This country of mine is
my mother. Her hands and her embrace
and how she can make any space a home.
My father and how everything is my father.
Traffic. Traffic. Traffic.
Girls with their designer handbags and half-smiles.
Boys slouching and smoking in front of Seven-Elevens.
The past peering from around the corner with your eyes.
Intellectual men who roll their eyes and tell me I’m ‘a lot.’
The taste of chilli and how it burns my tongue.
That one brand of cigarettes my brother smokes and hides somewhere in his bedroom.
That picture my mother hangs in our house:
of my great-grandfather and his four wives
and his gazillion great-grandchildren.
My friend telling me: the world will always be thus
and so the best we could hope for
is a rich husband who will treat us well.
How, no matter which season we’re in
— summer, monsoon or winter(ish) —,
there is always
the sun. The sun. The sun.
my mother. Her hands and her embrace
and how she can make any space a home.
My father and how everything is my father.
Traffic. Traffic. Traffic.
Girls with their designer handbags and half-smiles.
Boys slouching and smoking in front of Seven-Elevens.
The past peering from around the corner with your eyes.
Intellectual men who roll their eyes and tell me I’m ‘a lot.’
The taste of chilli and how it burns my tongue.
That one brand of cigarettes my brother smokes and hides somewhere in his bedroom.
That picture my mother hangs in our house:
of my great-grandfather and his four wives
and his gazillion great-grandchildren.
My friend telling me: the world will always be thus
and so the best we could hope for
is a rich husband who will treat us well.
How, no matter which season we’re in
— summer, monsoon or winter(ish) —,
there is always
the sun. The sun. The sun.
Pim Wangtechawat is a writer from Bangkok, Thailand, who is currently on the Creative Writing MA program at Edinburgh Napier University. As a freelance writer, her articles about cinema, television and culture have been published in various websites and literary journals, including the Mekong Review, the Nikkei Asian Review, and Yes Poetry. She has also performed her poetry at events hosted by Shoreline of Infinity, Typewronger Books, Inky Fingers, and the Scottish BAME Writers Network. You can follow her on Twitter at @PimsupaW and on Instagram at @pim.wangtechawat.