  You know how it is when you're busy with your life. Appointments, paperwork, phone calls, text messages, e-mails; work and family and friends colliding, intertwining, struggling for priority.
Being several persona in the span of a few minutes, a stream of consciousness that shifts in and out of multiple thought processes. In this whirlwind, you exist solely in the present and perhaps a week or so in the future, but that is all.
There is little time for anything else. Then you hear a song that stops you dead in your tracks and pulls you back somewhere into your past, and you have no choice but to follow. Today's song was urlLink America , by Simon and Garfunkel. I was three when we moved to Bangkok - old enough to remember the Philippines. (I was going to say - young enough to not be traumatized by the move , but it occurred to me that there is a gaping hole in my memories where that move should have been.
My mother tells me that when we first moved there, we lived in a hotel for a while before moving to an apartment, but I have no recollection of that, or of our last few weeks in Manila, or of the plane ride to Bangkok. Which is strange, because I have vague memories of visiting Hong Kong when I was a year old. Oh, well - one day, I suppose, I'll ask her what happened.
) We lived in a small flat, in a compound along Soi Rambutree - my father picked the place for its proximity to urlLink his office (this is the first time I've seen a map of the place since I left, and all the names sound vaguely familiar still). I have fond memories of that apartment, although it was easily one of the smallest and plainest places we've ever lived in.
It was the second storey of a duplex townhouse, designed so that one apartment occupied the entire first floor and the other occupied the entire second floor; you got to our place by climbing up a narrow, shadowy flight of stairs. The apartment was completely unfurnished when we got it, and remained, for the most part, unfurnished - my mother disliked it intensely, and refused to buy furniture in the hopes that it would motivate my father to look for a better place.
In the meantime, we rattled around an apartment that had two tables, two chairs, a few shelves, and a closet. Note that I omitted mentioning beds - we didn't have any. My mother bought cheap mattresses, which we laid on the floor in the bedroom and slept on. In the mornings, my sister and I would sprawl around the living area in our underwear and read and draw while my mother did the chores.
Years later, my mother told me how lonely and frustrated she had been, those first few months. She was in her early thirties at the time, living in a small apartment with a husband who was never there and children too young to talk to her, in a country whose language she did not speak, far away from family and friends. There was no e-mail in those days, and our apartment had no telephone. It was a moot point in any case, since at that time she didn't have any friends in Bangkok, so there would have been no one to call.
In order to understand how truly mind-numbing that must have been, you have to know a little about my mother's history. She had been a sixth-placer in the national board exams for nursing; even before she graduated, private companies were sending her lucrative offers to come and work for them. She chose, instead, to go and work for the urlLink Philippine General Hospital so she could pay off her scholarship. After having worked off her scholarship, she applied for work as a nurse in the US and was accepted.
She was 22 when she left for the US, young and pretty and fun-loving. We have pictures of her roaming across the US, and countless anecdotes from her travels there - watching Old Faithful in Yellowstone, eating lobster in Maine, picking oranges in Florida, hooting at boys as she drove past them in California, sleeping over at an aunt's place in Whidbey Island. Four years later my father proposed to her, and two years after that she came home for good, to marry him. Imagining myself in that situation, all these years later, I asked her How did you not go crazy? I don't know, she said, looking back at her younger self with amazement. I really don't know. The mornings were the emptiest times of the day. In the afternoons she would run errands or take us to school; in the evenings my father would come home.
In the mornings, though, there was nothing much to do, and it was then that she would flip through her collection of cassettes and play us music. My mother used to love music; a few weeks ago my sister and I came across a stack of old vinyl records, which she had collected when she lived in Ohio. By the time we got to Bangkok the music medium of the day was the cassette tape. She wasn't able to bring much, but the tapes she brought define the soundtrack of my childhood: the ubiquitous We Are the World , various albums of The Carpenters, the soundtrack of Flashdance , Olivia Newton-John, Chopin, Mozart, some Sandi Patti, and Simon and Garfunkel.
My sister and I learned that we could tell our mother's moods by the music she played. Olivia Newton-John and Flashdance , of course, were dance music; my mother used to be a dancer when she was younger and up until we were in grade school, she would put on music and dance to stay fit.
We Are the World , The Carpenters, and Simon and Garfunkel's cheerier songs were chore songs, which she played when she was trying to feel good about doing something she hated. When she was upset or irritated, it was classical or gospel music - Chopin when she was particularly frustrated. When she was lonely, or when she missed home, it was Simon and Garfunkel. She would sort through photographs while Sound of Silence played in the background, write letters home to Bridge over Troubled Waters , absently arrange and rearrange her belongings as Paul Simon crooned America .
Even more than the classical-music-times, we learned that these were the times when Mommy didn't really want to read stories or answer questions or blow bubbles off the balcony. Today I heard the words I'm empty and aching and I don't know why , and it took me back there - to that first year in Bangkok, and the longing look in my mother's eyes, and the way my father would sit on the balcony with his shoulders slumped, smoking. I remember playing with my sister, who didn't know how to talk yet; going to school and not saying a word, because - funnily enough - I didn't know how to speak English; poking tentatively at the noodles my mother had just bought in the street because she didn't know how to cook and that was the only thing being sold in our area and if we didn't buy it then we wouldn't have dinner.
I remember afternoons on our balcony, watching my father's hands as he pulled the thick skin off a pomelo, and thinking that he must be the strongest man in the world.
I remember clutching to my mother's dress as the little girl who lived next to us called out to me in Thai, asking something, and how horribly embarrassed I was because I didn't know what she was saying. Say pai tiaw, kha , my mother prompted softly. She's asking you where you're going. [ Note : Pai tiaw means, roughly, that you're going out; it's what you say when you know you're going somewhere, but you haven't really decided where you're going to go yet. Kind of like saying Kami lepak in Bahasa, or labas lang kami in Filipino. ] I remember, I remember, I remember.
There will never be enough words for a memory. 
