Thai Girl (30 page)

Fon supervised the cleaning up, collecting the dirty dishes, taking water from a waist-high clay pot and washing them in a bowl and tipping the scraps through the floor for the chickens, the last in the pecking order. As she worked, two of the monks sauntered across and chatted to her. Ben guessed they were asking questions about her
farang
friend and wondered how she explained him away. Then the women collected up their bowls and slowly began to return to their homes. Ben followed Fon and her mother back across the road to the house, already beginning to feel a little more comfortable with rural Thailand.

When they got back from the temple, Fon led Ben out of the house past the buffaloes and the rice barn, through the mango and jackfruit trees to where a group of women were sitting on mats near some low wooden huts. This gathering, Fon explained, was to celebrate the birth two weeks earlier of a little girl. The teenage mother was cradling a tiny baby with a pale oval face and a head of thick black hair. Fon and Ben's arrival caused quite a stir and she invited them to come and join her. Dressed in sarong and tee shirt, her hair tied back with a red ribbon, she smiled happily at the honour being done to her baby as the visitors sat down.

Ben found a corner of the mat to sit on and slowly took in the surroundings; the low wooden houses, the banana trees, piles of sticks and firewood, washing out on lines, an old motorbike, the dry season dustiness and all the clutter and mess of rural Asia.

With much joking and laughter, one of the older women then tied a twenty baht note to his wrist with pieces of string. Fon explained as best she could that the money was for the child and that he must now keep the string tied to his wrist for good luck.

As they sat and talked, Ben noticed that the local males sat apart from the women, the boys playing and tumbling, the teens and older men drinking beer together on the steps of one of the huts. A skinny youth who was the baby's father came across to greet them and then returned to his friends. One old man was rolling around making incoherent noises and Ben asked Fon if he was a mental defective. But no, he was just blind drunk, halfway through the morning of a long hot day.

Ben was curious about some of the characters around them and asked her about a wizened old woman cradling a tiny girl on her lap.

‘She grandmama,' said Fon. ‘Her daughter have baby, but papa have new lady. She not see daughter long time, not know where she is. And daughter not send money … big, big problem.'

When Ben slipped the child a fifty baht note, she disarmingly brought her pudgy little hands together under her chin in a traditional
wai
of thanks.

Fon was now making a fuss of another old crone who looked different to the others, a touch more exotic, her dark skin pulled tight over prominent cheek bones. Her lips were bright red from chewing betel nut and a torrent of curly black hair flowed from beneath a woolly blue hat. She was full of life and fun.

‘She come from Cambodia long time ago,' Fon explained. ‘Have too much fighting, too many people die. Before, she have husbands, but they die too, all die.'

‘How many husbands?'

‘Three … and she have children, but not know where they are. War finish, Pol Pot dead already, but Cambodia still dangerous. Step on bomb, you die. If you lucky, you lose leg.'

There was much boisterous talking and laughter with Fon the centre of attention, and there were many glances at Ben. He imagined the inevitable questions to Fon about life on the island, about the significance of the tall
farang
and the dream of marrying out of rural poverty.

After one loud outburst, Fon told Ben what the old woman from Cambodia had just said.

‘She say
most farang
are fat with big bellies and always smell bad. But this one doesn't smell at all!'

‘Thanks a million, Fon.'

‘Yes, but maybe she not come close enough!'

Early that afternoon, Fon and Ben joined a tractor load of labourers going out to harvest the rice. They climbed onto the wooden trailer and sat down on the floor with the other workers. The tractor was just a small engine mounted on a single axle with large knobbly tyres, handle bars for steering and a hitch attached to the trailer. They puttered off across the road and down a track through the houses and orchards, the trailer crashing heavily into the potholes, and soon reached the rice fields.

Stretching to the horizon, the landscape of small fields, each separated by low earth banks, was relieved only by patches of woodland, bamboo and fruit trees. Here and there stood a substantial tree, a survivor from the jungle which had covered the area not so long ago. The tracks were well built, sometimes following ditches and concrete-lined irrigation channels flowing with crystal-clear water. Ben was impressed that this infrastructure for the control of water to the paddy fields, essential for the production of rice in a region of low rainfall, was so elaborate. Now at the beginning of the dry season the fields had been drained and the rice was brown and ripe and ready for harvesting.

After several spine-jarring minutes the tractor stopped and they got down and joined some farm workers resting in the shade a few hundred yards away. On a rise in the ground under the mango and cashew trees stood a wooden shelter with a corrugated iron roof. A dozen or so farmers, both men and women, had stopped work in the midday heat and were now about to eat. Rice straw had been spread out under the trees to sit on and as Fon and Ben arrived the food was just ready; sticky rice, meat that was sizzling on a barbecue and raw beef dipped in seasonings. Ben decided to risk the raw meat which was succulent and tender, eaten with newly sprouted leaves from a nearby cashew tree.

The workers ranged from women in their late sixties down to a handful of little boys. Ben noticed one young girl who was obviously pregnant, her bare feet dry and callused from a short lifetime of work in the fields. He asked Fon about her.

‘She seventeen. Boyfriend go work Bangkok.'

‘Tough to have a baby and then be apart,' he said. ‘When'll he come back?'

‘Don't know. Maybe he like Bangkok … maybe he not come back.'

When they had finished eating, the workers began putting on short rubber boots, straw hats with wide brims and a face cloth wrapped around the head and neck to keep out the dust. Ben was determined to join in the work and asked Fon for a sickle. The Thai rice farmers swathed in clothes and the tall
farang
in floppy shorts and tee shirt then spread themselves across the end of a tiny field and advanced shoulder to shoulder into the standing rice, leaning forward and cutting the waist-high rice stalks. Ben's neighbour showed him how to grasp a bunch of stalks with the left hand and then cut through it by pulling the sickle back towards the body. He felt incompetent at first but after half an hour was beginning to get the hang of it.

He wondered how much the owner of the field paid the workers for their labour and jokingly asked Fon what he would be paid for his hour's work. She told him that when she was a child, everyone used to work together to bring in the rice and that cash did not usually change hands. But the old ways were breaking down and they now paid a hundred and twenty baht for a full day's work. Because of this there were times, she said, when the price of rice was so low that farmers could not afford the cost of bringing it in and so had to leave it unharvested.

It crossed Ben's mind that a day's wage for a rice farmer would hardly buy a pint of beer in his local pub back home. He knew that rice farming in Asia was still labour-intensive but he had not realised it was in such crisis. As he cut at the rice a handful at a time, he began to understand the human cost of a lifetime of back-breaking labour in the heat of the rice fields. It seemed to him a tragedy for these people that as the price of rice was falling, their unremitting physical work offered them so little reward; they were trapped in an old way of life that was in decline. On the other hand it struck him that if basic living standards could be maintained and changing aspirations did not seduce them away to the cities, a village like this could offer many compensations. A life on the land free of urban pressures and surrounded by family and friends strongly appealed to his romantic side.

But he could see many signs of instability and change. The story of how Fon had been sent away to work in Bangkok was just one example. Yet she had done well and the money she now sent back to her mother was helping to sustain a rural community no longer able to survive on its own. But this was hardly a satisfactory solution and he could not begin to guess what the future held for villages like this one.

His back was beginning to ache when his reverie in the rice fields was broken by Fon calling loudly to him. The tractor was about to run back to the road and they would have to go if they did not want to face a long walk home in the heat of the day. Bumping along the track, he longed for a shower and a cold drink and dreamed of the air-conditioned luxury of the Regal in Bangkok.

As they arrived home, an elderly neighbour from the next house was just beginning the long task of threshing his rice crop by hand. Ben watched as the old man pounded the bunches of rice stalks against a board, the grains falling off and collecting in what looked like blue mosquito netting. Gripping the bunch of rice stalks with two sticks joined together by a short length of rope, he beat them again and again to dislodge all the grains. His wife then winnowed the rice by pouring it into a basket from above her head while their daughter fanned hard with hand-held fans. From where he was now sitting in the house, Ben could see the dust and straw mixed in with the rice being blown away on the breeze. Finally the women spread a small quantity of rice on round bamboo trays and repeatedly tossed it in the air, teasing out the remaining stones and bits of stalk.

After some time the old farmer seemed to tire of his labour and wandered into the house where Ben and Fon were in front of the television lazily watching the heavyweight fight between Lennox Lewis and Hashim Rahman in Las Vegas. The old man sat down on the floor, leaned against the wall, his head in his hands and gazed impassively at the screen. He was just in time to see Lewis get his revenge, knocking out Rahman with a single blow to the jaw. As the camera lovingly replayed the final punch in slow-motion and Rahman again crashed to the canvas, he clicked his tongue, slowly got up and went back to his work without a word.

‘God, if only he could see Las Vegas,' said Ben.

‘Las Vegas good?' asked Fon. ‘He like?'

‘Well, it's kind of different! People are better paid for a start … and for getting knocked out, that boxer's just netted more than a rice farmer earns in a lifetime.'

‘Good life better than money,' said Fon quietly.

‘True, but today's taught me a bit about being poor, Fon. Rice farming's so tough.'

‘Yes Ben, but today not so bad … cutting rice easy.'

‘So what's the hard part then?' asked Ben.

‘First we have to plough … big big job, too hard. Then planting … standing in the water bending down, pushing every plant into the mud by hand, one, one, one, in rows. Your back break, blood come out fingers … pain everywhere. We mend the walls to keep water in the fields, and kill the weeds and bugs. Then cut the rice, carry home, beat and clean it in machine or do like old man today. Dry the rice, go rice mill, then take rice to sell.'

‘It's so labour intensive … just so much work.'

‘Yes, rice farming too hard … so farmer eat
yaa bah,
amphetamine. This work terrible, Ben, it kill you. Now have machines like rice mill, but have to pay, pay, pay … make small money.'

‘What's a rice mill like then?' he casually asked her.

‘Rice mill? You want look?'

Fon jumped up, grabbed him by the hand and dragged him out of the door. On the other side of the road was a tin-roofed building emitting a steady throbbing sound and a cloud of black smoke from a tall exhaust pipe. She took him inside and showed him a bizarre wooden structure with ladders and walkways connected by a series of drive-belts to a watercooled engine which was thumping away loudly in the background. Brown rice in a vat at the top of the machine was flowing slowly downwards in an elaborate process of shaking and polishing that Ben could not begin to fathom out. The contraption was producing a shower of husks at the back of the shed and a precious trickle of white grains which slowly filled a sack at its base.

‘Old time, the women do rice by hand in a wooden bowl,' said Fon. ‘One hour, three kilos maybe. Now rice mill very quick but expensive.'

‘And do they still thresh the rice by hand like your neighbour was doing just now?'

‘No, old man like to do it that way. Now have big blue machine come on tractor … but have to pay.'

Ben was beginning to wonder whether with all these new costs, rice production could still be profitable.

‘So after all this work, how much do they get for the rice?' he asked.