By: Dr. Panicha McGuire, PsyD, RPT-S™, LMFT
In January of this year, I returned to Thailand with my partner after nearly a year of conversations about what we wanted the next chapter of our lives to look like. This was not my first time returning. I visited Thailand almost every summer while growing up, and sometimes again during winter break. Thailand was never an unfamiliar place to me. I knew the food, the language, the customs, the temples, and the rhythms of family life. But this trip felt different.
Although we experienced some hiccups as many family trips tend to be, overall my partner would say that he fell in love with Thailand. When I asked what his highlight was, he said that he experienced the sense of community. He saw what early mornings looked like when monks came through the neighborhood and families came out to sai bat (offering food). I showed him the spirit houses that were in front of every home and establishment, including the many 7/11’s. I watched him experience parts of my culture that I had spent my entire life trying to explain to others in America. And I felt pure joy.
I ate foods that tasted familiar in a way that is difficult to describe. I spent time with cousins I had not really known as adults because I had not returned throughout graduate school. As an autistic person who loves trains, I was probably disproportionately excited about how much Bangkok’s rail system had expanded. But underneath all of that joy was also grief. Because I realized there is a difference between preserving your culture and living within it. That trip gave me a glimpse of what the latter could feel like. And somewhere in that experience, the question started shifting from “Could we live here?” to “Why aren’t we trying?”
The Grief of Going “Home”
There was something about being in Thailand that reminded me of the two years I lived in Hawai’i. I could walk into a space without automatically scanning the room. That may be difficult to understand if you have never had to do it. For many POC in America, there can be an automatic awareness when entering a room: Who is here? Am I the only one? How am I going to be perceived? Is this a space where I can relax, or is this a space where I need to pay attention? In Thailand, I didn’t have to think about being Thai. I just was. For once, my partner was the one who noticed that he was the person who stood out. And somewhere in that experience, I realized how tired I was. I cried with my cousins. We talked about how differently our lives had unfolded and what it meant that I was the one who had been “sent to America” while they stayed in Thailand. We were children when those decisions were made for us. Now we were adults sitting together, looking at what became of those decisions.
I don’t regret my life in America. I also don’t have any ill will toward my mother for bringing me here. I have a life that I love, relationships I treasure, an education and career that I am proud of, and opportunities that my mother desperately wanted me to have. But gratitude does not cancel grief. I think I will always wonder about the Panicha who stayed. Who would she have been? What would my relationship with my cousins look like if we had actually grown up together instead of seeing one another during summer visits? What would it have been like to grow up somewhere where I didn’t have to explain where I was “really” from? Would I hold the same beliefs about the world and carry the values that I have today? Ultimately, there is no answer to those questions. There is only the life I lived and the life I didn’t.
I Left Thailand When I Was Five
I was born in Pakkret, Thailand, a district just north of central Bangkok and east of the Chao Praya river. Thai was my first language. When I was five years old, my mother brought me to America. My grandparents and aunts had come first. They told my mother to follow them. Like so many immigrant families, there was an understanding that America might offer their children opportunities that were harder to access at home. But “we came to America for a better life” is one of those sentences that can contain an entire history inside of it.
My mother was also escaping her own hardships. She spent nearly everything she had on our journey and arrived in the U.S. with about $20 in her wallet. Luckily, my grandparents and aunts had already established a tiny foothold in Los Angeles. So we joined them. Seven people in a cramped one-bedroom apartment in Chinatown. Eventually, Echo Park became home, and later Thai Town. Keep in mind this was Echo Park before gentrification. It was heavily immigrant and working class. Thai was the language inside my home, but many of the children around me spoke Spanish. Before I really learned English in school, I remember learning a few Spanish words because I was trying to make friends. There is a memory from kindergarten that I still love. My first friend at Rosemont Elementary was another child who only spoke Spanish. So between her Spanish, and my Thai, somehow, we understood each other.
Thailand in 1998
Looking back now, it also matters to me to understand the Thailand my mother was leaving. I came to the U.S. in 1998. Thailand had just become the epicenter of what would become known as the Asian Financial Crisis. For years, Thailand had experienced extraordinary economic growth. Between 1988 and 1996, the Thai economy expanded by roughly 8% per year. But that prosperity existed alongside substantial inequality, including regional disparities and unequal access to education and economic opportunity. Then, in 1997, the economy unraveled.
On July 2, 1997, after intense pressure on the currency and weaknesses in Thailand’s financial system, the government allowed the baht to float. Its value fell dramatically. Thailand subsequently entered an international assistance program supported by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and other institutions. The crisis that began in Thailand spread throughout much of East and Southeast Asia. By 1998, the year I left, poverty increased, families lost income, unemployment rose, and the economic shock was felt particularly hard among people who were already vulnerable. At the time, I was obviously too young to understand currency markets, foreign debt, economic inequality, or the IMF. I understood that my mother was taking me somewhere else.
For adults, migration can be a decision made in response to circumstances. For children, migration is often something that simply happens to us. Someone buys the ticket, packs the bags, and decides where the family has the best chance of surviving or thriving. And suddenly, “home” becomes somewhere you used to live.
The financial crisis was not the sole reason my mother left Thailand. She was leaving in the hopes of a better future for herself as well. She had family waiting for her in L.A. She wanted safety and opportunity for both of us. She did what parents have done throughout human history. She looked at the choices available to her and tried to choose the one that might give her child the best chance.
Growing Up Thai in Los Angeles
We grew up the way many immigrant families do: collectively. Grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, everyone under one roof or close enough to function that way. The adults worked mostly service-industry jobs. Their shifts varied enough that there was usually someone home to take care of the children. We did not have much money, but there was always somebody home. I remember reading my first book in English in kindergarten and how proud my family was of me. By first grade, I had read my first book in Thai.
My mother worked very hard to make sure immigration did not mean losing our culture. I went to Sunday school at Wat Thai of Los Angeles. We went to temple events. I grew up in Thai Town. I visited Thailand nearly every summer. At home, we watched Thai television through satellite. I actually missed a surprising amount of 1990s American pop culture because we didn’t have cable. People will reference some quintessential American TV show or cartoon from childhood and I will have absolutely no idea what they are talking about. But when I went back to Thailand, I had the opposite problem. My cousins had their own TV shows, celebrities, jokes, school experiences, slang, and cultural references. I didn’t understand theirs just as much as they didn’t understand mine. Even the English we learned was different. They were learning forms of British English in school while I was learning American English. I belonged in both places and yet I was slightly foreign in both places.
Too American There, Too Foreign Here
When people here asked me where I was from, I usually said Thailand. That part was true. But I also learned pretty early that there was often another question underneath the question. The question many immigrant children are used to… “Where are you really from?”. Because no matter how American I became, I couldn’t escape how I looked. There would always be people for whom I was too foreign to simply be “American.” Then I would go back to Thailand every summer and discover that I was noticeably American there as well; it was in my clothes, my mannerisms, and the way I spoke. The things I knew and the things I didn’t. I could speak the language and know the customs and still somehow give myself away. Too American in Thailand. Too foreign in America. And that is where being a Third Culture Kid started to make sense to me.
Third Culture Kid is a term commonly used for people who spend a significant part of their developmental years navigating cultures different from their parents’ culture or culture of origin, often developing a sense of identity influenced by all of them. I don’t remember one dramatic moment when I learned the term. It was more like discovering language for something I had already been living my entire life. Suddenly, some of the questions I had carried made more sense. Why do I feel homesick in two countries? Why do I feel like I have to code-switch everywhere? Why do I grieve places that still exist? Why do I feel simultaneously grateful and sad? There was finally a framework for understanding why “Where are you from?” could feel like such an enormous question. Thailand? LA? California? Thai Town? All of them? The term did not resolve the tension. It just helped me understand that the tension itself was part of the experience.
One of the strangest things about migration grief is that what you are grieving may still be there. Thailand did not disappear when I left. My cousins continued growing up. My aunties have aged. Neighborhoods changed. New train lines appeared. People got married. People have passed away. Life just continued. I simply wasn’t there for most of it. That is a particular kind of grief.
When I returned in January and sat with my cousins as adults, I wasn’t grieving Thailand itself. I was grieving my place in a story that continued without me. I could visit every summer, speak Thai, eat the food, and participate in the traditions. But I could not go back and grow up beside them. I cannot know the version of myself who never left. And perhaps part of becoming an adult Third Culture Kid is learning that you are allowed to grieve that person without wishing away the person you actually became.
Being a Third Culture Kid and a Therapist
I think growing up this way profoundly shaped the therapist I eventually became. I learned early that there are multiple ways to understand the same behavior. I learned that something considered respectful in one culture can be interpreted completely differently in another. I learned that individualism is not a universal value. And that families can love each other deeply while having profoundly different ideas about obligation, independence, emotion, success, and belonging. Perhaps most importantly, I learned how exhausting it can be to constantly translate yourself. At Living Lotus Therapy, these experiences are part of why working with immigrant families, children of immigrants, multicultural families, and people navigating multiple identities has become one of our specialties.
I have also had the privilege of sitting with people who have been displaced from their ancestral homes, including refugees. Their experiences are not the same as mine, and I would never pretend that they are. But I recognize something in the grief.
I see it in 1.5-generation and second-generation children who feel guilty that they cannot meet their parents’ cultural expectations while also feeling like they are never quite accepted by the dominant American culture.
I see people trying to answer questions like: Which parts of me are actually me? Which parts developed because I needed to survive? How do I honor my family without disappearing inside their expectations? Am I allowed to grieve what immigration cost us when I know what my parents sacrificed to bring me here? Where exactly am I supposed to belong? There are rarely simple answers.
There is another layer to this for me because I am neurodivergent. Cultural code-switching and neurodivergent masking are not the same experience, and I don’t want to collapse them into one another. But there can be an interesting overlap as both can involve studying people. Watching and learning rules nobody explicitly teaches you. Figuring out which behaviors will be accepted in which environments. Trying to understand why something that felt completely natural to you produced a negative reaction from someone else.
As a Third Culture Kid, I was translating between cultures. As a neurodivergent person, I was also trying to understand social expectations that often seemed obvious to everyone except me. There were multiple layers of translation happening at once. I think that is one reason I am so interested in identity as a therapist.
So, I’m Moving to Thailand This December
The older I get, the more I realize that my migration story did not begin with me. It did not even begin with my mother. My grandfather’s family were refugees from China during the upheaval surrounding World War II. My grandmother’s lineage traces back to Burma, now Myanmar. Eventually, my grandparents made their lives in Ayutthaya. They put down roots in a wooden raised family home that still stands there today (with the same unpaved one way road that only a single car can get to at a time).
Then another generation moved. My grandparents and aunts came to America. My mother and I followed. And now, decades later, I am going back. Migration is part of my family’s history. Maybe home has never been as fixed in my family as I once imagined. People move because of war. Because of violence, finances, marriage, or simply because they had no other choice. Or, sometimes they did have a choice and they chose something different. And then they make homes in new places. They learn languages, cook familiar food with unfamiliar ingredients and they raise children who become something culturally different from them.
Recently, I asked my mother a question I had never thought to ask before. “When you brought me to America at five years old, did you ever think I would eventually move back home?” She said no, it had never crossed her mind. She assumed I would settle in America. I would go to school here, build my career here, create my relationships here, and live my life here. America was supposed to be the destination, and not a chapter.
There is something profound to me about that. My mother spent nearly everything she had to take me away from Thailand because she believed my future was somewhere else. And now I am choosing to return. She understands why I want this next chapter. She understands why I want to be closer to our family, our culture, our language, and the land we came from. And perhaps the most beautiful part of the story is that she is coming back too. The woman who left Thailand during one of the most economically turbulent periods in its modern history, is returning alongside the five-year-old daughter she once brought to America. Except I’m not five anymore. And she isn’t the woman who left. We are returning with almost three decades of life between those two moments.
I am not returning to Thailand expecting to magically become the version of myself who never left. She does not exist. I am returning as a Thai-American adult who was raised in Los Angeles. There will probably be moments when Thailand feels profoundly like home. There will probably be moments when Thailand reminds me that I am American. This year has helped me realize that both can be true. I want to know what Thailand feels like when I am not there on vacation. I want ordinary Tuesdays. I want to know the neighborhood instead of visiting it. I want to live near family instead of calculating the time difference before calling them. I want a relationship with Thailand that exists in the present rather than primarily through childhood memories and summer visits. I want to reconnect with the land, my roots, and my culture. And, if I am being truthful… I also know that if I don’t do this, some part of me will always wonder…what if?
Home Is Where I Make It
Maybe this move will reconnect me with my roots or maybe it will complicate my understanding of them. Probably both. But my story is not going to end with discovering the one place where I finally belong completely. I don’t think that place exists. Thailand is home, just like LA is home, just like San Diego is home, and just like Oahu was home. The communities I have built are home.
Home has never been one dot on a map for my family. Perhaps home is something we keep making. And now I get to decide what that means for me. I can love the life I built in America and grieve the life I did not live in Thailand. I can honor my mother’s decision to leave and make my own decision to return. I can belong to Thailand without pretending I grew up entirely there. I can belong to America while acknowledging that America has often treated people who look like me as though we are perpetually foreign. I can miss two countries and can be homesick while I am home.
For other Third Culture Kids, immigrant children, refugees, and people who grew up somewhere between cultures, I hope there is something in my story that gives you permission to hold contradictions too. You are allowed to be grateful for what migration gave your family and grieve what it took from you. You are allowed to love your parents and still wonder about the decisions they made for you when you were too young to have a choice. You are allowed to miss relatives you barely had the opportunity to know. You are allowed to grieve a country that still exists. You are allowed to stay and you are allowed to leave again. And you are allowed to decide that home is not something you have to find. Maybe home is something you make.
P.S.
If you have been following Living Lotus recently, you might reasonably be thinking: Wait. Didn’t you just open a new office in Point Loma? Yes. I did. For a long time, that was part of what made this decision so complicated. I wrestled with whether I could do both. Could I continue building Living Lotus here in America while also answering this calling I have felt toward Thailand? Could I create something rooted in San Diego while allowing myself to put down roots somewhere else too? Eventually, I realized I was thinking about it as though I had to choose. Living Lotus has never just been me. I could not have opened our Point Loma space without my collective. My associate, Maggie Chen, will be occupying the space alongside other professionals who are some of my closest friends and colleagues, people I trust deeply, both personally and professionally. Living Lotus has become something held by a community, not something that requires my physical presence in one building in order to exist. There is something particularly meaningful about realizing that at this point in my life.
I come from people who survived through community. Whether it was 7 people in a one-bedroom apartment or this new office suite, nobody did life completely alone. Maybe that is part of the lesson I have been trying to understand all along. Independence was never really the goal. Interdependence was. Knowing that Living Lotus is held by people I trust has given me permission to ask a different question. What if I went? Not because I expect Thailand to magically resolve every question I have about identity and belonging, or that I believe moving across the world will somehow give me back the childhood I didn’t have. There has simply been an itch I have been trying to scratch for most of my life. I don’t know yet what I’ll find when I return home, or whether I’ll finally answer some of the questions I’ve carried with me since I was five. Maybe that’s the point. I guess, for now, my story is to be continued…
