With a broken-down oven, in a hotel kitchen, on an uninhabited island
Subscribe and Save up to 45%
Jaed Muncharoen Coffin is the author of A Chant to Soothe Wild Elephants, which chronicles the time he spent as a Buddhist monk in his mother’s native village in Thailand. His forthcoming book, Roughhouse Friday, is about the year he fought as the middleweight champion of a barroom boxing show in Juneau, Alaska. Since becoming a father, he has stopped having dangerous adventures in remote places. He lives with his wife and daughter in Portland, Maine.
“The thing I remember most about watching my mother’s body burn,” my mother tells me in English, a language that has never quite served her, “is when I can smell her skin and hair as they are catching fire and crackling in the flame.”