Sometimes one doesn't stop to think, especially when writing a blog, that life keeps moving with all its events while the writer falls behind in recording them. There's a real contradiction in the fact that this blog is called Adventures in Asia and has now been recounting certain adventures in Mexico, our home country, for just under a year and a half.

In the middle of that reflection, we've decided to make this post a brief autobiographical sketch of our family, so that people can understand why we went to Asia in the first place and why we eventually came back to Mexico. Perhaps some of our patient readers will find it interesting to know what moved us. So here we go:

Both of us were born in Mexico City, and our only son was too. Our livelihood came from a family business dedicated to manufacturing auto parts, one that had sustained the whole family for more than 35 years. Around 1993 or 1994, as a consequence of the competition unleashed by globalization, we had the opportunity to partner with an American company working in the same field as us, and we took it. Some years later, when that company was acquired by a Swedish multinational, and given the circumstances at the time, we found ourselves forced to sell our share to that multinational.

Faced with this sudden shift in our lives, we tried to start something new, but always with a distrust of politics, particularly in these times when, for whatever reason and in nearly every part of the world, things seem to be made deliberately difficult for small and mid-sized entrepreneurs who don't enjoy any of the advantages available to big capital.

Our son received an unconventional education, first because he studied at an international school and then because he pursued a literature degree in the United States. At 22, when it seemed like he could take on the world, and when life had smiled on him as much as it had on the family, what many Christians would call our calvary began. The year he graduated was the year of the Twin Towers, and just like that, the projects and the job he'd been promised in New York City fell through.

Back in Mexico, our son helped his father with a new project and began a second degree at Universidad Anáhuac, with plans, at the time, to finish it in Barcelona. He started studying Catalan and was getting everything ready to leave when some friends invited him to join a project in Argentina, and he decided to take up that challenge.

The project got very complicated, and when he sensed it wasn't going to work as planned, he stepped aside. Since he'd already been working in translation on the side for some time, he stayed in Buenos Aires doing that for a little over six months, enjoying porteño life and immersing himself in the city's culture and rhythms. While all that was happening, he was planning a year-long adventure through Asia, so he came back to Mexico to share the project with us and save up money for that year of wandering.

About six months traveling through India (translating all the while), then shorter stints in various Asian countries, eventually brought him to Bangkok, where the monsoon forced a longer stop, and he fell completely in love with that city so utterly unlike any other. He stayed another six months or so, and Marcel began to see business possibilities in Thai goods, so he sent a few things home and we started testing the waters with people we knew.

With our enthusiasm and that of the people buying from us, our son made another leap with his plans and proposed that we come live in Bangkok for at least a year, combining the search for business with the pleasure of actually living there. He came back to help us close down our home; we sold practically everything we had accumulated over more than thirty years of life together, rented out the house, and set off for Bangkok having never once set foot in any Asian country.

Our first impressions, some of you have already read about in this blog, which my husband and I opened not long after we arrived. It was such a different experience that we both lost weight, yet we lived those year and a half with more intensity than many of the years we'd spent together before.

Our friends and family, though they didn't openly express their surprise or even the thought that we'd gone a little crazy, we could tell by their comments that they thought exactly that.

I probably made some mention of it in an earlier post, though not in detail. I wasn't entirely sure whether coming back was the right move, but at the same time the business we'd started seemed to need a push, and our only house looked like it might actually sell.

So when those two things converged, and with our savings stretched pretty thin, we decided that Juan should come home first. Once he was back in Mexico, since we had already begun sending silver and gold piercings that were selling well, I decided to come back too and keep pushing things forward. When I arrived, the piercing business seemed to be growing, and the piercing studios were saying that what we were importing from Thailand was among the best available. To this day I believe that's true, but in Mexico the piercing and tattoo scene still hasn't reached the level of acceptance it has in other parts of the world, and things seemed to stall here in Mexico City, where all our clients were.

The option, then, was to start traveling to the provinces (mainly the beach towns), when we realized we already had a star product on our hands and simply needed to fine-tune everything around it.

This new product, which we introduced into Sanborns stores just a month ago and into Liverpool just a week ago, is selling very well, because we worked hard to make it the best metal and jewelry cleaner on the Mexican market today. I say that without any hesitation, because we tested it thoroughly before we ever had the idea of building a business around it. We just wanted to give our piercing clients a good service. Who would have thought that we'd end up no longer selling piercings at all, now focused entirely on SILVER BRITE and a few other imports.

After all this time, today we feel content with the results we've achieved through so much tenacity and effort, even in times of crisis. All of this tells us that nothing is written in stone, and to prove it you need only look at the collapse that the economy has suffered, especially the banking and financial sectors worldwide.

This whole experience with our son has taught us that we should never look at youth with arrogance, because who would have guessed that it would be our children who would bring new ideas to those of us who once taught them everything. For us this has been an enriching experience any way you look at it, because we've combined our own experience (especially my husband's) with the fearless, restless energy of our son, always generating ideas and propositions.

So soon I'll tell you about where I think our son's, and really our own, hunger for adventure and constant movement was born, even now that none of us are twenty or thirty years old anymore.........

Sanuk