Sandy Does Southeast Asia

Maybe it’s the wind, I don’t know. Maybe it’s the wind blowing night and day, and living in a wooden house and drinking absurd amounts of coffee and this pleasure at being alone with my over-caffeinated thoughts. Whatever it is, it’s been making me think a lot about San Francisco recently.

I’m not missing my life in San Francisco but the city itself. In other words, this homesick feeling that has been rising in me is not for anything that belongs to a time, only to a place. I may have had some very dark days in the eight years I lived there but at the base of it all, I trusted San Francisco. I still trust that city like one might trust family. It protected and comforted me, and never once betrayed me, turned its back on me, or shut me out like Los Angeles did.

Thinking about how San Francisco offers unconditional love to the weird, the lost and the generally maladjusted has made me think – for obvious reasons – about Nong Khai. This town has some strong similarities to San Francisco – they are both pretty, small cities on the edge of the country, and they are both the last stop for people who haven’t quite managed to follow through with the life they were expected to lead. Both cities are outposts for outcasts.

John – the grad student who’s studying the retirement community in this area – said that one of the most pointed comments he’s heard about Udon Thani and by extension Nong Khai was on an Internet message board. It was a piece of advice that went something like: go spend a few years in Pattaya or Phuket and have fun, then come to Udon to die.

It makes me wonder what it is about the spirit of a place that draws people there to die, either literally or metaphorically (as in: dying into the next phase of one’s life). I also wonder if this is why I’ve had a freaked out paranoid panic a few times here – admittedly while drunk and under extreme emotional duress – that everyone in this town is already dead and that it is not a town but Purgatory.

Flashbacks aside, there’s definitely a feeling here that is sometimes horrible and sometimes fascinating, that everyone in this place is trying desperately to figure out or find something very important so they can move on to the next level, mostly without consciously knowing that’s what they’re doing. Interestingly, I felt the same thing many times in San Francisco but never in Los Angeles. People in Los Angeles did seem to be searching on an unconscious/soul level but in a useless, frustrated way that did not allow for growth; it felt like millions of people simultaneously looking for the right thing in the wrong place.

I think I am growing to trust Nong Khai. Not only have there been more frequent stretches of feeling content to just be, like how I felt when I lived in San Francisco, but also I’ve found myself relying more on the place itself than the people in it. Most telling, I do not feel lonely or shut out when I am alone. I feel like I am happy to keep company with the city itself, much like how I felt in San Francisco, that it is a dear friend. So yeah, it could just be the wind making me feel this way, but somehow I doubt it.

ps: ok, ok – an email from Mr J Ringhoff of California, USA reminded me of the real reason I miss San Francisco…”i have eaten nothing in the past 24 hours but burritos. beautiful northern california taqueria style burritos with lettuce, steamed tortillas and all the deliciousness imaginable. the last one i ate was in SF on valencia and i believe 18th st. sooooo good. and all the places i’ve got them have had the best tortilla chips on the side and that kick ass green sauce of magic.” Sigh. Green sauce of magic.

After enduring one last unexpected goodbye to Mr. Man (which made three heartbreaking farewell hugs in as many days), I did what any self-respecting, red-blooded American female would do – I went shopping.

It started with a practical matter. I need an electric kettle if I’m going to shut myself up in my house and write for the next two months. I cannot write without coffee. I can barely write my own name without coffee let alone the brilliance I fully expect to produce in the coming months. Leave booze to other scribes, I personally believe the answer lies at the bottom of a coffee mug.

There are kettles at the main covered market in town but I had an accompanying list of things to get that defied my time or patience with Tassadej market stalls: mugs, plates, Western-style broom, dust pan, underwear, and socks. It could have taken years to find all these things at the market.

So I caught a tuk-tuk out to Tesco-Lotus. It’s basically like Wal-Mart and every time I go there I get a sharp slap upside the head that I actually live in Asia. It happens when I am doing something much like today – pushing my cart slowly up and down the aisles humming along to Christmas carols and spacing out on brightly colored packaging in a totally familiar consumerist environment – and then suddenly I look around and notice that everyone is Asian…and there is a strange language being spoken…and all the writing is in an unfamiliar script. I have lost the plot for a brief moment before it all comes rushing back and shocks me. This rather upsetting disconnect happens every single time I go to Tesco. I usually recover with a chili cheese dog from Dairy Queen (so. not. joking.). Thank god for multi-national fast-food corporations.

So anyway, there I am strolling slowly along the aisles, pondering the absurdity of the Christmas show I saw on the way in – with the cast grooving around on an outside stage in the blazing afternoon sun, wearing Joseph and Mary costumes and foot-long smiles, while singing traditional carols in Thai accompanied by electric guitar to a suspiciously enthusiastic audience. I have no idea what was going on but it was weird.

I’m thinking about this while looking at underwear. I already know, before I even enter the ladies department, that this part of the shopping expedition is going to be a problem. I blindly grab at a packet of extra-large panties, throw them in the cart, and try to pretend that didn’t just happen. Moving right along…

The clever bit of cross-cultural understanding I came to today is that dressing rooms are universally appalling. What sort of sadistic asshole invented those lights, anyway? I am going to spare you the details and leave it at this: not even the dazzling engineering feats of Thai bras can compensate for seeing oneself naked under dressing room lights when one has recently quit smoking and gained a teensy bit of weight and, due to certain ethnic variations in body type, has extra-fucking-large underwear beating like a tell-tale heart just outside the door in their shopping cart. Ah-hem.

As I busily – and a bit desperately – distracted myself with brooms, dust pans, and coffee mugs, I kept noticing a tall, foxy hipster Thai boy. Then I noticed his foxy hipster Thai girlfriend. We kept running into each other. He kept overtly checking me out. He smiled at me. I smiled back. I wondered if maybe…could this…ooh…could this work both ways?

I may have extra-large Thai underwear lurking in my (oh what’s the English word?) dresser but my relatively exotic cultural status and my fair skin must have some cache, right? If it works for my male compatriots, maybe it can work for me.

But I let the opportunity pass. I don’t mean to be a complete jerk here but what the hell would I do with a Thai boyfriend? Am I the sort of person who could be happy sharing my bed, let alone my life, with someone who doesn’t know who Steve Martin is? Simply put: No.

It’s important to accept these things about oneself. I will wear ‘extra-large’ underwear, I will drink instant coffee, I will eat chili cheese dogs with white processed cheese and watery chili, but I will not date someone who just looks at me blankly when I come out of the blue with one of my frequent non-sequiturs like, “Oh man, Toonces, the cat who could drive a car – how funny was that?”

Drawing this line in the sand may result in spending the rest of my life alone, wandering the aisles of international Wal-Marts and snickering at my own cultural in-jokes. But honestly, as long as it doesn’t involve dressing rooms, I’m fine with that.

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