Jenny  Boully's The Body was published in 2002 by Slope Editions.  It is currently being translated for publication in Iran.  Her chapbook "of the mismatched teacups, of the single-serving spoon" is forthcoming in April from the Coconut Chapbook Series.  Another chapbook, "[one love affair]" is forthcoming from Tarpaulin Sky Paper Goods later this year.  She has a new manuscript, The Book of Beginnings & Endings & Other Such Things, and is putting finishing touches on a memoir.  She has just completed coursework in the Ph.D. program in English at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.  Born in Thailand and reared in Texas, she has studied at Hollins Univeristy and the University of Notre Dame.

Lun Duah, which means uncle who will not behave, passed away three years ago.  No one knows the how or why.  He was my grandmother’s adopted son.  Her sister, who sold peasant noodles on the side of the road in the village of Wan Nam Khoa (the village with waterfalls of white), was executed by the Thai government, along with her husband and son and daughter, while they slept in their house nestled between two white waterfalls. 

I have a video recording of my grandmother and in it a friend that she had not seen in over a decade is enumerating the dead—so and so is dead as is so and so and so and so—while my grandmother looks her friend straight in the eye, and my mother, who is standing next to my grandmother, looks far off, away.  Later, when we watch the tape, my mother explains her facial expressions, saying she did not want to know about all the dead. 

When my grandmother died, my mother was far off, away.  No one knew how old my grandmother was, and no one knew her legal name.  When my mother called from Texas to tell me that she had died, I cried because I knew I was expected to cry.  I always called my grandmother Yai, which means “grandmother” in Thai, and I always hated my Yai, especially when my mother and father had just fought, usually over money that my mother had sent to Yai, and my mother threatened to return to Thailand. 

I always thought that Yai was ugly; she was skinny, and she dragged her left leg after her when she walked; her left arm hung useless; she had a bad stroke when I was eight; when I was twenty, she had another stroke, after which she began showing her excrement to people; her mouth spittle ran red because of the limestone paste and betel nut she chewed; when she laughed, her teeth flared like black diamonds.  When she ate the rice that arrived monthly from the family to which she sold my mother, I wonder if she thought of her daughter’s tiny hands, her daughter’s tiny feet. 

When I was born, my mother soaked my bones in rice water; she bent back my fingers until they shaped themselves into taut bows; I would be a Thai dancer if my father did not marry her; I would learn to gesture about temples and the Buddha and life and death with the points of my feet and hands.  When I began to speak, the first sentences my mother would try to teach me, in Thai, were greetings to this Yai, who lived in Thailand.  Say, Baby Jue (for that was my Thai name) loves Yai.  Say, Baby Jue misses Yai.  Say, Baby Jue wishes she could see Yai. 

The verbal drills did not prepare me for love or the shock of crossing continents; when I first saw my grandmother, I was eighteen, and as she stroked my skin and cried over me, saying “white, white, white,” I told her how much Baby Jue loved her, then had to rush to the outhouse to vomit.  Later, she tried to slide a ring off my finger.  It was a fake diamond; my mother told me to give it to her; I didn’t want to because the band belonged to my father’s adopted mother who had long since died, and I had plans to replace the cubic zirconia with a real diamond someday.  (To pay off debts, my parents had to hock the diamond when I was a girl.) 

Her shack had a corrugated metal ceiling and the walls were hung with pictures that I remember painfully sitting for when I was girl.  “Smile for Yai.”  I remember having to wear stiff dresses, which we could not afford, and hang my hair, which reached down past my waist, over my shoulder.  I would only later learn of my mother’s vanity: in Thailand, due to lice in public schools, only the daughters of royalty and the very rich could grow their hair long.  None of these portraits hung in my childhood home: these were memories specifically manufactured for Yai. 

When Yai was young, she did not wade low with water buffalo to harvest rice (as my mother had done, as she began to do when she was eight and sold to the family that sent Yai bags of rice), but rather, she was a loom woman.  My mother says that Yai was beautiful and could work a silk loom so that everything she wove was infused with a golden glow like clouds at sunset, the wings of dragonflies. 

I remember once when Yai and I were alone; my mother and other relatives had gone to the market; the clouds gathered to threaten, and she spoke and spoke, but because of her strokes, I could not comprehend it all, but I knew she was remembering her past, by the manner in which she laughed, then became angry, then wanted to cry, then silenced herself.  Later I told my mother about Yai’s behavior, and my mother said that Yai was probably telling me a story that she should not be telling.  I wondered if perhaps I had heard the only apology Yai ever gave for selling my mother. 

When she died, I sent money, the little money I saved, to help pay for her cremation ceremony, and a week after her death, my mother said that her spirit would come to visit me, so I abstained from sex and brought her pale pink flowers, which wilted in my August apartment.  When the vessel in her brain burst, she was reaching out for her youngest grandchild, who was too afraid to crawl towards her.  At night, my nephew cries to my aunt that he can hear the rustling of an animal circling the house all night, and behind it something dragging.

© Jenny Boully 2006.