Welcome Me to the Kingdom, page 13
“Yeah, right,” I said in English. “I’m not like you.”
The language stung and she snatched her arm back.
It was a few years before this that I’d discovered that power. I must have been ten when I noticed my advantage in her missed plurals and the way she botched idioms: “I’m feeling down weather” and “Speak to the devil!” And so I switched to English whenever we fought, pulling the linchpin on her authority, watching it unhinge and spin to pieces.
“Keep up, Mom,” I said.
It was Thai against English. Dad, imagining we did all of this to spare him the intricacies of our quarrels, removed himself. He let us hash out our war in a battle that replayed itself all through my childhood years, until the ground had scarred beyond recultivation and Mom and I retreated from each other permanently.
* * *
—
Dad suited up every morning, but I knew he wasn’t actually going to interviews. He always came back blushing the red of brick dust, the grit of his guilt caught under the nails he picked at. He was going out to visit housing projects under construction; I knew because I used to go with him on weekends. Dad had worked with land development companies. They made large industrial parks, factories, and condominium plots. But his passion was in the smaller projects of residential architecture. It was his habit, coming back from my volleyball matches, to drive us through a neighborhood under construction, a housing community modeled after American suburbs for newly middle-class Thais. He ignored gates, was undeterred by homes without stairs. And the workers were too timid to challenge a white man.
Mom must have known, too. But her method was quiet, like the way she used her small body to box out Dad at the sink, taking the sponge from his hand if he tried to help with the dishes. She made this appear natural, just as she had made it ordinary to turn away his affection, bearing only her cheek to his lips.
“Let me, dear,” Dad would try. “I can do some dishes.”
“I wash,” she said. “You work.” Her anger had come down since we moved back to the townhouse.
“ ‘Temporary’ move?” Mom had yelled at the time. “ ‘Easy’ move? Only you farang are so easy to come and leave.”
After that, Mom wouldn’t even afford him the warmth of her rage. It put my dad off-balance. He relied on her affection. Within these multiplied walls of dressed-up cardboard, the sound skipping right through, I knew what was not being said in private. One night I listened outside their door. I expected a squabble, maybe a push-and-shove followed by sex. But all I could hear was Mom’s soft snores, which had grown faint, as if she were withdrawing even that sniff of life from Dad’s presence.
* * *
—
The students in my school’s set-one English were all Commonwealth kids—Singaporeans, Indians, Malaysians—their parents savvy about what Received Pronunciation could do for their children’s opportunities. It embarrassed our British teachers that the native speakers weren’t up to snuff. By native speakers, they really meant the white kids.
“Due to decreased student enrollment, we’re combining our class with set-two English,” our teacher told us. That was how I came to sit next to Tom Bell.
Inevitably: “Hullo, Laura.”
“Hi, Tom,” I managed, before pretending to have forgotten my copy of Great Expectations. He spread his book between us and kept a hand pressed on it like a wrestler pinning down his opponent, roughing up the spine in a way I both loved and hated. Freckles ran up Tom’s fingers. I pictured the freckles on his back, or those trailing up his thighs like a line of crumbs leading me to X-marks-the-spot.
Chicken skin, Mom would have called it.
Back then I was still peeking at the white girls as they came out of their clothes in the changing room. I wondered at their allure. In the last year their underwear had grown tighter, smaller, sheer. The effect? Their blemishes were all the more apparent. And yet Tom Bell only dated white girls.
“You’re one of those book lovers, aren’t you?” Tom said, when I ironed out a dog-ear fold with my thumb.
“What?”
“It’s okay. My mum’s like that, too.”
* * *
—
I skipped the next English class to follow Dad downtown, my motorbike taxi weaving in the wake of his car as it navigated its way to a construction site.
Posters along the perimeter promised Bangkok “another level of luxury.” Diamond Heights, they called the condominium. Two buildings. Swimming pools for every unit.
They had erected the honeycomb cores of the twin condos—thirty stories in concrete—but there were as yet no windows or outer walls. I slinked easily after Dad through an opening in the gate.
I had started to wonder about his disappearances. He had lived in Thailand so long that it seemed reasonable for him to yield to its behaviors, that practice of keeping another household. “Minor wife” was the Thai title for such women, as if it were a privilege. But the only other home Dad was going to, apparently, was vacant.
He saw me coming through the fence and smiled, maybe to hide his surprise.
“Going up?” He held back the gate of a construction elevator.
“Please,” I said.
“Okay, then—all the way up now.”
He took us to a penthouse where we sat with our legs dangled out over the edge. The view was of the twin building, like staring at a blueprint, the sky our drafting paper. Graffiti was the only embellishment to the grey concrete, and in what had been intended to be private balcony pools inky swamps had formed. Halfway down I could see where a can of spray paint had been smashed against a wall, exploding a comet of red.
“Your mother and I are thinking about what to do next. If it continues to be this bad, I might go back to the U.S. for a while, you know? Work there until things smooth over on this side.”
I swung my feet. “Why can’t we all go?”
“Your mother doesn’t want to move.”
“Then she can stay here on her own,” I said.
“Try to understand. What was the point of marrying me but to improve her life? She didn’t marry up to play a maid.”
There was movement below. Two men with gleaming coils over their shoulders were moving through the building opposite us.
“What are they doing?” I asked.
“Stealing the copper to sell, I expect.”
The bigger man carried a stepladder. They were quick, opening panels in the walls, one man stripping the rubber off the cables, the other coiling.
We watched them work up three stories before Dad said, “Let’s go. Probably not safe to be up here.”
* * *
—
I could tell Mom had made an effort with dinner. The pasta, angel hair, was coiled elaborately, dressing up its simple tomato sauce. The meal was a reminder of tables laid with excess in this house, the dinners of my early childhood. They had made me feel rich once, as I’d stand up on my chair, surveying the wealth of options. Mom’s own meal had always been huddled around her plate, two curries and raw vegetables that vined out of their bowls, a collection of food I often compared to a swamp. As for Dad’s side, it looked like a color sample for Hay Stack: the few sage leaves washed out in a butter sauce with pasta.
“I really like this. I do,” Dad said, and made sure Mom looked at him.
“Tomato,” Mom nodded.
“Pomodoro, pomodori,” Dad singsonged, happy, I knew, that we were all eating from the middle bowl, having adopted a homegrown superstition he adapted to mark out his own omens: one household, one dinner.
“Where you come from?” Mom asked, to which Dad lied blithely.
“Oh, I met an old contact at an office development company. They’ve paused their projects but seem actually to be weathering this pretty well.”
Mom asked if this was Khun Pin’s company, and I translated for Dad.
“Oh, no. An old acquaintance,” Dad said, responding to my translation but looking at Mom. “I was just curious.”
Mom cleared away dinner and Dad unfolded his newspaper. On the cover was an image of Thai policemen ransacking the offices of a foreign company.
“It’s hard being a foreigner in a recession,” he said, setting the newspaper aside. “The Thais blame us for their mess.”
He reached below the table for a box. It was wrapped in signature pink and white twine.
“For my girls.” He smiled like a boy. A boy coming in from the mud bearing pocket-gifts of live creatures mixed with chewing gum for his mother, oblivious of the beating to come.
Mom said to me, “What is this supposed to mean?”
I didn’t answer.
“Ask him,” she said.
“Ask him yourself.”
We knew the box, the string, the cloying scent. It was the bakery at the base of our old condominium. A charming Parisian place that reminded the residents of how far above the rest of the city they could consider themselves. Mom had loved it.
Mom turned to Dad. “No job but you waste money. Soon no house?” She pointed at me, jabbing with each phrase. “No school. No future. No good. What I want cake for?”
What had he been thinking?
He raised two empty hands. “Guess I just thought we all might like to share something nice for a change. Been pretty bleak lately. How about we cut it up and then decide?”
“Decide what?” I asked.
Mom said, “You eat. I clean up. Only in the slum they don’t have maids.”
“Why don’t you get a job, Mom?” I asked in English. “You want to live big so bad, you go and make it happen, huh? Do it yourself.”
“Don’t talk to me that way.”
I nodded toward Dad. “Speak in English so that we can all understand. Go on, tell him.”
“Actually, Lara,” Dad said. “We have been talking. And we think it might be best for me to move back to America. Back home.”
There was work, he could send money, and we could afford my last years of school.
“She’s doing this to you,” I said in English, “isn’t she? Making you go.”
But even then he defended her. “No, she isn’t.”
“We need you here more than we need money,” I said. “Other jobs will come.”
“Sweetheart, please don’t worry—soon as things pick up again, I’ll come back.”
I said to Mom, “You’re sending him away.”
“Your father has to understand. He has to be responsible. Tell him that,” she said, her eyes never leaving Dad. “Tell him.”
* * *
—
I let the house divide us. It was easy enough, given all the walls still left over. I staked out territory and avoided common spaces. The family room stood empty. Mom left me food on the kitchen counter. Dad existed in a periphery, the sounds of his living always a layer removed, a room away. His only presence was in the traces he left: shaving cream in the sink, his sock buried in the sofa, the bread crusts he never ate in the trash. These were the things I would try to piece together after he left, needing some semblance of his order, the way my life had come to orbit his, even if only to avoid him.
On the day of Dad’s flight, I left the house before he was awake. Unsure of where to go so early in the morning, I found myself at Diamond Heights, looking over a city that had become a graveyard of office towers and housing projects. I’d keep returning to the empty building over the next months, skipping classes to sit in its hollows while I read about the debt suicides. The newspapers ran stories of debt being sold to loan sharks. Of businessmen shooting themselves. Of businessmen shooting their families and then themselves. Some of those fathers were jumpers. In other homes across the city fathers were being dragged to jail. Others were running away to their second lives, those minor wives and backup families. It was a father conspiracy. They all had a plan B. You could trace their exploits, if you wanted to, in the home-shaped shells they left in their wake, all the invoices totaling their obligations.
* * *
—
When my next school break approached, Dad booked me a flight to go see him. We couldn’t afford two tickets, so Mom would stay at home.
On the last day of English class, I told Tom Bell I was leaving for the U.S. I needed something to work right then, and I could start with his attention.
“What? What’re you on about? Like a holiday?”
“I’m leaving. Flying tomorrow. America. To go live with my dad.”
“You’re leaving leaving?”
“That’s right.” I fished out a marker. “Will you write something on my shirt?”
“Well, sure. Didn’t realize you were off as well. How does ‘I’ll miss sharing stuff in English’ sound? And ‘Goodbye and good luck’?”
I nodded and angled my chin up so he could lean in to sign my front. “Oh, and it’s actually Lara, Tom. You’ll remember me? Lara.”
* * *
—
“What do you think?”
Dad walked me through the two-bedroom house he was renting, a house built to hold heat through winter. He had a dishwashing machine.
“Looks pretty permanent,” I said.
“Funny you should say that.”
“Why? What’s funny?”
He had lost weight since resuming desk work. I pictured Dad bigger, less than a year younger but at the height of his health, it seemed, marching through the house with his chest too broad for his shirt, earning his keep with bare hands.
“You’re not coming back, are you?”
“You’ll be out here soon anyway, right—for college?”
I waited for him to invite me to stay in the States so I could tell him what I thought of him: just another foreigner passing through, a white man with minor wives, a colonialist. What had the papers said of them—foreigners—in recent months?
Dad didn’t ask me to stay.
“College, right?” he said again. “You’ll be out here soon?”
“And Mom?”
He ran his palm along a pristine dining table. “Well, she wants to be in Bangkok, doesn’t she?”
* * *
—
Mom called that night and I answered the phone. I told her I was coming home and Dad wasn’t.
She asked to speak to him.
“He doesn’t want to talk to you,” I lied, in Thai so that she understood.
“I want to speak with my husband.”
I switched to English, “I told you, he doesn’t want to talk to you.”
“Please.”
The line was bad. Or she was crying, I don’t know. Something couldn’t contain her voice.
She tried English: “Please.”
Pinky let me come to dinner so I could learn from her. “A girl needs to know how to negotiate with a man.”
But what was negotiation to this guy? A buffet. He wanted it all. He leaned over his plate of crab shells and pointed a roe-red finger at her.
“Am I being too blunt?” His gaze slid from Pinky to me and back.
It was my first time eating crab, and because I didn’t know where to prize and where to suck, I’d filled my hand with regurgitated pieces of shell.
“Adults can take the truth. And you,” he told Pinky, “sure look like an adult to me.”
Under the table, Pinky squeezed my hand until the crab shards cut into my palm.
Nobody ever explained to me how Pinky and I were related. Back then I didn’t think to interrogate our relationship. I was still a child, accepting “cousin” as I accepted the “family” we visited on Chinese New Year, those house stops on a pilgrimage of refusing and then accepting food. The dining table was the common ground, and in the kinship of shared rice, Pinky was a sister.
I was fourteen when I moved into her apartment in central Bangkok. My new high school was in the city, a two-hour bus ride from my family’s outskirt neighborhood. We were too late signing up for the dorms, so my father arranged for me to stay with Pinky. Ba wasn’t about to let go of this opportunity. In a regular feat of overkill, I’d tested into the best high school in the country. And so I spent my last months of middle school basking in local glory, passing bus stops flanked by posters boasting my score, my face, and the name of the tutoring company (the posters’ sponsor) where I’d taken a mere month of lessons. In the photo I wore the dazzling white uniform they’d given me on the morning of the shoot, my hair trimmed to a regulation pudding-bowl bob, my pocket stuck with unchewed pens. I’d given the camera a thumbs-up, like I was egging on kids younger than I, who, with the help of this cram school, could pin similar honors on their little lives.
Of course, such tutoring had nothing to do with my success. Only in chemistry had I learned anything new. To hold the cram-school veterans in thrall, my science tutor employed sexual analogies desperately. More than the analogies, though, I was shocked by her: a thalueng woman. It would have been nothing in a man. Vulgarity was their jurisdiction. I knew this like I knew Boyle’s law. Abandoning the why of it—why this relationship between x and y—I marveled at the how. Were such women allowed to exist in that distant place of adulthood? The tutor proved only a prelude to Pinky, however, who would show me the true boundaries of my prudishness, and how to overstep them.
Pinky was twenty-two and, according to my mother, studying science at university. This turned out to be cosmetology at a training school. Her apartment was small, a bathroom connecting our rooms. When she wasn’t using this bathroom, she left the door on her side open, so I did the same. I would lie on my bed and watch her passing beyond the doorframe, the sound of her radio soap operas carrying straight through to me. I grew to differentiate the characters on the radio, even if they were all performed by the same troupe of six actors. In my head, these actors sat around a shared table. Their seats were surely labeled Adult Man, Adult Woman, Child Boy, and so on, but they donned and discarded their characters like so many masks.
