From Hamamatsu to Bangkok

In 1991, I finished a 26-month stint teaching English in Hamamatsu, Japan. As many English teachers are wont to do at the end of their tenure, they often decide to travel in Asia. I was no different, so I took six weeks and ventured between Bangkok and Singapore. The principal goal of my journey was an island south of Bangkok called Koh Samui. Most people in Japan know of this island, and they laugh at the name since samui is the Japanese word for “cold.”

I spent a week on this island in a small wooden cabin on the shores of the *** Sea. To get there, I took an overnight train south out of Bangkok to the port city of Surat Thani. From there, I caught a boat to the island and then took a taxi—which was really just the back of a pickup truck—to a small enclave by the sea. There, I found wooden cabins with thatched roved just 25 yards from the beach. The cabins were run by a young man called Ti, and his family ran a restaurant for all people staying there. The beach was simple: sand and grass with water, but the only people frequenting the beach were the people staying at this series of huts, so the wide beach was nearly empty. The specialty of the restaurant was mushroom omelets, but the mushrooms were psychadelic mushrooms, and therefore not a specific item mentioned on their menu. Still, all the travelers to this resort knew about the omelets and were happy to pay the price for them. Being a fraidy cat of sorts, and having made a personal vow not to do such drugs, I never did try the omelets, but I must confess that I enjoyed watching the European travelers enjoy their high while swinging in hammocks in front of their cabins.

My next stop was the town of Songkla. I took the ferry back to Surat Thani, and in Surat Thani, I paid for a ticket in an old Volkswagen van that seated eight people to take me to Songkla. However, thai people are often small, so the van driver was happy to sell eleven tickets for the eight-seat van. In my row of seats, we had four people, and I was seated next to the window. I concentrated on the topography, noting the tall green grasses, houses on stilts, water buffalo, and the 100-foot tall rock spires that haphazardly peppered the marshy plain. A Buddhist monk was seated next to me. He had a shaved head and pointy eyebrows, and he was wearing the bright red-orange robe that priests in Thailand are famous for.

Nearly two hours into the journey south, the monk spoke to me in a high nasal voice, “Where you come from?”

I was so astonished to hear him speak English, but I was happy to have the chat. Not two minutes after he got up the courage to speak to me, the van stopped at a restaurant by the side of the road. The monk bought me Thai iced coffee, and we sat at a wooden table to get acquainted. He introduced himself as Koon Kob, which literally means Mr Frog. Most Thai people have a one-syllable nickname which is coupled with the formal title, and this was the one he had chosen for himself. Koon Kob had just graduated from a monastery north of Bangkok, and he was returning to his town of Narathiwat in the far south to be with his girlfriend. I said, “I didn’t know that monks had girlfriends,” and Kob shrugged his shoulders and smiled.

Kob asked me if I wanted to come to Narathiwat to visit him. I had an agenda for my trip, and I usually stick to it once I’ve decided. This trip was the first one I had made where I was almost completely by myself for the entire six weeks, so I thought that considering the amount of time I had put into planning it, I should probably stick to a schedule as closely as I could until I learned to get more flexible. This attitude probably cost me a chance to see Prince Siyanuk return to Cambodia. The day before I was to leave for Koh Samui, the newspaper said that he was being reinstated into power in Phnom Penh, and there would be accompanying ceremony. I had gone to Kao San Road to check out the possibility of traveling there instead, and visas were indeed available, as were buses from the Thai border. But I already had my agenda set, and I had been thinking about Koh Samui for months, so I stuck with my original plan. As such, I said to Kob that I already had plans to get to Malaysia and Singapore, but then I saw on my calendar that I had three days of flexibility scheduled in at the beginning of December. Kob then suggested that I come then, and he gave me his phone number. I said, “Fine, I’ll see you on December 2.” Kob then said, “You chose a good time to go to Songkla because tomorrow is the Roi Ketan Festival.”

As I left the van in Songkla, I thanked Koon Kob and told him I would call him in December. My Lonely Planet guide had a recommendation for a good hotel in Songkla, so I went there straight away—a large yellow painted building with rooms with high ceilings. A woman with shoulder length hair and a cranberry colored shirt would check me into my room and give me directions to good food in the area.

The reason I had chosen Songkla was because I knew there was a huge bird refuge just to the north, and I wanted to spend the day bird watching. The next morning, I woke up and went downstairs to see the woman in the cranberry shirt. I said, “How do I get to this bird refuge?”

She smiled and said, “You have two choices. You can either take a bus, or my husband will drive you on his motorcycle.”

“How much does the motorcycle cost for the day?”

She quoted me a price of about three dollars, so I said that that was what I wanted. She said, “Just a moment!” and walked to a semi-fat man who was smiling, smoking a cigarette, and talking to a friend in the hotel doorway. As I saw the woman talk to him, I saw the smile change into worry and then into panic. The man was completely exasperated and shook his violently as if to say, “No, I do not want to do this.” I heard him shout to his wife, “Mai ban. Mai ban.” I’m not going, I’m not going. His wife walked back to me and said, “He’ll be ready in five minutes.” I said that was fine and I’d go and retrieve my things from my room.

When I came downstairs, the man sheepishly smiled and showed me his motorcycle. I had a map, and he pointed to the bird refuge. I smiled, and he pointed to the backseat. He got on, and then I got on. He showed me where to put my feet, gave me a crash helmet, and off we went, passing more marshlands, houses on stilts, water buffalo, and even a couple of 100-foot spires. After a half-hour, I could see a large white tower to our left, and the man turned the motorbike toward it. I went to the office where they had pictures of the local birds and descriptions of them written in Thai, and I paid the entry fee for both of us, about 25 cents. We then walked to the top of the white platform, and I looked for birds. I had my Thai dictionary with me, and together with the man, we looked up words for communication. The word nok, or bird, came up frequently, principally in that we kept saying that we couldn’t see any. We looked and looked, and there was not a single bird to be seen. We stayed on top of the tower for a half hour, and we never saw a single bird. We decided to walk down the stairs of the tower and follow some muddy trails through the marshes. I thought we might see some ducks, but there were none to be seen. Finally, after nearly two hours of walking, wading, slipping in the mud, and playing with the Thai/English dictionary, the man shouted, “Nok, nok!” and I could see off in the distance on a far-away telephone wire, a little brown bird. It was so small, I couldn’t make out what kind of a bird it was, just that it was small, brown, the only bird I had seen all day long.

Seeing that bird reminded me of when I took a pair of binoculars out into the desert with my dad to go bird watching. He is a retired biologist, and I thought it would be fun to go out into the New Mexico sand and watch the birds that had come south for the winter. We went to a rest area along an interstate highway which is known for its good birding, and we looked through the binoculars. Dad had the pair around his neck when he said, “Look, look! I see an LBB.”

I grabbed the binoculars and looked, and after a few seconds I saw a small brown bird. “Dad, what does LBB stand for.”

Dad smiled and said, “Well as a cultured and experienced biologist, I can tell you that LBB stands for ‘little bitty bird.’”

I groaned.

Dad then said, “Hey look to the right there. Can you move the binoculars so that they line up with cactus? There’s a GBB over there.”

“OK, I’ll bite. What’s a GBB?”

“A great big bird!”

My chauffeur and I had seen but one LBB or nok in two and half hours. The man suggested that we walk to a small community, and there was a party of some sort going on. We walked through the party, though I felt a bit strange, not to mention tall and white, walking through the party in which people were sharing coconuts and watermelons. Behind the party was a marshland, and there the man suggested we might see a nok or two. We waited, and we waited, but there was not a single bird. So we walked back through the coconut and watermelon party and back to the motorcycle. The day was a bust.

We rode out of the bird refuge and to the main road and started heading south. Suddenly, the man turned right into a house on stilts with a water buffalo in front of it. He motioned to his stomach that he was hungry. A woman walked down the stairs from her house to the ground. After talking to my driver, she took a green coconut from a pile sitting under her house. She then took a machete and swiped off the top of the coconut, giving it to me. My driver her paid her, and we enjoyed coconut milk as he chatted with his friend.

The driver then started to talk to me as if he had a brilliant idea, but I had no idea what he was saying. We got on the motorcycle, and he drove me to the Songkla Museum. There, I saw old artifacts from Thai history, and I enjoyed the walk around the museum.

It was getting close to 5:00 pm, and I had arranged for the day to end at 5:00 with the woman at the hotel. We rode back, but the woman told her husband to take me to a restaurant for coffee. We found an outdoor restaurant where monkeys were playing on the roof and in the trees. The man took a banana out of his bag, and before I knew it, he four monkeys were crawling on him, fighting their way up the arm he hold over his head, to get that banana. They screamed and jumped, and he laughed and laughed. As soon as one took the banana, the others would jump off him. But he delighted in this monkey teasing game so that he took another banana out of his bag and let the monkeys crawl on him again. He asked me if I wanted to do it, and I said, “Sure!” So he took a banana out and gave it to me. However, before I even had a chance to raise my arm with the banana, a monkey sneaked up from behind me and grabbed it. Unfortunately, I never got the chance to have monkeys swarm me because this was the man’s last banana.

We continued to play with the Thai/English dictionary, and I discovered that he had a son and a daughter. That night, they intended to go to the Roi Ketan Festival, so he invited me. We walked back to the hotel, and there his wife had indeed collected their two children, and we went to a nearby market for dinner. There we enjoyed red chile chicken and rice with Cokes, and we ate mountains of food until we were stuffed. By this time, the festival was beginning at the city port. Together we walked to the port, and the children had built Roi Ketan boats for the occasion. Each boat was made of pink construction paper, decorated with red, green, and gold ribbon, and had a candle in the middle. When we arrived at the port, there were hundreds of people on the shore with such boats. Each person lit the candle in the boat, and sent it out to the sea, symbolizing a means of colorfully saying goodbye to all their problems. I worried about the pollution of the port, but I had to admit seeing the thousands of pink boats with candles riding the tide of the sea at night was impressive.

The man and hotelier wife then invited me to their house to share a soda. I said that would be fine. They had a large house, in fact. The concrete walls stretched a good 12-foot high, there was a large kitchen, and the three bedrooms were up a set of 20 stairs. We walked in and chatted as best as we could. The woman’s English was pretty good, so we managed a conversation. We lay on a sofa, relaxed and happy, and we shared the soda. When I finished the soda, I observed that it was late and that I should probably get back to the hotel. I had plans to get to Malaysia the next day, and I would have to get up early in order to succeed in my plans.

The woman said, “Why don’t you spend the night here?” I thought about it. I felt like I needed to be sure that I got up early the next day, but since she was working at the hotel, she would be able to get me up. She even said, “You can even lie on that sofa over there. It’s very comfortable.” However, as she said that, I saw a large gray rat sniffing underneath the sofa, and I gulped.

“That’s very nice of you. I think I’ll just stay in my room at the hotel and be sure I leave by 8:00 tomorrow. Thank you though!” And with that, I said goodbye to my hosts. The man smiled and said thank you. I don’t think he knew when he woke up that morning that he’d be touring a white boy around town, but I think he really did enjoy himself, and I was certainly grateful.

I took two buses to get to the other side of the peninsula. From there, I took a motorboat to Malaysia. The trip from Thai shore to Malaysian shore was to take an hour an a half. The sun beat down on me, and I leaned over the side of the boat to feel the mist of the water cool my skin. As I did, the wind grabbed my sunglasses, ripping them from my head and plunging them into the ocean beneath me. I laughed in exasperation, noting that we were ten miles from the Thai shore and ten miles from the Malaysian shore. Then the motor of the boat started to sputter. Then it stopped altogether. The drivers tried to restart it, but it wouldn’t ignite, no matter how hard they pulled on the rope. I looked back and said, “So what do we do now?” and they smiled at me, gesturing with their arms that swimming was all we could do. Soon, one of the drivers said that if we started to paddle with our arms, we might be able to get the boat moving at least in the direction of Malaysia, so the ten of us in the boat cupped our hands and started paddling toward the coast. I thought to myself, “This is going to take a very long time.” Meanwhile, as we paddled through the sea, two of the boat assistants continued to work on the boat motor. It was difficult to lean over the boat, sticking its side into my armpit and then reaching into the water to paddle, and I had to paddle one minute and rest one minute. We were moving, but it was taking a lot of time and a lot of energy. The others were similarly having troubles. Suddenly, we heard the boat motor run. The two mates had gotten it started, and we all cheered as the mist of the boat sprayed us again.

In Malaysia, I joined up with a German tourist named Jurgen and rode to Pulau Lankawi. There I enjoyed the beach and a mountain spring where I met a young girl, dressed in pink Muslim garb. She said, “Do you think you can teach me how to swim?” and we agreed to meet at the ocean that evening. I was concerned because she had to keep the garb on while she was swimming, so we had to make arrangements on how it would not be cumbersome and interfering with her swimming. We practiced breathing and the timing of her stroke, and I announced loudly each time I was going to try to keep her afloat by placing my hand on her stomach, asking permission each time. She had probably tried to swim before because she was indeed swimming after just a couple of hours. She thanked me, said I was very kind, and ran to talk to her mom.

Jurgen and I traveled throughout Malaysia together. We went to Penang where we ate Indian food, and we took an overnight bus to Kuala Lumpur. On the bus, I heard beautiful Chinese music over the radio, and I enjoyed the tropical perfume of the air swafting through the open bus windows, accompanied by classical Chinese love songs. I closed my eyes, and I imagined my own song, one that reflected the picnics I had taken in Japan, mainly those I took in the spring for flower viewing tours, known as o-hanami. It was in a dreamy state on that bus that night that I wrote this tune:

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The bus driver stopped in the city of Ipoh, and he shared a midnight dinner. I was so elated with the music and the air of the bus ride that I could not wait to get back on the bus and resume my dreams. However, when we got back on, the driver put a tape in the VCR, and suddenly each of the ten television monitors was illuminated with the horror film Child’s Play, featuring the mad stabbing doll called Chuckie. From the moment the movie started, I was disgusted, but with ten monitors beaming their lights on me and with the volume turned up full, the movie was inescapable. I tried closing my eyes and covering my ears with my sweatshirts, but it wasn’t enough. I tried singing my new song in my head or recalling any of the Chinese love songs, but all I could do was watch that horrible movie.

In Kuala Lumpur, I walked to a new aviary, so I finally was able to enjoy birds. The aviary was constructed only 15 minutes walking from the train station, perhaps the most beautiful train station in the world, built with white concrete and adorned with Islamic mironettes. The National Mosque was also nearby, and I sat next to macaws and minah birds as the sun set at 6:00 and the soothing evening prayers were broadcast over the mosque loudspeakers.

From Kuala Lumpur, we ventured to Melaka, where we toured through the old Dutch and Portuguese port. I even tried to speak Portuguese with the locals there, but we couldn’t understand each other. I wondered if somehow I was hearing the Portuguese of 400 years ago. It certainly wasn’t the Brazilian kind I had studied. In Melaka, there is also a series of canals leading to the sea, and I enjoyed the slow roller coaster motion of walking up and down the slightly arched bridges going over these canals.

At one bridge, I saw a nine-year-old boy holding hands with his grandmother. She was smiling, and she was clearly telling him a story. I was seated on a concrete bench, and I watched the two of them. They stopped in front of me, and the grandmother stretched her arms out and gestured with them in various configurations as the young boy sat enthralled by all his wise grandmother had to tell. Her voice was glistening with enthusiasm and life, and the boy’s face expressed his towering interest in what his grandmother had to say, not to forget his deep love and respect for her. He was smiling as much as she was. I sat there, and I remembered my grandmother and all the stories she used to tell me. She had died five years earlier, but suddenly I missed her more than I ever had since she died. And I started to cry. A couple of people walked passed me and looked at me, and I realized I was more than sniffling, so I decided to truncate my sadness, wipe my face, and smile.

From Melaka, I went to Singapore, where I bought a fax machine. I had to haggle for the fax machine, and I found it fascinating to be haggling and using such big numbers at the same time. I had haggled before, but usually it only entailed differences of a couple of dollars here and there. Here, we were haggling over hundreds of dollars. I spent the day going up and down Orchard Road before I found the fax machine I wanted. But when I got it to the hotel room, I realized that it would not fit into my luggage. I had to take it out of its box, wrap each piece in my clothes, and carry it that way.

From Singapore, I caught an overnight train to the north of Malaysia and the city of Kota Bahru. I spent the day there shopping, and then left the following morning, walking across the border back into Thailand. When I entered Thailand, I asked how to get to the bus station, and the only means was by bicycle. With all my luggage, including my fax machine, a man put me on the back of his bicycle and pumped me up the hill to the bus station. There were no buses to Narathiwat, but I found a taxi that was willing to drive me to Narathiwat, where I could see Koon Kob. The taxi ride was 100 kilometers long and took two hours, but it only cost me four dollars.

I found a pay telephone in Narathiwat and I called the number Kob had given me. He answered and said he would come get me. He came on his motorcycle, and I got on with my luggage, including my fax machine, and rode to his home. He shared a two story house with a set of friends and his girlfriend greeted us.

In our conversations, he discovered that I was an English teacher. He and his girlfriend just happened to be having their own English class that night, and they wondered if I might teach them a lesson. I asked them what they wanted to do, and they wanted conversation and they wanted to know how to sing the Richard Marx song “Right Here Waiting.” I had been hearing that song on the radio every hour on the hour for the duration of my visit to Thailand, and it was wearing thin on my nerves, but I said I would if they had a recording of it. I said that thinking, “There’s no way they have a recording of that song,” but they did. It was tape, and I sat down and transcribed the lyrics, gagging under my breath at each gooey word I wrote down. Koon Kob gave me ten sheets of paper. On five of them, I wrote the lyrics to the song. On the other five, I made a list of questions I had made when I was teaching conversation in Japan.

When we arrived to the school, I met the English teacher, who said that he was glad I had come. I had them warm up with some pronunciation exercises on the sounds /th/ and /r/, and then I handed out the questions. It was a small class of maybe 12 students, and I had them sit around the set of questions in groups. I gave three groups the dice I had, and then I went to the board and drew

1

6 2

5 3

4

I then had each team member take out a coin, a different kind of coin for each person, and I asked them to place the coins at the top of the page. I then had the teams with dice roll the dice, and they moved the coins up and down the page, counting the number of questions that was on the dice and stopping at the last question, thereby having the die-roller ask the others in the group that particular question. For those without dice, I had them take out a pen and draw on a separate sheet of paper the number and line configuration I had drawn on the board. They then took a pen or pencil and twirled it. The direction in which the point of the pen landed most like the number compartment on the paper would be the number of questions they would choose to count up or down on their paper. Each group then joyously started conversing, based on the questions I had written, and their regular and I went from group to group, helping them with new words and pronunciation.

Following the question Parcheesi game, we took out the lyrics to the Richard Marx song. They had a couple of questions regarding the vocabulary, and we worked through those, but each person knew the melody by heart. First, I played the tape, then we worked on pronunciation, word by word. Then we sang the song with the tape, then without it on our own, and then with it. Each time they sang the song on their own, they clapped wildly. They were so proud of themselves.

After the class, the teacher and the students took me out for dinner, and one student said, “You are the first native English speaker we have ever met. We have taken this class for more than a year, and this is our first chance ever to really use English.” Another student said, “Actually, we didn’t know if our teacher could really speak English until today. He is our teacher for more than one year, and now we see him speaking English with you, and he really knows English. We’re happy.”

Kob and his girlfriend were happy too. They drove me back to Kob’s place where we joined his friends and listened to a tape of Credence Clearwater Revival’s greatest hits. They asked me if I knew any of these songs, and I knew a number of them. They laughed as I sang the lyrics. They then pulled out American motorcycle magazines they had found, complete with pictures of semifat naked women. They asked me if I knew these magazines, but I said I knew CCR music much, much better than I knew those magazines. I made faces of discomfort over the pictures in the magazine, primarily because I thought the naked women were just so ugly, and Kob laughed as I shouted, “Yuck” at each picture. Kob then suggested that we call it a night. He said he needed to remind me of two things. First, he would be getting up at 5:00 to meditate. Second, in two days time, his girlfriend’s mother was going to make me a special breakfast of food that can only be found in southern Thailand.

Kob did wake up at 5:00, and he did meditate. I found the music he chose soothing, and I enjoyed being awoken in such a manner. It was calming, almost as if I was doing my own meditation, though I was really just going in and out of my own dreams. When he finished, he noticed that my eyes were open and smiled. I sat up, and Kob said, “Don’t forget tomorrow morning, my girlfriend’s mother is going to make you a special southern Thai breakfast just for you.”

Kob had a small white car, which he loaded with his girlfriend, three other friends, and me. We went to a nearby Buddha, and then we took an obscure dirt path leading toward the ocean. The path then turned north, and we approached a small white shack where there was a man with a bayonet. Kob stopped the car and talked with the man, and the man lifted a long white bar, permitting us to pass into some otherwise forbidden land. I looked behind me, and the three people in back were awestruck, clapping in ecstasy. I said, “What happened, and where are we?”

Kob said, “We’re at the king’s summer house. We have tried to come here many times, and they never let us in. This is our first time. Today is the king’s birthday, and we are with a foreigner, so they let us in. You bring us good luck.” And Kob smiled.

At the king’s summer residence, we drove through a large forest to a small parking area. We walked up a hill on a small trail and found a series of cages and roped off areas. We were at a zoo. Kob said that the king wanted to stop cutting trees in Thailand, but it was too difficult. So, in an effort to keep some of the endangered species alive, he created his own zoo where he could make certain that some species would stay alive.

As we walked out of the king’s summer residence, Kob reminded me that the next morning, his girlfriend’s mother was going to prepare a special southern Thai breakfast, the kind of food you can get nowhere else in the world, especially for me.

On the way back into town, we saw a man with an elephant. The elephant had white paint on its side, and I noticed that the paint was in the shape of Thai letters. Kob said that it was an advertisement, and that he thought it was wrong to use elephants as an advertisement. He thought they should stay in the jungle.

As we settled down for the evening, Kob said, “Don’t forget in the morning, my girlfriend’s mother is going to make a special southern Thai breakfast especially for you.”

We woke up at 5:00, and I enjoyed Kob’s meditation again. When he was finished, he asked me to get ready because we were going to go to his girlfriend’s house for breakfast and her mother was going to prepare a special breakfast especially for me. With his constant reminding me, I felt the compulsion to get ready as quickly as possible, and we were at his girlfriend’s house by 7:00. At her house, there was a large crowd gathered outside the back sliding glass down, and we all sat down in plastic white chairs around a metal table. I could see the marshes glisten from the morning sun, and the air was cool and breezy. When I saw Kob’s girlfriend, she said, “Oh, I’m happy you come because my mother prepared breakfast especially for you.” I suddenly understood that I was going to eat this breakfast, regardless of whether I wanted it or not. It’s an old ESL rule: one never turns down gifts unless absolutely necessary, and even then one should figure out a way to accept the gift or one can inadvertently hurt the giver. This gift seemed to be the most important gift anyone had ever given me in that I had never had someone spend so much energy telling me how important and how unique such a gift was. I looked out into the marshes and I told myself that no matter what it was, I was not only going to eat it, but I was going to eat all of it. Nevertheless, I was worried. But then, a calm came over me. I had never gotten sick in all the time I had been in Thailand, and most Thai food was really good. I figured the only way I could get into trouble was if the breakfast somehow contained a piece of unpeelable fruit or vegetable, and I hadn’t really seen much of that at all up to that point. So I relaxed and felt better. I started to imagine that it would be a nice combination of spices, placed perhaps on eggs or chicken, and that the problem wouldn’t be whether it was safe to eat or not but just a matter of how spicy it might be. I liked spicy food, and Thai food hadn’t been such a problem for me, so I started to think that the food would be OK.

Then the mother brought out breakfast. I saw on a plate in front of me a bed of Thai white rice, about 30 red chile peppers, and a mound of raw cabbage. And that was it. Kob had his own plate, and he was pleased and eager to dive into his breakfast. He smiled with pride as he said, “There! That’s the special Thai breakfast, especially for you.” It seemed to me that for Kob that there was nothing finer on Earth. I saw the bed of cabbage and I thought to myself, “Oh boy! This is a problem.” This was an unpeelable fruit or vegetable, the kind that all guide books and nurses say to stay away from. I looked down at the plate of instant parasite and considered for a moment turning it down. But then I looked at Kob and saw his big smile. This man had done everything for me the previous two days, and I loved learning from him. He was so peaceful, and I knew I would never forget him. I was to leave in just a few minutes, so how could the last thing I do with him be to turn down his precious gift? I smiled and said, “Wow! With the green cabbage and the red chile, it really is beautiful to look at.” Then I took the spoon to my right, picked it up, and said to myself, “I will either pay for this now, or I will pay for this later.” I scooped up rice, chile, and cabbage, saying to myself, “If there is anything in this cabbage, I sure hope that the chile burns the hell out of it,” and shoved a big mound into my mouth. The cabbage had no flavor whatsoever; it might as well have been cardboard. The chile on the other hand started to burn, and I could feel different points of my mouth being affected. Kob was eating his food without any water, soda, or liquid for that matter, so I decided it might be rude of me to ask for any, so I let the roof of my mouth sizzle. I said to myself, “Here goes!” and I started to munch the food down, one spoonful immediately after another. I ate and I stuffed the food in my mouth, and I munched and swallowed as quickly as could reasonable be done. My mouth ached with fire, and I could feel sweat pouring out of my forehead. Still, I ate, putting both the cabbage and at least one chile in my mouth with each spoonful. I even finished before Kob did. That was a mistake because Kob then got up to get me some more. I didn’t want anymore, and I thought my mouth was going to fall out of my face if I didn’t get some water. While he was in the house, I opened my mouth in the direction of the breeze, hoping the chill of the wind would cool the roof of my mouth. When I heard Kob returning, I returned to my chair and smiled, though I really wanted to cry. Kob said, “No more!” His mother had given out all the cabbage and chile to all the other people and there wasn’t any more to be had.

I sighed and said, “That’s OK!”

“You like it?”

“Be sure to tell your girlfriend and her mother ‘thank you.’”

…

After my trip to Thailand, I decided to go to the US for six months more of vacation. I had applied for several jobs at universities in Japan, and I was awaiting their answers. The application process is long and arduous, so I knew it would take a while. As a result, I went to my parents’ home in New Mexico and hung out. Mom and Dad loaned me their car, and I drove to Austin, where I had gotten my Master’s degree, and I visited with old friends.

While in Austin, my friend Mary, a nurse with the country health department and the sister of my friend Paul, who I had visited in Africa, asked me if I wanted to participate in a study her colleague was conducting. Her friend was looking for people who had just been in third world countries to leave stool samples for his research on the development of parasites. I looked at Mary and said, “With that smile you’ve got, I’d almost swear that he hopes I have a parasite.

Well, it would be interesting, now, wouldn’t it?

For whom?

Still, if you have a parasite, don’t you want to know about it so you can do something about it?”

I couldn’t argue with that, so I agreed to participate in the study. Mary handed me a brown paper back with a kit inside it and pointed me to the bathroom.

From Austin, I drove east, going through the American Southeast for the first time in my life. My friend Paul, who I had visited in Tanzania, had married a Peace Corps buddy of his, and together they were studying for their PhDs at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

The morning I entered Alabama, I was driving not on the major interstate but on a rural two-lane highway running parallel to it. As I crossed the border from Pascagoula, Mississippi, I saw a large green-grass plantation with a three story white house with towering Colonial style pillars. On the left side of the road was a sign saying “Fresh Pumpkin Muffins.” I loved pumpkin muffins, and it had been a few years since my days in Boston that I had even tasted one, so I turned into the driveway. There was a side room to the house, a room that I thought might be a utility room for washing and drying, but cars were parked directly in front of it, and the light was on inside. I saw a couple of women staying in front of a counter, and an older lady was behind it. On the counter were baskets of fresh pumpkin muffins, glazed with orange icing. I bought six.

I returned to my car and marveled at the vastness of the plantation. It looked to be as big as a county, and I turned off the radio so I could imagine what it would be like to live in such a big house. About a mile down the road, I saw a man waving his arms. He was an African-American gentleman, just a little older than I was, and he looked like he needed help. It was morning, and I had muffins with me, so I felt generous and decided to give the man some notice. I rolled down the window.

“Are you OK?

Thanks for stopping. I’m wondering if I can trouble you for a ride to my house. It’s just about a mile down the road, and I’m afraid I can’t walk that far on my leg.

How far is it exactly?

Well, actually, you can see my house. You see that pink box over there about a mile away? That’s where I need to go.”

I could see it, and I agreed to give him a life. I invited him to a pumpkin muffin, but he turned me down. We rode on the two-lane highway for a while until the man said, “Turn right here.” I turned the car and entered a road without any markings on it. He then explained that he was from Gary, Indiana, and he was down in Alabama to see family. He talked about how long it had been since he had seen them and how nice it was to be back. “Turn left here,” he said. I turned left onto a dirt road.

“Here?

“Yeah!” and straight ahead I went on a narrow dirt road, walled in by large reeds and grasses. I couldn’t see to the sides very well, only the tunnel of the road in front of me, but the man reassured me we were going the right way. We came to an embankment, and I gunned the engine to get up it. He then said, “Turn right! You’ll see the pink house up ahead on the right.”

I did see the house, but suddenly I was riding my car through mud. I was concerned that if I stopped the car, I wouldn’t be able to get the wheels spinning out of the mud, but he said that his family would push me if I needed it. I stopped in front of the house, a white board house, built on cinder blocks. He explained they had no electricity or running water, but it was sure good to be home again. He invited me inside for a shot of whisky, but I said that I didn’t normally drink whisky at 9:30 in the morning, and I had to get onto Gainesville where my friend was waiting for me. He shook my hand and got out of the car. The mud embankment towered over the reed marsh, and I was nervous about making a U-turn. The man directed me piece by piece, helping me make a seven-point turn so that my car was pointed in the right direction and asserting that my car didn’t roll into the swamp. I waved to the man and said thank you for helping me, and his family came out and waved a goodbye to me. I put the car into first gear and started back the way I came. As I looked into the rearview mirror, I saw glistening in its green lawn the Colonial white house no more than a mile behind me.

When I arrived in Gainesville, Paul wasn’t there. He had to leave town to do data collection for his dissertation. I had been living in Japan during his courtship to his wife Jayne, so even though Paul was the longest standing friend in my life, I had spent no more than a day with his wife during their wedding time the year previously. Still Jayne seemed happy to have me around. I was concerned that she would spend too much energy trying to entertain me, and I prayed that she wouldn’t take me to Disney World in Orlando or any other theme parks, because I hate them. I hadn’t arrived in Gainesville until well past 10:00 in the evening, so we chatted a few minutes and decided to get acquainted the following morning.

When I woke up, Jayne was reading in her living room. “Hey, good morning, Eric! Want some breakfast?

OK! I’d be happy to help you.

That’s cool, but I don’t know how much help you can be. I’m having chips and hot sauce and a beer.

Chips and hot sauce and a beer?”

Jayne laughed proudly at herself. “Yeah, the breakfast of champions!” She looked at me, and I think she was trying to gauge what my reaction would be. Still, she maintained her proud rebellious smile.

“Well, when in Rome . . .” I cried out, and Jayne leaned over to give me a high five. She got up, went to the refigerator for salsa and beer and grabbed a large plastic bag of corn chips and brought them back into the living room.

“So, Eric, would you like to come and tag sturgeon with me on the Suwannee River today?

Excuse me?

Would you like to tag sturgeon on the Suwanee River? I have to go out there and see if we can find a fish we attached a radio to.” Jayne was working for the Fish and Wildlife Service, and they had a project tracking endangered fish and other species in the North Florida rivers.

“Are you kidding me? I can go with you?

Yeah, but you have to wear a funny yellow outfit. It’s just a raincoat and hat, but you’ll look really goofy.

Are you going to wear the funny yellow outfit?

Hell, no, man! I wouldn’t be caught dead in that. It’s only for the losers I take along with me.” Jayne laughed

“Well, gee! How can I resist?” Actually, I was ecstatic. Going out on the river and looking for animals in the country sounded exactly like my kind of journey. I was even willing to wear the funny little outfit.

We drove to her office and met her colleague, and we grabbed three funny yellow outfits, as we thought we might run into some nasty weather at some point through the day. We would also be riding on a boat, and the mist coupled with the brisk January temperatures would make for a cold day, even if it was in Florida. On the way to the Gulf Coast and the mouth of the Suwanee River, we stopped at a convenience store. Jayne suggested that we buy some lunch to take along with us, so we stocked up on soda pop and chocolate covered graham crackers.

We came to a cove and boat ramp on the river, and Jayne and his colleague prepared a motor boat for us to ride in. We moved the boat into the river, started the motor and started moving slowly down the river. Jayne’s colleague then took from his pocket a device that looked like a large TV remote control. It was actually a radio receiver. Jayne and he had found a sturgeon on a previous Suwanee trek, and they stapled a battery-powered radio transmitter to it. They had hoped to track where the sturgeon was swimming so they could figure out their swimming patterns, if there were any, and hopefully monitor the low numbers more accurately.

They also had a small fish net the road the surface of the water as we rode down the river. We hoped to catch another sturgeon to take back to the laboratory. We caught plenty of fish that morning, but none were sturgeon, and we let them go. We went out to the mouth of the river and found we were actually venturing into the salt waters of the Gulf of Mexico. We decided to circle and go back and forth at the mouth of the river to see if the radio signal would pick up. No success! We then decided to make a return trip up the river and resume the routine, hoping to catch a sturgeon in the surface net and/or pick up the radio signal of the already tagged fish. The first fish we caught was a large silver fish with a long pointed snout and sharp fins. It was a gar. It wriggled and writhed, trying with all its power to get out of the net, and the two scientists were worried because its fins were equally razor sharp and dangerous. They retrieved heavy gloves from their bags and returned to the gar. They lifted the fish out of the water and waited for it to calm down. It wiggled and wiggled, and though it didn’t completely stop twisting, it did slow down a tad. They asked me to take hold of an upper section of the net so it would stabilize it and give the gar less rope to squirm in. They told me to mind the fish so that I wouldn’t get cut. Then Jayne and her cohort look small sets of scissors, one holding the fish in the strong gloves, and the other carfully cutting little pieces of net around it. After nearly ten minutes, the fish was free, and we let it splash back into the river. The fish would be fine, but it had had a terrible afternoon. The three of us were relieved that we had gotten the fish out of the net without getting sliced.

We resumed hunting for the radio sturgeon or any of its friends, and the next fish to enter the net was indeed a sturgeon. We all cheered and placed it in the water chest on the boat. The sun was about to go down, and we had looked the whole day. Jayne said, “I think this calls for a beer,” and we all agreed. We returned to the cove, put away the boat, took off our funny yellow outfits, and went to the pick up truck. There we had an ice chest of beer and soda, and I had my bag of chocolate covered graham crackers. We munched and sipped, before deciding to head back to Gainesville.

In the truck on the way, I felt my stomach start to churn and growl. It hurt. Then I felt an acid reflex. Something was trying to get out of my stomach, and I didn’t know whether I should let out a loud eruptive belch or take a knife and cut my stomach out of my body. It hurt, and I started to squirm like the gar, and Jayne turned to me and asked me if I was all right.

“I don’t know. I just have the worst indigestion I’ve ever had in my life. I need to stop and get something.”

Jayne laughed and said sarcastically, “Well, we’ve just been models of nutrition all day long. No wonder your stomach is rebelling. We need to get some real food.”

When we returned to Gainesville, we placed the sturgeon in a holding tank for their research. Jayne was pleased they had found a sturgeon, but she was disappointed that they hadn’t found their first fish. We returned to her home, and Paul had returned from his data collecting in South Florida.

The next morning, we decided we would like to swim with manatees in the Crystal River, not too far south of the Suwanee River mouth on the Gulf of Mexico. Jayne went to her office to get her wet suit, and Paul and I decided to rent our own when we arrived at the river. At the river, we walked into the small bay at the mouth of the Crystal River, and, in our wet suits, we floated into the middle of the cove, snorkeling in semimuddy water and looking for large sea cows. Jayne instructed me that we were not to approach the manatees but that we were to just float around until one rubbed up against us. The water was too murky for me to see how deep it was or to see anything more than a foot underneath me, so I swam in the bay, enjoying the sky and the water, cold though it was. As I had my head out of the water, I felt a fuzzy pillow strike my stomach. It was a manatee, and it came to say hello. Two other manatees did the same with Paul and Jayne, and we all cried out laughs of excitement. I looked down into the water, and I saw whiskers and fins, though the animal was too big for me to see all of it. Still, it continued to rub its back against my stomach, and it seemed very satisfied with the idea of my lightly riding the top of it, though I continued to keep afloat, not pressing to hard on top of it. Jayne, a certified diver, decided to plunge underneath for a closer look. When she came up, she had a face of someone who had just fallen in love.

“I went down to look at the manatee’s face, and it looked straight at me. And then it moved its mouth up and down and made sucking motions. It was so cute. It was so cute.”

We floated and swam with the manatees for an hour. That was the limitation of our permit to be in the bay, though I think we could have swum with them the entire day. We returned to the boat, and a manatee followed us for a few yards, almost as if to say goodbye. I looked down and saw a mangled fin. Jayne saw it too and said, “Hey Paul, look! This manatee has had an encounter with a motor boat. Poor thing! Those boats just suck.”

We returned to Paul and Jayne’s car, a car with a license plate that said, “Save the manatee.” I almost wished I lived in Florida so I could have that license plate myself.

Upon arrival in Gainesville, I needed to start back toward New Mexico. I hugged Jayne and Paul goodbye and started in my car. Soon after my departure, I felt that nagging acid pain in my esophagus again, and I stopped to suck on as many as six Tums. When I arrived in Austin, I called Mary. She said, “So, Eric, how’s your stomach?”

I laughed. “It’s not that great, and you know something, don’t you!”

“You have a parasite.” She smiled. “My friend is so excited because you were precisely the kind of subject he was looking for his experiment.

My that’s reassuring!” I said sarcastically.

Mary laughed and said, “Let’s go to his office tomorrow morning so he can write you a prescription to get rid of it.” We met the next morning, and he gave me a prescription for Flagile, otherwise known as Metronidozole. I took one and I thought I was going to die. The medicine was far worse than any pain I had had with the indigestion. Mary told me to take it with plenty of water, but I didn’t realize that she meant a couple of gallons of water. I had to drink and drink and drink and drink to finally get that upset stomach feeling out of my system. And I did this daily for a week, even on the day I returned to Las Cruces to see my parents. Still, I persisted and finished the seven day regimen.

My mother noticed I was taking the medicine and she asked me, “What’s that for?

You remember I told you about the cabbage with the Buddhist monk in southern Thailand?

Yeah!

Remember I said I would either pay for it then or I would pay for it later?

Yeah!

It’s later.

…

By the first week in May, I had heard from all the universities in Japan I had applied to for work. All universities had been looking for people with PhDs, and I only had a Master’s degree, so all turned my application down. As a result, I decided I should work toward my PhD, and I told Mom I had decided to move back to Austin to continue my study. She was elated.

However, I had thought that at least one out of 20 applications might work out, so I left my car and most of my possessions in storage in Japan. Furthermore, I still had an open ticket back to Tokyo and Bangkok that I could use. I decided to go back to Japan, sell my car and bicycle, send my stuff back, all in preparation for school the upcoming fall. Additionally, I discovered that it would have cheaper for me to return all the way to Bangkok and buy an airline ticket back to the States than to simply buy one in Japan. The difference in price was so big that I found it was actually cheaper for me to spend a full week in Thailand rather than buy that simple ticket from Japan. I called the airline and made my reservations.

The night before I left for Hamamatsu, I looked for my Japanese driver’s license and my registration card. The registration card was the document I carried with me for over two years, asserting that it was legal for me to work as a teacher in Japan. I found the driver’s license, but I couldn’t see the registration card. I didn’t spend too much energy looking for it, though. I knew that if I returned to Japan and then left, they would ask me to give it up, and I kind of wanted to keep it as a souvenir. Therefore, I decided that I would ask the customs official upon arrival to cancel my work visa and give me a simple tourist visa.

When I woke up the morning of my departure, I turned on CNN to see a report of unrest in Bangkok. There seemed to be rumblings of a military coup. I realized that I would have to keep abreast of the news while I was in Japan.

When I arrived at Narita Airport, there was a long line of travelers waiting to get through the airport. I waited in line for a half hour before I was received by a customs official. She said that I had the working visa and asked to see my registration card. I explained that I didn’t have it, that I was coming to the country to collect my things, and that I was leaving the country in nine days, not working at any point during that time. I even showed her my onward ticket to Bangkok. She said that was fine and asked me to go through. I stayed at the desk and asked her to cancel my work visa and replace it with a tourist visa, but she smiled and motioned me through. I stayed again and asked her again, but she grew irritated with me and said “Shoganai,” That’s life! as if to say that it didn’t matter. I looked at her and said, “I think it matters, and again, she bowed her head, made a sweeping motion with her arm leading me through the desk area, and asked me to continue. I said, “I don’t think this is right,” and acquiesced, walking toward the baggage claim area.

Three days later, I read in the English language Yomiuri Shinbun that a British gentleman had been put in jail for not carrying his registration card on his person. I started to worry about my exit out of Japan.

The news from Bangkok was not good. There was in fact a military coup, and a large number of students were killed in a demonstration at the Monument ***

In Hamamatsu, I sold my car and my bicycle, and boxed as many things as I could. Many others I left with friends. Others I packed into my luggage. I took the trains back to Narita and went to the United counter to see how things were going in Bangkok. The official there told me that it was calmer and that I could go. I stood in line in passport control to leave the country. When I arrived to the controlling police officer, he asked me for my registration card. I said I didn’t have it. He looked up at me in tremendous surprise and said he needed that registration card. I explained that the controlling officer a week ago had not given me the appropriate tourist visa that I asked for, and the officer left his desk. I waited no more than a minute before a plump police officer grabbed my hand, pulled me through the security area, and angrily marched me into an office lit with florescent lights and metal chairs. He pushed me into the chair and started yelling at me in Japanese.

“You are breaking the law. We must have your registration card. Because you don’t have your registration card, we are going to put you in the buta bako.” Buta bako literally means “pig box,” but it really means jail.

I’m not sure the police officer even knew that I spoke even one word of Japanese. I was angry, and I had less than 20 minutes to board that plane to Bangkok. I yelled back. “I am not going to the buta bako and you can’t make me go to the buta bako.”

“Why do you think I can’t put you in the buta bako. I’m the police.”

“You’re not putting me in the buta bako because I’m going to Bangkok in 20 minutes.”

“Fine, then I’ll make certain that you are never able to enter this country again.”

“You’re obnoxious.” I bellowed. Then I started speaking Japanese faster and louder than I ever had in my entire life. “ I explained to the other officer that the passport officer last week put the wrong visa in my passport. Look at my passport!” I showed him the date of my last entry into the country. “I asked that woman for a tourist visa because I didn’t have shoganai. So now I have to go to jail because the stupid woman upstairs tells me shoganai? I lived in this country for nearly three years, and I have never been treated like this. This is not the Japan I know. Why should I go to jail because of the mistake of the visa official upstairs. I asked specifically for a tourist visa. I did nothing wrong, I’m going to Bangkok, and I’m not coming back to the Japan to work. I’m returning to the US to go to university.”

The police officer was astonished. He just stared at me. I’m not he expected me to argue back, or even explain myself loudly, forcibly, or passionately. He turned around and went into an adjacent room.

“Where are you going?” I shouted. “Koi!” There are few words as power related in Japanese as koi, a command of anger and power which means “Get over here now!” The police officer ignored me and picked up a typewriter and brought it back to my room and placed it on the table in front of me. It was an old manual typewriter. I could see a plate on the bottom marking it as made in the 1940s. The officer asked me to write a letter stating that I had lost the registration card. This way, they could keep the record of my having the teaching visa on this visit, and then they would have record of the registration card as misplaced in their own file. I agreed and typed a quick letter, noticing that none of the letters from the ink lined up in a straight line. I signed the paper, and the police officer said, “Bangkok e ike!” or Get the hell on to Bangkok!

I ran to the airplane and was the last person on. The plane was a 747, but it was only one-fifth full. When I arrived in Bangkok, I took a taxi to my favorite hotel in the Sukumvit area, and walked the street to find a newspaper. As it was May, it was the hottest month of the year, and it felt it: 104 degrees with high humidity. On the street, I saw broken glass from street lamps that had been rocked and phone booths that had been smashed. On other phone booths, messages were soaped and painted in Thai. There was debris in the streets, and few people were walking. I found an English newspaper, and I found that certain sections of the paper had been whited out. In other words, the spaces the journalists had reserved for the newspaper were maintained, but the actually articles had been taken out. It was the most blatant example of censorship I had ever seen. I walked back to my hotel, and I turned on CNN, the BBC, and NHK satellite TV services. Each was showing the military leader, ***, walking on his knees in the court of King ***. The king had asked him and other military leaders to come to his palace. They addressed him as a religious omnipotence, and bowed before him, never once looking into his eyes. The king addressed them, and asked them to stop the violence. The military leader who had been responsible for calling in the tanks immediately resigned, and Thailand was instantly without a political leader.

The next morning, I bought a newspaper without white out sections, and I went to my favorite travel agent, Mr Dum, to buy my ticket back to the US. To get the best price, I had to leave in a week, so I decided to escape the chaos of Bangkok and go to the resort island of Phi Phi in the south. Mr Dum also said that if things got crazy again, he would make certain that I left the country safely. I took an overnight bus and a boat to Koh Phi Phi and set myself up on a nearly deserted island, one that would otherwise be crowded, for the week. On Koh Phi Phi, I would hike up the hourglass mountain that overlooks the *** Sea. I went snorkeling. I ate pancakes and drank lemonade. I had Thai salad, noodles, and red and green curries. With no one there, Bangkok and the States seemed as if they were on another planet. It was a soothing vacation, and I felt like I was back in the Thailand I had fallen in love with only six months previously.

I found a service with a mobile telephone, and I asked them to try to call my friend Koon Kob. Kob had given me a number of a flower shop where he would be working in the town of Surat Thani. The number worked successfully, and I arranged to meet Koon Kob one more time for a couple of hours. It would mean going out of my way en route to Bangkok to see him, but I thought it would be worth it. I took a boat to the port town of Krabi where I caught a bus to Surat Thani. In Surat Thani, I braved my broken Thai to call the flower shop. Somehow, my Thai was sufficient enough for me to find Koon Kob. He came to the bus station on his motorbike and took me to his flower shop.

He told me had seen in Bangkok the American doughnut chain called “Mister Donut,” so he decided to name his shop “Mister Flower.” (Mister Donut is actually a Japanese company.) He said he arranged flowers for all occasions—weddings, birthdays, funerals, and anything one can imagine. When I arrived at Mister Flower, I discovered that all the flowers he worked with were made of paper. There wasn’t one plant in his shop.

He asked me if I was going to Bangkok, and I told him I was. He asked me if I was going to join any demonstrations, and I said I didn’t think so. The parliament was still in the process of choosing leadership, and student protests had erupted once again. Kob said he wanted to go. “I like demonstrations.

Please be careful.

I know. People died.” Kob smiled.

I bought Kob dinner and then had him drive me to another bus station. There I took an overnight bus back to Bangkok. The ride was uncomfortable, and I longed for a pillow for my head against the window. I pulled out a semi-wet towel that hadn’t quite dried yet from my snorkeling on Koh Phi Phi. It was hot, so the coolness of the dank towel actually felt good, so I fell asleep on it.

I woke up the next morning in a Bangkok bus station with my nose buried deep into the moist towel. When I awoke, I had trouble breathing, and my body was itchy. I got off the bus and took a taxi back to my Sukumvit hotel. I checked up and raced up the stairs to my room where I took off my shirt. I had broken out in a huge rash all over my body, and my hands were swelling up. I was probably allergic to the mold in the towel, and I was having a severe reaction. I checked my guidebook and found that there was a clinic near the king’s palace off of Kao San Road that I could go to 24 hours a day. I took a taxi to the clinic, waited no more than 15 minutes, and talked to a doctor. The doctor’s English was terrific, and he told me I needed a severe antihistimane quickly. He prepared a shot and injected me right away. He told me to sit down for 10 minutes before I left. I paid the small fee and walked to Kao San Road to get a Coke. As I sat in the restaurant, I could see the welts on my right arm dissipate and I gradually found my entire breath. “That was some shot!” I exclaimed to myself, as I felt wonderful. Still, I thought I should take it a bit easy, so I ordered some curry and sat for another hour.

As I sat at the table, another tourist leaned over to me and asked me when I arrived.

“I’ve been here just a week.”

“So you weren’t here a couple of weeks ago?”

“No, I was in Japan, but I already had my ticket to get here.”

“Wow, you missed!”

“Yeah?”

“We were hiding upstairs in our second floor room as the tanks rolled in. We could hear gun fire from just a block away, so we stayed there the entire day. Nobody went downstairs for any reason. Scary, man!”

I took a walk around the Kao San Road area. Vendors had started selling video tapes and magazines with pictures from the cable networks CNN, BBC, and NHK. I bought one of the magazines and quickly put it in my backpack. The magazine sported a cover with pictures of students yelling on the streets, some with bandages and blood dripping from their foreheads.

The sun seemed to be coming to twilight, so I decided to walk to the center of the violence, the Monument of Democracy. Usually, the Monument of Democracy is a large four pillar sculpture that rises above a large traffic circle. This day, it was a makeshift Buddhist shrine, all covered in flowers, streamers, large pictures of students who had died, and insense. I braved crossing the traffic circle and walked up the steps to the Monument, sitting on a set of steps. A young Thai man, dressed in khaki pants and a soft blue button-down shirt walked up to me. I introduced myself, and we sat next to me. I took out my Thai/English dictionary, and for the next hour and a half, we worked word by word through his story. He had been at the demonstration that day.

He told me that he was taking a physics class at the college just around the corner. In the middle of the class, he and his classmates heard singing coming from the Monument to Democracy. They asked the professor if they could go, and the professor declined. They continued the lesson, but the singing continued, so they asked the professor again. The professor actually wanted to go to the demonstration, as well, so they all walked to the monument together. Upon arrival at the monument, the traffic circle was packed with hundreds of singing students, not allowing any traffic to pass. He took me to the point near the monument where he was standing. It was on the north side of the traffic circle. After some time, he looked at the street that feeds the traffic circle from the south, and he saw a series of tanks rolling toward the monument. As the tanks approached, students started to back up toward the west boulevard that leads to the king’s palace and Kao San Road. The tanks turned the corner and rounded the circle to the same boulevard. The students stopped, and the tanks did, as well. With the students looking at the tanks, the tanks dipped their guns, aimed the guns into the crowd and began shooting. Chaos ensued as students ran in any direction to find cover. A band of army personnel were also following the tanks on foot, and they ran around the tanks and started chasing students in the streets with their bayonets. Some students were shot; others were stabbed.

My storyteller told me that a soldier ran up to him, pointing his bayonet at him. My friend put his hands in the Buddhist prayer position and said, “Please don’t kill me.” The soldier told him to lie on the asphalt cooking in the 104 degree weather. My new friend lay down and felt the asphalt burn his unprotected forearms. He even showed me where the burns were healing. He waited for the soldier to shoot him, but the soldier just walked away. The shooting had stopped, and the tank moving had stopped. My friend lifted his head and saw hundreds of students lying in the street. Many were acquiescing to soldier power. Others were injured, and many others had died.

As the sun went down, my new friend asked me to take a picture of him praying for his dead friends. As he stood in front of the temporary shrine, the twilight of the evening sun glistened off the back of his silk shirt as he pressed his hands together and looked toward the center of the monument. He almost lost his life that day. He lost classmates that day. I lit a stick of incense with him, and together we placed it on the shrine.

Insert O-Hanami