4

THAILAND

Your first impression of Thailand depends upon whom you ask. There are beaches; there are brothels; there are noodles; there are durian, a round, spiky fruit that smells like a noxious gym sock. There are rain forests full of banana trees and elephants. Bald monks hug smartphones and Starbucks cups, varying shades of orange fabric draped over their skinny bodies. An aging American man who stayed after the Vietnam War runs a bar with billiard tables for the tourists; he holds fast to his tight-skinned wife, a woman years his junior. A family of six rides a motorcycle; five smoosh together, back to chest, and the youngest rides in a plastic bucket, his mother holding the bucket to the side of the motorcycle by the handle. There are dentists and doctors with degrees from Europe and North America who choose to practice their vocation here. There are almost one hundred English-speaking private schools in the country for expatriate children.

And this temporary home comes with some familiarity.

In 2007 we stayed in the northern city of Chiang Mai for two months. We lived in Turkey at the time, and after I was diagnosed with severe depression, it was suggested that we visit this medium-sized city tucked into the mountains and misty forests of Southeast Asia as therapy. The perplexingly sizable expat population includes therapists and psychiatrists who speak English and can prescribe low-cost antidepressants with aplomb. It is cheaper to fly across five time zones and rent a house for two months than to travel back to the States and deal with health insurance, wait times, and medical red tape.

In those days, our oldest was two years old and I was in the second trimester with our second. We rented a house in the suburbs, a psychiatrist prescribed me medication, and I met with a therapist three times a week. We ate food not found in Turkey, we fed cucumbers to elephants, and we browsed English bookstores meant for expatriate student backpackers. I bought fabric from the night market to bring back to our apartment on the Aegean Sea and sew into curtains and pillows. We took advantage of cheap prenatal care and discovered that Reed was a boy. He was twenty-four weeks into gestation when we returned to Turkey; there I survived on antidepressants, memories of Chiang Mai, and occasional Thai-based therapy visits via Skype for the next three years.

In Oregon, I had subscribed to a private e-mail list for expats in Chiang Mai in search of temporary housing for the Thailand leg of our trip. Perhaps we’d find an expat family’s home to house-sit while they visited their home country. We could find a guesthouse if nothing else was available, but there was something endearing about the idea of watching over someone else’s bookshelves, frying pans, and soap dispensers. I placed an ad in the e-mail group.

A woman named Muriel needed what we offered; she was returning to the States for medical reasons and needed a house sitter. She lived in the same quiet suburbs where we had lived seven years earlier. It was ideal, except that she was in her seventies and her house didn’t have toys. I waited for another offer, but when none came, we replied to Muriel and agreed to stay.

Muriel’s house—this will be our home in northern Thailand.

The plane lands in the early afternoon, and we grossly overpay a taxi driver to take us to the house, a savvy entrepreneur who knows the cash value of white-faced travelers fresh off the plane. (“Where you from?” Oregon and Texas. “Okay, I take you because Dallas Cowboys.”) En route, I daydream about dumping the contents of our backpacks into a washing machine. I am eager for coffeemakers and unpacking our toiletries onto a bathroom shelf after our month of nomadically stirring instant coffee into lukewarm water. I want the kids to make progress on their grammar, their math. I want to cook.

Muriel’s Thai friend unlocks the front door, shows us the house, hands us keys, and warns us that her car needs servicing and to use it with caution. Tall ceramic vases ensconce top-heavy silk flowers; a knee-high bejeweled elephant sits next to a lightweight rattan couch; breakable empty tchotchke bowls rest on the fragile glass coffee table. Glass shelves encased with doors hold hefty volumes of Amish fiction, figurines of plump peasant children, and collector’s plates signifying anniversaries of varying importance (the marriage of Prince William and Kate Middleton; Christmas at Disneyland, 1981). Muriel’s final e-mail to me asked us to please make ourselves at home, but to take note that the dinner dishes are a complete set, and if one should break, we are responsible for replacing the entire imported set.

Everything is also pink. Pink dishes, pink vases, pink silk flowers, pink elephant, pink floor tile, pink bathroom walls, pink bathroom sinks, pink marbled kitchen counters. Everything is some shade of pink.

Thai it isn’t. But it is cheap. Kyle parks the breakables above the kitchen cabinets and refrigerator, and we take Muriel’s car to a nearby big-box store because, oddly enough, the house has no sheets or pillows. Also, we are out of soap. I wander the store that reminds me of a Kmart from my childhood, and I cry because I am so tired and because I cannot find soap I like. Tate begs for expensive turquoise sheets, and we find plastic bowls, plates, and cups to replace Muriel’s dinner dishes we would inevitably break. We gawk at duck beak and pig uterus shrink-wrapped in the meat department, snap photos with our phones, and text them to family back home. The store smells like salty ocean and cheap plastic. For dinner, we eat greasy fried chicken in the dining area.

We drive home, stretch our new sheets across the master bedroom mattress, and crawl onto the plastic, rococoesque bed straight out of a gawdy Caesars Palace bedroom. I glance at my nightstand on the left, jump out of bed, and remove the little porcelain girl staring at me with psychotic eyes. I hide her in the plastic rococo wardrobe across the room.

The next morning, while braiding Tate’s hair on our bed, the slats underneath the mattress suddenly snap and drop us to the floor, into the center of the monstrous yellowed plastic bed frame. Kyle and I drag the mattress to the other side of the bedroom floor, where we will now sleep until we leave this house.

The crimson-colored velour bedspread pills miniscule balls of fuzz in the nooks and crannies of our clothes (which I will still pull from my pajama pants four months later in Morocco). Geckos scamper across the floors, walls, and ceilings—this is the only thing remotely Thai about our bedroom. I can hear their little feet at night, inches from my body where I sleep.

Chiang Mai is the second-largest city in Thailand, the original seat of the Lan Na Kingdom, which reigned in 1296 and for five hundred more years. It’s known for its three hundred Buddhist temples, their roofs like pointed pushpins embedded across the city’s landscape, nestled between trees and cafés, neighborhoods and back alleys. There is an ancient moat enclosing the city center, drawing a seven-hundred-year-old fence around travel agency storefronts, burger chains, massage parlors, Mexican restaurants, dentist offices, women selling smoothies from blenders on wheeled carts, expensive French restaurants, and coffee shops with free Wi-Fi. Motorcycles are ubiquitous, the chosen cheap travel method of the masses. Second in popularity are songthaews, red pickup trucks with benches along the length of their beds and enclosed with tall roofs, the shared taxi system used by both tourists and locals. These, plus tuk-tuks, the three-wheeled motorbike taxis, all vie for space on Chiang Mai roads, their drivers using horns merely to let others know of their presence, not to tell them to move. It’s a jarring practice to a Western driver new to these streets.

Chiang Mai is ancient; Chiang Mai is modern. It is Buddhist monks and smoothies from electric blenders. There are five Starbucks coffee shops in the city of fewer than four hundred thousand people, an impressive concentration outside the United States. The city is a popular respite for vagabonds in need of cheap accommodations and Western creature comforts.

It’s also home to the second-largest concentration of Buddhists in the world, and its streets are filled with pilgrims during the Songkran and Loy Krathong festivals. At night, the old city center beams a fluorescent glow from carts selling mango sticky rice, coconut soup, knockoff Birkenstock sandals, and flowing sarong-style pants bought only by tourists. From makeshift outdoor corner studios, artists sketch portraits of children in photos to be sent home as souvenirs for grandparents. T-shirts are silk-screened with beer logos, Che Guevara, and the phrase “Same same but different,” vernacular used by vendors as an answer to a potential buyer’s question about the validity of the brand-name item for sale. A loose translation is: It is, and also, it is not. This phrase summarizes Chiang Mai in a nutshell. It smells of familiarity, but it also really, truly doesn’t. It feels like home, and yet it always surprises.

I wish I were a more adventurous eater. I will eat spices and peppers with poised composure, but I hesitate at unidentifiable meats even when I’m famished. My plate will pile with vegetables and meats and sauces so long as none of it smiles at me. Edible creatures must also be solidly dead, the overriding reason why I avoided scorpions on a stick on Wangfujing Street in Beijing, still fighting for life and blindly swatting their pincers in the air. Never put things down your gullet that could slash it in final vengeance on the way down—this is my gastronomic philosophy.

Tonight, I am hungry. A novice traveler could write an entire book solely devoted to the foreign cuisine offerings of northern Thailand, beginning in its French cafés and pâtisseries—scents of caramelized sugar and baked croissants wafting out their open doors reminding you of a Parisian boulevard—and ending with its offering of fish and chips served on the back porch of a neoclassical Georgian plantation home, crickets singing in the night air like a southern summer. A traveler can dine on pineapple pancakes under banana trees for breakfast, green chiles rellenos and margaritas for lunch, and rib-eye steaks with mashed potatoes and pints of German lager for dinner. Our wallets would be empty if we feasted only on foreign food, which is why it is best in Chiang Mai, as it generally is everywhere, to stick to local fare.

Thai food tastes like ocean and timeworn tradition, fields of basil and groves of mango. Streetwise cooks in aprons and flip-flops stir salty tamarind through rice noodles and hand patrons limes to squeeze over their bowls. Paired with glugs of Singha bubbling water, and it is the best three-dollar investment of your life.

There are passion fruit smoothies from street vendors and strawberry ice cream churned along late-night touristy streets; there is the gaeng khae soup with chiles and miso from the cheap diner in our quiet suburb, so spicy it makes me cry. My eyes water as it’s placed on the table, even after my request for no spice. This is Thai food.

Tonight, we find a hovel of a shop with the plain name of Cooking Love, tucked deep into the side streets in the old city center. Guidebooks and travel writers rave over this mom-and-pop eatery, and here on our first visit, the owner brings our children over to watch the kitchen chaos. The three of them tiptoe on chairs and peer over the Plexiglas shell.

“Hey! A ten-minute date,” Kyle jokes. Children are welcome to be children here in Thailand. Their curiosity is well received, and it proffers us a few minutes of adult conversation.

“Don’t you wonder about places like this?” Kyle says. “What’s this family’s backstory? How long have they been running this place? What was the tipping point that made it so popular?”

I watch the mom and son work in tandem in the kitchen, flash-frying vegetables in a wok and stirring milky-green curry in a stockpot. The teenage daughter takes an order from a table of European twenty-somethings. An old wrinkled man with a toothless grin, presumably the owner’s father, welcomes patrons at the entrance, takes their shoes, and meticulously places them on shelves.

“I wonder if that guy was the one who started this place,” I say, pointing to the elderly man. I picture him young and spritely, scooping bowls of rice and welcoming curious new guests. He smiles and nods at me. I nod back.

“I wonder if the whole family lives here too,” Kyle says, just as I was speculating the same thing. I glance at the back of the restaurant, where a curtain hides a mysterious back half, and I imagine a living room and residential kitchen.

Photos of previous customers wallpaper the walls, Polaroids signed, dated, and faded. The four-top next to us speaks Russian, and on the other side are Australians. The cook brings us our orders, and I dip my spoon into the green curry, glide it out between my lips, and close my eyes. The kids eagerly spoon their plates of chicken fried rice, and Kyle buries his chopsticks into noodles. Steam rises from our plates. Our table overflows with bowls and there are leftovers, and our total bill is ten dollars.

I could not lead anyone there, but thanks to Kyle’s innate sense of direction, we dine there ten times over the next month, following the scent of its tom kha gai like hypnotized cartoon characters. The grandfather eagerly takes our shoes every time, welcomes us to his family establishment as though we are old friends. On our fifth visit, Kyle says, “I’m already sorry for my future self who no longer has this food.”

The family that runs this establishment has a special seat in heaven at the right hand of God. I’m sure of it. They welcome us into their home, the most sacred of places, with the taking of shoes and the scooping of rice.

I am overdue for a dip back into the waters of cheap counseling and decide to treat myself to a checkup. The therapist with whom I met for two months during our original visit to Thailand has retired to his home in Michigan, but the center where he worked is still here in Chiang Mai. I’ve never met with a spiritual director before, but a writer friend of mine back in the States swears by regular meetings with hers, and there are a few available at this center as a service.

This afternoon, I sit in the office of a silver-haired, quiet-spoken woman named Nora. Her office is a simple converted bedroom in the corner of a house-turned-well-being-center. A couch and armchairs are centered around a coffee table, icons and paintings of St. Francis on the walls, and art supplies on shelves. From my chair, I watch her walk silently around the office, gathering a legal pad, pens, sheets of drawing paper. She sits down, smiles at me, and doesn’t move. I feel like a teenager on her first job interview, not sure if I am supposed to talk first. Should I have come equipped with a laundry list of concerns? Would she begin by asking about my childhood? This is not counseling, and I have no idea what to expect from an hour with a spiritual director. Do I make the first move? I sit there, smile back, look around the room.

After an eternity of silence, Nora says quietly, “I’m ready when you are.” I shift my eyes back to her, and she hasn’t moved. She is still smiling at me.

I decide that candor is probably best, that I will never see this woman again after this month. “I’m honestly not sure why I’m here, other than I feel like I could use some spiritual direction in my life.” This is the truth.

“Why do you feel that way?” Nora asks.

I sit for a few seconds, because this is a good question. I’m not terribly sure, other than my soul is weary, my usual recipe of prayer and reflecting on passages from the Bible isn’t inspiring me, and I sense a gaping, run-ragged hole in my soul where mature wisdom should be. Also, I don’t know where my home is, where I might really belong.

Years have passed since I last felt poured-into, I tell her, and I have not bothered to seek it out. I have embarked on this year of travel, at age thirty-seven, feeling less confident than I did a decade ago about what I believe to be true, and how that truth intersects with who I am. I am weary from game playing and formulaic answers, and the evangelical-Christian hat that I have worn daily with every outfit since I was fourteen feels too small, headache inducing. I fidget daily in its discomfort, but I don’t know how to exchange it, how it should be resized. Perhaps I can stitch a new hat from scraps I find scattered around the globe, I suggest. Perhaps she could be my milliner, maybe help me find the first scrap, floating somewhere along the sidewalks of old Chiang Mai.

I tell her this, and she only smiles.

Also, I started this year of globe trekking confident that traveling was the right thing to do, but somehow, that confidence hadn’t come with me in my pack. I feel fidgety and lost.

She only smiles.

“I need spiritual direction because I feel like I can’t find my compass, the thing that points me home. Also, the hat I’ve worn for over twenty years doesn’t fit anymore, and I want to find a new one,” I repeat.

Nora nods this time. “You think I can help you find a compass and a hat?”

“I’m not sure. But I’m willing to pay you twenty bucks a chat to see if you can help,” I reply.

“I think it’s good you’re here,” she says. “Because we all lose our way every now and then. Sometimes it helps to ask a fellow sojourner if she can see through the fog in front of you.”

I consider the fog in front of me, how I love writing but itch to break out of my genre into something new. I love the freedom of nomadic living, too, but yearn for the simplicity of home. I grow restless with the humdrum of small, ordinary life, but know it’s in those hours of sorting socks and vacuuming the car where most of life is meant to be lived. I don’t think I am made to do daily extraordinary things, to constantly unearth new sights. The loveliness of wandering, of travel, dangles like a carrot on a stick, but it’s coupled with the heartache of wanderlust, of knowing that there will always be one more thing to see. Chasing the globe’s rotation for more than a few months will do me in. I will come undone. It is not how I am meant to live; I know it.

“You already have the answers you need within you from God,” Nora explains. “I am simply here to walk with you and help you unearth them. I can do that.”

She lights a candle on the table in front of us and bows her head. I follow suit and close my eyes.

Because we’ll be in Thailand for a solid two months, I can meet with Nora at least six times. There are other things to do in Chiang Mai—night markets to shop for cheap art and phone cases, hikes through the hills to the highest point in the country, elephant sanctuaries to visit. But after my first session, I sense an unveiling—these spiritual direction sessions are a primary reason we’ve been drawn here.

In our third meeting, Nora ends our time together, as customary, with silence, her reading a psalm. To signify our time is over, she snuffs out the candle. The hour is spent as it was the previous two meetings: silence and candle lighting to start, Nora asking me what God is speaking to me today, more silence from me, then an unexpected outburst of tears as I share what comes to mind, usually some sort of frustration with my work as a writer. I pour out details of specific burdens and cultural movements that tie me in knots. Nora is a safe person with thousands of miles between our daily worlds. She will park when there is inward movement, help lift a stone when she senses treasure underneath.

At the end of our third meeting, snuffed candle smoke still rising in the air, Nora says, “Before you leave Chiang Mai, I have a prescription for you. I want you to visit a monastery in town for a day of silence.”

She hands me a brochure with a picture of a labyrinth on the front. I open it and find a smiling priest welcoming me to come for the day, the night, or for a week, to hear from God and get away from the city noise. There is no talking permitted on the grounds.

“You live in a world of noise,” Nora says. “Your work is noisy. Your home life with three kids is noisy. God speaks to us best in silence, in nooks and crannies when we’re willing to ignore the cacophony.”

I take the brochure with me, walk out of the living-room-cum-lobby with a tired grin on my face, get in the passenger side of the car where Kyle and the kids wait for me, and thrust the paper in front of him. “Look what I get to do,” I say. I wipe the tear smudges from my face and he backs out of the gravel driveway.

Kyle meets weekly with a counselor at the same center, so seven years removed from our Turkey respite, this place becomes, again, a home away from home, a resting place. Selah. I work with the kids on their schooling at a nearby café during his appointment, reading aloud and correcting handwriting and playing math card games while we sip pineapple juice and watch birds in the garden. Then Kyle and I tag each other, relay-style, and I meet with Nora while Kyle teaches fractions and tectonic plates and how to sketch birds.

Our routine in Chiang Mai becomes a pleasant revolving cycle of parenting, working, teaching, and spiritual direction appointments. We predict proceeding months will once more resemble the chaos of backpacking through China, a nomadic liturgy of packing, unpacking, and checking school notebooks on airplane tray tables, so this otherwise humdrum routine is welcome. The kids enjoy this slower pace of life, and they feel more like temporary residents than nomads.

This morning, I arrive at the monastery armed with supplies for a day of silence—water bottle, snacks, pencil, journal. There will be meals offered in the dining hall at set times, silent, so I need little else. I check in at the front desk and they nod me through the open-air entrance hall and out into the gardens. Paths twist this way and that, through bamboo enclaves, interspersed by an occasional bench or tree stump for sitting. In the center are six gazebos, each with a simple wood-hewn table and bench. Dormitories outline the monastery. In the far distance lies the labyrinth.

It is astonishingly hard to sit in silence right now. Bamboo creaks; wind rushes through banana leaves; car horns honk on the highway beyond the garden. I wander the grounds, claim a gazebo, and arrange my provisions in organized piles around the table. For an hour, I stare at them. I have thoughts, but none worthy of journaling.

I wonder what my brother is doing at work in Austin today.

These pants need washing.

We need to make travel plans for France.

I could use a latte.

I sit. I listen to traffic in the distance, nod at the other spiritual pilgrims meandering by on the paths, and fidget on the hard bench. The apple on the table, instead of leading me to prolific contemplation, stays an apple, stares back at me. I start to formulate a thought about the morning breeze and its symbolism, wonder if there is a poem there, but then an airplane thrusts overhead and, like a toddler, I shift my attention to the shiny object in the sky. The first hour ekes by.

I go on another walk around the path, return to my base camp, open my journal, and turn to the next blank page. Nora has given me homework—write a lamentation during my monastic day, a poem of mourning in order to fully flesh out a grieving process that needs skin and bones. So far, though, my thoughts are little more than a swirling mental distraction of annoyances and a vague inkling that something muddy wants out.

I know this: I am weary of playing games, of the games I am asked to play in order to succeed as a writer. These travels for a year are admittedly part escapism, a desperate plea for a sabbatical from expectations, pressure, noise. I want to get lost in myself, I want to stop thinking so much of myself, and I want to see in the flesh how many people there are in the world and how many don’t know me or, really, care about me. I want to remember my smallness. I want to be a prophet in the wilderness, shouting from jungles and deserts and foreign cities that we are all small, and to remember what a tiny place we each take up in the world. Small might be insignificant, but it does not mean unimportant.

In Chiang Mai, I have already passed by millions of street vendors—all of whom I will never know—and I think of how many more there are in the world. Their daily lives matter, but how am I any different, any more important, than an old woman selling key rings and water bottles at the kung fu show? I long for God to show me where I belong, where my home is in the world, and my smallness in it.

Before I write my lamentation, I read this from pastor and writer Eugene Peterson: “We are caught off-guard when divine revelation arrives in such ordinary garb and mistakenly think it’s our job to dress it up in the latest Paris silk gown of theology, or to outfit it in a sturdy three-piece suit of ethics before we can deal with it.”1

A quiet awareness surfaces, and I sense that it is ordinary. It’s for me. I do not need to make it big, or dress it up by sharing it on social media, or deconstruct it with a three-part explanation. I need to capture it, tackle it to the ground as it flies in the wind through the banana trees. My pen grows pregnant with words. The lamentation flows.

The first draft pulses with a respectable anger, and I set the pen down. I can barely decipher my own scribbles. But this feels good, freeing, a bit rebellious. Frustration quivers out my fingers and my body begins to strengthen as a poison leaves. Being on the other side of the world is becoming a bloodletting. I am fraught with self-imposed expectations about motherhood and writing that need to be released, and the crowded buses, the holding of my children’s hands through makeshift markets, the sunsets over suburban Thai rooftops are my medicinal leeches.

I walk to the labyrinth, step into the entrance, and start to methodically pray. Turn right, one step in front of the other; then the narrow path snakes and leads back out, then back in closer to its center. There is a plan, a prescribed path to the middle, but how slowly or quickly I arrive is up to me. I can stop midstep if I want, and pause, admire, adjust. These steps, one in front of another, are an expedition of its own. They mimic this year. First, leave your home, your familiarity. Then board your transport. Traverse through China. Step into Hong Kong. Into Thailand, and next, onward to Singapore, Australia, New Zealand.

When I arrive in the center at last, I tear out the lamentation in my notebook, crumple it into a ball, and set it on the waist-high rock serving as the labyrinth’s centerpost. I unearth a smaller rock on the ground and paperweight it on top of my offering to keep it from blowing into the banana trees. This rock is an Ebenezer of remembrance. I am free to scream to God my grievances—at least on paper—but when I am done, I must leave them and remember that my Maker knows me, will watch over my offering, and will return with me. I wind back out the labyrinth, faster this time.

Several weeks after my day of solitude, a few days before we leave Chiang Mai and head to southern Thailand, we go out for pizza at a bricked, side-alley café downtown. It swarms with tourists and the air smells of dough, salty sweat, fire-hot wood. We place our order, and from a distance music begins while we wait for our food. It’s quieter at first, echoing off the brick walls and neighboring shops, but soon the volume increases until its distorted combination of modern pop rhythm with Eastern heterophonic melody throbs in the asphalt beneath us.

We join the café’s other patrons who have left their seats to witness the commotion, and I hold Finn’s hand and squeeze our way through the crowd. A parade has begun, floats with sequined elephants and belly dancers and papier-mâché water lilies ensconced around thrones of young women dolled up like princesses. They wave at eager little girls on the street. Buddhist monks, in their fluorescent orange and burnt sienna robes, follow with flowers and candles to release onto the river at the turn of the parade’s bend.

Loy Krathong is Thailand’s annual holiday of gratitude; it is their version of Thanksgiving. We eat our pizza quickly; then the five of us soldier through teeming crowds to find a spot where we can release a paper lantern into the black sky. Tonight, thousands of candlelit lanterns will be offered into the air, humanity’s effort to add flickering pinholes up in the universe. These lanterns eventually run out of wick and wax, and every year the local municipality spends weeks cleaning up the aftermath, but for one evening, thousands of people gather in one tiny place on the planet to release a token of gratitude. It is a sight to behold.

We find a young monk-in-training, no older than sixteen, offering a flicker of fire for the paper lanterns. Our family’s lantern, bought a few feet away at a temporary stand, is large enough for all three kids to hold and release together, and so the young monk brings his lighter to our candle in the center, positions the kids’ hands around the lantern’s bottom edge, and when the candle starts to flicker, he lets go. The lantern is made of cheap, white tissue paper, and it holds my gratitude for this year of exploration, along with a prayer for clarity, for release. There is nothing to alter its course once it is liberated, but it will be beautiful as it flies into the night sky. Our offering is one of thousands, tiny like all the others, collectively a flickering symphony against a black backdrop.

The kids release the lantern and we watch until it disappears from view, intertwining with a thousand minuscule dancing lights.

“Can we get ice cream?” Finn asks. The pizza feels like hours ago, another world away.

We fly to southern Thailand for our own American Thanksgiving, to the island of Phuket. One of our travel strategies involves creating, as best we can, an endless summer—or at least, enough warm weather so that we can get by with one thin jacket. We will buy sweaters if needed, but we’d like to try to go without. On our country’s day for giving thanks in late November, it is 90°F, a warm, windy breeze rustling through the palm trees. We are on the southern coast of Thailand, on an island mere miles from Malaysia.

We have never been to Phuket and have little more than an Internet’s inkling of what to expect. The plane lands, and we hail a taxi driver.

She pulls into traffic and asks in English, “Which hotel?”

I show her the map on my phone that pinpoints the whereabouts of our guesthouse, but she pushes it away with a “Pfft!” Impossible, because this is a real neighborhood and not a tourist conglomeration of hotels. She does not grasp the concept, understandably enough, of a real home turned into a bona fide guesthouse.

“Which hotel?” she repeats, louder this time.

“Not a hotel! House!” Kyle calls out from the backseat, where he is crammed with the three kids. He sounds angry, but he’s not. He’s employing this trick to bridge the dialect disconnect: speak louder; surely they’ll understand.

The driver finds us incredulous. “Which! Hotel!” she yells.

We do this for an hour, as she drives through island streets, heading to the destination on the map while shaking her head. I am hot and sticky, and I am not in the mood to negotiate the cross-cultural language barrier.

Our destination isn’t a guesthouse, which no doubt adds to the cabbie’s confusion. Our instructions are, in complete seriousness, to take a taxi to a local art gallery, walk to the front desk, and ask for soup. We aren’t sure what this means beyond its literal interpretation. Is soup code for guesthouse keys? Will an art curator at the front desk nod knowingly, slide us a new map as though we’re in a spy movie? Will a bowl of soup unlock the code through its ingredients, or perhaps via a bar code on the bottom of the container? It feels very James Bond.

We are taken down a nameless dirt road and finally, we stop in front of little more than a covered booth, something you might see at an American farmers’ market. Two women are painting on canvas. Kyle walks up and asks for soup as the kids and I watch from the car. One of the women nods and makes a phone call while I sit on the edge of my seat, feeling the plot thicken. A few minutes later, Kyle emerges with a fellow in his twenties, motorcycle helmet tucked underneath his arm. The local straddles the red motorcycle parked out front and heads into traffic, Kyle motioning our driver to follow him.

“That guy’s name is Soup,” Kyle says as he gets back in the taxi. “He’ll lead us to our guesthouse.”

Thanksgiving Day, we walk the sleepy streets of our beach village, again in search of good food. We have only a few days left in Thailand, which means our season of delectable cheap food is drawing to a close. We are also homesick, so it feels especially important that we feast like kings, to cobble together a Thanksgiving dinner from local cuisine while our extended family gathers together twelve thousand miles away. Soon we will enter Singapore, where nothing is cheap, and then Australia, where even less is cheap. We spend the afternoon on the beach, sun-kissed and sand-caked like it’s the Fourth of July, and now we are on the prowl for a turkey-and-stuffing equivalent out of yearning for the most quintessential of American holidays.

It begins to rain and the sun has set, so we need to settle on a spot. We duck into the closest establishment with its lights on, a beacon in the dark pumping John Cougar Mellencamp from the house speakers.

Kyle asks the owner if we can sit outside on the empty patio, at a table tucked underneath an umbrella big enough for the five of us to escape the rain. She nods and ushers us outside, lights a candle at our table. We take menus and cross our fingers, hoping for a decent-enough Thanksgiving banquet. Instead of more noodles and curry, we read the selections: steak, ribs, mashed potatoes, glazed carrots, and rolls. Chocolate cake. Creme brûlée. The kids squeal with glee.

We chase meat with mojitos, which tastes nothing like home, but it doesn’t taste quite like Thailand, either. It is an ad hoc meal, food with no particular home, a conglomeration of Western barbecue and Eastern spices, seared and charred. It works well enough. It echoes how I feel right now, one foot in Asia and one out the door. We eat in the dark, in the rain, in flip-flops. Our waitress brings us cake with lit sparklers and sings to us in broken English “Happy Birthday” to pay homage to our national holiday. Tonight, we are satisfied to be together in the world, as a family, on a dot of an island in the Indian Ocean in Southeast Asia.

“I wonder what our next house will be like?” Tate questions, sighing with a full stomach.

“I get the top bunk if there’s a bunk bed!” shouts Reed.

Back at the guesthouse, toothbrushes are packed in our bags, shirts are rolled up next to socks, and we are ready to move on. Thailand has brought me some peace.