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Chapter 1 - The Sacrifice

I seldom think of her, but if I do it is usually of incidents that happened long ago rather than in the recent past: memories that have always been with me, but I’m never sure if they really happened.

Like the time I was at school in first grade when I had been dawdling on a stone bench waiting for her to fetch me home and she had come up from behind and clasped her hands over my eyes and said, “Guess who!” Or like the time I was being sent to boarding school with strangers and she had seen the look of apprehension in my eyes, despite my bravado. And she had said, to comfort me, “See! I’ve ironed your shirts and woolen underwear. They’ll still be warm when you open the suitcase.” Or like the time when I had come home for the holidays and we had sat in the parlor before a gas heater and she had thrilled me with stories from the Jatakas. And coming to some relevant part of a story she had said to me, “And you too will grow up and leave me.” And I had denied it, saying, “Never.”

These were the times when I had been sure she loved me, and my world was secure and I loved her very much and dreaded the day when she would leave me and I’d be alone. But of the times with her when I had grown into adolescence and manhood, these I never think of, because they were bitter times that left me with much guilt.

Like the time when we had quarreled over some trifle and I’d childishly refused to speak to her for months. Like the time, years later, my wife and I had quarreled with her and she had turned us out of her house, her grandchildren and all. Or like the time when we’d shouted at each other and I’d hated her — really hated her — and I’d roared, “From this day you are not my mother!” as if the strongest, most irrevocable bond in the world could be so easily severed.

As I say, I do not consciously think of her if I can avoid it, because it makes me feel very sad and guilty. But some nights, for no apparent reason, I’ll suddenly wake up and there’s a heaviness in my heart I cannot describe and I’ll try to clear my head to remember if it had been a dream that woke me. But no, it was not a dream. Then, inexplicably, without bidding, a word would form on my lips: ”Mother!” And I’d cry in my heart, for I knew that, in my cowardice, I’d deserted her.

Let me tell you something of my mother so that you may understand why, when she was sixty-nine — despite the best of our entreaties — she acquired a wolfram mine in the deep forests of the North, and ran it herself for two years.

Mother came from good Chinese stock on her father’s side, an immigrant who had made his fortune in rice trading. Unfortunately, unaware of the trend of history, he had sent his money back to his ancestral village where he had built a magnificent villa overlooking the Yangtze. When the Communists swept into power, they seized it. It is ironic to think that the profit gleaned from the sweat of Thai peasants should end up giving aid and succor to the Reds in China.

I never saw Grandfather Lee in the flesh, although his funeral picture haunted me throughout childhood. It was later verified as accurate when I saw it, or one like it, many years later. The picture shows him to be a kind man in his late fifties or early sixties, with a receding hairline or a very high forehead, dressed in a white European-style coat. My uncles look very much like him.

For some reason or other, whenever I think of him, I conjure up a vision of this framed funeral photograph placed at the head of his coffin; and connected with this vision I see children running after his hearse, scrambling for a shower of coins thrown from it. I have never witnessed this custom in later life and do not know whether it is a practice of the Chinese or whether it is just another money-connected dream of childhood.

His two sons, my mother’s younger brothers, distinguished themselves in government service while continuing the family tradition of setting up their own businesses and enriching themselves. Grandfather’s other two daughters, my mother’s elder sisters, married rich Chinese merchants.

Mother was an inveterate gambler. When father retired from the Foreign Service so that she was not required to travel anymore, and before she took the greatest plunge of her life, she spent most of her time playing cards with her friends. Often I did not see her for days or weeks at a time, except for brief snatches now and then when she’d be getting ready to go off again. I’d sometimes go into her room and chat, and she always had a few kind words for me. But then there’d be the inevitable toot of the car sent to fetch her and off she’d go again.

Cards had been a passion with her even as a young woman and, when I was little, though I remember nothing of it, she used to take me along with her to the houses of those same friends, stuffing me with rice and fish sauce spiced with chilies when I cried from hunger.

This is not to say, of course, that she had not done anything substantial in her life. When she was younger, before the Great War in Asia, she had contracted for the government, bought and sold used cars, and even opened a little store, all with the merest margins of capital. As a boy I saw the merchant blood rising in her many times: as when she opened a Thai restaurant in one of Europe’s great capitals where my father had been posted, the proceeds of which supplemented her allowance and paid for my education in private schools.

All these ventures were, I think, manifestations of her bent to engage in commerce as natural as a bird’s instinct to build its nest. The ventures always fizzled out because she never pursued them to their ultimate conclusion. In our family, commerce was considered somewhat demeaning: “Ten merchants are not the equal of one nobleman” was an oft-quoted Thai proverb.

Our first journey to the mine is indelibly etched in my memory. Mother, our partner Netr, and I had set off from Chiang Mai in a jeep early one morning in late December, before the sun has had time to evaporate the mist from the road. We were loaded down with sacks of rice, cartons of canned fish, baskets of fresh vegetables, pork and other stuff. It was a completely new experience for me, this adventure, seeing the mist-shrouded North-country which reminded me so much of the landscape of my childhood sojourn.

We passed through the bustling market towns of Hang Dong, San Pathong and Chom Thong, the road straight for long stretches and then curving in places to change direction. From Chom Thong to Hot the road undulated and wound through rice, tobacco and orchard lands. In places we were flanked by tall stands of teak, bamboo or tamarind trees. As we approached Hot, which in former times was the staging point for pack mule caravans into the Shan States, the mist cleared and we now saw that the mountains were all around us, a sign that we had left behind the vast Chiang Mai plains. Hot is a small district town perched on a rise at a T-junction in the road. We took the turning on the right which, many kilometers later, eventually leads to Mae Hong Son.

From Hot the road began to rise rapidly, undulating and coiling like a snake slithering through the mountains. For some distance we ran parallel to the course of the Mae Chaem, a wide, lazy tributary of the Ping. For the next twelve kilometers the drive was one of the most scenic I’d ever seen, all around us the low foothills of the Tennasserim Range which came right down to the roadside and the river’s bank on our right. At this time of the year the hills were ablaze with masses of red, brown, yellow and green foliage, and the road strewn with crackling leaves; autumn in the tropics.

When the road forked from the river it began to climb more rapidly and the trees reverted to evergreens, many of them pines, so that the mountains were now verdant once more. At Baw Keo, on the ridge of a low mountain, there was an experimental pine forest, with thousands of slender trees planted in ordered rows. We flashed past a sign saying, “Pinus something-or-other, Spacing Experiment, 1968.” The air was chilly, a consequence of the altitude, which I suspected was now over a thousand meters above the sea.

Past Baw Keo, up another steep rise, a turning on the left led to a laterite road which led to the district seat of Omkoi. We followed this road for another forty-six kilometers through forest country, coated in red dust now, rarely passing another vehicle. Now we glimpsed our first Karens, those patient people of the hills and forests, trudging in little groups with their inevitable wicker baskets slung over their backs. At our approach they stopped and stared at us or scrambled off the road to give us a wide berth. We past a few scattered settlements of highland Thais, their paddy fields flooring the valleys or terraced out of the sides of mountains.

 

Down a gradient and over a rough but sturdy timber bridge, near a marker post which said six kilometers to Omkoi, Netr pointed to a turning on the right which was barely noticeable. It led along a rough dirt track which was the path we had to negotiate to the mine. Now I had to do some skillful driving, as the track was narrow and rutted, making the jeep list and sway in unholy manner. I was a little nervous as it was the first time I had driven over such terrain, but Netr comforted me with the thought that he had been over much worse. Mother, as always, displayed a fearless front.

In the distance, through gaps in the trees, we could see the mine, an ugly gash of exposed sandstone high up on the side of a mountain. It was twelve tortuous kilometers from the turnoff at the laterite road to the base of the mountain on which the mine nestled, and we traversed it in just under an hour. The jeep could now proceed no further, blocked by a stream with steep embankments but which, at this time of the year, trickled just for the sake of form.

We were greeted by a motley group of Karens: betel-chewing women, grimy, dark and wrinkled; pipe-smoking girls; all wearing traditional Mother Hubbards--red for the matrons and white for the girls. The women, alerted to our arrival by the hum of the jeep’s engine reverberating off the mountains, now acted as porters, humping our supplies up three kilometers of steep grades, some sagging under as much as fifty kilograms. I parked the jeep under a make-shift shelter and then we followed on foot, huffing and puffing, lungs aching, occasionally resting, taking the good part of an hour.

All except Mother. She was borne aloft on a rattan armchair slung across two stout bamboo poles, on the shoulders of four wiry Karen males. And thus, in courtly splendor, like a dowager of ancient China, she arrived to lay claim to the mine.

Over the next couple of years I came to know this journey by heart, making the trip three or four times a month, in sunshine, in darkness, in mist and in torrential rain; alone and with company. Sometimes I looked forward to the journey and at other times I could not sleep the night before, depending on the weather and the condition of the jeep, and my own state of mind.

Tin and wolfram mining depends on a plentiful supply of water to wash the ores, which means that the mine can be worked only during the rainy season, say from May to October. The water is tapped from a stream about ten kilometers away, by an ingenious system of ditches hugging the side of the mountains. Where it is necessary to cross a valley or a gully, steel pipes up to a foot in diameter supported on rickety scaffolding had been erected. I couldn’t help but admire the previous owner’s ingenuity and perseverance. Most of the ditches were now silted up, the steel pipes were either clogged with sand or leaked so that only a trickle of water reached the storage pond. The jet gushing out of the monitor was impressive, but ineffective on the hard compressed sand.

Netr pottered around looking for the best location to begin new diggings. He recommended two spots; Mother picked the one away from the huts, past the yawning pit, on the rim of a steep valley. Pipes were connected from the pond on higher ground to bring water to the proposed cutting and the monitor was bolted into place. Now the workers could begin to hack away at the hard sand with sharpened steel bars and pickaxes.

But before the new cutting was made, the miners had to propitiate the guardian spirits of the mountains and forest who nominally owned the land. Usually a chicken or pig is killed in sacrifice at the site, but Mother forbade the taking of any form of life. So for the time being the spirits would have to make do with non-freshly butchered chickens. I did not care one way or the other, but argued that she was being hypocritical. Where was the difference in offering a live chicken and one that had been bought, killed and plucked in town? Either way we were condoning the killing of chickens and pigs for the table. It was these differences in philosophy which irked me and was to build up gradually into open conflict.

A little spirit house was erected near the proposed cutting and, on the auspicious morning, two chickens were boiled and placed on a table in front of the shrine, along with bananas, oranges, candy-coated peanuts and other condiments. Little cups were filled with rice whiskey and placed before it too. Then Mother lighted some candles and incense sticks and prayed in front of the spirit house, her lips moving in supplication. When she was done the miners took their turns until each had asked permission of the spirits to dig for their treasures of aeons. Only I stood aloof from the proceedings.

Afterwards the chickens and fruit were taken back to the huts and the feasting and merriment began. Being the cynic that I was, I was inclined to think that the ritual was dreamed up as an excuse for the miners to eat and drink at the expense of their employers.

The miners, however, were not altogether satisfied, because the ceremony had not been performed in the time-honored method. Our foreman, a man not disposed to joking, told me that soon after, as he was passing the site of the proposed cutting, some malevolent force tried to nudge him off the side of the mountain. Definitely, the spirits lusted for blood, it seemed.

They were to get it. It happened this way. The miners had been digging into the side of the mountains for several days, so that an overhang about head high had been formed. Two Karen women were squatting under the shade afforded by the roof. Suddenly it caved in. Lumps of soft crumbly sandstone rained down on the two old crones. Their cries alerted others, who rushed to dig them out. One woman’s legs were crushed, swelling up frightfully, while the other had her spine broken. She was taken in agony to her hut, and died some time in the night. It was an accident hard to explain, and more puzzling that the outcome was so tragic, seeing that the cutting was but head high.

The dead woman’s husband was paid money in compensation, but the Karens refused to work for us anymore and returned to their villages. Indeed, it was many months before they dared venture through our little settlement on their journeys through the hills.

Mother refused to reverse her ruling on live sacrifices. In a way I admired her for sticking to her guns, even though the spirits would never be satisfied.

Omkoi is rich in tin and wolfram and I discovered that illegal miners, working alone or in little groups, were panning the ore from streambeds in the manner of California gold miners of old. In two or three days they would fill a condensed milk can with the ore which they sold to traders, who made a double profit by supplying rice and other stuff back to the miners. However, unless one had a mining lease, as we did, it was illegal to transport or even possess the ore. Thus bigger fish would buy the ore from the small traders and when enough had been accumulated, they’d smuggle it to Chiang Mai.

Since we operated a legal mine, it was easy enough for me to buy up ore from the traders and take it to the mine. When it came time for us to sell the ore, I would pay a tax on it and get an official permit to transport it to Chiang Mai. Everyone made a profit on each leg of the long journey to the smelter in Phuket for tin, or to an overseas buyer for wolfram.

At the end of the first month, Mother had painstakingly accumulated just over one hundred and eighty kilograms of wolfram from the mine; while I had over two hundred and seventy kilos of tin from my buying forays. It was satisfying to watch the heavy grains being scooped out of buckets and poured into strong canvas bags. The bags would be filled to thirty kilos and then tied with wire and sealed. Karen porters were summoned from their village to carry the bags down to the jeep. I hefted one bag and could just barely lift it off the ground. The Karens, once the load had been jacked up onto their backs, could stagger for quite a way before taking a rest. It took about an hour for them to carry down the ore.

I was swept with exhilaration as I drove out with the load of precious ore stashed in the back of the jeep. It would not be the last time that my spirits seesawed between fits of depression and high hopes.

In time a tacit understanding developed between Mother and me. She stayed in the mine and oversaw production, while I delivered supplies and traded in ore. I preferred the arrangement, as it meant spending more time out of the mine and thus avoiding the increasingly annoying arguments with her. I had found the slowness of the pace and my own helplessness in the mine frustrating.

I did initiate one project which stands as a monument to my endeavors, and that was to hire some Karens to build a sturdy timber bridge over the stream. The jeep could then be driven to the top and thus end our dependence on the porters.

The stream was about fifteen feet at the fording and I doubted whether the Karens could construct a bridge of sufficient sturdiness to carry the jeep. However, in this I underestimated them. They chopped down trees and dragged them to the stream and sawed some into planks for the flooring. I provided them with nails and twenty-inch bolts. In no time they had the posts up, then the crossbeams and flooring.

When it was completed I gave the bridge-builders two young chickens from the mine. They slit their throats and dipped the feathers in the blood and daubed the bridge posts with it. Then they boiled the chickens and spiced the soup with aromatic herbs. Some of the meat was placed in little banana leaf boats together with cooked rice, whiskey and lighted incense sticks, and then floated downstream. In this way the spirits were appeased and would ensure that no harm befell the bridge.

Later, in the rainy season, when the waters rose high and swift currents swirled past the wooden posts, the bridge remained fast. However, after days of heavy rains a freshet jammed a scraggly tree trunk against the understructure and tilted it precariously so that I dared not drive across. Even so, the bridge was a great boon during the rains, as we no longer had to wade through cold, knee-high waters.

As the months passed it was clear that we were getting deeper into financial trouble. Production was not keeping up with the high cost of running the mine. Even the profits from my ore trading could not offset the drain on our financial resources. As far as I could see there was no way we could turn our losses into gains: we lacked the capital and know-how to mine properly. Essentially, we were just scratching the hard earth with our simple tools. And, for the superstitious, there was also the question of whether the guardian spirits would relinquish their treasure of the ages.

It was during this time that a disillusioned Netr found an excuse to leave the mine and never returned.

One day we had a very important visitor. I had heard much of him and was keen to see what he was like. His name was Soon, or Hia Soon as he was known throughout Omkoi, and he was the biggest merchant in the district, with his fingers in all sorts of pies. He was also the biggest smuggler of ore, and rumor had it that he accumulated five or six tons every month. It was also rumored that anyone who double-crossed him was liable to get a bullet in the back, his corpse left to rot in the forest.

Hia Soon drove up in a mustard-colored pickup with a bodyguard riding shotgun in the back. I heard the sound of his truck and rushed out of my hut. Mother had also come out to see who our visitor was.

“Good afternoon,” he greeted us. “My name is Soon. I’ve heard so much about you, Khun Ubol, that I had to come and pay my respects.”

“Please come inside and have some tea,” she said. She was pleased to have someone civil to talk to. “This is my son, Khun Noi.”

I said hello and poured him some tea. Outwardly he seemed pleasant enough: a soft-spoken, mild mannered man in his early forties. We chatted a long while on the problems of mining, and in the end he hinted that he was interested in leasing our concession from us. Then he left, with a promise to return for an answer soon.

“Well? Are you going to let him have it?” I asked. “He’s giving us a fair price, you know. Within a year or two we should get back what we’ve put into the mine.”

“I’ll think about it,” she replied. But I knew that she would never agree. She had bought the mine to work it, and work it she would, and consequences be damned. The mine had become an obsession with her.

 

I argued and cajoled as I would as a child. But I had not reckoned on her fierce pride and stubborness. At one stage she stayed continuously at the mine for something like six months. She developed all sorts of rashes because of the water. It was heartbreaking to see my mother grow frail, and her face lined with worry, before my own eyes. She could barely walk and presented a pitiable sight hobbling around with her cane making “inspections”. As soon as she was out of sight again, the workers went back to their snoozes or their opium pipes.

Then one day the break came. The previous day I had taken Father into the mine on one of his infrequent morale-boosting trips.

After a fitful night, I came downstairs spoiling for a fight. “Why did you tell the men to stop digging in the gully over there?” I demanded angrily. “Netr and the department engineer said that that was a rich deposit. I gave some of the men express orders to dig there, and you countermanded my orders. Why?”

“Don’t shout at me!” she flared. “Who do you think you are, raising your voice at me?” She was shaking with rage. “This is my mine and the men will do exactly as I tell them.”

“You won’t let them dig there just because it was I who gave the order. You don’t care if you ruin us, just so long as you get your way!” Anger and frustration were welling up in me and I wanted to goad her.

Father tried to calm us down. “Don’t speak to your mother that way,” he said.

“From this day she is not my mother!” I shouted angrily. “Either she leaves the mine and lets me run things, or I go, for good.” Then I stomped off.

She and Father went into a long huddle. I was hoping and praying that she would give in. There seemed to be no alternative but for her to do so. Netr was gone; and if I went she would be stranded. I was taken aback, therefore, when Father came to me and said that it was I who had to go. He had sided with Mother.

When it finally sank into me that I had gambled and lost and would have to leave the mine for the last time, I was filled with despondency. Something about the place — the serenity and wild isolation, the crispness of the air — tugs at one’s heartstrings and makes one yearn to return. For the last time I scrambled up to my favorite spot on a knoll away from the huts.

Everywhere I gazed was ridge upon ridge of green-clad mountains, dissolving into a bluish haze at the infinity. And above us all, the great vault of the sky, deep azure overhead, diluting to a blue of the most exquisite hue where it meets the horizon. And in the eastern sky, masses of white cotton clouds cast mottling shadows on the mountains, drifting to I knew not where.

 

I must have sat there a long time, depressed, ashamed of what I’d said and done, lost in thought. Perhaps I was the disharmonious note in the mine. After all, I did not take the guardian spirits seriously; did not give them the respect that was their due. Perhaps our luck would change if I did leave the mine. Some illogical part of me was still hoping for a financial miracle.

At eventide the whole firmament was ceilinged with grayish wads of fluffy clouds. Through gaps in the clouds the soft rays of the westering sun beamed through, incandescing their tops with a yellowish glow, lending them form and substance. The mountains were now blurred by haze, even those in the middle distance, while those at the edge of the sky blended into the horizon. It was my last sunset at the mine. The next day Father and I departed, leaving Mother alone and more isolated than ever.

In the next year I tried to forget the mine, finding other work to do. News trickled through, though; sometimes I felt a pang of guilt for having left Mother with only the workers for company. Then I heard that she had found a new partner who was preparing to take in a bulldozer, an excavator, two dump trucks and other equipment. The catch was that we would have to fork out more money as part of the deal. I was peeved: once again she was placing her trust in a total stranger. Again I protested, but again it fell on deaf ears.

Bowing to the inevitable, I put aside my role of doubting Thomas and prayed that it would pay off. It must be admitted that much was achieved. The ditch bringing water from the stream was unclogged of years of vegetation; the steel pipes were repaired or replaced and shored up; and the storage pond itself was excavated to thirty meters square and several meters deep. A huge chute twenty meters long into which the gravel would be washed was constructed out of planks and logs of hundreds of pine trees. For days the thud of axes and the buzz of saws filled the air. Its like had never been seen in those parts. More huts were built to house the expected influx of workers for the expanded operation, and generators installed so that work could go on round the clock. The track from the laterite road up to the mine was graded and the wooden bridge over the lower stream—built during my time—was strengthened so that it was possible to drive to the top again.

By early May all preparations were completed, and now there was nothing to do but await the onslaught of the rains. Only the bulldozer clanked and belched away, piling up a huge mound of dirt awaiting the day when the monitors would be turned on, washing the gravel in the great chute, there to be partially separated into wolfram concentrates.

In the breather before the storms, a date was set for the ceremony to propitiate the guardian spirits, according to the age-old custom. Father was to bring a dressed piglet for the occasion.

Even I was excited and awaited news of the outcome with bated breath. Would ours be a success story similar to the ones which had fueled us with dreams of riches and filled us with resolve to keep going all those months and years?

On June 6, three days before Father was to journey to the mine, Mother set out to meet him in Chiang Mai, accompanied by some workers and their families. She insisted on riding in the cabin of one of the dump trucks instead of the Land Rover as on the return trip they were to take back two drums of diesel fuel for the bulldozer.

The truck reached Hot without incident. At Hot they stopped for lunch. The men downed a small bottle of Mekhong. Not long out of Hot, it began to drizzle and the road became treacherous as a snake. The truck took a bend, came out all right, and then skidded and overturned. Mother was badly hurt and died on the way to hospital. The others escaped with only minor injuries. It was an accident hard to explain, and more puzzling that the outcome was so tragic.

A month later I was back at the mine, ostensibly to represent our family’s interests. Work had proceeded apace and the monitors had been sluicing the gravel into the chute for over three weeks, and now they had been turned off. It was time to retrieve the ore. Workmen hosed down the gravel in the twenty-meter-long chute, washing away the light sand and leaving the heavy, black, metallic grains trapped by the wooden crossbars. The gravel became blacker as the ore concentration increased. I became as excited as the men and waded onto the chute to help remove pebbles and stones, letting the cold water swirl over my bare feet and ankles. In exhilaration I dug my hands into the ore and sieved the coarse grains through my fingers. Never had I expected to see such a glorious sight as this at our mine.

A few days later the ore was clean enough to be removed from the chute. It was shoveled into wooden buckets, then slung across bamboo poles and hefted onto the stout shoulders of men who jogged with it to the ore-dressing shed. All in all, I counted over ninety buckets of ore, each weighing over thirty kilos. After the ore had been further refined and then roasted in a large pan over a wood fire, the final tally was over a ton of wolfram concentrate.

The guardian spirits had at last yielded their treasures of the ages.

As I say, I do not consciously think of her if I can avoid it because it makes me feel sad and guilty. And especially, I never think of the time she lay in a ditch far from home among strangers, her skull cracked, an old woman of seventy-one, light rain falling on her unshielded body suffering I don’t know what agonies; then taken in a rough pickup to a hospital in Chiang Mai to be pronounced dead on arrival.

But some nights, for no apparent reason, I’d suddenly wake up and there’s a heaviness in my heart I cannot describe and I’d wonder: was the sacrifice worth it?

(End of Chapter 1.)

Trirat Petchsingh

© Trirat Petchsingh. All rights reserved by the author.
ISBN: 978-974-7452-914
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