Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in This Is How It Always Is, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Gender and Binaries
Secrets and Misunderstanding
Violence and Discrimination
Storytelling
Family
Summary
Analysis
Every night after the clinic closes, Rosie and K sit in the cafeteria together in plastic chairs. Rosie is always anxious to get back to the guesthouse and check on Claude and talk to Penn, but still, she stays. Rosie knows that K has her own kids and husband to get home to, too, but K sits as well. Sometimes they talk, and sometimes they don’t. At first, it is just normal stuff—Rosie tells K about Penn and the kids and her job in family medicine and the emergency room before that, and K tells Rosie that she is a border medic with four kids (2 girls, 2 boys) and a husband who is also a Burmese soldier—but their talks soon turn more personal.
Rosie and K aren’t that different. Both women have husbands and rather large families, and they are both in the medical field. They also both leave their families to help take care of the Burmese people, who are likely minority Muslims escaping genocide. The Myanmar (Burmese) government does not recognize Rohingya (ethnic Muslims) as citizens. As such Burmese Muslims are often considered “stateless” and end up in refugee clinics like the one in Thailand.
Themes
One night, Rosie asks K about her kids. K asks if Rosie means to ask how K got her children, since K is “like Claude.” Yes, Rosie says, but how does she K know about Claude? K says she just knows. She asks who Claude is at home, and Rosie says he is Poppy. K says Poppy is a pretty name, and she tells Rosie that she isn’t officially married to her husband, but it is official to them. They always accepted that they would be childless, but the war created many children without parents. Now, there are more children than anyone can take.
K is clearly a transgender woman; however, this is the first time Rosie is mentioning it. K’s gender hasn’t been important, other than Rosie’s surprise that K is both a woman and a mechanic. K senses that Claude is transgender, too, which seems like a better “blind test” than the one Claude set up with the school children and his resemblance to a monk.
Themes
Rosie tells K that she is amazing. She leaves her home and her family to work in this clinic and try to save the people, all while dealing with “the stigma of being…” Rosie isn’t sure what to call it. “Kathoey,” K says, it is Kathoey in Thailand, and it is one of the reasons she is known as “K.” But there is no stigma associated with Kathoey in Thailand, K says. There are lots of Kathoey in Thailand, and no one cares. “We all Buddhist,” K says, “Is karma. Is life. Is just another way to be.”
Kathoey is Hindi for “ladyboy,” and it is what transgender women are called in Thailand. The term “ladyboy,” a hybrid word meaning both man and woman, also suggests that gender, for some, is not an either/or choice, but one that is a combination of both. The Thai acceptance of Kathoey proves acceptance, in time, is possible. This acceptance, K implies, is rooted in Buddhism, which recognizes many different ways of living and being.
Themes
Rosie is surprised there isn’t any stigma associated with being transgender in Thailand, and then she cautiously asks K what is “under [her] pants.” K smiles. Like Ralph, she has all her “original parts.” K grew up with a Kathoey cousin, and there were Kathoey students at school, so no one ever cared what was in her pants. “Everyone cares what’s under Claude’s pants,” Rosie says, and Poppy’s. K asks her why she tried to keep it a secret. Rosie admits she didn’t know any better. She didn’t learn until it was too late. Yes, K says, but she knows now and can fix it.
Through K, Frankel more directly implies that keeping Claude’s secret was the wrong thing to do. Here, K says she has her “original parts,” which means that, like Poppy, she is a woman with a penis. For K and others in Thailand, seeing gender in such a way is not odd or strange, so no one pays K any attention. This again proves that with enough time and understanding, acceptance is possible.
Themes
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Rosie doesn’t know how to fix it, and K tells her to take the “middle way.” That doesn’t exist in America, she says. Claude has to be male or female. No, K says, they have to find the “middle way” of living with what is difficult and with people who don’t accept Claude. It all comes down to change, K says. All life changes; it is never over. People “learn over lifetimes,” and they must find the “middle way” in this life and the next. “That is the story,” K says, “Learn mistake and fix and tell. Not-knowing to knowing. Even the Buddha. You see?”
The “middle way,” according to K, is learning to accept the struggles that come alone with being transgender, and, perhaps more importantly, Frankel argues that Claude will have to learn to live in a world that likely won’t be changing to accept him anytime soon. All Claude can do in the meantime is keep educating people and keep trying to fix what is wrong with society. The irony of this, of course, is that it falls on Claude to “learn mistake and fix and tell,” even though the problem isn’t Claude’s fault, which again reflects the anti-transgender sentiments of society.
Themes
