An American in Asia: His Quest for Cosmic Truth (or at least a Decent Espresso)

 

A Day in the Consulate,
A Week on the Farm
and a Surprise Wedding

In the last days of 2006, my wife and I hopped in our Honda Jazz and made our way north from Phuket towards Bangkok and the great Isaan outback beyond.

We had business with the American consulate in Bangkok, and we wanted to pay a visit to the house we built in her village in the rural northeast region of Isaan.

Tilting against bureaucracy

Though her visa interview at the US embassy in Bangkok was preceded by three months of chasing papers, miscommunication and hand-wringing trepidation, in the end it was almost a non-event.

Four days beforehand, we went to an expensive Bangkok hospital where she received a mandatory chest x-ray and was jabbed with various vaccinations, as if I were bringing livestock into the country. Her arms swelled with antibodies for measles, mumps and a half dozen other maladies, and the doctor warned her against becoming pregnant for at least three months following.

We arrived at the US embassy at our appointed interview time of 7:00am and foisted our paperwork over to a woman behind a bullet-proof window.

Then we waited for five hours on plastic chairs with a roomful of Thai and Cambodian nationals. We should have eaten breakfast. I passed the time talking with a Bangkok-based American lawyer who was accompanying the fianceé of some man in the US. During the course of our conversation I pumped him for information on whether our paperwork was in order and what the interview might be like. Finally, at noon, my wife's name was called.

Back at the window, a middle-aged male interviewer asked if she could understand English, instructed her to place her index fingers on a print scanner, then grilled me for five minutes over whether I had a place to live in the US and finances to support us. That was it.

The next day we showed up again at 3pm to pick up her passport. It contained her immigrant visa stamp, and was stapled to a giant folder with instructions not to open it until we get to a port of entry in the US.

Every other country just stamps your passport and you can slip it back in your pocket. I don't know why the US has to enlist us to deliver their paperwork, when there is a perfectly reasonable postal service available to them, not to mention a little thing called THE INTERNET.

After we left the consulate, we spent the rest of that day recovering at the Ambassador, a hotel I would describe as supremely adequate. No frills, but it's got what you need for a Bangkok stay, including a good lap pool.

Our D.I.Y. dream home needs some more D.I.Y.

The next day we left Bangkok for our house upcountry. It was an easy transfer, zipping along newly paved highways through the farmland of the Isaan plateau, until we reached the provincial capital of Chaiyaphum.

There we switched to rural roads which were just beginning to swarm with home-going schoolchildren, packed into pickup trucks or buzzing along the roadsides on 100cc motorbikes.

The number of potholes slowly grew and, by the time we pulled past my sister-in-law's high school, the road resembled the face of a teenager with a chocolate addiction.

We caught sis' just as she was climbing into an overloaded pickup. She jumped off when she saw us and hopped happily into our little car. She had lost some babyfat since I saw her a year or so ago and was halfway towards becoming a woman.

I don't expect she'll be a troublesome teen - her big plan is to join the army like her dad, who used to fight commies in a war that Westerners never heard about in the hills around our house. One of my wife's many oddities is that she knows how to clean and reassemble AK47s and RPG rocket launchers. Joining the army is probably a good decision in a country that is currently under the rule of a military junta.

Heading on towards home, the potholes gradually took over the road surface until the pavement finally gave up the ghost. The dirt road to our house has had a chance to recover from last rainy season so it was in reasonable shape to support the passage of our low-clearance two-wheel-drive. Just before the road was devoured by impassable jungle, we turned up the drive to our house.

The evening sun was striking its last rays onto its red tiled roof when we pulled in to see it for the first time since its completion. It looked good and, when we parked and took the tour inside, I felt proud of what we'd managed with US$15,000 and the help of some uncles and cousins.

As I took in the scene around the house the first thing I noticed was that dinner was being cooked - not in the perfectly reasonable kitchen we'd built, but in the dirt yard out front.

Low bamboo tables were set out around clay barbecues, and family members crouched in the evening shade chopping vegetables and gossiping about us.

The inside of the house was empty except for a few sparse furnishings and the only occupant of the expansive kitchen was a refridgerator. My wife explained, much to my mirth, that the family didn't want to make the house dirty before we arrived. I wondered if they've been living for a year between the stilts underneath the house, waiting for us to get here. Probably not, but then again it would not surprise me. My inlaws are so danged sweet.

After an attempt to get everyone up to the lovely open veranda to enjoy dinner before the mountain sunset view, I gave in and joined them on the rickety bamboo platforms in the yard. They say, "You can take the farmer out of the dirt but you can't take the dirt out of the farmer," but I think it might be the other way around.

After a dinner of spicy papaya salad, minced pork with peppers and lime, and the freshest rice I've ever tasted, I took a closer look at the house to see what remained to be done. There were flaws to be rectified for sure, but that was fully expected since we'd left the final touches unsupervised.

Most glariingly, the paintjob sucked. Despite the fact that I'd told the builders to a) sand the wood, b) lay on two coats of primer, before c) applying the color, they'd skipped right to step 'c'. We'll need to go back to step 'a' and do it all over again before the next rainy season.

Another thing we needed to take care of was water. Though they managed to give us electricity, and the plumbing was complete, it's not actually hooked up to H20.

We were originally looking to hire a company to dig us a well. They quoted 15,000 baht (US$424) over the phone but, when they saw the size of the house and heard it was owned by an American, they saw fit to increase the quote to 50,000 baht. This kind of double-pricing gets my wife incensed, so she told them to forget it.

I, however, would still prefer a well to piping off the village water system. So I suggested that, since there are many well-diggers around and one of them is bound to want money, we put out a standing offer of 15,000 baht to anyone who wants to wander by and dig a well.

In the meantime, we decided to run pipes from the village system by the road up to a tank, where a pump would send water on into the house plumbing. That would turn the trickling flow from the village water system into a nice blasting shower. So we planned a trip to town to get the pump, water tank and pipes. It would do fine until one of the well-diggers realizes shovels don't buy food and beer - money does.

While we lacked water inside, outside we had too much. The builders only put gutters at the back of the house, thinking that we only wanted them for collecting rainwater off the roof for drinking (the local equivalent of Evian). There were already discernable ruts in the earth around the edges of the house, so we'll need to put gutters the rest of the way around to prevent uneven sinkage during the next rainy season. That won't be too expensive - about 90 baht per meter, or under two hundred bucks for the remaining three sides of the house.

There are a few other minor details - I'd like to put in living room furnishings (though I doubt if my sweet in-laws will actually sit in a chair for fear of wearing it out before we come back) but these touches will have to wait until later.

Our primary concern right now is the move to America. I haven't lived in the USA for almost a decade and I suspect it will be quite an adjustment to restart my life there, not to mention the more profound adjustments my wife will have to make.

The simple life

The next afternoon I was waiting around for brother-in-law to finish loading a truck full of sugar cane, so he could help me go to the construction supplier and buy the plumbing supplies. I could have done it alone - I know where the best supplier is in the next village and I speak enough Isaan Lao to negotiate a deal for the stuff. But it wouldn't be much of a deal, as soon as they saw my white face. In fact, my wife has banned my presence from any financial transactions this trip.

While I'm waiting for Bro', I wander around the yard with Ma's slingshot. I get pretty good at hitting distant trees and I could probably nail a feral dog if one showed its face. The nice thing about the country is there is stuff to shoot at - that's even good to shoot at. None of this, "That's not a toy, kid. Careful you don't hit anything with it." More like, "You'll only get one chance to shoot that cobra in the head - careful you don't miss."

My retirement plan will definitely involve long walks in the Thai countryside with a slingshot in my pocket just like Ma-in-law, munching tamarinds and using their perfect, hard, round seeds for ammo. I wonder what name the kids will make up for the crazy old white guy. Maybe the one my wife already calls me - "Moong Ming", the Lao word for praying mantis.

Nearby my wife was thrilling over a tuber she found. Less than 24 hours back home and she's already digging in the dirt. Being a gentleman, I offered to help her dig, took a few pokes at it with the shovel and promptly sliced it in two. Sheepishly I handed the shovel back to her and she carefully dug the rest out while I slinked off with the slingshot. I'm more of a hunter-type, I guess. Later in the afternoon, Bro' still hadn't returned for our trip into town, but I'd become a dead-eye with a tamarind stone at 50 paces.

My wife and her sister had disappeared by then. Ma said they went off to the fields to collect snails for dinner. She said the rice fields used to be filled with crabs, shrimp, snails, clams and all sorts of other edible proteins, but since they started using chemical fertilizers some years ago, snails are difficult to find and the rice fields only produce rice.

Without much else to do, I took another walk around the neighborhood, this time armed with the camera. I snapped a few pictures around the fields, the red dust of the dirt roads stirring into the air to create some nice hazy effects with the setting sun. We don't get to see the sun's actual meeting with the horizon in our valley. It dips behind a great hulking jungle-covered hill and the darkness follows without much ceremony.

When I got back, Ma was just returning from a neighboring village that specializes in weaving banana-leaf bouquets. She'd bought a big one and hired some monks to come by the house that evening, and again at the crack of dawn the next morning for a house-blessing/marriage ceremony. Luckily I'd just had a new suit made when I was in Bangkok, as this was all news to me.

After the ceremonies, the plan was to go into town and buy the needed materials for the plumbing. Though since we didn't accomplish even that one thing on this long day, I had serious doubts as to whether we could accomplish that along with two ceremonies the next day.

Monk party!

As always with these kinds of things in Thailand, the event drew half the neighborhood that evening and the following morning. They were a well-behaved lot, due in part, I'm sure, to the fact that we only provided two cases of booze. Those who came just to drink wandered off fairly quickly.

Though the drunks weren't so bad as the inevitable gossipy wench who came by to see if she could find a weak spot in our marital bliss. This woman poked around the kitchen a bit, and brought out some competent English to ask if I knew about Thai culture. Then, in Lao she asked not very obliquely whether my wife worked as a dancer in a go-go bar.

Being a polite family, no one told her to leave (I would have, if I had understood a word she was saying). She finally slunk off when the monks' chanting overrode the garbage coming out of her mouth. When my wife told me the details of the conversation later, I left instructions that the woman was welcome to never return to our house in this lifetime.

The chanting of the five yellow-robed monks, who sat in our livingroom that evening to bless our house, was having other measurable effects as well. Children who were screaming outside settled down to some quieter games and all the older folks sitting cross-legged all over our floor seemed to generally mellow out. The monks finished chanting after an hour or so and we gave them a little spending money, some flowers and, oddly, three cigarettes, all placed before them on yellow cloths so as not to touch them physically. They filed out into the darkness, smiling at me in a serious sort of way.

The women then got to work, sitting on the bamboo tables outside and hacking at slabs of meat, chopping vegetables, throwing live fish into boiling pots and eventually turning it all into food. The older folks sat around our living room and one man poked and pinched me almost incessantly, as if trying to determine whether I was real or a ghostly apparition. Given my pale complexion I could understand the mistake.

Outside, where the women and children ate and talked, I goofed around playing peek-a-boo with a shy little girl hiding behind a post, and entertained the rest of the kids with the digital camera, showing them what they look like when they're being blinded by a flash.

Talking and occasionally laughing at the goofy American, the women churned out pots and pots of food, in preparation for another shindig tomorrow morning: our wedding ceremony.

We've been married nearly three years and I thought I'd managed to escape the rigamarole of a wedding in a foreign culture, but I was wrong. They were only waiting until we had a house, I guess.

Surprise wedding

I awoke to Isaan folk music blasting from a pair of meter-high speakers outside my bedroom window. Voices told me there was a crowd outside enjoying the music and, most likely, cooking.

I dressed and shaved and otherwise made my way back to the world. The monks were in the livingroom again, chanting. The walls were lined with older folk, also chanting. My wife was down in the yard with a small army of local women, cooking. Off to a discreet corner, a half-dozen brave men were pouring rot-gut Thai whiskey down their gullets at 7 in the morning.

I tried to see where a groom was supposed to fit in the busy wedding preparations. My wife was no help, as she was nominally in charge of the whole universe at that moment. Someone offered me a plastic chair. I dragged it to a discreet corner - a different one than the boozers', and tried my best to look useless.

When the monks were done with the morning chanting, they filed out, loaded up with food, flowers and cigarettes. Then the old village headman showed up dressed all in white and I was told to get in my suit. I joined my wife beside the man and, kneeling before the giant bouquet of banana leaves and flowers that Ma bought the day before, we chanted some more.

When that was done, after about an hour, everyone who shared even the tiniest strand of DNA with my wife, crowded around to take turns tying lengths of cotton string around our wrists for good luck. When someone was tying string around my wrist, my wife would place her hand on my arm, and vice versa, so we were always sharing the experience together. I had so many strings around both wrists I could have made a shirt.

During all this we were also holding a longer string which went around the bouquet and through the praying hands of the man in white. It was difficult to figure where my hands were supposed to be moment-to-moment. Through it all, little sis was zipping around, filling the digital camera with nearly two hundred pictures.

This ritual wound up with a final chant while we laid our heads three times on the mat before the banana leaf bouquet. When this was finished, the neighbors, relatives and friends dug in to the food. More laughter and gossip followed for the next couple hours until the party slowly dissipated and the farmers headed back to their farmwork.

The drunks were the last to leave. One guy kept trying to talk to me in Lao, which I barely understand from a sober person. Each time I shook my head, he'd repeat the same words louder hoping I'd get it. Finally I yelled back in my limited Lao, "I don't understand. Can you speak a little louder?" That brought a big laugh from all the women who were washing up. He was quieter after that and finally drifted away with a drunk uncle.

I was wiped out after all this and I barely did any of the work. I can't imagine how tired my wife was. I looked at the clock, thinking, "It's been a full day. Wonder how long 'til bedtime." It was noon. And guess what? Time to go buy the pipes and water tank.

One should never underestimate the Thais. Whatever their flaws might be, they will always wield the element of surprise. I didn't think we could accomplish even one of the chores we set for ourselves that day. But not only did we hold a party for five monks blessing on our house, we had a wedding and managed to do the plumbing too.

When brother and I returned with the pipes, a water tank and a pump, the family was up in arms over something and Ma was scowling around the yard. It seems that, when they returned some borrowed bowls and plates to the temple, the monks claimed a large number were missing.

This was a flat-out lie and Ma was pissed but, such is her respect for the Buddha, she gave them half of our kitchenware without a word.

My wife

All through this experience, while my wife worked so hard to make this event happen for us and for her family, I watched her. And I watched how other people in the village regarded her.

I could see that everyone thought my wife was something else, a being from beyond the normal world. They watched her with affection, but also bemusement, like they're never sure where her antics are off to next.

One evening, looking over some old pictures her father showed me, I asked who the guy in the white uniform was. "Oh, that's an old boyfriend," my wife said, "I met him when I was working as a maid in Bangkok. He saw me and came to my village to ask to marry me."

I looked more closely. "What's with the uniform?" It had a lot of colorful beads and buttons hanging off it.

"He was one of the King's personal guard," she said.

I knew my wife was a prize (her dad used to casually drop a knife into the floor between a suitor's feet to let them know they'd overstayed their welcome) but I didn't know she passed up a life in the King's court for a life with me. I hope I don't disappoint.

Moong Ming

Through that eventful week, and despite the strangeness of my surroundings, I slept well each night after watching meteor showers through the mosquito netting around our bed.

Now I'm in the livingroom, typing on a brand new Mac laptop while Father-in-law sits in a bamboo hut just down the hill, sifting bags of freshly-harvested rice using a $250 machine connected to a 45-year-old Japanese tractor engine.

Chickens are fluttering around in a cloud of chaff that spews out the back of the hut. Some local dogs are lurking around the edges of the yard eyeing the chickens, and Mother-in-law is prowling after them in turn, with her slingshot and hard pits from the green tamarinds my wife is snacking on.

The wheel of life has hit a bump here, with the giant house I built in the middle of this ancient farmland, but I don't think it will take long for the house to become a part of it all. Plants are already growing around it with the help of my in-laws, who can't keep their farming to the fields.

Ma and Pa are reaching an age where they will appreciate the comforts of a shelter that actually features walls, where they don't have to carry the water in on their shoulders.

The morning we leave, Pa cries more than my wife has ever seen him cry, while Ma gives us her country Buddhist blessings. On the stairs to the veranda, a moong ming watches us, not moving even while we bustle past him with suitcases. He's still there when we hug and wai goodbye to the family, get in our car and drive away.