Thai Girl

by Andrew Hicks

  There had been some unseasonal rain and the lights of the traffic shone on the wet road, the damp earth giving off a warm smell of dust and dung and deep countryside. Though the roads were straight and well-paved, this was the real, rural Thailand that Ben had longed to see. He had left behind the artificial worlds of Bangkok and backpacking and ahead of him lay new and authentic experiences of Thailand.

  After some time they reached the outskirts of a town. It was still dark and there was nobody about. When Fon leaned forward and spoke to the driver, he drew into the side of the road and stopped.

  ‘Okay Ben, get out,’ she said.

  ‘What are we doing? Where are we?’

  ‘Nang Rong. Go shopping.’

  ‘Shopping? Now? In the middle of the night?’

  ‘Yes, now. Not ask questions!’

  Ben obediently got out without a word and stared around at the bleak concrete streets of Nang Rong.

  23

  Fon and Jinda climbed out of the pick-up and walked briskly down a side alley towards the Nang Rong market with Ben following on behind. There was just a hint of the dawn as they reached the open-air market, a tightly-packed clutter of wooden stalls covered with grubby awnings. After the rain the air was heavy with humidity, the ground a dark soup of liquid mud. Despite the early hour, the market was alive with activity, the faces of the buyers lit by the harsh light of the bulbs swinging from the stalls. Ben picked his way through the puddles, trying not to submerge his sandals in the filthy water.

  The market stalls were weighed down with vegetables and fruit, few of which Ben could identify, and with fish which were still gasping and squirming. Fon chose a live fish to be collected later and bought meat, vegetables and herbs which she passed back to Jinda to carry. She attracted many sidelong glances, a self-confident young woman with her six foot foreign boyfriend in tow. As she went among the stalls, she freely sampled the fried insects and wriggly bamboo grubs.

  ‘Here Ben, you eat,’ she said as she popped a grub into his mouth with a wicked twinkle. Ben bit on it and it filled his mouth with a tasteless doughy mush.

  Jinda and Ben were soon laden with plastic bags full of food. They went back for the fish, now cleaned and de-scaled, and waded through the sludge back to the road. The pick-up was waiting and they drove on through the town and out into the dark countryside. After some time, a glow of light appeared on the horizon and for the first time Ben could glimpse the endless rice fields, scattered houses of wood and concrete and the occasional school or police post as they sped along the dead straight road.

  ‘Soon come to village. Not far now,’ said Fon.

  A few minutes later the driver slowed down and pulled over onto the verge in front of a cluster of houses set back from the road. So this is it at last, thought Ben as he climbed down from the cab and looked around at a world that was dripping and dismal.

  He followed Fon and Jinda as they crossed a slippery wooden plank over a drainage ditch and walked towards a small house from which an elderly woman was emerging. It was Fon’s Mama, a tiny woman in a sarong, with a weathered face the same broad shape as those of her daughters. The greetings were low-key and the moment casual and easy as if this sort of thing happened every day. All Ben could do was to smile awkwardly and look around while everyone loudly talked about him in Thai.

  The tiny single-storey house was dwarfed by a tamarind tree and by the larger house next door. It was built of concrete blocks skimmed in cement, with wooden doors and window frames all unpainted. A bamboo pole fixed to the roof was topped with a television aerial and ceramic pots stood under the eaves to catch rainwater for drinking.

  He was glad when at last Fon took him inside, adding their shoes to the collection outside the door. A narrow room with white strip-lighting ran the length of the house to a cooking area and washroom at the back. On the right were doors to two small bedrooms, each almost filled by a double mattress laid on the floor and draped with mosquito nets. As he looked in, he wondered where they would all sleep that night.

  The floor of the main room was covered with thin blue lino but there was hardly any furniture. The sole focus of the room was some rattan shelving with a television taking pride of place. On the top shelf was a ceramic Buddha still in its cellophane wrapping, a vase of artificial lotus flowers and a picture of King Chulalongkorn in a frame decorated with shells. A split-bamboo bed, a sack of rice in the corner and a spittoon half full of red betel spit were the only other things in the room.

  Fon showed Ben through to the kitchen which was bare except for an electric rice-cooker and wok, a twin-tub washing machine and a glassfronted food cabinet, its feet standing in bowls of water to repel the ants. As they went out of the kitchen door at the back of the house, it was now almost light. Ben could see that this was the place for washing the dishes; just a muddy space with a duckboard, a clay pot for water and a blue plastic basin.

  The small piece of ground at the back of the house was overgrown and neglected. Fon led him through the tangled vegetation and showed him banana and papaya trees, ginger, galangal and taro plants and a vine of pepper leaves used for chewing with betel nut. Beyond the wilderness, the vegetable gardens and rice fields began. Neighbours were already going to work in the fields, some of them casting curious glances at the house where the visitors had just arrived. One, an elderly man with a battered face and a wicked grin came across with a couple of bottles of beer and offered them to Ben who politely refused. He could think of nothing worse at that time of the morning.

  ‘So the house is almost new?’ he asked Fon.

  ‘Yes, I build it for Mama,’ she said proudly. ‘Old one no good … roof leak, wood broken. New house expensive … one window twelve hundred baht, door eight hundred. Mama think she have good daughter. I die if she work like people on Koh Samet.’

  Ben thought of the little old lady who flogged up and down the beach every day selling som tam. He could not imagine Fon’s mother carrying those heavy loads.

  ‘Come, Ben, see buffalo. Baby born yesterday,’ said Fon, her face lighting up. She took him round the side of the house through the mud to the buffalo wallow where a tiny pink calf was suckling a black buffalo cow which gazed at them head down, her massive horns swept back behind flapping ears.

  ‘Wow, a real live buffalo. I must get my camera,’ said Ben, rushing back into the house. As he photographed Fon standing in front of the animals, she made great play of the farang getting excited about something so ordinary.

  ‘Why you like buffalo? Not have, England?’

  ‘No, we only have cows.’

  ‘Smile buffalo. Farang take your photo!’

  ‘And what are the buffaloes for? For milk?’ asked Ben.

  ‘No! You joking me!’ Fon laughed at his stupidity. ‘Buffalo pull cart, plough rice field, make manure … and for meat. But now, have small tractor. Before many buffalo, but soon all gone, soon no more buffalo.’

  ‘So you had a buffalo cart?’

  ‘Yes, I ride behind Papa, take vegetables to market, carry rice. No have cars before. Never go very far … this our village so we stay here, happy family.’

  ‘The buffalo looks dangerous.’

  ‘No, not dangerous! When small, Fon ride buffalo, have race. Beat buffalo hard with stick … always want to win. Sometimes fall off, come home black face. Papa angry little bit, but no problem … he love me.’

  ‘And what’s that wooden building over there, the small one with its floor above the ground,’ asked Ben.

  ‘That one, rice barn where we keep the rice before. Now sell the rice and take it away. Very different today,’ said Fon.

  ‘Yes, everything changes.’

  ‘But still we have Buddha … temple not change so much. Today, Ben, we go wat with Mama, take food for monks. You come too.’

  They went back into the house where Fon’s mother was filling some jars with food for the monks. She, Fon and Ben then set off together, crossing the road and walking through the dewy grass. The t
emple was a modern concrete building with a red corrugated roof in Thai style, surrounded by mango trees and betel palms. Next to it was an open-sided pavilion of rough-hewn wood with a flight of steps leading up to a high wooden floor. Ben, still feeling bleary from the overnight bus ride and suffering mild culture shock, followed the others up the steps, kicking off his shoes.

  They joined four or five middle-aged ladies who were watching a group of saffron-robed monks with shaven heads sitting cross-legged in a circle on a raised platform, silently eating from enamel bowls. Fon motioned Ben to sit down on the floor with the women. While the monks were eating, the women waited quietly, only occasionally exchanging words, and sometimes holding their hands together in prayer.

  When the monks had finished eating, the women removed their dishes and, sitting round on the floor, shared the fish, meat and sticky rice that remained. There was lots of low-key banter and joking, most of it directed towards Ben. The women gave him shy looks, asking questions through Fon and teasing him about his capacity for chilli. When they had eaten enough, the women sat back and chewed betel nut wrapped in a wad of pepper leaves, the red pulp visible on their lips. Ben noticed them occasionally rocking forward on their haunches, their heads down, as if bowing to a deity. But no, they were spitting the bright red residue through the gaps in the floor boards down onto the earth below.

  Fon supervised the cleaning up, collecting the dirty dishes, taking water from a waist-high clay pot and washing them in a bowl and tipping the scraps through the floor for the chickens, the last in the pecking order. As she worked, two of the monks sauntered across and chatted to her. Ben guessed they were asking questions about her farang friend and wondered how she explained him away. Then the women collected up their bowls and slowly began to return to their homes. Ben followed Fon and her mother back across the road to the house, already beginning to feel a little more comfortable with rural Thailand.

  When they got back from the temple, Fon led Ben out of the house past the buffaloes and the rice barn, through the mango and jackfruit trees to where a group of women were sitting on mats near some low wooden huts. This gathering, Fon explained, was to celebrate the birth two weeks earlier of a little girl. The teenage mother was cradling a tiny baby with a pale oval face and a head of thick black hair. Fon and Ben’s arrival caused quite a stir and she invited them to come and join her. Dressed in sarong and tee shirt, her hair tied back with a red ribbon, she smiled happily at the honour being done to her baby as the visitors sat down.

  Ben found a corner of the mat to sit on and slowly took in the surroundings; the low wooden houses, the banana trees, piles of sticks and firewood, washing out on lines, an old motorbike, the dry season dustiness and all the clutter and mess of rural Asia.

  With much joking and laughter, one of the older women then tied a twenty baht note to his wrist with pieces of string. Fon explained as best she could that the money was for the child and that he must now keep the string tied to his wrist for good luck.

  As they sat and talked, Ben noticed that the local males sat apart from the women, the boys playing and tumbling, the teens and older men drinking beer together on the steps of one of the huts. A skinny youth who was the baby’s father came across to greet them and then returned to his friends. One old man was rolling around making incoherent noises and Ben asked Fon if he was a mental defective. But no, he was just blind drunk, halfway through the morning of a long hot day.

  Ben was curious about some of the characters around them and asked her about a wizened old woman cradling a tiny girl on her lap.

  ‘She grandmama,’ said Fon. ‘Her daughter have baby, but papa have new lady. She not see daughter long time, not know where she is. And daughter not send money … big, big problem.’

  When Ben slipped the child a fifty baht note, she disarmingly brought her pudgy little hands together under her chin in a traditional wai of thanks.

  Fon was now making a fuss of another old crone who looked different to the others, a touch more exotic, her dark skin pulled tight over prominent cheek bones. Her lips were bright red from chewing betel nut and a torrent of curly black hair flowed from beneath a woolly blue hat. She was full of life and fun.

  ‘She come from Cambodia long time ago,’ Fon explained. ‘Have too much fighting, too many people die. Before, she have husbands, but they die too, all die.’

  ‘How many husbands?’

  ‘Three … and she have children, but not know where they are. War finish, Pol Pot dead already, but Cambodia still dangerous. Step on bomb, you die. If you lucky, you lose leg.’

  There was much boisterous talking and laughter with Fon the centre of attention, and there were many glances at Ben. He imagined the inevitable questions to Fon about life on the island, about the significance of the tall farang and the dream of marrying out of rural poverty.

  After one loud outburst, Fon told Ben what the old woman from Cambodia had just said.

  ‘She say most farang are fat with big bellies and always smell bad. But this one doesn’t smell at all!’

  ‘Thanks a million, Fon.’

  ‘Yes, but maybe she not come close enough!’

  Early that afternoon, Fon and Ben joined a tractor load of labourers going out to harvest the rice. They climbed onto the wooden trailer and sat down on the floor with the other workers. The tractor was just a small engine mounted on a single axle with large knobbly tyres, handle bars for steering and a hitch attached to the trailer. They puttered off across the road and down a track through the houses and orchards, the trailer crashing heavily into the potholes, and soon reached the rice fields.

  Stretching to the horizon, the landscape of small fields, each separated by low earth banks, was relieved only by patches of woodland, bamboo and fruit trees. Here and there stood a substantial tree, a survivor from the jungle which had covered the area not so long ago. The tracks were well built, sometimes following ditches and concrete-lined irrigation channels flowing with crystal-clear water. Ben was impressed that this infrastructure for the control of water to the paddy fields, essential for the production of rice in a region of low rainfall, was so elaborate. Now at the beginning of the dry season the fields had been drained and the rice was brown and ripe and ready for harvesting.

  After several spine-jarring minutes the tractor stopped and they got down and joined some farm workers resting in the shade a few hundred yards away. On a rise in the ground under the mango and cashew trees stood a wooden shelter with a corrugated iron roof. A dozen or so farmers, both men and women, had stopped work in the midday heat and were now about to eat. Rice straw had been spread out under the trees to sit on and as Fon and Ben arrived the food was just ready; sticky rice, meat that was sizzling on a barbecue and raw beef dipped in seasonings. Ben decided to risk the raw meat which was succulent and tender, eaten with newly sprouted leaves from a nearby cashew tree.

  The workers ranged from women in their late sixties down to a handful of little boys. Ben noticed one young girl who was obviously pregnant, her bare feet dry and callused from a short lifetime of work in the fields. He asked Fon about her.

  ‘She seventeen. Boyfriend go work Bangkok.’

  ‘Tough to have a baby and then be apart,’ he said. ‘When’ll he come back?’

  ‘Don’t know. Maybe he like Bangkok … maybe he not come back.’

  When they had finished eating, the workers began putting on short rubber boots, straw hats with wide brims and a face cloth wrapped around the head and neck to keep out the dust. Ben was determined to join in the work and asked Fon for a sickle. The Thai rice farmers swathed in clothes and the tall farang in floppy shorts and tee shirt then spread themselves across the end of a tiny field and advanced shoulder to shoulder into the standing rice, leaning forward and cutting the waist-high rice stalks. Ben’s neighbour showed him how to grasp a bunch of stalks with the left hand and then cut through it by pulling the sickle back towards the body. He felt incompetent at first but after half an hour was beginning t
o get the hang of it.

  He wondered how much the owner of the field paid the workers for their labour and jokingly asked Fon what he would be paid for his hour’s work. She told him that when she was a child, everyone used to work together to bring in the rice and that cash did not usually change hands. But the old ways were breaking down and they now paid a hundred and twenty baht for a full day’s work. Because of this there were times, she said, when the price of rice was so low that farmers could not afford the cost of bringing it in and so had to leave it unharvested.

  It crossed Ben’s mind that a day’s wage for a rice farmer would hardly buy a pint of beer in his local pub back home. He knew that rice farming in Asia was still labour-intensive but he had not realised it was in such crisis. As he cut at the rice a handful at a time, he began to understand the human cost of a lifetime of back-breaking labour in the heat of the rice fields. It seemed to him a tragedy for these people that as the price of rice was falling, their unremitting physical work offered them so little reward; they were trapped in an old way of life that was in decline. On the other hand it struck him that if basic living standards could be maintained and changing aspirations did not seduce them away to the cities, a village like this could offer many compensations. A life on the land free of urban pressures and surrounded by family and friends strongly appealed to his romantic side.

  But he could see many signs of instability and change. The story of how Fon had been sent away to work in Bangkok was just one example. Yet she had done well and the money she now sent back to her mother was helping to sustain a rural community no longer able to survive on its own. But this was hardly a satisfactory solution and he could not begin to guess what the future held for villages like this one.