Pilgrims

Figures

Restless after the enforced seclusion of the rainy season, Maechi Roongduan takes the nuns on a thudong, a pilgrimage. Pilgrims usually choose the forest or the mountain for solitary meditation, but Roongduan, the head nun, has opted for a local teaching hospital. She wants us to meditate on the impermanence of life as we observe medical students dissecting cadavers.

On the drive to the hospital, I gaze at the road, memorizing the colors—emerald, jade, rose, aubergine, celadon—until Pranee, the seventeen-year-old nun, interrupts my exercise. She has been at the temple nearly a year; compared to her, I am a newcomer. Pranee tells me that Roongduan once took the nuns on a weeklong retreat to an abandoned crematorium. It was stifling hot, and they kept fainting during meditation. After three days everyone but Maechi Roongduan wanted to go back. “She wants us to know about bodies,” Pranee says, her eyes glittering with an emotion I can’t place. “About death.”

At last we arrive at a chilly hospital room. It is crowded with unsteady medical students, nuns in solemn white, and a few locals who seem to be here just for the fun of it.

The corpses arrive on cots: a man with the skin of his head folded back like an android, revealing red, yellow, and blue veins of circuitry; a yellowing woman with a long pelt of hair clinging to a flap above her severed ear; a child. Though the room reeks of formaldehyde, I begin to worry that I will be able to smell the stench of decay. It’s like my certainty at the dentist’s that the novocaine will wear off at any moment, revealing the white-hot agony of the drill. This has never happened, but my fear is so strong that I interpret every sensation as pain.

Fingering stainless steel instruments with dusted latex gloves, the students tell quiet jokes and get to work, peeling away the man’s face to get at his skull.

“That’s all we are,” Maechi Roongduan says, lining us up and coaxing us forward. “Flesh and bone, some breath.”

Breath. Breathe. In and out, in and out. My breath clings to the pale gray walls, to the metal trays, to the wheeled cots, leaving tiny droplets like perspiration. A sheen of panic coating the room. I learn that a dead body is far worse than a live one.

I remember the body I did not see. My freshman year at college, I worked with refugees from Laos newly arrived to the United States. My partner and I were entrusted with two families; we were supposed to befriend the children and help the parents through U.S. immigration and social services. We were supposed to convince them that America wanted them.

The families had been settled in a small, run-down apartment building in Dorchester, Boston’s most racially divided neighborhood. The nearest subway stop was in the white part of town, several long blocks away. The first time we visited, the children lectured us for arriving so late in the afternoon.

Bad people come out at dark, they warned us. You leave by four. My partner, queasy from an encounter with a rat in the bathroom, nodded.

Next time, we came in the morning, tripping a minefield of hostile glares from white men outside the Irish pubs along the street. We arrived to find one of the sons, a teenager who worked the graveyard shift as a busboy, sprawled on the sofa, face swollen and head bandaged. The bad people caught him as he walked home from the subway, the kids explained in hushed tones. They thought he was Vietnamese.

“We helped the Americans against the Vietnamese,” the father explained, his one good eye searching ours with milky urgency. “That’s why we had to leave.” He spread his fingers, palms up. “We lost everything for America.” My partner and I squinted in sympathy and left early, realizing then that they needed more than we had to give, hoping my partner’s pale skin would keep the red-eyed, red-faced men at...