Don’t Try This at Home

Near the wok and on the dining table in Thailand you can nearly always find a bottle of fish sauce. It’s salty, smelly, and indispensable. High-quality “naam pla,” as it’s called in Thai, comes from fresh fish that are allowed to ferment for more than a year. The resulting reddish-brown brew is high in protein and lots of other good stuff.

Most Thai food wouldn’t really be Thai without fish sauce, and so by extension most Thai people wouldn’t really be Thai without it. The stuff is so essential to life here that apparently sometimes it gets used for purposes it wasn’t designed for.

A colleague at work and I found ourselves caught up recently in that most ancient of male pastimes, the trading of injury stories. I described the time when I gashed open a toe while walking around the refugee camp in flip-flops; no clean water was handy so the Cambodians suggested that I pee on it. My friend countered with a childhood tale of a bad burn; his auntie reached for the bottle of fish sauce and gave him a good squirt.

A Thai doc confirmed for me that this home remedy, while still used by some well-meaning parents, is counter-productive. Fish sauce may indeed contain all the essential amino acids required by the body for growth and regeneration, but only if consumed—not applied topically.

Skype and Jip

We find it hard to remember life before Skype. Jip loves the video chats especially. Even though she can’t see the people on the other end, their comments about what she and her surroundings look like add a dimension to the conversation that delights her.

Now that we’re set up with wi-fi at home, we can skype from wherever Jip happens to be in the apartment. Not long ago we chatted in bed with some Seattle friends. My Chicago family took a guided tour of our place as I carried around the laptop and its built-in camera to various rooms. Sitting at our kitchen table, we were able to revive an annual tradition of ours by joining a holiday party that was going on halfway around the world.

Skype’s conference calling ability also works wonderfully with Jip’s random association ability. If we’re talking to someone who reminds Jip of someone else, we can spontaneously add the someone else to the call for a wild three-way conversation.

At the risk of showing my age, I recall what it was like to make international calls back when Jip and I used to work in the refugee camps. The little town where we lived had one only phone capable of dialing abroad, at a cost of several dollars per minute. The phone’s owner, never imagining that anyone could need to talk longer than seven minutes, had attached a timer to the phone so that it automatically cut off after that long.

I can definitely understand why Skype is now the largest international voice carrier. For much less than we spend on in-Thailand calls, we use the service roughly every other day, whether it’s to instant message, quickly check in with a relative, or conference among people who live in four different time zones. Send me an e-mail if you’d like to meet up on Skype!

China in Perspective

Now and then you come across factoids about China’s population that give you pause—percentage of the planet, number of cities with more than a million people, ratio of infant boys to infant girls. The trouble is that by themselves these stats can be unwieldy and hard to get a handle on.

Recently I saw a blurb that put China’s numbers in the context of other countries. To me the comparison below is easy to digest, and therefore more stunning than the raw numbers. Courtesy of James Fallows’ blog:

If Americans want to imagine what it would take to be "strong" in the way China currently is, all we have to do is imagine moving the entire population of the Western Hemisphere into our existing borders. Every single Mexican. (Rather than enforcing the southern border, we'd require everyone to cross it, headed north.) Every Haitian, Cuban, and Jamaican. Everyone from Central America. All 190 million from Brazil. And so on. Even the Canadians.

China, by the way, is just about the same size as the United States, though a larger share of its land area is desert, mountain, or otherwise nonarable.

If we did that, we'd be up to about a billion people -- and then if we also took every single person from Nigeria, and for good measure everyone in hyper-crowded Japan too, we'd finally be up to China's 1.3 billion size. At that point, like China, we'd have tremendous scale in everything. Rich people. Big businesses. A huge work force. Countless numbers of multi-million population cities. And we would also have a tremendous amount of poverty, plus pressure on resources of every kind, from water to food to living space. Just as China does now.

Scale gives China some strengths. But it also creates tremendous challenges, as Americans would recognize if we thought about this prospect for even a minute.

Here in Thailand (which is geographically about three-quarters the size of Texas but has a population about three times as large), these numbers feel familiar. Measured either in number of square kilometers or number of people, twenty Thailands equal one China. In other words, population density here and there is about the same.

Arable land is perhaps the biggest difference—Thailand’s percentage is twice China’s. As a result the Thais have for a long time been the world’s leading exporter of rice. The Chinese produce about ten times more of it than Thailand does, but for a long time have struggled to feed themselves. Tremendous challenges indeed.

What's Up?

Something is definitely up. We don’t usually get music floating in the windows from some hard-to-pin-down direction in the middle distance. But today there it is, the same sort of gentle tune that plays on quasi-public holidays like International Workers’ Day.

I make my way to the mall, thinking I’ll be in ’n out after a short errand and maybe a quick bite. But traffic is worse than usual for a Saturday morning, and when I get there the place is packed… with little people waving balloons. Not a free seat anywhere at the food court.

At the top of the escalator somebody has planted a big bounce house; a few tiny, smiling heads trampoline up above the roofline every few seconds. Dozens more heads just like them are moving that direction, all slurping or quaffing or gobbling. I take shelter on the margins of the fanfare, where a new mom is also parked, watching the middle distance, nursing a newborn.

Finally the penny drops. The second Saturday in January. Loads of free gifts, games, and food for kids. National Children’s Day! I love this.

Faad Khraw

Coming home late from the temple trip described recently in this space, I ended up with a leg injury that will leave me hobbled for a few weeks. (A motorcycle was involved. I’ll spare you the details. If you come visit, we can go out to the sidewalk in front of our place for a re-enactment of the whole uninteresting tale.)

What is interesting to me is the reaction of Thai friends and colleagues when they see me limping around. Almost to a person, they say the same thing after they hear what happened: “faad khraw.” This phrase, which translates literally as “to beat fate,” goes beyond the meaning of “I’m glad it wasn’t worse,” to suggest that paying a small price today will prevent future, bigger misfortunes. It’s a fairly common saying in Thailand, and seems to be especially appropriate around the time of a milestone, such as a new year. In this case people were telling me that because of this setback, 2011 will likely be lucky for me. Hope they’re right.

Talking with one Thai well-wisher about this event and his use of “faad khraw” in reply, I began to get a little goofy, wondering aloud about fate and karma and the possibility of some weird connection to the leg injury sustained by the guy I met on the road near the border two decades ago. My friend cut me off with another classic Thai reply: “yaa khid maak!”—“You’re thinking too much!”

Road Taken

Back in the refugee camp days, it wasn’t safe to go tromping off on your own to the actual Thai-Cambodian border. The closer you got to the dividing line between the two countries, the higher the chances that you’d meet somebody with a weapon. Lots of land mines got laid there too.

I still recall a lazy Sunday afternoon, sitting around playing music with a few other camp workers in the little border town where many of us lived. A frantic Khmer man drove up and asked for our help in getting his friend admitted to a nearby hospital. Not really thinking what we were getting ourselves into, two of us foreigners hopped in his truck and drove toward Cambodia for a few kilometers along a road we had never traveled before. We stopped in what seemed to be the middle of nowhere, only to see a couple of men emerge from the forest carrying a make-do stretcher.

When they came closer we realized that the guy they were carrying had stepped on a mine. They hung the stretcher, hammock-style, from the inside corners of the shell on the back of the pickup. I sat back there with the guy to keep him steady while we drove to the hospital. He was really suffering and the two of us didn’t have much common language. All I could think to do was to hold his hand and sing to him. Luckily we were able to get him cared for. It wasn’t until the driver dropped us back in town that my friend and I realized we had taken a big risk in going along on that ride.

Two days ago, twenty-plus years after that incident, I got a chance to travel again on that road. Cambodia is no longer off limits; that part of the border is safe. (Tragically, the mines don’t know the war is over, and they continue to claim victims in areas that haven’t been cleared). I journeyed there for a look at a 1,000-year-old Khmer temple I’d read about called Sdok Kok Thom.

The Thai Fine Arts Council’s restoration looks great, as you can see in these before and after pictures. I had the place to myself, except for a school group whose impressive leader taught with questions rather than by lecture: “how are you each going to tell the story of this temple when you get home today?”

Indeed, Sdok Kok Thom’s story is unique. A pillar once stood at the corner of the grounds, inscribed with details about the why’s and the who’s of the temple’s construction. Scholars who have studied the inscription (now in Bangkok for safekeeping) say that it explains more about the context of those times than any similar Angkor-era “cornerstone.”

Perhaps in the future more tourists will also discover the magic of this site. For now, the road remains just as empty as it was the first time I took it. At that time, of course, I hadn’t known where I was going, nor that a temple was hiding in the forest. I hadn’t realized then that just three years earlier, some of my refugee students had stayed in a camp just a stone’s throw from the temple—until that camp was destroyed by shelling from the Cambodian side of the border. I never considered that the area was mined.

A sign at the edge of the site today commemorates the collaborative mine removal effort, which finished in 2004. A total of 76 explosive devices were found buried around the temple.

Who Says Never the Twain Shall East Meet West?

Muffin flavor of the month at a Bangkok bakery: Banana cheddar.

• Sign that the apocalypse is upon us?
• Proof that Thailand now sets trends for global cuisine?
• Tragic consequence of somebody in the kitchen misreading the Thai-English dictionary?
• Indication that I need to get out more?

You make the call…

Ploughing Through

I know about racism and sexism—but what’s the word for when people ridicule or romanticize rural life? Rusticism? Idealization? Whatever you call it, I sometimes do it. Lots of city folks do.

Here’s a cure: a Thai documentary called "Agrarian Utopia," directed by Uruphong Raksasad. It’s about the hardships of growing rice here.

Rakasad made arrangements to film two families working a small plot of land for a year. There was no script, only suggestions to the farmers about what they might talk about on camera. The “actors” struggle with all kinds of weather, a stubborn buffalo, and spiraling debts. At various points they have to forage for food, taking honey from beehives and eating ants.

Whether or not this striking movie really captures what it’s like to plug away at this increasingly unsustainable way of life, I can’t really say. But I doubt I’ll look at gorgeous green rice fields in quite the same way from now on. Here’s the trailer. Check it out at a film festival near you.

Franklin's Angkor

To the list of time-honored traditions that go with this time of year, right alongside floating candles, yams with rosemary, and pictures with Santa, I’m now officially adding a 21-kilometer roadrace amidst Cambodian temples. For the fourth consecutive first Sunday in December, a few friends and I lined up at the start line in front of Angkor Wat to do a lovely early morning circuit of my favorite monuments on the planet.

The annual trot has become a comforting ritual. For some reason an old Grateful Dead lyric comes to mind:

In another time’s forgotten space
Your eyes looked from your mother's face
Wallflower seed on the sand and stone
May the four winds blow you safely home
Roll away the dew

Whatever that means. I’ve sung that tune countless times to myself, never really caring what it means, but somehow today it seems a fine description of the route taken by this magnificent race course.

We start out protected by a canopy of big trees lining the road that winds through the gigantic archeological park. Leaves drop around us as we settle in to our pace. The first five kilometers include a short out-and-back leg that makes the entire loop come out to be the right distance, which means we get a quick look at the leaders as they sprint by us on their way to finishing in under 90 minutes.

Not long after we leave behind the 200-meter-wide moat that surrounds Angkor Wat, we’re encountering kids by the side of the course. Most are hugging their moms’ legs out of shyness, or staring quizzically, as if to say, “It can ring like fire if you lose your way.” Soon a few have gotten brave enough to wave, and by the third or fourth water station, lots of the volunteers picking up the water bottles that runners cast aside are kids.

Every year I particularly look forward to a certain corner, just about at the halfway point in the race. The running route goes left, but if you were to turn right and go a few hundred meters a lovely reservoir known as Srah Srang (“Royal Bath”) would emerge from the forest. Perhaps this place lies just outside the formal boundaries of the park? or maybe the water source remains important to the locals, just as it was when they dug it out 800 years ago? Whatever the reason, the intersection marks a village, and so is busier with spectators than any place along the way other than the finish. A long receiving line of waving, smiling Cambodians awaits us there, extending their hands to be slapped, cheering in a mixture of Khmer and English. I can’t help grinning as I run past. The energy we take from that corner sticks with us for weeks.

And the temples just stay as great as ever. As I’ve said several times, you just can’t ruin these ruins. God knows people have tried. First we run by Prasat Kravan, the Cardamom Sanctuary, whose five brick towers have been restored to their original height but are missing what were once some impressive innards, likely carted off by thieves long ago. Further along is Ta Prohm, traditionally the coolest of Angkor’s untouched temples… until this past year, when the Indian archeologists began “improvements” to protect it from being loved to death. Then there’s Ta Keo, and the Victory Gate, and the Terrace of the Elephants, all of which have a few warts when seen in harsh sunlight, but at that hour—we’re passing by at around 7:30 in the morning—are just about the finest combination of sand and stone anywhere.

Finally the four winds blow us safely home. The race ends where it began, but of course we’re not the same people we were when we started. Another year has gone by. We’ve had a spiritual journey: answered the call, rung the bell, chanted the mantra, emerged from the whale’s belly, rolled away the dew. In the endlessly interpretable words of the Dead:

Some come to laugh their past away
Some come to make it just one more day
Whichever way your pleasure tends
If you plant ice you're gonna harvest wind

Talking Turkey

Unlike Loy Krathong, Thanksgiving is a holiday Jip can get behind. It’s the one day of the year when she agrees to vary her routine—or at least to trade one routine for another. Eating yams baked with rosemary has become our tradition.

Yesterday we took that dish across town to the home of a colleague, where a few folks from work gathered for the traditional feed. Jip didn’t have any turkey or pie, but she did enjoy the conversation around the table, just as she liked going last year to a gathering of people who all graduated from my college--she felt the banter was more interesting than what she usually hears at home. She seemed at ease right away, even thought she had met only one of the other people before. Partly that comfort is a sign of our hosts being easy to know, but mostly it reflects how much more social Jip has become during the past year or so than she was when we first came back to Thailand.

With this mixed-age, international group she took the opportunity to share her standard advice about how to eat a balanced diet: “Mix colors.” Later in the meal it seemed appropriate for me to tell a turkey day tale that’s been making the rounds on e-mail.

Once again this year, there’s lots for us to be thankful for.

Loy Krathong in Nonthaburi

As usual Jip this year took a Scrooge-like attitude toward Loy Krathong, saying as she did in 2005, 2006, and 2009 that the holiday has been commercialized and romanticized. She’s right about that part. But here we are in new quarters, with a new place to float, so in the end tonight she went along for the ride and the spectacle was beautiful.

A big banana leaf snipped from the garden out back provided plenty of raw material for more than enough krathongs. Jip’s caregiver and I pushed Jip to a prime spot near the swimming pool where she could hear the frogs as they began to celebrate the evening. We thought we had the place to ourselves, but just as we launched the last of our floating candles, a neighbor family, walking toward the parking lot, noticed what we were up to.

I think the parents had planned to celebrate down at the river, but their children couldn’t wait. Soon the whole pool was illuminated by our combined efforts. The kids were squealing, the frogs were answering, the world was shimmering. Jip grudgingly cracked a smile.

Four Hands

The Angkor Wat half marathon is coming up again. In trying to get ready without getting injured, I altered my training routine this year to include massages on rest days. Considering that every other day is a rest day, you might call this schedule pretty decadent.

Guilty as charged… but I’m pain-free so far, so maybe the plan is working.

One complication I hadn’t foreseen: massage shops close early in our new part of town. At some of them, if you’re not in the door by 7pm, there’s a risk of being told to come back tomorrow. That’s nearly what happened the other day. I showed up around 7:15, figuring I was safe because I asked for just the one-hour, feet-and-legs-only variety. The three staff had plans to be somewhere at 8. No problem, I said, starting to devise my Plan B.

They beat me to it. “How about I do your right leg, and at the same time she does your left leg, and we wrap up in 30 minutes?” Deal.

Old Pals, New Script

Jip had a visit from a few college classmates over the weekend. This group developed strong ties 30 years ago through lots of late night bull sessions. Their interest at that time was student activism.

The political pendulum swung fast in those days. Democratic experiments alternated with direct military rule. Conservative governments were brought down by leftist protests, only to return with the support of large movements that were concerned about the spread of communism. Thousands of dissidents went into the jungle and challenged the government from there about all kinds of issues.

Thailand had been a strong American ally during the war in Vietnam, which was still fresh in the minds of the Thai public when Jip entered college. Many students resented that American airbases inside Thailand weren’t being dismantled.

Jip says she and the friends who came to see us a few days ago protested “American hegemony” in front of the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok. They also chanted over what they said were unfair subsidies given to American rice farmers, which made it impossible for Thai farmers to compete in world markets.

This weekend, they talked about other things. The first one to show up hadn’t seen Jip since graduation. I was surprised to find that he too uses a wheelchair. He arrived in a specially equipped van, with a caregiver in tow. It wasn’t long before he asked Jip about how she prevents bedsores!

His disability has affected his speech. I imagine that some people meeting him for the first time might have trouble understanding him, as happens with Jip. Yet the two of them seemed to catch each other’s words easily, never needing to repeat themselves. Jip’s caregiver and his caregiver when off in a corner to compare notes.

After the others arrived, everyone soon began joking and laughing. They caught up on who has changed jobs, been divorced, gotten which advanced degrees—the usual old stuff. Jip never said so directly, but I sensed that for her the most special part of the afternoon was the new stuff.

Great Sleeping Weather

Historical average temperatures for October 30:

                         High           Low

Chicago, Illinois        57 (14)        37 (3)
Seattle, Washington      55 (13)        43 (6)
Bangkok, Thailand        88 (31)        73 (23)

Conditions don’t get much better than this here. It’s been cooler than normal for late October. Tonight the mercury dipped below 70—a record low for this date in Thailand.

There was none of the usual sweaty forehead on Jip, whose wacky internal thermostat usually leads her to request more blankets than she really needs. I tucked her in at bedtime and then went for a run. In the wonderful humidity-free air, I felt like I could keep going till sunrise.

Now I’m finally home again, googling historical average temperatures. In a minute I’ll look around for whatever blankets are left over, and sleep like a brick.