Tales of a Female Nomad (40 page)

It is 9:30 P.M. of my first full day and I am struggling to stay awake. Before I go to my bungalow for the night, Fon’s brother asks me if I would give his daughter English lessons. Nek is a beautiful, bright fifteen-year-old. I’m delighted that I’ll have a chance to give back.

The next morning, Manit and I board a motorcycle-driven transport that takes us to the open-air market in the center of the village. The sellers, mostly women, are wearing hats of every shape and size. Some are squatting; some are sitting on blankets; others are sitting on little stools, eight inches off the ground, surrounded by their vegetables. A truck is blaring soft rock and Thai ballads.

I walk and smell and look and touch and taste. There are basil leaves, celery, green onions, kaffir lime leaves, mint, lemon grass, and lots of other leafy things. I taste them all, touching a leaf and looking at the seller as I put my fingers to my mouth. Some leaves are strong. Some are barely flavored. Some taste just like, well . . . leaves.

And there are roots: tumeric, galangal, ginger. The ginger is younger than the ginger I know, not as brown or strong. Some sellers are selling it shaved in plastic bags.

There are also rows of mounded pastes as in the markets in Mexico, but the smells are different. Brown and fishy. Fiery red and garlicky. Lemon grassy.

And trays of tiny eggplants, mounds of red chilies about two inches long and a half inch wide, and squashes and mangos and pineapples, bananas, tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, shallots, cabbages.

Meat is hanging on hooks and languishing on tables. And fish of every size are flopping on tables, some of them gasping their final breaths. I feel a twinge of sadness when I see a magnificently colored parrotfish, whose relatives I admired in Lombok on the bottom of the sea.

There are also tons of ready-cooked things to eat: soups from steaming pots with add-your-own garnishes, noodles with sauces on the side, cakes in pink and green and white. Chicken and pork on skewers. Stuff wrapped in banana leaves.

I sit down and eat a bowl of noodles. They’re good, but Nark’s were better.

Later that morning, I am in my bungalow writing about the market when there’s a knock on the door. It’s Nark. Time to cook again. This time we get to eat it: a Thai vegetable soup with baby corn (fresh), squash, pumpkin, two kinds of leaves, celery, and a shade too much fish paste for my palate.

A few minutes later, Nark and his wife go home. He tells me he will not see me again. They live more than an hour away. I wave good-bye to the only member of the family I can converse with, and an unexpected anxiety sweeps over me. I remind myself that I’m here because I want to experience life in a Thai village that is not geared to serve western tourists. The anxiety remains but I am not worried. I know these moments of fear pass. It’s only been two days. I go to my cabin for an afternoon nap.

I wake up around three and work on a plan for Nek’s English lesson. She is coming at five for her first class. I know I can make a difference in her language skills, especially in pronunciation. I also need to work on her confidence. Even though she is studying English in school, she has not spoken to me. The fear of sounding foolish is the insidious enemy of learning a foreign language.

Last night, Nek read two of my books out loud to her cousins. I noticed four pronunciation problems dictated by sounds that don’t exist in the Thai language:
th, r, l,
and
v.

I make a list of thirty words that use
th.
And a list of
r
and
l
and
v
-words. I plan to begin every class with pronunciation practice until the feeling of the tongue sticking out between the teeth is not a weird sensation, and until the upper teeth and bottom lip connect naturally when they see a
v.
I can’t show a physical thing for the
r
and
l,
but careful listening will do it.

Next I write some sentences about life in Ban Krud. I will ask Nek to memorize them. Learning whole sentences by heart is a good way to develop confidence. When I am trying to learn a language, I hate having to go through the grammar and structure every time I try to say something. If I have a base of sentences that I know are correct, I can plug in different words and I’m confident that what comes out of my mouth will be correct.

Nek arrives at five. Nek’s sister Nan and their cousin Nun join us. They giggle over having to stick their tongues out to make the
th
sound, but I know that after a few days, and hundreds of repetitions, the strange thing that their tongue is doing will not feel so strange. Same with the
v
and the
r.
“Seven, eleven, very hot, very cold, TV, television, village,” etc. We do the list over and over again. It gets easier each time.

When the class is over, I go back to my bungalow and study Thai. I am sound asleep by nine.

The first thing I do after I brush my teeth in the morning is reach into my cosmetic bag for my hormone replacement medicine. When I take out the Prempro, I discover that the circular plastic pill case is filled with tiny ants. The shiny pink hormone pills, with black writing on them, come in the kind of container that moves around from slot Monday to slot Tuesday and Wednesday and Thursday. Well, sometime since yesterday morning, dozens of ants have entered through the empty Monday slot and they’ve been ravenously eating away at the pink frosting. Most of the shiny pink pills are white. I have not seen an ant anywhere in my room. Only inside my Prempro case, running up and down the plastic hills between the pills. How do they know there is this little yummy cache of pills in my cosmetic bag?

The next day, Fon tells me that we are going somewhere at 12:30. She mimes that we are going to eat. I assume she’s taking me to lunch.

At 12:25 I emerge from my room. Fon and four other women are sitting on mats in the middle of the dining area, looking and sounding a lot like Balinese women before a ceremony. They are cutting banana leaves into circles and stapling them, with metal staples, into little baskets, open at the top. The women are talking nonstop as women do all over the world when they get together in their shared work efforts.

Hmmmm. If there are party baskets, there must be a party.

“No now. Later,” says Fon. “Two.”

“Mai mi peng haaaa.”
I say. No problem. There is a murmur and approval from the crowd at my attempt to speak the language. How I wish I could converse.

I join the women on the mat. They nod and smile and say things I don’t understand. One of the women puts a bag of leafy basil stems in front of me. Fon removes a stem and shows me how to strip the leaves off and put them in a bowl.

It’s been fourteen years since I was in that Zapotec village in Oaxaca stripping oregano leaves from their stems. I have been all over the world, learned two languages, cooked and slept and celebrated and wept on mountains, in palaces, in cities and in swamps . . . and I’m still stripping leaves off of stems. And I still love feeling included.

The woman sitting next to me is uncharacteristically fat for a Thai. She points to me and then herself and says something in Thai.

“Same big,” translates Fon. I smile at the dubious bonding and reach out to shake the woman’s hand. We all laugh.

At around two, Fon puts the banana-leaf baskets into a big plastic garbage bag. I put the basil leaves into a small one. We are ready to go. I have no idea where.

We ride along the empty beach on Fon’s motorcycle. Clearly visible in his gilded dress is the Buddha on the hill, gazing benevolently at the pristine blue bay. All is well.

Less than a mile from the bungalows, Fon turns onto a muddy path, bouncing and splashing through clay-colored mud. To our left, on a grassy spot about twenty yards from the road, there is a crowd of about twenty-five women sitting and standing on six large mats, orange and green and yellow and red. Other women are setting up pots on burners.

Most of the activity is among the mat women who are preparing the ingredients: washing, chopping, slicing, pounding, grinding, peeling. Talking, shouting, chattering, conferring, and calling out orders.

On the perimeter of the mats are dozens of stainless and aluminum pots and giant blackened woks. There are stands attached to gas tanks waiting for the pots, tubs of ice storing fish and uncooked meats, pails of water for washing, and bottles of water and tubs of soda for drinking. There are dishes and glasses and cutlery for hundreds of people. And dozens of people, mostly women, sharing the work. The scene is my dream come true.

There are about nine dishes being prepared at once, and each of those dishes has someone in charge and a team of workers. In addition, there are general helpers who chop when they see something that needs chopping and slice when faced with a pile of meat or a mound of bamboo shoots. The excitement builds as piles of food become pot-ready ingredients.

Everyone is eager for me to taste the things I’m not familiar with, so I walk around on the mats, barefoot, catching eyes, motioning for permission to taste.
“Chan yak lien ahan Thai,”
I say. I want to learn to cook Thai food. They nod and smile and let me taste whatever they have in front of them. I’m not at all sure they understand my awkward Thai; I have learned the words, but not the music of the language.

One woman is squooshing a brown liquid filled with seeds and strings. It is the sour tamarind, a pod with pulpy seeds inside, that is being squeezed into a liquid.

Another woman is stirring a huge bowl of cut-up fish and coconut milk. Stirring and stirring with an energy that seems tireless. She’s been doing it since we arrived. Coconut milk and fish. Why all this stirring? I watch and discover that as she stirs, the mixture gets thicker. Then she calls to someone who dumps a huge bagful of hot red paste into the bowl. She continues stirring. Then more coconut milk is poured in and the stirring continues.

“Ho mok,”
says the woman, naming the dish. I smile.

“Aloi,”
says Fon. Delicious.

I notice that my basil and our baskets are next to this woman.

As the preparations conclude, the background music changes from chopping noises to the hiss of gas burners. The cooking begins.

Fon calls me to a briskly boiling pot filled with an orange liquid. They have already put in the chili paste and the chicken chopped into bite-size pieces and the bags of coconut milk. A woman is stirring as her team adds more chili paste and tiny eggplants and basil leaves. And fish sauce. The stirring continues. I taste, encouraged by Fon and the cook. It is what Thai restaurants in the U.S. call “red chicken curry.” It’s hot and delicious. I have forgotten to bring a tissue for my runny nose.

Very quickly the piles of prepared vegetables, chopped meats, bags of paste and sugar and sauces disappear into pots. Most of the action has moved to the fires, but the woman making
ho mok
is still stirring the fish and coconut milk. The mixture now has the consistency of soft mashed potatoes. Then finally, after she has been stirring for more than forty minutes, she adds strips of kaffir lime leaves, stirs a little more, and begins to spoon the mixture into our banana-leaf baskets. First five or six of
my
basil leaves are placed in the bottom of each basket; and then the fish-coconut mixture is scooped in. Each basket is topped off with a tiny strip of red chili.

The baskets are then placed side by side in two huge aluminum steamer trays, until there are dozens of little green baskets crowded up next to each other. And finally, both racks are placed above boiling water and covered.

Fon and I wander from pot to pot, watching the cooks stirring and calling out to their teams for the various ingredients. Fon tells me the names of each dish and I write them down along with the ingredients.

The chicken curry dish is finished and carried over to a wooden platform that is piling up with cooked food. Already there are little fried squids, a plate of raw, cut-up cucumbers and string beans, and a platter of fried fish. The
kang som,
a sour curry with bamboo and tamarind arrives. So does the
pad mie,
noodles with shallots, bean sprouts, tiny garlicky scallions, and a tamarind-sugar mixture.

The pork dishes are still cooking when Fon says,
“Ho mok, ho mok.
Ma.”
Come.

The first batch of steamed fish in banana-leaf baskets has come out of the steamer and they are brought to the platform. Fon rushes over and gets one for each of us. I spoon out a bit of the spicy
ho mok,
laced with kaffir lime leaf strips and sitting in basil. It is pure heaven. The fish and the coconut milk have blended into a thick, firm, mousse. I have never tasted anything so wonderful in my life.

One by one the pots of cooked food are placed on the platform. The different cooks pull me over to their creations and watch proudly as I taste each one. We are speaking without words in the language of food. They can see the pleasure in my eyes, the satisfaction in my smile, the look of joy on my face.

“Aloi mak mak,”
I keep repeating. And it’s true. Everything is wonderful. Each dish is different in taste and texture from the others. What an incredible experience. I am more than ever convinced that Thai food is the most complex and spectacular cuisine in the world.