Dtaw. A hard name to pronounce, like so many others here. I shrugged inwardly. No matter. He was just someone to bike and exercise with. But he did have a nice smile.
Badminton
Dtaw picked me up on his white motorbike. I sat well behind him, straddling the large seat. A Thai woman my age would have sat side-saddle in a similar situation, but I couldn’t bear to be so prim. We rode through town until he stopped and pressed the kickstand down in front of one of the weather-worn wooden buildings on the main street. He led me down a narrow alley to a thin wooden door. Stepping over the high threshold, built to keep out snakes, our footsteps echoed under the high ceilings of what used to be the town’s only movie theater. As we walked inside and Dtaw found the light switch easily in the dark, I saw that most of the rows of folding wooden seats had been removed. Faded dust-covered velvet drapes still hung in tattered strips from the tops of the tall walls all around.
Dtaw led me out onto the clean-swept wooden floor and handed me the racket he’d packed into a bright Dunlop bag for me. The racket gleamed with city slickness and felt light and springy in my hand. As we stood by the tightly strung net next to the rusty high chair for the line judge, Dtaw held my hand loosely around the racket’s grip, teaching me how to hold it correctly. I noticed his muscular hands and graceful fingers ending in clean well-trimmed nails.
He walked to his side of the net and lobbed a few shots over for me to return. I did okay, I thought, flailing at the light birdies. Every now and then I walked back to the edge of the net between us, using body language to ask him to help me readjust my grip, and every time, his soft palms and slender, strong fingers wrapped gently around mine as he smiled and showed me what I wanted.
After a while Dtaw’s friends arrived and began rallying shots on the court next to us. Though I couldn’t understand what they were saying as they chattered at him and he laughed along, it was clear that they were teasing him about his farang guest. Foreigners, or farang as the locals say, were not a rarity in the village. There were at least a dozen of us working in the refugee camp, and with the town’s strategic location across the river from Laos, there had been a foreign presence there since the beginning of the Vietnam War, though a Thai-farang couple was unusual.
Soon it was time for them to compete. I folded down one of the wooden seats from the front row and settled in to watch. The game was fast, and the portly, middle-aged players in cheap, thin-soled sneakers were surprisingly quick and agile as they lunged for shots it seemed they couldn’t possibly reach but almost always did. They laughed and shouted as they played, but there was no question about the intensity of their concentration and competition. I was transfixed.
There was also no question as to which player dominated the court. Dtaw lunged and fired shots so fast that the white-feathered bullet blurred in my sight as it shot across the net. But most amazing were his slams. Each time the birdie arched high overhead, Dtaw crouched, coiling to spring into a sudden curve of power, stopping the projectile’s descent and sending it, impossible to intercept, to his opponent’s feet. If the vision alone wasn’t terrifying to his opponent, the loud grunt of power issued with each swat would have been. As I watched this perfection of form, I realized I was noticing also breadth of shoulders and beauty of arms as they reached at every opportunity.
When I left the court to walk home, I felt spacey as I noticed the warm yellow glow of lights coming from the houses where people shushed babies and washed dinner dishes. I heard the hum of the crickets in my quiet lane and the boards of my porch squeak under my bare feet. I lifted the heavy padlock from the hasp screwed into the door and felt the clean cool of the polished planks underfoot. I walked into my room, dropped my clothes to the floor, and slid under the gauzy white mosquito net to lie down and dream.
Falling
In the late afternoon a few days later, I was waking up from the after-work sleep that the motion of the minivan often induced as we rode home from work. We were pulling up to our first stop at the edge of town. Outside the window, Dtaw stood smiling next to his motorbike, waiting. In each hand, he held an ice cream cone. I looked, unbelieving, as he nodded to me to get out of the van. He had come to pick me up. I felt my face burning at the teasing of my coworkers as I stepped to the door. I licked the sweet surprise, delicious in the heat and still frozen enough to resist my bites.
After a few more evenings of biking and badminton followed by dinner at the restaurant where we’d met, I began to notice things about this man. I marked the way he selected special morsels of food from his plate, gently placing them onto mine, the way everyone in town knew him and smiled at him approvingly whenever we met them, the way he spoke to children.
I decided it would be safe to get closer to him. I had no notion of anything like a long-term or even committed relationship. I was twenty-three and tired of sleeping alone each night. I knew I’d be leaving in eight months to go home, my two-year adventure in a foreign land drawing to a close. In my mind, he was only a playmate, a face, a story to add to the experience of living in an exotic world I’d impress my friends with when I got home.
Because our language was limited, I relied on my observations of his actions. Not a big talker, especially about himself, he never would have told me all the things I noticed. When I accompanied him on his frequent visits to his grandparents’ house, I watched the tenderness and reverence with which he helped them cook their meals, sweep their floors, even clip their toenails, all in such a way as befitted their dignity and the honor with which he regarded them. I watched them touch the top of his head, smiling at him, as he sat, crouched at their feet, and saw the approval, the appreciation in those small gestures.
When we did talk, when were able to understand each other with the few words we shared, the things he told me painted a picture of a man who’d grown up with an abundance of love from his family and devotion from his friends. He told me about his gang, boys his age who’d made their own rebellious adventures through childhood and still stuck together as adults. He told me stories that made me laugh or gasp with shock. When he was ten, he and his friends wanted to go pai teeo, out for fun. He told his friends to pile into the dusty truck bed. He slid in behind the wheel for the first time in his life, and off they rode, laughing and hollering as they waved to the neighbors on their way to the farm.
He had this great sense of fun, but he was also deeply disciplined. He told me about getting up at four o’clock each morning as a middle school student, long before the rest of his siblings, to train for badminton. He ran along the river, sprinting and practicing his footwork to perfect his performance. Then he’d go get the key from the owner of the court so he could practice alone for an hour with the basket of old shuttlecocks he’d collected to perfect his serve. His hard work paid off. By his sophomore year in high school he had won the provincial championship title and was invited to train in Bangkok with players from the national team. His determination and discipline impressed me.
He seemed resourceful too. By the time he was eight years old, he’d set up a drink stand at the court where his father and his friends played badminton in the evenings. There he’d sell bottles of Coke and Sprite and Fanta he’d bought for four baht each. He charged five baht and took home the profits. He always had spending money for candy he’d share with his friends.
When he graduated from high school and all his older siblings were pursuing their college diplomas, his mother sold her last pieces of gold jewelry to send him to Bangkok to do the same. That didn’t last. A back injury he’d sustained from a fall in badminton years earlier kept him from sitting for long periods, so listening to lectures wasn’t for him. Instead he was always moving, seeing friends, which at that age meant drinking. He told me stories of back-alley gambling and brawls, the last one of which landed him in the hospital and brought his father to his bedside in Bangkok to tend him until he was well enough to go home for good. I was learning that this quiet, respectful man who played like a little kid with his to
ddler nieces had a bad-boy streak.
When Dtaw invited me to take a short bike trip with him to the mountains, I said yes. One of Dtaw’s lifelong friends, Cam, had moved to a village a few hundred kilometers west of their home when they were in their twenties. Another friend had wanted to introduce Cam to a village girl there. Twelve years his junior, Tong was strong, hardworking, and kind. In her world, being fifteen and marrying a twenty-seven-year-old man was not unusual or unwise. They married and moved into her mother’s house to help with the farm until they could build their own place.
Dtaw wanted to take me to visit them. We biked past mango groves, rubber tree farms, the green and golden hills rolling away under our tires. The last ten kilometers up the mountain to their village was hard, but I loved the challenge. When we got close to the village, we had to cross a stream where the bridge was nothing more than a few thick tree trunks laid side by side across it. At the top of the rutted dirt road to the bridge, I had to stop and gather my courage before making the commitment to cross, knowing one wrong twist of the handlebars or falter in my pedal stroke and I would fall hard, maybe into the rocky stream below. I chanted to myself as my bicycle bounced over the rough road and I gathered speed toward the crude, treacherous bridge: No fear. No fear. No fear. I pressed my jaw tight to keep from banging my teeth when my tires hit the skinned trees. No fear. No fear. No fear. I held the handlebars steady, standing on the pedals, knees bent to let the bike bounce beneath me, keeping my eyes on ground. And I was across.
The village was so remote that people in front of their homes stopped in midmotion to stare at these strange visitors in bright lycra clothes with bulging packs attached to their bikes. When we rolled to a stop in front of Tong and Cam’s house, people clustered around us, asking what we had come to sell. The outsiders who came to the village were usually traveling salespeople.
Cam came out to welcome us, explaining to his neighbors who we were, and invited us to sit in the shade in front of his hut. He called to Tong, and she appeared as well. She was silent, too shy to look up, but she returned with a bottle of drinking water and two glasses before retreating into the safety of her home.
Dtaw took me down to the narrow stream below the garden so we could bathe. As bathing in the village was not a private event, he showed me how to wear one of the sarongs he had asked Cam to get from Tong. Wearing it as I stood on the sand under the clean moving water, I dipped my body below the surface and took the soap he handed me. When I got out, he helped me slip a dry sarong over my head before removing the wet one from underneath.
Over the night and day that followed, I grew used to being in a place without running water, without electricity, only flickering flames to light the way at night. I loved the quiet, the simplicity. I loved the way the neighbors gathered around the fire to talk at night after dinner while the children ran and played together. I loved the rough boards of the floor under my bare feet as I sat and watched Tong prepare meals.
Behind her two-room hut, a smaller structure that was the kitchen stood connected to the first by a board suspended over the mud. A square of dried mud was built into the center of the floor to serve as a fireplace. It was here that Tong cooked. Sitting beside the fire, she had everything within reach from the narrow shelves Cam had built into the walls. She never let me help her with the kitchen work. I sat, just wanting to be near her, another woman. Without words in each other’s language, we found communication in looks and smiles alone.
After a few days in this village, a place that seemed idyllic to me in my quest for quiet, in my desire to escape my own industrialized world, it was time to return to work. We said goodbye, promising we’d soon return. When we left, our packs were heavy with fresh melons and squashes and other gifts of the fields and gardens from Tong and her neighbors.
In the weeks that followed, Dtaw and I became closer, jogging and playing badminton together, taking walks by the river, losing ourselves in one another’s gaze, finding reasons to laugh and kiss. I kept telling him that this was playful short-term love. I would be going home soon, I assured him. Yet even as I tried to convince myself of this, I began to have visions of the two of us together, as old as his grandparents. I liked these visions. For the first time, never having been interested in commitment or progeny, I found myself imagining life as a grandmother of numerous kids with this smiling, easygoing man. It was this vision, more than anything else, that drew me even closer to Dtaw and began to open my mind to the possibility of a long-term relationship. I began to see that the qualities he possessed—patience, integrity, depth, and reticence—might not be easily found in another man.
Land
A year after our first visit to Cam and Tong, I left my job at the refugee camp. I had worked for the two years I’d planned on, and as the Thai government made more of an effort to resettle or repatriate the refugees, many of my friends had gone back home to their own countries. As I fell deeper in love with Dtaw, leaving him each morning to go to work became less tolerable. There was always plenty of other work in town for a native English speaker with teaching experience. To support myself, I ran a small after-school English class; we would meet at the table under the shady mango tree in Dtaw’s yard. The fact that Dtaw’s family was so well-known and well-respected in town gave me instant clout and a long waiting list for the classes. I couldn’t charge much, but having survived on $200 a month as a teacher in the refugee camp, I was used to living simply. Dtaw’s family seemed to delight in feeding us sumptuous meals every time we stopped by his mother’s or grandmother’s house. We could have eaten well anywhere. In Thailand the first greeting is not “Hello, how are you?” but “Have you eaten yet? Come eat with us.” People genuinely welcome friends and acquaintances to share food at every meal. In the Buddhist mind, generosity is a privilege and a pleasure.
Our low-income, low-effort lifestyle meant we could focus on time together. So when Dtaw suggested we go for another visit to Cam and Tong in the mountains, I agreed immediately.
When we arrived, Cam told us he wanted to show us the land he had recently acquired from a neighbor. The next morning we rose in the dark to eat sun-dried pork Tong heated over the coals between sticks of bamboo, secured with twists of bamboo skin. A chorus of crickets and peepers filled the air as we dipped hunks of sticky rice in geow, a bright red paste of dried and roasted hot chilies, garlic, sugar, shallots, and salt. We spoke only a few words, enough to acknowledge Tong’s work and skill. She picked up the dishes, and Cam and Dtaw and I stepped out the door and onto the earth under a sky the color of steel.
On the road in front of the hut, a group of neighbors gathered, men in wide-brimmed straw hats and long-sleeved ragged shirts. They smiled and greeted us, chatting as they waited for the fuel-powered plow to carry them to the fields that needed harvesting that day. Soon it came chugging up the road and they climbed onto the flatbed behind it.
They asked us where we were going. “To look at the land,” Cam replied. No more words were needed. They knew Cam and the goings-on of his life well enough to know that he would be taking us to see the land on the mountain he’d recently acquired.
Following the only road up out of the village, we walked away from the clink of breakfast dishes washed in basins behind houses where chickens waited for scraps, away from the barking dogs and squealing children preparing for school. As the road took us higher, Cam and Dtaw chatted in low tones, each with a machete, sheathed in smoke-darkened bamboo, hanging at his side. I walked beside Dtaw, content to be somewhere quiet and cool at last, spaciousness of sky and fields rolling away in every direction. At the edges of the fields, yellowing as the sun rose higher, green jungles fringed the ridges. Under our feet the soft dust rose in puffs with every step.
After half a mile, we passed one of the King of Thailand’s agricultural development centers, fenced in and carefully tended, full of groves of fruits that had never been seen in this area, macadamia nuts, avocados, coffee. The king’s mission in life was to better the lives
of his subjects, especially in the poorest areas of the country. He had spent much of his fifty-year career traveling to remote villages where he asked questions, studied, drew maps, and, most of all, listened to the farmers talk about the challenges of their lives. Part of his solution was to fund these centers, where local people were hired to grow and study and teach about new crops that might help bring better income to the villagers.
Cam led us through the gate to show us the different trees and flowers that grew there. He told us that no one liked the avocados, didn’t know what to do with them, had tried them mashed with sugar, but they did not take, so piles were left to rot under the trees. He promised he’d let me know when the next harvest came. I hadn’t eaten an avocado in the two years since I’d been in Thailand.
We walked through another gate and out onto the road again where it curved around a small pond. Here a few fishermen stood up to their waists in the cold water, throwing wide round nets that spread out between the cobalt sky and gray-green surface, twine knotted in perfect webs, weighted at the edges with small stones crocheted into snug pockets. In splashing mandalas, the nets fell and the men pulled at the purse strings beneath to gather the edges and any fish that might be caught within.
“Mahn baw?” (Any luck?) Cam called out, using the special word mahn, reserved for asking about fishing. It also is the word for pregnant. “Baw,” they answered back.
We walked on, higher with each step, until on our left, a long ridge came into view above the tall grasses by the road. “Hen baw?” (You see?) Cam asked. “The land.” In Laotian and Thai the words for my and mine are rarely used in conversation. The idea of ownership is much less embedded in the language and the collective mind. It is the land more than it is Cam’s land. In a society living so close to the earth, the notion that the land belongs to any one person is foolish. The awareness that, instead, the people belong to the land, the land that provides everything they eat and drink and, until the last century, wear, is so much a part of them that they probably would think it odd to even try to discuss the concept. It might be the land where Cam plants his crops now, and people would acknowledge his ownership if necessary, but possessive pronouns do not exist in Thai and Lao. The words of Cam must be used to convey ownership. A cumbersome inconvenience.
Now You See the Sky Page 2
