My parents spoke Lao at home. I answered in English. They went to the temple every Sunday; I went because I had to. Then one Pi Mai, standing in the temple courtyard with water running down my face and my aunt laughing beside me, something shifted. I stopped feeling like a visitor in my own heritage.

I was born in St. Paul, Minnesota in 1992 — seventeen years after my parents crossed the Mekong. My parents had rebuilt their lives with extraordinary determination: my father worked double shifts at a factory for eight years to buy our house; my mother cleaned offices at night and raised four children during the day. They did not have time to explain Laos to us. They were too busy surviving America.

What they gave us instead was the temple. Every Sunday morning, we piled into the car and drove to the Lao Buddhist temple in our neighborhood — a converted house with a Buddha image in the living room and a parking lot that doubled as a festival ground in summer. While my parents sat inside for the ceremony, my siblings and I played outside with the other children, speaking a mix of Lao and English that our grandparents could only half follow and that we already knew was disappearing from us.

I grew up thinking of Lao Buddhism as something that belonged to my parents and grandparents — a practice shaped by experiences I had not had, a faith developed in a country I had never seen. I respected it the way you respect a relative you don’t fully understand: from a distance, with some mixture of affection and foreignness.

The Pi Mai that changed things

The year I was nineteen, my mother insisted I come home from college for Pi Mai. I drove back reluctantly, annoyed at the interruption to my schedule. In the temple courtyard, the sand stupas were being built; children were carrying water in buckets; the monks were blessing a row of Buddha images with scented water. My aunt found me standing at the edge of the courtyard and without any warning poured an entire bucket of water over my head.

She was laughing before the water even hit me. I gasped with the cold and then, without planning to, I laughed too — and kept laughing. And in that laughing, standing in the temple courtyard with water running down my face and my traditional sinh plastered to my legs, I felt something that I had not expected: belonging. Not the belonging of understanding everything, or believing everything, or knowing all the words to the chants. Just the belonging of being in the right place, with the right people, doing the right thing — however imperfectly, however belatedly.

It was not an enlightenment experience. It was more ordinary than that. It was just the moment when I stopped feeling like an observer of my own heritage and started feeling like a participant.

What I know now

I am thirty-two now. I go to the temple most Sundays — not because I have to, but because I want to. I am learning to chant. I am studying the Lao script that my grandmother knew by heart and that I am only now beginning to read. I ask my parents questions about Laos that I should have asked twenty years ago, and they answer them with a patience and a relief that makes me realize how much they have been waiting for me to ask.

I do not have all the answers. I am not sure what I believe about rebirth, or kamma, or the cosmology of 31 planes of existence. But I know that the practice — the sitting in the morning, the offering of incense, the following of the breath — has given me something steady to stand on in a life that can feel, sometimes, like it is moving too fast in too many directions at once.

My parents did not have time to explain Laos to us. But they gave us the temple. And the temple, it turns out, explains itself — if you’re willing to get wet.

— Submitted by a Lao-American community member, St. Paul, Minnesota. Published with gratitude. Sādhu. ສາທຸ.