A Child Is Born

If you go to the bottom of our land and turn right out of the tiny bamboo gate by the new wooden house, walk a few hundred yards through the sugar cane, mulberry and taro, you’ll come to a tiny house or shack in a grassy clearing. When Cat took me there today, ‘Q Papa’, the man of the house, was gutting a scrawny chicken, a special luxury. They were celebrating the birth of a child, a sister for Q and for Cake.

Q Papa is a taciturn sort of man from the south who does electrics, tiling and most other such jobs for us. He’s willing enough, though he smiles rarely and never says anything much. His wife, a local girl, is a bit taciturn too, a rare enough quality around here.

Then again when you look at their house they don’t really have very much to smile about. It amounts to no more than a few posts, a wooden floor and corrugated roof and not much in the way of walls. With these recent violent storms, they must all get pretty wet inside when it rains.

The baby was serene and admirably white, sleeping on the floor in a mosquito net and Q Mama gazed at her in pride, gaunt and exhausted as I photographed her. No doubt the child howls all night, keeping her parents permanently exhausted as well as sick with worry as to how they’ll get by.

Neither of them has any work to speak of. Q Papa could go away to Bangkok and live in isolation and squalor, sending back perhaps a thousand baht a month, but then how would Q Mama cope with the baby and the two small children of three and four on her own. Something seems to have gone wrong with their family support systems and it looks a desperate situation.

The child is exquisite with perfect, tiny feet but what will happen to her and her little family in the current crisis. What will her future bring and what sort of a life is she going to have after the start she’s just been given?

The house is surrounded by palm trees, the ducks and chickens cackle and the buffaloes gaze balefully, heads down. It’s green and lush and pretty and it’s so easy to be taken in and to see only a romantic idyll. Rural poverty can be so beguilingly beautiful, but poverty this surely is.

This Is The House That Cat Built

It’s looking pretty good, this fait accompli house presented to me courtesy of my lovely wife Cat. It really will be great for Mama and for visitors and it looks amazing, especially with its new mook or porch whose functions, in no particular order of priority, are to shelter the steps and to keep several men in work and alcohol for a few more days.

But suddenly today they’ve all stopped work on the house and instead are building a couple of wooden beds to at least A1. packing case standards. I suppose a wooden house does need wooden beds, but there’s still loads more work to be done on the house… varnishing acres of wooden floor, tiling and painting in the shower room, not to mention making windows and doors. I really want to get shot of workmen, though in our several years living here we haven’t managed to yet.

We had a heavy rain storm last night and I went down to have a quick look at the house. Water was pouring through a gap in the complex of corrugated roofing over the mook and was cascading down directly onto the precious, high status steps it was intended to protect.

I called Saniam over who’d been responsible for the work and pointed out this small technical snag to him.

‘Mai pen rai,’ he said casually. Never mind, it doesn’t matter!

And do you know he wasn’t drunk and he meant it without the slightest hint of embarrassment. It’s only a roof, you see. You can’t expect it to keep all the rain out, now can you!

It’s at moments like these that I feel that local culture really does diverge from mine. Do I understand anything that’s going on around me? Is this really The Land of Smiles or are they just laughing at us, at these deranged, bewitched, fat walleted foreigners?

"Why Are Thai Women So Explosive?"

An arsenal of unexploded 'Thai girls'.


Somebody has asked me why ‘Thai girls’ are so explosive. Are they really?

The archetypal 'Thai girl' is sweet-natured, even-tempered, passive and gentle, a petite, purring pussy cat whose only pleasure is in pleasing her man. True or false?

So who's kidding who? Like hell she is! All the most powerful and fiery qualities are focused in Thai womanhood. It’s they who’ll fight most furiously for their families and for this strength of character as well as for their feminine qualities I salute them.

It sometimes happens that when I say "Thai girl”, people think I've said “tiger”. How apposite that is! Man eaters every one!

Thus, if William Blake had made it to Nana Plaza in Bangkok before London zoo, his famous couplets might possibly have run something like this.

"Thai girl, Thai girl, feisty, fit,
In the sois of Sukhumvit.
What immoral hand or eye
Can frame thy fearless symmetry."

Tigers of course are dangerous and it’s often asserted, fairly or otherwise, that Thai women are not merely fiery, they can sometimes be positively explosive. If so, a farang thinking of taking one as his sweet little wife had better think twice. Foreign men who think they are escaping the rigours of feminism for a much softer version may find an assertive woman of a very different kind.

My expertise on whether Thai women are explosive is extremely limited, but that’s never stopped me speculating about something, so here goes, a brief and superficial dissertation on the nature and qualities of Thai womanhood.

A thesis like this one always raises a host of subsidiary questions. Isn’t it the case that in all cultures and creatures, the female of the species is deadlier than the male? Who’s to say that Thai women are any more dangerous than the rest of them. In the animal kingdom, after mating the female praying mantis is said to kill and eat the male as he’s now of no further use to her, so things could be far, far worse than an exploding Thai lady as one’s mate.

It’s a nice coincidence that the Latin for wife is uxor, while in NGO-speak, UXO means unexploded ordnance, a landmine that blows your foot off when you tread on her toes!

Another question is whether the volatility of the puying Thai is regional… for example is it more extreme in the case of women from Isaan who make up a good proportion of farang wives. Then are Chinese Thai women the same as other Thais? What are the differences between rural and urban women, the educated and the poor farmer’s daughter? And how about women from neighbouring countries? Is not a Burmese, a Malay or a Lao likely to be similar to a Thai?

Is this alleged explosivity a general characteristic of all Thai women or is it a special quality of farang wives who are a self-selecting group. These particular women are not shrinking violets but powerful personalities with get-up-and-go and the potential for self-assertion and fireworks.

If explosions are about conflict, is conflict the particular way in which Thai women handle difficulties in their relationships? Or could conflict with farang husbands be a consequence of the particular pressures of these cross-cultural relationships? The questions are endless.

Thailand draws some of it’s cultural influences from India and one thus thinks of a philosophy that accepts the hardships of life as they come and which cultivates an ascetic stoicism in the face of all adversity. Perhaps there’s an acceptance of hardship in Thailand too, until such time as it becomes intolerable. Then when there’s no place left to turn, the only option, like a Malay villager, is to run amok and to sink a parang, either of sharpened steel or hard words into the thick skull of an unfeeling husband.

The status of women in this very hierarchical society is undoubtedly low. Money is paid to a girl’s parents when she marries and her duty to her husband is to produce and raise children, to keep house, to produce and prepare food and to wait upon and pamper her man, while he most probably philanders with other women and drinks himself insensible.

A Thai wife may be expected to tolerate this situation in silence. She cannot negotiate or remonstrate with her man if she’s dissatisfied as there’s nothing for her to negotiate about. There’s no culture of husband and wife talking things through as equals. Her only option therefore, other than chopping off his chopper, a crime with a high incidence in Thailand, is to fly off the handle and make a big fuss from time to time.

At its extreme, this is a desperate step to take as it’s an admission of failure, a breach of the culture of compromise that so values harmony in personal relations. However, handled well, open conflict can be a useful tactic, a strategy that can produce results. If it proves particularly effective, it becomes habit-forming and patterns of volatile behaviour are established and taught down the generations of women.

While Thai men can be weak, much is expected of Thai women who have to learn to be strong and who, when needs be, sometimes express that strength through aggression. Modesty, passivity and subservience are a female ideal but especially in gritty rural societies, women probably learn the value of assertiveness from watching how their fathers behave. And if they’ve been beaten by Papa and they’ve seen it happen to Mama too, how can they learn more sensitive ways? Nobody has taught them to mediate a way through a potential conflict, so it seems a useful tactic to get their retaliation in first… to throw some verbal punches, just when farang Dave’s least expecting them.

If a farang’s perception of his Thai wife is that she’s moody, hot headed and unpredictable, perhaps it’s true, though maybe there are pressure points in the marriage that partially explain it. There are many tensions in Lek’s relationship with Dave, a relationship that’s rewarding but also is high risk. She has a long way to fall, and having flaunted her gold to the village, the loss of face will be traumatic when he walks out on her.

First, she has no control of the purse strings and so money can be a constant source of friction. She has an abiding fear of poverty, of slipping back to the time when she had to eat rice with salt, when Papa was always drunk and Mama always pregnant, when they were still in debt even though Papa had sold almost all his rice land, when her older brothers were not sending money home and when they then looked to her to leave home to sell herself however she could.

Her recent alliance with big, cuddly Dave is substantially an economic exchange. From the time he handed over the sinsot on their wedding day, the question of how they spend his money is an unavoidable and ever present issue. As there’s no common ground and nothing’s ever hammered out, the problem of money is a ripe source for conflict. One day somebody’s going to call him mean as sticky shit, and having built her a palatial house on her family’s land, Dave’s not going to be a happy bunny.

Then there’s the problem of language. Dave and Lek can’t understand each other properly, so things are always tense, tense, tense. There are twelve tenses in English. Present tense, but maybe future perfect… if Lek can learn enough English to communicate properly with Dave who’s never going to get beyond saying sawaddicup and cowpat ghai. Misunderstandings are endemic and so the tensions slowly accumulate.

There are many cultural differences that lead to friction as well. Dave walks into the house with his shoes on because he says the floor’s dirty. He tells her not to wash his clothes every five minutes and she calls him dirty. He can’t eat chili like the rest of the family, so she has to cook special dishes for him. And instead of politely picking his nose or spitting on the ground, he blows it with a tissue… shock horror! Farang nagliat!

Perhaps most difficult of all is that, because of the language problem, Lek is the exclusive interface between Dave and the rest of the Thai world. She has to mediate between her husband and her family’s expectations of him and inevitably she’ll offend one side or the other. No ambassador could have the diplomatic powers to deal with this intractable situation.

Thus, as Dave’s interpreter and negotiator, she has to act as intermediary in all his petty disputes with traders and workmen and with the rest of the province. The painter’s smeared paint all over the woodwork of the doors, his satellite internet’s a disaster, the top of the table he bought has dried up and split, the noise from the neighbours’ sound system is deafening and somebody in the soi has eaten the cat and he’s very upset. Lek now has to deal with all these issues while Dave stands threateningly behind her, egging her on, pushing her, willing her to get the result he’s demanding.

But no, says Lek, mai pen rai. It’s not that important. The work’s acceptable and you can’t be that fussy. You’ve just got to swallow your anger and pay up. And the noisy neighbours. Graeng jai! You’ve got to be considerate to them and shut up even when they’re being inconsiderate to you. And you can always get another cat.
But Dave’s out for blood and he’s going to make her push, push, push until he gets full satisfaction from all of them. He’s a nice guy but this time it’s a matter of principle.

‘Cannot, Dave. You farang, you talk too much!’ she says loudly. Dave dares to answer back and then she explodes, a fearful sight to behold.

‘Dave, you farang… jai rorn, jing jing. You buffalo, no good, no good!’

And let’s face it, to be fair, sometimes Dave explodes too. Lek doesn’t have a monopoly on being explosive in this particular family.

Thus, stress and provocation can cause explosions, but sometimes they are primarily a tactic, a conscious form of manipulation. The more histrionic the explosion, the more effective it’ll be for getting Lek what she wants. Keeping Dave in fear of the next display of fireworks is a handy way of making him more compliant.

When a wife keeps changing her mind about small things all the time, flies into jealous rages, is petulant and moody and is a pain in the proverbial, it can be a bigger issue. Perhaps she has serious problems and is damaged goods. In so many poor families anywhere in the world, a child has to compete with her siblings, looking after the younger ones while Mama is pregnant or out in the rice fields and gets no parental attention herself. Papa is drunk and violent or has fled the scene, so there has been no role model to show her how to behave in a marriage. Nobody has taught her what behaviour's reasonable and what is unacceptable. She just copies the way her Mama used to scream at Papa.

And one last thing, if Lek once worked in the bars, her life defined by her monthly tally of lady drinks and bar fines, who knows what experiences she might have had and what resentments she harbours against those responsible for them. Dave will never know as she’ll never tell him, nor can he ever discover how it now affects her behaviour towards him.

Marriage has never been easy and as between farang and Thai there are certainly some massive cultural incompatibilities. Nonetheless, learning about each other and coping with the difficulties is all part of the fun.

Though as I said earlier, I’ve little insight into such marital conflicts as my own Thai wife is always, always sweet and wonderful. You see, Cat never ever explodes!

That ****** Gate Again!

Back in February I wrote that when you build a house for your Thai lady you must factor in the considerable extra cost of a prison-style concrete wall around your acres of garden and of elaborate steel gates of Buckingham Palace proportions. My comments quickly degenerated into a moan about how you probably need to employ a handyman at least part-time to maintain the gates to stop them reverting to the bundle of rusty steel rods, tubes, flowers and little arrows that you first started with.

In the few months since then, numerous twiddly bits have fallen off our gates and where the snotty nosed kids stand on the bottom rail and rattle the bars, several welds have failed. The gates are so heavy they’re sagging somewhere and the steel jockey wheels that run along the concrete of the drive have excavated a bumpy track down to the granite chippings and grind and drag most horribly. The whole thing’s looking thoroughly seedy, the blue paint has faded, there are numerous chips down to bare metal and rusty water oozes out of cracks in the nether regions of the tubing.

This is of little consequence except for the fact that the left hand gate has now become a potential killer. The weld holding the lower hinge has broken away and only the upper hinge is stopping the gate from crashing down and causing much death and destruction. It really is quite dangerous and there could be a serious accident.

The gate was made by a nice cousin of Cat’s and given that normally he services motor bikes, he had a pretty good shot at it. Doing our gate must have been wonderful practice for him and I’m grateful that I was able to provide this socially-useful service for only a small bag of gold. That said, it’s a pity he didn’t have much idea about welding and then painted it with only one top coat and no primer.

Never mind, we’ve now brought in the local pro to try and make it safe. He seems competent, but it looks like he’s getting lots of advice from all the lads and geriatrics who are passing him things and generally doing what they can to help in a fine spirit of collective enterprise. It really was quite a party and plenty of fine spirit was quaffed from the several bottles of lao khao I’ve just cleared away from where they dumped them in a tidy heap by the gate. This local white rice whisky at forty percent delivers a considerable kick and always seems a essential stimulus to efficient and competent workmanship. Can you guess who pays for for all the booze?

When you employ workers on a daily rate, you’ve also got to factor in the extra cost of rendering them semi-comatose, a process which begins long before the sun is below the yard arm and long before the work is finished. With the resulting loss of productivity and the outlay, it could add to the cost of a job by fifty percent!

They’re down there now in the dark passing round a single glass with hands that are still blue and pungent with paint, rolled in the hot blanket of the night, the blood throbbing in hazy brains, as they celebrate the pleasure of joint effort and a job well done.

Well, I hope it’s a job well done! Maybe this time the gate won’t need any attention now at least for several weeks.

Can This Be True?

This was one of the ladies who I shot planting rice the other day. None of the farmers I think understood my excitement when I saw her cap.

One possible definition of true innocence must be not knowing what the CIA is.

Why Can't We Stop Building?

Today we’ve had three men working on the new wooden house in the garden and somehow I feel that we’ll never ever stop building. I thought the house was finished but what Cat says is quite correct. At the near end the roof stops directly above the verandah and as the rain blows in from that direction, the steps and a yard or two of flooring gets soaked. And as Cat says, the railings and the stairs are of ‘mai pradoo’, a top quality wood which nonetheless doesn’t take the weather particularly well. It’ll all rot out in a year or two.

‘Teerak ja, we need some sort of a mook.’ she says, smilingly. ‘Then no problem with the rain!’

I know exactly what a mook is because we had this same debacle when we were building the concrete house. We totally forgot about a porch for the front and so something had to be cobbled together as an afterthought, causing all sorts of horrific complications.

So we’re now busy building an afterthought mook for the new wooden house as well. Cat’s first idea was to extend the whole of the existing roof by a few metres to cover the steps, but then foolishly I came up with an idea to do something a bit more interesting. Why not have a smaller gable that covers just the steps and verandah but not the old rice barn? It’ll look much prettier. I did a sketch plan and all was quickly agreed by Cat’s brother, Saniam, who was leading the work.

Saniam then worked out what wood we’d need and ordered it from a nearby village. The wood arrived in the dead of night and was noisily stowed away behind the house. Though we were at risk of jail for handling bootleg timber and would only be safe when it was safely nailed to the realty, the next day he failed to turn up for work. As usual we were left waiting and wondering.

Eventually after a day or two, we at last had a team of Saniam and two others on the job and things got started in earnest. The only trouble was that suddenly they announced that they couldn’t do it as per my drawing. It just wouldn’t work for some reason. So we spent a few hours chewing the fat, drawing and redrawing and getting nowhere. As the resident farang and banker, all I could do was stand in the sun in thirty six degrees and listen uncomprehendingly to the debate, occasionally trying to get Cat’s attention to make an anguished point or two.

Finally a plan was agreed upon and holes were immediately dug for the two supporting posts. Things proceeded apace and it was looking good, a sort of Roman portico across much of the front of our dear little shanty. But then Saniam again said we couldn’t do it that way because the left slope of the roof would block the doorway into the old rice barn, and especially with the gutter in place, you’d have to duck down to walk along the walkway in front of the barn.

They were all most solicitous that the tall farang might hit his head, though I didn’t care a damn. I just wanted it all finished and for me and my fragile bank account to be left in peace.

Round and round in circles we went, getting nowhere fast. Eventually I was losing interest and about to give up in disgust when Saniam said he had an idea. I was too hot to follow what he said but when I came back after an hour or two, he’d already done the timber work for an extra slope of roof coming off the rice barn allowing the farang to enter the barn without having to bow his head at all. It was a bit fiddly and complicated and not particularly beautiful but that’s just a consequence of a committee of rice farmers, obstructed by me, cobbling it together on the hoof.

Next thing, I had the silly idea of hanging some decorative woodwork on the bargeboards of the porch’s gable end. Cat liked the idea so we got in the pickup and went off and bought a load of materials, including the blue corrugated iron we needed for the roof. It was a good morning’s work except that as the two sides of the roof turned out to be of different lengths, we had to go back and buy some more corrugated sheets for the longer side.

On getting back to the house, I discovered that Cat and I were at cross purposes as to where we were going to hang the decorative woodwork. She wanted it across the horizontal gable beam and not on the bargeboard. This debate then took an hour or two, which ultimately she won.

Then we had to decide whether they should be hung on the back or the front of the beam. Sitting on the grass, now in the shade as the sun had gone round to the west, we contemplated the samples the men had hung for us, while Bpirt’s electric plane screamed blue murder. That took at least another half hour.

The next debate was as to the colour of the fascia boards to be hung under the eaves… maroon to match the house was decided upon, or so I thought. The next day when we got back from the builders’ merchants, I discovered we’d got cream in the back of the pickup!

‘Tell them not to put those up, Cat. They’ll look awful,’ I insisted and she fully agreed. When I came down again a few hours later, sure enough the cream boards were nailed in place under the eaves.

Now I’m knacked and if I have the choice, I’ll never ever build anything again in my life. But probably I won’t… have the choice I mean!

Tomorrow we’re having a day off and we’ve told the workers not to come in. We’re going to our friends’ divorce party.

It’s a farang and his Thai wife who’ve quite recently finished building a great big house, with another one in the garden for Mama. He’s had enough of this world and he’s decided it’d be better to stop home making and to go off and become a monk instead. I must get him to give me the address of the monastery!

Whither the Rice Harvest?

The ideal way to cultivate rice, from ploughing, to raising seedlings in a nursery bed and then planting each one by hand in the flooded field.


About the time I flew back to England at the end of April the first rains had already fallen, precious drops falling onto the parched ground and giving off the rich smell of hot earth. Cat told me over the phone that unusually the rain was continuing and after a week or two that the farmers were preparing the soil and planting the rice. I was surprised as this seemed earlier than usual and with no guarantee that the rains would continue. A resumption of the hot, dry weather would surely burn the young shoots.

It’s now early July and the rice crop is not looking good at all. Most of the rice land has been planted but much of the rice looks yellow and thin and very little of it is in the standing water that’s necessary for robust growth. Rather than seedlings being pre-germinated and individually planted in the flooded paddy field in the usual backbreaking way, it looks as if most farmers have broadcast the seed rice directly onto the earth. When the ground is relatively dry like this year, the only option is to broadcast the seed, a method that saves time but produces a smaller yield.

In a few places with a high water table the fields are flooded and there’s an example of this at the end of our soi where a pond has recently been filled in. A farmer and his wife have just been ploughing it with their ‘iron buffalo’, the two wheeled tractor that does such good service in this part of the world, before they plant out the rice. This they’ll do in the optimal way by first germinating the seeds in nursery beds. When the seedlings are about a foot high, they gather them in bundles and take them to the flooded fields. There the farmers, often women, wade bare foot in the mud, bent double planting each seedling individually in rows, growing conditions which produce a much better yield.

In the last few weeks there have been some dramatic storms and the sky has darkened, the low clouds streaming by on the squall, dumping cold stair rods of rain on us for a few minutes but then in all their sound and fury fast moving on. What’s now needed is the long grey days of continuous rain that we’ll probably get in August when my daughter and son-in-law come out to stay for a couple of weeks. We’re going for a trip to Southern Laos and while I hope we don’t get washed away, I do still worry for the rice harvest.

Cat simply says that the world is changing. New weather patterns may thus mean that rice production in this dry region becomes even less viable than it already is. Yet you wouldn’t think so when at the rice harvest later in the year all the farmers come streaming in to the rice depots to sell their crop. The trucks, pickups and iron buffaloes are lined up for miles and they sometimes wait for days for theirs to be sold. It seems sad that after all that work they’re so desperate to pay off some of their crippling loans that they can’t wait a few months for a better price.

I’m sure the devil runs rice farms in hell as torment for the wicked and in purgatory too. Rice farming really is a tough life and I wonder what the future is for our North Eastern Thai village where rice cultivation ceased to be a viable way of life at least a generation ago.