Remembering

Lamai Road, Koh Samui

Dad

Tools of the Kmer Rouge

Deep in Chinatown, Bangkok

Roadside Shrines

Monk on a Bangkok Street

Kid in the village floating on Tonle Sap

Baptist Church

Bangkok

My trip to Southeast Asia was beautiful and mysterious and exotic and good and bad and joyful and fearful and freeing and confusing and evil and...

I spent most of my time on Koh Samui, an Island off the southern portion of the isthmus of Thailand. I also went to the north end of Thailand, to Cambodia, spent a day in Paris.

I walked much of the city. Communion in the cathedral of Notre Dame...
art of ancient Greece and Egypt in The Louvre’, escargot and wine at a sidewalk cafe.

Bangkok was similar. I had four days there. I spent dozens of hours strolling crowded streets, riding subways and sky trains...Girls on Sky Train... Many wore masks, hoping to avoid Swine Flu

The government was advocating them.

exploring crowded markets and royal parks.

Bangkok at Night
Bangkok Dtuk Dtuk Driver
This fellow did amazing feats of transportational acrobatics on three wheels.

I'll never forget that turn on that busy street...

He saw the intentions of another driver...

He used a regular taxi as a shield, slinging us across six rows of streaming, tightly fitted knot of vehicles.

I did my best to fully experience the cultures. Snake head soup, fried garlic frogs, mystery meats... Delicacies... I’m unsure of what exactly some of them were.

The architecture was full spectrum. I loved examining Notre Dame, and the ancient temples of Buri Ram... and Angkor Wat. Bangkok had skyscrapers and hovels, colonial french structures decaying slowly into hidden canals, temples old...
and new... Chinatown felt like I’d slipped into yet another country.

Cambodia... Rice fields and a too empty landscape.

Rice Tractor

Cambodia is a country limping back from genocide. Fifty percent of the population is under 21. Those who are older are either illiterate peasants who’d avoided ethnic cleansing or currently are low level officials, resentfully performing duties, exuding malevolence... probably former Kmer Rouge officers who’d avoided the U.N. Tribunals by flipping to the winning side just in time.

Genocide, 1974-1979

Cambodia... extreme poverty... the young population competing fiercely for foreign dollars or sinking into hopelessness.

One evening I hired a fair sized boat to take me out to the large lake to watch the sunset.

Sliding through the floating village... A School in the Floating Village

I felt guilt over the money in my pockets, the possessions in my home. Some used that guilt to pry my wallet open a little. I didn’t mind. In fact, I found opportunities to help a few who did not expect it, spread a little farang money...

The memory which looms largest from Cambodia is of a young girl at the ancient temple complex of Angkor Wat. She is between ten and twelve, selling postcards, beverages, and herself. She was angry at me for refusing to buy any more than the postcards.

Sex is big business in Southeast Asia, as is anything utilizing labor. When poverty is combined with a large population, many things grow cheap.

This isn’t to say the people I encountered were promiscuous or immoral. They had their standards, their sense of what is and isn’t appropriate.

I was a little surprised at how modest most of them are... even those who sell their bodies. Showing too much skin, or showing too much affection in public, embarassed them. I saw locals embarrassed by the antics of foreigners.

I spent much of my days zipping around seeing unusual sights: performing tigers, taunted cobras, butterflies bred beneath netting...
beautiful beaches and jungles...
coconut picking monkeys, temples new and ancient filled with exotic sculptures, paintings, and mummies.

I spent evenings either sitting on the bunglaow porch reading while listening to geckos chirping, or drinking juice and beer at the bars along Lamai Road (and I hitting internet cafes, writing blog posts and communicating with those I love).

In sitting at those bars, playing board games with the girls, I learned a little about them.

First, I found these were people who, for the most part, have big hearts and do what they do through nescessity.

I had assumed some sort of nefarious organization behind prostitution... run by seedy men who’s wealth made it easier for them to prey on the poor.

The truth I saw was a little different.

It’s true many of the women had been brought there by bars who charged a “fine” for taking a woman away. They had invested money and expected a return. The bars provided low quality shelter and food (by the way, it seems most bars are owned by women). The women I got to know had very practical reasons for doing what they do.

I talked to many of them, and when I had known them enough to pry a bit into their lives, I found them to be extremely focused on family. They weren’t there to party. Well maybe a few of them were... Mostly they were there to simply get money to send home.

Each one I got to know spoke often about their homes. I tried to convince them how it would be better for their hearts if they left what they were doing and returned home.

I convinced one. I got a couple to waiver. Most simply shrugged... they felt they had no choice. Perhaps they don’t.

Anne was such. One evening she and I had a long conversation (one I had paid the bar fine for so she was freed for a bit, though she made it clear that she could only spare an hour or two as she hoped to find a customer who would pay her for more than talk).

Anne told me she wanted love. She told me she wanted a family... husband, children... She told me that what she did was just business. It was what she had to do. The night before I left I spoke with her and others I had befriended and Anne insisted I take her picture.

“Will! You take my picture! You take it to America and you put it on internet and find me husband, OK?”

“Sure, Anne! Any particular type of man you want me to find?”

“Yes. He needs to be 27 and handsome.”

“Twenty seven and handsome. Got it. Anything else?”

“Oh yes! He must have a good heart. Oh yeah. He should have big muscles and lots of money!”

I promised I’d do what I could... so for anyone out there who is interested, here is that picture of Anne...
Let me know if you meet her criteria.

I pressed Miw hard to leave. She was new there... in the three weeks I had known her she had not had a customer yet (as was true of several others).

Miw hesistated. She considered my words. But in the end, she simply could not leave.

“Will. You make my heart big, big, big. You make me see mans can be good to peoples like me. I understand what you say. I understand why you say this not good for my heart. My mother cry when I come here. My mother love me and miss me. But my mother need money. She old. There no work in my village. She told me, with sad in her heart, I come here so I send her money.”

That is the truth of it. So many of these women do their work because there aren’t other options.

As a teacher I asked many questions about schooling there. I found that most of those I met had only four years in school. They haven’t any skills. Any bill I received, if it contained more than one item, was added with a calculator. Seriously, every bill. I bought two items at one place, one was 20 baht, the other was 30 baht. They did not readily believe me when I told them it was 50 baht all together.

They need skills.

I did talk Yom into leaving, into going back home.

Yom is a good example of how women are treated there. Yom was married to a Thai man once. An angry man. He beat her into a coma when she was seven months pregnant. She woke to being a mother, the doctors having performed a C section on her. Her fourteen year old daughter was what convinced her to go home.

When I last saw Yom she asked me to write a love letter for her, trying to convince the German she had married to return from Europe, or at least to send her a little money. (Gerhardt! Remember Yom!)

This trip to Southeast Asia was wonderful. It did me a lot of good. I find myself smiling broadly and often.

I feel as if I should write about all the wonderful and mysterious things I saw there... the exotic foods and sights, and people.

But such a post would be thousands of words long, and still fail to do the trip justice. So I wrote this piece which focuses on a few people clinging in my memory.

After getting to know some of them, I feel the urge to defend them to my fellow westerners, pointing out that the prostitutes I met had large hearts, were sweet people stuck in terrible circumstances. I feel the urge to explain how they so desperately need other skills. They need education.

I remember the smells of the jungles, and the stink of the hidden canals of Bangkok, the scent of spicy food, the salt of the sea. I remember sights and sounds and flavors.
I remember the people more.

Somnang, my Dtuk Dtuk driver for two days in Siem Reap, Cambodia. Ponlork, the young man at the internet cafe desk putting himself through college. I helped him understand Charles Dickens a little. The starving woman with three children in a little boat floating on that lake. Phon, Ai, Miw, Anne, Miw at left, Anne in Mirror

Yom, Pym, Koh, Gai, Wat, Alung, and others at the bar. I remember the horribly burned beggar in Bangkok, and the many other beggars there who often never looked up, they simply lay on the sidewalk, their faces pressed to the concrete, stubs of arms and legs stretched out showing their encounters with landmines.

Perhaps I remember that girl selling postcards at Angkor Wat the most.

I wish... I pray... for so much more for the people of Southeast Asia.