Through the revolving doors and past the doorman I went, up 12 floors to what I thought was my first apartment in New York City. The building still smelled crisp and new, like fresh paint and polished glass. Accents of bright hardwoods and buffed metal caught my eye high and low, the kind of little touches that make a place not only modern, but stylish and unique. Heck, even the New York Times wrote a story about how nice living here was, and now that I had arrived, I was not disappointed. Despite lugging my entire life behind me in a duffel bag and suitcase, I moved with a light-footed ease. I was excited. And then I arrived at the end of the hallway, at door number one, what I thought was the threshold of my first apartment in New York City.
On the way to this door, I'd passed a very round Korean man in the hallway. He asked if I was moving into room 1223. I told him I was. He said that was great, because he was going to be my roommate -- along with someone else who had dropped off a couple bags, then quickly departed. The portly young man said he was in a hurry and had to go, but would talk to me later. He waddled away toward the elevators. I would never see him again.
As I approached that first door, I should have seen the warning signs. Every other doorway along the hall was immaculate, welcoming in that pristine, never-lived-in sort of way. The door that was supposed to be mine had an old broken printer and scanner stacked just outside, and the welcome mat was decidedly not so; it literally read: "Not Welcome." I dropped my bags and took out my key. I didn't need to turn it to know what awaited me. I could smell the garbage from outside.
Behind the door was a scene I could only describe as "Puij-esque." Puij, you see, was a next-door neighbor of mine in college. His real name was Thomas (the nickname was from some anime), and the man was the least-kempt person I have ever met, including folks sleeping on sidewalks. One time, Puij left a urine-soaked phonebook in his shower for weeks after another friend threw it in there as a joke. Puij would sleep in a mess of dirty clothes on his bed like a hibernating hamster, cuckooning himself in the stench of sheets gone unwashed for months. Another time, Puij refused to get up and clean up his kitchen experiments gone wrong, even when a friend hurled a half-dozen mini-bibles at him, shouting, "The power of Christ compels you!"
The scene behind the door of my would-be apartment, with the multiple rice-cookers, rotting Korean cuisine, and unwashed pots and pans, was decidedly Puij-esque. I wandered into what was supposed to be my first bedroom in New York City and sat down my bags. I immediately wanted out. Aloud, I said to myself, "We're going to have to have a talk."
Being the type to try to work things out, I weighed my options. I could try to get another room, but hell, that might end up even worse. Out of the frying pan and into the fryer. And what if I landed here by fate, and I end up being good friends with this guy? I decided to wait until he came back. Maybe he was just going through a bad time and forgot to take out his garbage. I decided to forget the mess for the time being and get ready to go meet some friends out in Brooklyn for dinner and drinks.
But the mess, in a way, wouldn't stay forgotten. As I was about to leave, the door opened. A posse of young Asian men walked in. At the front of the pack was the person who had dropped off his bags and then quickly dashed. He'd brought back some friends to show how filthy the apartment was. His name was Shawn; he was one of those popped-collar, muscle-bound preppy Chinese guys. He told me he was from the nice part of Brooklyn, and before I could tell him my story, he launched into a chest-puffed tirade about how he couldn't believe how fucking disgusting the place was, how he's paying too much for this kind of shit, and how he was going to demand a new building entirely. I told him I had arrived only 10 minutes before, and the mess inside was the fault of the other guy, who had apparently been nesting here since the fall semester and decided not to move out. He demanded to know what the other resident looked like, as if he and his posse, equally spiky haired (though less muscle bound), would hunt him down and force the Korean Puij to clean up his mess.
I left shortly after, around 6 in the evening. I had an amazing time in Brooklyn. I stumbled back in the early morning and immediately passed out in my room, which was clean, though I still hadn't bought a blanket or sheets for the bed. At around 11 a.m., someone opened the door and woke me up.
"Yo. Can you believe this shit? This other guy still hasn't cleaned up."
It was Shawn. Shouting down at me as I poked my head from my sleeping bag.
"Really? Hell," I said.
"You see the guy?" Shawn asked.
"No. I still haven't seen him. I got home at like 4 a.m."
"You went out? That's cool. Where at?"
"Brooklyn, around Williamsburg, then BedSty."
"Oh man, you know that's the dangerous part, right?"
"My friends say it's in transition."
He looked at me like I was crazy. Biggy and Naz were from that part of town.
"Well, yo, I talked to the people. They said I can move, so I just came back to get my stuff."
I took a deep breath and smelled the spoiled kimchi waft into the room.
"You know, I might do the same," I said.
I showered, trying to ignore the scummy tile of what would be an otherwise beautiful bathroom.
After I got dressed, I went to the building manager's office on the second floor. I was hungry, thirsty and just wanted to get this over with. Behind a white desk covered in lists and post-it notes, a woman named Beatriz was doing something on an iMac. I walked up to her and cut to the chase. I told her I'm a moderately clean guy, and moving into a place so cluttered and dirty was not what I had in mind -- especially not since this was supposed to be my first apartment in New York City.
She shuffled through some papers. Looked at some lists. Tried to find a baby blue sticky note among a dozen other baby blue sticky notes. Then she called her assistant into the office. She sent him up to inspect the room -- just to be sure I wasn't being picky. The assistant looked, acted and talked rather effeminately. He was dressed impeccably. Luckily for me, even if I was exaggerating about the room -- which I wasn't -- I imagined he'd return with a favorable report. She handed him a baby blue sticky note with the room number before he left. I sat in an awkward silence with Beatriz for 10 minutes as she tapped at her iMac keyboard, the computer softly playing Latin love songs. My attempt at small talk didn't go too well.
"Looks like you've got a pretty big job here -- how many tenants are in this building anyway?" I asked.
"That's a good question. I don't really know. I just started," she replied.
Finally, the assistant returned.
"The room is pretty dirty -- especially the floors," he reported to Beatriz.
"Is the resident there?" she asked.
"He was sleeping. I guess he isn't now."
Beatriz turned to me.
"That room should have been cleaned a long time ago. Let me see what I can do."
She scanned another list, then told her assistant to go up and check to see if this new room -- just a few doors down from the first one -- was cleaner.
I panicked just enough to make a difference.
"Uh, is it possible for me to look at the room first? Just to be sure I'm not, like, jumping out of the frying pan and into the fryer?"
"Actually, you can't. We're required to give notice to the tenant before we show the apartment," Beatriz replied.
She told her assistant to go find keys to this new place, and I sat there, silently dreading what the outcome would be. And then Beatriz had a change of heart.
"You know what, this will save everyone some trouble," she said.
She had her assistant get a tiny envelope with a room number on it and keys inside from a big box of identical tiny envelopes. There were hundreds.
"Nobody's living in this unit yet. That way, you can set the rules," she said.
I was ecstatic.
"Thanks so much. I really didn't want to be the guy to come in and say, 'o.k., buddy, here's how things are going to be from now on,'" I said.
She handed me the keys to a big corner room on the 14th floor. I sneaked back into my old apartment, stuffed my things back into my bags, careful not to rouse the sleeping Puij in the other bedroom, and hauled like crazy back through the obstacle course of ethernet cords, a bike helmet, unused cleaning supplies and empty strawberry cartons.
Later, I would say to Beatriz, "He probably felt really bad, knowing all his roommates abandoned him because he was too dirty." She hid her snicker behind a fan of papers.
The red elevator doors opened onto the 14th floor. I was even more excited than I had been the day before. My entire life was in the luggage behind me, not quite packed as well as before, as I arrived at room 1403, what was supposed to be my second apartment in New York City. There were three fishbowls made from colorful construction paper pasted onto the door around the peephole. Inside each bowl was a goldfish with a name written on it: "Ashley!" "Stephanie!" "Amanda!"
This felt good. Girls like that usually keep their rooms pretty clean, I thought. At least all the girls I knew from college, anyway -- the kind who always kept a can of Fabreeze handy, who did laundry three times a week, who owned a Swiffer and actually changed the cloths. I opened the door of what was supposed to be my new home. Instead, it would become the address I would hold for the shortest amount of time -- ever -- despite my long list of short-term addresses.
When door number two opened, and the evidence registered in my brain (the shock of it caused reality to slow down), I said aloud: "Ho-lee shit."
Who would have thought three preppy, peppy little girls who pasted their walls with photo spreads from Vogue and hung framed vintage romantic pictures on their walls could cause this magnitude of rock star-in-a-hotel-room destruction?
They were Lindseys. Lindsey, to use another anecdote from my college days, was a girl who lived downstairs from me my junior year. She was the type of girl to stay out all night and come home with the sunrise only to fall asleep half-naked on the floor with her feet caked in barroom filth. She gave off a preppy vibe, drove a nice car, but simply didn't seem to properly manage any aspect of her life. She put off getting a proper bed for months, instead sleeping on a mattress on her bedroom floor. She had a little dog, which she left locked inside while she was away at class all day. I'm surprised the thing didn't die -- since one time, when I was hanging out with her roommate, I saw a couple packages of Plan B strewn next to her mattress, slightly chewed.
This room was decidedly worse. It appeared that the girls of 1403, the former occupants of what was supposed to be my second apartment in New York City, had thrown a massive party the night before they moved out. Confetti and glitter was somehow jammed into every nook and cranny in the place. Beer bottle caps and crumpled cans lay nonchalantly here and there. The garbage can was overflowing with the detritus of modern college living: cell phone charger, sugar free Red Bull cans, packaging from prescription samples, and more cigarette packs than I can count. A coffee cup was filled with that pungent juice that distills from beer being mixed with four dozen cigarette butts. Two holes were somehow punched into the kitchen wall. And in the bathroom, there was the crown jewel of this wreckage -- a scorched Pepsi bottle with a hole drilled into it, with a makeshift tinfoil cap over the top, filled with a half-smoked bowl of weed.
I repeated my refrain: "Ho-lee shit."
But in addition to the mess these girls had left behind for their daddies to pay for and the maids to clean up, they also left every thing else. By that, I mean everything. A closet full of coat hangers, a toaster, two desk lamps, a power strip, a pair of dice from Dad's Casino in Vegas, a duvet with cover and sheets and pillows, a corkscrew, and so much more. There was even a cluster of brand-new cleaning supplies, as if the girls started to clean up, realized the task was far beyond them, and just said "fuck it."
There was no way that I was going to stay there, or even wait for the staff to clean that hell hole. I left my stuff in the entryway and prepared to go back down to talk to Beatriz and get yet another room. But as I was about to leave, it donned on me: how about a shopping spree?
I had only brought the essentials with me to New York; clothes, computer, and that's about it. I was planning to buy everything else. But when the environment, even the urban environment, gives you lemons, you don't turn down the lemonade -- especially when it comes with sugar and a juicer. I took what I needed, wrapped the stuff in a bedsheet, and left the bundle in the vacant hallway. The stuff would have ended up down a garbage chute anyway.
I took the elevator back down to the second floor. Beatriz looked surprised to see me.
"You're not going to believe this," I said. "I'm going to need to return this one too. The room looks like a party bomb exploded, and nobody bothered to clean up."
"This has just been a nightmare for you, hasn't it?" she said.
"It's alright -- I know it's not your fault. I just want a clean room." On the outside, I appeared tired and plaintive. On the inside, I was smiling; I was about to walk away with a few hundred dollars worth of household goods and move into, what I hoped, would be my third apartment in New York City.
"Here, take this room. It's a studio, and nobody's scheduled to move in for a while," Beatriz said. She handed me the key to room 1117. I liked that number. It was sounded both clean, and lucky.
"Thanks. Hopefully I won't be back," I said.
I returned to the hellhole and gathered my things and left the bundle of swag behind for a second trip. I took the elevator down to the 11th floor. I arrived at door number three, what I hoped would be my first real apartment in New York City.
The chrome-coated lock tumbler twisted like perfection. The door opened, and sunlight from a bank of 5-foot-tall windows was cast over me. The wood floors shone like just-threshed wheat. I could see into the canyons of both 23rd and 24th streets. Not a single remnant of the previous occupants was left behind, except for the fact that they had scrubbed the place to a sparkle.
Behind door number three, I found my first apartment in New York City.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Thursday, February 26, 2009
Burma IV: The places we're drawn to
When a man is starving, he will do almost anything for food. When a man is merely hungry, he may simply make poor decisions. I was merely hungry.
I marched over to the first food stall I saw at the edge of the market. I eyed the offerings cooking atop the vendor's wheeled grill. The wench behind the grill, burly and bug-eyed, stared at me as I perused her selection of strange meats. I was already unsure of the quality of these simmering strips of protein, but, like I said, I was hungry. And I did not want to venture very far back into the market.
I pointed to what most closely resembled chicken and held up three fingers. I gave her three 10 baht coins. She smiled at me then, and I said "thank you," as I did not know the Burmese equivalent. Perhaps she knew some English, so I asked, "how do you say 'thank you' in Burmese?" I did not want to be the crude westerner who did not bother to learn the pleases and thank-yous of the places he visits.
She did know a little English, but she did not know much Burmese.
"I Thai people," she said.
She was a crude neighbor.
Many of the vendors here, with the minimal capital it took to have such a push cart operation, were Thai, apparently.
"Kup Kun Khrup," I said, in her native language. She smiled and bowed, though her fat lips and bug eyes still made me question the three "chicken" skewers I held in my hand inside a little plastic bag. The food may have been fine, but she apparently doesn't know just how important presentation is in the restaurant business -- even if your restaurant is just a makeshift grill on wheels.
There was nowhere to sit down, so I began eating and walking. The "chicken" skewers were very stringy. Though they were probably chicken, my imagination altered my taste buds and perhaps made them taste more off than they actually were. With all the animal parts for sale around here, jungle cat hides and monkey skulls, I didn't think it would be terribly far fetched for bush meat to have infiltrated the local meat supply. I only finished one of the skewers. I'd lost my appetite. Though I kept holding the remnants of my ill-fated meal. When you look busy, you see, you're bothered less. You're less fresh. You've demonstrated that you have already spilt some of your fat purse into the local economy. You're not the person wandering aimlessly, looking for something, or nothing at all. You're doing something. This is the case when you're carrying something neutral and active at the same time, like a cell phone, or in my case, a meat skewer.
I wandered rather aimlessly around the edges of the market, careful not to venture in very far. But drifting over me like a cool wind in my hair, I heard "Hotel California" playing somewhere in the distance. Just as alluring as the warm smell of colitas rising up through the air, I was drawn toward the music, even though it took me inside a place where the summer sweat certainly wasn't sweet. The Eagles were such a curious, foreign sound in this place. The music drew me to a store that sold pirated CDs. Since I can pirate all the music I want from the comfort of my computer, I did not go inside. So far, my stringy chicken had kept me safe, like a chewy talisman against the bats.
Down a nearby alleyway there were some men sitting around a table, just beyond the shadows at the far end. They were loud and doing something angry and quick with their hands. It reminded me of watching the black men in Miami's Liberty City shoot craps under the eaves of a faded pastel housing project. I wanted to get a closer look at the men and their game, but the alley was dark most of the way, and it reminded me that I was still inside the cave. I stepped out from the shaded market and back into the sun and wandered down a street, then another and another. I could have been going in circles, or I could have been zig-zagging. I didn't really know or care. All the buildings looked the same: sunbaked and forlorn. Outside the market, there was very little shade. I passed what passed for a nice hotel here. There were actually two cars parked outside the entrance. I wonder if the Swiss girl knew about this place. It looked safe, with a tall gate and a security guard out front. I kept walking, and eventually came to a dead end where I was forced to make a right turn. Suddenly, I realized: this was the other side of that dark alley I'd avoided.
The Burmese men were just around the corner, clustered around the outside of a closet-like grocery store. The store was a hole-in-the-wall -- literally. It appeared to be nestled inside a tall wall. Five of the men were seated on squat stools and upturned buckets around a low wooden table. The table was square and had a grid painted onto it. There were plastic chips covering the table, and in turn, they flicked a large chip at the smaller multicolored ones. They were aiming to knock them into small circular pockets at each corner of the board. It looked like a mix between air hockey and billiards.
At first, the men didn't notice my presence. I slipped around the corner and slid as close as I could to the far wall. But rather than continuing on, I stopped right at the line of shadow between the hard sunlight and the dark alley. I watched them for a minute, then stepped closer. One man looked over his shoulder at me. I smiled. He smiled back and nodded. I waved to him, and took this as a sign that I wasn't about to be attacked for spying on their game. Money was changing hands around the square table; they might have not wanted me to intrude on their gambling.
I took my camera from my pocket and stepped closer. I raised it to the man who had smiled and gave him a look, asking if the camera was alright. He smiled again and nodded. I began to record their game. I stepped even closer. This was when one of the men at the table wearing a drab coat and tattered black boots glanced up at me with hazy yellow eyes. Just for a moment, his eyes flickered, like a shock of danger or anger energized them long enough to jolt his languid stare. He stood up and quickly slunk away inside the nearby store. Before I could react to his abrupt desertion, he turned around and slunk back out and moved quickly toward the table. He reached behind one of the men who was sitting next to him. He had a pair of crossed battle axes tattooed on his hand. He hefted a black foreign-made assault rifle, its banana clip battered, and the synthetic stock scratched and scraped in hundreds of places. He walked away down the alley with his rifle.
The man who I made first contact with must have seen my surprise.
"He soldier. No want photograph," he said.
No shit.
"Ah, sorry," I said. I stood for a moment of silence, unsure whether to dart away or continue watching the game. I decided to squat down with the other men and have a closer look, figure out exactly what the rules were.
"Where you from?" asked the smiling man, who appeared to be the only one in the group who could speak English, or was confident enough to practice it with a stranger.
"America," I said. "Florida."
"U.S.A.? Barack Obama?"
"That's right, Barack Obama," I said. I was happy that he seemed pleased with my country's president.
I watched the men play, oohing and ahhing at the near misses and tough shots. After a few minutes, I asked: "Can I play?"
The man looked at me, smiled again, and offered me his seat. They started a new game. I threw down two 10 baht coins and took my first flick. They laughed. I didn't so much flick it like you're supposed to, but pushed the cue puck along. My break wasn't too bad, though, I managed to get one in. It was beginners luck. I was handily beaten. The experience, though, was worth my $0.45.
I wanted to play another game, but time was running short for me. I needed to get back to the bus, to safety. Before I left, a man covered in strange tattoos offered to take my picture as I sat with the gang of alley rats. Burma, I thought, isn't so bad once you escape the bat cave, the tourist traps.
Epilogue:
A smiling Burmese officer handed me back my passport on my way out. I asked him how to say "thank you" in Burmese. The answer: "Amyaji chezu tinbade." When I repeated that mouthfull back to him, it must have sounded like a mumble.
I stepped in a puddle of spit tobacco juice on the way out. The orange splotches are everywhere here; on walls, in the road, on car tires. The Burmese, it appears, love dip. Amid the carcinogenic splotches, 5-year-olds carry their infant siblings in slings on their backs, hands outstretched to the few tourists who walk back across the border. I put a 5 baht coin into each dirty little palm.
A silent and fast-handed immigration agent at the Thai-side border checkpoint hastily stamped my passport. Her body language spoke the equivalent of a bored and grumpy eye-roll.
"Will 5 o'clock ever get here!?" her uninterested face projected.
I had a few minutes before I needed to get back to the bus station. I bought some chao su bao and fried bananas from a street vendor and sat down on a bench inside a shaded eating area near the food stalls. Two boys, no more than 7 years old, jostled for the scraps of chicken bone left over at an adjacent table. The taller boy's face was scraped from his eyebrow to his chin, the wound just beginning to scab. The younger boy's hair was sun-streaked to a light brown. Children like this seem to be everywhere here, scraping up change and table scraps. I just figured out why I had gone all day and not seen a single dog, unusual for this part of the world. The children had taken their place. When the boys came over to me, naturally, to beg for money, I instead handed them my bag of uneaten bananas. The taller boy didn't hesitate a second when he saw that I was going to give them the food -- his hand shot out with ferocity, snatched the bag from me, and clutched it toward his chest. He looked like a hungry mutt snatching a bone from a garbage bag. The smaller boy could only look on in sadness. I saw this, and scolded the taller boy, gesturing between the younger boy and the bag of bananas.
"You, share with him. Sharing is good. Remember that."
The older boy probably didn't understand a word I said, but he must have picked up on my reprimanding tone. He looked inside the bag, as if trying to find the best pieces to keep for himself, then handed the smaller boy the runtiest of bananas. Such is life when you are a small boy living as a dog.
I took a moto taxi back to the bus station. The drunk brit from the bus was already there. An empty beer can sat at his feet, and he cracked open another Singha as I walked past toward the row of benches in the bus terminal. At the far end, I saw the pedophile looking man by himself, nervously glancing around. His bald head appeared slimy in the late-afternoon sun.
I sat down a few rows ahead of two monks. They'd make a nice buffer between me and slimy head man.
Just as I sat my backpack down, I saw the young mother walk into the station. She appeared from the bright sunlight, and moved with a casual elegance that made her seem to float as she walked over the scuffed and dirty tile.
She couldn't have been older than 30, yet here she was in the hardscrabble town of Mai Sai with a 1-year-old baby strapped to her chest. She sat down in the row in front of me and let her daughter out of a durable looking nylon sling. She was a willowy woman, tall, with short golden hair and wide blue-gray eyes. Her daughter, though still a chubby thing, had her mother's golden locks, and eyes that were an even more arresting deep blue. The little girl was wearing a tiny T-shirt that read, "Keep my Planet Clean."
This was a brave woman.
She was staying in Chiang Rai, an hour away, but decided to go on a day trip with her little girl to see more of the countryside. She didn't have a bus ticket, and was waiting to see what came along to get back. I was wowed at the fearlessness she had, and the serene calm she projected as she waited in the gritty station with her giggling infant.
But as time passed, I could see she was growing worried, as night was approaching, and no buses had shown up. Then my big bus pulled into the station. It was sold out for the ride back, I knew. I thought about offering her my ticket and figuring out a return trip on my own. I didn't want to board until I was sure this young mother had a safe ride back. Five minutes before my bus was set to depart, a rickety old blue local commuter bus pulled up. It had a TV antenna welded to the roof, no panes of glass in the windows, and was already packed with Thai travelers. It had "Chiang Rai" painted on its side. The young mother, without hesitation, hefted her squealing girl and put her back into the sling.
"Ooh, she's getting too big for this thing," the woman said. She walked to the bus, stepped aboard, and somehow, made the grimy old vehicle seem a little brighter. I knew she'd make it home just fine.
I marched over to the first food stall I saw at the edge of the market. I eyed the offerings cooking atop the vendor's wheeled grill. The wench behind the grill, burly and bug-eyed, stared at me as I perused her selection of strange meats. I was already unsure of the quality of these simmering strips of protein, but, like I said, I was hungry. And I did not want to venture very far back into the market.
I pointed to what most closely resembled chicken and held up three fingers. I gave her three 10 baht coins. She smiled at me then, and I said "thank you," as I did not know the Burmese equivalent. Perhaps she knew some English, so I asked, "how do you say 'thank you' in Burmese?" I did not want to be the crude westerner who did not bother to learn the pleases and thank-yous of the places he visits.
She did know a little English, but she did not know much Burmese.
"I Thai people," she said.
She was a crude neighbor.
Many of the vendors here, with the minimal capital it took to have such a push cart operation, were Thai, apparently.
"Kup Kun Khrup," I said, in her native language. She smiled and bowed, though her fat lips and bug eyes still made me question the three "chicken" skewers I held in my hand inside a little plastic bag. The food may have been fine, but she apparently doesn't know just how important presentation is in the restaurant business -- even if your restaurant is just a makeshift grill on wheels.
There was nowhere to sit down, so I began eating and walking. The "chicken" skewers were very stringy. Though they were probably chicken, my imagination altered my taste buds and perhaps made them taste more off than they actually were. With all the animal parts for sale around here, jungle cat hides and monkey skulls, I didn't think it would be terribly far fetched for bush meat to have infiltrated the local meat supply. I only finished one of the skewers. I'd lost my appetite. Though I kept holding the remnants of my ill-fated meal. When you look busy, you see, you're bothered less. You're less fresh. You've demonstrated that you have already spilt some of your fat purse into the local economy. You're not the person wandering aimlessly, looking for something, or nothing at all. You're doing something. This is the case when you're carrying something neutral and active at the same time, like a cell phone, or in my case, a meat skewer.
I wandered rather aimlessly around the edges of the market, careful not to venture in very far. But drifting over me like a cool wind in my hair, I heard "Hotel California" playing somewhere in the distance. Just as alluring as the warm smell of colitas rising up through the air, I was drawn toward the music, even though it took me inside a place where the summer sweat certainly wasn't sweet. The Eagles were such a curious, foreign sound in this place. The music drew me to a store that sold pirated CDs. Since I can pirate all the music I want from the comfort of my computer, I did not go inside. So far, my stringy chicken had kept me safe, like a chewy talisman against the bats.
Down a nearby alleyway there were some men sitting around a table, just beyond the shadows at the far end. They were loud and doing something angry and quick with their hands. It reminded me of watching the black men in Miami's Liberty City shoot craps under the eaves of a faded pastel housing project. I wanted to get a closer look at the men and their game, but the alley was dark most of the way, and it reminded me that I was still inside the cave. I stepped out from the shaded market and back into the sun and wandered down a street, then another and another. I could have been going in circles, or I could have been zig-zagging. I didn't really know or care. All the buildings looked the same: sunbaked and forlorn. Outside the market, there was very little shade. I passed what passed for a nice hotel here. There were actually two cars parked outside the entrance. I wonder if the Swiss girl knew about this place. It looked safe, with a tall gate and a security guard out front. I kept walking, and eventually came to a dead end where I was forced to make a right turn. Suddenly, I realized: this was the other side of that dark alley I'd avoided.
The Burmese men were just around the corner, clustered around the outside of a closet-like grocery store. The store was a hole-in-the-wall -- literally. It appeared to be nestled inside a tall wall. Five of the men were seated on squat stools and upturned buckets around a low wooden table. The table was square and had a grid painted onto it. There were plastic chips covering the table, and in turn, they flicked a large chip at the smaller multicolored ones. They were aiming to knock them into small circular pockets at each corner of the board. It looked like a mix between air hockey and billiards.
At first, the men didn't notice my presence. I slipped around the corner and slid as close as I could to the far wall. But rather than continuing on, I stopped right at the line of shadow between the hard sunlight and the dark alley. I watched them for a minute, then stepped closer. One man looked over his shoulder at me. I smiled. He smiled back and nodded. I waved to him, and took this as a sign that I wasn't about to be attacked for spying on their game. Money was changing hands around the square table; they might have not wanted me to intrude on their gambling.
I took my camera from my pocket and stepped closer. I raised it to the man who had smiled and gave him a look, asking if the camera was alright. He smiled again and nodded. I began to record their game. I stepped even closer. This was when one of the men at the table wearing a drab coat and tattered black boots glanced up at me with hazy yellow eyes. Just for a moment, his eyes flickered, like a shock of danger or anger energized them long enough to jolt his languid stare. He stood up and quickly slunk away inside the nearby store. Before I could react to his abrupt desertion, he turned around and slunk back out and moved quickly toward the table. He reached behind one of the men who was sitting next to him. He had a pair of crossed battle axes tattooed on his hand. He hefted a black foreign-made assault rifle, its banana clip battered, and the synthetic stock scratched and scraped in hundreds of places. He walked away down the alley with his rifle.
The man who I made first contact with must have seen my surprise.
"He soldier. No want photograph," he said.
No shit.
"Ah, sorry," I said. I stood for a moment of silence, unsure whether to dart away or continue watching the game. I decided to squat down with the other men and have a closer look, figure out exactly what the rules were.
"Where you from?" asked the smiling man, who appeared to be the only one in the group who could speak English, or was confident enough to practice it with a stranger.
"America," I said. "Florida."
"U.S.A.? Barack Obama?"
"That's right, Barack Obama," I said. I was happy that he seemed pleased with my country's president.
I watched the men play, oohing and ahhing at the near misses and tough shots. After a few minutes, I asked: "Can I play?"
The man looked at me, smiled again, and offered me his seat. They started a new game. I threw down two 10 baht coins and took my first flick. They laughed. I didn't so much flick it like you're supposed to, but pushed the cue puck along. My break wasn't too bad, though, I managed to get one in. It was beginners luck. I was handily beaten. The experience, though, was worth my $0.45.
I wanted to play another game, but time was running short for me. I needed to get back to the bus, to safety. Before I left, a man covered in strange tattoos offered to take my picture as I sat with the gang of alley rats. Burma, I thought, isn't so bad once you escape the bat cave, the tourist traps.
Epilogue:
A smiling Burmese officer handed me back my passport on my way out. I asked him how to say "thank you" in Burmese. The answer: "Amyaji chezu tinbade." When I repeated that mouthfull back to him, it must have sounded like a mumble.
I stepped in a puddle of spit tobacco juice on the way out. The orange splotches are everywhere here; on walls, in the road, on car tires. The Burmese, it appears, love dip. Amid the carcinogenic splotches, 5-year-olds carry their infant siblings in slings on their backs, hands outstretched to the few tourists who walk back across the border. I put a 5 baht coin into each dirty little palm.
A silent and fast-handed immigration agent at the Thai-side border checkpoint hastily stamped my passport. Her body language spoke the equivalent of a bored and grumpy eye-roll.
"Will 5 o'clock ever get here!?" her uninterested face projected.
I had a few minutes before I needed to get back to the bus station. I bought some chao su bao and fried bananas from a street vendor and sat down on a bench inside a shaded eating area near the food stalls. Two boys, no more than 7 years old, jostled for the scraps of chicken bone left over at an adjacent table. The taller boy's face was scraped from his eyebrow to his chin, the wound just beginning to scab. The younger boy's hair was sun-streaked to a light brown. Children like this seem to be everywhere here, scraping up change and table scraps. I just figured out why I had gone all day and not seen a single dog, unusual for this part of the world. The children had taken their place. When the boys came over to me, naturally, to beg for money, I instead handed them my bag of uneaten bananas. The taller boy didn't hesitate a second when he saw that I was going to give them the food -- his hand shot out with ferocity, snatched the bag from me, and clutched it toward his chest. He looked like a hungry mutt snatching a bone from a garbage bag. The smaller boy could only look on in sadness. I saw this, and scolded the taller boy, gesturing between the younger boy and the bag of bananas.
"You, share with him. Sharing is good. Remember that."
The older boy probably didn't understand a word I said, but he must have picked up on my reprimanding tone. He looked inside the bag, as if trying to find the best pieces to keep for himself, then handed the smaller boy the runtiest of bananas. Such is life when you are a small boy living as a dog.
I took a moto taxi back to the bus station. The drunk brit from the bus was already there. An empty beer can sat at his feet, and he cracked open another Singha as I walked past toward the row of benches in the bus terminal. At the far end, I saw the pedophile looking man by himself, nervously glancing around. His bald head appeared slimy in the late-afternoon sun.
I sat down a few rows ahead of two monks. They'd make a nice buffer between me and slimy head man.
Just as I sat my backpack down, I saw the young mother walk into the station. She appeared from the bright sunlight, and moved with a casual elegance that made her seem to float as she walked over the scuffed and dirty tile.
She couldn't have been older than 30, yet here she was in the hardscrabble town of Mai Sai with a 1-year-old baby strapped to her chest. She sat down in the row in front of me and let her daughter out of a durable looking nylon sling. She was a willowy woman, tall, with short golden hair and wide blue-gray eyes. Her daughter, though still a chubby thing, had her mother's golden locks, and eyes that were an even more arresting deep blue. The little girl was wearing a tiny T-shirt that read, "Keep my Planet Clean."
This was a brave woman.
She was staying in Chiang Rai, an hour away, but decided to go on a day trip with her little girl to see more of the countryside. She didn't have a bus ticket, and was waiting to see what came along to get back. I was wowed at the fearlessness she had, and the serene calm she projected as she waited in the gritty station with her giggling infant.
But as time passed, I could see she was growing worried, as night was approaching, and no buses had shown up. Then my big bus pulled into the station. It was sold out for the ride back, I knew. I thought about offering her my ticket and figuring out a return trip on my own. I didn't want to board until I was sure this young mother had a safe ride back. Five minutes before my bus was set to depart, a rickety old blue local commuter bus pulled up. It had a TV antenna welded to the roof, no panes of glass in the windows, and was already packed with Thai travelers. It had "Chiang Rai" painted on its side. The young mother, without hesitation, hefted her squealing girl and put her back into the sling.
"Ooh, she's getting too big for this thing," the woman said. She walked to the bus, stepped aboard, and somehow, made the grimy old vehicle seem a little brighter. I knew she'd make it home just fine.
Monday, February 16, 2009
Burma, part 3: Bats and Trap Churches
Some things make you take a deep breath and steel yourself to the onslaught you know is about hit. Like bracing yourself before a crest of foaming surf crashes down, or feeling the heat of a defender on your neck as you rush toward the goal line, knowing you're about to be planted into the turf. Stepping around the corner and into that first real street in Burma was a moment like that.
They came at me in a loose cluster and locked on with dull but persistent eyes, numb and unflinching to rejection, unknowing of shame. These were the tuk tuk drivers, pirated video hustlers, scam tour operators, and cigarette peddlers of the Burmese borderland. You come to know their type well in this part of the world. There's a seemingly inexhaustible supply of these mangy men, from every big city to seedy backwater port.
You want movie? Motor bike, cheap cheap. Tuk tuk? Marlboros, sunglass, anything, you want?
I saw them through my smokey lenses and clenched my teeth, squaring my jaw, and felt my chest rise with a long, slow sucking of air. I needed the air. The flurry of dismissals, the roll of rote rebukes I'd steadily distribute among them, would take a lot out of me. I like to be left alone most of the time, unless you just want to talk. If I want something, I will ask for it. If I need help with anything, I will seek it out. But most of the time, I just like to do things for myself.
My preferences are completely incompatible with who these men are and what they want. Their goal is to pressure clueless schmucks unfamiliar with their surroundings into disgorging some of their conscience-burdening, lust-fueling, or shamelessly mad money.
I waded through the knot of short copper-brown men. Their hair was stiff from shampooing with bar soap, and their too-big polyester shirts made them sweatier than necessary. I wasn't desperate yet, but I was fervently looking for an escape. I only need to get away somewhere long enough pass an hour or two, to wait for suspicions to pass and paperwork to process. Then I would turn around and catch a bus back to safe, sunny Chiang Mai, to good food and hot showers, and that sweet, svelte coffee house waitress who's still on my mind.
But before I could even think about getting back, I needed to act, and act fast. The tree-lined road ahead was a crowded strip of gray asphalt paralleled by cracked sidewalks. These sidewalks were a gauntlet of push carts and beggar children and legions more of the hustler sort, their eyes already stonily grinding up at the sight of me. Today, you see, I'd decided to play the part of Joe Tourist. I'd faux-hawked my hair a little more, broke out the cotton khaki shorts, and rolled up the sleeves on my blue linen shirt from Banana Republic. I figured I'd have less trouble at the borders if nobody suspected me as a local, or a foreign drug runner trying to lay low.
But it also painted a big, fat mark my chest, and projected a green dollar-sign halo over my head.
Not that identifying me as a foreigner was hard to do, it's just that lately, I'd been trying to tone down my appearance. I had been perfecting a disguise over the past few weeks, picking up on certain wardrobe cues from the natives, trying to blend in as much as I could for daily operations. I found that my torn up leather sandals were perfect streetwear, accompanied by a generic polo shirt and the Thai-brand Greyhound jeans I'd picked up in Bangkok. Hardly the look of a farmer, but if I shaved, and kept my tan up and parted my hair, people would second-guess me. I am vaguely Asian, after all, though look more East Asian than Thai.
With no way to simply vanish, and the road ahead far too sticky with the nagging men and a few heart-rendingly poor children I didn't feel like feeling sorry for right then, I took the only other option I had: the narrow concrete steps I'd almost sworn off as being too anonymous. They led down from the raised street into the heart of the city's border market. If I'd known what was waiting for me at the bottom, I would have waded through the swamp of little dirty children along the road and given them all of my coins and felt guilty for not doing more.
The stalls of bric-a-brac and animal pelts, fake shoes, pirated movies, and thousands of other tacky items you could find in nearly every marketplace around the region stretched out to an intersection, and kept on going down each of the side streets. I'd stepped not ten steps away from the stairs when the first of the hardcore hustlers approached me. These men were a breed beyond the simple purveyors of scam tours and fake gems that predominantly populated the raised road I'd left behind. These were a different strain, the kind that would commit actual depravity for a dollar. I didn't know where they came from, but like bloodsucking bats hiding unseen in the darkness, they'd drop off their guano-covered cave walls and jerkily fly down when a hot meal came strolling past.
The first man had a simple, determined look on his face when he offered the prescription painkillers and boner pills to me. Selling felony-worthy amounts of drugs in broad daylight appeared no big thing to him. He had a shallow plastic basket with him, filled with controlled pharmaceuticals, likely knockoffs imported from China. The pills' packaging was not terribly well done. If I hadn't seen with my own eyes how beautiful in substance and spirit this part of the world was once you get away from the places like this, I would have been trying to hold down a bubbling resentment in my heart.
I decided that a joke and some posturing might be the best form of therapy for me and bat repellent for him.
"Buddy, do I look like I need stuff like that to get my game on? You know what I'm saying?" I clenched my fist and held my arm up for him, like an erection. I took off my glasses, winked at him, and smiled.
He did not smile back. He looked blank for a moment, then took out a squat brown vial from his basket.
"You put in lady drink, she fall love with you," he said.
I wasn't sure if the vial contained roofies or hormones. I didn't want to ask. I was beginning to think that men like this were so far gone, or so locked into scraping money into their hands whatever way they could, that even humor was lost on them. Couldn't he see how ridiculous this scenario really was? I tried to give his humanity the benefit of the doubt.
"I've got a lot of problems my friend, but I don't have any problems with that," I said, throwing some swagger into my voice. I grinned at him and turned away and kept walking down the street. He followed me, and tried to show me some wrapped bundles of porn.
"I have plenty at home, man. I don't need it. The Internet already has you out of business," I chided to him as I walked. Then he put his hand on my arm to stop me, and stood closer to me.
"You want girl? Very small, I can get. Little girl, no problem. You like."
A resentment bubbled over, and wiped away my winks and grins. I knocked his hand away and leaned into him.
"I don't want your shit, Ok?"
I turned down the road and kept walking, moving away from that market. Two more bloodsuckers would jerk over to me before I got out of that garish and malaise-stricken block.
The area beyond, though, was not much more pleasant.
I'd emerged onto a desolate street that was covered in dust, lined with trash, splashed with the direct glare of an unrelenting midday sun. The buildings were gray and white and shedding plaster and paint all over the street. I kept walking until I'd rounded a slight bend and the market was nearly out of sight. That was when I saw the church.
It was a pale building with a crimson roof that looked brittle at its seams. It was behind a tall fence of metal and concrete, the iron gate filled with ornate swirls of curled metal, with an ornamental flourish at its top. There was a Christmas tree outside the chapel's red doors, even though it was now February. Two raised boxes covered in Plexiglas outside contained neon lights, giving the bare churchyard a vegas-style kitsch that was badly out of place. In the middle of the churchyard, there was a thick concrete crucifix topped with an oversize crown, draped with a crimson shroud shaped from plaster.
Part of me wanted to go inside, if only for the quiet, and for the guarantee of a place clean from the muck spread around just outside its gate. But a fear lanced out from the part of my brain that I tend to trust; no, it wasn't the fear of dogma, or of the twisted cultish acolytes that might lurk inside. I was afraid that this church, so aptly placed and easily discovered, was a trap. The ever-restrictive government of Myanmar might have set this place up to find out exactly which visitors have tendencies to challenging their brutish inanity, to spread something that could undermine the restrictive tenets of their power.
I couldn't be seen here. I stepped away from the gate and began walking down the street away from the market again. And then I saw her. The steady-eyed Swiss girl.
Her hair was down and it flashed more auburn than blonde in the sunlight. Her shirt was coral pink, sleeveless and cotton. Her bra straps were exposed. She was trudging down the street just past the church, each step seeming belabored by the equivalent of a midget strapped to her back. She must have gone around the market and emerged from a side street ahead of me. I was happy she'd gotten clear of the immigration checkpoint without too much difficulty. From the direction she was walking, it appeared that she had indeed opted for the long haul, and was looking for a place to sleep.
Part of me wanted run up to her and walk with her down these desolate streets, at least until she'd found a place to stay. She would be a slow target if any of the fiendish short caught sight of her, with that pack pressing her to the ground so firmly. From what I'd seen of the character of this city, it was no place for a petite woman with enough cash to sustain herself in a country that had hardly any ATMs to be hiking around alone, obviously with little idea of where exactly she was going. Then again, who was I to inject myself into her adventure? She thought she could take care of herself. If she'd wanted help, she would have asked for it.
I watched her walk until she disappeared around another slight bend in the road. The last thing I saw was a flash of her hair over the top of her pack. I'm sure she'll return to Switzerland in six months or a year with a fabulous story to tell. But I couldn't help imagine an alternate future, one where all Interpol would eventually find after an exhaustive search was that hulking backpack, riddled with bullet holes and floating in a trash-clogged river. She'd gotten curious and come too close to an opium farm.
I turned back toward the market. I was getting hungry, and was willing to again face the bats for a bit of food for myself.
They came at me in a loose cluster and locked on with dull but persistent eyes, numb and unflinching to rejection, unknowing of shame. These were the tuk tuk drivers, pirated video hustlers, scam tour operators, and cigarette peddlers of the Burmese borderland. You come to know their type well in this part of the world. There's a seemingly inexhaustible supply of these mangy men, from every big city to seedy backwater port.
You want movie? Motor bike, cheap cheap. Tuk tuk? Marlboros, sunglass, anything, you want?
I saw them through my smokey lenses and clenched my teeth, squaring my jaw, and felt my chest rise with a long, slow sucking of air. I needed the air. The flurry of dismissals, the roll of rote rebukes I'd steadily distribute among them, would take a lot out of me. I like to be left alone most of the time, unless you just want to talk. If I want something, I will ask for it. If I need help with anything, I will seek it out. But most of the time, I just like to do things for myself.
My preferences are completely incompatible with who these men are and what they want. Their goal is to pressure clueless schmucks unfamiliar with their surroundings into disgorging some of their conscience-burdening, lust-fueling, or shamelessly mad money.
I waded through the knot of short copper-brown men. Their hair was stiff from shampooing with bar soap, and their too-big polyester shirts made them sweatier than necessary. I wasn't desperate yet, but I was fervently looking for an escape. I only need to get away somewhere long enough pass an hour or two, to wait for suspicions to pass and paperwork to process. Then I would turn around and catch a bus back to safe, sunny Chiang Mai, to good food and hot showers, and that sweet, svelte coffee house waitress who's still on my mind.
But before I could even think about getting back, I needed to act, and act fast. The tree-lined road ahead was a crowded strip of gray asphalt paralleled by cracked sidewalks. These sidewalks were a gauntlet of push carts and beggar children and legions more of the hustler sort, their eyes already stonily grinding up at the sight of me. Today, you see, I'd decided to play the part of Joe Tourist. I'd faux-hawked my hair a little more, broke out the cotton khaki shorts, and rolled up the sleeves on my blue linen shirt from Banana Republic. I figured I'd have less trouble at the borders if nobody suspected me as a local, or a foreign drug runner trying to lay low.
But it also painted a big, fat mark my chest, and projected a green dollar-sign halo over my head.
Not that identifying me as a foreigner was hard to do, it's just that lately, I'd been trying to tone down my appearance. I had been perfecting a disguise over the past few weeks, picking up on certain wardrobe cues from the natives, trying to blend in as much as I could for daily operations. I found that my torn up leather sandals were perfect streetwear, accompanied by a generic polo shirt and the Thai-brand Greyhound jeans I'd picked up in Bangkok. Hardly the look of a farmer, but if I shaved, and kept my tan up and parted my hair, people would second-guess me. I am vaguely Asian, after all, though look more East Asian than Thai.
With no way to simply vanish, and the road ahead far too sticky with the nagging men and a few heart-rendingly poor children I didn't feel like feeling sorry for right then, I took the only other option I had: the narrow concrete steps I'd almost sworn off as being too anonymous. They led down from the raised street into the heart of the city's border market. If I'd known what was waiting for me at the bottom, I would have waded through the swamp of little dirty children along the road and given them all of my coins and felt guilty for not doing more.
The stalls of bric-a-brac and animal pelts, fake shoes, pirated movies, and thousands of other tacky items you could find in nearly every marketplace around the region stretched out to an intersection, and kept on going down each of the side streets. I'd stepped not ten steps away from the stairs when the first of the hardcore hustlers approached me. These men were a breed beyond the simple purveyors of scam tours and fake gems that predominantly populated the raised road I'd left behind. These were a different strain, the kind that would commit actual depravity for a dollar. I didn't know where they came from, but like bloodsucking bats hiding unseen in the darkness, they'd drop off their guano-covered cave walls and jerkily fly down when a hot meal came strolling past.
The first man had a simple, determined look on his face when he offered the prescription painkillers and boner pills to me. Selling felony-worthy amounts of drugs in broad daylight appeared no big thing to him. He had a shallow plastic basket with him, filled with controlled pharmaceuticals, likely knockoffs imported from China. The pills' packaging was not terribly well done. If I hadn't seen with my own eyes how beautiful in substance and spirit this part of the world was once you get away from the places like this, I would have been trying to hold down a bubbling resentment in my heart.
I decided that a joke and some posturing might be the best form of therapy for me and bat repellent for him.
"Buddy, do I look like I need stuff like that to get my game on? You know what I'm saying?" I clenched my fist and held my arm up for him, like an erection. I took off my glasses, winked at him, and smiled.
He did not smile back. He looked blank for a moment, then took out a squat brown vial from his basket.
"You put in lady drink, she fall love with you," he said.
I wasn't sure if the vial contained roofies or hormones. I didn't want to ask. I was beginning to think that men like this were so far gone, or so locked into scraping money into their hands whatever way they could, that even humor was lost on them. Couldn't he see how ridiculous this scenario really was? I tried to give his humanity the benefit of the doubt.
"I've got a lot of problems my friend, but I don't have any problems with that," I said, throwing some swagger into my voice. I grinned at him and turned away and kept walking down the street. He followed me, and tried to show me some wrapped bundles of porn.
"I have plenty at home, man. I don't need it. The Internet already has you out of business," I chided to him as I walked. Then he put his hand on my arm to stop me, and stood closer to me.
"You want girl? Very small, I can get. Little girl, no problem. You like."
A resentment bubbled over, and wiped away my winks and grins. I knocked his hand away and leaned into him.
"I don't want your shit, Ok?"
I turned down the road and kept walking, moving away from that market. Two more bloodsuckers would jerk over to me before I got out of that garish and malaise-stricken block.
The area beyond, though, was not much more pleasant.
I'd emerged onto a desolate street that was covered in dust, lined with trash, splashed with the direct glare of an unrelenting midday sun. The buildings were gray and white and shedding plaster and paint all over the street. I kept walking until I'd rounded a slight bend and the market was nearly out of sight. That was when I saw the church.
It was a pale building with a crimson roof that looked brittle at its seams. It was behind a tall fence of metal and concrete, the iron gate filled with ornate swirls of curled metal, with an ornamental flourish at its top. There was a Christmas tree outside the chapel's red doors, even though it was now February. Two raised boxes covered in Plexiglas outside contained neon lights, giving the bare churchyard a vegas-style kitsch that was badly out of place. In the middle of the churchyard, there was a thick concrete crucifix topped with an oversize crown, draped with a crimson shroud shaped from plaster.
Part of me wanted to go inside, if only for the quiet, and for the guarantee of a place clean from the muck spread around just outside its gate. But a fear lanced out from the part of my brain that I tend to trust; no, it wasn't the fear of dogma, or of the twisted cultish acolytes that might lurk inside. I was afraid that this church, so aptly placed and easily discovered, was a trap. The ever-restrictive government of Myanmar might have set this place up to find out exactly which visitors have tendencies to challenging their brutish inanity, to spread something that could undermine the restrictive tenets of their power.
I couldn't be seen here. I stepped away from the gate and began walking down the street away from the market again. And then I saw her. The steady-eyed Swiss girl.
Her hair was down and it flashed more auburn than blonde in the sunlight. Her shirt was coral pink, sleeveless and cotton. Her bra straps were exposed. She was trudging down the street just past the church, each step seeming belabored by the equivalent of a midget strapped to her back. She must have gone around the market and emerged from a side street ahead of me. I was happy she'd gotten clear of the immigration checkpoint without too much difficulty. From the direction she was walking, it appeared that she had indeed opted for the long haul, and was looking for a place to sleep.
Part of me wanted run up to her and walk with her down these desolate streets, at least until she'd found a place to stay. She would be a slow target if any of the fiendish short caught sight of her, with that pack pressing her to the ground so firmly. From what I'd seen of the character of this city, it was no place for a petite woman with enough cash to sustain herself in a country that had hardly any ATMs to be hiking around alone, obviously with little idea of where exactly she was going. Then again, who was I to inject myself into her adventure? She thought she could take care of herself. If she'd wanted help, she would have asked for it.
I watched her walk until she disappeared around another slight bend in the road. The last thing I saw was a flash of her hair over the top of her pack. I'm sure she'll return to Switzerland in six months or a year with a fabulous story to tell. But I couldn't help imagine an alternate future, one where all Interpol would eventually find after an exhaustive search was that hulking backpack, riddled with bullet holes and floating in a trash-clogged river. She'd gotten curious and come too close to an opium farm.
I turned back toward the market. I was getting hungry, and was willing to again face the bats for a bit of food for myself.
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Burma, part 2: Checkpoints
Like a cast of characters from some bizarre off-Broadway experimental, the denizens at the Thai border each made their introductions.
There was the tall and thin Italian man pacing off to the side of the line. His cheeks were shaded with stubble, and his curly hair hung down to his shoulders, held stiff with gobs of styling gel. He had dark and shifty eyes. They shifted to me and I quickly looked away.
There were the two young Belgians, one wearing a New York Yankee's hat, the other, holding his hip with an effeminate bend. They'd earlier left the line to fill out exit forms, and when they came back, the pair decided to cut in front of me. They hovered a bit, then slowly inched in. I saw their intent, and almost said something rude. Instead, I stepped back, and let them merge.
Good karma, I hoped.
"Merci, thanks," said the one with the baseball cap.
They were the French kind of Belgians.
The German woman and the Swiss girl had settled in behind me and remained quiet. The Swiss girl was hunched under the weight of her heavy pack. She was clearly going in for the long haul. Guess you can do that in Myanmar with neutral credentials.
But a few places up in the line, there stood the motherload of what I consider entertainment in this bizarre sideshow of international transit. The man was the ultimate stereotype, the kind of American America has unfortunately gotten a bad name for over the years. He was talking to his Thai girlfriend. She was doting beside him in the line.
"I don't know how long I will be," he said. "You wait here. I will be back later."
His words were overly enunciated, so she could understand. She understood just fine.
The Thai girl arched her back and raised her dark chin toward his face. Her eyes were soft with a sort of coy pleading, cooing something up at him; "no, my big American man, how could you leave me all alone out here?"
She followed that glance with a squeaky, "I going miss you," and rubbed his pink sticky arm.
She was either that naive, which I would bet my passport she wasn't, or she was that good at getting what she wanted out of these big pink hairy farangs.
"Here, sweetheart, go buy yourself something in the market and something to eat," he said, reaching into the little camera bag he had strapped across his chest, pulling out a fat wad of Thai bills.
The Thai girl smiled at him, gently tugged his shirt sleeve, and stepped back to watch him walk through the checkpoint before she'd go back to the market and flirt around until her boyfriend came back from his day trip. As the American waddled ahead, I couldn't help but write down in my notebook just how silly he looked.
"The guy's shorts and t-shirt are soaked through. His bulges are apparent through the fabric, especially around his waist and nipples. His round little face and close-cropped graying hair and bald spot and petite nose look foreign to the way the rest of his body is clothed. A face like that looks out of place unless it's nestled deep into the recesses of a thick suit in a dark room in Boston in wintertime."
I got through the Thai border checkpoint with no problems. The immigration official smiled when I greeted and thanked him in Thai. Too many westerners, it seemed, insisted on not even learning the pleases and thankyous of the places they visit. Or maybe, he was laughing to himself at my pronunciation. I chose to believe the self-righteous of the two possibilities.
I stepped out from the dim tunnel and into the tropical midday sun. The German woman had left the tunnel just ahead of me. Her immigration agent was apparently quicker than mine at passport stamping. It was an awkward walk across that long bridge with her. After that first incident, I was not going to try again at striking up a conversation.
The white concrete bridge stretched out before me, spanning the sad trickle of a river that separated the two countries here. The bridge was more for show than practicality, much higher and longer than it likely needed to be. Even in the rainy season, the little stream below couldn't possibly inundate this much -- or maybe it could, and they were just being careful. Regardless, it was a long walk through no-man's land. The experience was even more unnerving as the bridge appeared wide and sturdy enough to support trucks and tanks, but there wasn't so much as even a car in sight.
Halfway across the bridge, two undernourished children ran toward me and waved their hands. How cute, I thought. I waved back and smiled. They must have been very disappointed. I would later figure out that they were not waving hello, but trying to make a living by performing one of the few jobs they're skilled enough to perform at age 4: usher tourists from the left side of the road to the right; halfway across the bridge, the lanes shifted directions of travel.
The two skinny boys waving at me were like all the other children I'd seen at similar border areas and tourist zones in Phnom Penh and Bangkok; they would find some way, any way, to perform a service, any little thing, to garner just a little bit of money. These children, I though, would grow up to be the hustlers and tuk tuk drivers of this world, not the poor beggars or weary farmhands. They had, at least, initiative and intelligence.
I continued past the children toward the strange conglomeration of wrought iron on the other side. The metal was painted a laundry water blue, and gold letters were drawn onto the arch the iron formed over the barricades: Union of Myanmar.
I passed through the gate, and right away, I knew where to go. Again, a line of sweaty, pale bodies pointed the way. Above them was a sign: Tachilek. Immigration Checkpoint. The sign was attached to a small concrete building. Its windows were heavily shaded, and its facade had a funny shape, like the ridges on an accordion.
By the time I got to the doorway, the line outside had suddenly disappeared. Perhaps the Burmese officials were just re-opening from a lunch break. I found that a curtain shrouded the doorway. I looked left, then right, to be sure this was the right curtain to pull back, and drew the blue sheet to one side and peered into the dim, crowded room beyond.
There were at least a dozen people inside the small space, about as large as your average college dorm room. I remember joking to my roommate freshman year after an anti-gun commercial flashed on our television that the jail cell in the TV spot looked bigger than our room. This is how I felt in that tiny space with all those people.
From the craning necks and tightly clutched passports, the nervous glances and crossed arms, I could tell the crowd inside was about as confused as I was. How the hell does this process work?
Forming an L-shape around the crowd were two long tables, each with three Burmese officials behind them. One table was covered in money and passports and entry permits. The other was laden with two old CRT monitors and hulking inkjet printers.
A Burmese man at the table covered in Thai Baht and U.S. dollars was exchanging money for entry permits. You'd give him $10, or B500, and he'd give you a glossy paper card. Of course, most people here had Baht with them. The Burmese were making a killing off the exchange rate -- B500 is worth about $14.50. Shows their preference for the good 'ole greenback, though.
After you've paid your entry fee, like buying a ticket to some amusement, you shuffle through the knot of smelly bodies to the table with computers. There, you sit down in a battered wooden chair, directly facing the immigration agent, and have your picture taken with a little Web cam. You sit there nervously tapping your feet while the official looks over your passport, copying information onto the entry permit. The permit goes through the printer, which has slender jerry-rigged hoses snaking out into big vials of ink, and your information and photo get printed onto it. You keep this as a receipt -- because after you get handed back the glossy paper, you hand over your passport to an agent of one of the most restrictive governments on the planet. They hang on to it until you come back -- just to be sure you don't go meddling around too much in the business of the Burmese.
When I went to the table to turn in my passport, I saw the Swiss girl there, caught up in some confusion with the man who exchanged the money. Her huge bag had been dragged off into a corner like a passed-out dwarf, and her steady eyes were wavering just a little.
"I don't know how long I will stay," she said. "I may go and come back today, or I may stay longer. I'm not sure. I want to go in and see."
"How long will you stay? Just for shopping?" the Burmese official said. He was a head shorter than she was.
"No, maybe. I don't know," said the Swiss girl. "Do I need to know now?"
This exchange continued on for a few more rounds. The Burmese man's "shop-ing? shop-ing?" ringing somewhere in every one of his sentences.
I didn't hear the rest of the conversation. I handed over my passport, longingly looked at it as it was placed atop a stack of lonely maroon and forest green and dark blue documents just like it, and stepped out through the curtain.
There was the tall and thin Italian man pacing off to the side of the line. His cheeks were shaded with stubble, and his curly hair hung down to his shoulders, held stiff with gobs of styling gel. He had dark and shifty eyes. They shifted to me and I quickly looked away.
There were the two young Belgians, one wearing a New York Yankee's hat, the other, holding his hip with an effeminate bend. They'd earlier left the line to fill out exit forms, and when they came back, the pair decided to cut in front of me. They hovered a bit, then slowly inched in. I saw their intent, and almost said something rude. Instead, I stepped back, and let them merge.
Good karma, I hoped.
"Merci, thanks," said the one with the baseball cap.
They were the French kind of Belgians.
The German woman and the Swiss girl had settled in behind me and remained quiet. The Swiss girl was hunched under the weight of her heavy pack. She was clearly going in for the long haul. Guess you can do that in Myanmar with neutral credentials.
But a few places up in the line, there stood the motherload of what I consider entertainment in this bizarre sideshow of international transit. The man was the ultimate stereotype, the kind of American America has unfortunately gotten a bad name for over the years. He was talking to his Thai girlfriend. She was doting beside him in the line.
"I don't know how long I will be," he said. "You wait here. I will be back later."
His words were overly enunciated, so she could understand. She understood just fine.
The Thai girl arched her back and raised her dark chin toward his face. Her eyes were soft with a sort of coy pleading, cooing something up at him; "no, my big American man, how could you leave me all alone out here?"
She followed that glance with a squeaky, "I going miss you," and rubbed his pink sticky arm.
She was either that naive, which I would bet my passport she wasn't, or she was that good at getting what she wanted out of these big pink hairy farangs.
"Here, sweetheart, go buy yourself something in the market and something to eat," he said, reaching into the little camera bag he had strapped across his chest, pulling out a fat wad of Thai bills.
The Thai girl smiled at him, gently tugged his shirt sleeve, and stepped back to watch him walk through the checkpoint before she'd go back to the market and flirt around until her boyfriend came back from his day trip. As the American waddled ahead, I couldn't help but write down in my notebook just how silly he looked.
"The guy's shorts and t-shirt are soaked through. His bulges are apparent through the fabric, especially around his waist and nipples. His round little face and close-cropped graying hair and bald spot and petite nose look foreign to the way the rest of his body is clothed. A face like that looks out of place unless it's nestled deep into the recesses of a thick suit in a dark room in Boston in wintertime."
I got through the Thai border checkpoint with no problems. The immigration official smiled when I greeted and thanked him in Thai. Too many westerners, it seemed, insisted on not even learning the pleases and thankyous of the places they visit. Or maybe, he was laughing to himself at my pronunciation. I chose to believe the self-righteous of the two possibilities.
I stepped out from the dim tunnel and into the tropical midday sun. The German woman had left the tunnel just ahead of me. Her immigration agent was apparently quicker than mine at passport stamping. It was an awkward walk across that long bridge with her. After that first incident, I was not going to try again at striking up a conversation.
The white concrete bridge stretched out before me, spanning the sad trickle of a river that separated the two countries here. The bridge was more for show than practicality, much higher and longer than it likely needed to be. Even in the rainy season, the little stream below couldn't possibly inundate this much -- or maybe it could, and they were just being careful. Regardless, it was a long walk through no-man's land. The experience was even more unnerving as the bridge appeared wide and sturdy enough to support trucks and tanks, but there wasn't so much as even a car in sight.
Halfway across the bridge, two undernourished children ran toward me and waved their hands. How cute, I thought. I waved back and smiled. They must have been very disappointed. I would later figure out that they were not waving hello, but trying to make a living by performing one of the few jobs they're skilled enough to perform at age 4: usher tourists from the left side of the road to the right; halfway across the bridge, the lanes shifted directions of travel.
The two skinny boys waving at me were like all the other children I'd seen at similar border areas and tourist zones in Phnom Penh and Bangkok; they would find some way, any way, to perform a service, any little thing, to garner just a little bit of money. These children, I though, would grow up to be the hustlers and tuk tuk drivers of this world, not the poor beggars or weary farmhands. They had, at least, initiative and intelligence.
I continued past the children toward the strange conglomeration of wrought iron on the other side. The metal was painted a laundry water blue, and gold letters were drawn onto the arch the iron formed over the barricades: Union of Myanmar.
I passed through the gate, and right away, I knew where to go. Again, a line of sweaty, pale bodies pointed the way. Above them was a sign: Tachilek. Immigration Checkpoint. The sign was attached to a small concrete building. Its windows were heavily shaded, and its facade had a funny shape, like the ridges on an accordion.
By the time I got to the doorway, the line outside had suddenly disappeared. Perhaps the Burmese officials were just re-opening from a lunch break. I found that a curtain shrouded the doorway. I looked left, then right, to be sure this was the right curtain to pull back, and drew the blue sheet to one side and peered into the dim, crowded room beyond.
There were at least a dozen people inside the small space, about as large as your average college dorm room. I remember joking to my roommate freshman year after an anti-gun commercial flashed on our television that the jail cell in the TV spot looked bigger than our room. This is how I felt in that tiny space with all those people.
From the craning necks and tightly clutched passports, the nervous glances and crossed arms, I could tell the crowd inside was about as confused as I was. How the hell does this process work?
Forming an L-shape around the crowd were two long tables, each with three Burmese officials behind them. One table was covered in money and passports and entry permits. The other was laden with two old CRT monitors and hulking inkjet printers.
A Burmese man at the table covered in Thai Baht and U.S. dollars was exchanging money for entry permits. You'd give him $10, or B500, and he'd give you a glossy paper card. Of course, most people here had Baht with them. The Burmese were making a killing off the exchange rate -- B500 is worth about $14.50. Shows their preference for the good 'ole greenback, though.
After you've paid your entry fee, like buying a ticket to some amusement, you shuffle through the knot of smelly bodies to the table with computers. There, you sit down in a battered wooden chair, directly facing the immigration agent, and have your picture taken with a little Web cam. You sit there nervously tapping your feet while the official looks over your passport, copying information onto the entry permit. The permit goes through the printer, which has slender jerry-rigged hoses snaking out into big vials of ink, and your information and photo get printed onto it. You keep this as a receipt -- because after you get handed back the glossy paper, you hand over your passport to an agent of one of the most restrictive governments on the planet. They hang on to it until you come back -- just to be sure you don't go meddling around too much in the business of the Burmese.
When I went to the table to turn in my passport, I saw the Swiss girl there, caught up in some confusion with the man who exchanged the money. Her huge bag had been dragged off into a corner like a passed-out dwarf, and her steady eyes were wavering just a little.
"I don't know how long I will stay," she said. "I may go and come back today, or I may stay longer. I'm not sure. I want to go in and see."
"How long will you stay? Just for shopping?" the Burmese official said. He was a head shorter than she was.
"No, maybe. I don't know," said the Swiss girl. "Do I need to know now?"
This exchange continued on for a few more rounds. The Burmese man's "shop-ing? shop-ing?" ringing somewhere in every one of his sentences.
I didn't hear the rest of the conversation. I handed over my passport, longingly looked at it as it was placed atop a stack of lonely maroon and forest green and dark blue documents just like it, and stepped out through the curtain.
Friday, February 13, 2009
Burma, part 1: Strange Bedfellows on the Way to Myanmar
Seats on planes, trains and buses and all manner of similar transportation are always a roulette game. I remember that very morning, scrawling in my notepad, "dodged bullet dodged bullet dodged bullet" as the old Chinese tourists and lazy looking Thai women and fat Australians shuffled onto the bus and took seats all around me, but lord, somehow, not next to me.
This is how I started my day, just after sunrise, on my first trip into Burma.
I thought I bought a ticket for the cheap bus. Was cheap enough for me, anyway, the cost of the air conditioned ride across the few hundred kilometers from Chiang Mai to Mai Sai. Turns out, though, the stub they gave me put me up in first class. I was shown to a leather seat, and given packaged cookies by a sweet little bus lady with a neckerchief like a flight attendant.
The ride was four hours of falling in and out of sleep, and half-listening to the damn rock music I'd loaded onto my iPod. From the scenery fluttering past outside the window when I blinked into consciousness every now and then, it would have been much more fitting if I'd loaded a bit of Pan-Asian orchestrals with an epic bent for the trip: Almost the whole way, my view was spire-like green mountains, the spine of some snake dragon undulating a sharp-crested sine wave through the countryside. Definitely not the place for the System of a Down or Nine Inch Nails I had. Though the shredding, roaring, grating sounds were fitting at some moments; You see, I'd eventually lost that roulette game.
When the steady-eyed Swiss girl came onto the bus, her blonde hair in a scarf atop her head, I was thinking, "hope this one strikes!" In my notepad, the quickly jotted feeling was, "hit target hit target hit target."
No such luck. Missed me wide, three rows up.
At least I'm not that poor young Thai guy, I thought, stuck next to the earring-wearing drunken Brit who's mumbling all kinds of crazy in between sips of the three Chang beers he's snuck on and stuffed in the magazine holder in front of him.
Then again, maybe I wish I was. This brings me back to the rock music and my run of bad luck at roulette.
The seat-mate who eventually came shuffling up the aisle with his numbered ticket stub was a French Canadian too tall for his frame. Something was just a little off about his face, too. It was too long, and too slack. He was young, but there was something odd about his demeanor, like he was up to something, or smirking for no good reason.
Not ten minutes into the ride, Slackface kept slouching over the line between the two-by-two seats. I was fine, I had the window to sleep on. But he kept slouching over too close to me. One time, he was really out cold, and when he slouched over an inch from my shoulder, I put an elbow right into his ribs. His head bobbed up, and I pretended to sleep, like I'd just unconsciously shifted in my seat and jabbed him. I turned up songs like Spiders and Toxicity loud as I could, hoping the racket would spill out from my earbuds and remind Slackface, wearing his stupid matching khaki pants and jacket, to stay on his side of things. It must have worked. He eventually started slouching off into the aisle.
Just before noon, the big green bus pulls into an eerily empty bus station. This is the main transport hub of the northernmost city in Thailand, Mai Sai. It's the gateway to Burma, and a quick and easy outlet for most expats anywhere near Chiang Mai to go for a visa run. Through the giant polarized glass windows, I saw the red taxi trucks waiting. So did everyone else. A dozen nervous eyes glance around the bus.
Those the things supposed to take us to the border? Nothing to see or do out here but the border; must be, right?
Nobody, of course, said anything. Too many languages, too many strangers. I think it's one of the most awkward things. Somebody can at least show a little expression, like revealing how happy they are to be out from under those plastic-smelling air conditioning nozzles on the bus. I know I sure as hell am. But I keep my thoughts to myself for the time being. Not sure how much longer I can hold them in, though.
Everyone files out onto the tarmac. The sweet little attendant bows and in a tiny voice, much younger sounding than she actually is, thanks us for riding.
No, little sweet lady who gave me two packs of cookies, thank you.
Like a bunch of deaf-mutes dumped onto a runway, all with a collective notion to get to the same place, most of the passengers amble toward the cluster of waiting red taxi trucks. Everyone seems to slow their pace, to see what everyone else will do. The trajectory remains constant as the passengers heft their duffles and backpacks and plastic 7-11 bags -- a metered approach, a cluster of folks who don't want to seem too nervous or too eager. When they make it to the taxi trucks, not a soul asks the driver a thing. Like little dogs who know an open car door means a gateway to somewhere other than here, everyone just piles into the backs of the waiting vehicles. The passengers fill two and a half of the little red Mazda pickups that have a canopy over the bed and benches set up so people can sit. It's at least 12 people per truck. I follow suit, and climb in the second one in the line. Ooh, steady-eyed Swiss miss sits next to me. I help her lug her unbelievably heavy backpack into the truck bed. She smiles a little, and just nods.
What is it with all these people and not talking?
So far, nobody has said a word. Half the truck is westerners, too. I know they can all speak English, even if it's just a bit. They wouldn't be out here if they couldn't.
The truck starts up when it's got bodies crammed in so tight arms and legs are sticking out the windows and open back. It begins trundling north on the same highway the bus turned off from. I can see the signs: border, 4 kilometers. Almost there. I try to look cool and calm, letting my blue linen shirt open and billow in the wind, adjusting my shades close against my nose, hiding my eyes as they flash around, scanning every sign and building in the world outside the truck, and trying to read every face I could see on the inside.
The silence finally gets to me after one of the Thai passengers wordlessly gets off the truck outside of a squat old townhouse. When the truck starts moving again, I brace myself, then blurt: "So, who's excited to go to Burma today?" My comment was mostly directed toward a sturdy looking European woman across from me. She seemed like she'd be a willing participant, humoring this young American in his real Ray-Ban shades. She sort of just looked out the window across from her, giving me only a half-glance.
I know they all heard me. You could've heard the sweating, bald, scrunched pedophile-looking guy buried at the far end of the bench fart through the kind of silence that was sulking around back of that truck.
Damn, what's with these people!
I look around the little truck for help, like I'd just jumped into the center of a crowded room and yelled, "anyone having a good day?" and everyone just keeps milling about like I hadn't said a thing. A second, then another passes. In desperation, I turn to the Swiss girl. I knew she was Swiss because earlier I'd seen her bright red passport. She looked at me through my smokey lenses. "Yes, I'm pretty curious," she says quietly, her accent lovely as her steady eyes. I could tell she was consoling me, though, like I'd made a mistake and she'd felt bad.
Damn, what's with these people...
Can't have even a little friendly conversation with your fellow travelers? Guess everyone's got some super secret private business on the border they've all got to keep close to them, so clandestine even a mumble might reveal too much. For once, I wish there was a ruckus of young Australian guys around. The stereotype I've yet to see disproven: a hyperactive scrum of loud, obnoxious and rude ruffians, never too far from a couple 1-liter beer bottles. I'd prefer their kind of embarrassing tit-grabbing and poon joking over the sort of aloof quiet that weighed down on this little truck like something's amiss.
Two painfully wordless minutes later, the truck pulls up to the end of the road. Literally, this was the end of the road. It stopped at a huge arch with the immigration checkpoint nestled underneath. The area before the gate was as alive a place I'd seen since I'd left the bus station in Chiang Mai.
It was like most border markets, with shops set into the ground floor of row houses along the crowded sidewalks, vendors selling everything from plastic Hello Kitty hairpins to fried meal worms, pots and pans, fake watches, cheap clothes, lottery tickets and TV sets from Japan and Korea. I get out from the truck, heft by small backpack, and begin walking the 100 meters to the border checkpoint. I can't decide whether to hurry ahead of the other passengers, hang back, or casually match pace with them. I decide to push ahead. Though the Swiss girl and the European woman, who I determine to be German from a brief exchange in German she had with the Swiss girl, walk fast too. They were hot on my heels as I walked up the little concrete slope to the steps of the border station.
On approach, I could tell this would be one of the more interesting border crossings. I saw the usual signs above the metal corrals: Foreigner. Thai. Day Pass Holder. The day pass line, of course, meant the despised Burmese migrant workers who came across every day to do the work Americans give to their Mexicans. Though it wasn't the Day Pass line that caught my interest. It was the foreigner line. It looked like a fleshy pink herd made up of flip flops, tacky T-shirts, knockoff North Face and Puma athletic gear, bad suntans, and the sad little dreams of middle-aged white men hoping to make up for everything they lacked in the real world by buying their way to faux dominance in the faux wilds of Southeast Asia.
To be continued...
This is how I started my day, just after sunrise, on my first trip into Burma.
I thought I bought a ticket for the cheap bus. Was cheap enough for me, anyway, the cost of the air conditioned ride across the few hundred kilometers from Chiang Mai to Mai Sai. Turns out, though, the stub they gave me put me up in first class. I was shown to a leather seat, and given packaged cookies by a sweet little bus lady with a neckerchief like a flight attendant.
The ride was four hours of falling in and out of sleep, and half-listening to the damn rock music I'd loaded onto my iPod. From the scenery fluttering past outside the window when I blinked into consciousness every now and then, it would have been much more fitting if I'd loaded a bit of Pan-Asian orchestrals with an epic bent for the trip: Almost the whole way, my view was spire-like green mountains, the spine of some snake dragon undulating a sharp-crested sine wave through the countryside. Definitely not the place for the System of a Down or Nine Inch Nails I had. Though the shredding, roaring, grating sounds were fitting at some moments; You see, I'd eventually lost that roulette game.
When the steady-eyed Swiss girl came onto the bus, her blonde hair in a scarf atop her head, I was thinking, "hope this one strikes!" In my notepad, the quickly jotted feeling was, "hit target hit target hit target."
No such luck. Missed me wide, three rows up.
At least I'm not that poor young Thai guy, I thought, stuck next to the earring-wearing drunken Brit who's mumbling all kinds of crazy in between sips of the three Chang beers he's snuck on and stuffed in the magazine holder in front of him.
Then again, maybe I wish I was. This brings me back to the rock music and my run of bad luck at roulette.
The seat-mate who eventually came shuffling up the aisle with his numbered ticket stub was a French Canadian too tall for his frame. Something was just a little off about his face, too. It was too long, and too slack. He was young, but there was something odd about his demeanor, like he was up to something, or smirking for no good reason.
Not ten minutes into the ride, Slackface kept slouching over the line between the two-by-two seats. I was fine, I had the window to sleep on. But he kept slouching over too close to me. One time, he was really out cold, and when he slouched over an inch from my shoulder, I put an elbow right into his ribs. His head bobbed up, and I pretended to sleep, like I'd just unconsciously shifted in my seat and jabbed him. I turned up songs like Spiders and Toxicity loud as I could, hoping the racket would spill out from my earbuds and remind Slackface, wearing his stupid matching khaki pants and jacket, to stay on his side of things. It must have worked. He eventually started slouching off into the aisle.
Just before noon, the big green bus pulls into an eerily empty bus station. This is the main transport hub of the northernmost city in Thailand, Mai Sai. It's the gateway to Burma, and a quick and easy outlet for most expats anywhere near Chiang Mai to go for a visa run. Through the giant polarized glass windows, I saw the red taxi trucks waiting. So did everyone else. A dozen nervous eyes glance around the bus.
Those the things supposed to take us to the border? Nothing to see or do out here but the border; must be, right?
Nobody, of course, said anything. Too many languages, too many strangers. I think it's one of the most awkward things. Somebody can at least show a little expression, like revealing how happy they are to be out from under those plastic-smelling air conditioning nozzles on the bus. I know I sure as hell am. But I keep my thoughts to myself for the time being. Not sure how much longer I can hold them in, though.
Everyone files out onto the tarmac. The sweet little attendant bows and in a tiny voice, much younger sounding than she actually is, thanks us for riding.
No, little sweet lady who gave me two packs of cookies, thank you.
Like a bunch of deaf-mutes dumped onto a runway, all with a collective notion to get to the same place, most of the passengers amble toward the cluster of waiting red taxi trucks. Everyone seems to slow their pace, to see what everyone else will do. The trajectory remains constant as the passengers heft their duffles and backpacks and plastic 7-11 bags -- a metered approach, a cluster of folks who don't want to seem too nervous or too eager. When they make it to the taxi trucks, not a soul asks the driver a thing. Like little dogs who know an open car door means a gateway to somewhere other than here, everyone just piles into the backs of the waiting vehicles. The passengers fill two and a half of the little red Mazda pickups that have a canopy over the bed and benches set up so people can sit. It's at least 12 people per truck. I follow suit, and climb in the second one in the line. Ooh, steady-eyed Swiss miss sits next to me. I help her lug her unbelievably heavy backpack into the truck bed. She smiles a little, and just nods.
What is it with all these people and not talking?
So far, nobody has said a word. Half the truck is westerners, too. I know they can all speak English, even if it's just a bit. They wouldn't be out here if they couldn't.
The truck starts up when it's got bodies crammed in so tight arms and legs are sticking out the windows and open back. It begins trundling north on the same highway the bus turned off from. I can see the signs: border, 4 kilometers. Almost there. I try to look cool and calm, letting my blue linen shirt open and billow in the wind, adjusting my shades close against my nose, hiding my eyes as they flash around, scanning every sign and building in the world outside the truck, and trying to read every face I could see on the inside.
The silence finally gets to me after one of the Thai passengers wordlessly gets off the truck outside of a squat old townhouse. When the truck starts moving again, I brace myself, then blurt: "So, who's excited to go to Burma today?" My comment was mostly directed toward a sturdy looking European woman across from me. She seemed like she'd be a willing participant, humoring this young American in his real Ray-Ban shades. She sort of just looked out the window across from her, giving me only a half-glance.
I know they all heard me. You could've heard the sweating, bald, scrunched pedophile-looking guy buried at the far end of the bench fart through the kind of silence that was sulking around back of that truck.
Damn, what's with these people!
I look around the little truck for help, like I'd just jumped into the center of a crowded room and yelled, "anyone having a good day?" and everyone just keeps milling about like I hadn't said a thing. A second, then another passes. In desperation, I turn to the Swiss girl. I knew she was Swiss because earlier I'd seen her bright red passport. She looked at me through my smokey lenses. "Yes, I'm pretty curious," she says quietly, her accent lovely as her steady eyes. I could tell she was consoling me, though, like I'd made a mistake and she'd felt bad.
Damn, what's with these people...
Can't have even a little friendly conversation with your fellow travelers? Guess everyone's got some super secret private business on the border they've all got to keep close to them, so clandestine even a mumble might reveal too much. For once, I wish there was a ruckus of young Australian guys around. The stereotype I've yet to see disproven: a hyperactive scrum of loud, obnoxious and rude ruffians, never too far from a couple 1-liter beer bottles. I'd prefer their kind of embarrassing tit-grabbing and poon joking over the sort of aloof quiet that weighed down on this little truck like something's amiss.
Two painfully wordless minutes later, the truck pulls up to the end of the road. Literally, this was the end of the road. It stopped at a huge arch with the immigration checkpoint nestled underneath. The area before the gate was as alive a place I'd seen since I'd left the bus station in Chiang Mai.
It was like most border markets, with shops set into the ground floor of row houses along the crowded sidewalks, vendors selling everything from plastic Hello Kitty hairpins to fried meal worms, pots and pans, fake watches, cheap clothes, lottery tickets and TV sets from Japan and Korea. I get out from the truck, heft by small backpack, and begin walking the 100 meters to the border checkpoint. I can't decide whether to hurry ahead of the other passengers, hang back, or casually match pace with them. I decide to push ahead. Though the Swiss girl and the European woman, who I determine to be German from a brief exchange in German she had with the Swiss girl, walk fast too. They were hot on my heels as I walked up the little concrete slope to the steps of the border station.
On approach, I could tell this would be one of the more interesting border crossings. I saw the usual signs above the metal corrals: Foreigner. Thai. Day Pass Holder. The day pass line, of course, meant the despised Burmese migrant workers who came across every day to do the work Americans give to their Mexicans. Though it wasn't the Day Pass line that caught my interest. It was the foreigner line. It looked like a fleshy pink herd made up of flip flops, tacky T-shirts, knockoff North Face and Puma athletic gear, bad suntans, and the sad little dreams of middle-aged white men hoping to make up for everything they lacked in the real world by buying their way to faux dominance in the faux wilds of Southeast Asia.
To be continued...
Sunday, February 1, 2009
Entering the Terminal
December 26, 2008:
Embossed badges set upon crisp blue suits. I can see them now as I approach the maze of nylon zip-queues and metal detectors.
The glint and sheer mass of those badges is mind-blowing. I can make out the chunky etches and symbols from halfway across the terminal. I wonder how much design work, hours of minting muscle, went into forging those glistening bits of metallurgic officiousness.
I approach closer, hefting my things. I can read the writing on the walls.
Thank you for participating in security.
How polite. The little signs are everywhere. But there's something about the font that makes me uneasy.
I pause, and look around. I notice how everyone else who came off the tram is quickly moving toward the badges and the maze. The old people waddling toward the labyrinth seem trustworthy, but are they too trusting? Then I see a pretty girl walk through the opening. Assured of their sincerity now, I enter.
It took just a moment inside to realize: Wrong move. I always trust the pretty ones too much.
I crossed an invisible line. It's transforming. I feel more like a cow than a rat. See, I expected to be a rat; rodent mazes at least let you run around until you find your way out. But a bovine?
This is bad.
Then I realize why I felt like a herd-minded heifer; this is no maze, it's el enciero. I've been deep in one of these before. The cows go in one way and can't turn around. They're pointed, then prodded to stampede out the other end. And there's always bad stuff at the other end.
But it was too late. I'm already inside. I clutch my bags and go with the herd.
I shuffle forward every minute or so, inching ever closer to the badges and their machines. They looked so shiny and friendly from afar. But now I can see the details, the procedure. I know what they intend to do. Those machines intend to zap me, scan me, and check to see if I'm a threat. I learned a long time ago badges aren't your friends like Mr. Rodgers told me so. I guess lessons require repetition to take.
Still inching forward, I have a moment to let their institutional insinuations sink in. Really, me, a threat? I'm flattered, but really? I just want to get to the other side! It's a little offensive, actually. No wonder they're trying to be so nice. I'll take a lesson away from this if I make it out: Never trust polite messages in blocky sans-serif.
I seethe a bit during the final few steps until finally, my date with destiny arrives. I stand on the line at the other end of the corral. I can see all the machinery now, and just how many badges are swarming around, white-gloved and waiting.
First, there's the maw. A chunky steel cave that swallows your shoes and anything that emits even an iota of EMP. Its long black carpet invites your belongings to lay down, then pulls them inside through a dark canvass curtain. The maw is a bit of a voyeur, too. It peers inside your cases and computers. It makes you take off your shoes and belt. The later of which causes your pants to come down.
Then there's the tall rectangular archway. They make you step through it, and like the Presbyters' elect or Rawlings' sorting hat, you're beeped, or pardoned. If you're beeped, you get the wand. If you fail the wand, they take you away to a room someplace hidden. But I won't try to think about that.
And finally, planted there like racks of knives and pliers and corkscrews strategically placed for maximum visibility in the cold stone space of some inquisition chamber, are the specialty tools. The whirlwind chamber and the x-ray cylinder. They sniff your flesh for bomb smells. They scan under your clothes, revealing every mole and curve, to find shivs duct taped to thighs, or garrotes strapped under breasts. They're shiny and cold, and exude the kind of impending violation that can extract truth without actually being used.
I say a non-denominational prayer before I step across. They're just tools. I need to remember that. Metal detectors, not bad guy detectors. They can smell your chemicals, not your fear. Or can they? If dogs can do it, why can't a million-dollar truck-sized tube?
No time to wonder. It's my turn. I take off my belt and hold up my pants. I put in my flip flops, and barefooted, step through the arch.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.
Oh. No.
A young woman leaps at me with a wand. It's black and yellow, like some electrified initiation paddle. She's one of the badges with a vest. The vests under the big badges look elite, and perhaps even more official. I think she might have a beret tucked in a pocket somewhere.
I freeze until the beeps subside. But instead of panic, I feel calm. I feel cool. I'm smarter than the badges. I'm more human than the machines. I'll find a way.
The first thing I do is spread 'em before she even asks. I've beeped. I need to be extremely careful from this point forward. If I mess up, they might actually use one of the special tools -- or worse, take me to the hidden room.
She wastes no time. I'm wanded under the arms. Over my legs. Across my crotch. I can't feel a thing, but I know the tendrils of electromagnetism are sparking over me, clawing through my dermis. This could be bad.
"Could you go back through, sir?" she says.
Her voice surprised me. She actually sounded a little sweet. I might even be a couple months older than she is, from the taught pale skin of her face, the only flesh visible through the vest and gloves. Could be all a ruse, though -- or, could be she's just a girl behind all that security spectacle and pomp. No time to ponder. I've got to act. I decide it's worth the gamble: Charming. I've got it. Be charming.
I look at her, right in the eye, and a little smirk sneaks across my lips.
"Wonder what it could be?" I say.
She stares back, unmoved, like every strand of dirty blonde hair on her head tucked back into a perfect and tight bun. I should have paid more attention. That bun looks too good. I need to up the ante. I pat myself down more elaborately than I need to. I try to think, though, what the cause of the beep could be, other than of course a very typical machine malfunction? Maybe it's the rivets in my jeans. Or maybe. Oh damn. I have 10 quarters in my back pocket.
"Maybe it's my money," I say.
I stick my hand into my back pocket, fish around, hear the jangle, and pull out all $2.50 in silver Washingtons. It makes no fiscal sense. I could have always deposited these quarters in the bank, or just used them when I got back. But no. Before I left, I took all the quarters from my cupholder. These silver bits would be my bonus cash, maybe a pack of gum or half a newspaper. We all know airport dollars are not the same as real dollars.
I step back behind the arch. There was a smiling and easygoing black man there. He'd appeared out of nowhere. Didn't surprise me, though. The badges are everywhere, and they come and go as they please between arches and maws and sniffer chambers. He looked friendly, too, though. Could they all be such good actors? He held out a gray disk-shaped bowl made from soft plastic. I placed my fist over the receptical, clenched around the quarters, and opened my palm.
CA-CHING.
It was a satisfying noise born from a moment of silence. The black man and the security girl where looking at me. They were smirking a little now, too. Badges think barefooted young men with pants coming down and an inordinate amount of quarters are funny? Sure. I'll go with it. I'll be a funny cow. Maybe this comedy routine would be my ticket out.
It was.
"That'll do it," the black man said. He put my coins onto the maw's tongue, and the machine swallowed them.
I walked through the arch again, did not beep, smiled at the security girl, but didn't linger too long, and went to collect my things from the bowels of the maw, a long stretch of moving black carpet on the other side of the arch. Like a wanton woman after a shameful encounter, I collected my things, and in full view of the swarming, bustling maze with all its cows and badges and discrete little glass eyes, I pulled up my pants, put on my shoes, and entered the airport terminal.
Through! By jobe, I was through! The cow has emerged from el enciero alive!
I walked straight to the washroom. I needed to check for damage before dealing with the waiting. And lord, even worse, the flight attendants.
Embossed badges set upon crisp blue suits. I can see them now as I approach the maze of nylon zip-queues and metal detectors.
The glint and sheer mass of those badges is mind-blowing. I can make out the chunky etches and symbols from halfway across the terminal. I wonder how much design work, hours of minting muscle, went into forging those glistening bits of metallurgic officiousness.
I approach closer, hefting my things. I can read the writing on the walls.
Thank you for participating in security.
How polite. The little signs are everywhere. But there's something about the font that makes me uneasy.
I pause, and look around. I notice how everyone else who came off the tram is quickly moving toward the badges and the maze. The old people waddling toward the labyrinth seem trustworthy, but are they too trusting? Then I see a pretty girl walk through the opening. Assured of their sincerity now, I enter.
It took just a moment inside to realize: Wrong move. I always trust the pretty ones too much.
I crossed an invisible line. It's transforming. I feel more like a cow than a rat. See, I expected to be a rat; rodent mazes at least let you run around until you find your way out. But a bovine?
This is bad.
Then I realize why I felt like a herd-minded heifer; this is no maze, it's el enciero. I've been deep in one of these before. The cows go in one way and can't turn around. They're pointed, then prodded to stampede out the other end. And there's always bad stuff at the other end.
But it was too late. I'm already inside. I clutch my bags and go with the herd.
I shuffle forward every minute or so, inching ever closer to the badges and their machines. They looked so shiny and friendly from afar. But now I can see the details, the procedure. I know what they intend to do. Those machines intend to zap me, scan me, and check to see if I'm a threat. I learned a long time ago badges aren't your friends like Mr. Rodgers told me so. I guess lessons require repetition to take.
Still inching forward, I have a moment to let their institutional insinuations sink in. Really, me, a threat? I'm flattered, but really? I just want to get to the other side! It's a little offensive, actually. No wonder they're trying to be so nice. I'll take a lesson away from this if I make it out: Never trust polite messages in blocky sans-serif.
I seethe a bit during the final few steps until finally, my date with destiny arrives. I stand on the line at the other end of the corral. I can see all the machinery now, and just how many badges are swarming around, white-gloved and waiting.
First, there's the maw. A chunky steel cave that swallows your shoes and anything that emits even an iota of EMP. Its long black carpet invites your belongings to lay down, then pulls them inside through a dark canvass curtain. The maw is a bit of a voyeur, too. It peers inside your cases and computers. It makes you take off your shoes and belt. The later of which causes your pants to come down.
Then there's the tall rectangular archway. They make you step through it, and like the Presbyters' elect or Rawlings' sorting hat, you're beeped, or pardoned. If you're beeped, you get the wand. If you fail the wand, they take you away to a room someplace hidden. But I won't try to think about that.
And finally, planted there like racks of knives and pliers and corkscrews strategically placed for maximum visibility in the cold stone space of some inquisition chamber, are the specialty tools. The whirlwind chamber and the x-ray cylinder. They sniff your flesh for bomb smells. They scan under your clothes, revealing every mole and curve, to find shivs duct taped to thighs, or garrotes strapped under breasts. They're shiny and cold, and exude the kind of impending violation that can extract truth without actually being used.
I say a non-denominational prayer before I step across. They're just tools. I need to remember that. Metal detectors, not bad guy detectors. They can smell your chemicals, not your fear. Or can they? If dogs can do it, why can't a million-dollar truck-sized tube?
No time to wonder. It's my turn. I take off my belt and hold up my pants. I put in my flip flops, and barefooted, step through the arch.
BEEP BEEP BEEP BEEP.
Oh. No.
A young woman leaps at me with a wand. It's black and yellow, like some electrified initiation paddle. She's one of the badges with a vest. The vests under the big badges look elite, and perhaps even more official. I think she might have a beret tucked in a pocket somewhere.
I freeze until the beeps subside. But instead of panic, I feel calm. I feel cool. I'm smarter than the badges. I'm more human than the machines. I'll find a way.
The first thing I do is spread 'em before she even asks. I've beeped. I need to be extremely careful from this point forward. If I mess up, they might actually use one of the special tools -- or worse, take me to the hidden room.
She wastes no time. I'm wanded under the arms. Over my legs. Across my crotch. I can't feel a thing, but I know the tendrils of electromagnetism are sparking over me, clawing through my dermis. This could be bad.
"Could you go back through, sir?" she says.
Her voice surprised me. She actually sounded a little sweet. I might even be a couple months older than she is, from the taught pale skin of her face, the only flesh visible through the vest and gloves. Could be all a ruse, though -- or, could be she's just a girl behind all that security spectacle and pomp. No time to ponder. I've got to act. I decide it's worth the gamble: Charming. I've got it. Be charming.
I look at her, right in the eye, and a little smirk sneaks across my lips.
"Wonder what it could be?" I say.
She stares back, unmoved, like every strand of dirty blonde hair on her head tucked back into a perfect and tight bun. I should have paid more attention. That bun looks too good. I need to up the ante. I pat myself down more elaborately than I need to. I try to think, though, what the cause of the beep could be, other than of course a very typical machine malfunction? Maybe it's the rivets in my jeans. Or maybe. Oh damn. I have 10 quarters in my back pocket.
"Maybe it's my money," I say.
I stick my hand into my back pocket, fish around, hear the jangle, and pull out all $2.50 in silver Washingtons. It makes no fiscal sense. I could have always deposited these quarters in the bank, or just used them when I got back. But no. Before I left, I took all the quarters from my cupholder. These silver bits would be my bonus cash, maybe a pack of gum or half a newspaper. We all know airport dollars are not the same as real dollars.
I step back behind the arch. There was a smiling and easygoing black man there. He'd appeared out of nowhere. Didn't surprise me, though. The badges are everywhere, and they come and go as they please between arches and maws and sniffer chambers. He looked friendly, too, though. Could they all be such good actors? He held out a gray disk-shaped bowl made from soft plastic. I placed my fist over the receptical, clenched around the quarters, and opened my palm.
CA-CHING.
It was a satisfying noise born from a moment of silence. The black man and the security girl where looking at me. They were smirking a little now, too. Badges think barefooted young men with pants coming down and an inordinate amount of quarters are funny? Sure. I'll go with it. I'll be a funny cow. Maybe this comedy routine would be my ticket out.
It was.
"That'll do it," the black man said. He put my coins onto the maw's tongue, and the machine swallowed them.
I walked through the arch again, did not beep, smiled at the security girl, but didn't linger too long, and went to collect my things from the bowels of the maw, a long stretch of moving black carpet on the other side of the arch. Like a wanton woman after a shameful encounter, I collected my things, and in full view of the swarming, bustling maze with all its cows and badges and discrete little glass eyes, I pulled up my pants, put on my shoes, and entered the airport terminal.
Through! By jobe, I was through! The cow has emerged from el enciero alive!
I walked straight to the washroom. I needed to check for damage before dealing with the waiting. And lord, even worse, the flight attendants.
Thursday, January 29, 2009
From tractor to 'Benz, farm house to town house
The day begins with another rooster wake-up. Contrary to what a lot of people think, these cocky birds don't just crow at daybreak, but let out those rise-and-shine chicken calls in the middle of the night, or whenever else they feel like it. Earlier this morning, I got an earful of crow around 1 a.m.
I roll over on the thin straw-filled mat surrounded by bright pink mosquito netting. This section of the one-room farmhouse is the girls' bedroom. Two usually share the homemade bed here, a third sleeps out on the porch. Western guests like me have never visited this little farm before; the whole family, seven people who share this house, insisted we take the beds. The first few nights here, I tried to sleep out by the pond in my hammock; I got one night in before they took down my hammock while I was out for the day and persisted in offering the bed. So, I obliged, while they all slept out on the porch, cuddled together under thick blankets to fend off the chilly breeze that sweeps in at night from the hills.
I sit up slowly in the bed. My throat is sore. I've been sick for the past couple days; nothing too unexpected, especially since I've been tromping around the Cambodian countryside and downing whatever food was put in front of me with impunity for the past three weeks. My fatigue at the end of every day out interviewing also drove the ever-hospitable farmers to insist that I take the bed. I open the plastic bottle of aspirin I have left over from when I hit my face on the bottom of a swimming pool in Florida this summer. I chew the last two tablets, push aside the sheet that separates the girls' area from the main house, and step into the room. The space would be large -- if it were just a bedroom. But it also takes the place of a playroom, living room, and the parents' bedroom. The tiny color television is connected to a little cluster of exposed wires strung through the roof and down the long dirt driveway to the main road. Tucked into the corner is the parents' bed, shrouded in mosquito netting. Even with the wooden shutters closed, bugs permeate this stilted house. The windows are simply squares cut out from the untreated clapboards, with no glass. The corrugated steel roof sends skittering sounds into the house at night, as mice and foot-long geckos scurry and squeak between the beams and dark spaces.
Shirtless, I step outside through the open doorway. It's still cold here, by subtropical standards. I tense my body as the chill hits. The noises of the morning greet me. The faraway thrum of rice trucks and motorcycles. Chickens clucking and rooting. Cows penned up and mooing to be let out to eat. I descend the rickety wooden steps. I can feel my weight shake the whole house. I look now across the area under the house's stilts, which doubles as a garage and dining room. The mom is busy in the kitchen, preparing breakfast. Rice porridge, with some vegetables. I hurry to the bathroom. I open the rough wooden door and step inside the small shack. A waist-high concrete basin is filled with water. A ladle floats inside. This is the shower. I am in no mood for a chilly shower today. In the middle of the tiled floor, next to the basin, is a porcelain-coated hole in the ground. This is the toilet. Since I've been sick, an ailment that includes unpredictable diarrhea, I'd stashed a roll of toilet paper in here. Most Cambodians just ladle themselves clean. I wasn't looking forward to the squatting, but I got down to business. People take their bathroom thrones for granted.
I step out to eat breakfast. But before I can make my way to the table, one of the young sons approaches me holding up a large black kettle. He made a fire and boiled water for me. Out here, this was a hot shower. They don't often take hot showers. He didn't need to push this bit of hospitality on me one bit. Au kun. I take the kettle back to the shed and ladle myself a steamy bath.
After breakfast, plain porridge from chipped old bowls, we head out for an interview with an old mechanic who was my uncle's teacher during the Khmer Rouge days -- before they sent everyone from the city to the farms. After an hour in his greasy living room, where old van benches are the furniture, we drive a half hour across scrambly dirt roads to get an Internet connection. At the Internet place, I meet a Peace Corps. volunteer. He's been here for 7 months. He'll soon be taking his first vacation -- to Thailand -- and is wondering how he'll manage another year working here in this backwater province. He's a brave soul. I am already having cheeseburger dreams.
Little did I know, they would soon come true.
My uncle was growing increasingly frustrated with the computer in front of him. He has a business back in the U.S. to run, but no way to run it from here. The manager of his business in California had just been stricken with a bad stroke. The other employees don't know how to handle everything alone. And my uncle can't access his accounts remotely. Out here, even an American bank's Web site takes 20 minutes just to load its main page. Forget getting through a secure login and funds transfer.
It is a tough call, but have had to do it. We will cut the first jaunt into Cambodia short by three days. We need to go to civilization. We need the Internet.
***
Through the canyon of seedy casinos, across the garbage-choked stream, through the throngs of rag-clothed beggar children, and we are away from Poi Pet and into Aranyaprathet. It is like stepping from one world into the next. The differences between a Thai and Cambodian border town are striking. The roads are paved. The police aren't sneering so eagerly for bribes. Air conditioned banks, with rows of ATMs, greet you on the way in. The chaos of even the border market seems more ordered.
We walk to the storefront of a relative, Jek U. He's made a fortune wholeselling pharmacy products and cosmetics. His business is basically the CVS for this half of the province. There is still no Tesco in Aran. In his office, which has no fewer than three computers, we are able to get online in an instant. High-speed internet. My god. After weeks in Cambodia, where even sending an e-mail is a labor in its demand of patience and a test in its prodding of frustrating, the big LCD monitor and instantly displaying GMail screen causes a wave of serenity to wash over me. It's like getting high after way too long being dry. The Internet is truly a precious resource. I go on a binge of e-mailing and facebooking, partaking in an orgy of message replies and news catch-up.
Jek U's wife, a sweet old woman who treats me like a grandson, comes over with a tray. She set it down. There are chips and chocolates, and a tin filled with those Pepperage Farm Pirouette cookies. I ate half the tin. I'd probably lost a pound or two eating only fish and rice and noodles with little slivers of chicken and pork during my time in Cambodia. I probably gained them all back on the spot.
It was time to go. We would stay at Jek U's son's house for the night. Tee is a nice guy, with a penchant for travel and the nicities of western life. He pulls up in his brand-new Mercedes Benz C200. I bet it's the only one like it in the province. German imports with suspension tuned taught as that little 'Benz aren't too common outside the big cities in Thailand. We get in. The leather seat cups my body. Tee turns up the stereo. Linkin Park blasts from a glorious surround system. He's been a fan ever since the Road to Revolution tour stopped by Bangkok. Despite a yearly wage of only a couple thousand bucks for millions of Thais, plenty urbanites have the cash to pay full price to see the A-list of American pop artists. Last time I was in Thailand, the Black Eyed Peas were performing here to sold-out crowds.
We arrive at the building -- the whole building -- the family owns. It's 5 stories tall, and on every floor, lushly appointed. The ground level sports fine wood cabinets and a floor that looks like some kind of polished marble. And then, for four floors all the way up to the roof, every bit of underfoot space is clad in planks of rare wood brought down from the mountains of Chiang Mai. The sumptuous floors feel solid underfoot, each step I take on them resonating with a satisfying thump. This was indeed fine wood. Its reddish-brown warmth rises up, making the walls -- papered with thick dressings with real flowers pressed into the sheets -- seem even more inviting. After the second floor, a clear dragon motif begins to materialize. Tiny glass dragons, with associations to ducks and water in their color and form, are hung up, a flock of them skimming a far wall. Another wall sports a long painting of a similar dragon rising over a lake. There is a second kitchen, with granite counter tops and a balcony, on the fourth floor.
I am shown my bedroom. The maid had just straightened up. Other than the extra rooms for nephews and guests' kids to play in, there are two guest rooms with beds so big and soft, they'd be at home in any hotel. The custom cabinets inside, though, are empty. The lavishly patterned bedsheets are still stiff and crisp. Nobody has ever slept in this bed before.
After I put my luggage down, I set up my laptop. My god. Linksys. I am getting a signal from across the street.
Then, I go to the bathroom. Hot water. And a tall, flushable throne -- with one of those rounded comfort seats. As much as I love getting nuzzled by cows, breathing in road dust and roughing it in the woods, in the recovering state I am in, the sight is as lovely as the last sunset I'd seen over the rice fields.
Dinner was delivered from a nearby restaurant. The dirty dishes were taken away just the same.
I fall asleep to the cool rush of an air conditioning unit.
But I dream not of fast cars and computers, big houses and spotless bathrooms.
I wake up remembering the smell of wet clay and boiling noodles. Visions of cow herds and farm girls still swirl in my head.
I roll over on the thin straw-filled mat surrounded by bright pink mosquito netting. This section of the one-room farmhouse is the girls' bedroom. Two usually share the homemade bed here, a third sleeps out on the porch. Western guests like me have never visited this little farm before; the whole family, seven people who share this house, insisted we take the beds. The first few nights here, I tried to sleep out by the pond in my hammock; I got one night in before they took down my hammock while I was out for the day and persisted in offering the bed. So, I obliged, while they all slept out on the porch, cuddled together under thick blankets to fend off the chilly breeze that sweeps in at night from the hills.
I sit up slowly in the bed. My throat is sore. I've been sick for the past couple days; nothing too unexpected, especially since I've been tromping around the Cambodian countryside and downing whatever food was put in front of me with impunity for the past three weeks. My fatigue at the end of every day out interviewing also drove the ever-hospitable farmers to insist that I take the bed. I open the plastic bottle of aspirin I have left over from when I hit my face on the bottom of a swimming pool in Florida this summer. I chew the last two tablets, push aside the sheet that separates the girls' area from the main house, and step into the room. The space would be large -- if it were just a bedroom. But it also takes the place of a playroom, living room, and the parents' bedroom. The tiny color television is connected to a little cluster of exposed wires strung through the roof and down the long dirt driveway to the main road. Tucked into the corner is the parents' bed, shrouded in mosquito netting. Even with the wooden shutters closed, bugs permeate this stilted house. The windows are simply squares cut out from the untreated clapboards, with no glass. The corrugated steel roof sends skittering sounds into the house at night, as mice and foot-long geckos scurry and squeak between the beams and dark spaces.
Shirtless, I step outside through the open doorway. It's still cold here, by subtropical standards. I tense my body as the chill hits. The noises of the morning greet me. The faraway thrum of rice trucks and motorcycles. Chickens clucking and rooting. Cows penned up and mooing to be let out to eat. I descend the rickety wooden steps. I can feel my weight shake the whole house. I look now across the area under the house's stilts, which doubles as a garage and dining room. The mom is busy in the kitchen, preparing breakfast. Rice porridge, with some vegetables. I hurry to the bathroom. I open the rough wooden door and step inside the small shack. A waist-high concrete basin is filled with water. A ladle floats inside. This is the shower. I am in no mood for a chilly shower today. In the middle of the tiled floor, next to the basin, is a porcelain-coated hole in the ground. This is the toilet. Since I've been sick, an ailment that includes unpredictable diarrhea, I'd stashed a roll of toilet paper in here. Most Cambodians just ladle themselves clean. I wasn't looking forward to the squatting, but I got down to business. People take their bathroom thrones for granted.
I step out to eat breakfast. But before I can make my way to the table, one of the young sons approaches me holding up a large black kettle. He made a fire and boiled water for me. Out here, this was a hot shower. They don't often take hot showers. He didn't need to push this bit of hospitality on me one bit. Au kun. I take the kettle back to the shed and ladle myself a steamy bath.
After breakfast, plain porridge from chipped old bowls, we head out for an interview with an old mechanic who was my uncle's teacher during the Khmer Rouge days -- before they sent everyone from the city to the farms. After an hour in his greasy living room, where old van benches are the furniture, we drive a half hour across scrambly dirt roads to get an Internet connection. At the Internet place, I meet a Peace Corps. volunteer. He's been here for 7 months. He'll soon be taking his first vacation -- to Thailand -- and is wondering how he'll manage another year working here in this backwater province. He's a brave soul. I am already having cheeseburger dreams.
Little did I know, they would soon come true.
My uncle was growing increasingly frustrated with the computer in front of him. He has a business back in the U.S. to run, but no way to run it from here. The manager of his business in California had just been stricken with a bad stroke. The other employees don't know how to handle everything alone. And my uncle can't access his accounts remotely. Out here, even an American bank's Web site takes 20 minutes just to load its main page. Forget getting through a secure login and funds transfer.
It is a tough call, but have had to do it. We will cut the first jaunt into Cambodia short by three days. We need to go to civilization. We need the Internet.
***
Through the canyon of seedy casinos, across the garbage-choked stream, through the throngs of rag-clothed beggar children, and we are away from Poi Pet and into Aranyaprathet. It is like stepping from one world into the next. The differences between a Thai and Cambodian border town are striking. The roads are paved. The police aren't sneering so eagerly for bribes. Air conditioned banks, with rows of ATMs, greet you on the way in. The chaos of even the border market seems more ordered.
We walk to the storefront of a relative, Jek U. He's made a fortune wholeselling pharmacy products and cosmetics. His business is basically the CVS for this half of the province. There is still no Tesco in Aran. In his office, which has no fewer than three computers, we are able to get online in an instant. High-speed internet. My god. After weeks in Cambodia, where even sending an e-mail is a labor in its demand of patience and a test in its prodding of frustrating, the big LCD monitor and instantly displaying GMail screen causes a wave of serenity to wash over me. It's like getting high after way too long being dry. The Internet is truly a precious resource. I go on a binge of e-mailing and facebooking, partaking in an orgy of message replies and news catch-up.
Jek U's wife, a sweet old woman who treats me like a grandson, comes over with a tray. She set it down. There are chips and chocolates, and a tin filled with those Pepperage Farm Pirouette cookies. I ate half the tin. I'd probably lost a pound or two eating only fish and rice and noodles with little slivers of chicken and pork during my time in Cambodia. I probably gained them all back on the spot.
It was time to go. We would stay at Jek U's son's house for the night. Tee is a nice guy, with a penchant for travel and the nicities of western life. He pulls up in his brand-new Mercedes Benz C200. I bet it's the only one like it in the province. German imports with suspension tuned taught as that little 'Benz aren't too common outside the big cities in Thailand. We get in. The leather seat cups my body. Tee turns up the stereo. Linkin Park blasts from a glorious surround system. He's been a fan ever since the Road to Revolution tour stopped by Bangkok. Despite a yearly wage of only a couple thousand bucks for millions of Thais, plenty urbanites have the cash to pay full price to see the A-list of American pop artists. Last time I was in Thailand, the Black Eyed Peas were performing here to sold-out crowds.
We arrive at the building -- the whole building -- the family owns. It's 5 stories tall, and on every floor, lushly appointed. The ground level sports fine wood cabinets and a floor that looks like some kind of polished marble. And then, for four floors all the way up to the roof, every bit of underfoot space is clad in planks of rare wood brought down from the mountains of Chiang Mai. The sumptuous floors feel solid underfoot, each step I take on them resonating with a satisfying thump. This was indeed fine wood. Its reddish-brown warmth rises up, making the walls -- papered with thick dressings with real flowers pressed into the sheets -- seem even more inviting. After the second floor, a clear dragon motif begins to materialize. Tiny glass dragons, with associations to ducks and water in their color and form, are hung up, a flock of them skimming a far wall. Another wall sports a long painting of a similar dragon rising over a lake. There is a second kitchen, with granite counter tops and a balcony, on the fourth floor.
I am shown my bedroom. The maid had just straightened up. Other than the extra rooms for nephews and guests' kids to play in, there are two guest rooms with beds so big and soft, they'd be at home in any hotel. The custom cabinets inside, though, are empty. The lavishly patterned bedsheets are still stiff and crisp. Nobody has ever slept in this bed before.
After I put my luggage down, I set up my laptop. My god. Linksys. I am getting a signal from across the street.
Then, I go to the bathroom. Hot water. And a tall, flushable throne -- with one of those rounded comfort seats. As much as I love getting nuzzled by cows, breathing in road dust and roughing it in the woods, in the recovering state I am in, the sight is as lovely as the last sunset I'd seen over the rice fields.
Dinner was delivered from a nearby restaurant. The dirty dishes were taken away just the same.
I fall asleep to the cool rush of an air conditioning unit.
But I dream not of fast cars and computers, big houses and spotless bathrooms.
I wake up remembering the smell of wet clay and boiling noodles. Visions of cow herds and farm girls still swirl in my head.
Wednesday, January 28, 2009
Three Sisters from Sa Keo
The first of the three sisters was born 65 years ago. The other two, not long after. And for all the time these women have been alive, they've woken up and fallen asleep in the same place almost every day. They've grown up and grown old, seen their friends and family live, die and move away, all from the same boxy lot in the little town of Sa Keo.
And during all this time, fate, luck and love have not smiled very brightly on any of the three. An emptiness is clear on their faces in wrinkles and wear, more pronounced with each woman up the gradient of years. As much as the sisters try to carry on without questioning themselves and their station, their state surrounds them, worn like a defect no forced smile or perfume can hide.
We've never married. Never moved. Never been desired. But always, alone together.
The weariness and disappointment hanging heavily around their necks, hunching the eldest, thinning the second, and plumping the third, has seemingly dripped and stained, the hollowness absorbed into their surround, making their world as lonely on the outside as it is on the inside.
The walls that surround them bear witness.
When their brother became wealthy, he knocked down the old wooden house and built his sisters a fine new home. The house they were born in was not destined to be the one where they will die. But that didn't change much.The roof may be covered in strong ceramic, the walls may be glass and granite and brick, but the land beneath the newly poured slab is the same. The towering china cupboard in the tall dining room is stuffed with enough plates and teacups for any feast or wedding. But most have never been used. The big halls and living rooms are all spotless, the floors covered with ornate tile and deep red hardwoods. But most of the space is empty, the little furniture there pushed against the walls, with boxes piled high atop the benches and tables; the wealthy brother, seeing how the old women simply left all the space alone, uses the empty rooms as storage. The ceilings, too, are grand and high. But the walls draping down from the rafters are mostly bare. Nobody lives in these living rooms. Most of the bedrooms, too, are barren; fully furnished affairs with tall teak beds that have never once taken someone to sleep.
A mud hut or mansion, a spinster's home is still a spinster's home.
Some would say being old and lonely is a matter of deficient character, or some held bitterness that a person has gripped onto, pride forbidding any slack in grip. But when three women wind up in the same way, one following the next, the youngest with a look at her own future through the eyes of the oldest, more is at play than their own decisions.
The sisters grew up educated and rich in a town that was mostly scrappy and poor. No boy in such a static little place would want to give a girl like that a try, especially since none of the three was exceptionally beautiful. Maybe then, if they were three forbidden beauties with long raven hair and pouty little lips and porcelain skin and eyes that beamed and beckoned, a boy would have been tempted enough to risk all he had for a kiss.
But we all know that Juliet was beautiful, and no stories are told about ugly girls.
And so, for 60 years, the town grew little, save for older. Houses stand and wait. The market has grown fatter along with the highway that runs through the place, but off that strip, neighborhoods of quiet sameness age with their residents. No big parties here. No department stores or even supermarkets. Just a once promising border town, pushed to the middle of nowhere by growth and progress elsewhere.
Just as time has crept up and left Sa Keo just a blip on the map, it has also taken whatever hopes the sisters had and turned them into dreams, the kind that will never come true. Birthdays pass and are forgotten, Chinese New Years come and go. They eat the duck. The light the incense. It's always the same.
The photographic records they keep of the epochs in their lives also mirror the last new thing left for them to experience.
The sisters' photo albums are filled with funerals. Elaborate ceremonies of white robes and long processions, burning candles and incense, prayers and coffins and urns.
Six albums, and not a wedding in the bunch.
The oldest sister, the most faraway and bitter, will probably go first. Her bowed legs, gaunt frame and hanging clothes make her seem like a skeleton. The circles under her eyes make her pupils seem far away, as if her gaze is tucked away someplace else, or buried by resignation.
But maybe, her death will mean new life for the younger two; he middle one, a yappy shopping fiend, and the youngest, a departure from her rail-thin older sisters, a round woman with a warm smile and big appetite.
Maybe when the oldest sister's frail and wrinkled form withers a bit more and the life simply fades out of her, the younger sisters will find life outside their lonely home. Maybe then, they will move to the mountains. Maybe then, they'll see a sunrise from a different vantage point, and let the sun set behind a verdant rise, not the shed outside their back door that's been staring back for a half-century. Maybe then, they'll fill an album with wedding pictures, a new one for every day in the springtime, as the promise of love and life fills the temples here the whole season long.
Maybe then they'll postpone their own funerals by forgetting how long they've been waiting for them.
And during all this time, fate, luck and love have not smiled very brightly on any of the three. An emptiness is clear on their faces in wrinkles and wear, more pronounced with each woman up the gradient of years. As much as the sisters try to carry on without questioning themselves and their station, their state surrounds them, worn like a defect no forced smile or perfume can hide.
We've never married. Never moved. Never been desired. But always, alone together.
The weariness and disappointment hanging heavily around their necks, hunching the eldest, thinning the second, and plumping the third, has seemingly dripped and stained, the hollowness absorbed into their surround, making their world as lonely on the outside as it is on the inside.
The walls that surround them bear witness.
When their brother became wealthy, he knocked down the old wooden house and built his sisters a fine new home. The house they were born in was not destined to be the one where they will die. But that didn't change much.The roof may be covered in strong ceramic, the walls may be glass and granite and brick, but the land beneath the newly poured slab is the same. The towering china cupboard in the tall dining room is stuffed with enough plates and teacups for any feast or wedding. But most have never been used. The big halls and living rooms are all spotless, the floors covered with ornate tile and deep red hardwoods. But most of the space is empty, the little furniture there pushed against the walls, with boxes piled high atop the benches and tables; the wealthy brother, seeing how the old women simply left all the space alone, uses the empty rooms as storage. The ceilings, too, are grand and high. But the walls draping down from the rafters are mostly bare. Nobody lives in these living rooms. Most of the bedrooms, too, are barren; fully furnished affairs with tall teak beds that have never once taken someone to sleep.
A mud hut or mansion, a spinster's home is still a spinster's home.
Some would say being old and lonely is a matter of deficient character, or some held bitterness that a person has gripped onto, pride forbidding any slack in grip. But when three women wind up in the same way, one following the next, the youngest with a look at her own future through the eyes of the oldest, more is at play than their own decisions.
The sisters grew up educated and rich in a town that was mostly scrappy and poor. No boy in such a static little place would want to give a girl like that a try, especially since none of the three was exceptionally beautiful. Maybe then, if they were three forbidden beauties with long raven hair and pouty little lips and porcelain skin and eyes that beamed and beckoned, a boy would have been tempted enough to risk all he had for a kiss.
But we all know that Juliet was beautiful, and no stories are told about ugly girls.
And so, for 60 years, the town grew little, save for older. Houses stand and wait. The market has grown fatter along with the highway that runs through the place, but off that strip, neighborhoods of quiet sameness age with their residents. No big parties here. No department stores or even supermarkets. Just a once promising border town, pushed to the middle of nowhere by growth and progress elsewhere.
Just as time has crept up and left Sa Keo just a blip on the map, it has also taken whatever hopes the sisters had and turned them into dreams, the kind that will never come true. Birthdays pass and are forgotten, Chinese New Years come and go. They eat the duck. The light the incense. It's always the same.
The photographic records they keep of the epochs in their lives also mirror the last new thing left for them to experience.
The sisters' photo albums are filled with funerals. Elaborate ceremonies of white robes and long processions, burning candles and incense, prayers and coffins and urns.
Six albums, and not a wedding in the bunch.
The oldest sister, the most faraway and bitter, will probably go first. Her bowed legs, gaunt frame and hanging clothes make her seem like a skeleton. The circles under her eyes make her pupils seem far away, as if her gaze is tucked away someplace else, or buried by resignation.
But maybe, her death will mean new life for the younger two; he middle one, a yappy shopping fiend, and the youngest, a departure from her rail-thin older sisters, a round woman with a warm smile and big appetite.
Maybe when the oldest sister's frail and wrinkled form withers a bit more and the life simply fades out of her, the younger sisters will find life outside their lonely home. Maybe then, they will move to the mountains. Maybe then, they'll see a sunrise from a different vantage point, and let the sun set behind a verdant rise, not the shed outside their back door that's been staring back for a half-century. Maybe then, they'll fill an album with wedding pictures, a new one for every day in the springtime, as the promise of love and life fills the temples here the whole season long.
Maybe then they'll postpone their own funerals by forgetting how long they've been waiting for them.
Friday, January 23, 2009
On the road, danger lurks, but a reward beckons
All we had to go on were 30-year-old memories and a new map. As time changes all places, as wars re-draw boundaries and as cities grow and are re-named, the task ahead would not be an easy one. We were going to find the spot where my uncle crossed into Thailand from Cambodia in 1979 with his parents and brothers after a night scrambling through the jungle. Then we were going to locate the old refugee camp where Thai authorities corralled the illegal immigrants, sorting out the ones with family here -- who could stay -- and the ones who had simply charged across the border, hoping anyplace would be better than the place where they'd just been. Those immigrants were turned around and sent back into Cambodia, which was still in the throes of conflict -- remnant Khmer Rouge forces were still waging a guerrilla war against the conquering Vietnamese.
We sat at the back desk of Jek-U's cosmetics wholesale business in Aran, a border town in Thailand where my grandfather did a lot of trading back in the '60s and early '70s. We had a Thai road atlas spread out, and on the computer screen, I'd pulled up a Google map of the region. Comparing both sources, one thing became clear: Cambodia is a blank when it comes to maps. The town where my uncle departed from, according to both maps, didn't exist. And another problem; according to the satellite imagery from Google, the whole borderland, which used to be thickly forested, had been cleared; miles and miles of patchwork rice fields had replaced the trees. Like the orange groves back in my home town in Florida, revisiting them 10-years later, the location was the same, but its character was irrevocably different. Instead of acres of fruit trees, there were characterless rows of cookie-cutter subdivisions. But still, I'd be able to tell you exactly which screed-in swimming pool took the place of my little fort built from scrap construction-site lumber. From the existing towns on the Thai side, we were able to narrow down the crossing zone to a pretty narrow swath of land between Ta Phraya and Thap Sadet, two towns about 60 kilometers to the north of Aran. The refugee camp was likely a little ways further north from there.
We borrowed one motorcycle and rented another and set off along highway 348. We probably could have been smarter about this, but making due with what we had, we zipped up the highway at up to 100 KPH, helmetless, clad in just jeans, t-shirts and sandals. Riding that fast and so exposed to the elements isn't pleasant, but if the locals ride this way, why couldn't we?
Hair flying, aviator glasses glinting in the morning sun, I embraced the freedom of two wheels and the open road. A little flick of the wrist, and vroooom! Every chance to pass a slow-moving truck or ox cart, I took it, dodging potholes, kids on bicycles and taking the pelting from the little beetles and dragonflies ricocheting and splattering on my shirt and shades.
As can be expected from a guy like me enamored with speed driving on a road with a speed limit hardly ever enforced, it was about 30 minutes into the ride that I nearly died.
Drivers here, like in most of Southeast Asia, don't wait for openings when they merge into traffic. They simply make them. And in Thailand, like in the U.K., traffic goes the other way. Cars are all right-hand-drive. That can be very dangerous if you've driven on the right side of the road your entire life. And so, when a young man suddenly pulled his moto out in front of me, trying to cross the undivided highway and make a long right-hand turn, I acted on instinct. I leaned left. My my little 150cc Honda responded perfectly. And so did the young man who'd pulled out in front of me -- according to the rules of the road here. He went right.
Oh. Shit.
The distance between us was being gobbled up by speed. A collision course was set. I was going too fast to veer off to the right. I could feel it; if I tried to go that way, I'd wobble, flip and get scattered all over the pavement. The distance between us grew even closer. The young man came to a stop. He was staring at me like a goat in the headlights of a tractor. Oh boy. I couldn't brake in time. I had only one option. Go left as far as I could go. Problem was, there was no more road that way. There was no time, either. Decision made.
Off I went into the ditch.
Call it reflex from hours on the mountain biking trail, call it luck, call it a blessing. Somehow, I didn't flip when I went off the pavement and into the shallow ditch off the shoulder. I heard the grass and sticks and little rocks nick and pummel the tires and body of my moto. And then, a second later, it was over. I careened up a smooth side of the ditch, and launched back onto the road.
Holy. Shit.
The little Honda hummed on like nothing had happened.
The rest of the ride to Ta Phraya, I took things a bit slower. I admired the eucalyptus groves, the farms, the little flowers in the fields.
After about 45 minutes, we pulled into town. Me and my uncle got iced coffees, and we talked about how a Thai farmer on citizen's watch had spotted his little group of refugees and told them to stop just minutes after emerging from the forest into Thailand. He drew a map of the Thai Army outpost they were taken immediately after and questioned for two days before being sent to the refugee camp after it was established they had family here.
"How did you make it across?" an officer then had asked my uncle through a Khmer translator. "We have hundreds of troops patrolling the border."
Just a teenager, my uncle responded: "We just kept walking."
After the coffee, we found the house of a distant relative who lives here in Ta Phraya. It seems I have family everywhere I go here. She confirmed that we were close, very close, to the road we were looking for. We set off East toward Cambodia. In five minutes of riding, we'd left the city behind and the landscape of roads and gas stations and shops changed into potholes and rugged countryside. We zipped passed a police checkpoint, and continued on past groups of wandering water buffalo and farm girls shuttling bags of vegetables on bicycles. We were getting closer. Just a few miles further down this road, my grandfather and his wife and sons emerged from the woods 30 years ago, setting foot in a free country after four years living in fear.
Then we saw the long ribbons of razor wire. Indeed, political lines had shifted over time. A "temporary border checkpoint" had been set up. National police officers were manning the the little structure and guardhouse ahead. Everywhere I looked, there were razor-sharp slinkies of steel concertina wire. We asked if we could continue on.
"For your safety, you cannot cross here," said one of the officers. "You need to go through Aran if you want to cross."
This access point was mainly used for agricultural purposes, locals with day passes. The road beyond, apparently, was just a narrow dirt strip, just 10 years removing it from the last time machine gun shells clinked to the ground nearby, their bullets flying of hostility. Civil war was still a very recent memory in Cambodia.
While not the exact spot, I'd come close enough to get a feel for the terrain, to have a sense of place. I was able be able to see the same trees (albeit a lot taller), smell the same country smells, and feel the same midday heat in this isolated borderland.
After a few minutes poking around the border stop, we turned around and headed back to the city. We needed some gas before continuing on to find the refugee camp. We passed the farms and girls on bicycles, and then when the Ta Phraya was in sight, I saw something new. A black vehicle just barely poking out into view, mostly hidden behind a little wooden building near the road. This might be a different country, and the vehicle was far from any Crown Vic' I've ever seen, but the posture was unmistakable. I know a cop when I see one. I felt a little ill.
And sure enough, the engine under the hood roared to life, and a black police pickup truck shot into the road, heading slowly in our lane straight toward us. The driver stuck an open palm out the window. The universal signal: Halt.
I definitely wasn't speeding just then.
In an instant, three guys jumped out of the back of the little pickup. Two more emerged from the cab. They were bulky for people from this part of the world, and a little taller. They approached slowly. Only one wore his gun visibly outside his clothing, but as they walked toward us on our stopped bikes, it was quite clear the other four had guns tucked into their waistbands, concealed under long T-shirts. One would lift his shirt up a bit, revealing a silver revolver. The kind that doesn't just put a man down when it hits, but throws him to the floor.
Are we going to get shaken down? Why are we getting stopped? Thai police are pretty good to foreigners; did I have anything to worry about? It didn't matter. They'd seen a couple people on motorcycles, people who didn't look like they belonged around these parts, zip around a police checkpoint from a border crossing hardly anyone uses.
I could feel the adrenaline begin to flow. They had surrounded us. Two were behind me. You don't surround innocent people for a routine traffic stop. My uncle, luckily, speaks both Thai and Khmer. They asked him in Thai first, then Khmer, what we were doing? He explained.
"Are these motorcycles yours? What are you doing with them?" one of the policemen asked.
Apparently, people smuggle bikes all the time from Cambodia and sell them for a profit in Thailand. Tax-free vehicle transport. Very illegal here.
I looked around. I smiled. I shrugged. Just a dumb American checking out the countryside here!
They nodded and said we could go. My uncle is a good talker. They still stayed circled around us, though, and kept staring. I gunned the throttle, and left the ring of scowling cops behind.
We got some gas. Only about 17B ($0.50) per liter. Then we set off again in search of history. The way there was dusty and bumpy as it was hot.
After leaving Ta Phraya, the road quickly degenerates from well-maintained blacktop to a patchwork of dirt and old asphalt, with as many cows to dodge as potholes. The 18 kilometers north to the dam where my uncle suspects the refugee camp used to be took longer than expected. And by this time of day, the sun was glaring down hard, and the country here is surprisingly dry this time of year.
Whenever a truck lumbered past, its trailer overburdened and sagging from the tons of bagged rice piled high above the cab, the dust kicked up was miserable. I wanted to close my eyes while driving so many times. I had to take off my glasses several times to wipe away the tears from the irritation, and wipe the lenses clean with my shirt. There would be dirt smears there on the white cotton.
After a half hour of dodging cow shit in the middle of the road, we found what we thought was the spot. But all around, there was nothing signaling that we were in the right spot. Just desolation. Just a towering dam behind relatively new gravel-braced ramparts, just watering holes with buffalo wallowing in the mud, just more rice fields and the occasional car or motorcycle traveling alone down the bumpy road. It seems they built a dam atop the old refugee camp, and the traders who had sold overpriced food and amenities so many years ago to the thousand or more Cambodians who sought refuge here had disappeared along with the tents and appetites eager to devour real food for the first time in years.
But when my uncle told me they put the refugees far away from anything, I had no idea it was this far; maybe not in actual distance, but certainly in feeling.
We jumped back on our motorcycles, and sped off back toward Aran. We were sunburnt and dust-battered. We'd rambled through rough country, been stopped by men with guns, nearly crashed, and were sore from hours in the saddle. But when we returned, as we were eating dinner at a long banquet table in the private section of a restaurant with great aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces, their new Toyotas and Mercedes parked outside, I felt a sense of gratitude I hadn't felt in a long while. I'd put in some blood (my foot got caught between a big rock and the motorcycle earlier), sweat and dust-induced tears today. I put myself out there to give the past more definition and meaning. But what I'd squeezed from the miles of road wasn't just a taste of my past, but a sweetener for this day, and likely many more to come.
We sat at the back desk of Jek-U's cosmetics wholesale business in Aran, a border town in Thailand where my grandfather did a lot of trading back in the '60s and early '70s. We had a Thai road atlas spread out, and on the computer screen, I'd pulled up a Google map of the region. Comparing both sources, one thing became clear: Cambodia is a blank when it comes to maps. The town where my uncle departed from, according to both maps, didn't exist. And another problem; according to the satellite imagery from Google, the whole borderland, which used to be thickly forested, had been cleared; miles and miles of patchwork rice fields had replaced the trees. Like the orange groves back in my home town in Florida, revisiting them 10-years later, the location was the same, but its character was irrevocably different. Instead of acres of fruit trees, there were characterless rows of cookie-cutter subdivisions. But still, I'd be able to tell you exactly which screed-in swimming pool took the place of my little fort built from scrap construction-site lumber. From the existing towns on the Thai side, we were able to narrow down the crossing zone to a pretty narrow swath of land between Ta Phraya and Thap Sadet, two towns about 60 kilometers to the north of Aran. The refugee camp was likely a little ways further north from there.
We borrowed one motorcycle and rented another and set off along highway 348. We probably could have been smarter about this, but making due with what we had, we zipped up the highway at up to 100 KPH, helmetless, clad in just jeans, t-shirts and sandals. Riding that fast and so exposed to the elements isn't pleasant, but if the locals ride this way, why couldn't we?
Hair flying, aviator glasses glinting in the morning sun, I embraced the freedom of two wheels and the open road. A little flick of the wrist, and vroooom! Every chance to pass a slow-moving truck or ox cart, I took it, dodging potholes, kids on bicycles and taking the pelting from the little beetles and dragonflies ricocheting and splattering on my shirt and shades.
As can be expected from a guy like me enamored with speed driving on a road with a speed limit hardly ever enforced, it was about 30 minutes into the ride that I nearly died.
Drivers here, like in most of Southeast Asia, don't wait for openings when they merge into traffic. They simply make them. And in Thailand, like in the U.K., traffic goes the other way. Cars are all right-hand-drive. That can be very dangerous if you've driven on the right side of the road your entire life. And so, when a young man suddenly pulled his moto out in front of me, trying to cross the undivided highway and make a long right-hand turn, I acted on instinct. I leaned left. My my little 150cc Honda responded perfectly. And so did the young man who'd pulled out in front of me -- according to the rules of the road here. He went right.
Oh. Shit.
The distance between us was being gobbled up by speed. A collision course was set. I was going too fast to veer off to the right. I could feel it; if I tried to go that way, I'd wobble, flip and get scattered all over the pavement. The distance between us grew even closer. The young man came to a stop. He was staring at me like a goat in the headlights of a tractor. Oh boy. I couldn't brake in time. I had only one option. Go left as far as I could go. Problem was, there was no more road that way. There was no time, either. Decision made.
Off I went into the ditch.
Call it reflex from hours on the mountain biking trail, call it luck, call it a blessing. Somehow, I didn't flip when I went off the pavement and into the shallow ditch off the shoulder. I heard the grass and sticks and little rocks nick and pummel the tires and body of my moto. And then, a second later, it was over. I careened up a smooth side of the ditch, and launched back onto the road.
Holy. Shit.
The little Honda hummed on like nothing had happened.
The rest of the ride to Ta Phraya, I took things a bit slower. I admired the eucalyptus groves, the farms, the little flowers in the fields.
After about 45 minutes, we pulled into town. Me and my uncle got iced coffees, and we talked about how a Thai farmer on citizen's watch had spotted his little group of refugees and told them to stop just minutes after emerging from the forest into Thailand. He drew a map of the Thai Army outpost they were taken immediately after and questioned for two days before being sent to the refugee camp after it was established they had family here.
"How did you make it across?" an officer then had asked my uncle through a Khmer translator. "We have hundreds of troops patrolling the border."
Just a teenager, my uncle responded: "We just kept walking."
After the coffee, we found the house of a distant relative who lives here in Ta Phraya. It seems I have family everywhere I go here. She confirmed that we were close, very close, to the road we were looking for. We set off East toward Cambodia. In five minutes of riding, we'd left the city behind and the landscape of roads and gas stations and shops changed into potholes and rugged countryside. We zipped passed a police checkpoint, and continued on past groups of wandering water buffalo and farm girls shuttling bags of vegetables on bicycles. We were getting closer. Just a few miles further down this road, my grandfather and his wife and sons emerged from the woods 30 years ago, setting foot in a free country after four years living in fear.
Then we saw the long ribbons of razor wire. Indeed, political lines had shifted over time. A "temporary border checkpoint" had been set up. National police officers were manning the the little structure and guardhouse ahead. Everywhere I looked, there were razor-sharp slinkies of steel concertina wire. We asked if we could continue on.
"For your safety, you cannot cross here," said one of the officers. "You need to go through Aran if you want to cross."
This access point was mainly used for agricultural purposes, locals with day passes. The road beyond, apparently, was just a narrow dirt strip, just 10 years removing it from the last time machine gun shells clinked to the ground nearby, their bullets flying of hostility. Civil war was still a very recent memory in Cambodia.
While not the exact spot, I'd come close enough to get a feel for the terrain, to have a sense of place. I was able be able to see the same trees (albeit a lot taller), smell the same country smells, and feel the same midday heat in this isolated borderland.
After a few minutes poking around the border stop, we turned around and headed back to the city. We needed some gas before continuing on to find the refugee camp. We passed the farms and girls on bicycles, and then when the Ta Phraya was in sight, I saw something new. A black vehicle just barely poking out into view, mostly hidden behind a little wooden building near the road. This might be a different country, and the vehicle was far from any Crown Vic' I've ever seen, but the posture was unmistakable. I know a cop when I see one. I felt a little ill.
And sure enough, the engine under the hood roared to life, and a black police pickup truck shot into the road, heading slowly in our lane straight toward us. The driver stuck an open palm out the window. The universal signal: Halt.
I definitely wasn't speeding just then.
In an instant, three guys jumped out of the back of the little pickup. Two more emerged from the cab. They were bulky for people from this part of the world, and a little taller. They approached slowly. Only one wore his gun visibly outside his clothing, but as they walked toward us on our stopped bikes, it was quite clear the other four had guns tucked into their waistbands, concealed under long T-shirts. One would lift his shirt up a bit, revealing a silver revolver. The kind that doesn't just put a man down when it hits, but throws him to the floor.
Are we going to get shaken down? Why are we getting stopped? Thai police are pretty good to foreigners; did I have anything to worry about? It didn't matter. They'd seen a couple people on motorcycles, people who didn't look like they belonged around these parts, zip around a police checkpoint from a border crossing hardly anyone uses.
I could feel the adrenaline begin to flow. They had surrounded us. Two were behind me. You don't surround innocent people for a routine traffic stop. My uncle, luckily, speaks both Thai and Khmer. They asked him in Thai first, then Khmer, what we were doing? He explained.
"Are these motorcycles yours? What are you doing with them?" one of the policemen asked.
Apparently, people smuggle bikes all the time from Cambodia and sell them for a profit in Thailand. Tax-free vehicle transport. Very illegal here.
I looked around. I smiled. I shrugged. Just a dumb American checking out the countryside here!
They nodded and said we could go. My uncle is a good talker. They still stayed circled around us, though, and kept staring. I gunned the throttle, and left the ring of scowling cops behind.
We got some gas. Only about 17B ($0.50) per liter. Then we set off again in search of history. The way there was dusty and bumpy as it was hot.
After leaving Ta Phraya, the road quickly degenerates from well-maintained blacktop to a patchwork of dirt and old asphalt, with as many cows to dodge as potholes. The 18 kilometers north to the dam where my uncle suspects the refugee camp used to be took longer than expected. And by this time of day, the sun was glaring down hard, and the country here is surprisingly dry this time of year.
Whenever a truck lumbered past, its trailer overburdened and sagging from the tons of bagged rice piled high above the cab, the dust kicked up was miserable. I wanted to close my eyes while driving so many times. I had to take off my glasses several times to wipe away the tears from the irritation, and wipe the lenses clean with my shirt. There would be dirt smears there on the white cotton.
After a half hour of dodging cow shit in the middle of the road, we found what we thought was the spot. But all around, there was nothing signaling that we were in the right spot. Just desolation. Just a towering dam behind relatively new gravel-braced ramparts, just watering holes with buffalo wallowing in the mud, just more rice fields and the occasional car or motorcycle traveling alone down the bumpy road. It seems they built a dam atop the old refugee camp, and the traders who had sold overpriced food and amenities so many years ago to the thousand or more Cambodians who sought refuge here had disappeared along with the tents and appetites eager to devour real food for the first time in years.
But when my uncle told me they put the refugees far away from anything, I had no idea it was this far; maybe not in actual distance, but certainly in feeling.
We jumped back on our motorcycles, and sped off back toward Aran. We were sunburnt and dust-battered. We'd rambled through rough country, been stopped by men with guns, nearly crashed, and were sore from hours in the saddle. But when we returned, as we were eating dinner at a long banquet table in the private section of a restaurant with great aunts and uncles and nephews and nieces, their new Toyotas and Mercedes parked outside, I felt a sense of gratitude I hadn't felt in a long while. I'd put in some blood (my foot got caught between a big rock and the motorcycle earlier), sweat and dust-induced tears today. I put myself out there to give the past more definition and meaning. But what I'd squeezed from the miles of road wasn't just a taste of my past, but a sweetener for this day, and likely many more to come.
Wednesday, January 21, 2009
Of fireflies and lotus flowers
Walking the road toward the gate, I can feel the earth squish under my bare feet. Red clay between my toes. Nothing that won't wash off later.
There's a gentle wind blowing. As the breeze passes over me in the darkness, I can feel a coolness take away the stale heat of daytime and in its place leave a crisp calm that will settle and stay until morning. After such a sun-stroked day, I'm sure even the mosquitoes welcome the chill.
The path ahead is lined with towering shoots of bamboo. Their leafy tops disappear into the night, with emerald boughs hanging down, swaying, rustling in the wind. Bamboo has always felt safe and familiar -- like some hidden dragon is moving with me just beyond the thicket, silently watching over me.
I arrive at the gate. It's open. The serpentine guardian lanterns are silhouetted by the moonlight. Their lights are off. Before I go any further, I turn around and lift my head. The night sky here isn't a black expanse. It's a brilliant tapestry of lights and colors. My imagination is spun and strung between the stars. I could stay tangled here for hours. The blackness is almost an afterthought.
I am snapped back to earth by perhaps the only other subtle kind of fire in the night more wonderful. Fireflies. Among the stalks of bamboo, in the clearing around the gate, all around me, the little bugs flicker and glow. These tiny embers of organic magic ignite and blink away so fleetingly, they seem almost imagined.
Some minutes trickle away into forever, and then I leave the nightfires behind and pass through the gate. The little house rises up from the clay just beyond. It's raised on stilts, with hammocks strung between the supports below. In a few months, come the rain season, anyone walking here would be walking on water. The hand-built clapboard house is just one room, but home to some of the kindest, most generous seven people I know.
I continue forward underneath the house. The earthenware cisterns and tiny concrete bathroom and kitchen are dark off to my left. I move on deeper into the farm. As I near the wooden chicken coop, I see the shapes of a dozen birds tucked warmly into their feathers, settled all around in their evening roost.
When I near the pond, a strange fragrance causes me to stop. It smells like jasmine, but fainter, more ethereal. I hadn't seen any jasmine vines here during the day, so the soft tendrils of contentment carried to me on the nighttime air are something of mystery. Then I look more closely to the water. The moon is out, but there is no reflection. Only pale shapes hovering over the surface. Lotus blossoms. The lilies cover the pond. The flowers are just beginning to bloom.
This is where I will sleep. Between two trees on the water's edge, I string my hammock. The rice fields beyond are cast in white moonlight. I lay down, and let the fabric wrap around me. I breathe deep. The night is silent when your mind is alight and moving, but when you are still, it rises into a symphony. The sound of ten thousand crickets pour into my ears.
As I begin to fade from one dreamland into the next, I am startled by footsteps coming toward me from the brush beyond. Alone and zipped-in, I feel vulnerable. I start up and rustle in my sleeping bag. The noise should scare any deer or rodent away. The footsteps come nearer. I fumble for my little lantern. I am afraid. The farmer's children didn't want me to come out here to sleep. Above the door frame in the stilt house, they have a prayer scribbled across in white chalk. A warning to spirits not to pass the threshold. They were afraid that out here, the ghosts of the night would get to me.
I told them, "I'm not afraid. If I see any ghosts, I will become their friend."
And here they were.
I shine my light toward the forms just feet from my prostrate body. Here are the ghosts. Their noses are wet, and their tongues dangling. Waggly tailed, two farm dogs smile at me. I shake my head. "Pups, hey," I say.
The dogs don't move. I lay down again. Then, I feel them come nearer. I hear them beneath me. They curl up beneath the hammock.
Not quite dragons, but they suit me just fine.
Nighttime on the farm is as close to a dream as I've ever been.
There's a gentle wind blowing. As the breeze passes over me in the darkness, I can feel a coolness take away the stale heat of daytime and in its place leave a crisp calm that will settle and stay until morning. After such a sun-stroked day, I'm sure even the mosquitoes welcome the chill.
The path ahead is lined with towering shoots of bamboo. Their leafy tops disappear into the night, with emerald boughs hanging down, swaying, rustling in the wind. Bamboo has always felt safe and familiar -- like some hidden dragon is moving with me just beyond the thicket, silently watching over me.
I arrive at the gate. It's open. The serpentine guardian lanterns are silhouetted by the moonlight. Their lights are off. Before I go any further, I turn around and lift my head. The night sky here isn't a black expanse. It's a brilliant tapestry of lights and colors. My imagination is spun and strung between the stars. I could stay tangled here for hours. The blackness is almost an afterthought.
I am snapped back to earth by perhaps the only other subtle kind of fire in the night more wonderful. Fireflies. Among the stalks of bamboo, in the clearing around the gate, all around me, the little bugs flicker and glow. These tiny embers of organic magic ignite and blink away so fleetingly, they seem almost imagined.
Some minutes trickle away into forever, and then I leave the nightfires behind and pass through the gate. The little house rises up from the clay just beyond. It's raised on stilts, with hammocks strung between the supports below. In a few months, come the rain season, anyone walking here would be walking on water. The hand-built clapboard house is just one room, but home to some of the kindest, most generous seven people I know.
I continue forward underneath the house. The earthenware cisterns and tiny concrete bathroom and kitchen are dark off to my left. I move on deeper into the farm. As I near the wooden chicken coop, I see the shapes of a dozen birds tucked warmly into their feathers, settled all around in their evening roost.
When I near the pond, a strange fragrance causes me to stop. It smells like jasmine, but fainter, more ethereal. I hadn't seen any jasmine vines here during the day, so the soft tendrils of contentment carried to me on the nighttime air are something of mystery. Then I look more closely to the water. The moon is out, but there is no reflection. Only pale shapes hovering over the surface. Lotus blossoms. The lilies cover the pond. The flowers are just beginning to bloom.
This is where I will sleep. Between two trees on the water's edge, I string my hammock. The rice fields beyond are cast in white moonlight. I lay down, and let the fabric wrap around me. I breathe deep. The night is silent when your mind is alight and moving, but when you are still, it rises into a symphony. The sound of ten thousand crickets pour into my ears.
As I begin to fade from one dreamland into the next, I am startled by footsteps coming toward me from the brush beyond. Alone and zipped-in, I feel vulnerable. I start up and rustle in my sleeping bag. The noise should scare any deer or rodent away. The footsteps come nearer. I fumble for my little lantern. I am afraid. The farmer's children didn't want me to come out here to sleep. Above the door frame in the stilt house, they have a prayer scribbled across in white chalk. A warning to spirits not to pass the threshold. They were afraid that out here, the ghosts of the night would get to me.
I told them, "I'm not afraid. If I see any ghosts, I will become their friend."
And here they were.
I shine my light toward the forms just feet from my prostrate body. Here are the ghosts. Their noses are wet, and their tongues dangling. Waggly tailed, two farm dogs smile at me. I shake my head. "Pups, hey," I say.
The dogs don't move. I lay down again. Then, I feel them come nearer. I hear them beneath me. They curl up beneath the hammock.
Not quite dragons, but they suit me just fine.
Nighttime on the farm is as close to a dream as I've ever been.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)