bangkokpost.com wrote:
You can take a baby girl out of Thailand, but you can't take the Thai out of her.
A woman from the US walks up to a young man on the steps of a home in a small village in Udon Thani province.
"Hello, I'm your elder sister."
"No, that's impossible, I'm the oldest child. I had a sister but Mum says she died."
"I didn't die. I have come home," said Somi Palmer. She was taken from her Ban Phue district home in 1973, days after her birth. Her teenager mother, trying to cope with a marriage already on the rocks because of disapproving in-laws, put her new baby up for adoption at an office of the US Air Force in the provincial capital.
Somi was adopted and named by a missionary couple from the US. Morrie Palmer and his wife had already adopted two children from their home country, and they welcomed - and named - Somi as their third child just as they returned home to middle America.
In Minnesota, and later in Nebraska, Somi grew into a typical, normal US child, then teenager, then woman. Her family and siblings loved her.
But she wasn't typical. And life wasn't normal.
"From the age of five, from my very first memories, what I remember is that I was different. Life was difficult. I didn't belong."
When she was at the doubly difficult age of 12, the Palmers moved to Grand Island, Nebraska, population somewhere around 10 per cent of Muang Udon Thani, and something of a backwater in terms of sophistication.
"I couldn't talk to the Asian kids because they all spoke their own language," Somi recalled. But it was far worse than that.
"Some of the boys and girls wouldn't talk to me because of my skin," she said, meaning that it is darker than that of white people in the US.
"Some of the kids liked me, but their parents told them they had to stay away from me because I was different, I was darker."
The right to pursue happiness was continually snatched away from the adopted Thai. She felt isolated outside her immediate family. "I really craved friendship or just attention. It was terrible. I started to do destructive things," she said, to get that attention - nothing violent, but unpleasant to remember.
But this is not a sad story. Somi's life took a decided turn for the better, and not too many years later she was happily married to an American man, Jay.
"I was so lucky," she said recently to a group of mostly Thai women in her current hometown of Fort Collins in northern Colorado. "My wonderful husband said, 'Well, we have the means, so if you want we can go to Thailand and find your family."'
Roots tug hard. Somi could be taken out of Thailand but Thailand could not be taken out of Somi. So the newly married couple picked Thailand as their honeymoon destination.
Her adoptive parents had kept her birth certificate, identifying the original hometown and name of her mother, Mrs Suan. By a huge stroke of luck, Somi's husband's brother lives in Bangkok.
But as she set out to discover her roots and find her blood relatives, all she had was that piece of paper and the resolve to satisfy her desire to discover her roots and remove a lifetime of hurt.
In days, hours really, the fears, objections and difficulties faded.
REUNITED
Brother-in-law Dennis was a fabulous organiser. Her husband was phenomenal support. But nothing and no one beat Fon, the English teacher-come-tourist police aide placed in her path by fate.
A hard-working, village-smart woman, Fon drove Somi to Ban Phue district and into the surrounding villages, asking at offices and roadside stalls along the way for information. In less than an afternoon, they had visited four villages and pinpointed the right area, the right street, the right house.
Then, suddenly, on the step was a curious, disbelieving, stunned, excited little brother - Top.
Somi learned she had "three new brothers and a new sister".
Mum was at a funeral near the city. Fon called her mobile phone. Within an hour, a pick-up truck, the bed packed with family and in-laws and cousins and curious people who remember the baby who became Somi arrive and Mum climbed out.
"Top smiled and said that this was my mum. There were about three or four women getting out of the truck, and I wasn't quite sure which one was my mum. She was a short Thai woman with short hair and a great smile. We walked up to each other and gave each other a big hug.
"She was crying a little, but not me. I wasn't quite sure what to feel. I was very happy to have found her, but there were so many emotions going on right then, I didn't know which one to feel."
The older people checked her fingers; they all remembered baby Somi had beautiful, long fingers. There were tears, and many cheers.
Somi returned to the US, her new country, last October. But she did not leave her roots.
Last month, mother Suan, translator Fon and others flew to Colorado to see how baby Somi had done. There was a lot of hugging again, Mrs Suan got to meet the Thai community in the area, whose female members have protectively given her a home away from home away from home, so to speak.
Mrs Suan did a little shopping ("The prices here are too high"). Her most prized purchase was a pair of dark sunglasses.
"I don't want people to see me crying all the time," she laughed - and sniffed.
Life will never be the same for Somi Palmer. She has dug deeply into her past, discovered her true roots, and struggles with a dual identity.
It is not the big stuff that bothers her so much. She "knew I was different" from her earliest, childhood memories. All of that is part of the life with which she has struggled openly.
Her Thai identity is another matter. "I can feel things," Somi says, not quite sure what they are.
But it is the little stuff that has confused her, determined her to continue to dig up those roots which have partly decided her life.
The most amusing? "I guess it's the fish," she laughs.
Most people in the US do not eat fish heads, but they also do not eat fish brought to the table with the head still there. On the night after she found her mother, Somi and Jay took the "new family" to dinner in Muang Udon Thani, and of course fish was part of that long-table banquet.
"I told my cousin, 'Please don't bring out the fish with the heads,' and he told the restaurant people," Somi said. "So of course here come two fish with the heads on. Now, the other people at the table were telling the waiters, 'No, take off the heads'. They scurried back and took off the heads, but I'm sorry to say I still couldn't eat those fish.
"It's so American. I know. I just have to get used to that."
Somi has gone where few of us have ever been, returning to a place she never really knew existed. While her adoptive parents always were straightforward, she had no memory of Thailand, no knowledge of how to be Thai, and no active remembrance of her biological mother.
It is impossible for anyone who has not sought his or her roots to know how they would react when they find them. She didn't cry, she didn't shriek, she didn't really even wobble, she just "... felt, well, different".
Life goes on, but, well, differently. Mrs Suan is back in her Udon Thani village.
"I am so relieved. For 35 years I felt guilt, giving up my daughter for adoption, even though I knew I could not look after her. So young, and my husband left me. And for most of that time, I thought she was dead. I don't know where that story came from, but it's not true ... that's so great.
"And now my daughter has come back. I am so happy. She is healthy. She is successful. And such a wonderful daughter, not one time did she want to know why I gave her up for adoption. She understands me so well."
Somi is back in Colorado, almost exactly halfway round the Earth. She has told her brothers and sister that if they feel the drive, she will help them get a higher education in the US.
Realistically, their English language skills would have to improve a lot.
"I can kind of figure out what [brother] Top says sometimes, but really I don't know," she says.
Somi has a nuclear family in the US, and that complicates things somewhat. She can't just pack up and move to Thailand as she sometimes dreams.
"I'd like them [her family] to come to the States," she says, and then adds, " I have to go back to Thailand.
"I want to take my kids to Thailand. I want to stay longer ... I want to live there maybe, at least a lot longer than two weeks."
With the complications come a lot of rewards.
"Yeah, I have doubled my pleasure, doubled my family."
