One Day in a Border Town

Warning - long post is long.

The strange thing about living in Thailand (apart, obviously, from their tendency to put ham in doughnuts) is that loving the differences and resenting them; feeling like I could take on the world and feeling drained and in need of some goddamned Western-style bread; in other words, coping and not coping, come in waves.  Actually, maybe that isn’t strange at all.  Maybe that describes the process of getting used to living anywhere, especially after the first few months, when your focus shifts from adjusting to settling in and building a life.

So I have rough patches, sometimes.  (Not always bread-related, I should add. :))  There are days when I feel like I’ve already tried every dish from every vendor in our little local market about five times, or when I waste whole evenings idly websurfing – surrounded by dorm-style furniture, under a fluorescent light, in a room that could be anywhere in the world – and can barely remember, afterwards, what I even read.  Or when I finish checking over the spelling and grammar of the thousandth English translation for my organisation, and wonder what good I’m even doing here.

But there are also a lot of good days.  More good days now, I think, than over the past month or two.  VSO warned us going in that for most volunteers, there’s a rocky period about three to five months in:  you’re homesick, the things that used to be thrilling and exotic are now irritating or inconvenient or just not the way you want them to be, and you still haven’t fully adjusted.  It’s like you’ve scuffed up your new life, but you haven’t quite broken it in.  (And you’re getting sick of putting metaphorical bandaids on your rhetorical toes every morning.)  One of my brother’s friends, back when he was living in Nepal, put it even more simply:  “After six months, there will come a point where you’ll hate it.”

I never hated it here.  I doubt I ever will.  But I know what that adjustment period feels like – and now, I think I’m coming out the other side. 

I’m starting to feel really at home in my neighbourhood.  The stallholders and the neighbours know me; we seem to have progressed past the point where they were all insatiably curious about the farang, and kept trying to pepper me with questions, and then past the point where we all more or less ignored each other on the street (probably my fault – city girl instincts), and to a stage where we can exchange a smile or a few words without it feeling like we’re staging an elaborate pantomime of a cultural encounter.  Even my neighbour’s cats put up with ear skritches now.

I’m also starting to be more comfortable with the rhythms of the work.  There can be a definite sense of hurry-up-and-wait about it; sometimes, they don’t give me anything new for days, while at other times, they ring me up at night or on a Saturday morning to come in and check over a funding submission.  But I understand enough about the workings of the organisation now that I don’t have to wait for assignments all the time; I can pitch in, or work up proposals for new projects (provided that I present them as a range of possibilities, to avoid my boss just automatically saying yes to all of them to please me). 

So I want to talk about one of the good days.  This was last Tuesday.  Pretty much an ordinary day – nothing earth-shattering happened… but that’s kind of the point.

Let me tell you a story.

I am sitting in the back seat of my organisation’s truck with my colleagues A., a fellow VSO volunteer, and Green Gaz, a New Zealander who works with my organisation.  We are driving down Thae Pae Road, away from the old city.  Gaz has put on his own mix CD; we joke about the fact that Burmese people always seem to gravitate towards the worst in Western music, as the other CDs in the truck are an unlikely mix of Cliff Richard, John Denver, and Westlife.

We all spent the morning at a meeting to strategise practical ways of engaging with the government of Burma on climate issues.  It was a good discussion.  No posturing on why this is impoooortaaaaant, just solid information and ideas from a bunch of different NGOs.  It’s good to get in a room with people who are approaching the same problems from different angles – development, political reform, indigenous rights, conflict prevention.  In particular, I loved meeting the two leaders – two snarky, incisively intelligent women – of an NGO that works on engaging with investors in conflict zones and other risky areas.  Security studies is my thing, I came to environmental activism through that, so talking to them felt kind of like coming home.

We are turning the corner now, just before the red-painted Chinese gate, hung with paper lanterns, spans the road.  On both sides of the street, the curbs are crowded with tuktuks:  the drivers, in their brightly patterned shirts, nap in their front seats or lounge back, fanning themselves idly with newspapers and casting around for any lost tourists who might wander this way.

After the meeting, Green Gaz whipped out a report – okay, lugged it out, given that it was the size and weight of a Gutenberg Bible – to show to the women from the conflict NGO.  “It’s the case for genocide in Burma.”

Now, my bizarre sense of humour has gotten me in trouble before.  Hell, it’s gotten me in trouble before in Thailand.  But it would have taken a strength I don’t have to resist a straight line like that.

“The case for genocide in Burma,” I deadpanned.

Luckily, this time, they laughed.  “Yeah,” Gaz said.  “Let’s kill everybody.”

‘Both Hands’ by Ani DiFrano comes on the mix.  “I love this song,” says A.

We gave some of the attendees a ride to their next meeting with yet another Burmese group – for NGO workers visiting Chiang Mai, the trip tends to be a constant whirlwind of tiny residential offices and hotel function rooms and coffee shops, as they try to meet up with as many different organisations as possible in the time they have.  After that, we parked and strolled up the main road that bisects the old city – past Chiang Mai’s most impressive wat, past the stalls selling mango sticky rice and bags of decoratively carved pineapple chunks, past the Italian restaurant, past the jewellery sellers and the little kids peddling garlands of white flowers.  We went to a vegetarian Burmese place called Aum, and kicked off our shoes so that we could climb the old wooden stairs and sit in the more traditional section of the restaurant, where there were cushions surrounding low tables and a French backpacker was talking earnestly to a tattooed guy with a guitar.

We swing a U-turn along the moat, and pass the corner where the stallholders are selling durian.  I barely notice, but A. says that if you drive past on your motorcycle, the smell is overpowering.

Green Gaz, who has been here twenty years, was horrified that the food has gotten so expensive, which reminded A. of a story.  The way A. tells stories is a little idiosyncratic – he sets them up well, the whole buildup leading to the punchline, it’s just that the details he thinks are important don’t always gel with everyone else’s perceptions.  So he told us, “Yeah, my neighbour was saying the same thing.  My neighbour’s a crusty old American guy, been here a few decades – we don’t really get along, he tried to decapitate me with an axe – anyway, he claims that it’s all the new farang, like me, who are driving the prices up in Chiang Mai.”

It took Gaz and me a moment to piece this together.

“With an axe?”

It turned out that A. had tried to break up a fight the neighbour had been having with his Thai gardener, because the fight had progressed to the point where the neighbour had been, yes, actually waving an axe around.  (The gardener had been laughing, but that’s a cultural thing – Thais tend to react to any situation that disrupts social norms, from misunderstandings to road accidents, with laughter.)  Apparently, that gem about all the new foreigners causing problems for the foreigners who have been happily capitalising on Thailand’s low prices for years was one of the things the neighbour had screamed at A. before trying to chop his head off.

A. seemed disappointed that we were missing the point of the story.

There’s a nice view from the bridge of the waterfront stretching in both directions, with the market and some posher buildings – the American consulate, hotels – in one direction and lush strips of forest along the river on the other side.  Ani Di Franco is still singing.  I don’t usually get to appreciate the details of this view when I’m concentrating on driving, so I take the chance to really look around.  Motorbikes weave past us at breathtaking speeds, swarming around the car, up onto the footpath, everywhere.

The waitress at Aum was a Karen woman from Burma; A. talked to her a little in her own language, and she was shocked.  “How did you know I’m Karen?”  “Because I have been in here many, many times,” he explained.  She stared.  “I’m often with Thai friends?”  She shook her head.  Finally, A. reached up and sketched a kind of wide halo, indicating the shock of curly hair he used to have before deciding to shear it all off a few months ago.  “My hair was… different.”

“Oh!”  Her face suddenly lit up.

To be fair, I barely recognised A. after that, and he’s the only other American in my office.

We drive along the riverside, past the waterfront bars and the craft stores.  I daydream for a moment about the places I want to show my friends when they visit next month.

We all ordered khao soi, pretty much the signature dish of Northern Thailand – a bowl of red curry and coconut milk soup, served over egg noodles, topped with crispy noodles and handfuls of coriander, red onions, and pickled radish.  As we ate, Gaz told us about his last visit with his sister, a take-no-shit former punk rock fanatic, who ran screaming away from New Zealand at the age of 18 and hit London in the late 70s.  “She must have loved it,” I said.  Gaz shook his head sharply.  “I don’t know – never discussed it with her.  We don’t really talk about things like that.”  But a little while later, his voice softened.  “She’s smart, though, my sister.  She’s so very smart.”  I realised that he could be me, talking about my brother.

The road back to the office is the same one that takes you to my house, since I live so close.  As we drive past my side street, I point to the high fences on either side, and the scaffolding poking over the tops of them.  “When I moved here in October, those were both open fields,” I tell them.  Condos are mushrooming up all over Chiang Mai, especially in this area – away from the old city and the tourist neighbourhoods on either side of it, but right on the highways, within easy reach of everything, and close to the massive new shopping complexes that dot the ring roads.  “The old ladies who used to do Tai Chi in the fields have moved into my driveway,” I add.  A. laughs.  “Awesome.”

And then I worked the rest of the afternoon, and walked up to the market to get a green pork curry and a bag of rice for dinner.  I strolled home, past the karaoke bar and the huge pet shop where they dress their terrier in a bumblebee costume when it’s cold; past the cookshop where I usually get lunch; over the bridge, and past the little tin fishing shack on the shore, with its single occupant dozing shirtless, a fishing line dangling into the water beside him; past the auto repair shop and the hotpot restaurant; around the corner, and along the lazy curve of the back street where I live.  It’s a quiet street in a noisy neighbourhood; if you turn in one direction from my apartment building, it’s all guest houses and big townhouses, with acres of garden full of mango trees, and if you turn the other way, it’s all neat, tiny houses with food stalls out front and alley dogs eyeing you as you go past.  I filled my water bottle at the machine and bought a five-baht skewer of barbeque chicken from the smiling grey-haired lady who sets up her grill nearby.  (I walked past that place for months before I was sure that it was definitely a food stall, not just a spot in front of her house where she cooked for her family; that’s how small it is.)  As I picked up my laundry from the machines that sit under an awning with all our motorcycles, my landlady’s husband waved and asked in Thai, “Have you eaten yet?”  “No, I am going to eat now.  Have you eaten?” I managed to get out, almost smoothly.  A few months ago, I could barely say hello.  I went upstairs, startling the geckos.  The sun was fading, and as I reached my front door, the balcony lights flickered on.

And that was my day – one day, a more or less usual day, in my life here in Chiang Mai.  Thank you for bearing with me. :)