My husband and I have just returned from a trip to Thailand, where we placed my mother’s ashes in a Buddhist temple in Nonthaburi, next to her parents and grandmother. My mom, Sunanta “Sunny” Quinn, passed away on December 27, 2017, after a long, tough battle with cancer.
Sunny was born in Bangkok, Thailand, on September 16, 1954. As a young girl, Sunny was a total tomboy. She grew up playing soccer and learned Muay Thai kickboxing moves from her uncles. Her father was a civil engineer for the Thai government, and her mother was the neighborhood midwife. She was the eldest of six kids, growing up in a family that was amazingly close-knit. Family dinners were a loud affair, lasting hours. They were full of laughter, with spontaneous outbursts of singing and dancing.
She met her first husband, an American in the U.S. Air Force, in Thailand, where they married and where I was born in 1974. My father brought my mother and me to the U.S. in 1976 — we landed in Minnesota and started our new life there. Sunny had great stories about her time in the frigid north: her first experience with real cold weather, making spaghetti sauce with ketchup, driving a riding lawn mower at a church cemetery, and getting stuck in an outhouse in below-zero temperatures.
