Sandy Does Southeast Asia

Dear God,

Thank you for all the cool job opportunities you’ve been shooting my way of late. They are very appreciated. First there was the weekday after-school tutoring of Julian’s sons Johnny and Benny (ages 8 and 11). Then there was the weekend playtime/English lesson with 19 month old Jeddar. And now Jeddar’s family has asked me to be the English tutor for his four school-age cousins.

But while I’m glad I have work, it does seem there’s been a slight mixup. When I said I really wanted kids, I meant I wanted to like, you know, get married and then get pregnant a couple of times. It’s your call on how to handle this clarification. In the meantime, I’ll be drawing up lesson plans and fending off child viruses.

Love,
Sandy

There are some things I am not good at, such as speaking Italian on command and running long distances. There are other things I am very good at indeed, and one of these is making snap judgements about other people’s sexual orientation. Maybe this comes from living in San Francisco for eight years, where once you adjust for the guys who only date asian women, the ratio of straight single white females to straight single white males is about 278:1.

An English girlfriend of mine here has had it brought to her attention recently that she is a lesbian. This has come as news to her. She argues that she cannot in fact be a lesbian since she very much enjoys having sex with men and does not at all want to have sex with women. But what can she do? It seems a concensus has been reached. I suspect my friend Simeon may be next on the outing list since I have seen him do some pretty gaybo things recently and I can’t have been the only one to have noticed. I tipped him off. He laughed and said he couldn’t be less gay. I told him that of course I believe him but that I’m not sure it matters.

It made me wonder about how we determine the sexual orientation of others, especially when we are in a foreign country or in a community such as this, where there are people from so many different home cultures. I suddenly became aware of the blurred lines all around me, like a totally flamey looking Thai guy who announced to the kitchen staff that he thinks I am very pretty and has taken up flirting with me. If I knew the Thai words for, “Are you sure you’re not gay cuz honey would you ever be a big hit in the Castro,” I would return his compliments with that.

Last week I went to a free buffet put on at a local German restaurant/bar called the Tassadej Cafe in honor of their seven-year anniversary. I went with Simeon, Petra and her friend Frank who is visiting. Petra and Frank are both German. We all jumped on the Meat Extravaganza and spent the next ten minutes eating with great concentration while listening to groovy German techno. The relative silence was broken by Frank who pointed out, “It is really a catastrophe to eat these things without mustard. He has already apologized.” “He” being Karsten, the owner. This is a fine example of culinary honor among Germans, I suppose. They asked if I had met Karsten. I said that I had, briefly, and that he seemed very nice. Then they said he was gay. Out of nowhere, just like that, apropos of nothing in particular. “Really?” I said, “I hadn’t noticed.” They looked at me like I must be missing half my brain and both eyes.

Crap. Have I completely lost my gaydar? What am I going to do if I move back to SF? How will I function? Or is it possible that it’s being jammed by cross-cultural signals?

I thought about something my friend who’s married to a Thai woman said, about how the thing he really appreciates in cross-cultural relationships is that you’re forced to not make assumptions as you would with someone from your own culture. The other person is essentially a mystery and you must learn them as an individual rather than as a collection of pre-determined categories. When I stopped to think about it, I realized that I guess I do this a lot. We all do. Otherwise social relations, and life in general, would be unbearably complex. But these if/then assumptions – if he lives in New York and is 38 and is unmarried and is Jewish, then he must be neurotic with some sort of hangup about his mother – it also drains a lot of the richness of getting to know other people.

I decided I would try to stop making assumptions about other people, especially people whose cultures I did not fully understand. I would let myself discover who other people really are. I would appreciate them as individuals rather than a set of personality attributes. And I would definitely stop trying to figure out if they were gay or not.

On the way home I was feeling quite pleased with myself. Simeon was feeling quite pleased too, after eating his own body weight in almond pastries. “It’s just so nice to have dessert at the same place you have dinner,” he said raising his eyebrows and adding a little sashay to his step. “You just don’t get that here in Thailand.”

And I actually managed to bite my tongue.

I recently decided that I was having an identity crisis. I wasn’t about to let a little detail like not knowing what an identity crisis is stop me from the pleasure of self-diagnosis. But that left me with the next logical question: what does one do when one has an identity crisis?

Well, I reasoned, since the best thing to do in any crisis is to make a list, the obvious answer was to make a short list of the details of my evolving daily life so that I could then look at the list and decide what’s going on…

1. Living in a small tropical border town in Southeast Asia where I am marginally employed and spend my time talking to other expats and/or getting into awkward emotional situations

2. My town has a solid population of British expats who seem to spend a great deal of time drinking themselves into oblivion in seedy bars and associating with prostitutes; but truthfully, when I really look at it, everyone here seems lost and me no less than most

3. Deeply questioning some of my long-held codes of morality and feeling very unsettled by that process

4. Struggling internally to find/reaffirm faith

I re-read my list a few times, gave it some thought and decided that yep, that pretty much covers the bases. It also sounded oddly familiar. At first I assumed that looking at my own life and having it sound like a book I’d read was just par for the course with an identity crisis but then…no, it really did sound familiar. Very familiar. It sounded like…like…Oh my god that’s it…

I have become a character in a Graham Greene novel.

And that was that – identity crisis solved.

I have a sweet employment situation here in Nong Khai. For instance, my second job is to spend one hour a day on weekends hanging out with 19-month-old Jeddar, ostensibly to give him an early childhood educational foundation in English As Spoken With An American Accent.

Jeddar is the smallest member of one of the premier families in Nong Khai – his mother is a doctor and his father’s family owns the big shopping mall, a school, some other stuff I forget, and has major real estate interests here and in Bangkok. The extended family of grandparents, five children (one of whom is Jeddar’s dad) and truckloads of privileged grandchildren live in a Thai-style mansion on manicured grounds behind a big gate.

Although I have been hired, as I said, to acclimate Jeddar to American English, I suspect the real reason I am there is that the family grew bored with their massive home theatre and needed new entertainment. Jeddar’s 32789 female cousins are a nearly constant audience as I crawl around on the floor singing songs, clapping and screeching like a maniac. Although I’m not exactly sure what they’re saying as they giggle in Thai amongst themselves, I’d bet good money it’s something along the lines of, “Look at that farang make a complete ass of herself! This is hilARious!! Who’s totally amazing idea was this?!”

For hours afterwards I speak to everyone like they’re a toddler. I’m a little afraid that the day will come when I’m unable to snap out of it and then I will spend the rest of my life speaking in a high pitched, overly enunciated voice and clapping and screeching when something pleases me. Oh wait, I’ve always done that, haven’t I? Never mind then.

I am having a confusing week. Or should I say: more confusing then usual, since confusion sometimes seems to be my natural state. Anyway.

So remember my novella? Remember how it was 90-something pages of blood/sweat/tears that I was going to turn into a novel? And how I spent weeks building a chapter outline around it and sorting out how I would use it as the foundation of this Really Great Book because there really was some beautiful writing in there?

Yeah, well now it’s somewhere around Cambodia if it hasn’t already been eaten by fish. Because I flung it into the Mekong yesterday. I know it was ridiculous – honestly, I do usually know when I’m indulging my Dramatic Artistic Temperament – but there was something so immensely satisfying about looking through it and remembering how much time, how much effort, how much emotion, how much of me is in there…and then flinging it away into oblivion. The pages scattered into a white raft that bobbed brightly on the muddy water. I watched them until they were out of sight. They say that with kratongs, if you watch them until they are out of sight then your troubles will be carried far away from you. I thought perhaps the magic would work for all the heartbreak and loss that had been poured into the novella. I watched intently and kept watching long after I had lost sight of it.

Partly it was a temper tantrum, I admit. But mostly it was because there have been a lot of things happening recently that are making me question assumptions that I have held for a long time about myself. About my writing, mainly, and thinking maybe I shouldn’t be writing at all. Maybe this is all some stupid idea I got in my head when I was a child. Even as a small child I was fascinated by the fact that my first and middle names mean ‘helper of mankind’ and ‘defender of mankind’ (yes I believe I was actually born taking myself this seriously – sad isn’t it?). And I knew (or thought I knew?) from as far back as I can remember that I was supposed to do something to contribute to humanity, and that how I would do this is writing fiction.

Now I’ve told myself that for so many years that it’s an integral part of who I think I am. But the fact is that I hate the act of writing most of the time and I don’t get any of the recognition that people who put in half the effort get, so I must be doing something wrong. If you keep trying and it keeps not working, eventually you have to admit you’re on the wrong track. I simply must not have any talent. Maybe it’s time to let it go. It’s just that I have no idea how life could possibly be satisfying or worth living at all without having this sense of direction and vocation. I guess it’s something I will have to start thinking about.

In the meantime, I am still not sure if I feel like laughing or crying when I think about all of those white pages fluttering like birds over the water.

It finally happened yesterday. After a month and a half away, I finally got homesick. I knew yesterday was going to be a challenge because it was (would have been?) the one-year anniversary of the first date with my ex-boyfriend. So I had that running in the back of my mind, imagining what we would have been doing in LA. Imagining going to the bar we spent that first night in, having beers, then walking home late down Sunset, talking, holding hands. I got to feeling very lonely and very far away.

I had to distract myself. Unfortunately, I chose to do so by reading a book a friend lent me the day before – Tortilla Flat by Steinbeck. I was pretty much begging to get sad about being away from California, right?

My next distraction was significantly more successful. Since yesterday was Loy Kratong we had a long table set up in the garden for shrine-making. Loy Kratong is a very important festival here in Thailand. For it, each person makes a little round shrine (called a kratong) out of a slice of banana trunk and decorates it with banana leaves, flowers (we mostly used orchids and marigolds), three sticks of incense and a candle. When it’s finished you float it down the river as a thanksgiving for rain and irrigated crops. But you also get to a make a wish!

So yeah, major arts & crafts time in the garden. The Thais made gorgeously complex arrangements of flowers and folded leaves. My kratong was pretty lame in comparison but I had fun making it. After dark, Caroline and I sent ours off from the side of her floating bar. The water seemed calm and happy beneath the full moon. There were dots of candlelight all along the river as the ones sent out further upstream drifted past. Perhaps it was the magic of the moment or the magic of the Mekong – and I know it’s silly – but there is a small part of me that wants very badly to believe that the spirit of the river heard my wish.

Or to be more accurate: Halloween at Surreal. Surreal is the bar here in Nong Khai that hosted the Halloween party we went to.

Halloween was a stressful day by my new standards. By 1pm Caroline and I had run costume-acquision errands to the covered market, to Tesco (I was lured along on this one with promises of a proper espresso machine located in the same mall), to the post office to pick up a package from her mom with costume makings enclosed (by which point we were so exhausted and frustrated that Caroline threw a temper tantrum when she realized her mom had not sent the right stuff), and to the fabric store.

To be fair to Caroline, she was working with only a few hours of sleep thanks to her new puppy. Yes, we have a baby at Mut Mee. His name is Sid (short for Siddhartha) and he is eight weeks old. But I digress.

By 7pm the whole group was in costume and ready to go. I had managed to put together a white toga with a gold ribbon belt and a headdress of plastic grape bunches. It was a vaguely Bacchanalian thing, you see. Caroline was a pink devil complete with body paint, wig, horns, etc – all pink. Simeon was a mummy. Petra was snow (cooler costume than it sounds, really). Lee was a nerd. And Julian was Oscar the Grouch (green body paint + plastic trash can). It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that with all the body paint floating around, by the end of the night my white toga was less than pristine.

Surreal was my first actual bar experience in Thailand. Like most bars I’ve peeked into, it was more like someone’s living room than a Western bar. The highlight was that Jose catered the party so there was a gorgeous buffet with Carribean-style shredded pork, black bean chili, mashed potatoes, veggies, pasta. I ate like a maniac. A betoga’d pork-eating maniac. And also enjoyed my fair share of lime/mint/vodka smoothies.

The party was ok fun. It was mostly just our group, a big crowd of Travel to Teach volunteers and some random Nong Khai-ers. Once everyone was liquored up we had a bit of a dance party. Oh, and Caroline won the limbo contest. But the shot she was given as a reward pushed her over the edge from fun drunk to way drunk, so I had to take her home not long after.

And that was Halloween. Sorry for the lame entry. I will try to make it up to you soon with photos of our night.

I haven’t been writing much…I know, I know!…but that’s only because I want to spare you, my dear friends and family, from having to read this over and over every day: “Today I woke up, ate breakfast and journaled with Caroline, read, ate lunch, laid in a hammock, wrote, ate dinner, socialized, went to sleep.” If you’re ever curious what I’m up to, just come back and read that sentence a few times.

Yesterday was an exciting day though – I made my first visa run! It wasn’t half as glamorous as I was hoping it might be (what is though, right?) but it did break up the routine. I started off first thing after breakfast with a tuk-tuk ride to the Thai customs office at the base of the Friendship Bridge (about 10 minutes from Mut Mee) that spans the Maekong between Thailand and Laos and is the official border crossing in this part of Thailand (which is also why there’s so much farang traffic in Nong Khai – everyone moving between Thailand and Laos down here has to pass through town).

At the customs window, I handed the official my departure card and got a Thailand exit stamp in my passport. Then I followed the crowd of people onto a waiting bus that drove us over the bridge to the other side of the river, which is Laos. I got off the bus, was given some paperwork to fill out by the Lao customs official, which I handed back in along with $35 US dollars. About five minutes later they called me up and gave me back my passport with a fancy Lao visa pasted into it. (FYI for anyone planning to travel in SE Asia – I’ve noticed there’s still some doubt surrounding this on the Internet, but it is 100% officially true that you now get a 30-day visa-on-arrival for Laos instead of a 15-day one like before.)

Then I made a quick tour of one of the duty-free shops. Even though I’ve only been away from the States for a month and the shop I went into was like a teeny-tiny Macy’s, there was so much stuff and it was all so organized and so clean that I really felt like I’d been transported to another world, a world of opulence and abundance. It made my head feel funny but in a good way.

When I’d had enough of the novelty, I went back out to the Lao customs window, got an exit stamp, got back on the bus, and crossed the bridge back to Thailand. Got out of the bus, filled out entrance/departure cards, handed in the entrance card, and was given another visa waiver Thai entrance stamp in my passport, like the one I got at the Bangkok airport when I arrived. Then I got back in a tuk-tuk and returned to Mut Mee.

Altogether the whole process from leaving the garden to sitting back down with a fresh cup of coffee took less than two hours. The funny part was not so much that I was going through this charade with the Thai/Lao officials but that there were no less than 10 other Westerners doing the same thing at the same time. Those officials must feel like they’re on a farang merry-go-round. Regardless, I am now set for another 30 days.

Two other fun things from yesterday: In the afternoon, American Justin (as opposed to Irish Justin, who left yesterday for the islands so I guess I can just call American Justin ‘Justin’ from now on) mentioned what a good speller he is so of course, us both being ugly Americans, we had to face off in a spelling contest. I’m sure he thought he’d win just because he has a PhD in, like, science or whatever. It was a heated contest with more than its fair share of psyche-outs. But I won!! Barely. Then we had another quick contest about who could be the least gracious winner/loser and I’m sorry to report I swept that one also. I’m just glad Justin’s Thai wife wasn’t around at that moment to see the full glory of his national heritage. I’m sure he was, too.

Last night, Caroline, Simeon, Justin and I went to this Australian place called – imaginatively enough – Outback for their all-you-can-eat Friday night pig roast. Not pork roast but pig roast, as Caroline the vegetarian pointed out in disgust, as Simeon, Justin and I shoveled crispy pork skin fat into our faces. Mmmmmm. It was magic.

That’s all the news for now, folks. And if you honestly aren’t satisfied by my scintillating tales of crossing bridges, winning spelling contests and eating pork fat…well, there’s just no satisfying you then.

Nearly every evening, I walk out the back gate of Mut Mee, along a path that leads to an open pavilion overlooking the Mekong. Thai families lay on the cool rose-colored marble. At the bottom of the steps boys play soccer. The setting sun casts a silver blue sheen over the river that is brown the rest of the day. The colors of the river are brown, silver and finally pink, with Laos always green on the opposite bank.

There is a story I often think of while I sit alone watching the river, a story that someone must have told me once although I cannot remember who it was or when. In this story there is a man who loves a woman very much and she loves him equally in return, and so great is this love and so great is their relief at having finally found each after a lifetime of searching that they promise each other that they will be together always. Sometimes though, they are afraid of each other’s love. There are many silly, terrible things that grow from this fear. I cannot remember the details but the important part is that eventually the man does not want to be with her anymore and then what would have seemed unthinkable, that he does not love her anymore. She can still feel his love like a phantom limb. At the end of the story, she goes on and on for the rest of her days always being alone in her heart.

I know that this story, although it is familiar like a dream, cannot possibly have happened to me. But where did I hear it? And why, every time I think of it, do I feel a pain like death at the core of myself? Sometimes I strain to remember but really, it does not matter. All I know for sure in this time of forgetting is the pale yellow light of evening and the yells of boys playing and the river sliding past like memories sliding slowly and calmly into oblivion.

This is how yesterday started: with a long, excited, coffee-fueled conversation with Caroline about the nature of consciousness. This is how yesterday ended: with a long, sleepy, wine-fueled conversation with Simeon about the nature of consciousness. And this is what happened in between…

Caroline and I spent the entire morning at the front table, curled up in our chairs, talking, periodically dragging other people into the conversation. When it finally died down, I wrote in my journal for a while and then wandered off to check email. Then it was time for my daily spin down the main drag of Nong Khai to collect food from street vendors.

I joined the lunch crew at Mut Mee with my little bags of spicy papaya salad, sticky rice and meat on a stick. The conversation again turned to the nature of consciousness but this time was a little more heated because of all the different opinions on offer. Lunch lasted a long time.

After lunch, Caroline, Lee and I went to Lee’s house to watch a movie. I got Guest Music Pick privileges. I chose The Shins, which were promptly delivered. After almost a month away from my CDs I was dead pleased to be able to listen to exactly what I wanted when I wanted to hear it. Then we watched Waking Life.

Directly after the movie I had to rush off because I was already late to meet my friend Dawnie, who is kindly giving me a series of reiki sessions. Yesterday’s was especially intense and I wonder if that’s because of all the crazy conversations I’d been having. Regardless, it was amazing. We sat afterwards talking about, when I remembered that I was supposed to rendesvous back at the garden at 6:30 to go to dinner. It was 6:32.

Caroline, Lee, Simeon and I walked to Jose’s restaurant. I’d only met Jose once, when he showed up late one evening and hung out at Mut Mee totally drunk and obnoxious. Honestly though, I don’t care what an obnoxious drunk someone is if they have Mexican food on offer. He was super nice and friendly though (and sober). We sat around and drank beers and watched the pilot of Lucky Louie while Jose cooked our meals. I started to get really bummed out watching the show because one of my ex’s friends is in it and I was feeling like I am doomed to these constant reminders of my ex. Like I can go halfway around the world and there is still nowhere to hide from him. Like there is nowhere I can escape and heal. Like…oooh pork enchiladas with freshly handmade tortillas and tons of cheese and sour cream and rice and beans!!! Wait, was I thinking about my ex-boyfriend? Wait, ex-boyfriend who? Screw it, because these are the best enchiladas ever!

We walked slowly back to Mut Mee, full and happy, to sit around and chat. Caroline busted out her box of red wine (only the best for us!). Eventually, it was just Simeon and I having a talk about consciousness and meaning and life and everything. Then I was too tired to think (yes, it does happen) so I retired for the night. Just before I went to sleep a downpour started. It was the first since I’ve been here. I went back outside to watch the raindrops hammer down like bullets. After the long, social day, I was so happy to be alone with the night and the rain, knowing that with morning would come another sunny beautiful day full of friends and fun.