I couldn’t describe, exactly, the layout of the trailer my family moved into when we arrived in the United States; or even the view outside the first apartment I lived in on my own. But I can close my eyes and summon the fearsome rush of the river in Verghese’s Covenant of Water. A snowy wood in a cursed land, dimpled with the footsteps of a talking faun. A snug, green-gabled house on Prince Edward Island that smells of apples in the fall and tiger lillies in high spring. The moors of 19th-century England, across which the ravaged ghost of Cathy Earnshaw storms, like a ruthless wind.
Have you been to those places? Where do you go in your dreaming mind?
***
The first time I realized that I could travel in this way, I must have been eight or nine. My daughter is now this age, so it rises up in my mind. This is the age, I think, where we begin to read with our bodies. A shocking passage makes us gasp; one of beauty makes us sigh. Laughter is sudden and convulsive. Books begin to feel real.
I used to read my books on a swinging bench in my grandparents’ overgrown yard, where an ancient tortoise roamed and pigeons squawked inside a steel cage. My grandfather kneeled in the soil, coaxing the seeds of cherry trees that would take years to fruit. Square glasses slid down his nose; pink scratches ran up his arms. In my mind, he was tall and his shadow long, but in reality, he hardly cleared 5’3″.
“Where are you going today?” he’d ask me. A tortoise, craggy and tired, would inch through the weeds. In Florida, the sun was always punishing, but he and I could linger in the garden for hours, caught up in the peace of a fellowship that demanded nothing from the other person.
Treasure Island, I’d say. Or Wayside School. A Little House on a Prairie.
My grandfather never read any of my books — he did not read much in English — but he was there with me. And he took me with him, too, not to fictional places, but to places of memory that felt, perhaps, as distant as Narnia.
He told me about the fishing village where he grew up, an orphan and later a boy soldier, where the palms were ledged for young climbers, and the basa flopped onto the banks in rods of silver. He described the floating villages of Can Tho, where painted boats slanted against one another like a thousand brilliant leaves. Someday, he said, he’d show me the world.
Later in life, I visited many of those places he detailed — with him, in fact, on a tour of Việt Nam. We ran down the alleys of Ho Chi Minh City in search of an obscure hủ tiếu stand he wanted to visit. We clutched our seats during a precarious cable car ride above the green mountains of Đà Lạt. At my childhood home, he showed me his first garden, where I once liked to sit on his shoulders like a tiny despot, surveying the land as if it would always belong to us. Now, from a distance, that trip takes on a strange mythology, sculpted from the real sites I encountered, as well as my grandfather’s memories, which were never mine but felt like they belonged to me all the same.
***
I would not have been a writer without him. An avid garage sale shopper, he’d wake early on Saturdays to walk the neighborhood in search of a deal. He brought back boxes of books he thought I’d like and, once, he set a clanky old Word processor in front of me. It was his way of telling me to write my own stories. With each clack of the keys, I found myself transported to realms only I could reach. I soared far and wide, knowing that, one room over, he’d be waiting for me to come home.
My grandfather has now gone to a place I can’t find. When I imagine him, he is always in a garden. He pauses and turns. He beckons to me. There’s still so much to see, he seems to say. But then the image shudders and fades, and I can’t follow him after all. What’s left is longing; crushing and sublime and, somehow, life-giving.
In the pandemic, isolated from people and places I held dear, I wrote a romance novel about all the cities I had traveled to with my grandfather, and those I wanted to experience with my own child someday.
When writing my book, I wanted nothing more than to return to that time and place with my grandfather and create my own landmark in the atlas of my imagination. There, the scenery would be lush, the days long and crowded with adventure, and the happily-ever-after guaranteed. The best kind of places — those real or imagined — can hold our most beloved stories, as well as all those we yearn for.
Thao Thai is a writer and editor in Ohio, and her new romance novel, Adam & Evie’s Matchmaking Tour, just came out this September. She’s written for Cup of Jo about motherhood, absent fathers, physical affection, and her year of selfies. A recipient of the 2024 Ohio Arts Council’s Individual Excellence Award, Thao also wrote the novel Banyan Moon (June 2023). You can follow her on Instagram or subscribe to her newsletter, if you’d like.
P.S. The life motto Joanna learned at her grandmother’s funeral, and a darkly funny book we loved.
(Photo by Pansfun Images/Stocksy.)