The Writing Life
Then my friend Nong invited me to her home for Songkran.
Songkran, at the beginning of April, is the old Thai new year, which they take far more seriously than January 1. It is a water festival that originates in ancient mythology (a snake god called a naga lost a fight with other, younger gods and in its flight from heaven carved out the course of the Mekong). People ambush each other with water pistols and buckets of water, get drunk, have plenty of fights and get into traffic accidents. It is the hottest time of the year in Thailand, and the holiday provides relief from the unrelenting sun.
Nong was doing very well as a bar girl in Bangkok that year, so — since the only purpose of having money in Thailand is to build status, or “face” — she decided to throw a huge party with live entertainers. I was with her on a bus to her village in the steaming central plains when she decided this. I stayed with her family in the Petchabun region, in a tiny hamlet of half-a-dozen wooden shacks, all built on stilts around a well. The communal toilet, which Nong had paid for, consisted of a hole surrounded by a wall with an opening on one side. Her elder sister could not stop drinking rice whiskey and was wasted in body and mind, wholly dependent on the bottles of Mekong that Nong often supplied. Her younger sister could not stop having children by different men and depended on Nong’s financial assistance to bring them up. Her mother was illiterate and almost blind from glaucoma (Nong wanted to pay for the operation, but her mother was afraid of doctors and hospitals). Her father had died young, having displeased the Buddha by killing five men with a knife.