arriving and the woman moving to greet them, Joe and I returned to his car. “This,” he said as we walked, “is how journalists and priests get killed.”
I laughed again. “Happy New Year to you, too, Joe.”
Ménage à Trois
I wasn't the first foreigner to build a home in Nam Bua Daeng. Ron Hutchinson, a Scot, was there before me, marrying and building a two-story house for my wife Lamyai's closest friend, Jeab, an abandoned mother of two who'd met Ron at the same Three Roses bar where I later met Lamyai. He also bought her a pickup truck, taught her how to drive and sent a monthly allowance from the comfortable sum he earned working in Saudi Arabia.
Jeab was six years younger than Lamyai and about two-thirds her size, a spunky little thing with a firecracker personality. She also drank and was addicted to a card game called “hi-lo.” But she was not, entirely, a layabout. Nam Bua Daeng was more a “hamlet” than a village, without a store or a place to eat, so once she quit the bar business, Jeab erected two rows of shelves beneath a roof, lined them with the basics–dry noodle soup, soaps and shampoo, batteries and light bulbs, cooking oil, whisky, a selection of pharmaceuticals, snacks and candy and cigarettes–and stocked a standup, glass-fronted fridge with soda and the cheapest brand of beer. She also moved in a tank of gas and set up a three-burner, outdoor kitchen, preparing soups and stir-fries every day, priced at the equivalent of 25 US cents. It helped pay for the gambling.
At first, Ron was someone who visited Thailand on holidays. He didn't gamble, but he smoked and drank voluminously, so it was no surprise when he was disabled by a diseased liver and emphysema and his employer retired him at age fifty-nine. At about the same time Lamyai and I moved into our new home, he began fulltime residence in Nam Bua Daeng.
It wasn't easy for them. Ron's money and belongings were still tied up in Saudi Arabia and he continued to drink and smoke and an earlier hip replacement acted up and he was reduced to using a walker for a while. Even when he recovered, he did little more than sit in a chair in the little “store/kitchen” and make change while smoking, drinking and watching football on TV. While Jeab played cards between selling bowls of rice and soup.
Sometimes, Jeab said she'd stop gambling if Ron gave up the booze. Sometimes it was the other way around. But then one of them would backslide and all hell broke loose. Once, Jeab bit into Ron's left arm, leaving the crescent marks of her teeth as a permanent scar. Another time, when he passed out in the middle of an argument, she was so angry she shaved him bald. The villagers, whose homes were only a few meters away, were delighted; it gave them something to talk about.
All that said, I really believed that Ron and Jeab cared about each other, that their shared spousal abuse–the “boxing,” as Lamyai called it–was their way of showing love. They also kept few secrets about their mutually enjoyed time in bed together, providing further entertainment for those living within hearing.
Still, Ron never really got into being a resident of Nam Bua Daeng. He knew only a little more Thai than I did and didn't like Thai food, insisting that Jeab prepare the meat and starch dishes that sustained him all his life. He refused to visit the monks' encampment in the woods. Aside from Jeab and her daughters, I was his only friend, and a one-week-a-month pal at that. His house had the only telephone land line in the village and he enjoyed sending and receiving e-mail. The last time we talked, he asked me to bring some new software for Jeab's oldest daughter, for whom he had bought a computer. He taught her how to use it, thus making her the only computer-literate Thai in miles.
The next time I went home to Nam Bua Daeng, he was dead. Lamyai and I visited Jeab and she showed us photographs of Ron, curled in eternal sleep; an autopsy showed his liver had beaten his lungs to the final punch as he slept. Over the desk where he once sat making change, Jeab had erected a small shrine, with his photograph, flowers, incense and a glass of beer.
Lamyai and I accompanied Jeab to visit the monks and after arranging some fresh flowers in Ron's memory, she asked if we wanted to “see” Ron. She retrieved a sealed vase from one side of the altar and said it contained his ashes. She then produced the two titanium parts of Ron's artificial hip that hadn't melted during the cremation and clinked them together. “Ron not come here before he die,” she said, “–now he here forever!”
Within a few months, after selling his computers–Ron's money and goods were still in Saudi Arabia–Jeab hung up her rubber slippers and took out her dancing shoes and returned to work in a bar in Bangkok. Her fifteen-year-old daughter wanted to be a flight attendant and that meant she had to continue her education and learn to speak English fluently.
That was in December. In May, 2002, a forty-five-year-old, yellow-haired, rosy-cheeked, corpulent bus driver from Denmark named Villy Danborg entered the Three Roses Bar, met Jeab, and spent the next four days with her in a hotel room across the street. They communicated in English–“Ve talk, ve make luf,” he later told me–and before returning to Copenhagen, he asked Jeab to marry him. In the months that followed, he wrote long letters (which I read to her) and they talked on the phone as often as a dozen times a day. In this way, Jeab learned that he had twin nineteen-year-old sons by a Danish woman he never married, a five-year-old son by a Vietnamese woman he did marry. Both women walked out on him–also leaving their sons behind–as did a subsequent Thai wife, aged forty, who migrated to Denmark under his sponsorship with a teenaged son; she left Villy and moved in with a man only a little more than half her age soon afterward, taking her son with her. This left Villy with three boys to raise and he said they, and he, needed a woman.
Through persistence, Villy convinced Jeab to get a passport and visa to visit Denmark for three months. The idea was that if it worked out, they'd then get married and Jeab's two daughters would move to Copenhagen, too. (During her initial visit, her daughters were to remain in Thailand with her brother.) Villy said he wasn't rich, but his salary, plus a fee for managing the forty-unit co-op in which he had a spacious flat, gave him $4,000 after taxes a month and he thought they could live on it comfortably, while Jeab's girls could get a western education.
On a later visit to Thailand to meet Jeab's family and visit her village (and then accompany Jeab home with him), Lamyai and I helped Jeab through the passport and visa process and told Villy we'd accompany him on the overnight train to Surin. I also offered to help him try to understand the strange new world that he was about to experience. I liked Villy. I thought he was an innocent as well as a romantic, and if I thought he was rushing things, he had a good heart and when he said, “I luf her, I cannot help myself,” I knew he meant it.
The village came as a shock, I think. He was pleased by the modern house that Ron built, and impressed by ours, as well, but the village's engulfing shabbiness, trash strewn everywhere, everything tired and worn, the women doing little more than gossip all day, the men drinking from early morning, nobody doing much work, left Villy quite distressed, especially after seeing Lamyai's extensive and flourishing gardens. Why didn't the others do the same? I told Villy about the “inertia of the poor,” a concept that generally applied to the poorest of the poor, those who had, more or less, given up or lost any desire for or notion of improvement, taking whatever came. Westerners might confuse this with what they, the foreigners, called laziness.
Notice, too, I said, that most of the people in the village were old or very young. The middle generation, the parents of many of the children he saw, worked elsewhere, many of them in Bangkok, because there was no money here. I said I knew of seven households (out of about forty) in Nam Bua Daeng whose young women either worked in the bars or returned home only after a farang started sending money. What he and I did, I said, contributed much to Thailand's rural economy. The war bride phenomenon didn't begin with American hostilities in Vietnam, but it flourished then and spread to Thailand and the Philippines, where few of the brides were met in a church. Thousands of foreign men married Thai bargirls and took them home, while others remained in Thailand with them, or didn't marry them but wired regular allowances to their bank accounts. There was an old joke about the farang being taken home and the woman saying, “I'd like you to meet your village-in-law.”
Meanwhile, Jeab was behaving in a manner that seemed designed to offend, as if she were trying to get Villy to change his mind. She told me that she was