Nok by Ben Fairfield
Everyone’s got a reason to move. If they don’t, they’re still here. I think it’s the second law of thermodynamics, right? A moving object will remain in motion if nothing stops it, and an object unmoving will stay stagnant unless pushed. Or pulled. I see no reason why the laws of nature wouldn’t apply to us.
My family was in motion for generations upon generations. We picked up our community every three years, moving to the next ridge. Make way, mountains; step aside, tigers. The Karen are coming! Within a month, we all had bouncy new bamboo houses, leaf-thatched roofs fragrant with autumn, terraced hillsides awaiting the next monsoon. It was like watching a plant spring out of the earth: from the dust arose a village. We never really left home. As long as we were on the mountain, we were home.
It takes a push or pull to stop a body in motion. Amazing how such a strong culture of people who lived among and loved the trees could be derailed by a single sheet of paper. People in uniforms informed us that we were now permanently settled on whatever ground we happened to be standing on at that particular moment in history. It wasn’t a concept my parents had the ability to grasp. They didn’t come to understand stagnancy until two years later, when their genes told them to pick up and move to the next ridge. It felt like watching a poor salmon making his way home, only to find a huge concrete wall blocking his only known route.
None of us knew what to do. We stayed put, as ordered. The force keeping us from motion now was fear. We had no Thai citizenship cards, which meant we were suddenly illegal inhabitants of our own mountains. If we tried to go anywhere, any policeman could search us. Since they had no where to deport us illegals to, we’d end up in jail (save for the few who could afford the “fee”). So we stayed put. We rebuilt our two-year homes every couple of years. We watched our harvest decrease annually. We sat, helpless, as foreigners arrived with good intentions, installing complex systems of irrigation and other such technologies that inevitably fell into the tropical abyss. We welcomed roads, and, soon after, truckloads of packaged noodles, canned fish, shrink-wrapped blankets. Soon we incorporated new words into our mountain-shaped language: cement, trash, pipe.
The younger kids took to “civilization.” The stars in the evening sky were forgotten and replaced by stars in black boxes that plugged into our walls. Names of herbs in the forest were less easily identified than brand names. Parents no longer knew how to raise their own children. The town’s elders felt their authority sliding away. Their knowledge veered toward obsolete.
And me? I met a boy named Mawn. He had a cousin who knew more about these urban things. We stayed up listening to stories of lovers, romance, action, and adventure. Mawn swallowed these whole. He told me stories of star-crossed lovers who had nothing but each other, men who gave up everything for a woman’s love. He craved such a true experience, a love worth fighting for. It sounded good to me, too. Relationships of our parents’ generation seemed so conventional and boring, like the town itself.
A light tap on the window woke me. I don’t know why. The bugs in my village swell to sizes larger than frogs, and they are always charging blindly at the lights. My mom used to compare us young people to them, actually. But they make this loud popping noise when they hit the long fluorescent tubes. This tap on the window was no confused bug. I barely heard it over the squeaky rotating fan. I knew, just by the silhouette, that Mawn waited outside. He smiled, holding up a bottle of Pepsi and a bag of Lays. I crept out of the house, and the moon lit our path down to the bridge. It was just like those movies I had never seen.
Sometimes it feels like that Pepsi was the last thing he ever bought me. The two kids he gave to me were also “on the house,” as they say in Chiang Mai’s bars that cater to western clientele. I learned such phrases because I needed money. I needed money to feed the kids. I needed money to feed the kids because our fields produced less and less each year. Mawn stayed back with the kids while I set off for the city.
Here’s what I remember of my first impressions: I had never walked on a surface as hard as sidewalks, traffic was astonishingly louder than a forest full of takajans and crickets, and the city never got completely dark at night, yet was still dim enough for shady dealings to take place unnoticed.
The best tips came from foreigners. The nicer I treated them, the creepier they responded to me. I tried to not recoil in horror when they touched me. I hated them. I hated me. And I had a family back home that relying on this setup. For the next four months I convinced myself that I was someone else, someone other than Nok, the loving mother and sacrificing wife. Nok would never do something like this. I saved enough money to last at least through the cold season and boarded a bus home, armed with a full bag of candies for my two little ones whose faces I could never forget.
The village seemed to have survived an extra month of the rainy season. The roofs looked like drenched poodle hair, and a bit slimy. When I left, my son had just taken his first steps. Now he ran to greet me, arms swinging out of sync and feet bending outward with each bulky step. My daughter approached with less haste. I swore on my own tears I would never leave them again. They were real, warm, moving beings. The lifeless money in my bag promised only more unmoving, made up words: concrete, trash, pipes. Why would I ever make such a foolish tradeoff?
For a while I felt like a hero. Sticky smiles thanked me for the candy. Teenage girls coveted my adventure, begging me for stories. Others weighed my path and purse. Mawn was harder to gage. At first I thought he was too proud to admit that he missed me. Then I thought he would rather I hadn’t come home at all. Then I thought he was angry that I wasn’t there for our children. The reality wafted in like a meandering venom. My eyes narrowed, my teeth clenched, my mind would not settle. He was jealous. He had introduced me to the outside world. He had seen the epic VCDs. That distant adventure was meant to be his. Not mine. I was the one who got to run away, leaving him in a town he despised, with two squirming symbols of his immobility, doomed to retrace the endless cycle of his idiotic ancestors, never progressing nor aspiring to anything higher. He thought I was stupid to come back to such a dead place. To him I was a dog reconsuming a vomited mess better left discarded.
He worked out his exit strategy quickly. He brought the kids over to the heavy cement houses of the mayor, the principal, the wealthy people in our neighborhood. They took rides in big, black, Vigo 4-wheel-drive trucks with Thai country music blasting from the cab. They devoured excitement until it became desire. Mawn embedded greed into our kids’ heads until they begged him for riches he was unable to provide. He sat them down, gently telling them how much he wanted to give them what they wanted, how hard it would be, and how he would go off to work in the city if it would enable him to provide for them. He loved them enough to leave. Everyone cried but me. Mawn’s tears were not brought by sorrow.
He wrote weekly letters for the first few months. They included magazine clippings, advertisements of all the crazy products those city people used. Face-whitening creams, bust enhancers, slimming body belts, 40 different kinds of shampoo. When the kids stared at them, they refused to look anywhere else, knowing the reality just a few feet behind the paper that blocked their vision: warped wooden walls, sun blazing down on bent-over rice harvesters, mothers lined up for more free blankets and instant noodles. They lived vicariously through their father’s adventures. When the letters stopped coming, they created their own stories to tell their friends at school. They begged me for a TV, and when I finally scraped up enough baht, they told their friends Mawn had bought it for them.
My case was far from unique. The abandoned housewives became their own club. Meeting at the water tanks to do laundry every morning, we heard each other’s stories. Yuri’s husband had a Burmese mistress; Supa’s husband spent almost all his money on whiskey and cigarettes. We all shook our heads and accepted our lot. When we were girls, we washed our laundry every day. Now our daughters watched cartoons all day. The sons assumed even less responsibility, another wonderful gift from their absent fathers. There was nothing we could do.
After two months of silence, a letter arrived. Mawn would be coming home for Songkran, the New Year. The kids couldn’t sleep on Friday. I was nervous, too. We all stretched out on the floor in front of the TV, our bodies sticking to anything they touched at the height of the hot season. I was the last to fall asleep. We would be together as a family again. We would talk, play in the water, visit the elders, and discuss our future home, all concrete and cool.
Mawn stayed for three days. He said he had to get back to work, that his boss was a jerk. We barely even saw him while he was home. He took a smoke break every 20 minutes and drank with the other men every evening. I only had one conversation with him, and nearly every sentence was in a raised tone of voice. He left without saying goodbye, or when he would return next.
Other migrants had also returned home for the holidays. Most notably was Somsak, home from college. Most aid organizations came to our town with handouts or tickets to heaven, but a few set up schools or educational programs. Somsak had taken advantage of the educational opportunities and went off to college for free. He came back with prospects, not just easy money. He had a tangible, enlightened success we couldn’t really pin down. I sat up when he talked. I listened to what he had to say. I wanted to be like him.
School was not fun. I worked as a janitor five days a week at the local government office, and I worked as a janitor seven days a week at home. My kids operated a TV remote better than a broom. On Fridays I filled up the moped and rode 6 hours north for classes. Saturdays I attended class all day. On Sundays I rode back, cleaned the house, made dinner, cleaned up dinner, and collapsed. With heavy eyelids I rolled into work the next day after making breakfast and dropping the kids off at school. At work I served hot coffee and cold water to dignified men, burned dignified heaps of plastic and Styrofoam, and stole away to study during any free moment. If only my kids would care about their education as much as I did.
Classes were awful. Exhausted from the long ride, I forgot to hide my country accent. Professors puffed through their noses when my hand went up to answer a question. My clothes did not look anything like my classmates’. Neither did my skin. School was mental exhaustion. Home was physical exhaustion.
“What are you studying?” I had expected a demeaning tone. There was none. The American volunteer had entered the kitchen to refill that bottle of water he carries everywhere. He was an okay guy. He came here with his wife to volunteer. She teaches at the school I won’t send my children to (I want them to get a better education elsewhere) and he works here at the office. Some days I feel like he just wanders without a purpose. He does speak some Thai, but we had not spoken much before.
“I’m studying,” I say, unsure of his grasp on the language.
“What subject?” Maybe his wife taught him some school words.
“Science.” That look probably means he doesn’t understand that word.
“What degree are you getting?” Well, I guess he knows some words about college.
“My associate’s degree.” He looks bored.
“What school?” No, he looks like he wants someone to talk to.
“An extension college up in Mae Sariang.” I don’t think he knows where that is.
“Where is that?” Nope. Doesn’t know.
“About six hours away.” He’s doing the math.
“So you do this on weekends?” I think this conversation might last a while.
An hour later, we were still talking. My only previous knowledge of foreigners had come from the homogeneous sleaze at that bar. Never once did any of those men show interest in my educational ambitions. Maybe I could talk to this guy. I knew it was against cultural customs to whine about one’s husband to another man, but the American wasn’t bound by those customs, was he?
I spilled everything. I talked of my constant exhaustion, about women in the town. We were all exhausted. I told him my husband had seen ten times as many mistresses as his own flesh and blood. I talked of trying to make ends meet as a de facto single mother while my husband went out and bought a gleaming new truck. I told him that my husband came home once or twice a year to spend time drinking with the men instead of seeing his children. I talked of my son, who didn’t know how to be a man. I told him I was tired and powerless. That my head ached, my body ached, my heart ached.
When such complaints slip out at our female gatherings, we all commiserate. The American’s answer to my monologue surprised me. Simply put, he told me, “Well, that’s not fair.” He thought my husband should be helping, loving, and spending time with me and the kids. He told me an American woman would not have to stay with such a man. He said an American husband would be expected to be present and helpful and supportive, that cheating on a spouse was never brushed aside, that hitting a woman was grounds for separation. If he ever treated his wife the way Mawn treated me, his wife would leave him. And he would deserve it. The more I talked about my situation, the more visibly upset he became.
His ideas were nothing new to me. I had just never allowed myself to seriously consider them. After 7 hours of restlessness, I got up at 6am and picked up the phone. It had been weeks since I had called Mawn, longer since he had called us. After 15 rings I heard his groggy voice. I never knew I had it in me. Unwavering, I told Mawn he had to come home and be a father to his kids. I did not have to repeat myself. He asked me a few questions. I answered “No” to all of them. His silence was brief and I was not patient. He exhaled. He would drive home the following week. For good.
I set the phone on the TV without a sound and walked outside. The sun was inching over the mountain ridge and tears tickled my cheeks. For the first time in my life, I had power. I felt it in my veins, warming me. Of all the forces that had tugged on my people, every power that had propelled us, each influence that spurred a sluggish object into motion, I had joined their ranks. I had caused something to move.
