Marking Transnational Missing Through Tote Bags & Coffee Coasters

I never understood what the deal was with souvenirs. Does your kitchen apron saying “Greece” on it conjure more than the haggling you did to buy it? Does “London” plastered on a tote bag mean anything to passersby other than that you’ve been to one of the world’s biggest thoroughfares, one they’ve likely been to as well?

I never understood what the deal was with souvenirs, until I started traveling with my mother. She has this affliction where she physically cannot pass a gift shop in another country without going in. She does what she calls the “I’ll be in and out,” which is efficient indeed, until she’s been in-and-out at six tiendas in a row and your mid-afternoon caffeine withdrawal is kicking in.

But the way she can’t pass by without at least looking is not dissimilar from how she approaches the rest of life: the smallest things delight her — the crimson cardinal on the deck in winter, her homemade table arrangements with tiger lilies from the garden and persimmon from the store. She will stop and look at everything on the trip. Not just the shops; and not just the grand cathedrals, sprawling squares, and bustling markets. It’s the tiny embellishment on the eaves of the pagoda; the humor in the monastery’s architecture, the flooring.

In Lisbon this summer, we must have visited at least 35 gift shops in the baixa, all carrying pretty much the same stock of goods: cork coasters, bags, and coin purses sporting the same blue-and-white tile pattern for which the walls of the city are famous. But of course, each coaster in the city was marginally different. I was proud to say by the end of the trip that we’d memorized the stock at every tourist store in town. For us, it became a ritual of sorts: scouring the shop and lining up our favorite tile designs on the cashier’s counter, crinkling our noses when the ceramic tile in the middle was even a bit misaligned with the cork edging, Ratna remarking that the piece was overpriced while Mama forged her South Asian connection with the shopkeeper to nimbly slide the price down. There is a camaraderie in the perfectionism, the way time slows down as we’re paying (arguably too much) attention to detail. The finicky does not go away after we return to our respective homes.

There emerges a little bit of desperation in the buying that happens on the last few days of the trip. (Did we both need matching tablecloths almost too small for my dining table and certainly too small for hers?) But there’s a nagging question underlying the wider and wider filter we apply as the trip progresses. When will we be back here and get to look at these things again, together? “You’re jaded now, but this will look SO good in your house when you get home,” Mama encourages me, having helped to furnish my flat in Hong Kong even though she hasn’t seen it in person yet. There’s a sense that we don’t know when we’ll get back to the same destination together again. She states this possibility aloud: “there’s always a next time, inshallah, if my back holds up.” And I try not to think about a world where my mom is getting older, and the globe is limitless but our time is not.

I am back home now and the fresh-pressed lavender lotion reminds me of the fragrant field she navigated us to with her phone, that we literally rolled around in, laughing. Then there are the more unwieldy souvenirs like the identical bottles of tawny port we brought back for “wine nights on Zoom” that are impractical given that I’m 12 hours ahead and eat my breakfast when she’s still having the last night’s dinner.

I used to wonder as a kid why we had so many tiny souvenirs at our house in Virginia. Now I think about the sense of wonder, my younger mother’s dreams, and the sense of urgency that went into her collection.

“You may live far from me when you’re older’,” my mom said to me when I got my first job after college. “But you don’t have to come all the way back home to spend time with me if it’s too far. Just tell me where you want to visit — we must go there for a week each year. Pick a place.”