When we hopped on his motorbike on the way to class that morning, he went the same cop-laden way as ever. “If I get stopped,” he’d said before he left, buckling his helmet, “you have to protect me.”
I got a ride back from Office Two from a different student, who, like most everyone else, drove tensely even along the alternate route. At the house, Htan Dah was nowhere to be found. What’s more, his assertion that if he didn’t cook nobody would turned out to be true.
There still wasn’t any dinner at seven, and still no Htan Dah, who usually started cooking around four. I hoped he was just busy, and since I didn’t see any groceries to cook with, I sat down at the table with a bowl of rice. The Blay started frying some thin, crispy wafers made of beans and rice powder. “Poor dinner,” he said, laughing.
That’s where I was when Htan Dah finally came home. Though he was safe, and though he was, as always, perfectly cheerful, there was horror behind his smile. Finding his American houseguest eating a bowl of plain white rice was like seeing your visiting mother-in-law relegated to eating the ketchup packets out of your fridge.
The next morning, Ta Mla passed cops again on his way to class, but they were already busy with two other people. He sped up anyway. At the break between classes, I followed Wah Doh, the wired, wiry kid who had written the sick note, into the little Office Two computer room to help him with his HRD translation, as I often did. Today, he also wanted to show me a word he saw all the time so I could explain its meaning to him:
marginalized
. (He grasped the concept pretty quickly.) Once, he’d asked me the name of the thing that people used to bind other people’s feet against their will. I told him I didn’t think we had a word for that in English. (I was wrong. The noun he was looking for was
fetters
, the verb being
to fetter
, but it’s a very old word and one that is, for good reason, not currently supercommon. When Htoo Moo asked me later for the word for systematically slicing open the skin on someone’s forearm, I told him I didn’t think we had a word for that, either.) In return for my English help, Wah Doh blathered at me in Karen for a couple of minutes, as he liked to do, gesturing wildly and unhelpfully, with the idea that this was a way of instructing me in the language.
I didn’t even try to follow him this time. When I’d come downstairs to cook with Htan Dah before breakfast, he was gone. Eh Soe had served Abby and me a pile of raw green beans he pulled from somewhere, so I hadn’t eaten anything substantial since the morning before. I was considering going to the only Italian restaurant in
town later to pick up a ton of takeout, maybe introduce the guys to pasta.
26
But for now, I was hungry, which I handled about as well as I did being tired, so I found Wah Doh’s immersion session annoying at best. When he finished, I just stared at him.
“Do you know what I said to you?” he asked.
“I know you know I don’t.”
“I said, ‘If you eat too many eggs, you will get fat.’”
Back in the classroom, the afternoon session was awfully empty. I wandered into the other room, which held the little TV, and a dozen sleeping refugees at night. Mu Na, the only girl in the advanced class, was standing in the middle of the floor, swatting the ass of the guy who’d bent over to pick something up next to her.
“Good butt,” she said, laughing, when she saw me looking at her. “Good butt for slapping.”
Indeed. “Where are my students?”
Only Ta Mla, Eh Na, and Collin came to my beginner class that day; everyone else was busy. The four of us sat in chairs—a rare departure from my having my legs folded under me on the floor at the front of a crowded classroom. Eh Na didn’t even work for BA, but had joined the household and the class when he’d recently escaped from inside. His face was remarkably wide, and he bore the pink scars of bites and cuts from doing jungle labor at gunpoint. He was as quiet as he was dark-skinned, serious cocoa, not the softer brown of his colleagues. Collin was a chatty fortysomething with twinkly eyes and a bowl cut. He meant to use the paltry attendance to get more gabbing than work done.
“May I ask what is your religion?” he said.
“I don’t have a religion,” I told him. “I was raised Catholic, but I don’t believe in God anymore.”
He gave a tight nod, registering that. “You are . . . atheist?”
“Yes.”
“If you are atheist, what do you do when you are in trouble?”
This made me laugh, not because it didn’t make sense for him to ask me that, but because it did, perfectly, sadly. “I guess I try to find a solution.”
He nodded again. Then, “You don’t pray?”
“No.”
“Never?”
“Ever.”
“What if your trouble has no solution?”
27
“I’m from Ohio, Collin.” My shoulders dropped with pity. “I know it’s difficult for you to imagine what I mean, but I really don’t have the same kind of trouble as your trouble.”
After I got home, I told Abby I’d join her to buy souvenirs for her boyfriend. We walked into town, though I was limping slightly. The squat toilet had finally bested me, as they seemed to on every trip; they can be treacherous when they’re wet, and they are, of course, always wet, since after every use water is thrown into and all over them. I’d been careless stepping off ours, one foot at a time in the squat position, letting my balance slip as my first foot hit the ground, smashing my other foot into the ceramic toilet platform, crushing it underneath my body weight. Though I’d avoided plunging my foot into a urine-filled toilet bowl, my big toe was seriously suffering, and I shuffled painfully along the highway in my flip-flops in the late afternoon heat.
The most interesting thing that had happened to Abby that day, she said, was that Eh Soe had walked up to her and asked, “What is the word when a man and a woman sleep in bed together before they are married when it is not polite?” When she’d asked him if he meant “premarital sex,” he’d confirmed that he had, and asked her to write
premarital
on his hand. (He knew how to spell “sex,” he’d told her.)
I wasn’t sure, I mused, what the most interesting thing that had happened to me recently was. Ta Mla had told me he was looking for two things: a wife and a way to get out of Thailand. As for the former, he wasn’t particular: “I will marry white, Thai, Karen; as for me, it doesn’t matter.” Regarding the latter, I fielded questions about how people get married in the United States and then scandalized him into speechlessness and hard blush by saying that if he were so inclined, you know, he really didn’t have to get married to have sex, if he didn’t want to.
But then again, the more interesting conversation may have been with Htan Dah, who had told me that That Khaing had chest hair, and then made That Khaing lift up his Che shirt and show it to me, and then asked me if I was familiar with this sort of thing, chest hair.
When Abby and I got back to the house with some of the ubiquitous yellow shirts that commemorated the Thai king’s yearlong sixtieth-anniversary celebration, making the populace one nation under color coordination, Htan Dah was in the dining room/garage with fried green beans and fried eggs with onions. He looked like he’d been waiting.
“Just for you,” he said, smiling at me and gesturing at the food. And indeed it was; none of my housemates sat down to dinner with me.
“I am sorry about the poor food,” The Blay said, passing through.
I objected to his apology, pointing happily at Htan Dah’s eggs and beans.
We made more of the same for breakfast the next morning. It was Friday. So soon enough, the BA employees who lived in Office Two started arriving in pairs on motorbikes and filing in through the dining room/garage door. I wasn’t particularly interested in the weekly all-staff meeting, since I knew by now that about five phrases would be translated for me during the whole hour-long affair. When I’d finished eating, I went upstairs to reclaim my old reading bench and rest before class.
“What are you doing?” Htoo Moo asked, popping into the room. He was wearing his pleated navy-blue Dickies with a loose black tank top. The sunlight coming in through the open balcony door shone off his cleavage.
“I’m resting,” I said without moving.
“Why? What did you do today?”
“I’m going to teach English today. I taught English all day yesterday.”
“Oh, wow,” he said. “Was that heavy?”
“Shut up, Htoo Moo,” I said as he started giggling. “Have you ever taught English before? It is actually really hard.” The more I defended myself, the harder he laughed. “You have to make a lesson plan, and be ready to be flexible given your students’ needs. Plus it takes a lot of energy to engage your students, especially when there’s a language barrier.” The harder he laughed, the louder I yelled, which just exacerbated the former. I forced myself to stop talking, and just lay there shaking my head and clenching my teeth until he walked away, laughing all the way down the stairs.
I was in the same spot when Eh Soe walked in after the meeting ended.
“What are you doing?” he asked. He talked faster than anyone in the house, maybe just because he could, because his English was better. It made him sound fussy. That, and the fact that if Htan Dah’s intonation was like Yogi Bear’s, Eh Soe’s wasn’t entirely unlike Snagglepuss’s.
“Nothing, Eh Soe. I’m resting. How was your meeting?”
He sat down on the end of the bench, pushing my legs out of the way with his ass. “Fine. Why didn’t you come? We talked about you.”
I sat up. “You guys were talking about me?”
“Yes.”
“What did you say?”
“Just, is it useful to have English classes, should we have English instructors in the future . . . like that.”
“Well what did they say?”
“They were just discussing if it is a good use of time when we are very busy, and our English teachers come only for a short time, is it long enough to learn anything or make a difference.”
My mouth went dry. “So what did they decide? Do they think it’s helpful for me to be here?”
“They were just discussing.”
“I mean, you can’t expect miracles in a month, and it certainly can’t hurt for my students to be taking classes, or even just having English speakers around. Plus I paid for my own trip, and I buy some of my own food, so it’s not like it isn’t cost-effective. You should have come and got me when they started talking about teaching so I could have participated in the conversation!”
Eh Soe shrugged. He repeated, more firmly, “They were just discussing.”
By the time I returned home from class that day, I’d sunk to the full depth of a morale crisis. Due to busy schedules, the enrollment of my early, advanced class had suddenly dropped from seven to three. It also seemed to me, however delusional, that my students/coworkers /housemates—and, I’d thought, friends—weren’t being as friendly. They had decided, I had decided, that I was useless. So I nearly cried thankful tears when Htan Dah walked up to me after I got back to Office One and said, “Can you help me with something?”
It took me about five seconds to find the organizational map of the United Nations on the Internet.
“Wow!” Htan Dah said. “Thank you!”
By the time I’d finished showing him some tips for effective Googling, I felt much better.
“It’s getting late,” I said. “Do you have a lot more work to do today?”
He shrugged. “Are you hungry?”
“Always.”
He thought for a moment. “What should we cook?”
“What do we have?”
“Nothing.”
“Okay . . .”
“Eh Soe can take you to the market. Do you want to go?”
Eh Soe never went to the market, but I thought it was nice of him to give Htan Dah a break from grocery shopping. “Okay.” I’d never gone anywhere with Eh Soe before. I was about to realize that I should have kept it that way.
I’d gotten a lot better about being on the motorbikes. One recent day, I’d noticed when Htan Dah and I were almost all the way to our destination that I’d forgotten to spend the ride picturing skulls crushed against the pavement like so much fruit. He was trustworthy, stable, careful, and the panic that had before made me hard and tense throughout—with my small, soft, precious head exposed to the wind and the sun—had suddenly turned to something warm and liquid like tea.
Eh Soe, however, careened carelessly around corners, too fast in traffic, turning his head back to talk to me, terrifying me by taking his eyes off the road. He tipped his face almost far enough around to make eye contact with me when he told me that any groceries that were about to be bought for the office/house, I had to pay for. There was no more money in the food budget, he said, not looking at the oncoming traffic and sharp impending bend.
The house food budget was forty-five hundred baht, or a little more than a hundred bucks, a month. With all the extra people around and hungry visitors coming through, there wasn’t anything Htan Dah could do to make the budget stretch that far, not that he’d really tried—we want to eat it now, we eat it now, budget be damned. And so the market funds had dissipated completely two days ago, a
whole twelve days shy of the next check from the organization. If I wanted to eat anything for the next ten days, Eh Soe advised, I had to buy it, and I couldn’t very well eat in front of everybody else, so I should buy food for them, too.
“Do you really think that’s fair?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said, steering with one hand and gesturing gratuitously with the other. “If I have no money, and you have a lot of money, you should buy the food.” Once we parked, he started grabbing big bagfuls of stuff, and when I started to protest that that was kind of a lot, he reminded me that there were, like, seventeen people to feed. And here I’d thought Eh Soe was just being sweet in offering me a ride.
When we got back, Htan Dah was in the dining room/garage talking to Abby. He met my gaze, but not so easily as usual.