I walked around the ancient community, armed only with an envelope that read “7/1, Soi 2, Thippanet Rd.” Lots of helpful people scratched their chins and pointed, saying it might be “around that corner” and so on.
In one dead-end soi I met a woman who had never seen a Soi 2, but said she would ask the postman the next time she saw him. She took my phone number. That kind offer happened about 45 minutes into the search.
I re-traced my steps, planning to head home. It was getting dark. Expecting a shortcut, I headed down a soi I had passed earlier but not entered because it was labeled as “Soi 6, Wualai Rd.” A grandma swept her driveway behind a gate. Two noisy dogs told me to go away, but on a hunch I decided to ask anyway.
She motioned for me to come closer and I shouted my question. “Twenty years ago?” she smiled. She waved her neighbor over. The two of them talked. The neighbor looked doubtful but agreed to be my chaperone on an expedition to look for “Auntie.”
After two twisty turns, we found Auntie on her porch. She hollered down to us that her address was “7/2, Soi 2, Thippanet Rd.” I knew from experience that 7/1 isn’t always next door to 7/2. Auntie encouraged me to take a look anyway—though she couldn’t understand why I didn’t just phone for directions. The chaperone wished me luck and headed back to her own place.
I carried on a few more steps around yet another corner, and there it was. As the crow flies, the weathered old wooden structure sits only about 300 meters from the house of the woman who said she could ask the postman. It had taken me about 15 more minutes of walking to get there.
Even before I saw the blue plastic sign displaying the numbers “7/1,” I had no doubt I had arrived at the right spot. For anyone else it might have been unremarkable. To me it looked astonishingly like the classic two-story Thai house in the South where Jip grew up.
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