Thanksgiving Tidings

Happy Thanksgiving!

My guess is, with the current state of chaos and dysfunction in the world, many of you might be wondering what it is you have to be thankful for. If you are reading this at all my guess is that you have many things to be thankful for. Shifting from fear to gratitude may be the most challenging call of our times.

I’d assume that you have reliable electricity, or like me a least a reliable place you can go to get electricity, and a fairly reliable internet connection. I’d assume that you are not under extreme physical stress to have the time to check in on my humble substack. I’d like to think that even if some are gone that you still have some others you can share this holiday of gratitude with. Even if it is only your pets.

How is this even a revelation? As a sidenote I have never made a profile for any dating site, whether it be Tinder, Grindrr, ChristianMingle, ThaiSingles, OKCupid, PlentyofFish and whatever the rest of them are called. There also should not be any footage of me on say PornHub or OnlyFans. I’m curious how good the AI is getting if I am out there or did they just do hidden cameras?

Make it make sense folks. We’ve got to burn down the village to save it!

There’s a point in this immigration process where I get the sense that the gatekeepers are running out of things to gatekeep. With Oh I remember I thought I’d reached that point in April of 2014 when I rolled my eyes at the US Embassy’s latest 221 (g), which requested information about the “occupant” of the Las Vegas house. They specifically wanted proof of this person’s citizenship or legal status in the USA.

I had a few reasons that I rolled my eyes at the seeming absurdity of this request. The first was that it was my US citizen mother’s house in Las Vegas and she had already submitted documents showing as much. If she had an “occupant” in the house, say a totally undocumented person named Pedro who was staying rent free in exchange for doing repairs, I didn’t really understand why this was any of the US Embassy’s business. It would have been my business as her daughter to vet this guy and make sure he wasn’t trying to scam Mom in some way, but that would also be true of hypothetical US citizen Fred, who was a recovering addict who had fallen on hard times but otherwise had a similar story. I’m not sure which of those two hypotheticals I would pick as better though thankfully neither were true.

At that point they had requested a lot of information prior regarding our domicile or our intent to move to the United States. My parents generously stepped up and offered for me, my husband and our daughter to stay at their house until we got off our feet so to speak. Mom owned the house exclusively, as my reclusive father had always avoided any paperwork or legal documents as he had told me since my childhood “I want the US government to think that I am dead.”

So mom produced her tax documents, her paperwork on the house and her birth certificate proving she was a US citizen. The US Embassy’s request for information about the “Occupant” of the Las Vegas house was referring to my father, who had been married to my mother for 40 years at that point and who I was presumably a child of.

This strange request took a lot of backtracking. My Dad had no idea where his birth certificate was, the only proof he had of US citizenship, and so I needed to call some Ohio records department to request a new one. They couldn’t find it at first when I provided Dad’s date of birth of July 5, 1948. Was he born in another state? I asked my lawyer uncle, my Dad’s brother.

“No. He lied to you about his birthday. Since you were little he’s been telling you kids he was born on July 5, 1948. He was born on July 5, 1949!”

I called the records section back, they found Dad’s record in their system and they mailed a copy of his birth certificate which proved my father’s US citizenship. To this day I have no idea why the US Embassy needed that record or thought that they did, but I virtually guarantee that the paperwork verifying it was the last legal document my father ever signed.

Around that time I saw brother Ka’s ID card and Phuket airport security badge laying on a table and noticed that the birth year was one year exactly off from what he had posted on his Facebook page. My head swirled that night as I considered my time of birth. I knew Oh’s paperwork was not from his biological family and I wanted to ask him likewise what his real birthday was. Could he be a Scorpio? It was a 1 in 12 shot.

Oh’s visa went through in May with no more hiccups and we made it to Las Vegas in time for the Independance Day Celebration and my father’s birthday. He died one week later, but not before leaving my husband Oh with some of his home spun wisdom. We went shopping for a used car one day, for instance. “Never listen to them when they tell you what the price per month is on a car!” My Dad insisted. “Always just ask them to tell you the price! What is the price period!”

My Dad wanted to calculate the day of the week that my husband was born on, something he had avoided doing until he met Oh in person. “So you said April 10, 1985?” Father asked me. He thought in his head. “He was born on a Wednesday.”

I hesitated to tell my father something. Maybe I shouldn’t have. “That’s not Oh’s real birthday.” I finally blurted out. “That’s just the day they made his Thai ID card so Oh could go to school. His Mom told me that he was really born on November 7, but I’m not positive of the year yet.” My Dad seemed to be staring a hole into the back of my head.

I sighed. “It’s even weirder with his brother. Now he was born on March 19, 1979, at around 2:00 AM.” Mar had said it was not too long after midnight. I shook my head. “I obviously don’t need you to tell me the day of the week there. I can logically figure out that if I was born on the Sunday night that he was born on the Monday morning.”

That was the last significant conversation I had with my father before he died, or at least that didn’t involve his declining health.

This Thanksgiving I have many things to be thankful for, but at the top of the list is perhaps the fact that I still know it is Thanksgiving in a land far far away from here. My Mom is preparing to roast the 14 pound turkey which was kindly provided by the neighbor across the street. My younger daughter is going to see her cousins while my older girl is planning to spend the day with her father’s family. Traditions get passed on, however haphazardly. I’ve been trying to explain to Ka how you cook a 7 kilo bird.

“In the oven for like four to six hours!” I told him.

“Ahh same same for the pig. I know.” Ka is always watching these Isaan videos of them preparing food, including putting whole pigs in a cinderbox oven of sorts. “Do they have dipping sauce?”

“No, not really. But there is stuffing.” In thinking about it my Mom always makes a gravy from the turkey pan drippings.

I am thankful the US Embassy got my package and that somebody there called me back almost immediately. I am thankful that ghost phone has been working perfectly as of late. They wanted updated visa photos on Ka. The current ones were over one year old and they needed something less than six months old.

“I’d have to say of all of the requests for more documents new visa photos has to be the most positive sign.” I explained to my mom.

“I agree.”

Later in the day they had an eye roll request, at least from my vantage point. The US Embassy wanted proof of any legal name changes among either of us.

Now I have never changed my name legally since birth, despite using my husband’s last name and my middle name on this substack. I was planning to after I married Ka but my younger daughter especially gave me so much pushback that I thought better of it. Perhaps it is better that I didn’t.

Ka, however, did change his name legally in 1994. Not his last name of Sukwan, but rather his first name.

“So what is Ka’s real name?” Jasmine asked me some years ago.

“Technically Wisuttipong. But he changed it from his birth name of Sarika.”

”Really? Why?”

“Okay so Ka was like 14 years old at the time. I don’t think he was trying to dodge some criminal records. Think about it Jasmine. Sarika.” I pronounced it with the long E sound in the middle.

“I have no idea why he would change his name.” My daughter answered.

“What’s your first instinct? He changed his name at 14 to the rather stuffy sounding and hard to pronounce Wisuttipong from Sarika.” I asked her.

“Well,” Jasmine paused as I waited for it. “It sounds a little feminine…”

“Bingo.” I said. It was a boy named Sue problem. “He told me that he was getting bullied a lot in school over it. Apparently Sarika was a name that was okay for a boy or girl for awhile, but there was a popular female pop star who made it all about being a girl’s name only around the time.”

I understood it completely as when I entered Junior High, due to the intense bullying I had in fifth and sixth grade, I went on a similar new school new me change. I insisted that everyone called me by my middle name of Amy and I died my hair dark auburn. It didn’t stick. Some of the kids called me Amy and I still recognize and respond to it, but a few teachers did not want to call me by my middle name and some of the kids who knew me from my old school claimed “But I just know you as Gen!”

The nickname Ka I suspect was a shorthand when he was a child for his full name of Sarika. I still consider it a beautiful name. For a girl.

The US Embassy’s request in this case felt like they were running out of things to say no to. This is all paperwork that I sent them almost five years ago, which was presumably long ago cleared, and which nobody has said one pip about since. I’m hoping this is their last stand. I sent them that paperwork this morning which probably won’t be delivered with the US Embassy’s Thanksgiving holiday. The Thai Post will be running strong regardless. I’ve had a few jokes with the Thai post regarding the US Embassy’s insistence on their address being on Wireless Road instead of the named Wittayu Road. No Thai taxi driver or mail carrier seems to know where Wireless Road is. Ahh US Imperialism at its finest.

This song seemed apt, for those who have taken the time to read this.

Then again so did this one:

Are things getting better or will the Empire make a last stand in careening us towards chaos?

Happy Thanksgiving…

Buy me a ko-fi