by Theo Halladay
I showed a photo to my roommates the other day. It was taken two years ago, a full-body portrait of my brother and I dressed in traditional Thai clothing: stiff, mandarin-collared shirts with etched Sanskrit on the buttons, elaborate wrap pants, tall socks. It was my aunt’s wedding, and like any of our weddings, the whole family dressed in traditional wear for the occasion. My grandma, spearheading the initiative, shoved jewel-toned skirts and patterned sashes into people’s arms, pulling out decades worth of clothing from a musty, red suitcase. Funnily enough, I’ve never looked inside, though I’ve been able to recognize the luggage before I learned the language to identify it. I think if I looked inside the suitcase it would no longer be bottomless, no longer the matriarchal secret, so I stay away. My mother only wears color for these occasions, when everyone else stands out too. We look like a circus act. We look foreign. We look like family.
There is no way to feel home in this body. I’m starting to believe that people are either born with that ability or they were nomads in a past life. I hate how I look in this photo. All I see are round cheeks and hair in need of shearing. But I love what I’m doing. I love that I’m standing next to my brother, matching him in both outfit and expression. We weren’t always close like we are today, but then again, maybe our souls migrated next to each other.
I know who my family is, what genetic traits they share, where they come from. I know what my grandfather’s cologne smells like, what brand of toothpaste my grandma buys. I can list the countries my aunts were born in, retell their stories from the refugee camps. We’ve all worn something from that red suitcase.
I always thought that my mother looked gorgeous in Thai clothes, in pha sin or sabai. The warmth of her skin’s brown stands out against the electric blue or white silks. Embroidered gold patterns weave through the sash she wears with one of the outfits, which lay against her chest, decorating above her heart.
My mother never wore color, never wore gold. They were rules she had formed before her children, before her husband. There is a polaroid on the fridge of my mother sitting on the steps of her highschool, no more than sixteen, head-to-toe in black. Once, when I was barely a teenager, I asked my mom for a tour of her jewelry collection. She unlocked the chest on her nightstand, rifled through underwear drawers, wiggled her fingers between crevices from up high. It was quite a collection: handfuls of rings (some older than her), knots of necklaces, earrings that lost their twins long ago. A carved jade bangle next to a bedazzled nameplate necklace inscribed “sagittarius.” A thrifted pearl sweater chain from the 1950s sharing a box with screw-on earrings, also thrifted, with an illustration of a Thai dancer on each one. The backside is stamped “Siam.” I was looking at Asian American girlhood. I was looking at treasure.
I’ve never had a very good idea of what I look like. To spend your whole life in a body that you had no choice over—to listen to your grandparents, uncles, and cousins chatter about your nose (flatter and smaller than your brother’s) and your skin (acne, more freckles than your brother’s, lighter too, foreign) and your body (big), and you only understand half of it because you whined and fussed whenever your mom took you to Thai school so now you hang on to the handful of words that you understand in the rapidfire conversation, the conversation in front of you, and about you, but not to you. Jamook, pha lahng, un. It’s enough to make you afraid of strangers, afraid of mirrors, afraid of being perceived. I am in the middle of a conversation, any conversation, and am also falling apart because I can’t steal their eyes and look at myself through them.
This is of course not my mother’s fault. Yes, she married a white man, who muddled my features. Yes, she speaks more Thai to the dog than to her sons. Yes, she put Sun-In on her hair in middle school and got a perm and let people mispronounce her name. But that’s not her fault, it’s just her pain—which is inheritable.
The day of my aunt’s wedding was a long one, an emotional one. The whole wedding party on her side dressed in clothes we knew from countless memories, countless photographs and funerals, graduations and the red suitcase. I’m not wearing a “traditional Thai outfit,” I’m wearing my parents on their wedding day getting blessed at temple, my grandfather declaring that he wants to move to America, my uncle’s silence as I translate what he asked of me, my mother’s tears when I told her I would no longer be using my deadname.
I closed my phone, setting it face down in my lap. My roommates said that I looked so much like my brother and our clothes were very pretty, very cool, so interesting. I pretended that I took their words as praise. I pretended that I knew what was in the suitcase.
Chinoiserie Blooms
by Chelsea Tikotsky
Theo Halladay is a young writer attending Pratt Institute in New York City after being raised in SF his whole life. He is currently exploring flash-fiction portraits with a slant towards horror while at college. His poetry and visual art have previously been published in his high school art magazine.
Chelsea Tikotsky is an abstract artist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. A graduate of SFSU, she studied abroad in Florence, Italy. Working primarily in oils and watercolors, her work captures nature’s fleeting magic and nostalgic moments. She won a Juror’s Award at the 2024 PBS KVIE Art Auction.
Ignatian Literary Magazine 