It’s that time where I’m working on my someday-to-be-released amazingly-fascinating memoir about living in Thailand and I stumble upon some gem from my archives. Here, friends, is the story of Mother Crab for your Sunday night enjoyment:

“Children! Walk straight please. When will we reach there if you walk meanderingly?” Mother crab said to her children. When little crabs heard Mother Crab, they told her, “Mother! You should walk for exampling us how to do the straight way.”

“Alright! Look at me, I’ll walk straight for you.” Then Mother Crab showed how to walk straight correctly.

“How is it? Did you see how to walk straight I taught you?” Mother crab said proudly.

“We saw that mother.” All little crabs replied. “But you also walk meanderingly to the left and the right, the same as us.”

When mother crab heard that, she turned back to look at her walking path and saw that she did not walk straight, just like her children.

“X Years Ago I … “

SIX years ago I had three Thanksgiving dinners. For the first one, I rode a motorscooter to the village market and bought all this for $10:

Then I made an American Thanksgiving meal out of Thai village market ingredients for my Akha host family using one gas burner & a toaster oven (in which I cooked a pumpkin pie, not pictured, from that massive pumpkin-like thing top right in the above pic):

Then I celebrated Thanksgiving with an American family living north of Chiang Rai. My only job was to stir 2.5 sticks of melted butter into the stuffing.

Then I cooked for my Thai & minority (“hill tribe,” but I hate that term) co-workers.

I didn’t know turkeys were sold frozen and needed time to defrost so I picked up my turkey from the Wal-Mart-like Big C the morning of. But I still got that sucker defrosted and cooked in five hours flat. BAM.

Capsule: cap-sune

Captain: gap-tun

Carbohydrate: kah-boh-hai-drate

Captivate: literally translated, “make-so-like”

Swag: Young orangutans ride bicycles during a road safety campaign for Thai children at Dusit Zoo, Bangkok, Thailand

Even orangutans look smarter when they wear helmets.

Also, you’re welcome.  Happy Friday.

(via jonwithabullet)

Apparently, in honor of my birthday, on July 21 CNN named one of my favorite foods (I make a killer version, FYI) “the world’s most delicious food.”

Massaman Curry, Thailand

Emphatically the king of curries, and perhaps the king of all foods. Spicy, coconutty, sweet and savory, its combination of flavors has more personality than a Thai election.

Even the packet sauce you buy from the supermarket can make the most delinquent of cooks look like a Michelin potential. Thankfully, someone invented rice, with which diners can mop up the last drizzles of curry sauce.

“The Land of Smiles” isn’t just a marketing catch-line. It’s a result of being born in a land where the world’s most delicious food is sold on nearly every street corner.

Note:  If you’ve just declared it the world’s most delicious food, perhaps you should axe the extraneous perhaps?  Either it is the king of all foods, or it isn’t number one, and Neapolitan Pizza is.  Make up your mind.

Thankfully, someone invented rice.  Like, I don’t know, God.

More personality than a Thai election.  Gratuitous winking political joke, because, after all, this is CNN?

Was this actually a contest to write the worst blurb?

I’m ridiculously nostalgic right now.

I felt like this when the ‘06 coup happened, months after I returned to the US.  And later, when the red shirt protests got out of control.  I ached to be back there, like it was my home country, because in some ways, it is.  I don’t even know who New York’s senators are (I just registered to vote here, after voting in Washington for over a decade) but I am filled with emotion about Thai politics.  I want to speak Thai.  I want to hear what Thai friends think.  Yak grap bai muang Thai.  It’s a part of me no one here really knows, and it’s a big part to have go unknown.

Maybe I’ll cook some good old Northern Thai food tomorrow.  Kow soy & kow neow, anyone?

So Thailand joins the ranks of Germany, Argentina, India, even Pakistan.  Bolivia, Iceland, Switzerland, Malta.  The Philippines.  Nicaragua.  Ireland.

Damn.  Is there any country that hasn’t had a female head of state?  It almost doesn’t feel like an accomplishment anymore.  Oh wait.  There’s the US, in good company with Mexico, much of Africa, much of the Middle East and Russia.  Awesome.

I’m not as up on Thai politics as I used to be but the second I saw Thailand’s newly elected PM’s last name I felt like the headlines in Western media got it wrong.  It’s not really Thailand’s first female PM.  It’s just another Shinawatra.  Her family practically owns the country.  Her brother got ousted in a coup shortly after I left in 2006, and her sister’s husband was in power following, in 2008.  Is same old same old really something to celebrate, even if she’s got different anatomy? 

Thaksin, her brother, was beloved in the rural north - her family is from Chiang Mai, the ancient Northern capital, and Thaksin’s policies purported to be pro-rural poor.  He reduced rural poverty by half in four years, enabling Thailand’s poor to acquire modern amenities like cell phones.  Coincidentally, the family is a telecommunications giant.

He allegedly gave away free bags of rice in exchange for voting, resulting in the largest voter turnout in Thailand’s history in 2005.  The roads were clogged with pro-Thaksin convoys chugging toward the capital; it was impossible to decipher genuine enthusiasm from free rice.

He allegedly backed massive extrajudicial killings in drug-war-infested villages, but the villages got cleaned up.  In many places, it wasn’t safe to be out at night before his human rights violations.

He’s currently in exile in Dubai and has acquired Montenegrin citizenship.

Many of the development workers in the area were suspicious of Thaksin when I was there, but at the end of the day, they reasoned, at least he paid attention to the poor.  In contrast, I read reports in Bangkok newspapers claiming, for example, that Thailand shouldn’t have a full-on democracy, but something like a weighted vote for urban dwellers, with rural folk’s vote getting some fraction of a whole.  Sounds eerily familiar.

Here’s what I got.

May 2006

Two days earlier, when we saw another visiting relative off to the airport, I vigorously objected when Siri suggested it might be my last time in Chiang Mai.  But even I am surprised to return so soon, for a funeral.

Seven years ago, my time in Thailand began with a funeral I declined to attend. It wouldn’t have been fun. And at the time, fun was a primary evaluative measure.

This funeral was not fun but I am hopeful that the fact that this did not deter me indicates that I have grown up, just a bit. I ended up being a person on whom my friend, the bereaved, could lay her grief. I didn’t plan this, but I was given the grace to be with her in it, and being that was a grace to me, too.

I have a preoccupation with knowing that time works change in me, like my own personal timeline must validate Western civilization’s view of history’s unwavering march toward Progress. Time devoted to a particular place must impress itself upon me, produce a me I would not otherwise have been.

My last week in Ta Wang Pa, the arbitrary village in Northern Thailand where I’ve lived these last six months, has gratified me with indicators that this is so, little doves overhead proclaiming, if only to me and my demons, that I have done well. I am not the girl who first came to Thailand seven years ago, or even last August. This knowledge feels precious, like the struggles have matured to full value and are now ripe for returns.

My tailor makes a mistake on my pants. The inseam is sixteen inches long, suit pants for a hoodlum or a clown. Such an error doesn’t lend itself to tinkering; even her second try makes me look like I’ve pulled daddy’s pants from the dress-up box. “It’s your tua falang,” she accuses, your foreigner body. It isn’t that the pants don’t fit, it isn’t that I made an error in my measurement. It is your weird western hips, your strange height, your bizarre belly.

Read More

{I’ve been editing August 1999 of my memoir, the month I first moved to Thailand.  I randomly opened the file marked “March” (2000) to see how I changed.  Here’s a brief piece I found, in its unedited state.  It made me laugh.}

I meet the two people, an impressive matronly Thai woman and her diminutive son Nok, cool from a year in the US, who rescued me from the customs ordeal when I first got off the plane in August. They have stories for me I can only begin to appreciate. Walking off that place, so green, so hopeful, wearing my straw hat and a Thai-style sarong wrapped around like a skirt, I was a little girl lost in the jungle, Alice in Wonderland. My backpack weighed 20 tons and the marathon plane ride had aged my exterior about 15 years.

“You are in a beauty contest!” they tease, hinting at the enormous change my appearance has undergone since that day, “you win a free train ride to Bangkok on Sunday!”

“Yea!” I answer back, mock-thrilled. “Key thung Krung Thep,” I say, I miss Bangkok.

“Really?” Nok asks, incredulous. Chiang Mai is the lovely fairytale, Bangkok the messy truth.

“No,” I say, deadpan. Then I grin; I do adore Bangkok, I just need breaks.

The woman interjects, “Tua yai! Yai yai! {big body} When you got here, you had such tua yai, but now you lost weight so much, so slender!”

“Yes,” her son agrees, grinning at me “suay {pretty}!”

“Charming girl,” the woman continues. I’m always amused at the vocabulary capacity. It is no trick to use words like ‘charming’ with precision, but articles like ‘the’ and ‘a’ are perpetually neglected. “Justin says you are the leader of the group.”

I am momentarily stunned by Justin’s apparent compliment. Later, when I thank him, he looks down sheepishly. “Actually, I said you were the R-eader of the group. Reader. Not Leader. R, not L.” Too late, her Thai hears little to discern the difference, and in her mind, at least, I am the newly made force to be reckoned with.