by Pamela Paul
But what could be done? Killing bugs wasn’t Buddhist. If I asked Nai Noi to dispel the encroaching wilderness, she would daintily pick up the spiders that hung vertically from the shower ceiling and escort them one by one outdoors. They always came back. I learned to wrap my hand in toilet paper before flushing the toilet; its handle was inevitably teeming with ants.
It was harder to acclimate to the giant water bug who lived behind the toilet bowl. He’d come out late at night as I sat there, determinedly confronting me from the puddled floor. (Thai bathrooms did not have separate shower stalls so the floor was always wet and often sticky.) The water bug, more like a New York City rat than a cockroach, was so large you could see into his eyes and read his defiance. After flushing I would catapult off the toilet in Olympian fashion, clearing the water bug, and, panting heavily, run back to bed and my awaiting ants.
One night I snapped. Not fully aware of what I was doing, I grabbed Anna Karenina off my bed and brought it down with all my might on the water bug. I smote him. Turning on the spidery showerhead, I let the bloody remains swirl around in a wet mess until he was nothing more than a brackish veneer. I wiped the crushed limbs off my book cover. My heroine had come to the rescue.
When I looked up, there was Nai Noi, surveying me with her enormous Buddhist eyes. Murderer. One week later, sitting on the toilet, there was a second confrontation. A new water bug, even mightier than the first, was standing directly before me. I swear I could hear him say, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”
These emissaries from the natural world were telling me something: I wasn’t really cut out for the Farm. I loved living there, but not as my former urbanite self, as someone new, someone who did things I didn’t do. In Thailand, I climbed a mountain, learned to motorcycle, and accidentally ate durian, the dread “stinky fruit.” I crossed the border into forbidden Burma. I even ended up riding a donkey and a camel, Thalia Zepatos–style, and an elephant too. Being off the path didn’t always come easily. Sometimes I would ride around town on my motorbike, running unnecessary errands, just to feel like I had someone to meet or somewhere to go. I’d stop at a newsstand to read as much of the International Herald Tribune as I possibly could on the rack without feeling shamed into buying it, something I’d budgeted to do twice a week, making sure to get the weekend edition, with its movie and book reviews. I’d head to the library at the Association of American Alumni, where they had three-week-old copies of the Sunday New York Times. At night, I read my comfort books, hauled across the globe from New York. Hello, home culture.
As much as I was getting out of the experience, I wasn’t always sure Thailand wanted me there. One night on my way home to the Farm, an angry water buffalo came careening down my lane of the highway, against traffic, bent on mowing me down. It felt like an unfortunate metaphor, the natural world telling me, “Watch out. You’re going the wrong way.” On another occasion, a full-size municipal bus turned straight onto me as I puttered en route to a local guesthouse for a twenty-cent passion fruit shake. My motorbike was thrown against a telephone pole, the front tire somehow landing parallel to the road, squashed beneath one of the bus’s front wheels. Everyone on board was abuzz at the site of a damaged foreigner, pointing and gaping out the windows. Physically, I was fine. But I felt like an idiot for ending up under a bus, making a spectacle of myself in front of a crowd of people who surely knew better.
My very presence in Thailand felt inherently offensive despite a constant effort to avoid offense. I didn’t tell anyone, for example, what I really thought about ghosts, which Thais take seriously, building small wooden “spirit houses” outside every residence and office building so the ghosts will elect to stay there rather than wander into human territory. Despite such precautions, ghosts occasionally do come inside and cause trouble. Spring semester, a ghost moved into the dorm room of one of Nai Noi’s classmates, Oi (Sugarcane). “The first night the ghost just lay quietly in the corner, but on the second night, she leaned over my bed,” Oi confided. “She was crying and whispering my name.” Apparently, that’s all it took for Oi and her roommate to get the hell out of there, leaving the ghost with a spacious double to herself. Oi temporarily moved into our house until the university could relocate her into a ghost-free dorm. The only one who didn’t seem understanding was me, and I was teased for my obtuseness on the matter.
I regularly found new ways to draw attention to my ignorance. For weeks, I helpfully told shopkeepers who were tending to other customers, “Don’t worry—I can wait.” The inevitable response was baffled silence. It turned out I was using the wrong tone and was in fact saying, “Don’t worry, I can penis.” On another occasion, as I gathered my clothes to have them cleaned and folded by a local laundry, as I’d been doing since I’d arrived in Thailand, Nai Noi recoiled in horror.
“You can’t, you can’t…” she said in a strangled voice. I stared at her, awaiting enlightenment. “Underwear,” she finally sputtered. “You can’t give them your underwear.”
My underwear? I knew my underwear wasn’t clean at that moment. But what I didn’t know was that in Thailand, women’s underwear is never clean. It is by its very nature a foul and despoiled thing, and can never, ever be handled by anyone other than the woman who wears it. Women’s underwear was dangerous just as women were dangerous—helpless and yet dangerous—and helplessly dangerous.
What kind of heroine was I, anyway? In my own small-scale Anna Karenina style, I, too, was trying to act independently but inadvertently defying social norms. Everywhere I went, people asked about my husband. Where is he?, they needed to know, with the implied, How could he have let you come here by yourself? I lied about him since he didn’t exist, even contemplating wearing a fake wedding ring, as many women did while abroad. But I didn’t want to pretend I was something I wasn’t, and I didn’t appreciate the suggestion that a wedding ring made me inherently less unnerving. A wedding ring also seemed to shut off any prospect of future romance, which I held on to with dwindling hope.
My Vronsky was nowhere to be found. Moving abroad, I’d expected to meet other young college graduates keen on adventure. Instead I met people fleeing bad marriages, on the prowl for subservient Thai wives or underage sex partners, pedophiles and misfits, missionaries and teachers who hadn’t succeeded at teaching at home. Everyone had something to escape and someone to exploit. One night after a Thai kickboxing match, a bunch of us went to a bar catering to expats and were immediately surrounded by prostitutes. They dove into the laps of every middle-aged white man, giggling and fawning with sly expertise. My presence was superfluous. Just being there felt like its own kind of racist acquiescence and degradation.
Still I held on to hope that I might meet some like-minded fellow American traveler, pitifully encouraged by a psychic monk who offered to read my palm during a Thai lesson one afternoon. It was difficult to read women’s hands, he explained, because much of a good palm reading involved touch, and monks were forbidden to touch women. By his estimate, about 30 percent of the available information would be lost. Still, he leaned forward, peering at my outstretched hand. I was, he pronounced, an impatient, critical, and stubborn person. “Your life will require intense effort in the next few years,” he told me. My stomach, he emphasized, was in horrible shape; I ought to see a doctor.
“You are intelligent and artistic,” he continued, perhaps in response to my grimace. “You work with your hands, but not manual labor. You do the work of an artist.” Now this was more like it. I longed for a lover, he said delicately, yet would not find one for a long time.
“But when you do”—he smiled, curling a long pinkie nail in front of my nose—“it will be magic. No effort. Done!”
Just not yet. Everyone else I worked with at the International School seemed to be getting busy. Clive and Neil, an expat couple from Australia who taught elementary students, fed their bickery relationship with a parade of outside stimulation. Clive was bitter about being a teacher in Tha
iland when he was meant to be in the theater in Sydney, bitter because no matter how many he tried, he didn’t actually like Thai men, and bitter because, with his squishy physique and parsimoniousness, he wasn’t their type either. This was not a problem for his partner Neil, who looked sixteen, taught fourth grade, and liked to pick up teenage boys after work.
Beyond these activities, neither Clive nor Neil had much interest in the Thai people. Clive refused to learn the language because, he declared, “I doubt they’d have anything to tell me that couldn’t be relayed by someone in English.” Thailand, Clive liked to say, had no culture because it lacked a literary tradition. There were no Thai novels written before the late twentieth century, he informed me—a sign, he declared, of a fundamental absence of imagination.
I set out to find Thai literature, if only to refute him. Not much had been translated for the literary appetites of Westerners. In an English-language bookshop ten hours south in Bangkok (there were none in Chiang Mai), I picked up a copy of Khamsing Srinawk’s The Politician and Other Stories. Srinawk, a writer from the impoverished northeast, was one of the best-known writers in the country. A journalist turned short-story writer, he benefited from a brief period of press freedom in the late fifties, when his stories began appearing in local newspapers. He had traveled abroad in the sixties as the recipient of a Time-Life grant; later, he became politically active and was exiled and banned before returning in the eighties.
Srinawk’s work, often satirical in nature, gave voice to the Thai peasant class. Just the year before my arrival in Thailand, the National Culture Commission named him the National Artist of Thailand in literature. There was Thai literature; Clive just didn’t know about it. The limits of his curiosity exasperated me. I made a heavy notation of The Politician and Other Stories in my Book of Books in frustration.
It had been a long time since I’d hung out with someone my age, from a similar background, someone to whom I wouldn’t have to explain myself and all my references, someone who was inspired by the same stories. Of course, I had sought precisely this scenario by moving to Thailand in the first place. Living there was a constant exhilaration and provocation; I just hadn’t realized how tiring that would be. My main release was on paper—books and Bob and letters home, long missives I sent to my mother called Pamograms, which she photocopied and mailed to a list of friends and family.
In my Pamograms and in my mind, I tried to envision myself a noble heroine in a grand and epic novel culminating in the realization of some larger purpose. If not Anna Karenina, then some equally romantic but less suicidal figure. Any morning could be the dawn of a new narrative, one tailored to that day’s circumstance, something that would offer, if not a happy ending, then at least a better story line. You could assume the character of whatever novel or biography you were reading at the moment, create your own, or attempt to alter yourself to suit any relevant ambitions. “Today, I’ll be the more intrepid type,” I’d tell myself upon waking, and proceed through the day like a character from a completely different story.
Over the years, I had developed a related habit of narrating my every move aloud, occasionally in the third person. “There she goes for the five-to-eleven shift,” I’d mutter on my way to work. “Perhaps tonight she’ll have rice pilaf for dinner.” Mostly I yammered away in the plain old first person: “I’ll just swing open the door of the car,” I informed my best friend, Ericka, while visiting her at Wesleyan freshman year. “Then I’ll get back in and drive up I-95. I should be there before dark.”
“Stop it!” she yelled. I’d been doing this all weekend, apparently. “Stop narrating your every move! It’s unbelievably annoying.”
Oh my God she was right. I think I’d been annoyed, too, I just hadn’t realized that I was the problem. From that day forward, I tried hard to keep the narration to myself, and to a minimum. Narrating your life necessarily means holding it at a certain distance. There’s a risk to reading your life more than actually living it.
But I still unconsciously broke my days down into stories—tailoring haphazard sequences of events into neater narratives, ones with beginnings, middles, and ends circulating in my head like a private polyphonic novel. You could sketch out characters, editing as you went, predicting upcoming plot points, and then cleaning it up afterward. You could take full advantage of l’esprit de l’escalier, making everything just a little more clever than it actually was.
After dinner, enveloped by my ants, I’d plunge back into Anna Karenina and try to locate myself within Anna’s story. Feeling unloved and unexcited by the relationship possibilities around me, I lived vicariously through Anna’s mad affair with Vronsky, her desire and abandon filling the void where a boyfriend might have belonged. Her story expanded on my own, enriching and filling out the parts that felt missing. When you’re young and single, infidelity is more opportunity than tragedy, and the pain of abandoning a child is unimaginable. Perhaps you’d read the book differently if you were newly married, finding it scandalous and wrong, or after you’ve been married for a time, at which point it might once again make you swoon but for different reasons. For me in that place and at that time, Anna Karenina was incredibly seductive, Anna’s story adding a tinge of romance to round out the coarser aspects of my life abroad. Pitching myself onto a train track held zero appeal. I nonetheless wished I could be just a little more like my heroine.
CHAPTER 10
Swimming to Cambodia
The Company of Narrators
The friends I made living in Thailand were friends of circumstance—Angela, a yellow-haired English minister’s daughter who wore brightly colored jewelry and said things like “faffy” and “grotty”; Brad, a fiftysomething history teacher from Hawaii who lived with a Thai teenager; Alma, a Swedish backpacker I hung out with on the beach, seemingly the only other solo girl on Ko Phi Phi for the holidays. Each provided a companionship of convenience; we probably never would have crossed paths at home, and if we had, we’d have each swiftly moved on. Here, I clung to them.
It would have been great to have had a real friend to travel with. It would have been even better to have had a real boyfriend to travel with. Instead, when I decided to go to Cambodia in the spring of 1994 for the Cambodian New Year celebration, I had Tyler. A former navy sailor, Tyler was the smartest and worldliest American I’d met in Chiang Mai and my most recent companion of last resort. He was handsome in a mean and careless all-star way, one of those guys who winked at plain women on the street knowing it would make them blush. I couldn’t have been less interested in him romantically, which was saying something, since what I really could have used at that point was romance. But that didn’t seem to be Tyler’s core strength anyway. While stationed in the Philippines, he’d met, married, and abandoned a local woman after he couldn’t get a Catholic divorce. He then moved to Chiang Mai, where he rented a two-story wooden house on the outskirts, turning the ground floor into an English-language classroom. I chose not to inquire about his current love life, but Tyler otherwise seemed relatively respectful of the local population; his Thai was impeccable, and having developed a serious book habit during long, tedious hours on a submarine, he read ambitiously in both Thai and English. If nothing else, we could talk about literature together, and we did.
The most noteworthy thing about Tyler was the way he peed at night. His toilet was located on the first floor of the house, a steep and narrow staircase away from his upstairs bedroom. To avoid a precarious descent in the dark of night down what was more a ladder than a flight of stairs, he’d rigged a long plastic tube from the first-floor toilet up the side of the house to the window of his second-floor bedroom. At night, he’d simply release into the plastic tube and the runoff would make its way into the bowl. Tyler’s system, alas, did not accommodate women.
He was kind of a solo operator generally. Though he and I didn’t know each other well, we managed to find something to fight about while waiting for our flight to Phnom Penh. Before boarding, we mutually deci
ded to go our separate ways. My travels in Asia were too precious to be compromised by bad company.
“You can take the hostel,” I said to Tyler at the airport; we’d reserved a room with two beds in the city’s tiny backpacker ghetto. “I’ll find somewhere else.” This was easier said than done. It was early days in Cambodia’s tourism revival and accommodations were hard to come by. The nascent tourist industry hadn’t been helped when, three months prior to my trip, a professor from the University of Texas was kidnapped and killed by rogue Khmer Rouge fighters while she was visiting a temple outside Angkor Wat. Phnom Penh, the capital, was still dominated by UN forces and NGOs; the Khmer Rouge, who had been deposed more than a decade earlier, had yet to go on trial for crimes against humanity. There was only one luxury hotel in the entire country, a gleaming Sofitel for people of note; everyone else scattered into the remaining run-down establishments.
By sheer luck I wound up at the Renakse, an elegantly dilapidated French colonial hotel directly across from the Royal Palace. It was a step up from my usual grubby guesthouse, but I wanted to avoid bumping into Tyler within the cluster of budget accommodations. The Renakse, as it happened, was the prime hangout for a kind of expat very different from those populating Chiang Mai. Instead of missionaries and sex tourists, there were academics, artists, and nonprofit workers from Europe and the United States. So here were the people I’d been fruitlessly searching for abroad.