a cup of cold water

“Eight million in this country of 65 million earn less than the equivalent of $100 (US) a year. Yet twelve of the world’s hundred richest billionaires are listed as Thai citizens. We have the third highest sales of Mercedes Benz cars in the world, but in our countryside, royal foundations are lending money to people for whom the most important thing is to own just one pig.”

-- King Bhumibol, Ninth Rama of Thailand,
in 1996, just before economic collapse.


Last night I was at a birthday BBQ in the scorched border town of Aranyaprathet. Five of us sat on kindergarten-sized stools around a clay pot of coals with a grill on top. The day’s heat oozed up through the thin lino rolled out to make a restaurant of this empty parking lot. As the sun sank and the mosquitoes came out, garbled Thaiglish techno music pumped up with the daily aerobics session happening not far away, on the same tarmac.

Back in Bangkok now, I’m alone with a load of laundry in the wash and leftovers I love anytime: pomello, jackfruit, papaya, dragonfruit… Peanut butter and crackers, noodles and green-curry tuna in the cupboard. I don’t want to go shopping because I’m leaving Thailand again soon.

Sitting stalled on the bus in city traffic this morning, I noticed a few days’ progress in the huge condo complexes rising out of our area’s shrinking wetlands. These high-rises are riding on the backs of migrant labourers, I need to add. I’ve seen toddlers in nothing but dirty undershirts playing on piles of sand while their parents haul buckets of wet cement up storeys of bamboo scaffolding.

A bit of a breeze sent a breath of fresh marshy air through the bus as we passed a small clutch of green not yet gone. The contrast was striking and soothing at once – I’d like to say breath-taking, but it was obviously just the opposite. Bus drivers here wear masks like the one I used to have to put over my mouth and nose to go into an isolation unit when I worked at a Canadian hospital. City air is toxic.

Why do you like the countryside so much better? I asked Auntie Gaow yesterday, over lunch. The air is good and my heart is happy, she replied simply. I wanted to take a picture of this tiny woman’s toughened feet, which have packed down so many proud paths through her patches of spring onion, dill weed, corn, long beans, tomatoes, Chinese parsley, chilies… But a picture of an old woman’s callused feet would be the height of immodesty in Thai culture, so I asked another question instead: What jobs do find hard, farming here?

None! she said, Everything is easy, now that we have our own well of water. Auntie Gaow’s few acres of vegetables have been so profitable that last year she and her husband were able to purchase some cattle, as well. Friend and neighbor, Sister Lii, similarly used garden earnings to buy not one, but four pigs.

Most of these older ladies have been to Bangkok, many to visit sons or daughters who have settled in the city. A high ratio of these sons and daughters send their own children back to the country, to be cared for by ailing grandparents. Auntie Gaow herself makes the three-hour trip every week, for medical reasons – she’s seeking help from a specialist for her tired and twisting feet.

With a dismissive shake of her head, Auntie started talking about Bangkok: If you want to eat supper there, you have to fight traffic to go buy something -- expensive, and probably not good for you, anyways... Here at home, we just walk out to the pond for some fish, grab some vegetables -- and all for free! We’d just made green papaya salad from all home-grown ingredients, and I knew her words were true. I’d helped pick the tomatoes.

Not that this is untouched paradise. These hard-working, gracious women returned again and again in the course of our conversation to my white skin and foreign “beauty.” I was reminded of once counting how many commercials for skin-whitening cleansers and creams were aired on Thai TV – four out of seven ads, in a run sandwiched between a popular soap opera and the evening news. Even warm-hearted friends will usually describe someone first by the shade of their skin: Sister Noi’s husband? Oh, he’s so dark! And his son is just like him! Very good workers, though…

And I can sense the boredom of the granddaughters. On school holidays right now, they’re conscripted to help cook and clean, but otherwise spend muggy hours taking turns in the hammock in the shade, reading a glossy magazine from Bangkok and playing games on their mobile phone. Their trendy t-shirts belie the lumpy cross-shaped scars they have on their shoulders from infant vaccinations performed by the village doctor. Younger cousins bury their feet in the dry red dirt. A big event is the sound of the motorcycle man, who has the fixings for sweet slushy drinks strapped to the side of his bike.

Driving through any number of these villages, we saw what was a comparative villa every once in a while, with blue-tiled roof and SUV parked out front. That’s so-and-so’s new house, my host would say. She went to Pattaya and found a husband. Meaning the young woman worked the bars there and managed to bring a sex tourist home. These “husbands” are usually older men, wanting to retire in Thailand, or perhaps happy to have a house and mistress for annual holidays. The houses they finance are looked upon as impressive dowries and envied accordingly.

Family survival and sustenance and status are such a tangle. A couple days ago, we took roads turned livid-red-mud by thunderstorms to a village very near the Cambodian border. So near that in the late ‘80s and early ‘90s the land was free to anybody wanting to farm it. This frontier resettlement paid for with funds from both Thai and European governments concerned about border defense. We were unused to the grid-like layout of the town, and got lost trying to find our friends’ cinder-block home among all the others, but eventually pulled up to their little gas station booth, hidden in the hedge.

A chatty elderly couple welcomed us in. The man was wearing carefully folded fisherman pants, and always placed his prosthetic leg away from us. I don’t know the story of his missing leg; but I’ve heard that during the Cold War, American planes dropped a payload of bombs every eight minutes for nine years on the countries bordering Thailand. In any case, this couple was happy to see us and paused in their daily tasks to visit. The woman had been winding spools from larger skeins of silk to be used in their daughter Nang’s weaving.

In response to their calls, Nang brought some swaths of silk out from the shadows of their concrete house. Peacock blues, wine reds, coal blacks, threads of gold and coral pink and lime green hit the daylight like unearthed gems.

But Nang’s khol-lined eyes, precious in their own right, were sad. Later I asked about children, and was told that she's raising her two kids alone, since divorcing her husband. People in the village said Nang’s mother forced the divorce, and that Nang’s spirit was broken and her mind wandering as a result. Nang and her husband had previously emigrated to Korea, where they worked as labourers in a textiles factory. Nang sent all her earnings home, and when her husband asked that she give only a portion of her wages to her parents, her mother got angry and demanded she come home. Nang did so, silently. And silently weaves her silk.

Survival. Sustenance. Status. Such a tangle.

Many tourists who visit Aranyaprathet will marvel at the beautiful silk to be had, and haggle the price down. Most will walk straight on through the border crossing to catch a ride to Angkor Wat. My brother remembers being mobbed by scores of Khmer kids, who turned on the tears and called him a “bad man” when he declined their bleating offers of ten (poorly made) postcards for a dollar. But the land around Aran is scattered with so many lives mostly invisible to us: people hearty, hopeful, harrowed by whatever circumstances have landed them there.

I myself caught a cheap casino bus to Bangkok today. Gambling is illegal in Thailand. The immense casino hotels situated a dusty stone’s-throw from the border remedy the situation nicely for urban Thais who want a week-end getaway, and gave me a handy ride back to the city.

It’s almost four o’clock, and the temperature inside my apartment has climbed to thirty-one degrees. 35ºC outside in the shade. I’m thinking of the green-clad workers six storeys down, young guys digging trenches for my water pipes. I’m wishing all my thinking could do something. The sun is so hot. But I’ve been burned in my own way, too, and have learned not to linger. The glow of my skin was too much for one guy, who exploded into violence when a friend asked him to leave me alone on the bus. We had to jump off, run away, flag a taxi home.

Still. I’m wishing all my thinking could do something. A couple of cold water, in the name of Christ? A cup of cold water, for the ones who labour on my pipes...

The hot sun. The glow of my skin. A cup of cold water. Christ?