I lost the language. I never lost the food.
I was born in Kamphaeng Phet, Thailand—a place of old temples and flooded fields, where my grandmother’s family farmed the land and my mother learned to cook before she could read. By the time I was a child in Korat, food was already a language spoken without words.
Each afternoon, my mother would lift me onto the back of her scooter and drive us home from school. We always stopped along the way. The same food stall. The same woman. The same soup.
I always wanted more.
I never learned her name.
In 1976, when I was six years old, my father packed our life into a shipping container, and we left.
My mother chose what she could carry. A mortar and pestle. A spice rack. A Singer sewing machine. What mattered most lived in her hands—the recipes she had never written down, the measures she had never needed to name.
My father brought his camera.
And a brown cardboard box wrapped in Thai newspaper, filled with more than a thousand photographs he had taken across the country we were leaving behind.
He never explained them.
He never needed to.
At the airport in Bangkok, I stood at the window in pigtails, watching the plane that would take us to America. It sat still on the tarmac, as if it had all the time in the world.
I did not understand what was ending.
My father did.
He raised his camera and took four photographs.
The Box
When my father died in 2001, the box came to me.
I carried it for twenty-four years without opening it. Through houses, through seasons of my life, through versions of myself that came and went. I never left it behind. I never looked inside.
I cannot explain that. I only know it was not time.
In 2025, my mother died.
At the end, she returned to Kamphaeng Phet—to the farm where she was born, to the place where everything she knew had begun. And when she was gone, what she carried in her hands was gone with her.
After that, my husband Chris and I opened the box.
Inside were slides—over a thousand of them. Small frames of light, each one holding a moment my father had chosen to keep.
We sat together and brought them back, one by one.
Thailand, in the early 1970s.
A country I had come from, but had never seen this way.
Water stretching across my grandmother’s rice fields. Markets crowded with heat and motion. Vendors who looked directly into my father’s lens, as if they knew they were being remembered. Temples standing where they had always stood.
The floating market—where my father stepped into a boat, because he did not believe in watching life from the edge.
And my mother.
Young in a way I had never known her. Laughing. Sewing. Feeding a child with a spoon. Standing at Loy Krathong, her face lit by candlelight, holding a small offering in her hands before releasing it into the dark water, where it joined hundreds of others drifting slowly away.
She was there in a way I had never seen her before.
Not as my mother.
As herself.
Everything was in that box.
Her Hands. His Eyes.
My mother was Buddhist. My father was Catholic. In America, I was raised between them—my days shaped by school uniforms and church, my nights by the smell of fish sauce and lime.
I learned early that the most important things do not compete.
They complete.
Sweet and sour.
Heat and salt.
Prayer and offering.
Thailand and America.
Nothing cancels the other. Everything deepens it.
My mother cooked this way. Without measurement. Without instruction. Her hands remembering what could not be written, rebuilding flavors in a new country until the air itself felt familiar again.
My father moved through the world differently. He watched. He framed. He waited for the moment that revealed something essential, and then he kept it.
I am their daughter.
I cook with her hands.
I see with his eyes.
What I Am Building
My name is Susie Thompson.
I teach the food my mother carried across an ocean—food that began in Kamphaeng Phet, passed through a kitchen in Maryland, and now lives in my home in Florida.
People find their way here from all over the world. What they are looking for, I think, is more than a recipe.
It is how to remember.
I am writing a book.
Her Hands His Eyes: A Memoir in Recipes is the story of what a family carries across an ocean and what it means to finally open the box.
Some of them are here.
The rest are still becoming what they were meant to be.
The Family Table
My husband Chris met me in Maryland, in a pizza place, in another lifetime.
That first Christmas, he sat at my mother’s table and tasted her Massaman curry. He did not speak. He did not look up. He just kept eating.
He has been doing that for forty years.
We built a life around that table.
Our sons grew up there—watching, tasting, learning without being told they were learning. One cooks with fire and smoke. The other makes his grandmother’s curry as if it had always been his.
Now there are grandchildren.
When my granddaughter Remi was eight years old, she set up a camera and filmed herself making lasagna. No one asked her to. No one showed her how.
I learned to make lasagna at eight, standing beside my father in a kitchen in Maryland.
She did not know that.
She didn’t need to.
Now she is fifteen.
Recently, she came into my kitchen and asked me to teach her.
Not everything. Just a few things.
Beef noodle soup.
Pad Thai.
She stood beside me the way I once stood beside my mother—watching, asking, storing it away.
My mother taught me without naming it as teaching.
I did the same with my sons.
And now it is happening again.
Four generations.
Not in a straight line, but in a circle that keeps widening.
I opened a box and found my past.
My granddaughter walked into my kitchen and showed me my future.
What Is In My Home Tonight
In my living room, there are lamps my father once photographed in our home in Korat. Marble and brass. Still lit. Still here.
In my kitchen, there is a mortar worn smooth by hands that came before mine. A rice cooker that has never needed explaining.
One day, it was not on the counter.
Remi noticed immediately.
She looked at me and asked, quietly, “NiNi… are you okay?”
No one had told her what it meant. That it had been there in every kitchen. That its absence was a kind of silence.
She felt it anyway.
Some things are taught without words.
Around us are objects that have traveled decades to remain where they are—wood, cloth, metal, prayer. Things carried. Things kept. Things that outlast the people who first held them.
Thailand is not a place I left.
It is something I live inside.
Every day. In every meal. In every photograph. In every moment that passes from one set of hands to another.
And now, at last, I am bringing it home.
Her Hands His Eyes: A Memoir in Recipes ~ Coming Soon
HerHandsHisEyes.com
Thailand gave me my roots. Maryland gave me my heart. Florida gave me my voice.
~Susie Thompson