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?