Tales of a Female Nomad (41 page)

Soon, the community arrives to eat. Up until now, it’s been just the cooks. After the eating, there is a ceremony at a small temple nearby. This whole event is to honor and pay homage to a particular deity whose statue is in a nearby cave. (At the time I didn’t have a clue; three months later, when I am back in Seattle, Jip explains it to me.) For many hours after the meal, women dance, music blares, people pray.

The women who did the cooking pull me into the dancing and I circle with them, moving my feet in the simple step. But I am not interested in the dancing or the ceremony or the music. It is the
ho mok
I am thinking about; I must learn how to make it. Suddenly I know that
ho mok
is the reason I have come to Thailand. It is the dish I am going to take with me around the world, shouting its brilliance and cooking it for people I love.

A few mornings later, I am riding with Fon on her motorcycle when we pass through a coconut grove.

“Monkeys?” I ask. Jip has told me about the monkeys who harvest coconuts.

Fon nods. Before long we are standing with a group of farmers watching coconuts drop from a tree that must be seventy feet tall. One of the men is holding a long string that ends at the top of the tree.

Then the coconuts stop dropping and a little brown monkey scurries down. It has a white forehead, dark eyes, furry jowls, and a curly black tail. The monkey joins the man holding the string. As we stand there, a motorcycle comes out of a driveway. The driver is wrapped in monkeys, two sitting in front of him and another behind, the way families often sit when they go for rides.

Fon and I return home and I discover there’s another guest. He’s a young Thai man who speaks English quite well. I am full of language questions, and when I discover he’s a friend of the family, I ask him about the meetings I’ve seen in the evenings. Two nights this week four or five people have gathered around a table with paper and notebooks and folders. One night Fon pointed out that one of the group was talking on the phone to a radio station. She was listening in the kitchen.

The guest, Patom, tells me that Somkit (Fon’s father) is the leader of a group of citizens who are protesting the building of a power plant just north of the village. He has carried their fight onto television and in the newspapers and is a well-known figure in Thailand. Several years ago the government built a similar plant in a valley up north. The fish died and the blue water turned black, says Patom.

“The builders are the government in partnership with a huge Japanese company. The protesters have delayed the building for two years, but the fight is not over.”

“Is it dangerous for Somkit to be the leader of this group?” I ask.

“Maybe,” says Patom, “but the people protect him. Everybody loves him.”

On Friday of my second week, Manit calls me into the kitchen and tells me that we are going to cook
ho mok.
The ingredients are on the table. So are a stack of banana-leaf baskets. While Ei makes the hot orange paste in the mortar, I am given my first job: picking off the leaves from basil stems.

While I am doing the basil, Manit takes a big white bass out of the refrigerator; it’s two feet long and fat. She removes the center bone and cuts the meat off of the skin into bite-size pieces. She ends up with a huge pile of fish about the size of a giant coconut.

The last bit of preparation is slivering the kaffir lime leaves into needle-size strips. I can do that too.

And then comes the miracle of
ho mok.
The fish meat is put into a big aluminum pot with two liters of coconut milk. I am given a short stool, six inches off the ground, and a thick spine from the center of a palm leaf that is more than two feet long. I hold the pot between my feet on the floor in front of me and I begin to stir, briskly, mimicking the woman at the “big cook,” holding the top of the spine more or less in one position with one hand while moving the bottom of the mixer with the other hand, around and around. After five minutes, the mixture begins to thicken. A few minutes later, Manit comes over and decides it is time for more coconut milk. I continue to stir. From time to time Manit checks the consistency.

When the mixture is about the thickness of thin mashed potatoes, Manit adds a large bag of orange paste, about two cups of it. Then Manit takes over the stirring with new energy, thoroughly combining the fish with the paste. Toward the end she adds some very thin coconut milk, maybe a half cup . . . and a few minutes later, another half cup, until she is pleased with the consistency.

The final addition is a handful of the slivered kaffir lime leaves, which are thoroughly mixed in. Then we begin to fill the baskets.

Manit puts a handful of basil leaves into each basket and the mixture is spooned on top of the basil. Then the baskets are placed next to each other in an aluminum steamer tray and the whole thing is placed on top of briskly boiling water in the steamer pot. And covered. After about fifteen minutes, Manit lifts the top, pokes one of the fillings and lets it cook a few minutes more before she lifts the steamer tray off the pot. A second tray filled with baskets is placed over the water.

I am the first to taste the treasure. It is exquisite. The bits of fish have become that sensational coconut-milk fish mousse. The texture is amazing.
Ho mok,
a gastronomical miracle. Where does it get its custardy texture, its mousse-y lightness? There are no eggs in here. No flour. No cornstarch or baking powder. Apparently it’s all in the stirring. That’s the secret, endless stirring.

I hope I can make it when I’m no longer in Thailand, when banana-leaf baskets are aluminum foil, and coconut milk comes from cans. When the basil has a different flavor. And kaffir lime leaves are hard to find.

If I can’t eat
ho mok
in the West, I may have to spend the rest of my life in Thailand.
Ho mok
is that good.

A few days later, I spend the morning with Fon’s five-year-old son, Boat. We have sung “Do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do” about twenty times, backwards and forwards. We have named—in English—the colors in a striped umbrella. We have played the “pile the hands on the table” game, and snuggled, and sung songs.

We’ve also viewed all the screen savers in Windows 98 (we both like the fish the best, though the mystery house comes in a close second for him). We’ve written his name and the names of all his cousins in every size and font we could find. And we’ve played dozens of games of one-card-at-a-time solitaire. He likes that gush of cards when you win. So do I.

Now we are playing a sound game that we’ve played before. He says
“saparot,”
which is the Thai word for pineapple. I repeat it. Then he changes the last syllable,
“sapalit”
and I say
“sapanit”
and he says
“sapame”
and I say
“sapaboo”
and on and on until it gets wild and we end the game.

Boat used to try to have conversations with me but he has given up. I can’t respond. I’m not sure he understands that I speak a different language. More likely he thinks I’m just dumb, literally and figuratively. I do a lot of grunting and mmm’ing. But even so, we manage to have fun.

A few days later, the cool comes. As I walk along the water, a fierce wind blows my three-inch hair strands as though they were flowing locks. Overnight the weather has changed from oppressively hot to breezy and cool.

The same day, a group of men check in. They are dressed casually, but they are obviously businessmen, a mix of ages and statuses. They are eating at the next table, peeking at Nek and me as we work on her English in front of the computer. I wonder who they are and what they do. The next morning, I find out.

It is before eight when I see one of them across the street, standing on the sand, staring out into the sun-blazed sea. I take some coffee and cross over. He is thin and wearing light-rimmed glasses that are fiery with the reflection of the sun. He speaks first. In English.

“I saw that you were teaching English last night. Are you a teacher?”

“I’m a writer,” I say. “And you?”

He tells me he is an engineer who works for the government department of power. He and his colleagues are working on the power plant project that Somkit and his committee are protesting.

“Do you know that Somkit, the owner of Rim Haad, is the leader of the protest group?” I ask.

“Yes, I have seen him on television.”

“Are you here to meet with him?”

“No. In fact, I was worried when my boss told me we were staying here, but last night I talked to Somkit and he said it is no problem.”

I am amazed and skeptical. They are adversaries, these two men. Could it really be as innocent as all this or is there some devious thing going on here?

I have been told that the government is planning to use low-grade coal in the plant, which is a serious air pollutant; and that the hot water that will pour into the sea from the plant will kill the fish and the coral in the water. There is a similar plant in the north that has ruined the air and destroyed the marine life.

He tells me that the plant in the north is in a valley where the bad air gets trapped. The new plant will be in an open space and the pollutants will disperse. He also says that they will try to cool the water before it enters the sea.

“We have shown Somkit our proposal. He told me last night that he has read it and he doesn’t trust the words.”

I don’t either.

That same night, the people in Ban Krud are preparing for Loy Gathong, a full-moon festival that contrasts poignantly with the massive power plant that is certain to pollute the water. The festival honors the goddess of the river. On the night of the full moon, people thank her for providing the water that sustains them and ask the goddess for forgiveness if they have misused her gift.

It is after dark when Fon, eight kids, and I begin making our boats by wrapping slices of a porous banana-tree trunk with strips of banana leaves, and then decorating the green boats with flowers and colorful buds and petals. When our creations are finished, Fon adds a candle and three sticks of incense to each one and we go off to the river.

We carry our offerings through the crowd, across a bridge, and down a little hill to the edge of the water. Then we light the candles and the incense, hold the boat between our hands, and kneel. I pray silently to the river goddess that she will continue to provide us with water, I ask for her forgiveness if I have misused her gift. And finally, I implore her to help Somkit win his fight against the power plant. Then I place my boat with the hundreds of others in the river.

Even with the full moon, the night is dark. The flowered boats, their flames flickering, float down the river to the sea, in grateful thanks for the gift of water. How beautiful.

I am packing to go back to New Zealand when Fon comes to get me. A couple from Austria have checked in for the night and they’ve ordered lunch. The chopped pork dish they were served was supposed to have been a tomato salad. It’s right there on the menu . . . tomato salad. That’s what they ordered. But no one has ever ordered a tomato salad before. The cooks didn’t know how to make it, so they made this pork dish. The woman is a vegetarian.