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 17. 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.
I was already tired when I sat down.
That was my mistake. You don’t open something like this when you are already running on empty. You don’t go back into that dress shop in Bangkok, back onto that porch in Kamphaeng Phet, back inside a twelve year old girl with a Walkman and no language when you have nothing left to protect yourself with.
I didn’t know that until it was too late.
I started writing and the chapter just took me. Pulled me all the way under before I knew I was drowning.
I wrote my mother’s hands on my shoulders in that Bangkok dress shop. Moving me away from the window without a word. Twelve years old and already something that needed protecting and not yet knowing why. Too American for Bangkok. Too Thai for Maryland. A girl who gave six years to becoming Susie only to come back and find out that Supattra was gone too. That there was no door in the world that opened all the way for all of her at once.
I pushed back from the desk.
Looked at the ceiling.
Couldn’t move for a while.
I came back and wrote the Walkman. Eye of the Tiger on headphones at my family’s dinner table in Kamphaeng Phet while everyone talked and laughed and passed food in a language I had lost. I was right there at that table. I was nowhere. The headphones were the only place that took all of me without asking me to be less.
I stared out the window after that one.
Just stared.
And then I wrote the porch.
Kun Yai. Six years gone and me not knowing it yet. Not in my body. Not in the place where grief actually lives. And then I was back in Kamphaeng Phet and I was twelve and it came for me all at once. Six years of grief that had been patient and was done being patient.
My mother came and sat beside me.
Didn’t say a word.
Her shoulder against mine and the frogs starting up and the sky going pink over the fields and both of us missing the same woman in the same silence.
That’s when I broke.
Not in Kamphaeng Phet. Here. In Florida. At my desk. I put my face in my hands and I cried the way you cry when you are exhausted and the thing you are writing is true and there is nothing left inside you to hold it back with.
I had nothing left.
The chapter took everything I had.
I sat there a long time.
Then I got up and made Drunken Noodles for Chris.
I don’t know why that dish. I just moved toward it the way you move toward the thing your hands already know.
I got the wok hot. The oil. The noodles going in. And then the holy basil at the last second and the smell hit me and I was gone.
Not Florida. Not my kitchen. Not 2026.
I was in Kamphaeng Phet. I was six years old and filthy from the rice fields, Peprakhong and me running in from outside, legs muddy to the knee, hungry the way only children who have been running all day get hungry. And there was Kun Yai. Standing in front of the wok. Her back to us. The same smell. This exact smell filling that kitchen the same way it was filling mine right now.
I stood at my stove in Florida and I could not move.
She has been gone my whole adult life and she was right there.
Right there in my kitchen.
In that smell.
Chris came in and sat down and ate and said it was good. He didn’t know that I had just cooked my way back to a kitchen in Kamphaeng Phet. He didn’t know that Kun Yai had been standing at my stove. He didn’t know what the day had taken from me or what that smell had given back.
Some things you can’t explain to someone who wasn’t inside it with you.
But she knew.
She always knew.
That is why she taught me to cook. That is what the kitchen has always been for. The thing you do with your hands when the rest of you is gone. The way the ones we have lost find their way back to us.
Not in photographs.
Not in words.
In smell. In heat. In a wok in front of a window with your back to the door and two muddy children running in from the rice fields.
I went back to the desk after dinner.
I finished the chapter.
Because she taught me that too. You feel it all the way through. And then you pick up the pen and you finish what you started.
She never put anything down.
Neither will I.
