This is an essay I wrote for my Advanced Non-Fiction Writing class about my summer, in case you’re interested or if you just want a synopsis of this whole freaking thing. It was supposed to be five to six pages and I wrote thirteen and a half. My prof is making me cut it down to like eight for the final draft tomorrow………so that sucks. But this is the version I like, so here you go.
I used this here brog to jog my memory and I copied a few sentences from it here and there, which you may notice, but probably not because I am crazy and obsessive and you are not. Plus there will probably not be more than three people who read this. In any case, I still owe the three of you one last post, which will happen hopefully in the next week or so. Good thing it’s not months overdue or anything.
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The Border
By Marie Dohrs
“I don’t have an occupation,” I say clearly, in Thai. “I’m a student. And I don’t have an address; I’m staying at my grandmother’s house at Lad Prao 80.” The woman in front of me has my two passports in her hands, one navy blue and one crimson, one American and one Thai, one that will let me stay here for 30 days and one that will let me stay here forever.
Forever is about how long I’ve been sitting in this chair at this station adjacent to the immigration lines at the Suvarnbhumi (pronounced Su-wanna-poom, obviously) airport. The flecked beige tile under my flip-flops is just the same as it’s been all my life, every time I’ve stood drowsily in this room with my parents, shuffling through the tourist passport line, the first signs of humidity cloying in my nostrils. This time, though, I’m by myself, and I have a Thai passport, which I got last summer at the consulate in Vancouver. The photo in it is eight hundred times better than the one in my U.S. passport, and thank God they used my regular English signature instead of my attempt at writing my full Thai name, which looked like my four-year-old cousin wrote it drunk. Armed with this red plastic booklet, I attempted to go through the Thai citizen immigration line, which ended me up in this chair. The woman looks at me, bleary-eyed and frustrated after eighteen hours of flying on Korean Air, and chuckles in amusement and confusion. Uninhibited mirth at another’s expense: I have arrived in Thailand.
* * *
I haven’t been here since I was sixteen. Upon finally seeing my family, though, I realize that this hardly matters, because they still, and will likely always, treat me like I am twelve years old, fragile and blossoming and clueless. My tiny grandmother grins widely and reaches up with surprising strength to press her nose against my cheek, and I feel my years undoing themselves. I let myself be coddled. I allow myself to feel safe with my family and scared without them. I let them make sure I never go anywhere on my own, and I let them fuss with my necklines and warn me about strange men, long-fingernailed, leering, lurking everywhere we go, waiting to snatch me away and sell me like an animal or maybe kill me.
They worry about me, and they can’t believe my parents have allowed me to come here to live and volunteer by myself on the Thai-Burma border for two months. If the Irish Catholics have their guilt, the Thais have their terror. My family refuses to grasp the idea that I can live with relative independence in Mae Sot. They keep asking me if someone will be looking after me or if I’ll be living with someone. “Ehhhh…no,” I keep saying, “but I know a few people in town.” This satisfies them until the next time they ask. It’s true; I know the head of the school where I’ll be working, and I know a few of the students there, from three summers ago when I volunteered there the first time (albeit slightly more supervised). Not really anyone who can take care of me, though, but that’s fine because I don’t really need taking care of. But they just cannot accept this, especially my great-aunt, whose floor I’ve been sleeping on. Since we are roommates for the ten days I’m spending in Bangkok, she has plenty of time to voice her opinions. I’ve had to reassure her several times that I have pepper spray and I know that kicking a man in the balls is the most effective way to incapacitate him.
* * *
I could easily take a bus from Bangkok to Mae Sot, but my aunt and uncle insist on waking up at six in the morning and making the seven-hour drive through the mountains so they know I get there safely. They also deem it a good idea to wake up my other uncle’s child, my almost-five-year-old cousin Krathi, and bring him with us. On the ride, he and I watch a DVD of some show that is basically Power Rangers, but instead of cool intergalactic-crime-fighting high school kids, they are badass Japanese violinmakers. Then we watch a karaoke DVD on a loop of a bunch of songs by one Thai pop-star who is essentially Justin Bieber except far less talented and a grown man who should probably be ashamed of himself. Krathi sings along to all of these songs, with hand movements. His favorite is “Look! Like! Love!” (Stab own eye, make shrugging gesture, point and smile winningly.)
I don’t know what I’m doing, but I just watch the lush green countryside as my uncle careens around the mountain, and I try not to think about this.
My room in the Ban Thai guesthouse is gorgeous, which I find surprising. It is one of two rooms in a house on stilts set far back from the main area of the guesthouse; the walls and floor are dark lacquered wood, and I have my own bathroom and a wardrobe and a TV. The sheets on my bed are fresh and white, and in place of a normal blanket I have a very large starchy white towel.
That night after dinner, my aunt helps me secure the windows shut, and makes me promise that I will lock the door after they leave. I reassure her that everything’s fine, even as the tendrils of panic start to curl in around me. When they leave, I feel suffocated with irrational fear. I can’t bring myself to turn off the bathroom light. For a while I can hear people in neighboring houses laughing and playing music, but eventually they go quiet and all I can hear are crickets. I refuse to remove my towel-blanket even though it is boiling hot in my room, and I can’t aim the fan directly at me because it will disturb the curtains that I have meticulously placed over the windows. Eventually, I go to the bathroom and douse my head in cold water so I can be cool enough to sleep. My pillow is soaked. I sleep restlessly and keep waking up, until it cools down and the sun comes up and I get a couple hours of real sleep. In the morning, I switch to a room in the main house. I have no TV or wardrobe, and I now have a shared bathroom, but it’s cheaper and that night I sleep soundly, with all the lights off.
* * *
On my first day of work, I leave twenty minutes early in case I get lost. I ride my bike in circles, plural, all over town, until I finally find the right turn to take out to the countryside road that leads out to Hsa Thoo Lei Learning Center and Orphanage. I arrive in the Burmese Migrant Workers Education Committee office an hour late; my butt aches from my bicycle seat and I am dripping with sweat. No one seems to notice how late I am.
Every day, I take off my shoes at the door and sit at the end of Aye Mya’s desk. The window is always wide open and overlooks a tree by the dormitories that flutters with brown and yellow butterflies. I spend my days picking through and editing bits of reports that employees write, reporting on the 60 refugee schools BMWEC oversees for the donors. I drink Nescafe out of a tiny water glass, and at noon every day, I give 10 baht (33 cents) to the woman in the office who picks up lunch for everyone and ask for the spicy red noodles that come from the restaurant run out of a hut on stilts over a puddle just off campus, because I don’t know how to ask for anything else. Boe Cho sits at the desk adjacent to me and Aye Mya, and she sings exuberantly along to her music, which consists of songs like acoustic covers of Britney Spears’ “Hold It Against Me.”
* * *
Netflix does not work in Thailand. Nor does Hulu. Every afternoon, I arrive home on my bike, stumble into a cool shower, and then go in my room and close the curtains and lay naked on my bed for a long time. Periodically I think, Alright, time to go to dinner, and then I realize I would have to put clothes on to do that, so I stay where I am and resign to eating coconut yogurt for dinner. But then I have to put clothes on to get yogurt anyway, so I usually just sack up and go. I ride to one of the three restaurants I frequent, and sit alone and read On The Road, or a compilation of Mark Twain’s travel stories, or a novel written by a woman who volunteered in Mae Sot for two months.
For a week or two, my nights are dedicated to watching every episode of Glee on a bootleg website I’ve found. Sometimes I wonder if I should have some friends by now, but I’m surprised to find that I haven’t gone totally insane from extreme loneliness and boredom, and I in fact kind of like the solitude. I don’t even talk to myself, although I do sing a lot of Beyoncé in my room and my neighbor probably wants to kill me, but serves him right for playing his guitar at two in the morning that one time.
* * *
At the end of my second week, Boe Cho asks if I want to come play soccer with her and go out afterwards. I eagerly accept, although I have no shoes besides flip-flops. I arrive at the Mae Sot Football Club after sundown for the women’s game, but can’t play because of my lack of appropriate footwear and athletic ability, so I sit on the sidelines and watch the game, and also watch all the mosquitos swarming around the glare of the spotlights, and the bats that swoop through and eat them, and I listen to the crickets and the huge frogs in the country around us.
Later, we meet up at Mali Bar, which is literally a stone’s throw from my guesthouse. Boe Cho, G-Man, and I sit on a worn red couch drinking huge bottles of Leo beer. They tell me they were here on Wednesday and were out until five in the morning. “If you ever see someone in the office drinking a lot of coffee,” they tell me, “it is because last night they were drunk.” We talk about music (“Do you like Nickelback and Korn?”) and language and refugee camps and schools and parties and bars and alcohol. They don’t know what vodka is. They tell me that sometimes they have parties and the music is too loud and the neighbors complain and the cops come, and everyone runs. Shit’s universal. Tipsy in Thailand feels the same as tipsy in America. Thai bars smell and sound the same as American bars, and Thai bars look like American basement parties.
At the next bar, I drink a pitcher of a cocktail called Sexy Violet, which is neither sexy nor violet. Then I get on the back of Boe Cho’s motorbike, and we ride in a group through the empty streets to a seedy nightclub. Riding tipsy on the back of a motorbike through a humid, tropical breeze after midnight is probably one of the best feelings in the world. I cannot stop grinning. At the club, we do our best to ignore the underage Thai girls in bras and pleated skirts shimmying halfheartedly onstage, and dance like idiots to the noise blaring from the terrible rock band. When Boe Cho takes me home, I tell her it’s the best night I’ve ever had in Mae Sot. Then I go to bed and puke an entire pitcher of Sexy Violet into my trashcan.
* * *
My friend Colleen comes to stay with me for a long weekend, after spending a month volunteering in Cambodia. We shop for clothes and jewelry at the market by the Moei River. We walk through the streets at night, me with my pepper spray out, ready to defend us from the hundreds of stray dogs that growl from the eves of stores. We solicit rides from strangers. We spend a night in Mali Bar having drunken debates with some forty-year-old men, one of whom tells me truthfully but unnecessarily that I play pool like shit. We hang out with Boe Cho and G-Man, and G-Man informs Colleen that he will love me forever. I meet a Thai woman named Pi Tang, who wants me to teach her English and is dismayed that I only have three weeks left in Mae Sot. “But I like you so much!” she says. The next night, I meet a dreamy Australian and we talk until four in the morning. On Sunday, we take a six-hour bus north to Chiang Mai, where I pay for some highlights that go terribly wrong, and Colleen gets an elephant tattoo at two in the morning while I make friends with the Thais who run the parlor. In the morning, Colleen starts her trip back to the states, and I take the bus back to Mae Sot by myself. The first thing I do when I get home is bike to the supermarket and buy dark brown hair dye. Eight hundred baht for weird blonde highlights that I had for less than twenty-four hours.
* * *
Pi Tang is twenty-nine years old, and her name means watermelon, just like my mom’s younger sister. She is slight and tall for a Thai woman, with short black hair that curves around a sweet kind of face, which is funny because she tells me she wanted to be friends because she thought I had a sweet face. Pi Tang was born in Mae Sot—which is relatively unusual, since the town population is about 60 percent refugees from Burma—and lived and worked for a while in Bangkok, but came back here when her father was sick. Since he passed away, she has been looking after her mother and looking for a job closer to home. We go to dinner at a seafood place, and it surprises me how easy it is to talk to her, considering that she speaks almost no English at all. She is patient with me when I sit in silence, grasping for words, and she does what she can to help me with my Thai. I can feel my language getting better within a week of hanging out with her. We go to Mali Bar most nights, where I watch Pi Tang play pool and the bartenders tease me for asking for glass after glass of water, and we go to to house parties that consist mostly of white people singing Sublime songs, and I translate for her and the westerners and keep losing track of what language I’m speaking. We go to dinner with her friend Pi Seiwa, who talks so fast that even Pi Tang doesn’t understand her sometimes, and her flamboyant friend Pi Om, and we sit around at Pi Boong’s house, where he holds regular jam sessions with some of the forty-year-old men Colleen and I debated with.
Pi Tang has a relationship with some Spaniard dude she met online, whom she has never met in person. She calls him “Samee,” or “Husband.” He keeps ignoring her periodically because he gets jealous when she does things like hang out with me (because he assumes that I’ll have some male friends who will steal her from him) or write on Facebook that she misses my neighbor Jon, who is almost definitely gay. I keep telling her that she deserves better and that if he’s this jealous when they’ve never met, imagine what he’d be like in real life. Still, she keeps a blurry photo of him with a border of fat pink hearts as her phone background.
* * *
My room feels like home; I even sleep with my back to the door. My windows have no glass in them, and I love falling asleep during earsplitting spells of rain. In late June, the rain turns into what will eventually turn into the worst flooding in Thailand in decades. It’s impossible to bike anywhere. I am informed that my room might flood, and that I should stock up on food and not leave. I roll my pants up and wade barefoot to Mali Bar. It’s all about dedication to the party.
* * *
Lauren, a girl from Seattle whom I met right before I left, arrives in the middle of a week of rain. She’s here to volunteer with disabled children, and is frugal to the point that I feel terrible about all my pineapple smoothies. She gets a room at a guesthouse a little down the road from me, and we start eating together most nights and hanging out on the weekends. I like Lauren a lot. We open up to one another in the fast-forwarded kind of way that happens when you’re two like-minded people thrown together in an unusual situation, and it’s nice having someone to talk to about my day at work, and someone to share fries with. Sometimes, though, I find myself missing my solo meals, reading Jack Kerouac and eavesdropping on the weird Americans at the next table.
* * *
Erin arrives in Mae Sot at the end of June, and gets a room at my guesthouse, but she is so busy that I don’t see her until I run into her at the office. She’s overseeing a documentary project commissioned by James Cameron, and is a liaison between Suzy Cameron’s school in Los Angeles and the Good Morning School in Mae Sot, and she works closely with BMWEC, which has been disintegrating since shortly after I got here. Paw Ray, the founder and chairperson, is being accused of embezzling money, and donors are threatening to pull the funds. Out of consideration for me, my coworkers have been keeping me in the dark about it, leaving me in the office while they go to meetings that will determine the future of the organization. Sometimes Simon, our supervisor, texts me to take the day off. Erin is right in the middle of this; she has been close with Paw Ray for years and thinks she’s being framed. In the midst of dealing with BMWEC, Erin makes time to go to Good Morning School to teach and spend time with the kids. I start going with her to the school and on home visits to the villages where students live. I quickly become very popular; the kids call me “Teachah Mary” and hold my hands and hug me and braid my hair and make me drawings of flowers and mountains. I receive at least one pair of pink plastic earrings per day, and several flimsy gold plastic pendants on gold string that they tie around my wrists and neck.
Pi Tang and I go with them on the annual waterfall field trip, for which 125 excited children pile into four pickup truck beds and drive through the countryside to play in two waterfalls. I sit up on the back of the bed and hold the bar in front of me, the sun beating down on my arms and legs. I cannot even deal with how beautiful the drive is. Every time we make a turn and get a slightly different view, all the little boys punch the air and cheer. “WOOOOW!” At the first waterfall, the girls hold my hands and guide me up each level of the waterfall, among kids clambering around barefoot and fully clothed, splashing me until I stop screaming and consent to submerging my head. They paint my face with the traditional Karen cosmetic paste thanaka and throw me flowers like I’m an Olympic figure skater. At the second waterfall, we have a lunch of curry, hardboiled eggs, cucumbers, and hard lumps of rice, and then we disregard waiting an hour and jump in the water, which is shallow and teeming with delighted children. Ray from Hong Kong and Rodrigo from Mexico are throwing them into the water as they scream with laughter, and I have at least three kids clinging to me at all times, and all I can do is laugh and hug them and bounce them up and down in the water. A dozen of them circle around me and hold me up and giggle as I float on my back. Something tells me that fulfilling my bucket-list goal of crowd surfing will be a little disappointing after this.
* * *
There’s a woman in Mae Sot who spends all day shuffling through every restaurant, her long ponytail swaying behind her, flashing her toothless grin as she peddles bags of hard shriveled banana chips. Sometimes her son EQ comes with her; at night they hang out in Mali Bar, selling potato chips to drunk people while he plays pool with the best of them. He is fourteen, like my brother, but is about half the size. Maybe it’s just because I miss my brother so much, but I kind of love EQ. He chats easily with people in Mali Bar in Thai, Karen, English, and French, and wears ridiculous oversized lime green t-shirts with anime characters on them. Pi Tang is friends with EQ, and one day we go on a day trip out to the hot water springs—EQ, his mom, Pi Tang, Lauren, and me. We wade around in the stream, feeling where the water gets hot and where it gets cold again. EQ takes off his shirt and flexes for pictures, and then drifts around in the stream for a while. Afterwards, we go to lunch and split the bill between Pi Tang, Lauren, and me. I slurp my orange-carrot smoothie out of a weird bulbous mug and look around the table, cluttered with dozens of tiny dishes, and feel more content than I can ever remember being.
* * *
I don’t see Pi Tang for a couple days, because she spends two nights in Bangkok to get a visa for her upcoming trip to Burma. She calls me when she gets back, asking if she can stop by. When she pulls up to my guesthouse, she introduces herself to my mom and brother, who arrived the day before. She calls my mom “mother,” which I guess is the polite thing to do, but makes me really happy for some reason. Then she dumps a plastic bag out onto the table on the guesthouse patio—a jumble of floral fabric. Five matching dresses, for me, her, Lauren, Pi Seiwa, and Pi Jang, to wear to my goodbye party. I choose the one that looks least like lingerie.
* * *
In my last week, I teach a self-portrait drawing class at Good Morning School, and I can’t keep the majority of the kids from giving me their finished products. In the afternoon, Erin and I ride out to a village where many students live, in an HIV/AIDS community. While it’s still light out, we play cane ball with some of the boys, which is like volleyball with your feet, and hurts a lot. It quickly evolves into a game of Everybody Just Pass to Marie So We Can Laugh At Her, Even Though It Means We’ll Have to Spend the Majority of the Game Retrieving the Ball. This is the only sport I am good at. That night, about 20 of us watch Harry Potter in one of the huts, and I bring out red, blue, magenta, and purple nail polish. At first the boys resist, but eventually the hut morphs into a full-scale nail salon.
* * *
My last full day in Mae Sot arrives, even though I never asked it to. Erin and I wake up on the floor of the hut with the first rooster call, and ride back to town. My voice is gone. Rather than let me take a bus back to Bangkok, my aunt and uncle have opted to once more make the drive to collect me, along with my mom and brother. They arrive in the afternoon, and we go out to dinner to celebrate Krathi’s fifth birthday. He does not receive an iPad as he requested.
That evening, I attend an event in town that has hired Baby Mime, an act from Bangkok that consists of three really loud, vulgar mimes. I sit with the Good Morning School kids who are there, and afterwards, as they pile into the back of a pickup truck, Erin announces that I’m leaving, but assures them that I’ll be back. The kids look at me, and I’m filled with terror that they don’t believe me, but I remind myself that they know Erin, and Erin always comes back. I grasp hands with each of them, and as they pull away, they are all waving and yelling, “See you again!”
My goodbye party is at Mali Bar, of course. Since it’s a Buddhist holiday and drinking is outlawed, we pretty much have the place to ourselves. The spread provided by Pi Tang includes two bottles of tequila, five bottles of nail polish, a package of fruit, two bags of hard candy, and two bottles of iced tea, which are all prerequisites for any going-away party, really. The guests are me, Lauren, Pi Tang, Pi Seiwa, Pi Jang, Pi Om, French Joon, ex-neighbor John, Boe Cho, and G-Man, and we celebrate my leaving by painting our nails by the light of my cell phone and pounding tequila. “You guys,” I keep saying in two languages, “I’m so sad.” At the next bar, Boe Cho somehow gets a guitar and starts playing a mixture of Thai and American pop songs, and we each sing along to what we can, sometimes doing solo performances with varying degrees of prowess. I sing “Tears In Heaven,” which seems appropriate. In the middle of a lull, G-Man says hilariously, “Okay, let’s all cry now.”
* * *
I sleep from four-thirty until nine, and then I get up and pack up my life. After I arrange my bicycle donation and we pack up the van for the journey, I go to say goodbye to Erin, who is outside her room with the film crew. I tell everyone goodbye and that I’ll be back, and then, finally, I start getting choked up. As I walk back down the driveway to the van, Pi Deff gestures towards my room and says something to another guy about how I “used to” live there, and then I just can’t even talk anymore. I get in the front seat and we drive away, and I cry silently on and off until we’re an hour away from Bangkok. My uncle announces this to the van at large. I’m sure they think I’m crazy.
* * *
Erin leaves Mae Sot a little after I do, after I spend two weeks with my family, shopping and eating and staying at beach resorts, after I spend my last night in Thailand on party-tourist-infested Khao San Road with Pi Tang, after she takes me to Suvarnbhumi airport with my aunt and uncle and cousin and I fly home alone, stopping for twelve hours in Seoul. But whereas I have to wait two years to go back, Erin is back in Mae Sot already. I’m sitting in the library at school in Lake Forest, Illinois when she sends me a message—“I was teaching yoga today at Good Morning School,” she says, “and I noticed one of the boys still had his toenails polished blue. Albeit chipped…I couldn’t believe it was still there.” She started to look around, she says, and there were several little colored toes.
