Cutting the Tag
I live in Switzerland now, raising my daughter from a marriage I once had with a Thai-Chinese woman I met while living in Bangkok. We divorced, and I’ve raised our daughter ever since. Once or twice a month, my daughter spends a weekend with her mother. I don’t ask her what happens there. She tells me when she feels like it.
On a trip to Germany not long ago, she began talking about a war between Thailand and Cambodia. I asked how she knew. She said her mother had grown very angry at the Cambodians. I explained that this “war” was little more than a temple dispute, a quarrel inflated by national pride. In Thailand, I told her, many conflicts are about face.
A few weeks later, that lesson unfolded in a quieter way. It was one of those weekends with her mother. Her mother had bought a shirt, then noticed the small tag stitched at the collar: Made in Cambodia. The shirt stopped being fabric in that instant. It became history, grievance, betrayal. She was ready to throw it away.
My daughter intervened. Not with lectures about geopolitics or history — those things didn’t matter to her. She simply said: Don’t throw it away. The shirt looks really good on you. Why not just cut off the tag?
That’s all. No theory, no speech. Just cutting through the fog.