By Max Pasakorn
“There is no sound in English exactly like ก. Entering this lone letter into Google Translate produces two English consonants closest to it: the ‘g’ sound; and the ‘k’ sound. ก is an in-between of the two, a queer hybrid sound.”
When I was nine, I saw a trans woman for the first time. I was at my mother's hawker stall, where she sold flavourful Thai dishes to hungry Singaporeans. She was always busy cooking, but she found a way to pass her time. A sitcom was rising in popularity among her friend circles. And it was there, on the small laptop screen powered by the spottiest internet connection, where I saw her. Her name was Golf, and she was a maid.
Golf, portrayed by Thai comic Tongtong Mokjok, was a caricature of the working-class Thai kathoey. Though this label may be translated as "ladyboy," Golf was a trans woman: she ended her sentences with feminine particles, introduced herself with feminine pronouns, and used the women's bathroom. But, unlike common media portrayals of kathoeys servicing expatriates in bars and clubs, Golf's world was purely domestic. Golf was hired by the show's titular protagonist, the handsome Pentor, to clean their apartment, run household errands and socialize with other female characters. The jokes she delivered were usually about men who would never reciprocate her affection. In the first conversation Golf had with Pentor, she said, matter-of-factly, that she had a new phone number. When Pentor asked for it, she gushed, placed her hands on her cheeks and exclaimed exaggeratedly: "Wow! It's the first time a man has asked for my number!"
Golf was always the stooge, the butt of the joke, estranged from other characters through her own queerness. The 2004 sitcom centered the themes of love and lust, but Golf sat at its periphery. She watched other heterosexual characters sleep around, but never developed a successful romance herself. Her few short-lived relationships ended prematurely with her boyfriends swindling her of her savings. It was as if she was cursed with poverty and loneliness. But such betrayals never bothered her. She might experience short periods of grief, but within the next few episodes, she would return to her cheery self, thirsting over the man whose waist she gripped onto tightly while she rode on his motorcycle. No matter the setback, she could laugh it all off.
As a child, I watched Golf radiate that unexplainable joy from my mother's laptop screen. But when we discussed the show, my mother would warn me against following Golf's footsteps, that a life like hers would be treacherous, painful, and difficult. Such was my first impression of queerness — that it should only exist on the TV screen, in a world shaped by fiction, and that I should not be a part of it.
Golf's effeminacy made me reconsider my gender. Once, she articulated a distinction between how men and women used the bathroom. Because men stood up when they peed and women sat down, allowing herself time on the toilet bowl made her feel more like a woman. I tried that as an adolescent, choosing to pull my pants all the way down and plop my butt cheeks on the toilet bowl. It was more troublesome than it was affirming, but I found pleasure in thinking that I had agency over my gender in the actions I performed in my day-to-day. I might use the men's bathroom, but it was what I chose to do inside, in my privacy, that showed who I was. Gender could be interpreted through me and by me.
My parents probably never envisioned this relationship to gender when they imprinted masculinity into my first name: Pasakorn. In Thai, the name is made of two parts: Pas, which refers to the sun; and Korn, which refers to being a son. To be labeled Korn is a wish placed onto me. I was to grow up a man of value, to hold true to the gendered male tradition. When I first started learning Thai, I was fascinated by this word. Unlike most Thai words, it had no vowel in its written form. The word consisted of only two letters, ก (making the 'k' sound) and ร (which usually symbolizes the 'r' sound, but here creates the 'n' sound). The round 'o' sound was invisible. To an early student of Thai, it is an impossible word to pronounce, like a secret codeword one must memorize to access masculinity. But they would at least know the first letter, ก. It is the first letter of the Thai alphabet, and possibly the most peculiar one.
There is no sound in English exactly like ก. Entering this lone letter into Google Translate produces two English consonants closest to it: the 'g' sound; and the 'k' sound. ก is an in-between of the two, a queer hybrid sound. Gk. To the native Thai speaker, the sound is easy to pronounce; it is everywhere. The Thai name of Bangkok begins with the Gk sound: Gkrungtaep. Beyond sound, the mystery behind ก also unfolds in its written form. To write ก, I place the tip of my pencil at the bottom of the stipulated line space and draw a straight line halfway up. This is unusual because most Thai letters begin with a small circle, allowing the character to sprawl outwards from itself, as if the circle was its home. The circle in ก is absent, making it a letter with a missing center, one that exists bravely, independently, from convention. At the line's peak, I create a quick notch inward, to the right, before resuming the line's original path, upward into a rounded top, then allowing it to fall to the bottom of the space. The result is an alphabet, but also a symbol. When one learns the Thai language, one knows that ก is affiliated with the chicken. When one sings the Thai alphabet song, one would sing, "Gkor Aei, Gkor Gkai." Gkai is chicken. Look closely at the letter and you will see it too. The notch is a beak, and the rounded top is the chicken's head. ก is one of few Thai letters that looks like what it represents. In writing ก, the chicken comes to life. I imagine it moving, its left-facing beak giving it direction, bobbing its head as it rears the rest of the alphabet behind, a parent. I do not know why ก begins the Thai alphabet. Perhaps it is because the chicken is the first to rise every morning, and its daily crowing wakes the rest of civilization. ก represents the leader. That is why it begins the word Korn. To be masculine is to be a leader, a spearheader, provider of families, solver of problems. With my name, I bear the responsibility of the strong and prideful chicken.
I have been called a chicken many times. But, in English, a chicken is stripped of its reverence. It is reduced to a creature that stomps around the farm, maniacally flapping its wings, as if it is naturally afraid and always on the cusp of panic. To be called a chicken was a peer pressure tactic intended to leave me swimming in doubt, a method of emasculation. I was a chicken for declining things I did not want to do, when I turned down invitations to physically demanding hikes or said no to flirting with strangers. With one word, I was a land- bound bird, with one foot squarely out the door, always ready to leave uncomfortable social spaces. To be bound to a fat queer body, limited by physical capabilities and homosexual desires, was a curse I had to bear. I never had problems demarcating my boundaries, but I could hear the uncontrollable annoyance that left my peers' lips in sharp airy sounds: "Tsk!" Like the clicking one made to call an animal to one's feet, to assert one's power over the excited being that hopped gently on the ground, waiting eagerly to be fed. With a single metaphor, I became a domesticated animal and understood my queer place in this straight world.
It was only recently, through Wikipedia, that I learned how Golf's name was spelled in English. Before that, I thought it was Gkob; that was how her friends said it. In Thai, there is no ending consonant 'f', so the natural substitute was a 'b'. The first letter of Golf's name is ก. Because of the consonant's thickness, pronouncing her name felt less like the posh image of the socialite swinging a golf club — probably what she intended when choosing the name — and more like the unintentional sound a chicken makes when traversing ground: Gkob, gkob, gkob. Golf's name expresses a peculiar duality within her selfhood, the blurring between her imagination and her reality. She was a trans woman, but some still think of her as a man, so much so that men who treat cis women kindly would threaten to beat her up should she make any romantic advances. Yet, she did so anyway, selectively, carefully, spending her life playing this game of relationship minesweeper. She did nothing immoral but was constantly punished by the men around her. But even in her precarious position, Golf was a person who found belonging on the TV show's domestic space. People laughed at her jokes. She was accepted fully and wholly by her straight employers, who supported her through heartbreaks. In Golf, I see both chickens: the chicken in English that was a metaphor for being put in one's place; and the Thai chicken, the first letter of the alphabet, the one that stood unruffled, proudly herself, leading the charge, queering and bending gendered norms to exist unashamedly on her own terms. As a child, I listened to my mother. I knew being queer would be difficult. But I also saw the side of Golf that displayed the possibility of living purposefully within a marginalized queer body. Through her, I learned that there was room for nonconformists. To the nine-year-old boy who probably knew deep down of his queerness, Golf was someone to look up to. She showed me how to live joyously, to laugh despite life's challenges, to be so confident of her selfhood that she could shrug off anything. Golf was both chickens at once, but she also transcended beyond them, to a being undefinable by our limited language.
There is an answer to the age-old riddle: which came first, the chicken or the egg? The riddle perplexes because the chicken and the egg represent distinct parts in the same life cycle. Without the egg, there would be no hatched chicken; without the chicken, there would be no laid eggs. The answer lies in how the Thai alphabet is ordered. The first letter, ก, is the chicken. The second, ข, represents the egg. The riddle is solved not by considering the linearity of life, but rather the two beings' inter-dependence to survive in the same generation. The chicken does not just lead the rest of the alphabet. It cares for its unborn successor first, like a mother tethered to her child. While ก is sometimes the rooster, the one who crows first, the initial line of defense against the unknown terrors of the night, ก is also the mother hen, who cares fervently for the eggs that follow behind, who nurtures them and encourages them to become stronger, better chickens than their parents. A single symbol represents both mother and father; a single symbol for the complex layers that make up our gendered life. If the ก in Korn is a wish of masculinity, ก also holds the key to breaking out of it, to allow me to transcend beyond its barnyard shackles and live unmarred by gender. When I saw Golf on television, it was not just her charged courageousness to live openly and queerly that struck me, but also how much of myself I saw inside her. We were both low- income fat Thai gender nonconformists, whose inherent joy multiplied when our friends laughed. Golf was not just a rooster, but also my mother hen, the one who walked first with her taloned footsteps, leaving behind a pathway for me to follow and dream with. Like my mother, she echoed how life could be lived: painfully. Unlike my mother, she showed me how life could be rich and rewarding as I traversed the passage through that pain.
When I was fifteen, I lost my mother to cancer. Her departure thrust me out of the nest she had precariously built. At that age, I still felt like an egg. But life had forcefully cracked my shell open to reveal a chick yellowed by the absorption of its own yolk. I had no choice but to enter an adulthood characterized by short, underdeveloped wings. Without a mother, I was exposed and directionless.
When I was twenty-six, reflecting on childhood in a writing workshop, I was reminded of Golf again. I remembered how I interpreted her existence as courage to exist unperturbed in an antagonistic world. I looked up the TV show's episodes on YouTube. On my thirteen- inch laptop screen with much more stable WiFi, I discovered that the show was still running, eighteen years after its pilot episode. And Golf was—is—still very much alive. She has lost weight with age, but she still wears the same outfits: a bright T-shirt; a pair of dark pants; a brown bob wig; and the slightest smidge of makeup. Golf, despite her aging body, still delivers jokes with the same cheekiness, the same amount of life. Almost twenty years later, she is still thriving. Persevering on the TV screen has made her a queer elder. She is a chicken that transcended its limited lifespan to teach generations of young children what queer joy could look and feel like.
I turned to my closet mirror. Just past my quarter-life, I saw so much of Golf in myself. I had fallen in love with a non-binary person, experimented with makeup, and wore bright, attention-grabbing clothes. I embodied her humor, poking fun at myself in everyday conversations, finding joy in the boisterous laughter I shared with my friends. To my mother, Golf was a warning sign. But to me, she was a roadmap. I reached my hands up to the plumpness surrounding my jawline, feeling a sudden sense of security. Golf had led me to a present where I could find solace and joy true to my queer identity. I could not help but wonder how many young children, like me, grew up watching her beautiful, extended reign on television as a sign that we all belonged somewhere, that our own bright futures were just ahead of us.
I have dreamt about my mother more times than I could count. She passed away in her late forties. At the funeral, relatives surrounded me with watchful eyes, as if I too had been forecasted with a death too early, too unmerciful for a living being. But the exciting thing about death is that memories — the best ones — become permanent. Memories of the deceased are installed in one's being, the way eggshells remain in nests even after chicks leave them. In those dreams, like the playing and rewinding of VCRs, I relived moments of joy we shared together as mother and child. These vignettes had no greetings or farewells. We just enjoyed each other's company. She was the mother hen that knew to watch out for danger, to never relinquish her lifelong duty despite death's sullen tearing us apart. When I woke, breathlessness would fill my lungs, as if I was again learning how to breathe for the first time.
A child, once separated from their mother, becomes their own complicated being. The child must chart their own journey in relation to the rest of the world, an inevitable independence from the maternal tethering they've relied on. And yet, the child still knows nothing without guidance. That is when they turn to other mothers, similar to them not through biology, but through inherently resonating selves. When I watched Golf on television as an adult, I instinctively saw a future to aspire towards. It was then that I moved, searching for a trail to follow. Golf became the hen to line up behind. It was by walking in her footsteps that some parts of me found their footing. I became a hybrid of multiple mothers, dead and fictional, a singularity converging upon their unspoken influences. Watching Golf again made me realize that it was in the intersections of Golf and my mother's motherhoods that my identity as a queer person was truly founded.
In the weeks before she passed, when my mother could still converse, she asked if I could put on an episode of the sitcom. She had missed it while she was in the hospital. When Golf appeared onscreen, my mother let out a weak but prominent chuckle, the air in her lungs thin and waning. Golf triggered a joy in her that she had forgotten, her body having been in a constant battle with pain. As I lay in her lap, she ran her fingers through my short hair, as if combing the little crown of a rooster. I could feel her conferring onto me her hopes for my future. But it was different this time. No longer was it about strictly following the path she had laid out for me: to be a scholar and settle down with a nice wife. None of those details mattered against the immanence of death. With each gentle stroke, I could feel that she was letting me go, telling me to begin dreaming of a life I had always wanted to live.
I looked up at the screen to see Golf laughing at her own jokes. For the first time in a long while, I felt energy re-invigorate my mother's frail body. In that moment, I felt happy, thinking that my mother was on her way to recovery. Only years later did I understand what that moment was — a child handed from their dying mother off into the outstretched hands of another prominent female figure. When my mother finally believed in a femininity that was greater, queerer, and more complex than any of us could understand, she created a confident passage into my future.
From young, I have been aware of the symbols and metaphors within the building blocks of the languages I speak: English, Thai and Mandarin. When I first discovered the nonfiction form, I was enamored by how the latent meaning in everyday language could be treated as evidence in building universal human experiences. That instinct, combined with a curiosity to understand my inner femininity, made speculation the glue that threads, weaves and holds the varying sources of evidence together into a comprehensive argument about selfhood. Speculation is the lens that allows us writers to uncover indefinite layers of meaning from the real world.
Max Pasakorn (he/she/they) is a queer, Thai-born, Singapore-based essayist and poet. Max's writing, predominantly about their identities, has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the SFPA Rhysling Award and can be found in Chestnut Review, Strange Horizons, Defunkt Magazine, Freeze Ray Poetry, Fifth Wheel Press and more. Max's most recent nonfiction chapbook, A Study in Our Selves, won the OutWrite 2022 Chapbook Competition and was published by Neon Hemlock Press in 2023. Max is currently pursuing their BA in Arts & Humanities (Creative Writing) at Yale-NUS College in Singapore. Read more about Max at www.maxpasakorn.works.