XXXXXL

Sorry, I seem to have misplaced my camera, so I am short on pictures.

What I wanted to take pictures of may not have fit in the camera anyway. I am too fat for Thai clothes. The first week in Thailand I went to the mall to buy some replacements for the 4 red shirts I packed. (Who packs 4 red shirts to go to Thailand in the middle of a Red Shirt revolution?) I did. I went into the first store because I could see it had a bunch of really cool shirts. The lady worker walked up to me and said, "Sorry. No, no." Then she motioned to by stomach. "Too big". I went store to store. Same thing. Nothing my size, or only really ugly shirts my size. I told my Thai friends and they said they would take me shopping where I could get clothes my size. We went to an outdoor market. Stall after stall we went and my friend kept asking if they had clothes that would fit me. Each one of them looked at me, shook their head and pointed to another stall. Finally, totally discouraged, my friend Win said, "I know where we can go, Export" Export, it turns out, is a store full of clothes made in Thailand, that were supposed to be shipped to America, but for some reason weren't. We walked in and there was a shirt at least 5 feet wide hanging on the wall. 5XL. I was in the right place.

Phuket Airport

Across the waiting room and behind a glass a wall, a stream of glassy-eyed tourists are taking their first breaths of Phuket air. Across from me, my friend is groggy and recovering. What a difference 2 days can make. 2 days of riding around on my scooter. My face and neck and arms are burned by the sun, seared by my lack of precaution, lack of protection.

2 more days in Phuket and my conscience might be seared as well. The arrogance of people using this country to do what they would never do at home.

Last week, on the way to the JDC, Tze pointed out a shirtless couple riding a motorcycle. (the girl had a bikini top). "Not polite" he said, "but they are farong (foreigners) so its OK." Tze's understanding is encouraging but the couples lack of understanding is symptomatic of so much that is wrong with Thailand. Over a hundred miles from the beach and they are riding through a city like they would never ride through Sweden or London. Like no Thai person would ride through Chiang Mai. This is their playground. It does not matter that it is someone else's home.

Patong is the same mentality amplified to an absurd extreme.

Innocent sounding ping pong shows are actually a huge tourist draw, one of the most popular and ubiquitous events. They feature women shooting ping pong balls from their vagina. The show escalates to women opening bottles of beer with it, inserting whole bananas, and that is where I asked the descriptions to stop.

A few interns thought it would be important to attend a show to understand what the women go through. They wanted to understand so much, some of them went twice.

I am not sure if I follow the logic, but then again I have only the description in my mind, shocking me to disgust- they have vivid close up images. On the other hand, they were well drunk by the time the show started, so maybe the images are not so vivid after all.

Reporting From Kings Project

Being Immersed:
The sun is setting over the hills, orange glow reflecting off the lake onto the patio of my weeklong lakeside home. This is luxury living. People pay money to stay in places like this. I guess I did too. Maybe when I wake up tomorrow and hike through the hills I will think differently, but this feels like a retreat, a splendid vacation. People also pay to work now that I think of it. My sister is a hiking guide at a spa that recently changed its name to “Biggest Loser Resort” in conjunction with a reality TV show where fat people compete to lose weight by working out. The spa makes millions off making fat people work. HAHA.. Maybe this summer is a weight loss program for me. If anything, it would be a wonderful added bonus.
Day 1
Turns out most communication is non verbal. Either that or filling bags with dirt is a remarkably simple task to learn.... scratch that. Our two teams combined filled 21 bags with dirt during our morning shift. The workers need to have 200 bags to make the two dams we were working on. 7 law school students could not keep pace with 2 50-something-year-old men. Why are some skills so valued and others not? Imagine filling bags with dirt for 8 hours. My oversized fake 501 jeans were soaked all the way through. My white boxers now totally blue. It felt remarkable. Doing something and immediately seeing the progress. I think something in human nature craves results. I am used to working in areas where the results are ambiguous and come very slowly. A semesters worth of reading and thinking boils down to one test which translates to one grade that when put next to other grades makes a cumulative number from which prospective employers base a portion of their assessment of me. What crap. Part of me would rather fill bags of dirt with some of the most cheerful people I know, and I don't even speak their language.


Tze Time
I like to tell stories. I also like to write stories, but sometimes, when I meet a truly interesting person, I just want to listen. Tze is in town and it could not have been better timed. Everyone was pretty exhausted and only drank lightly before heading off to bed. I stayed outside on the patio, amidst an orchestra of bugs and the laughs of lizards, talking with Tze. He told me the whole history of Thailand and the history of Burma, and the tenets of Budhism and his view on politics and Thai culture and dating and life. I can maybe thank a bottle of Chang for opening him up a bit, but it was so nice to sit and chat and listen to a totally new view of the world. I feel satisfied and dare I say “immersed” for the first time this week. I don't know that I will have another opportunity to have an intimate conversation like that with a Thai person this summer, but I look forward to working with Tze on any project.

Saem, the Dam, and the special light.
Saem and I walked to the dam and laid on our yoga mat beds looking up at the stars. She says she has never seen the stars so clearly before. It was hardly clear at all and I felt remarkably spoiled because I grew up in the desert and slept every summer night on my tampoline under clear star-filled skies. We saw a light in the sky. It looked small like a satellite, moving smoothly before it grew larger and larger becoming a bright orange ball of glow, then fading back down to a dot and sailing out of sight slowly. In all my years sleeping under the stars, I have never seen a light like this. I told Tze when we came back to check on us and he told Porn, our house mom. She consulted her husband PeTam and together they explained that it was a special light that usually only monks see to remind them of something special from their past life. They said they both had never seen such a light in all their lives, but they hope to one day. Tze said maybe we were Thai in a past life and that is why we got to see the light. I don't know about any of those theories, but this is a special place and I love being out here.

Kids are Kids, but these kids are also grown-ups
The school does not have enough supplies. The alphabet chart has “Uicon” (supposed to be Unicorn) for the U animal. X is xmasturkey, all one word. The is no A/C and we could not even find paper to play a game with. The kids in grades 1-3 range in age from 5-12. Some are tiny and some are quite large. They wrestle and goof off like any kids, but when it comes down to it, they watch out for each other. They make sure everyone gets a turn, that the big kids dont always win the games, and that they cooperate despite our complete failure to speak Thai. Sumchai is 12. He has some kind of physical disability but his english is the best of all the kids in the class, and he was eager to translate our directions into Thai. I was eager to let him. Each day he would hug me and hold on until I made him let go. What will happen to kids like Sumchai? I feel terrible for walking into his life for a week and then walking out. Friday when we left, he hugged me and said, “No see you tomorrow” and he ran away.

I make it rain.
All week we wanted rain. Anything to cool the air and make our furnace house more bearable. Sometime during dinner, Nur managed to finagle a saw and a hoe from PeTam and cut up a dead tree. A fire was burning on the beach before the sunlight was all the way gone. No one wanted to join him because the hot hot heat was already too much. I felt bad for Nor sitting down by the lake all alone so I told them I would go to the fire and do a rain dance to make it rain before bedtime. I swear, I took the energy from the fire and called in the storm. I know how preposterously superstitious that sounds, but it really really worked. The fire went from hot under clear skies to horizontal from the wind with thunderheads piling over our lake. They all came down and we danced. The rain lasted all night. I tried not to take all the credit I was given, but really, would rain dances be so popular for so long if they never ever worked?

Those British Bastards

I live about a block from a temple. Next to the temple is an upscale restaurant. If you listen close enough and tune out the sound of Thai airforce jets on training drills and dogs barking, you might hear the bellicose chuckling of the fat Brits sitting around glutting themselves to an early grave. Tables full of expat kings gorging on cheap food and women 40 years their junior. The women sit silent. The men tell tales of riotous times and posh living. I ate there once and watched as one particularly obese Brit sat in a white linen outfit eating from 3 plates, a back brace and bright blue socks with sandals. A young Thai woman on each side. I tried to hide my outrage, but I could not contain the mimicking. "Oh hohohoho, Charles, you always were a cheeky bastard weren't you. HAHAHAHA. Good thing our kids don't know our women are younger than their children, muhahahaha. If Helen hadn't taken half my money I would have two more girls each night, hahahaha" Colonialism is alive and well in Thailand. They are not conquering land, but they are still conquering people.

The sex trade is big business.

Today, I went to the bookstore to pick up a Thai/English phrase book. Next to the book I bought was a whole row of books dedicated to teaching foreigners how to say things like, "I like younger women", "I want to sleep with 4 girls tonight, is thatOK?", "Do you like pain?" and it gets MUCH more explicit from there. The books are available in English, German, Swedish, Danish, Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, and maybe more. Can you imagine your grandpa walking into a Thai bookstore to get a phrase book designed solely to speak to Thai

prostitutes?

I would love their faces on billboards outside their London flats or their Florida tract home. Outside their country club, a big flashing sign for their friends and wives and stockbroker sons to see. "Grandpa supports human trafficking"

Fresh Things.

Meet Tze: (pronounced Tee, like the letter or the drink or the thing you golf with). Tze makes Thai style noodles. Like Thai Ramen, but a bajillion times better than ramen. His noodles are fresh, never dried, never frozen, and mixed with fresh kale and crispy pork (name your meat). He gets up every day at 5 to make the noodles from scratch. By 9 he comes to work at BABSEACLE (where I am doing my internship) He goes to the restaurant during lunch to help his mom with the lunch rush and then comes back to work until about 6:30. Then he teaches us our Thai language class and hangs out with us until about 10, when he goes home and gets ready to make more noodles the next day. He does this 7 days a week, even on Thai holidays. He is only 23 and definitely one of my favorite people... and his noodles.. definitely my favorite noodles.

Leaving the Loin

I left San Francisco at 1:20 am Friday and arrived in Hong Kong at 5:45 am Saturday. The flight was only 14 hours, but 29 hours passed on the clocks. I spent almost the whole flight sleeping, which is remarkable considering I was on the 64th row, seat 1 of 10 in the row. Man was not meant to fly coach, or I just got really spoiled flying first class to India last year.
I had directions to my hostel by way of train, but I decided to find a bus that would take me into he city instead. I saved 60 Hong Kong dollars by taking the bus, plus I got to see some incredible sights along the way.Like colorful piles of shipping containers, stuffed full of plastic toys and cheap electronics, waiting to make the trek across the pacific. Next stop: San Francisco, after that, someones birthday party, then, the final million years will be spent decomposing in a landfill on the outskirts of every American town.I did not really know where to get off the bus, so I just got off when I felt like it and it turned out really well. I was super close to my hostel, so I dropped my luggage and went out... at 7:00 am. I wandered til I should have been good and lost, but I ran into the elders (Mormon missionaries) and they gave me directions to a ferry that would take me across the harbor to some hip shopping district where I could look back and see the city.I thought I listened to the elders directions, but apparently I didn't cause I just got on the first ferry I saw and it went about 40 minutes away to this island that has no cars and no buildings over 3 floors. Truly unique in Hong Kong, and actually much cooler than Prada. I decided to explore the island and ended up hiking all over, buying swim trunks, and swimming in the ocean, right next to a huge power plant.

All dressed up for Muni.

4/24/10

5-to Ocean Beach

These buses vibrate like the coin operated beds you see in movies but are never so fortunate to actually encounter. I am on the 5 to Ocean Beach.
Across from me a woman is propped up quite comfortably reading the Chronicle. She is making no attempt to contain herself to one seat. Her cheap convention style book bag draped sloppily onto the adjacent seat. Her bare chubby legs spread open as if she is straddling a bucket of popcorn. She just switched the Chronicle for "Real Simple" magazine. Her purple metallic round hairy potter style spectacles magnifying all sorts of advise she will likely never take. She is wearing white tennis shoes, white tube socks, and very short white shorts. On knee is scabbed and both legs are spotted orange with fake tanning cream. The collar of her white polo is twisting out from under her over-sized blue sweatshirt. Her graying pony tail pulled through the back of her white cap. Loads of jewelry and make-up. She definitely spent time putting this ensemble together. Unfortunately, any chance she had of looking classy is overshadowed by the jiggling of her orange and white legs. Her shorts so short they disappear into the jiggling. Skin meeting skin. She is somebody's grandma. I hope she has a good day.