Her name is Mu Nay Paw, but everyone in the camp near Chiang Mai’s northern edge calls her Yei, grandmother. She is seventy-four. The brass coils around her neck shine dully in the afternoon light—thirty of them, heavy with time, smoothed by weather, war, and waiting.
She came from the hills of Kayah State, Myanmar, carried across the border in the back of a rice truck in 1988, her children pressed against her ribs, her husband already dead from a landmine. They built the camp from bamboo and breath—scraps of tarpaulin, hope, and stubborn hands.
Now, she is the matriarch of the displaced:
the one who remembers before the fleeing,
before the soldiers,
before the silence of their language in foreign courts.
She sits outside her stilted hut each morning, weaving longyi patterns into cotton, her fingers slow but sure. Girls bring her yarn, small complaints, bruised hearts. She listens. Nods. Sometimes answers in riddles:
“A root must curl to find water.”
“A tiger does not pity its own claws.”
When tourists come to the village—with wide eyes and heavy cameras—she does not pose. She watches. Regal, unreadable.
Some take her photo anyway, whispering “She looks like royalty”, not knowing how true it is.
She does not wear her rings to entertain.
She wears them because that is what the mothers before her did.
Because they are memory. Armor.
A map of her people’s vanishing.
Her youngest granddaughter, Ehla, speaks Thai fluently.
Wants to become a teacher.
Sometimes refuses to wear the coils.
This does not anger Yei.
Only saddens her a little.
“Change is not shame,” she tells the child.
“But forgetfulness is a kind of death.”
On festival days, she sings the old songs—low and rhythmic, in a Kayan dialect few still understand. The words bloom slow, like flowers unfolding after rain. Even the men hush when she begins. Even the tourists pause.
At night, she lights a small clay lantern and places it at the doorway, a habit from home. The camp quiets, crickets take over, and she sits cross-legged by the fire, brass shimmering in the embers.
She has outlived war, husbands, soldiers, the walk to Thailand, two rainy-season floods, and a disease that took half the village.
Still, she remains.
Watching.
Guiding.
Heavy-necked and unbowed.
In a village that floats between borders and definitions,
she is gravity.
She is root.
She is the mountain that remembers.