The ‘lucky’ migrant

I miss Thailand and my grandparents every day. Some days the longing is physical. My chest hurts and it feels like I am trapped under water, slowly drowning. I miss my grandparents even when I am back home in the village, because my mother tongue has slowly eroded after all these years in the west. I find myself reaching for specific words and sentences, as if they were items stored on the top shelf of a supermarket, painfully close yet out of reach.

I do not know what to do with such longing. My mother traded her life and family for me to have a better future, and doesn’t fully understand why I would long for the life she left behind. As a child of a migrant you are in a form of limbo, caught between gratitude and longing, between your family’s expectation of material support and your own westernised dreams and hopes. My mother’s generation of women had one goal: to migrate and create a better life for their children. How do you explain to them that you, as a young adult in the west, have other hopes and dreams without sounding spoiled and ignorant of everything they have done for you?

My western friends do not understand how difficult it is to have life choices and consequences taken on your behalf. Taken for the best of reasons, in hope, love, and a selfless attempt to give one’s children better opportunities than those they had themselves. But you are still left with a daily, all-encompassing longing.

Migration and motherhood are intertwined for the women in Isaan. I cannot stop thinking of how much collective heartbreak we’ve suffered in the search for a better life. How it was never possible for mothers to raise their own children because they had to leave to search for jobs. My mother worked at various factories in the outskirts of Bangkok before going to Denmark, so my grandparents cared for me even as a baby. For a long time I thought they were my parents, I saw my mother so seldom. When she came for me after marrying a Danish man I could no longer recognise her. I screamed and cried out for my grandparents when she dragged me through Don Mueang, the old international airport in Bangkok. I did not understand that she was my mother.

If my mother had not migrated from Thailand, I would probably still be in Isaan today. I would have two or three children and work in my family’s rice paddies, at a factory, or have some other kind of low paying job. Maybe I would have to migrate to Bangkok to work an unskilled job at a factory, leaving my children in the care of their grandparents in those months where there is no work to be done in the fields. Maybe I would have to work in the sex industry in Pattaya and send home money to my children and my mother, because sex work is the field where you earn the most as an unskilled female labourer.

Under the public eye

When I was a child I was ashamed of the way we had come to Denmark. In the part of Denmark where I grew up, I overheard someone call my mother the ‘mail order wife’. I was the mail order wife’s daughter. I began looking at myself from the outside, just like a stranger would. With pity and repulsion. When I was a teenager my mother asked me to help a Thai aunt with a dating site so she too could get a Danish husband. I asked my mother if she did not have any respect for herself. She asked why I did not want to help my aunt get a better life in response.

When you grow up as the child of a marriage migrant from southeast Asia, you quickly find out that there is a hierarchy within migration – and hierarchies between people. It is seen as more dignified to migrate for work than marriage. Denunciation and condemnation come from other minorities, including other Asians. I’ve seen women who are supposed to be allies, women who know what it’s like to experience racist and sexist prejudice, boast that they did not migrate that way. They married a westerner out of pure, ‘real’ love and not because they saw marriage as a migration tool. I’ve heard other Thai women emphasise that they are not one of ‘those’ women from Isaan, and that they certainly did not work at a go-go bar in Pattaya – as if that was a bad thing.