My dad was the best storyteller. I mean, he is the best storyteller. He’s just one of those people. When you’re at a dinner party or something, he starts talking and everybody is just eyes glued on him and he tells the same stories over and over. He tells the same stories again, but they’re just so captivating. I mean, I think part of it is the circumstances. He came to the US when he was 19, so super young. And this was in the beginning of the seventies, so the world was just so different then. So he just paints this picture of what America was, the difference between America and Thailand. So he talks about how him and his brother, they got on the plane in Thailand at the … went to the airport dressed in suits. They look like the Beatles, like a real slim dark suit with a tie.
Your b … you wore your best clothes to get on the airplane. It was a huge deal to be able to come to America and their parents saw them off. And of course it just took, at that time, like 48 hours to get here. They had to fly to Japan and Hawaii and connect in all these places. And he said that they landed in Los Angeles in like 1969, 1970. And the friend that had been living in the US for a while came to pick them up at the airport and he was wearing bell bottom jeans and a hippie shirt that was unbuttoned all the way bare chest and long hair, and was like, “Hey man, welcome to America.” And my dad was like, okay, I never put that suit on again. He just instantly became an American kid, like American hippie after that. That’s one of my favorite stories.
For more author interviews, please visit ReadingRockets.org.
