You were not the first monks I met in Thailand, but you were the only ones I bowed to with both hands pressed together at the chin to demonstrate respect. You were two together and we were together, two married women passing for straight, but you wondered about that in the way you eyed my hair.
It was short with a swoop of bangs pushed to one side and a cowlick at the crown. I’d been cutting my own hair for months by then, holding the scissors perpendicular and slicing into the bangs, careful not to clip my fingers. I thought the long bangs made me look half like a woman and half like a boy band star and nothing like a soccer mom, which is how hairdressers always made me look. I had a habit of tugging on my bangs when I was unsettled or didn’t know what to say or simply wanted to be somewhere else, which was most days.
Once your temple was the grandest in Chiang Mai, but the stupa collapsed inward in an earthquake, in 1545. Grass grew in the cracks between crumbled bricks—a UNESCO-sponsored renovation had never been completed.
The main temple was half-decayed or half-repaired, depending on how you looked at things. The temple walls were studded with elephant statues, stained black with algae. Buddha statues sparkled in vibrant reds, whites, and gold. Offerings were everywhere: incense, marigold garlands, lotus flowers.
I loved the dense, vivid clutter of the courtyard, the way your temple seemed not set apart from urban life but central to it. Sometimes in ancient European churches, I’d have a similar feeling of attunement to a communal holiness. I refused confirmation, I did not believe in organized religion, but subtle divinity, here-then-gone like incense on the breeze, could still spark something in me.
At your temple, I felt empty, though not in the Buddhist sense of emptiness as the nature of all things. The other tourists made me shy about my interest in learning meditation, and I recast my desire for stillness and inner peace as a typical Western faith crisis. It had been so long since I’d let in joy that I could only see it sideways, like an alley cat. I had nothing to give.
From 9 a.m. to 6 p.m., you waited in the courtyard in your ochre-colored robes, the face of monk chat. Monk chat was a cultural exchange, Buddhist teaching, and English conversation practice open to anyone who was interested. Buddhism, monk’s life, Thai culture, anything, read a sign on a far wall. Please come and talk with us.
When our turn came, we sat across from you at a plastic folding table. Your hair was buzzed, but thick and dark, covering your cranial bones. Your faces were wide and dotted with acne scars. You broke into toothy smiles when you laughed or spoke in English. You were from Myanmar, you said. Had we been there?
We hadn’t. I asked how you liked your studies at the temple; why you’d come here instead of remaining in Myanmar.
“There’s more opportunity here,” you said. Then you asked about my hair.
I wasn’t prepared for your close attention, could only guess at what lay beneath your curiosity. I didn’t think I could explain female masculinity or gender expression so I said I liked it that way. I was pretending to be straight, pretending my wife was only my friend; it was easier and safer that way, we’d heard.
You asked if we were American, then you asked if people in America hated Muslims. I gripped the table with my hands, needing something solid for grounding. “We don’t hate Muslims in America,” I said. But you looked puzzled—you heard otherwise on the news, perhaps, and I imagined you clustered around a dormitory hall television—so I tried again. “Some Muslims did bad things to America, but that doesn’t mean all Muslims are bad. Anyway, we don’t hate them.”
In the courtyard, tourists with selfie sticks, phone cameras, and sunburned faces waited their turn to speak with you. What would they say if asked about Muslims in America?
“You can be whatever you want to be in America,” my wife said. “You can be any religion and it’s okay.”
We didn’t meet your expectations for American tourists. Your questions weren’t what we imagined we’d be asked, either. We asked about your daily schedule. You asked for a donation to cover the cost of education. We handed over baht, bowed once more, and left.
I still think of what you might’ve meant when you asked about my hair, or American Muslims, or whether I treated your curiosity fairly. I still think of the space between us, the things I imagined you might be, the things I needed you to be.
I wanted to believe you held faith dearly, that it made you good. I wanted to walk away from the table having grasped a deeper truth. I wanted to believe that I could be good, that I could one day believe in something larger, that this might heal me. But I never asked those questions.
I felt obliged to represent the best parts of America, but I hadn’t represented myself truthfully.
In the beginning, it was easy to lie. To accept the hotel room with two twin beds. To keep our hands to ourselves, except in the backseat of a tuk-tuk. It felt freeing, at first, to pass for what I hadn’t been in so long, or ever. The longer we stayed, the more it felt impossible to do anything other than pretend.
Lindsey Danis is a queer writer whose essays have appeared in Longreads, Catapult, and Hobart, and have received a notable mention in Best American Travel Writing. Lindsey also runs the queer travel blog QueerAdventurers and is the creative nonfiction editor at Atlas + Alice.
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Heavy Feather Review 