Her Hands His Eyes: A Memoir in Recipes

By Susie Thompson

My father left it when he passed in 2001. Inside, more than a thousand 35mm slides wrapped carefully in Thai newspaper — each one a moment he had chosen to keep. I carried that box through every house, every move, every version of my life for twenty-four years without opening it.

Maryland. North Carolina. Florida.

I never left it behind. I never looked inside. I cannot explain that. It simply was not the time.

In 2025, my mother passed. She returned to Kamphaeng Phet at the end — to the farm where she was born, to the red earth and the Ping River. And when she was gone, what she had carried in her hands for fifty years was gone with her. The recipes she had never written down. The flavors she had rebuilt from memory in every American kitchen she ever had. The whole weight of a life lived quietly between two worlds.

My husband Chris left a 35mm slide scanner on the kitchen counter one Saturday morning without saying a word.

I opened the box.

Thailand in the early 1970s. A country I had come from but had never seen this way — through his eyes, through the particular attention of a man who understood that nothing announces itself as important while it is happening.

My father was stationed at Korat Royal Thai Air Force Base in the early 1970s, there to keep the communication lines open between Vietnam and the Pentagon. He brought his camera everywhere. He pointed it at Tuesday afternoon and pressed the shutter. The food vendor at the market. The woman at the river. The child at the window.

He met my mother at Loy Krathong — the festival of light on the Ping River. She was standing in the crowd in an orange dress, an enormous krathong in both hands, candles burning. She turned and found him watching. He kept the moment she saw him. He kept the moment she forgot him. He kept the moment she came back. He kept the moment she let go.

He kept everything.

Inside that box was the floating market at dawn, where he stepped into a boat because he did not believe in watching life from the edge. The temple ruins at Phimai. The streets of Saigon. The canals of Venice. Bangkok movie billboards painted by hand, ten feet tall. My mother young and laughing in a way I had never known her. My grandmother Kun Yai on a wooden floor in Kamphaeng Phet. My cousin Peprakhong and me in the rice fields.

And me.

A little girl at an airport window.

Four times he pressed the shutter. Four times he walked back. Because he understood what I did not — that this was the last time Thailand would be my whole world. That I was six years old and thinking about the adventure while he was standing behind me, understanding what was ending.

He kept it for me.

He always knew I would need it.

Her Hands His Eyes is the story of two parents and the things they carried.

My mother carried the food. Not in notebooks. Not in recipe cards. In her hands — in the particular weight of a handful of lemongrass, in the way she tasted and adjusted and tasted again, in the complete authority of someone who had made the same thing ten thousand times and never needed to write it down. She crossed eight thousand six hundred miles and rebuilt Thailand in every American kitchen she ever had. She never lost a single flavor. Not one.

My father carried his camera. He pointed it at ordinary afternoons and floating markets and the child at the window. He understood that nothing announces itself as important while it is happening. He just kept pressing the shutter.

I am their daughter.

I was born Supattra in Kamphaeng Phet, Thailand. America gave me Susie. I lost the language at six years old — replaced by English so completely that when we went back to Thailand when I was twelve, and my family spoke to me in Thai, I could only stare. Not a word. Not a syllable. They were not pleased. My mother absorbed it the way she absorbed everything — quietly, without fuss, without apology. She had given up the language to give me America. She made sure I did not lose everything else.

Every morning she sent me to Catholic school in a pressed uniform. Every evening she burned incense at the altar. Every festival day she drove me to Wat Thai in Silver Spring without explaining why. Two worlds held simultaneously, without conflict, without explanation. She understood that a person can belong to more than one thing at once.

And around my neck, the amulet she placed there at Lady Mong in Korat when I was twelve years old. She fastened the clasp, stepped back, and looked at me the way she looked at me when she had done something she intended to do.

A memoir told in recipes. Twelve chapters. Twenty-two dishes.

The Korat street soup with rice flakes and a hard-boiled egg — the one I ate every afternoon on the back of my mother’s scooter, the half egg I always asked for. Pien’s red curry — what she put in front of my husband Chris that first Christmas without being asked, the bowl that said you are welcome here before a single word was spoken. And Nini noodles — instant noodles with two eggs and a squeeze of lemon juice, invented in a Florida kitchen for grandchildren who were hungry, now the most requested dish in this house.

Three generations of the same instinct. You feed the people you love. You do not wait to be asked.

Woven through the recipes are never-before-published photographs from my father’s collection — images of Thailand in the early 1970s that have never been seen outside our family. The floating market. The rice fields of Kamphaeng Phet. My mother in an orange dress, looking back at my father with everything still in her hands.

My granddaughter Remi walked into my kitchen at fifteen and asked to learn. She stood beside me at the stove the way I once stood beside my mother. One afternoon the rice cooker was not on the counter. She noticed immediately. She looked at me and asked quietly, “NiNi, are you okay?”

No one had told her what it meant.

She felt it anyway.

Some things are taught without words.

This book is for whoever comes next.

Susie Thompson was born Supattra Terry in Kamphaeng Phet, Thailand and raised between two worlds — Thai kitchens and American classrooms, Buddhist altars and Catholic schools, fish sauce and football games. She left Thailand at six years old and spent the next fifty years carrying it with her.

Through SusieCooksThai.com she has shared her mother’s recipes with readers around the world. Her Hands His Eyes is her first book.

She lives in Florida with her husband, Chris. The rice cooker is always on.

THE BOX

This Is Happening Right Now