Her Hands His Eyes is a journal written in real time about writing my book. Every week I open the box a little further. A memory. A photograph. A recipe. This is Entry 13. Start from the beginning with Entry 1. You are reading this as I write it. When the book is ready you will be the first to know. Open The Box.
I was sitting at my desk this week looking at slides.
Looking for inspiration. Looking for the next memory. The next photograph. The next piece of the story that needed to be told.
And then my phone rang.
Remi.
NiNi what do you put in your peanut sauce?
I smiled. I rattled off the recipe without thinking. Fish sauce. Peanut butter. Coconut milk. Lime. A little sugar. The proportions my hands know without measuring. And then I said I’ll send you the link.
Remi has known about SusieCooksThai.com for years. She sees me working on it when she visits. She knows her grandmother has a cooking website. We never really talked about the rebranding. About Her Hands His Eyes. About the journal entries. About the book being written in real time every week.
I just sent her the link.
And then I went back to my slides.
She Called Back
A little while later my phone rang again.
Remi.
NiNi your website is cool.
I smiled. Bigger than I expected to.
Because she did not find just the peanut sauce recipe. She found the journal entries. She found Her Hands His Eyes. She found the memoir her grandmother has been writing in real time every week about opening a box of slides and preserving family stories and trying to find words for the things that lived in her great grandmother’s hands.
She found all of it when I sent her that link.
And she called it cool.
Chris’s Drive Home
Every day Chris calls Remi on his drive home from work.
It is their thing. Has been for years. The daily check in. The conversation about nothing and everything. The particular rhythm of a grandfather and granddaughter who talk every day without needing a reason.
That evening he came through the door and told me what Remi had said.
She had mentioned a friend who needed a Thai peanut sauce recipe. And Remi had said I got you. She sent her friend the link.
Not just the peanut sauce recipe.
The whole website.
Her Hands His Eyes. The journal entries. The memoir her grandmother has been writing in real time every week about opening a box of slides and preserving family stories and trying to find words for the things that lived in her great grandmother’s hands.
And then she told her friend I got you.
I sat with that for a long time after Chris told me.
“Some things are taught without words. She felt it anyway.”
Why I Am Writing This
This week I understood something I had not fully understood before.
Remi calling back and saying your website is cool. Remi telling her friend I got you and sending her the link.
That is why I am really writing this.
She is second generation. Born in America. Fully American in every way that counts. She does not carry Thailand the way I carry it. She does not carry the grief of leaving or the loss of a language or the weight of a box that sat in a closet for twenty-four years.
But she felt something when she read those journal entries.
She did not know she was looking for it. She called about peanut sauce.
And she found her grandmother preserving family stories in real time. She found the box and the slides and the farm in Kamphaeng Phet and the woman on the train who traveled hours and hours to bring a little girl home.
She found where she came from.
And she said I got you.
That is everything.
That is the whole reason.
“Preserving family stories is not just for the people who lived them. It is for the ones who did not know they needed them.”
What I Know Now
I was looking at slides for inspiration this week.
I found it in a phone call about peanut sauce.
That is how this works. You sit at your desk and you look at photographs and you try to find the next story and sometimes the next story finds you first.
Remi is fifteen years old. She stood beside me at the stove and asked to learn. She noticed when the rice cooker was not on the counter. She felt something without being told.
And this week she found the journal entries and called her grandmother and said your website is cool and then told her friend I got you.
She is already preserving family stories. She just does not know that is what she is doing yet.
Maybe that is how it always works.
Maybe that is how it worked for me.
Standing in my grandmother’s kitchen at six years old doing small tasks and watching hands and thinking this was just what mornings looked like.
Not knowing I was learning something.
Not knowing I was already carrying it.
I am writing it all down.
For Remi, Samantha, Jackson, Brook, Stetson, and Charlotte.
So they know where they came from.
So they know what NiNi was doing at her desk all those weeks.
So they know that preserving family stories is not a grand gesture.
Sometimes it is just sending someone the link.
And letting them find what they were not looking for.
What Comes Next
This is Entry 13 of Her Hands His Eyes, a memoir written in real time as I open the box.
Next week another memory. Another photograph. Another recipe. Written in real time as it happens.
