I am looking down at the deep brown, wrinkled, and extremely dirty face of a man from one of the hill tribes. He is smiling at me with ochre teeth. His clothes are royal blue and red and covered with silver ornaments that catch the sunlight. In his face I can see that he finds me just as marvelous as I find him.
It is a cool night, and I am standing on the steps of V.’s house when a tuk-tuk, one of the small trucks that serve as Chiang Mai’s taxis, stops on the road. P. and several others climb out and walk toward us, but it is only P. whom I remember without blur. He is tripping toward me with an enormous grin on his face, dressed in a white T-shirt, narrow blue jeans, and over his shoulders he has draped a brilliant pink feather boa. He stretches out his arms for my embrace and calls out my name: “Sili! Sili!”
V. and I are walking toward the village on a dirt road spotted with pale marks from the sunlight that shines through the dark green trees. Five or six children are walking toward us. One of them is carrying a blaring radio in his arms that blasts out the popular song about Muhammad Ali. I hear the words “dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” When they get closer, they eye me, begin to shriek, turn, and run fast in the opposite direction. I can see their thin brown legs pumping hard, the dust rising beneath their bare feet. V. turns to me. “The’re shouting the Thai word for spirit. They think you’re a ghost.”
I am watching a small orange lizard on the wall through a gauze of mosquito netting as the afternoon sun shines through the window. The memory is as still as a photograph, and if there was any noise at all, I have forgotten it.
Only the unprotected self can feel joy.
There was another side. I saw two literal wounds during those three months.
The streets are so crowded, it’s difficult to move. The whole city has come out for the Festival of Lights. The Mekong River is burning with light from a thousand boats, some tiny, some larger, illuminated by torches and candles. V. and I are walking together, holding hands to keep from being separated by the pushing throng. My sister Asti is somewhere behind me with other friends, and then ahead of me there is a burst of red. Blood. The back of a man. Something has hit his shoulder. The memory is in slow motion, clearly a distortion of what really happened, and yet I watch as the crowd parts, opens onto a view of what? I don’t know. People are scrambling away, and V. tugs hard at my arm. There must have been shouting and screaming, but I can’t recall these sounds, only add them to the confusion. “Someone threw a Molotov cocktail into the crowd,” V. tells me. I still don’t know how he knew that. I don’t bother to ask. I don’t feel anything. I note this. I’ve seen a terrible thing, and I’m not responding. Was it because I didn’t see it well enough? Wasn’t it real to me? It’s as if I’m anesthetized, absent.
I am near the Burmese border, watching an operation. A young man has been in a motorcycle accident, and his right leg is badly injured. There is blood all over the operating table. I can see the enormous gash in his leg, a messy, deep wound. I am looking down at him and the physicians from a small balcony. Beside me is the doctor with whom I have traveled. I’ve been living with him, his wife, and his daughter since I arrived in Chiang Mai. I look down at the leg and say to myself, Siri, you are looking down at his injury, and you are okay. You are tougher and stronger than you thought. I silently admire myself. A few seconds later, I feel dizzy. Then the familiar nausea rises up inmy stomach. It has happened before. I feel it coming. My knees give way, and I’m fainting.
Not long after I returned to the United States, I fell violently ill. For days, I lay in bed with a head that felt like someone had left an axe in it. I became a vomiting, shuddering ruin that couldn’t stand upright or tolerate any light from the window. The vertigo and nausea came and went, but the pain in my head remained in varying forms and degrees for eight long months. While I sat in the library, dutifully reading through the pain, I blamed myself for generating a bizarre psychosomatic symptom, a punishing head that made it hard to see, hard to read, hard to think — in short, hard to do what I had to do. But the worst was that as time wore on, I became more and more afraid of myself, or perhaps more conscious of the fear I have always had — a fear that within me is some danger I can’t name.
I slowly emerged from the headache and threw myself even more forcefully into my studies the following year. I became obsessed with Russian intellectual history — in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It was so vivid, so crazed, so horribly sad in the end that I filled myself up with it. I continued to eat books like a starved person. I rejected Jung but was dreaming for Freud every night, making dreams the master would have liked: a twenty-year-old woman going through transference with a dead man. I wrote more poems, composing slowly and carefully — sonnets. I wrote a lot of sonnets.
It would happen again in 1982. A stupendous headache would arrive after I had fallen in love, after many months of ecstatic feeling had reached an aching zenith when I married the man I wanted. The attack began on our honeymoon in Paris with a seizure, one that to my utter astonishment threw me against a wall in the Galerie Maeght and then ended as quickly as it had begun. Half an hour later, I was walking in the street with my husband and my vision suddenly sharpened, as if every building, object, person, and color had been refocused through a powerful camera lens, and then I heard those words in my head, Ihave never been so happy in my life as I am now. I was ill for a whole year. Near the end of that period, I landed in the neurology ward at Mount Sinai Hospital. A listless, prone body that had been ground to a halt by the drug Thorazine, I lay in bed plagued by guilt, busily interpreting my sickness. Had I just imagined I was happy? If I didn’t want to be married, why did it seem that I had wanted it so much? I was an enigma to myself, a burden on my new husband, and insane to boot. I have forgiven myself since then. I recognize that migraine can be triggered by any kind of high emotion, be it joy or fear or grief. I am resigned to myself as a jangling, spasmodic, fluttering body that must work to find calm, peace, and rest.
Sometime during my first week in New York City, the week I started graduate school at Columbia University in the fall of 1978, I was standing in the tiny student room I had rented, and I turned to look at myself in the small mirror over the sink. I knew the person I was looking at was myself, and yet there was an alien quality to my reflection, an otherness that brought with it feelings of exuberance and celebration. All at once, I was looking at a stranger. I had left my parents only days before, and when I said good-bye to them at the airport I had felt unexpected tears rise in the corners of my eyes. It seems to me now that in my mirror image I saw a confirmation of my sudden and radical autonomy, a recognition that a cut from home had been made, and I had survived it whole.
I embraced my solitude. I had left everyone I had known and knew nobody in the city. It wasn’t long before I cut all ties to the boyfriend I had left in Minnesota as well. I threw him off with the town and my childhood, and I did it abruptly. I still feel bad about it, not because it was a mistake but because in some frightened corner of myself I had known that I would never return to him or include him in my future and had hidden that truth from myself. Years later, I was at a dinner party in New York during which the host loudly declared his undying love for his wife. Two weeks later, he left her for another woman. I am as convinced that his declaration was sincere as I am that he was a cipher to himself.
That fall, I walked into another world. New York City struck me as more brilliant and more alive than anywhere else on earth. My body hummed with the city’s speed, verve, and humor. I acquired the urbanite’s sixth sense, the ability to detect the vague scent of danger in the streets and stiffen oneself against it. I wore out my shoes walking, and as I walked I rejoiced in the city’s massive ugliness, its mysterious ruined blocks, its gorgeous pockets of wealth, its markets, its crowds, its colors. Columbia is in and of the city, and I can’t separate one from the other during those years. Both the city and the school were part of a crazy new rhythm of things, a repetitive beat of excitement and discovery. The graduate department in English where I had come to study teemed with critical theory. Foucault, Derrida, Althuser, Lacan, Deleuze, Guattari, and Kristeva were authors I’d never heard of, much less read. By the time I arrived, structuralism had come and gone and the hipsters who populated the graduate schools in the humanities were deep into its postincarnation.