A Place to Pray

The house that the three men lived in looked like any old house in the neighborhood. No carvings on the door or around the roof. No lush garden out back, just a patch of green and barely even that. The windows had all been closed and the curtains drawn. When the men were outside, they wore jeans and cable-knit sweaters instead of their saffron robes. Teenagers driving by would yell “Yo-Yo Ma!” at the sight of them on the front lawn. At first, the men didn’t know what those teenagers meant, and they reassured each other that it was no insult.

Over the years, places like this—ordinary homes on the outside, but Lao Buddhist temples on the inside—got complaints, were shut down, vandalized. Neighbors gossiped, said it was a front for gambling, money laundering, selling drugs. They didn’t know it was a temple. It looked like an ordinary home with a garage, a driveway, brick.

Later, people would shout at the men who lived there: “Go back home!” Truth was, they wanted to. But home was lost to them. A war had driven them all out, which was why they were living in that house in the first place. They simply wanted a place to worship.

That winter, Boun Lai’s mother moved into this temple, the only woman among them. Women did not usually serve the temple unless they were old widows. She’d felt a calling and wanted to serve. All her children were grown and no longer lived at home. They had their own families. Instead of waiting around for them to visit or call and ask about her, she thought she could start a new life doing something else.

She arrived at the house dressed in her crisp white robe, singular and distinguished, ready to shave her head. Black clumps of tangled hair, hair that she no longer wanted to bother washing or combing or shaping anymore, fell onto the patio floor, behind the house. The wind carried strands of it across the snow like small black tumbleweeds.

Without hair, her face opened up. It brightened and she seemed like a new person, though not for long.

A couple of months after his mother moved into the temple, Boun Lai’s father died. He was put in a wooden box—a makeshift coffin, the lid nailed shut—and was left hidden out back, like garbage.

When Boun Lai got to the temple to see what was left to take care of for the funeral, he caught sight of that wooden box out back and knew: It was because his father used to be one of them, a monk, who had abandoned the whole thing. Still, the old man deserved better than this. Boun Lai was furious. Where were the monks to deliver the rites? Where was the gathering of friends, the feast, the ceremonies? His mother, of all people, should have known.

Boun Lai tried to contain himself. He didn’t want to criticize his mother, didn’t want to critique what she devoted herself to. But standing there with his family—his brothers and sisters, his mother—he could not hold back.  “Is everyone seeing what I’m seeing?!”

No one said anything.

His mother wept, though she knew those tears would keep her husband’s soul trapped here, unable to move on. After a few minutes, his mother said, “This was all the temple could do for us, given the money we have right now.” As if it really was about the money. 

Boun Lai recalled the funerals of other men, one in particular who had been placed inside a mahogany casket. The golden handles sparkled. His hair had been slicked back, his navy-blue suit pressed without a wrinkle, a perfectly tied knot tucked neatly at the center of his collar. Black, gleaming shoes. The temple had stopped everything to hold his funeral and had given him the proper rites, the proper ceremony. Boun Lai’s father had once said to him, “That’s how I want to go.”

“I thought I could at least see his face one last time,” Boun Lai said. “Nailed shut! And left out in the cold like this!” Here, in this box, his father was invisible. What was he wearing? How was he presented? No one would ever know. Had he been given shoes to wear? Was he just lying there naked? That certainly was no way to show up to meet his maker. Boun Lai thought about breaking into the box—but that would be unheard of, to disturb a dead body.

Boun Lai’s brothers just stood there in a cluster, each with his cell phone out, tapping at its surface. It seemed to them there was nothing wrong with standing outside, in a cold driveway, for a funeral. Of all the siblings, Boun Lai, the eldest, looked like their father the most: the high cheekbones, the wide nose, the narrow eyes, the thick, black hair. Looking at him, it was as if the old man had risen from the grave, come back to complain about his own funeral. They looked so alike at that age, forty-two.

Boun Lai looked over at his sisters. The two of them, their winter coats unbuttoned, their low-cut dresses showing skin. Too much skin for a funeral, to be honest. Tall, pointy heels. They were dressed as if to go barhopping—ignoring the tradition of white! He hadn’t seen them in years, but he could see what living in the new country was doing to them. They’d forgotten where they came from. So desperate to fit in and do away with the people they belong to. 

They were all so ugly. He wanted to say this to them, to somehow set them right, but the words clogged his throat and wouldn’t come out, and he could only manage to do what he was afraid to do, and wept. Nearby, his little nieces and nephews, shouting in English, ran circles around the wooden box.

Months ago, when his mother had decided to live at the temple, Boun Lai was the most vocal among her children about her decision. To do so with a husband still living was basically like saying he was dead—dead to her, at any rate. Boun Lai pointed this out to his mother and added that he didn’t trust the men who ran these so-called temples. He didn’t trust men who vowed, from childhood, to be celibate. “No boy of nine,” he said, “should take a vow of celibacy. I just don’t buy it. I’m telling you.”

“You don’t believe in anything.”

“Every time I visit a temple, I have to shell out something like two hundred bucks for good karma. Money—that’s my faith. That’s my belief.”

“I’m going to go live there. I’m going to do what I’m going to do.”

“I just don’t want you to get disappointed.” He paused, then said, “Remember that ajahn you loved so much back in Laos? Remember how he traded his robes out for some pants and a shirt and got himself a woman and got married so he’d have papers? See how quickly he gave up on devoting?”

“I can’t believe you remember that—you were just a boy.”

“I was twenty-three, Ma! A man. I was a man, and besides, you don’t forget things just because they happen while you are only a boy,” he said. 

“People do what they have to, to live. You think he would have lived if he hadn’t done that? He did it so he could live and devote. It’s his devotion that matters.”

“And what about Pa? People are going to think you’ve fallen in love with one of the ajahns. You know how people can talk.”

“And let people talk!” She swiped at the air as if surrounded by little flies. “Psssh. People and their talk. It’s what they do to entertain themselves.”

“Ma, I’m just saying. I see the way they look at women. Don’t come crying to me when they take off with one.”

“Shhhh! It’s bad to go on like this about them. They are good men.”

“And Pa? You’re just going to leave him to himself? He needs you.”

As Boun Lai and his mother continued, over the phone, Boun Lai’s father sat there looking at his wife’s lips form the shapes of words he couldn’t understand—he had lost his hearing years before. He shook his head and smiled, because he knew simply by the way she looked while speaking that it was Boun Lai on the phone, and he chuckled at the thought that those two were always going on about something.

Boun Lai’s father was old. The tattoos he had gotten in his youth—one along his upper left arm about faith and love, the other on his right thigh that just said sex—now just looked like large raisins. The tattoos had meant something to him once, a long time ago after he’d just left the temple, his vow of celibacy broken. No longer a monk, he could mark up his body however he wanted; he could do whatever he wanted.

There had been some talk about getting Boun Lai’s father a hearing aid, but he had only just recently gotten his teeth. All of it together would have cost too much. The old man already had a home, a place to live. It wasn’t right to ask for so much. There wasn’t much use in hearing anyway. He preferred the sound of his own body, locked in a quiet hum. It was like being in a temple, but alone. Besides, he had heard it all, from everyone—and anyway, how long would he be wearing the hearing aid? A few months or years before he’d be gone. It was no use spending that kind of money on him.

Boun Lai’s father didn’t have his hearing or his real teeth, but he had his pigeons and the vegetables in the backyard when it was summer. When it got cold, he just put them in cheap plastic containers and brought them in. Any time he turned on the tap there was drinkable water. He didn’t have to walk far to get it. It was right there. And the house was paid for. It wasn’t a palace, sure, but it was his and it was paid for. All of it. Maybe it even looked like an outhouse—small, flat-roofed, two rooms and a bath—and, as he liked to joke, in his own country, they had bigger outhouses than this, but at the end of the day, when all was said and done, he owed nobody nothing. He liked it that way.

Boun Lai’s father knew what it was like to want to serve the temple, but he was not the kind of person who would have put it into words for others to understand. When he was younger, he went, like a soldier, to do the right thing. His wife had it now, that calling, and she was going to see it through. He knew the honor of devoting, what it meant for the family, how proud his parents were when he was seen shaving all his hair off. He felt the same kind of pride for his wife now. He wanted her to serve, however unconventional the timing, even if it looked to others like she were leaving him. He knew she wasn’t leaving him, and that was good enough.

Boun Lai’s mother spent enough time at the temple that she practically lived there already. She and his father had their routine together, and in the weeks after she moved into the temple, it didn’t change much. He prepared her favorite meals, dishes that brought back memories of their life together. He loved watching her eat what he prepared for the temple, his donation. Of all those little bowls—the alms that the community brought—he loved how she could recognize which dish was his. He loved to make mok pa, a recipe he knew by heart, and which, for fun, he would make with variations from time to time.

She would look up from her group and search for him in the crowd, and a slight smile would cross her lips: She knew. That mound of dill, bits of lemongrass and shallots. The way he folded the banana leaf and stuck a wooden toothpick in to sew one stitch to seal it—that could only be him. To be known and seen that way—through the food—well, that was something special for him. At home, just the two of them, over dinner, she had never looked at him like that. So when she started spending all her time there, devoting, at the temple, he went every day just before noon, to help prepare the food, offer up his donation.

Sometimes love happens to you all over again. It isn’t loud and doesn’t come with so much drama, and maybe to someone else it might mean nothing. Having her look up and know it was his cooking was what he lived for. He never would have set foot in a temple again had it not been for her. Now he showed up every day—not for his faith, but for her, to honor the love they had outside the confines of the temple. He thought he had lived a good life, had done the best he could with what he had. There wasn’t much to show, but he had done good with all of it. There was nothing wrong with doing right by that.

Boun Lai considered himself a grown man. He was the eldest son, independent, making it on his own. He made his own living, wasn’t begging for money. He did the dishes and the cooking in a Thai restaurant called Spicy Spices. Not his idea. What he cooked there was actually Lao food, but it was called Thai. “People don’t know anything about Laos,” the owner told him. “You mention Thailand and they all say friendly people, bright smiles, pretty girls, spicy food. You mention Laos, and no one knows where it is.” In the end, that was just fine with Boun Lai, just as long as he wasn’t making burgers and slopping ketchup all over everything.

Most people Boun Lai’s age were already married with children. All his siblings were. He briefly dated one of the waitresses, just before she quit. The waitresses all looked the same to him. He could have chosen one, pursued it, and he wouldn’t have to explain, and people wouldn’t be asking him about it.

There was one waiter, Sam, who worked there for two weeks one summer. Boun Lai had noticed underneath the man’s clothes lean muscles around his neck and along his arms. Every time Sam spoke to him it was like his face knew how to find the light. Sometimes a person can want something and be too scared. He didn’t feel that way about the female waitresses he saw every day.

That Boun Lai never went calling on his parents was proof to him that he was an individual, a grown man. But, of course, he would always be their child, the little boy they chased after to put pants on after a bath. His parents lived in the city now, with his brothers and sisters nearby, but he lived the farthest from all of them in a small town. He wanted it that way, to be on his own. When the Vietnam War ended, they had needed to get out of Laos. They all ended up in a refugee camp. He hadn’t wanted to wait any longer. At first, they were told it would be a few weeks, and then months passed, and then it was a year. He got desperate. He was willing to go anywhere as long as they would take him in. It didn’t matter to him if the whole family went together.

He was twenty-three then, old enough to be on his own. When the nuns in the refugee camp told him he could get baptized and be sponsored by the church, he signed up without his family. His family had refused to be baptized, even when they saw that within days he had his papers and was getting out. All he had to do was believe. And wasn’t that faith, to come to a country where you didn’t know the language? By faith alone you knew you would find your way.

When he first landed, he told his parents “This place, it snows all year round—and you won’t believe this if I told you, but everything is covered in ice cubes! Ice cubes, Ma! Ice cubes! You wouldn’t believe it even if you saw it.” He did not know what the word for snow was in Lao, so he called the snow the only thing he knew that was cold in his country. Ice cubes. He went on about the cold. An ice-cream headache that never ended, he said. He liked to exaggerate the cold to make himself seem courageous and bold—a pioneer, roughing it in the bush. His brother once made the mistake of calling him a country boy, about not moving up in life, like they had, in the big city, but Boun Lai wouldn’t have it, rising from the chair, hovering over him, and insisting he lived in the city. His town was a city and he was a city man.

On the few occasions he did call his parents, their conversations would always return to religion or some bit of gossip the sisters or brothers picked up, if he had a girl, about friends back home, at one of the card parties they loved to go to on the weekends. The talk would quickly turn into something unpleasant. It always ended with him saying something that didn’t sit right with his mother, and then he would feel terrible about it, and then, later on, there would be a phone call to make things right again, some more back and forth, as if the fights were just a warm-up to getting at the thing she wanted.

There was this one time his parents came to visit. This was before his mother was living in the temple, serving there. It was at his expense, of course, and his mother brought along her new man, the ajahn, and his dad. She said she was bringing along the ajahn to bless his home. He didn’t know what for. It was just a rental with mice and cockroaches occasionally scuttling across the floor.

When his mother arrived, he noticed her boundless energy and how she had quickly taken charge of his home as if it belonged to her. Her finger pointed at areas that needed to be cleaned, and then later, at the missed spots. Told him to prepare elaborate meals. There had to be warm soup, meat, rice, fruits—the ajahn’s favorite dishes. There had to be a variety of things throughout the week. “None of that cheap stuff you eat! New day means new dishes! Spare no expense when it comes to Ajahn. This is how you will earn good karma for the next life.”

“Ma,” he said, “I’m kind of interested in the karma in this life.” 

His mother knew that this life was too late, and stared him down, unable to understand what kind of thoughts were in his head, what kind of thinking he did. She blinked and then went on. “Only use the bowls that the ajahn carries around with him,” she said. “Otherwise, his nose will bleed, eating out of the same thing as common, sinned people. He is a pure soul. Devoted since he was nine! Devoted! Now, always put the food in little bowls. Serve him first. We eat later, after he’s eaten from all the bowls. The very fact that he’s eaten from one is his blessing.”

“Yeah, blessed all right,” Boun Lai joked. “With his germs.”

Boun Lai’s mother grew angry. Such ignorant mockery. How could she have raised such a faithless son? What good was belief when you never even made use of it?

Boun Lai’s father was silent. Not a word out of him, quietly preparing meals in the kitchen. What his father thought about all this, this devotion, he never asked.

Three weeks after his father’s funeral, it was Boun Lai who had to go get his mother when she called him on the phone. She didn’t want to be at the temple anymore. What happened, or what changed her mind, she didn’t say. When he made the drive, alone, to get her, he found her standing there at the end of the paved driveway in the cold dark. She was holding a black plastic garbage bag, the open-end closed by her grip.

To anyone else, she looked like someone taking out the garbage. How long had she been standing there? He could only guess, but it didn’t really matter. It was that she didn’t want to be there at all. He had heard it in her voice when she called him. She sounded small, as if the life force that made her voice boom was missing. 

They drove in silence to his small apartment. The first thing he did was clear out the shoe closet. A few days later, he fit it with bookshelves—a place for candles and statues, bowls for dried fruit and water to hold her offerings. All his mother wanted was a place to pray. He wanted that for her too. Every morning and every evening, Boun Lai’s mother would open the shoe closet, get on her knees, bring palm to palm, and pray. The shoe closet, despite the incense and lighted candles, smelled of old leather and sweaty socks.

One day, after she was done praying, Boun Lai’s mother walked to the end of the dark hallway and looked out a small window and saw a courtyard garden—lush and green, with a fountain, a thick cement wall. The way the light fell on the whole place was a thing at which to marvel. A large bell hung high above. At its peak, a beaming gold cross. The sun, wherever it was in the sky, always found a way to shine on it. It was clear to anyone looking what this place was for.