She would wake before 5am, every morning without exception, to prepare the sticky rice. I complained once. I was twelve, and it was cold outside. She looked at me the way she always did when I said something foolish, and went back to her cooking.

Twenty years later, I finally understand what she was doing.

My grandmother came to America in 1980. She had crossed the Mekong at night with my mother and two uncles — my grandfather was already gone, killed in the years of fighting that destroyed the country they had known. She came with a small bag, a Buddha image wrapped in her sinh, and whatever she carried inside her that did not fit in the bag.

In our apartment in Minneapolis, she created a practice that I did not recognize as practice until I was old enough to ask its name. Every morning, she rose before anyone else, prepared sticky rice, and walked with my mother to the nearest Lao temple — a converted house in our neighborhood — to offer food to the monks at Tak Bat. She came home, made breakfast for us, and went on with her day.

She never explained it. She never asked me to understand it. She just did it — the way a river simply flows.

What I thought it was

As a child in an American school, I thought Tak Bat was a religious obligation, like church for Catholics or Friday prayers for the Muslim families on our street. Something the adults did because they felt they had to. Something that defined them as belonging to a particular group, following a particular set of rules.

As a teenager, I thought it was tradition — a nostalgic attachment to Laos, to a country my grandmother could not return to and could not stop being from. The rice she placed in the monk’s bowl was the rice she could not bring herself to abandon along with everything else she had lost.

As a young adult, I stopped thinking about it at all. I went to college. I came home for Pi Mai and ate the food and wore the traditional clothing for photographs and then went back to my life.

The morning I understood

My grandmother fell ill when I was twenty-nine. I went home to help care for her — weeks that turned into months. In the early mornings, when she could no longer walk to the temple, I would sit with her as she recited her prayers quietly, hands in the nop position, eyes closed, moving through something I did not know the words to.

One morning she opened her eyes and saw me watching. She was quiet for a moment, and then she said — in Lao, which by then I could follow better than I admitted — something I have tried to translate ever since. Something like: “The rice is not for the monks. The rice is for the part of me that has not forgotten.”

I did not understand it then either. But I wrote it down.

She died that year. The Buddha image she had wrapped in her sinh in 1980 now sits on a small shelf in my apartment in Minneapolis. Most mornings, I light incense in front of it. On the best mornings, I sit quietly for a few minutes and follow my breath. On the worst mornings, I at least pause.

I think I understand now what she meant. There is a part of each of us that has not forgotten — that knows, beneath the noise of everything we’ve been told to want and be and achieve, what actually matters. The rice placed in the bowl at dawn is an offering to that part. A way of saying: I remember. I am still here. I have not entirely lost the thread.

My grandmother rose every morning to make that offering. Twenty years of cold Minneapolis winters. Twenty years of a life rebuilt from nothing. She never explained it because it was not explainable. It was just what she did to remain herself.

I am still learning how to do the same.

— Written with gratitude to all the grandmothers who carried the thread across the water. Sādhu. ສາທຸ.