My body is made of many souls, not just mine, not just one, but of thirty-two. My body sheds some of these souls, sometimes, as I move through the world. Sometimes, I need to call them back to me.
I call Danny.
Danny is fighting for a last-minute pardon.
I try to count his souls one December morning, while staring at his photo on Mother Jones. He and I are Lao people. We believe that the body contains thirty-two souls, the kwan, and that they come and go at different times of our lives. To achieve happiness and equilibrium, the kwan must be bound together. Without them, our body becomes open to bad luck, to illness, to loss. Without them, our bond to our community is severed.
Somdeng Danny Thongsy was two years old when he became a refugee in this country. He was a teenager when he was sent to prison. He was an adult when he was released, when we became friends. Like many Southeast Asian refugees with a past criminal conviction, he fears ICE will deport him to a country he has barely known—a country the United States had bombed from 1964 to 1973, to the rate of a planeload of bombs every eight minutes for nine years, 24/7. To this day, up to eighty million bombs lay undetonated in Laos. The war may be over, but it still demands bodies.
I think of Danny’s body. Of the way his mother must have clutched him against her chest as she escaped war. I wonder if her skin were sweaty, if his breath warmed the crook between her breasts. I wonder if her knuckles were as white as the water you use to rinse khao neow, if her eyes were wide with hope. It is hope above all else that propels a parent to flee danger—the hope that you can let your children laugh out loud, make mistakes and not die from them.
His father was left behind.
One soul.
When Danny and his family were resettled in Stockton, I wonder if they slept in the same room. My brother and I slept in my parents’ room until I was nine years old, our crowded souls sharing two mattresses. I don’t think it had ever occurred to my mother to split us up between the living room and the bedroom. As long as we were on the same bed, her hand would reach out and pat my head, making sure I was safe.
I am my mother’s kwan.
Danny had a brother he loved deeply. His brother was killed. Danny was seventeen. I try to imagine despair and anger inside Danny’s body, the blood they thicken and the salt they spill. Which body is coldest, the one left behind or the one that leaves you? How many souls can a mother lose in one day?
He is his mother’s kwan.
I am still counting.
While in prison, Danny strove to make the world a better place, starting with himself. Therapy put words on feelings he had never understood until then. I know those words, because my parents withheld them from me. We did not speak of trauma or depression. There were no Laotian words for them and besides, a little bit of sadness was far less important than survival. Our parents were busy contorting their tongue around a new language, and they forced us to do the same to ensure that this new world would accept us. My tongue hurt from learning to be articulate. My heart stung when I was told I was.
I can’t write Laotian anymore.
There are souls I no longer understand.
When Danny was freed from prison, he reached out for help, and help was given to him. A community of activists gave him the support he needed, but most important, these activists became his friends. On the Mother Jones’ article, he stands alone, but I know that his phone must contain hundreds of photos of people standing with him, their bodies surrounding him like a barrier. They hold placards and signs and letters. They hug him, have dinner with him, high-five him.
Bodies can form a circle.
Circles can be broken.
Danny has said goodbye to friends who were deported to Cambodia. I wonder how long the scent of their hair and the sound of their voices linger in the rooms they used to share with their families. Families who expected to kiss their faces every morning until forever, in the way families take forever for granted when they are happy.
I am the apple of my mother’s eye.
She said her body will always shield mine.
Southeast Asian families are putting their bodies in hallways, in airports, in offices looking to defend those who are being threatened with deportation. Their bodies stay close to each other, knowing that a community menaced with separation must be bound together even more tightly. With them, Danny continues to help others, even though he is constantly worried about himself. When he shakes your hand, he draws a circle of protection around you.
Your body has 32 kwan, but I promise you, Danny has 64 of them.
96.
128.
160.
This is how many I have counted on a December morning.
And when I begin to feel weary, I let music continue the counting. Rasmee, an Isan singer from Northeast Thailand, calls out “Yu sai, yu sai? Where are you? Where are you?” As her voice comes through my headphones, her song almost becomes a prayer. My body sends a beacon to all the souls that I have somehow shed and that I now need again, as I write a letter to the governor.
I am calling our kwan back to us. I want Danny to stay here. I want the people who love him to be able to keep him here, to touch him, to hold him. Community can be many things, but in its most essential form, it is a body that keeps us safe. Tearing it from limb to limb can only leave our country open to more pain, more trauma, more illness. It is time to bind our thirty-two kwan. Let refugees find a safe home here. Let Danny stay.
• •
I have been rewatching the Scent of Green Papaya, basking in the sensory details of every scene, like small islands of serenity strewn across the movie.
