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-maché 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.