Passport, please (part 3)
Not nostalgia, something else
“How much do I have in common with this place?” is the question that’s been on my mind since I knew I would spend a couple of days here. By here, I mean Laos, where my mother was born and raised.
I could have chosen to come here during my last trip, but I chose not to, and it’s still unclear if it was a conscious or unconscious decision. A part of me definitely wanted to come here, and another was for some reason stressed to come here to see this country from up close. So in the end I just didn’t come, and flew somewhere else instead. I knew back then that I would have to come here at some point but my last trip just didn’t feel like it was the right time to do so.
Now that I’m here, I’ve begun to experience this place in ways that challenge my assumptions and remind me of just how little I truly know about this country. But unexpectedly, certain answers have taken me back to my early childhood in surprising ways.
Walking through food markets triggered memories of dishes and flavors I hadn’t thought about in years. Some tasted exactly as I remembered, instantly transporting me back to the past. Others were so faint in my memory that they felt completely new, like rediscovering a piece of myself I’d long forgotten.
Hearing the language spoken around me has stirred up similar feelings. Lao doesn’t feel as foreign to me as some other languages. I can’t speak or understand it, but it lingers in my mind like the melody of a song I know I’ve heard before.
Even seeing a word written alongside its phonetic pronunciation sparked something in me. I suddenly recalled that, at one point in my childhood, I’d learned to read a little Lao. I didn’t get very far, but I can clearly remember sitting at a table, carefully writing out letters and characters, trying to make sense of them.
I’m not sure if “nostalgia” is the right word for what I’m feeling. Can you even be nostalgic for something you’ve never truly experienced? I don’t have any memories tied to this place - no stories to recall, no past to lean on. The few memories I do have come from my early childhood, but even those are fragments of culture my mother carried with her when she left.
There’s something in my blood that originates here, but perhaps that’s all I share with this place.
Or maybe I’ve been asking the wrong question. Instead of wondering, “How much do I have in common with this place?” perhaps the better question is, “How much of this culture do I carry within me?”
It’s not an easy question to answer. It might not even be the right one. But for now, the search goes on.
_
Fred
Fred
