Every evening, at 17.00, my mother in law goes dancing. She is nearly 70. Each day she wears a different colour polo shirt-pink, orange, gree, blue etc. This is the grannies dance gals.
This week is special. There are basketball matches and the teams have cheerleaders, too. All the teams have granny cheerleaders. The Thais have solved the difficulty of getting the ball in the net by having a keeper who stands on a chair with a bamboo basket which she waves around to catch the ball!
Ma is in the blue shirt on the right!
Monday, November 29, 2004
October in Sawankhalok, Sukothai!!
You ask how I spend the day!
Well you don’t but shall I tell you?!!
You have heard some of this before, I guess, but it is life anew.
E wakes about 7.00 and plays in the bed, talking, talking.
Her friends are already running in the road
She goes to meet them
I sleep more
K never wakes
In an hour or so
E eats sticky rice and salty pork
I wake fumbling for orange juice
Another hour, if we are lucky, K wakes
Like a 19 year old pulled through a hedge
Stunned by sleep for another hour
E is busy in the streets.
While it is half term.
Now school has opened and they are off at 8.00. E is most indignant. Dee go school too. You know she calls herself Dee-though it is changing- and now she is more likely to call herself Edodie! She puts on shoes, gathers her books, puts them in her backpack and is ready on her bike to go. When they leave without her she howls and we have to play going to school in the living room.
We shower
Cold water sluiced from a huge sistern
Edodie don’t like it she says. For some reason she has taken against hair washing.
She eats sticky rice and pork for her breakfast and is gaining weight like a Lao piggy!
She speaks a fabulous mixture of English and Thai…Now Thai words but English syntax. Dee done Leeaw…ie Elodie done it already and Dee Kin Mot ie Elodie has eaten it all up!
I go to the Post Office. Open emails. Send Invoices. Do the banking. All has to be done before about 11.00 as after that the Net gives up until after lunch. Now with a 7 hour difference it is tedious to wait until 11.00 here, 04.00 in the UK for the banks to have done their computing.
I go to the market
I can buy every ingredient from French Charcuterie and Pork Cookery mostly for about 10p an item. Pig’s heads, innards, liver, kidneys, back fat
There is tough Islam beef
Salted fish, live fish, catfish, not much sea fish, but squid, octopus, prawns and mackerel, frogs, turtles, snakes, rats…plenty of protein. The sea fish does not come in until about 10.00
I buy potatoes!! Expensive. Lentils, coconout, chili , red peppers, aubergines. In total about £2.50
We cook, we eat.
About 14.00m E goes to sleep for a couple of hours. Maybe us too.
We shower, go to buy Rice Porridge, Durian, Melons, Vegetables, this week Chinese Vegetarian Food, as it is the festival of Kin Je, supposed to be no meat, no alcohol, no sex……!?
By 17.00 it is cool enough to play again in the road, bikes, trucks, games.
Then they play inside. Maybe watch peculiar videos.
Today she has an exquisite new friend. 7 years old, a face like a Cham statue, But her skin is scarred from head to toe with mosquito bites.
K and I start to talk.
E goes to sleep at 8.30. Books read by K. She has two lovely Thai books, one about all the things that can sting you…jep jang loeey!! And one about yawning Haaow…She yawns most movingly..then Kipper and Mog, Various other cat books, Laura and her Star, The Gigantic Turnip….books read by Dada.
Her favourite now is a version of Briggs’s Snowman which has extended into an enormous world of snow, ice, lands beyond, dreams….By 9.30 she is asleep
We talk
Maybe 4 hours or 5, maybe watch a peculiar Thai soap opera or a movie at the same time
By midnight Thai TV has surrendered itself to yowling folk and country music and by 02.00 the adverts for body building have taken over
Time for showers and beds
In amongst all this there are sharp interludes of visits to banks, critical purchases, love! Trips to Tesco in Phitsanulok, mendings of bikes and cars, phone calls to the UK and France, visits to outlying family hovels
And in this little town?
I do not pretend to understand this town
Under the patronage of one good family for decades who have worked out how to keep the money coming in and the intrusive bureaucrats at bay?
We are not old money, definitely
Old money here is, I think, some 300 years or so of thrift and graft. Some more recent. It is, in its centre, a Chinese town. Businesses all..mobile phones, grocers, funeral parlours, general agricultural merchandise, .et.al. metal bashing, bikes, computers, photo shops, cars.a bit..all Chinese businesses…there are elegant middle aged Chinese gentlemen to be seen conducting serious and leisurely business in doorways, back rooms, the street.
I have said before you could make a movie in the Bangkok Bank alone. The staggering sums withdrawn and deposited, taken from little handbags, stuffed into carrier bags…$10,000 at a time and more…buying and selling, cash businesses. The boy that runs the vegetable night markets dripping in gold,, the girl that sells retail too.
There is some sense of volume here that I do not sense in a European small town, but maybe I am just ignorant of business
The centre of the town shifts throughout the day. In the early morning you can sidle out into your nearest road, nod at a few monks seeking alms, buy sticky rice and fried dough, soya bean milk, pork satay, endless sticky rice sweets, a few essentials more for morning food. By 6.00 the street market is open, busy, by 09.00 dead. The covered market busy from 5.00, by midday dead., too. The town sleeps. Around 16.00 the evening markets open. One sells more fish-fresh, pickled, fried to death, prawn fritters,, fresh vegetables, fruit-oranges, mangoes, pineapple, longan and lychee, cantaloupe, mangosteen…all according to season, fried chicken, grilled chicken hearts and livers on skewers, skewers of parson’s noses, honey ,banana flowers, all from local farms.
Then the cooked food market opens around 17.00. Here we buy Rice Soup, Noodles Soup, milky drinks, more fruit, made dumplings, fried sausage, grilled squid, flowers, endless curries in plastic gags, bird’s nest soup, tuna and sweet corn sandwiches..! yes, . In another hour or so the night vegetable market is busy. 10 kilo sacks of vegetables..sweet corn, aubergines, yams, cabbage, salad, broccoli, greens, onions, radishes, peppers and chilis..all going to little food businesses in the surrounding villages.
But all the while 7-11, Seven, that focal point of Thai small town life is there.. open…. the money pouring in.
CP foods, the franchisee of 7 here is one of the biggest companies in China, Thailand, The World. Very big in chickens. Bigger than the disgraced Tysons. Don’t think you can buy any part of a chicken, an egg or its offshoots they don’t own. They own that enormous new mall in Shanghai..what’s it called…?? No wonder. They are collecting money 24 hours a day round the globe at little cost and great profit. It is hardly sustenance food..just fripperies of the night. Coke, sweets, beer, ice cream, sausages, crisps, cakes, slushies and slurpies, there is a huge box of condoms next to the till!
At 05.00 again the monks speak pleasantries, urbane platitudes, through Tannoyed speakers…and soon it will be the all night festival season again…! I must order ear plugs..or go out into the dawn.
So what is good about this town?
It is hot, which I like; cool in the morning and at night. We have a house that is OK, a garden, family. I can buy food 24 hours a day, and most normal consumer goods. The air is clear, there is a river running muddy, deep and sufficiently wild.
There is an airport. One hour to Bangkok, 40 minutes to Chiang Mai. Flights to Laos, Singapore China.
What if Pwllheli was an hour from London, Dublin, Paris?
There are birds, flowers, beautiful fields of rice. The Internet is quick and works. K has friends she has known all her life, E has her little circle too. If she goes to school these, too, she will always know. It is like a French/German provincial village before..now? I do not know. When I was in Munster everyone went home to their villages at the weekend.
I have been on buses filled only with kids coming home here from BKK for a week.
I cannot buy mustard, olive oil, wine..why should I…there are other condiments…though I can do so in Chiang Mai. I miss my new friends. But better to be alone here than there. But we will have to return for money, schools.
It continues to be the contrasts and juxtapositions that rouse the dulled senses. A guy drives down the main drag on a Ford 6600 tractor, large disc harrow in tow, stops to top up his mobile phone and inspect the display of Laptop computers that are displayed under a tent outside the station. He has no shoes.
But
It is a long way from the sea, which I miss. I am a stranger and will always be so. We are a bit odd. There are no books, no toys, no gin. Everyone is getting on with life disregarding, and why not.
Thai TV is awful but that would be the same everywhere. Is S4C so good? I think not. There is a pulse and rhythm to the months that I am and never will be part of. Of what was I a part in the UK?
The lighting is terrible. I was thinking of making some juice this evening and went to the kitchen only to think:. One strip light is SO depressing..I cannot see, I do not want to be in this room…Electricity is cheap..and so are lamps and bulbs, but….no thank you…!! Of course if you do not read books…don’t need light to watch TV.
My personal space is limited, but here not much valued. They ask: Why would I want to be alone?. Those habits of thought and writing, reflection and dream must now be part of the life of others. I who was so all alone, no longer so! I have not developed that art of self absorption that the Chinese and Thais appear to have done..see Austin Coates on this. We went down the road. I said…the mad boy looks bad today, he is dirty loud. Who? She said? I said The Mad Boy, you complain about him every day…I did not see him, she said, I was thinking about Durian…How could you miss him?.Shrug…
But she says to me too. I, who cannot sleep alone.. too many nights in freezing, small, tightly wrapped beds with too few blankets and a falling off eiderdown. I like to sleep alone. I slept, on a small space of hard floor, the mosquitoes whining, with my mother, my father, drunk, my two sisters, fussy, for 14 years. No space to write, for homework, no light but the grim striplight, the TVs blaring, neighbours shouting. Now I have my own bed, my own pillow.. I can lie in bed, read, think, look in the mirror, talk on my mobile, pamper my hair Now, at last, I have my space. I can sleep alone! Then Elodie comes!! But who can gainsay that?!
I have been reading Gabriel Marquez’s new book, struggling with my rusty Spanish. Old men and sex. Is that me?. When I used to read Iris Murdoch as a youth I was accused of only reading books that were about my life….Sex, he says, is all you have when you fail to attain love. Not so.
I have never paid for sex, though I have paid for company..Company comes more expensive I think!
I have been trying to explain to K, regimen, diet…mind, body and estate/spirit via Foucault and Galen…Moderation, the mean, quality of air, foods..the prolongation of life, the regulation of venus…….There must be an equivalent lurking here. China is different of course where the whole thing is as articulated as in Europe..now forgotten..not in China..the value of old knowledge, lost knowledge. The difference between China and Europe enormous..wives and children, the hierarchies of pleasure, the context of pleasure in the equilibrum of marriage.
There are four words I have been trying to translate: Pleasure, Delight, Lovely. Adventure.
So far I have failed. Pleasure as something more relaxed, more intense, seekable, achievable..than fun, Going Out, and also as a verb to pleasure. Delight seems even more difficult. As it falls short of excess, is not Joy, Charm nor Fun, but is a transport, too.. Lovely is not Neat, Nice, Beautiful…thou art more lovely. And Adventure with its echoes of Journey, Risk, Novelty, but slightly contained…I am not finding the words for these. Maybe I am not finding a proper grasp of them in my own life.
But to return to The Laureate…Marquez, I mean……
Hang On
Another good story comes in!!
I met a guy a the Bangkok Bank, American, riding an un-necessarily large motorbike, and we fell into conversation waiting for the unbelievably complicated bureaucracy of Thai financial transactions to work themselves through. Nice guy from Atlanta, Georgia, Civil Engineer..well off retired 50 plus, bit of a hippy manqué but who in these parts is not. We talk about our lives. He has a wife from here AND a large family, of course. The girl comes from the market, ordinary, pretty enough, about 30 I suppose…been together 4 years. Then another girl appears 20 or so, More pretty but very chippy. .pouty face, rude, ogling me… .who is this? ..he raises eyes…her sister…so? She asks him for money..he gives her 500B and off she goes…the wife mutters at him…what can I do he says…she just asks for money all the time..if I give about 10,000 every week…10,000 that is $200….. there is peace… if not Father, Mother, Uncles, Wife think I am a shit….Good grief, how much do you give your wife I ask…..Don’t do it, face it out I say….yeah yeah
Anyway today K comes home
The guy has left for the US
But before he went he hired a JCB and took it to the house they had built, nice dwelling US style on the outskirts of town and demolished the whole thing. Left a note saying Sorry to the girl But your family is impossible ..I am not stupid. .I know I need to look after you all and so I did but your family just drunk on money and you do not stop them…
But of course they have the land
So K’s guess is that in a year or two there will be another husband another house……..what do you think??!!
Miss you very much
Love G, K, E
October 27 2004
I should start to write about my spectacularly dysfunctional family. Except. In Thai terms I rather think it is quite normal..maybe better than average.
My wife, the exquisite Kate, .She is 28 years old. She is the only child of her mother and father, but read on!
She lived with her mother and father and older half sister until her sister, 6 years older went away to University to become a nurse. I guess my wife was 12 or 13 when this happened., She stayed on, fighting with her father.
They moved house a couple of times in those years eventually ending up in the rather lovely two story classic Thai house on stilts in which we all now live. The day she graduated from high school, she got on a bus on her own and left for Bangkok.
She goes to work. Selling ice-cream, vegetarian food, goes to work for a marketing company, then goes to university.
She wants to study painting and graphic design. There are no facilities, no teachers. Sometimes a room with a video. There are cribs you buy in the street to enable you to pass the ludicrous multiple choice tests that pass for exams. Rhodri and I read E101..full of errors, archaisms and unintelligible stuff. IT101 Computing is all about obscure workings of out of date mainframe computers. So she tries Mass Communications, which at least appears to have a syllabus and teachers.
She meets Christians, boys, pimps, traders in everything; shares rooms with dozens of people. Sees the world. She said to me: I was a good girl, living in Bangkok. I did not need much; but I met most of the people who have been unpleasant to me in those few years. And some of those were people from Sukothai who had known me all my life.. City life?
This is paid for, to some extent, by the elder half- sister (and government loans). By virtue of, besides being a good girl who loves her mother, being a state employee the banks are headlong in trying to lend the nurse sister money. Lesson one: Work for the government.
She even has a different colour ID card! She gets preferential rates of interest on anything….
My wife has three half sisters and a half brother on her mother’s side. They are now aged c.40, 38, 37 and 33. When her elder sister was 2, she is the one is now 33, her mother, now aged 65, decided she no longer wished to be a minor wife and , in spite of the children, upped and left with my wife’s father. She took the elder sister with her and left the other three with their father and his major wife. I think there is some animosity between all parties on this score!
My wife’s mother’s first ‘husband’…how does one describe this..climbed in through her bedroom window when she was eighteen and raped her and took her to be his minor wife….explains why all the downstairs windows of this house are nailed up….
This guy, father of the other kids, is he a step father if he was there before? I think not…was a Phu Yai, big cheese, Khmer-Chinese…plenty of old money, land, rents, businesses…no need to work…He died some 8 years ago. His children by his major wife were already dead. He left nothing to the children of his minor wife. In that common Thai way all has been stolen by the nephews, great nieces and who knows who..a few gifts here, a few arrangements with officials there and the land papers have strangely re-appeared with their names on.
My wife’s father was a property developer from Vientiane. Chinese-Lao, amongst other things I guess by his looks. Started life a s a rubbish collector and pulled himself through so far. He was trying hard, but failed, to cover this province south of Chiang Mai in concrete. When he realised he was not to achieve this dream he gave up on life and took to the bottle and to beating everyone up.
Last year, as a result, he had a huge stroke which has left him paralysed down his right side.
He is younger than me.
I think there is some unspoken idea that I was his nemesis. No-one had managed to deal him for all those years and then we arrive with the small child and in 6 months he is gone and smitten.
My wife also has a half brother and half sister on her father’s side. They are aged 36 and 34 .The father now lives with that daughter and son, who live in adjacent houses the other side of town, definitely the other side of the tracks too. It is an unusual set up. There is this, sort of, huge extended family living in some half a dozen houses. Three of the houses are substantial modern concrete two story, balconied edifices, built with westerners money that the two lady boys have acquired along with absent partners. They are all actors and perform Likay, traditional Thai dance and plays, around the country, and were the principals in the story of moving house from BKK that I told a few years ago!
On her father’s side her half brother has two girls 13 and 10, little bored lolitas, while her half sister sister has three boys, 10, 8 and 6. All playing Likay. None go to school.
Her father’s first wife also lives with their children, as does he, and his first wife’s lover, who is about 35 and is the strong man of the Likkay.
Are you still with me?
Her siblings on her mother’s side have no children, except her eldest sister. She has a boy and a girl who are older than my wife. The boy has no children, but the girl has two, a boy aged eight and a girl aged six. Two different fathers. So they are K’s great nieces!. The mother has thrown them away and they are looked after by my wife’s sister. The daughter now has a new husband and a new 1 year old baby.
This one reason why Elodie is so special.
Her eldest sister also has a husband. And they have been together forever and live in the house next door. He drives a mini bus, occasionally, and raises fish under the house. She makes amazing yellow sweets, which require the purchase of about 200 eggs every couple of days. A few of these she sells in the night market. Her second sister looked after her father, ie her father not my wife’s father..oh dear!, for many years. When he died it emerged he had given most of his land, while senile, to his granddaughter in Yala, in the S of Thailand. His major wife and children long dead. She and her husband have some land of their own, so not too bad. They cannot have children. Her half brother now lives with them and his wife, from whom he is divorced as a consequence of the long story you may have read elsewhere re his adventures in Taiwan. It seems he cannot have children either. The Thais account for this by the fact that he has a white patch in his black hair.,
My wife’s other sister, the nurse, who is supposed to be the jewel in the crown, and it is a measure of the difference between being a state employee and not that she has been able to do what she has done, has now got ‘married’ I use this word advisedly to a guy, a teacher from Korat, she met on the Internet. Interestingly he too has a white patch of hair and the same conclusions have been reached. We shall see.
As far as I can work it out none of his family came to the ‘wedding’..and he got married in my jacket and shoes!. My wife has decided that the reason they ‘married’ was to ensure my mother in law was not embarrassed by the girl sleeping with the guy in the hospital 30 miles away where she works. They have not got a tabian jot –marrige certificate-from the Amphur, and everyone considers them not properly married. Indeed most people think he must have a wife already. Why else would your mother, your sisters and your friends not come to the ‘wedding’? The excuses were, apparently, too busy and too sick! The day after the wedding he went back to Bangkok. Too busy, also.
Indeed no-one in this saga, including mother in law, with the exception of my wife and I who were married in Richmond Upon Thames, heaven help her, has a marriage certificate. Most of them do not know on which day they were born, though they have had to invent birthdays for tabian ban. No-one celebrates birthdays. My mother in law has no clue on which day she, let alone her husbands and children were born. None of the siblings know their own nor each other’s birthdays.
When I have talked elsewhere about the ‘anarchy’, is that the right word? of Thai daily life this is partly what I think of..
Small diversion on weddings!!:
One time, when younger and ignorant, I had occasion to take up with a lady called J from Sisaket, in the East of Thailand, on the edge of what they call the weeping plain. No water, poor soil, but eerily pretty, a bit like the middle of Sicily but flat! After various passages of pleasure and business in Bangkok, Chianfg Mai, Phuket and Elsewhere we went ‘home’ to Sisaket.
After some days a party was announced. I already knew this as going to cost me money. So the appointed night arrives. 300 or so persons appear. There are bonfires and fireworks, food in abundance; by 22.00 an impressive pile of Singha Beer and Mekhong whisky bottles is building. A policeman, who has the only truck, is despatched to what the bThais call ‘seven’ ie. The 7-11 minimart in town to buy more crates.
Monks appear.
I am bound by the wrists with white threads about 200 times to this young lady, by every person present. What is happening/? Oh you are getting married of course says an ‘uncle’…well there you go…’Mind you’ he says, ‘you are, I think, the fourth guy she has married this year, but this is a VERY good party; you must have moré money..very good.’
We return to BKK. Me dripping with threads..walking in the street,,,,
European guy: Hi J how are you..(sees our wrists)..wow what happened? you got married?
J: Yes I very happy..
Farang: Oh? found someone rich enough at last??
J: Maybe
Did not last much after that!
In fact we went to Kanchanaburi and after various passages with hotels and restaurants we were walking by the river, J dressed up in combat gear and all the dogs of Kanchanaburi decide to eat her. J winding them up all the while with switches. We made it home. All my fault. I just got on a bus. And do you know she was wearing 10B of gold, about $2000 dollars worth, and she gave it all back so she cannot have been all bad. Many years later I found her, through a madam in Sukhumvit, who tells me I am the only one she loved…oh yeah? She has a Luk Kreung, a half European child, a little girl, 5 years old with a guy long lost in Finland!
Her sister has a worse/better life. Met a guy from Germany with a furniture store. Nice guy but entirely spaced/smashed. One day we went back to the apartment in Soi Korpai, Pattaya. He is looking v. green. Dead on the floor. Last seen trading stuff with some Thai guy on the stairs. Looks like bad heroin. No-one in the apartment building wants to know, foreigners, Thais alike. Every one knows what happened. A short visit from the police, a few pictures, some cursory inquiries into who the Thai guy might have been. Case closed. Another stupid foreigner…. who cares.?
Parents come from some former E German city, Jena I think, to collect son’s body, take wife, yes wife, home with them. Good, very upset people.…particularly liked the bit of the wife milking the Amex card, and all bank cards, from the ATM in the few minutes before going to the police station.
Last heard of shacked up, of course, with German ‘husband’ in Berlin…..at least got more sense than to come back to Thailand.
As I say, the general view around town here is that the guy, I am now returning to sister’s new husband, who is quite presentable if pompous, must have a wife and family already..so the whole thing is a wonderful Thai charade.
I have the wedding photos. Never saw a guy look so miserable in all my life..a wedding?..I think not..but of course no one can say anything….!
Not about this nor anything else. I am continually surprised by the utter freedom individuals here believe they have to do exactly what they want when they want to, but only in certain spheres of life. This ‘freedom’ is of course circumscribed by a ferocious set of social controls which start early with the different child rearing processes for boys and girls, follow through into the nonsensical rigidities of school, reinforced by the tyrannies of age and status so ingrained in the language and in patterns of respect and behaviour-overlaid with a good deal of monkish nonsense, but also infused with sets of values and practices, I think far more sensitive to the realities of the lives of human beings than many in the so-called ‘West’.
These things range from the trivial and annoying-I’ll park my car, drive my car anywhere I want without considering there is another one on the road, I will go to the counter ahead of 300 people waiting, If I want to sleep with someone I will-why should you care?, If you want a mia noi, I don’t care….which leads to: You are my family and so more important than anyone-I will care for you and you for me and we for our children and they for us over and above everything until we die, I will give my father all my money (and yours!) if he needs it,
Thailand is the third country on the list with the highest number of deaths by shooting of all countries after South Africa and Colombia
At the end of the month. Full Moon. Awk Phansa. Time for the short stay monks to leave the monastery. E and I go out into the road to await the procession. This time very small and short. A few monks in pick ups gathering alms, then some characters in mock ancient Chinese masks. Funny face says E, then the line of monks gathering rice and finally a peculiar procession of papier mache ‘monsters’ of which the children are supposed to be terrified. They look like badly made Mini- Ents from Lord of the Rings. More funny face says E.
Granny has gone to Nong Khai with her minibus grannies’ outing, of which there are many. She is a transformed woman with the departure of K’s father. She comes back with jars of rice spirit, lengths of beautiful cloth, sausages.
The killing goes on in the South. Even the Bangkok Post, a most brown-nosed newspaper has been criticising Thaksin. I just say..remember he is a policeman and all he really will be happy with is a police state. This is the kind of thinking will get me and all of us shot. The general view here seems to be that …’muslims are mad’ ’because they ‘’don’t want to be Thai’…I say it is madder to pile bodies in trucks stacked 10 high, and with sacks on their heads, so they suffocate…silence..Even The Nation was moved to deplore the sheer disregard of Thais to what was going on.
When I was with the kings’s nephew P in the 90s and the * family from Songkhla they all knew what was going to happen…”just a matter of time if nothing is done about the economy, the oppression, the neglect of the South”, they said…so here we are.Thaksin has dissolved the only talking shop with predictable results. One wonders, as with so many bad men, what motivates him? It must be power. Wealth and fame/notoriety he has already.
No Halloween here. I light some candles, but for whose souls I do not know, Ma?, Dada? Kate? How lonely priests must have been. The night is quite cool. I drive the bike far and very fast under the most orange of moons. I am very depressed. Why are we here?. How did all this happen?. Was I so incompetent at life that this chaos is all I could achieve?. I think so. But why? I cannot blame it all on those early years, but how did I never get it to improve it?. I feel as sorry for K as anyone. How was she to know what was coming to her life?. Had she any idea, that would have been an even greater reason for lack of love. As it is I am just another cross sent for her to bear. That I love her dearly probably makes it worse.
E continues to force English on all the children. They have taken to mocking her, quite kindly,: Elodie don’t like it, Elodie don’t want it, Elodie coming too; and ‘Careful darling!’ She continues to expand her Thai vocabulary with English syntax. Is this the power of the ‘mother’ tongue. I am not sure why she speaks English, but I seem to remember saying how cross I was with everyone two years ago because they were not speaking with her. So here you have it not mother tongue but father tongue. What will be the implications of that?
You ask how I spend the day!
Well you don’t but shall I tell you?!!
You have heard some of this before, I guess, but it is life anew.
E wakes about 7.00 and plays in the bed, talking, talking.
Her friends are already running in the road
She goes to meet them
I sleep more
K never wakes
In an hour or so
E eats sticky rice and salty pork
I wake fumbling for orange juice
Another hour, if we are lucky, K wakes
Like a 19 year old pulled through a hedge
Stunned by sleep for another hour
E is busy in the streets.
While it is half term.
Now school has opened and they are off at 8.00. E is most indignant. Dee go school too. You know she calls herself Dee-though it is changing- and now she is more likely to call herself Edodie! She puts on shoes, gathers her books, puts them in her backpack and is ready on her bike to go. When they leave without her she howls and we have to play going to school in the living room.
We shower
Cold water sluiced from a huge sistern
Edodie don’t like it she says. For some reason she has taken against hair washing.
She eats sticky rice and pork for her breakfast and is gaining weight like a Lao piggy!
She speaks a fabulous mixture of English and Thai…Now Thai words but English syntax. Dee done Leeaw…ie Elodie done it already and Dee Kin Mot ie Elodie has eaten it all up!
I go to the Post Office. Open emails. Send Invoices. Do the banking. All has to be done before about 11.00 as after that the Net gives up until after lunch. Now with a 7 hour difference it is tedious to wait until 11.00 here, 04.00 in the UK for the banks to have done their computing.
I go to the market
I can buy every ingredient from French Charcuterie and Pork Cookery mostly for about 10p an item. Pig’s heads, innards, liver, kidneys, back fat
There is tough Islam beef
Salted fish, live fish, catfish, not much sea fish, but squid, octopus, prawns and mackerel, frogs, turtles, snakes, rats…plenty of protein. The sea fish does not come in until about 10.00
I buy potatoes!! Expensive. Lentils, coconout, chili , red peppers, aubergines. In total about £2.50
We cook, we eat.
About 14.00m E goes to sleep for a couple of hours. Maybe us too.
We shower, go to buy Rice Porridge, Durian, Melons, Vegetables, this week Chinese Vegetarian Food, as it is the festival of Kin Je, supposed to be no meat, no alcohol, no sex……!?
By 17.00 it is cool enough to play again in the road, bikes, trucks, games.
Then they play inside. Maybe watch peculiar videos.
Today she has an exquisite new friend. 7 years old, a face like a Cham statue, But her skin is scarred from head to toe with mosquito bites.
K and I start to talk.
E goes to sleep at 8.30. Books read by K. She has two lovely Thai books, one about all the things that can sting you…jep jang loeey!! And one about yawning Haaow…She yawns most movingly..then Kipper and Mog, Various other cat books, Laura and her Star, The Gigantic Turnip….books read by Dada.
Her favourite now is a version of Briggs’s Snowman which has extended into an enormous world of snow, ice, lands beyond, dreams….By 9.30 she is asleep
We talk
Maybe 4 hours or 5, maybe watch a peculiar Thai soap opera or a movie at the same time
By midnight Thai TV has surrendered itself to yowling folk and country music and by 02.00 the adverts for body building have taken over
Time for showers and beds
In amongst all this there are sharp interludes of visits to banks, critical purchases, love! Trips to Tesco in Phitsanulok, mendings of bikes and cars, phone calls to the UK and France, visits to outlying family hovels
And in this little town?
I do not pretend to understand this town
Under the patronage of one good family for decades who have worked out how to keep the money coming in and the intrusive bureaucrats at bay?
We are not old money, definitely
Old money here is, I think, some 300 years or so of thrift and graft. Some more recent. It is, in its centre, a Chinese town. Businesses all..mobile phones, grocers, funeral parlours, general agricultural merchandise, .et.al. metal bashing, bikes, computers, photo shops, cars.a bit..all Chinese businesses…there are elegant middle aged Chinese gentlemen to be seen conducting serious and leisurely business in doorways, back rooms, the street.
I have said before you could make a movie in the Bangkok Bank alone. The staggering sums withdrawn and deposited, taken from little handbags, stuffed into carrier bags…$10,000 at a time and more…buying and selling, cash businesses. The boy that runs the vegetable night markets dripping in gold,, the girl that sells retail too.
There is some sense of volume here that I do not sense in a European small town, but maybe I am just ignorant of business
The centre of the town shifts throughout the day. In the early morning you can sidle out into your nearest road, nod at a few monks seeking alms, buy sticky rice and fried dough, soya bean milk, pork satay, endless sticky rice sweets, a few essentials more for morning food. By 6.00 the street market is open, busy, by 09.00 dead. The covered market busy from 5.00, by midday dead., too. The town sleeps. Around 16.00 the evening markets open. One sells more fish-fresh, pickled, fried to death, prawn fritters,, fresh vegetables, fruit-oranges, mangoes, pineapple, longan and lychee, cantaloupe, mangosteen…all according to season, fried chicken, grilled chicken hearts and livers on skewers, skewers of parson’s noses, honey ,banana flowers, all from local farms.
Then the cooked food market opens around 17.00. Here we buy Rice Soup, Noodles Soup, milky drinks, more fruit, made dumplings, fried sausage, grilled squid, flowers, endless curries in plastic gags, bird’s nest soup, tuna and sweet corn sandwiches..! yes, . In another hour or so the night vegetable market is busy. 10 kilo sacks of vegetables..sweet corn, aubergines, yams, cabbage, salad, broccoli, greens, onions, radishes, peppers and chilis..all going to little food businesses in the surrounding villages.
But all the while 7-11, Seven, that focal point of Thai small town life is there.. open…. the money pouring in.
CP foods, the franchisee of 7 here is one of the biggest companies in China, Thailand, The World. Very big in chickens. Bigger than the disgraced Tysons. Don’t think you can buy any part of a chicken, an egg or its offshoots they don’t own. They own that enormous new mall in Shanghai..what’s it called…?? No wonder. They are collecting money 24 hours a day round the globe at little cost and great profit. It is hardly sustenance food..just fripperies of the night. Coke, sweets, beer, ice cream, sausages, crisps, cakes, slushies and slurpies, there is a huge box of condoms next to the till!
At 05.00 again the monks speak pleasantries, urbane platitudes, through Tannoyed speakers…and soon it will be the all night festival season again…! I must order ear plugs..or go out into the dawn.
So what is good about this town?
It is hot, which I like; cool in the morning and at night. We have a house that is OK, a garden, family. I can buy food 24 hours a day, and most normal consumer goods. The air is clear, there is a river running muddy, deep and sufficiently wild.
There is an airport. One hour to Bangkok, 40 minutes to Chiang Mai. Flights to Laos, Singapore China.
What if Pwllheli was an hour from London, Dublin, Paris?
There are birds, flowers, beautiful fields of rice. The Internet is quick and works. K has friends she has known all her life, E has her little circle too. If she goes to school these, too, she will always know. It is like a French/German provincial village before..now? I do not know. When I was in Munster everyone went home to their villages at the weekend.
I have been on buses filled only with kids coming home here from BKK for a week.
I cannot buy mustard, olive oil, wine..why should I…there are other condiments…though I can do so in Chiang Mai. I miss my new friends. But better to be alone here than there. But we will have to return for money, schools.
It continues to be the contrasts and juxtapositions that rouse the dulled senses. A guy drives down the main drag on a Ford 6600 tractor, large disc harrow in tow, stops to top up his mobile phone and inspect the display of Laptop computers that are displayed under a tent outside the station. He has no shoes.
But
It is a long way from the sea, which I miss. I am a stranger and will always be so. We are a bit odd. There are no books, no toys, no gin. Everyone is getting on with life disregarding, and why not.
Thai TV is awful but that would be the same everywhere. Is S4C so good? I think not. There is a pulse and rhythm to the months that I am and never will be part of. Of what was I a part in the UK?
The lighting is terrible. I was thinking of making some juice this evening and went to the kitchen only to think:. One strip light is SO depressing..I cannot see, I do not want to be in this room…Electricity is cheap..and so are lamps and bulbs, but….no thank you…!! Of course if you do not read books…don’t need light to watch TV.
My personal space is limited, but here not much valued. They ask: Why would I want to be alone?. Those habits of thought and writing, reflection and dream must now be part of the life of others. I who was so all alone, no longer so! I have not developed that art of self absorption that the Chinese and Thais appear to have done..see Austin Coates on this. We went down the road. I said…the mad boy looks bad today, he is dirty loud. Who? She said? I said The Mad Boy, you complain about him every day…I did not see him, she said, I was thinking about Durian…How could you miss him?.Shrug…
But she says to me too. I, who cannot sleep alone.. too many nights in freezing, small, tightly wrapped beds with too few blankets and a falling off eiderdown. I like to sleep alone. I slept, on a small space of hard floor, the mosquitoes whining, with my mother, my father, drunk, my two sisters, fussy, for 14 years. No space to write, for homework, no light but the grim striplight, the TVs blaring, neighbours shouting. Now I have my own bed, my own pillow.. I can lie in bed, read, think, look in the mirror, talk on my mobile, pamper my hair Now, at last, I have my space. I can sleep alone! Then Elodie comes!! But who can gainsay that?!
I have been reading Gabriel Marquez’s new book, struggling with my rusty Spanish. Old men and sex. Is that me?. When I used to read Iris Murdoch as a youth I was accused of only reading books that were about my life….Sex, he says, is all you have when you fail to attain love. Not so.
I have never paid for sex, though I have paid for company..Company comes more expensive I think!
I have been trying to explain to K, regimen, diet…mind, body and estate/spirit via Foucault and Galen…Moderation, the mean, quality of air, foods..the prolongation of life, the regulation of venus…….There must be an equivalent lurking here. China is different of course where the whole thing is as articulated as in Europe..now forgotten..not in China..the value of old knowledge, lost knowledge. The difference between China and Europe enormous..wives and children, the hierarchies of pleasure, the context of pleasure in the equilibrum of marriage.
There are four words I have been trying to translate: Pleasure, Delight, Lovely. Adventure.
So far I have failed. Pleasure as something more relaxed, more intense, seekable, achievable..than fun, Going Out, and also as a verb to pleasure. Delight seems even more difficult. As it falls short of excess, is not Joy, Charm nor Fun, but is a transport, too.. Lovely is not Neat, Nice, Beautiful…thou art more lovely. And Adventure with its echoes of Journey, Risk, Novelty, but slightly contained…I am not finding the words for these. Maybe I am not finding a proper grasp of them in my own life.
But to return to The Laureate…Marquez, I mean……
Hang On
Another good story comes in!!
I met a guy a the Bangkok Bank, American, riding an un-necessarily large motorbike, and we fell into conversation waiting for the unbelievably complicated bureaucracy of Thai financial transactions to work themselves through. Nice guy from Atlanta, Georgia, Civil Engineer..well off retired 50 plus, bit of a hippy manqué but who in these parts is not. We talk about our lives. He has a wife from here AND a large family, of course. The girl comes from the market, ordinary, pretty enough, about 30 I suppose…been together 4 years. Then another girl appears 20 or so, More pretty but very chippy. .pouty face, rude, ogling me… .who is this? ..he raises eyes…her sister…so? She asks him for money..he gives her 500B and off she goes…the wife mutters at him…what can I do he says…she just asks for money all the time..if I give about 10,000 every week…10,000 that is $200….. there is peace… if not Father, Mother, Uncles, Wife think I am a shit….Good grief, how much do you give your wife I ask…..Don’t do it, face it out I say….yeah yeah
Anyway today K comes home
The guy has left for the US
But before he went he hired a JCB and took it to the house they had built, nice dwelling US style on the outskirts of town and demolished the whole thing. Left a note saying Sorry to the girl But your family is impossible ..I am not stupid. .I know I need to look after you all and so I did but your family just drunk on money and you do not stop them…
But of course they have the land
So K’s guess is that in a year or two there will be another husband another house……..what do you think??!!
Miss you very much
Love G, K, E
October 27 2004
I should start to write about my spectacularly dysfunctional family. Except. In Thai terms I rather think it is quite normal..maybe better than average.
My wife, the exquisite Kate, .She is 28 years old. She is the only child of her mother and father, but read on!
She lived with her mother and father and older half sister until her sister, 6 years older went away to University to become a nurse. I guess my wife was 12 or 13 when this happened., She stayed on, fighting with her father.
They moved house a couple of times in those years eventually ending up in the rather lovely two story classic Thai house on stilts in which we all now live. The day she graduated from high school, she got on a bus on her own and left for Bangkok.
She goes to work. Selling ice-cream, vegetarian food, goes to work for a marketing company, then goes to university.
She wants to study painting and graphic design. There are no facilities, no teachers. Sometimes a room with a video. There are cribs you buy in the street to enable you to pass the ludicrous multiple choice tests that pass for exams. Rhodri and I read E101..full of errors, archaisms and unintelligible stuff. IT101 Computing is all about obscure workings of out of date mainframe computers. So she tries Mass Communications, which at least appears to have a syllabus and teachers.
She meets Christians, boys, pimps, traders in everything; shares rooms with dozens of people. Sees the world. She said to me: I was a good girl, living in Bangkok. I did not need much; but I met most of the people who have been unpleasant to me in those few years. And some of those were people from Sukothai who had known me all my life.. City life?
This is paid for, to some extent, by the elder half- sister (and government loans). By virtue of, besides being a good girl who loves her mother, being a state employee the banks are headlong in trying to lend the nurse sister money. Lesson one: Work for the government.
She even has a different colour ID card! She gets preferential rates of interest on anything….
My wife has three half sisters and a half brother on her mother’s side. They are now aged c.40, 38, 37 and 33. When her elder sister was 2, she is the one is now 33, her mother, now aged 65, decided she no longer wished to be a minor wife and , in spite of the children, upped and left with my wife’s father. She took the elder sister with her and left the other three with their father and his major wife. I think there is some animosity between all parties on this score!
My wife’s mother’s first ‘husband’…how does one describe this..climbed in through her bedroom window when she was eighteen and raped her and took her to be his minor wife….explains why all the downstairs windows of this house are nailed up….
This guy, father of the other kids, is he a step father if he was there before? I think not…was a Phu Yai, big cheese, Khmer-Chinese…plenty of old money, land, rents, businesses…no need to work…He died some 8 years ago. His children by his major wife were already dead. He left nothing to the children of his minor wife. In that common Thai way all has been stolen by the nephews, great nieces and who knows who..a few gifts here, a few arrangements with officials there and the land papers have strangely re-appeared with their names on.
My wife’s father was a property developer from Vientiane. Chinese-Lao, amongst other things I guess by his looks. Started life a s a rubbish collector and pulled himself through so far. He was trying hard, but failed, to cover this province south of Chiang Mai in concrete. When he realised he was not to achieve this dream he gave up on life and took to the bottle and to beating everyone up.
Last year, as a result, he had a huge stroke which has left him paralysed down his right side.
He is younger than me.
I think there is some unspoken idea that I was his nemesis. No-one had managed to deal him for all those years and then we arrive with the small child and in 6 months he is gone and smitten.
My wife also has a half brother and half sister on her father’s side. They are aged 36 and 34 .The father now lives with that daughter and son, who live in adjacent houses the other side of town, definitely the other side of the tracks too. It is an unusual set up. There is this, sort of, huge extended family living in some half a dozen houses. Three of the houses are substantial modern concrete two story, balconied edifices, built with westerners money that the two lady boys have acquired along with absent partners. They are all actors and perform Likay, traditional Thai dance and plays, around the country, and were the principals in the story of moving house from BKK that I told a few years ago!
On her father’s side her half brother has two girls 13 and 10, little bored lolitas, while her half sister sister has three boys, 10, 8 and 6. All playing Likay. None go to school.
Her father’s first wife also lives with their children, as does he, and his first wife’s lover, who is about 35 and is the strong man of the Likkay.
Are you still with me?
Her siblings on her mother’s side have no children, except her eldest sister. She has a boy and a girl who are older than my wife. The boy has no children, but the girl has two, a boy aged eight and a girl aged six. Two different fathers. So they are K’s great nieces!. The mother has thrown them away and they are looked after by my wife’s sister. The daughter now has a new husband and a new 1 year old baby.
This one reason why Elodie is so special.
Her eldest sister also has a husband. And they have been together forever and live in the house next door. He drives a mini bus, occasionally, and raises fish under the house. She makes amazing yellow sweets, which require the purchase of about 200 eggs every couple of days. A few of these she sells in the night market. Her second sister looked after her father, ie her father not my wife’s father..oh dear!, for many years. When he died it emerged he had given most of his land, while senile, to his granddaughter in Yala, in the S of Thailand. His major wife and children long dead. She and her husband have some land of their own, so not too bad. They cannot have children. Her half brother now lives with them and his wife, from whom he is divorced as a consequence of the long story you may have read elsewhere re his adventures in Taiwan. It seems he cannot have children either. The Thais account for this by the fact that he has a white patch in his black hair.,
My wife’s other sister, the nurse, who is supposed to be the jewel in the crown, and it is a measure of the difference between being a state employee and not that she has been able to do what she has done, has now got ‘married’ I use this word advisedly to a guy, a teacher from Korat, she met on the Internet. Interestingly he too has a white patch of hair and the same conclusions have been reached. We shall see.
As far as I can work it out none of his family came to the ‘wedding’..and he got married in my jacket and shoes!. My wife has decided that the reason they ‘married’ was to ensure my mother in law was not embarrassed by the girl sleeping with the guy in the hospital 30 miles away where she works. They have not got a tabian jot –marrige certificate-from the Amphur, and everyone considers them not properly married. Indeed most people think he must have a wife already. Why else would your mother, your sisters and your friends not come to the ‘wedding’? The excuses were, apparently, too busy and too sick! The day after the wedding he went back to Bangkok. Too busy, also.
Indeed no-one in this saga, including mother in law, with the exception of my wife and I who were married in Richmond Upon Thames, heaven help her, has a marriage certificate. Most of them do not know on which day they were born, though they have had to invent birthdays for tabian ban. No-one celebrates birthdays. My mother in law has no clue on which day she, let alone her husbands and children were born. None of the siblings know their own nor each other’s birthdays.
When I have talked elsewhere about the ‘anarchy’, is that the right word? of Thai daily life this is partly what I think of..
Small diversion on weddings!!:
One time, when younger and ignorant, I had occasion to take up with a lady called J from Sisaket, in the East of Thailand, on the edge of what they call the weeping plain. No water, poor soil, but eerily pretty, a bit like the middle of Sicily but flat! After various passages of pleasure and business in Bangkok, Chianfg Mai, Phuket and Elsewhere we went ‘home’ to Sisaket.
After some days a party was announced. I already knew this as going to cost me money. So the appointed night arrives. 300 or so persons appear. There are bonfires and fireworks, food in abundance; by 22.00 an impressive pile of Singha Beer and Mekhong whisky bottles is building. A policeman, who has the only truck, is despatched to what the bThais call ‘seven’ ie. The 7-11 minimart in town to buy more crates.
Monks appear.
I am bound by the wrists with white threads about 200 times to this young lady, by every person present. What is happening/? Oh you are getting married of course says an ‘uncle’…well there you go…’Mind you’ he says, ‘you are, I think, the fourth guy she has married this year, but this is a VERY good party; you must have moré money..very good.’
We return to BKK. Me dripping with threads..walking in the street,,,,
European guy: Hi J how are you..(sees our wrists)..wow what happened? you got married?
J: Yes I very happy..
Farang: Oh? found someone rich enough at last??
J: Maybe
Did not last much after that!
In fact we went to Kanchanaburi and after various passages with hotels and restaurants we were walking by the river, J dressed up in combat gear and all the dogs of Kanchanaburi decide to eat her. J winding them up all the while with switches. We made it home. All my fault. I just got on a bus. And do you know she was wearing 10B of gold, about $2000 dollars worth, and she gave it all back so she cannot have been all bad. Many years later I found her, through a madam in Sukhumvit, who tells me I am the only one she loved…oh yeah? She has a Luk Kreung, a half European child, a little girl, 5 years old with a guy long lost in Finland!
Her sister has a worse/better life. Met a guy from Germany with a furniture store. Nice guy but entirely spaced/smashed. One day we went back to the apartment in Soi Korpai, Pattaya. He is looking v. green. Dead on the floor. Last seen trading stuff with some Thai guy on the stairs. Looks like bad heroin. No-one in the apartment building wants to know, foreigners, Thais alike. Every one knows what happened. A short visit from the police, a few pictures, some cursory inquiries into who the Thai guy might have been. Case closed. Another stupid foreigner…. who cares.?
Parents come from some former E German city, Jena I think, to collect son’s body, take wife, yes wife, home with them. Good, very upset people.…particularly liked the bit of the wife milking the Amex card, and all bank cards, from the ATM in the few minutes before going to the police station.
Last heard of shacked up, of course, with German ‘husband’ in Berlin…..at least got more sense than to come back to Thailand.
As I say, the general view around town here is that the guy, I am now returning to sister’s new husband, who is quite presentable if pompous, must have a wife and family already..so the whole thing is a wonderful Thai charade.
I have the wedding photos. Never saw a guy look so miserable in all my life..a wedding?..I think not..but of course no one can say anything….!
Not about this nor anything else. I am continually surprised by the utter freedom individuals here believe they have to do exactly what they want when they want to, but only in certain spheres of life. This ‘freedom’ is of course circumscribed by a ferocious set of social controls which start early with the different child rearing processes for boys and girls, follow through into the nonsensical rigidities of school, reinforced by the tyrannies of age and status so ingrained in the language and in patterns of respect and behaviour-overlaid with a good deal of monkish nonsense, but also infused with sets of values and practices, I think far more sensitive to the realities of the lives of human beings than many in the so-called ‘West’.
These things range from the trivial and annoying-I’ll park my car, drive my car anywhere I want without considering there is another one on the road, I will go to the counter ahead of 300 people waiting, If I want to sleep with someone I will-why should you care?, If you want a mia noi, I don’t care….which leads to: You are my family and so more important than anyone-I will care for you and you for me and we for our children and they for us over and above everything until we die, I will give my father all my money (and yours!) if he needs it,
Thailand is the third country on the list with the highest number of deaths by shooting of all countries after South Africa and Colombia
At the end of the month. Full Moon. Awk Phansa. Time for the short stay monks to leave the monastery. E and I go out into the road to await the procession. This time very small and short. A few monks in pick ups gathering alms, then some characters in mock ancient Chinese masks. Funny face says E, then the line of monks gathering rice and finally a peculiar procession of papier mache ‘monsters’ of which the children are supposed to be terrified. They look like badly made Mini- Ents from Lord of the Rings. More funny face says E.
Granny has gone to Nong Khai with her minibus grannies’ outing, of which there are many. She is a transformed woman with the departure of K’s father. She comes back with jars of rice spirit, lengths of beautiful cloth, sausages.
The killing goes on in the South. Even the Bangkok Post, a most brown-nosed newspaper has been criticising Thaksin. I just say..remember he is a policeman and all he really will be happy with is a police state. This is the kind of thinking will get me and all of us shot. The general view here seems to be that …’muslims are mad’ ’because they ‘’don’t want to be Thai’…I say it is madder to pile bodies in trucks stacked 10 high, and with sacks on their heads, so they suffocate…silence..Even The Nation was moved to deplore the sheer disregard of Thais to what was going on.
When I was with the kings’s nephew P in the 90s and the * family from Songkhla they all knew what was going to happen…”just a matter of time if nothing is done about the economy, the oppression, the neglect of the South”, they said…so here we are.Thaksin has dissolved the only talking shop with predictable results. One wonders, as with so many bad men, what motivates him? It must be power. Wealth and fame/notoriety he has already.
No Halloween here. I light some candles, but for whose souls I do not know, Ma?, Dada? Kate? How lonely priests must have been. The night is quite cool. I drive the bike far and very fast under the most orange of moons. I am very depressed. Why are we here?. How did all this happen?. Was I so incompetent at life that this chaos is all I could achieve?. I think so. But why? I cannot blame it all on those early years, but how did I never get it to improve it?. I feel as sorry for K as anyone. How was she to know what was coming to her life?. Had she any idea, that would have been an even greater reason for lack of love. As it is I am just another cross sent for her to bear. That I love her dearly probably makes it worse.
E continues to force English on all the children. They have taken to mocking her, quite kindly,: Elodie don’t like it, Elodie don’t want it, Elodie coming too; and ‘Careful darling!’ She continues to expand her Thai vocabulary with English syntax. Is this the power of the ‘mother’ tongue. I am not sure why she speaks English, but I seem to remember saying how cross I was with everyone two years ago because they were not speaking with her. So here you have it not mother tongue but father tongue. What will be the implications of that?
Sunday, November 28, 2004
Loy Kratong
The best cut, paste and invention I can do is this!
Most of what is written else is just tourist brochure or invention of tradition splurge.
Ban Chang, Thailand. Two students perform traditional dance to celebrate Loy Kratong. In their left hands they hold a lotus flower containing a candle.
The festival of Loy Krathong, known as Yi Peng in the north, has many conflicting explanations of its origins and purposes. Is it a Brahmanic rite honoring the dead? A plea for an end to the rainy season? A celebration of the end of rice planting? Is it a way of ridding oneself of bad luck, or the accumulated sins of the year past?
Different legends surround the origins of Loy Kratong. The most popular version is it was an expression of gratitude to the goddess of water 'Phra Mae Kongka' for having extensively used, and sometimes polluted, the water from the rivers and canals. It is also in part a thanksgiving for her bounty in providing water for the livelihood of the people.
Some believe the festival originates from Buddhism. They say the offering of flowers, candles and joss-sticks is a tribute of respect to the footprint of the Lord Buddha on the sandy beach of the Narmaha River in India, as well as to the great Serpent and dwellers of the underwater world, after the Lord Buddha's visit to their watery realm. It is possible that this is derived from a Hindu festival that pays tribute to the god Vishnu, who meditates at the center of the ocean.
Others believe that the floral kratong is offered to the pagoda containing the Lord Buddha's topknot, which was cut off at his self-ordination and is now in heaven. Another explanation is that it is a way to pay respect to one's ancestors.
Another version has it that young couples launched their krathongs together in order to secure their happy and successful journey through life together.
According to a common version the festival was established under the reign of Sukhothai King Ramkamhaeng in the 13th century. His wife, Noppamas, daughter to a Brahmin court priest, was the kingdom’s most famous poetess. She introduced to the King the practice of constructing floats of lotus flowers to send down the river. the King made Loy Krathong into an official state ceremony. (Loy means, "to float", a krathong is a "receptacle made of banana leaves.") The Nang Noppamas Beauty Contests, commemorate this woman's contribution to Thai culture.
But this story may be mere legend. Some scholars have recently contested idea that Rama Kamhaeng devised the Thai system of writing in 1283. Instead, it is possible that the 19th-century King Rama IV inventedthis first formulation of Thai script in order to demonstrate to the europeans that Thai culture and learning was on par with Europe's. Or he might have intended to create a false, but expedient sense of Thai national identity to help deflect colonial encroachment. Possibly the Loy Krathong story along with ‘ancient’ legends was created for similar reasons.
In any case, Loy Krathong has become perhaps Thailand's most beautiful, colourful, and - at least until Bangkok's government started cracking down on the use of firecrackers in public places - noisy. Still, the fireworks begin well before the festival's actual commencement, occurring on the day before the full moon of the 12th lunar month, which usually falls in late October or November.
Building krathongs is an integral part of the festival and a social event in itself, although it is possible to buy pre-made krathongs at roadside stalls.Families will collect or buy the necessary items and make kratongs together.
A krathong's base is a squat, cylindrical cross-section of a banana tree's spongy stem. In Bangkok. Experiments have been made with using Styrofoam instead, because the decomposition of thousands of organic krathongs in Bangkok consumes oxygen needed by marine wildlife. Of course Styrofoam does not decompose at all, which makes the notion of the festival as penance for dirtying the river quite daft.
This was an idea of Samak the recent governor of Bangkok, now reincarnated as a TV chef.
In general, krathongs are made using only natural materials. Folded banana leaves are attached to the krathong base using toothpicks or pins; and then the krathong is decorated with flowers and a candle, joss-sticks, incense, a lock of hair,and a fingernail clipping . A one baht coin also is added
K and I put photographs, nail clippings and locks of each other hair into the Kratongs.
Elodie thought they were variously cakes, because they had candles and hats.
The candles were not supposed to go out which was a sign wishes had been granted.
If the candle stays afloat longevity, too, will surely ensue together with our love! Mmm?
Towards dusk the temple compounds will be a seething mass of vendors and entertainments. All manner of goods are for sale, while dance troupes perform traditional and modern dances and plays, particularly ‘Likay’. Celebrants often dress in traditional Thai styles. Lantern-bedecked parade floats weave through the streets, while on the river boats take part in racing competitions.
We will light khom loys, These are cylyndical hot air lanterns sent high into the sky until their orange light is hidden in the clouds
Finally, the candles and incense of the krathongs are lit, and everyone makes for water Wishes are made the krathongs are set afloat. Any body of water will do, but in Sawankhalok we use the Yom river in Sukothai thelake in the Historical Park, in Bangkok and Chiang Mai the Chao Phraya and Ping Rives. In Phuket we used to launch the kratongs into the the ocean; the trick being to get far enough out beyond the surf. However even so they are likely to wash up later.
If the intention of floating kratongs is to cast away one's sins, is their return some confirmation of the irrevocability of karma?.
The young boys, being practical, get into the river or the lake and nick the coins from the Krathongs.
When you really want to push the boat out these elaborate festivals can accompany Loy Kratong
The Jong Priang, Lote Choot, Loi Khome Long Nam royal ritual begins with an assembly of Buddhist monks for the recital of evening prayers. The next morning, the monks receive offerings from the king. Brahmin priests then perform the ritual in the Brahmin Hall.
Candles and the "priang receptacle" which contains oxen fat or butter are presented to the king. The candles to be presented as sacred offerings are anointed with oxen fat or butter, lit by the king and placed in three distinct types of lanterns. Each denotes the rank and social status of the individual.
The Khome Chai lantern (the lantern of victory) with its nine-tiered umbrella is symbolic of the king. Its bamboo frame is covered with white fabric decorated with stained glass or coloured mirrors. The Khome Chai lantern is fixed to a wooden lantern pole with swan-shaped hooks adorned with dainty bells. In contrast, the Khome Pratiab lantern of the royal concubine features a seven-tiered umbrella, while the tubular-shaped bamboo Khome Boriwarn lantern of the royal entourage and attendants has a three-tiered umbrella.
The lit lanterns are hoisted onto lantern poles lining the palace walls as well as along the outer walls of the palace and the living quarters of the court attendants. At the end of the designated period, the lanterns are taken down from the poles and floated in the waterways.
‘Loi Prateep’ with Illuminated Replicas of the Royal Barges
The "Loi Prateep" royal ritual was performed in the royal court on the night of the full moon of the twelfth lunar month. The ritual begins with the king making offerings of rice, followed by Buddhist sermons being held in the Grand Palace.
The king then placed floral offerings at the "Ubosoth" (chapel) of the Temple of the Emerald Buddha or Wat Phra Si Rattanasatsadaram, and the "Ho Phra" scripture hall of the Grand Palace, before setting off to Ratchaworadit Pier to float the giant krathongs.
What is notable about the water-borne procession of "Loi Prateep" is the impressive fleet of no less than five hundred illuminated vessels, each with two lit candles and an incense stick, being carried down-stream.
Two royal ceremonial barges serve as the State barges, the third carries a sacred Buddha image and the fourth carries other sacred and floral offerings. Other vessels consisted of escort boats, floating Thai orchestra, police boats, firework boats, and others. One of the accompanying vessels, the Phraya Chodeuk Ratcha Setthi Chinese Junk stands out from the rest.
However they don’t do that often and anyway only in BKK..the affair in Sukothai was a deal muddier, but E quite excited by it all.
Now we are off to the real thing in Sukothai City!…I think it will be ‘Son et Lumiere’ at its worst. The slightly amazing thing to me, at least, is that in 30 years no-one here has ever been!! Its 20 miles away.
Yes, well…the Sound and Light turned out to be a most lugubrious affair performed at snail’s pace. Nothing much happened for 10 minutes except a few bursts of illumination of the Sukothai ruins, then there were a couple of invisible battles and a lot of folk milling around being ‘alive’; enter a king or two and finally hundreds of dancers who while beautiful did not as they say ‘do much’. Finally a cast of some 500 put half a dozen kratongs into the lake. This version of the story apparently first written and performed for ‘The Emperor of Japan some 10 years ago. Poor chap I wonder what he made of it. Perhaps he got a Japanese voice over instead of the usual pompous basso profundo that accompanies so many ‘serious’ activities here!
Saturday, November 27, 2004
What is one to make of things like this? If true, it helps contribute to the reasons why it is no longer fun to be 'at home'..everything to be read has to come from somewhere else.
lies?
lies?
Friday, November 26, 2004
Thursday, November 25, 2004
Tuesday, November 23, 2004
EDITORIAL I: The frightening cost of death
Published on November 23, 2004
The fatality rate on Asean’s chaotic roads is exacting a terrible social and economic toll
The estimated death toll of 385,000 men, women and children, and millions others injured or
maimed in Southeast Asia over the next five years sounds more like the casualty count from a major armed conflict. However, there aren’t any large-scale wars in the region. The projected loss of lives and injuries are attributable to one single, man-made factor – road safety, or the lack thereof. According to the Asian Development Bank, which sponsored an in-depth report, some 75,000 people were killed and more than 4.7 million injured or disabled for life in road accidents in Southeast Asian countries last year.
This startling revelation was among a litany of grim statistics publicised by the ADB, aimed at drumming up support among the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) for the drafting of a five-year Regional Road Safety Strategy and Action Plan.
Asean groups Brunei, Cambodia, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam.
The proposed coordinated approach to improving road safety is due to be discussed today at an Asean transport ministers meeting in Phnom Penh.
The well-researched report was bound to raise eyebrows – but not because Southeast Asians are squeamish about the loss of precious human lives to senseless road mishaps, many if not most of which are preventable – after all, life continues to be a cheap commodity in most Asean countries. Rather, the report grabs the attention because of the thoroughness with which the researchers collected mismatched sets of data from 10 different countries, harmonised facts and figures and crunched numbers to produce a report that provides insights and a sense of perspective for policymakers and the general public.
If the sheer number of people killed and maimed on Southeast Asia’s deadly highways and byways fails to move or stir governments and peoples into action, perhaps the staggering economic cost from traffic deaths and injuries could do the trick?
According to the ADB, if nothing is done to improve road safety, not only will some 385,000 people die, with millions of others injured and maimed, traffic accidents will also incur an economic cost of over US$88 billion (Bt3.5trillion). Annual economic losses from road accidents are put at around $15 billion, or 2.2 per cent of the region’s total gross domestic product.
In other words, life may continue to be cheap in this part of the world, but the economic cost associated with untimely, preventable deaths of otherwise able-bodied, tax-paying, productive members of the society comes with a price. One has only to think about the lost income, lost productivity, property damage, medical bills, social problems and other burdens on society to appreciate the magnitude of the problems caused by the lack of road safety.
Surely no society can sustain such huge casualties and ballooning economic cost and still expect to achieve sustainable economic and social development.
It is still not clear what form the proposed regional strategy and action plan to improve road safety in the region will take, and whether it will be effective. But at least one thing is clear for Thailand: out of the 10 Asean countries, Thailand recorded the highest number of deaths – 13,116 – reported to police in 2003. Although there were discrepancies between the deaths reported to the police and estimates based on local research, health statistics and sample surveys, the grim situation Thailand is in cannot be overstated.
In monetary terms, Indonesia loses the most in the region, amounting to $6.03 billion per year (or 2.91 per cent of its annual GDP), followed by Thailand at $3 billion (2.1 per cent of GDP).
Surely, leading the countries in the region with level of road carnage, compounded by runaway economic cost, is not something Thailand should be proud of. It’s high time the Thai authorities and members of the public took the initiative to slow down and avert the country’s hell-bent rush along its killer roads toward economic disaster.
We can start with strict enforcement of traffic laws. Because too many Thai motorists have little or no regard for human life, perhaps including their own, strict enforcement must be backed by strong deterrents, including steep fines and mandatory jail terms for reckless motorists causing death and injury, regardless of their economic or social status.
SO NOW
See below!!
So that did not last long did it?
What did I say about Thai Driving Licences?
Oh This is what I said to my friend:
Anyway we are now the proud possessors of a glitzy black Toyota, which after 5 minutes in the Sukothai dust looks like a badly rusted coal scuttle. However the alternative colours were dire and besides I have not had a black car since that old Austin 10 when I was 8! The clock goes up to 220 kph..can this be possible? I doubt it ..lots of the roads here are like those provincial French ones…30 kilos of straight road, but without the plane trees..so maybe! Not planning to try.
K has been to ‘driving school’ for 20 hours and has thus on payment of a consideration of £50 received a driving licence. There were some hiccups over minor matters like hill starts and reversing round corners, neither of which have yet been achieved, but hey so what. There seems some doubt over whether she can actually drive in the UK with this ludicrous piece of paper, but even if not now ..only wait one year…lordy! We were returning from a not so distant kraal yesterday and The Bill fancied a look at driving licences. I gave him my International one which he studied for a while, upside down, then saluted smartly and waved us on. They have discovered they can charge £8 to those not in possession of driving licence, which means about 80% of Thai drivers are likely to be game…it goes up to £12 as you get nearer payday at the end of the month, then they disappear off the streets for a while.
Oh...My foot a bit slow on the brake..well of course Flip Flops
Sunday, November 21, 2004
We went to a wedding
which
turned out to be as preposterous as one might have imagined.
The night before we had taken Granny over to her 2nd daughter’s house and then gone on to her son’s house, both about 15 miles away and where she used to live 30 years ago with husband 1..(My piece on dysfunctional families forthcoming)…..where a ragged assembly of fat women in their late 30s/early 40s and orange T shirts, and an equally disreputable, or so I thought, collection of middle aged drunkards were busy feeding their faces and dancing to the most appalling and loud karaoke.
We survived this for an hour or two, while Elodie grooved around the place and wanted to do not much more than dance.
The bride is the daughter of the son’s wife’s elder sister; ie his niece!. This is the son of whose adventure in Taiwan you may have read
6.00 am next morning, we have to pole up for the real thing which was a strange mixture of elegance and naff-beautiful flowers and clothes, appalling lurid plastic mats on the floor, endless monkish intonings, which I gathered no-one understands as it is all in Pali!. And are tedious because you are supposed to keep your hands in prayer all the while droning goes on. Anyway there about 250-300 people of whom about 60 are squashed into a room with the bride and groom and the monks. The rest scattered around a big mud floored tree covered compound feeding their faces. On looking inside the room I saw that 9 out of the 10 monks were busy noshing too.
The food, of course, turned out to be symbolic, banana stew because the threads in the bananas bind you together, minced pork-larb for luck, lots of lurid pink and green and yellow little sweets again to bind you.
The couple are dressed in cream-the girl pretty, the boy very dark and his cream suit v. ill fitting. Whenever he comes outside he has trouble with flip flops as he is having to wear socks. He looks very young and totally bemused; but he appears to have a formidable array of older siblings performing various tasks behind him.
Then they bind the couple together with reams of white thread and everyone shuffles forward on knees and pours water from a shell over the hands of the couple.
All this seems to be about the grannies and grandpas making sure that everyone knows they are well and truly married, so difficult to run away later. Their friends only pole up later as you shall see.
Another round of eating is now called for..we have got to about 8.30—all the while outside the karaoke continues-and last nights drunkards are sitting with their feet on crates of beer; what I took to be innocuous little plastic jugs of water on the tables turn out to contain 70% proof white rice whisky.
The chaps turn out to be the kamnan and pu yai baan--provincial and local headmen-the doctor, teacher, policemen…ie the real bees knees-oh and the long distance bus driver—I was not sure about this one so asked K who just rubbed her fingers together..
They were all a bit of a funny shape as they lounged and eventually all was revealed when they started producing an astonishing quantity and variety of firearms from various parts of their persons. All in possession of the latest Nokia WAP video mobiles of course, too, .but with calloused feet and ancient flip flops.
I discovered that Thailand is third highest on the list of hand gun deaths after S.Africa and Colombia.
Bit like my discovery of Tucson being the third highest murder city of the US when I went there!
One spends most of the time in these sorts of groups avoiding getting drunk and telling them you are very old-at least 80..they decide you are 40 and after about two hours they give up asking until someone new joins the group and the same litany of questions starts again. However you tell them you are an ‘ajahn yai’ ie big cheese prof. and they shut quickly! At least no contempt for teachers here! And certainly, no credit transfer.
It is starting to get hot. What are we waiting for now? The magic moment appointed by the monk to get married..oh so we have been going three hours and not got there yet. About 10.00 am another 200 people appear. This is the groom’s family-all present hitherto having been the bride’s! They pole up waving two large banana trees and two large bits of sugar cane-more fertility symbols. They are confronted by the bride’s family carrying a huge tree. This is the first door. The door of wood. After about 10 minutes of bawdy remarks and intricate financial transactions this door is opened with much dancing and inebriation, on to the next door, the door of silver..much more money required, then up the steps to the third door, the door of gold-enough said.
The bride price seems to be about £3000 plus an amazing quantity of gold chains and bracelets-though some of this appears to get given back-with gold at its most expensive for 20 years thanks to Mr. Thaksin and the muslims-this amounts to another £2500-remember average income running at about $3000p.a. -not that one can believe these statistics.
A lot more people pile into the wedding room while the rest start on the food and whisky. The karaoke has been replace by a band, consisting of a drummer, who is ace, a man with a tambourine and a man with a spoon and a beer bottle who make enough noise to set many people dancing and at least keep the karaoke turned down.
The couple’s friends appear, many of them in school uniform. I had already remarked a. that the groom did not appear to have yet encountered a razor, and b. that the bride looked older than K-certainly plumper!.
It turns out, of course, they are both 15.
If they are married they cannot go to school any more, as the school won’t have them, nor will it have pregnant girls, girls who appear in beauty pageants or children who have appeared on TV.
This also explains why mothers in law have been in tears all the time and the fathers aren’t there at all- apparently both are too angry. One supposes, confirmed by K, that the girl must be well and truly pregnant.
By 11.00 everyone is either too stuffed or drunk to do anything. The policeman who is both having not stopped since 6.00 has got more and more gloomy. He is spotted by a gaggle of the orange T Shirted women who start singing bawdy songs at him..Why does he look so sour, why does he not smile, does his wife know where he is, would anyone with a face like that have a wife, she has probably run away??? etc..he attempts a grin and fails, fingers his gun nervously and calls for more beer..
Now even the band is wilting.
The monks depart. Clearly that is it.
Sunday, November 14, 2004
Wednesday, November 10, 2004
Monday, November 08, 2004
More on the emerging Thai Police State
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2004/11/08/opinion/index.php?news=opinion_15339907.html
http://www.nationmultimedia.com/2004/11/08/opinion/index.php?news=opinion_15339907.html
Thursday, November 04, 2004
Never mind Bush and Kerry, nor later Mr. Blair
Here is food for thought:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/FK04Ae03.html
Here is food for thought:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/FK04Ae03.html
Tuesday, November 02, 2004
Was reading the Asia Times
Compare this with the provincial stuff in Thai news:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/FK02Ae03.html
Compare this with the provincial stuff in Thai news:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/FK02Ae03.html