do typography and photography; I told one of my dad’s friends, at around three years old, that I wanted to grow up to be a little, tiny giraffe. I am only getting started. With the things I will be, not my transformation into a tiny giraffe.
I am also, as you might have guessed at this point, a writer. I guess that, really, is where this starts.
Whatever all this adds up to, whatever I left out, I am myself. I think it’s amazing that I get my whole life to figure out what that means.