My aunt is on stage at the Kennedy Center in Washington-DC, wearing a golden headdress and a fuchsia silk garment that is secured with an elaborate golden belt around her waist. She presses her thumbs against their respective palms, arches her four other fingers and wrists backwards towards her upper arms, and raises both arms outwards like the wings of a bird. Bending her knees slightly, she takes rapid but graceful steps forward, backwards, and in a circle. She is portraying a kinnaree, a half-woman-half-bird creature who is married to a human-prince but longs to return to her childhood home. The ensemble of musicians behind her –playing the saw-duang and saw-u fiddles, the ranat-thum and ranat-ek xylophones, the stringed khim, and the gongs –accompany her as she captivates the audience with a performance of the Manohra Kinnaree, a Thai classical dance-drama dating back to the 14^th century of the Ayutthaya period of Thai history. At the end of the dance, she brings her hands together in a prayer and bows.

What follows next is pandemonium. As the audience rises with robust applause, my aunt turns to leave the stage and collapses. I stumble my way through the crowd towards her while the musicians come to her aid. She is unconscious. Someone calls 911. My aunt is placed onto a stretcher, and I accompany her in the ambulance with the paramedics. I try to convey, between my own panicked gasps of air, that she has a congenital heart defect and a history of arrhythmias. We arrive at the ER, where she is transported into a room. Instantly, there is a cacophony of footsteps rushing to her bedside, medical-jargon such as syncope and atrial tachycardia ringing out in urgent tones, and the squeaks of the cardioversion-machine’s wheels as it is brought to her bed. The medical-staff place electrodes connected to the cardioversion-machine on her chest to deliver shocks to her heart to restore a normal heart rhythm. I’m ushered to the waiting room, and the only thing I can think of is how the Thai phrase for an escalating heartbeat is jai-then (a “dancing heart”).

***

I hadn’t initially planned to spend my spring-break in DC. I was living in Seattle –in the other Washington –attending college as a Comparative Literature major. I’d been trying to write a novel as a personal side-project, but I hadn’t made much progress, so I thought I’d spend the break working on it. Hoping to clear my mind after one particularly grueling writing session, I went for a jog around my dormitory. Wiping the perspiration off my forehead, I stared desolately at the overcast sky, the Thai word for sky – faa –morphing into the expletive fuck in my mind. I was ruddy and rudderless.

As if by some telepathic ability to sense my distress, my aunt called me then. She was the director of a troupe of Thai classical dancers and musicians in DC and was herself a consummate dancer. She told me excitedly about the performances they had scheduled at the Thai Embassy, the Wat Thai Temple, the Smithsonian Museum of Asian Art, and the Kennedy Center, which would coincide with my spring-break week. She asked whether I would return home over the break, and when she added jocundly that she would cook my favorite stir-fried pad-kee-mao, the memory of the smoky noodles opened the floodgates to a homesickness that I’d been suppressing for months. I told her I’d be there.

***

I was raised in DC by a family of artists. My mother –my aunt’s sister –was also a Thai classical dancer while my father played the saw-duang fiddle. My parents met at a performing arts school in Bangkok, Thailand, and after their training, they married and immigrated to DC –from one nation’s capital to another –along with my aunt and their colleagues, forming a troupe of artists with the aim of sharing and teaching Thai classical arts in the US. I took dance and music lessons as a young girl myself, but I was more enamored of the stories –the Thai epics and poems conveyed in the dance performances. My fondest childhood memory involves my parents reading to me the story Khun Chang Khun Phaen, featuring the adventures of three characters caught in a love-triangle amid a backdrop of war and political intrigue. I never wanted this bedtime story to end, but what I never anticipated was that the very triangle between us –father, mother, and daughter –would come to an end as well.

When I was in elementary school, my parents traveled back to Thailand for a two-week conference at their alma mater to meet with students who were interested in coming to DC for further training. I was left with my aunt during that time, and after school, she brought me along to her rehearsals for a production of the Hindu epic Ramayana (or Ramakien in Thai), a collaborative project between her troupe and a group of Indian-classical dancers and musicians. The story follows Prince Rama, his brother Lakshmana, and a troop of monkey-warriors on a quest to rescue Rama’s wife, Sita, from the demon-king Ravana. I remember that the first show was a success, and after the performance, I gamboled down the hallway in my gamboge silk-dress towards my aunt’s dressing-room to congratulate her. Bursting into that room with jubilation, I stopped abruptly upon catching sight of my aunt’s expression, which was not one of rapture but of rue. My grandparents in Bangkok had called to tell her that my parents had died in a car accident. Enveloping me in her arms, my aunt’s voice quavered about how life had transmogrified into a perverse rendition of the Ramakien –she as Lakshmana with the troupe of performers, my father as Rama and my mother as Sita killed senselessly before they could be saved.

Thereafter, my aunt, who was not married and had no children of her own, became my guardian. We found ourselves floating between two worlds: between what was and what is, between what is and what could be, and between the creative world and the real world. I struggled to adjust to a childhood without my parents; I retreated into books and wrote fictional stories, inhabiting the lives of other characters to dissociate myself from my reality. Meanwhile, my aunt escaped into the lives of characters she portrayed on stage. She felt, moreover, that as the matriarch of the troupe, she had to maintain a stoic demeanor around everyone else. Thus, she didn’t openly discuss her health other than when she had to attend appointments with her cardiologist or when she asked me to remind her to take her medications. But I had secretly witnessed the moments when she was alone backstage and unmasked: I’d stand near the doorframe of the dressing-room in the venues where the troupe performed and peer in, finding her breathing rapidly, her eyes closed, her hand clutching the necklace with a small golden Buddha around her neck. When other dancers were present in the room, she spoke gregariously to them, but once alone, she wiped away her makeup and her smile as well, revealing an underlying enervation and tristesse.

Gradually, we became open-hearted with each other. My aunt was my designated bedtime-storyteller, and as I grew older, story-time shifted from the bedroom to the kitchen. She taught me how to mix coconut-milk and curry-paste to make panang-curry and recalled the times when my mother, the younger and more mischievous sister, attempted to climb the coconut tree near their house in order to drink fresh coconut-water.

Sometimes, her stories were sobering. While I grappled with grief for the first time in my life, my aunt was well-versed in it, having experienced it since her own childhood. Her encounters with grief, however, were not due to the loss of loved ones but rather the loss of her own health. She was born with a congenital heart-defect and received several operations in her infancy.  When complications arose in her childhood, she found herself shuffling between school and medical appointments, unable to join the other neighborhood kids in playing sports that were too strenuous or straining, and spent hours in front of the bathroom mirror instead, tracing scars on her chest. She had her sister though, and together, they pursued Thai classical dance, which provided the optimal balance between the exercise she still needed and could tolerate and the outlet for artistic expression that she craved.

When I was in high-school, my aunt was in the hospital for several days following a heart operation. I remembered that her favorite movie was the Titanic, so when visiting her, I guided her to the window, where she could see the world outside the confines of the hospital. Standing behind her, I lifted her arms outwards, holding her steady, and sang “My Heart Will Go On,” trying to reenact the scene where Jack and Rose stand on the deck of the ship, arms spread out, taking in the glory of the world. She turned around, teasing, “You’re pulling at my heartstrings,” and I squeezed her hand, bantering, “I’m wearing my heart on my sleeve for you.”

We talked too about Thai expressions. Just as the heart is central to a person’s life, there are a plethora of emotion-related words in Thai containing the word jai (heart) within them. My aunt reminisced about the times when she and my mother, as young schoolgirls, engaged in “verbal tennis” –each taking turns uttering a word containing jai until they ran out of words (such as dee-jai (happy), sia-jai (sad), kao-jai (to understand), korp-jai (to be thankful), jai-dee (kind), jai-glah (brave)).

I told her then, “You’re my raeng-bahn-dahn-jai (inspiration).”

***

I’ve played the jai-game in my mind ever since as a coping mechanism for when things feel out of control, the familiarity and rhythm of the words bringing me repose. But as I wait in the ER for my aunt the night of her Kennedy Center performance, I cannot focus on jai-words because my mind is a maelstrom of memories. I cogitate about how stories are like genes: stories form the fabric of our cultural identities just as genes form the basis of our biological existence, and both are propagated to subsequent generations. I remember my aunt mentioning that when she was younger, her cardiologists had advised her against becoming pregnant since her condition put her and her baby at a higher risk for complications. So, she never conceived, never even dated, and focused instead on passing down her skills and stories to the next generation of artists. My thoughts dart then to the novel I’m struggling to write and how I want to write it for her. I’d been reading stories and essays outside of my required coursework, hoping to gather additional ideas for my novel, and had come across a story by Margaret Atwood called “Happy Endings,” where she comments that there are no happy endings, only death. I consider the possibility that my aunt will die today, and if she does, she will never see me graduate or read the novel that is meant for her. With this realization in mind, I recall another Thai phrase –ohk-huk (broken chest) –because it describes a sorrow so intense that it breaks not only one’s heart but one’s entire chest.

***

A nurse meets me in the waiting room and informs me that my aunt is in stable condition. She brings me to see my aunt, who is awake, though drowsy, and sitting upright in the hospital bed.

“Pen yung rai, Paa Kaew (How are you, Aunt Kaew)?” I ask.

She responds tiredly but affectionately, “Ok, ja.”

“Your performance today was beautiful,” I say.

She confides wistfully that going forward, she’ll perform less frequently due to her health and increasing age and focus instead on teaching and directing the troupe’s administrative affairs. It occurs to me that her name Kaew, meaning “glass,” embodies her spirit. Throughout her life, she has maintained a hardy exterior, resilient in the face of challenges, and like a glass prism dispersing white light into a spectrum of colors, she brings out the full potential and talent of each student passing through her life. I want to tell her this, but before I can do so, she picks up her Buddha necklace lying on the bedside table, places it in my hands, and remarks, “I want you to have this. It’s from my first dance instructor, who I met at Wat Phra Kaew (Temple of the Emerald Buddha).” She thinks for a moment before proposing, “How about we travel to Bangkok during your summer break? We haven’t visited in years.”

***

In June, we arrive in Bangkok, and the city is alive and pulsing. We ride in a ­tuk-tuk, a motorized three-wheeled vehicle, to Wat Phra Kaew. Motorcycles meander through the crooked lines of honking taxies. Flashy advertisements displayed on skyscrapers compete for our attention while the aroma of street food greets our noses. The temple, though bustling with tourists, offers us much-needed solace from the streets. It consists of numerous buildings, one of which houses the sacred Emerald Buddha statue, which is believed to protectively watch over the country. We head inside the temple and kneel before the statue, placing our hands together in prayer, closing our eyes, and bowing our heads down to the floor three times. Around us, the walls contain murals, depicting stories of the Buddha’s quest for freedom from the suffering engendered by the cycle of birth, death, and rebirth until he achieved enlightenment. I think about how a story, as an entity, also proceeds through infinite life cycles: each performance of a story is a birth, the finale its death, each retelling a reincarnation. It is then that I have something akin to a moment of clarity –not necessarily a moment of enlightenment as the Buddha had experienced but a moment marking the beginning of something. I decide to jettison the novel that I’m currently trying to write and resolve to write a new story set in modern-day Bangkok. Perhaps the main character will be a dancer –not a reincarnation of my aunt but someone modeled after her –and perhaps she’ll time travel to previous epochs in Thai history.

As my aunt and I meditate, I don’t ask her whether she believes in reincarnation or what she wants to be reincarnated as in another life and whether she wishes to be born without a heart condition. She gave me her answer years ago, without me even asking. It was that day in the hospital when we discussed the jai-game. When we came to the word them-jai (fulfilled), she paused for a minute before remarking how she no longer lamented the suffering she’d endured or questioned why the vagaries of life occurred as they did or envisioned alternative lives. She accepted this life for what it was, feeling them-jai and ready for whatever may come. “Because,” she said, “in this life, I have you.”

Alice Ranjan is a clinical research coordinator at the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle, WA. She graduated from the University of Washington-Seattle, where she received a B.S. in Microbiology, B.S. in Molecular/Cellular/Developmental Biology, and a minor in English. During her time there, she served as a founding member and editor-in-chief of Capillaries Journal, a publication that includes written and art works on health, illness, and healing, as well as academic pieces on public/global health issues. She has also worked as a cancer research fellow at the National Institutes of Health and aspires to combine medicine, clinical research, and the arts in her future career.