Thai and Lao Fragments

Fragments, fragments, fragments...the word repeats itself in my groggy mind as the rain falls hard and the window gets wet and the morning ages, and all I can see or think about are partial images, partial lives, arbitrary resting places and equally arbitrary stopping points and no final endings. And a story to go with each and every one of the fragments that comes to mind. All of the stories mere fragments.

Of the country girl with unshaven legs and no earrings and rice field nails and unpainted toes and a colorless top and two jade rings on the middle finger of her right hand, and the sweetest, the loveliest smile I have seen in weeks.

Of the Aussie ordering a second Heineken and chatting with his friend--not a girlfriend, I would learn--of two years, and telling of the courts giving his wife 70% of all that he and his wife owned fifteen years ago, and now he comes every year and might buy a small place and might not; and then there's the little story within this story about the expensive education for one of the kids that cost him a fortune because the ex insisted and he didn't like it, but that's okay, he now says.

Of the room for the night in Luang Nam Tha way up north in Laos, with the low door to the toilet that was so low that I cracked my head a good one and why I went to the toilet I'm not sure because there was no running water and no soap and no toilet paper; but there was a noisy desk fan sitting on the floor that cooled my feet at night and it was still running when I left through the door that could not be locked, which was better than the door to the adjoining three-dollar room that was cracked open as I left and I could see a long hairy white leg hanging over the bed and I imagined he did it this way in college too--slept late and was too big for the bed and dead out like a rock when he slept.

Of finding myself walking down the rolling dirt road toward an Akha village near the Chinese border and passing all of these young dark men in rags and they were barefoot and carrying antique shop rifles, and looking like guerillas, but now heading out to shoot squirrels and pigs and birds because they can't shoot tigers and other large animals anymore because they're all gone; and then in the village, seeing from a distance and then much closer, this old woman on a raised mat platform, her legs crossed, her face with lines as thick as sidewalks and with bared breasts that hung to her waist, and she was, I guessed because of the time of day, as happy as she could be in her third or fourth betel nut chewing session of the day.

Of the way in another Akha village while eating a lunch of bamboo sprouts and cold sticky rice and cabbage soaked in too much water the village headman took the bananas we had given them and wouldn't eat and cracked--yes, this is the right word--in half each one and gave a half to one son and another half to another son and a third half to a neighboring boy with dark brown teeth and a black Mao cap slanted to the left who was barefoot. There were large open tears in the shirt and the pants he wore.

Of Chris the middle-aged chain-smoking German from Cologne who comes yearly to Vientiane and stays for a month and does nothing but drink, and smoke; who fell in love, in my story, with the twenty-seven year old Lao girl who makes fifty dollars a month as a seven-day-a-week cook and who owns a six hundred dollar Chinese motorbike; and how she got it I haven't yet figured out. She fell in love with Chris even though she hated his jerky blue jean shorts and high-top red tennis shoes, and so he promised to marry her and then one day after he had gotten her visa papers and was happy to be getting a much better life he disappeared. But to where is not known; but then maybe it is known since one day the girl with the Chinese motorbike who is a cook in Vientiane saw a red high top tennis shoe floating in the Mekong River, on a day when she was returning down river to her childhood home, the home where two years and four months ago she saw her mother have convulsions and fall over and die. I haven't yet decided how they buried her or maybe burned her body because she was a Buddhist.

Of a night among quiet and gentle nights in the north when I walked a long street or two or three and came upon all these young men I thought were girls and girls I thought were men and absolutely did not know which was which. And when I did guess I was wrong half the time. I knew only that this was an experience with random guessing of the sort I had never experienced or imagined; and all of these people must have known of my confusion and anxiety because on the last corner I passed a girl I took to be a boy, and a skirt came up and I saw that I was mistaken. This was the only time in this three-block zigzag through the night that I could be certain who I was looking at.

Of son Cole's tiredness that lingers and comes and goes and worries me, oh does it now, with its persistence, worrying me as I'm lying one morning in bed wondering what he's got in his DNA that I don't have in mine, hoping and knowing that this difference in his DNA does not matter.

Of this Chinese visa I've now got in hand and a plane ticket yet to buy that will put me on the road west out of Xiangun in Yunnan, one that goes all the way to Tibet; and I could not help wondering if that's also the same road that leads to Poona and maybe I should take it.

Of the tall girl with undeveloped legs and a mustache and a tooth prominently missing from the right side of her mouth; and I wondered if I could put her in a story that ends in Mexico in the time of Diego Rivera and they would meet but he wouldn't like her because she was too tall and not an artist and she wouldn't like him because he was like too many farang, fat like a woman in the last days of the ninth month.

Of the day I sat in a minivan without air conditioning for nine hours eating road dirt and waiting and waiting for the road to be graded and dump trucks to be filled, and sometimes climbing out the window to get air and take photos, knowing this was a Laos soon not to be because the Chinese have come and are building this road and taking everything. And then I'm wondering about the Dutch girl who sat not far away in the minivan, her hair knotted and dull black and when she turned around and I saw the pasty yellow face and I heard her speak in Lao I thought she was a community development worker for UNESCO, but found out that she is no such thing. When I offered her some of my drinking water to pour on her head because she was roasting as we sat in the shade beside the minivan eating dust she thanked me but said she would tell me later what she did, a thought that could not compare in importance with her eagerness to get home to the Lao town she lived in, having been away a mere week and not once had she ever experienced this kind of longing for friends in all her years in Holland.

Of the king on a bill with a camera hanging around his neck, a man revered like few I know, his photo everywhere; and I guess he wants to be remembered as a photographer and a man who wore oversized glasses.

Of silences, and unanswered questions, silences and questions that will never be other than what they are at the moment--unknowable, unanswered. Other people speaking as they must speak.

The author can be contacted at:  korski1@cox.net

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