Rice For Thought

by Anouthinh Pangthong

Khao. That’s Laotian for rice. My mother taught me how to prepare and steam rice when I was seven. Before I went to bed, I would head to the kitchen where the 50-pound sack of rice was in the pantry and scoop about four or five cups into a bowl. I’d rinse out any sand or bugs that may have wandered into the sack. Then I’d filled the bowl with water until just an inch of water covered the rice and let it sit overnight. This helps soften the rice before it is steams. In the morning, I would transfer the rice from the bowl into a bamboo steamer and let it come to a boil on the stove until the rice turned translucent and sticky. From the steamer, I’d put the cooked rice into a bamboo basket for the family to eat and enjoy. Before I had the technique down, I burnt a lot of rice. My mother didn’t like that.

The Laotian culture is steeped in traditions. Rice, in many ways, plays an integral role. On one occasion, a friend of my mother’s had just given birth. Monks dressed in their golden robes sat in her living room chanting. The mother held the baby’s wrist out to the monks. In one of the mother’s hands was a ball of sticky rice and a hardboiled egg. These were offerings. The monks tied strips of white yarn around the baby’s wrists. These strips of yarn contained the blessings of the monks.

At fifteen, I severed my connection to the Laotian culture when I committed first-degree murder.

Nineteen years of incarceration have left gaps in my cultural identity. In my heart, I am Lao. The same blood that flows through my veins, the same genetic code that maps my existence, comes from my parents and grandparents. However, that is the extent of my Lao identity. Once fluent, I now struggle to put together complete sentences in my native language. This has made it difficult to communicate in Lao to my mother and father. I’ll start off saying something in Lao and then my mind goes blank trying to find the words. I’d have to finish my sentence in English. Those fifteen-minute calls home consist of conversations in English and broken Lao. Along with the language, the customs I learned as a child are now just foggy remnants.

As a child, I loved it when family members come over to our house. I was very close to almost all my cousins. When they came to visit, I knew that we would be eating some of the best tasting food, like chicken curry or beef and bamboo soup with a side of spicy papaya salad. But the main course had to be the freshly steamed sticky rice. Eaten with the fingers, its sticky consistency allows it to be shaped into a ball. I would press a small circular indentation into the ball with my thumb so I can use the rice ball to scoop the chicken curry or spicy papaya salad. I let the sticky rice cool on my nimble fingers before I got a scoop of the entrée.

On one of her visit with me, my mother told a story that took me to her childhood years. I know very little of my mother’s past. When I was growing up, she’d shared very little of herself with my brothers and me. To us, she was just Mom. However, during this one visit, I had the opportunity to see my mother in a different light. She told me a story of her working long hours laboring in a rice field. She’d spend hours stooped over, transplanting little seedlings into the fertile ground covering several acres. Once the seedlings had grown to stalks containing the starchy seeds, the villagers came together to harvest. Each day a different family would work the field clearing stalks. After the harvest, the villagers celebrated their hard work at the village temple with worship, food, and drinks. They placed offerings of the harvested rice on altars. Folk songs told stories of life, love and patriotism, something akin to American country and bluegrass. The work was intense. Her fingers, hands, and back would ache throughout the night. Today she still feels the effects of long hours spent stooped over. She would cut little pieces of heat pads and place them along her aching body.

She also shared some history about the turmoil going on in Laos when she was growing up. It was the 60’s and 70’s and Southeast Asia was in civil unrest. Communism ruled the country. My grandfather was taken to a re-education camp and my mother and other villagers had to hide in bunkers when night fell because of nightly air raids. She called the planes haunting the night skies “spooks.” I was intrigued and captivated by what she shared. My mother is not an open person when it comes to her personal life. It must have taken every ounce of strength she had to revisit the past.

I am Lao and the Lao culture has a lot of history. For my mother, it started in the rice fields. It continued on to a seven year-old kid learning how to cook rice for the very first time, and to me now, remembering.

Anouthinh “Choi” Pangthong is a writer currently incarcerated at San Quentin State Prison.