June 2007
One of the interesting things about the English language press in Thailand is how widely it is distributed.  I’ve seen copies of The Nation on the racks next to Thai Rath and Grisly Auto Accident Photo Weekly in Rayong, Ranong and Yala.  Every time I ask the vendor if he actually sells them, I learn that there is a Danish marine biologist doing dugong research in the local estuary, or a Japanese engineer at the local sugar cane mill, who buys the paper religiously.  We foreigners are scattered far and wide throughout the Kingdom, and sometimes we’re found in very odd places, doing very odd things.

The first time my wife Mem ever took me to her family’s ancestral home in Nakhon Si Thammarat was for a Songkran celebration.  The first day on the old home place her grandfather, Po Ta, spent a few hours showing me around his ten rai of coconut trees and several photo albums documenting his thirty years as Provincial Superintendent of Schools.  Her aunt, Mae Som, stuffed me full of local delicacies, and her uncle, Na Lek, in concert with some of the male cousins, got me drunk and smoked all my cigarettes.  At the end of the day Mem tucked me into the bed her grandmother had been born in, given birth six times in, and died in, and the following morning the family was at a loss as to what to do with their new, hairy, son-in-law.

I was hung over, reduced to smoking Khrong Thips and in a foul mood.  Neighbors were coming by to stare at me, and I was in no way presentable.  Na Lek saved the day by suggesting a trip to visit the local farang.  I agreed to go because it would be a four-day holiday and I’d forgotten to bring any books; I thought maybe the guy would be a reader and I could borrow something.

Na Lek piled us into his new pick-up truck and bounced us over 30 kilometers of rough road, through endless rubber groves and rice paddies, proving once and for all that the term “local” has different definitions in New York and Nakhon Si Thammarat.

Finally, we climbed an almost vertical hill and came upon a wrought-iron gate set into a brick wall that circled about two rai of land on the crest of a mountain.  The gate was ajar and Na Lek said we should go right on inside, suggesting that while we visited the farang he would go into town and buy me some cigarettes and a newspaper.

Mem and I entered the grounds and followed a neat gravel footpath toward a little bungalow surrounded by rose arbors.  Dozens of kinds of flowering shrubs crowded around rock gardens and fishponds full of koi that had to be worth 50,000 baht a head.  Fake Greco-Roman statuary assumed martial poses in artificial grottoes, and honeybees lumbered from blossom to blossom in an embarrassment of riches.  I knew what Mem was thinking; “You’re a farang, so how come we don’t live in a house like this?”

We walked toward the sound of electric hedge clippers coming from behind a topiary seal balancing a ball on the end of his nose, and surprised a 60-ish man in a battered solar topee in the act of trimming the seal’s flipper-tips.  He was indeed farang, slightly obese and lobster red from working shirtless in the sun, clichéd enough to be a character in a political cartoon in the Phuket Gazette.

“How ya doin’?” I asked him, and he jumped three feet in the air and dropped his hedge clippers.  He hit the ground running and made the front door in three strides.  My New York trained ears heard the unmistakable sound of a deadbolt lock being driven home, and then Mem and I were alone with the buzzing of the bees and the chatter of drop-forged hedge clippers chewing gravel.

Mem and I looked at each other and shrugged.  We began to approach the door, and half-way there I noticed four pairs of eyes staring at us through the Venetian blinds in a big picture window next to the door.  One pair of eyes was blue, the other three dark brown.

Before we reached the steps the door opened, just a crack, and a very petite Thai woman, who was either just approaching 40 or just recently slipped gracefully past it, came out through the narrow opening.  The door shut behind her and again I heard the shhhh-chunk of the deadbolt lock.  The woman faced us from the top step with her fists on her hips and in a heavy European accent said, “Vat choo vant?”

Mem addressed her in Thai, saying “Excuse us, Elder Sister, my husband has come to meet the farang who lives here.  He is lonely at my family’s house, and wants to borrow some books.”

The woman sized me up, evidently not liking what she saw.  Without taking her eyes off me, she said in Thai “Take it out, si!”

Now, Mem doesn’t much care if somebody calls me an “it”, but nobody uses the command verb form “si!” with her except Po Ta and the general manager of her hotel.  I felt her drawing breath beside me and I cringed out of habit, but before she could say, “Listen, Sister, do you know who I am?” the door had opened again and the mean little troll had disappeared back into the Hall of The Mountain King.  Mem sputtered and fumed and I wondered if it was safe to turn our backs on that big picture window as we made a strategic withdrawal to the gate.

Mem spent the time while we waited on the roadside for Na Lek plotting a revenge that involved phone calls to every influential person in her Roladex, and I toyed with the idea of dropping that hedge clipper, still plugged into 220 volts and still trying to dig its way to America, into one of the ponds full of expensive, useless carp.

Eventually, Na Lek returned, proudly presenting me with a three-day-old copy of The Nation and a pack of Rothman’s.  He said that the local grocer carried these items for the very farang in the shadow of whose gate we had been trying to find shelter from the midday sun for the past half hour.  We went back to Po Ta’s and Mem complained to the family for two days about how the neighborhood had changed since she was a little girl.  I spent that first Songkran soaking wet, of course, rationing my stale Rothmans and memorizing every paragraph in that copy of The Nation.

We’ve been back to Nakhon for several Songkran celebrations since then, but I’ve never been back to visit the mysterious farang in his enchanted, or cursed, garden.  I do sometimes think of him reading this column though, and if he is today I want to reassure him that I don’t work for Interpol or a divorce lawyer or the mafia or any tax collection agency.  I’m just a writer, and all I wanted to do was borrow a book.  But he had better watch out for Mem, because she’s still angry.

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