Red Dirt

My nine-year-old host brother and I were playfully wrestling in front of the parked sedan, and as he unfairly stomped on my flip-flop-clad foot, I slapped him on the shoulder.  He stuck his tongue out at me as my host parents called to us, and we all clambered into the car, the leather seats sticking to our skin in the midday heat.  I headed for one of the seats in the middle, not liking to be in “the way back”, as we called it.  My host brother and sister sat beside each other in the way back, and I passed them the bag of “khanom”, or Thai snacks like fried bread and fruit.  I remember that during that time of the year, it was still surreal to see the palm trees waving at me as we drove down the dirt road.  Even after three months, I still expected evergreens and corn fields, not towering2 palms and mango trees.

On the small highway, we drove behind a truck that was carrying a huge load of durian, that horribly smelly fruit that, once you’ve gone a bit crazy and tried it more than once, actually doesn’t taste too bad.  The first time my host father walked towards me with the beagle-sized monster and a hatchet in the other hand, I could smell it before he’d cracked open the shell.  I thought I was going to be sick even before it was in my mouth, which really begs the question: why did I try it again?  Even though I liked it now, it still looked offensive, as if it’s telling you that it’s dangerous way before you breathe its putrid scent into your mouth.  The Thai people often eat them in places where they don’t want ‘Farang’, or culturally-ignorant foreigners, to come (I was very proud to finally consider myself more Thai than Farang). The fruits range from the size of a large grapefruit to that of a watermelon, and it has a hard outer shell with inch-long spikes everywhere.  They were piled like Legos in the back of a truck in front of us; and with twine tied around his tiny wrist and attached to a hook in the back of that truck, there was a monkey.  I leaned my head against the glass and smiled at him as we passed the truck on the highway.

When we got closer to Chaiya, the highway began to follow the railroad tracks.  Then we eventually took a slight turn off of the highway and on to a dirt road that wove directly below the raised tracks.  In the tiny village of Chaiya, all the roads were dirt, the same dirt that clothed the ground between the houses.  I was a little drowsy from the forty minute drive, and slightly annoyed by my bright-eyed, talkative host brother, but mostly, I was curious about where we were.  I knew we were going to visit some family member, I believed my host dad’s grandmother, if I had understood correctly.  In Thai, the words for family members are complicated.  There are different words for Aunt, Uncle, Grandfather, and Grandmother, depending on whether they are on the paternal or maternal side, and as far as Aunts and Uncles go, depending on who was the oldest, etc.  So, if my knowledge was correct, we were going to see Kun Yaa, or my father’s maternal grandmother.

The snacks that we’d had to eat when we first got in the car seemed a long time ago, and didn’t seem nearly as delicious now that they had been sitting in my nervous stomach for nearly an hour.  Conscious as ever about my white body (both the color and the shape), I got out of the car once we’d parked and fidgeted with the waist of my pants, the bottom of my shirt.  I pushed my hair behind my ears, cleaned my glasses, looked at my toes in my flip-flops.  They were already covered in a light dusting of the red dirt.

The car door slammed shut, and the car itself looked so incongruous with the houses around us.  All of them were small, were covered in that red-brown dust, and were distinctly shabby-looking.  Hammocks were suspended on some of the porches, along with bunches of fruit.  As we started to walk down a narrow path between two of these small, one-room houses (for we could see the one room through the open front door in most of them),  four children tore past, giggling.  My little brother immediately dashed after them.  My sister hesitated a little longer until the children had turned around. They came skipping back, tugging on her shorts and shirt, smiling and chattering; everyone had met before.  My sister smiled at them, and followed the much younger children to a creek near the path on which we were walking.  She always was the fun older person that younger children gravitated toward.  She could play the clapping games, the skipping games, she could play hide-and-seek better than anyone. 

I stayed walking with my host mother, father, and aunt, feeling slightly torn.  I wanted to go and run and play with the other children, but I didn’t know them.  Being a foreigner made other people my age nervous around me, let alone much younger children. I would have been the awkward person in their games, the one who needs the rules explained four times because she can’t speak Thai as well as a five-year-old.  I wasn’t by any means an adult, but I didn’t know how to integrate myself into the games with the kids, so I stayed behind. 

I watched the kids congregating around the stream. Now, more children had come out of their nearby homes; nearly eight of them were with my brother and sister now.  All of their clothes (excepting those on my host siblings) were stained with play, most of them not fitting well, looking like hand-me-downs or worse.  I watched their eyes, though, as they splashed in the water, jumped from a makeshift bridge made by a log, and joked with one another.  And they didn’t care about the state of their clothes.  I listened to their voices and tried my hardest to understand, did my best to shut up the part of my brain that insisted on thinking in English.  I remember listening so closely that I felt dizzy.  And then I remember coming back to my own mind in frustration, having caught a few words but no more – and realizing that I was several yards behind the rest of my host family, standing on the path in my own daydreams.

I walked quickly to catch up and found that we were already there: there turned out to be another of the one-room houses, two or three steps up to the porch, a laundry line strung from the porch railing to a nearby sapling, and a large hammock.  Kun Yaa was sitting on the worn wooden floor of the porch, leaning against one side of the doorframe.  She was wearing a faded pink sari, wrapped and tied around her legs, and a worn yellow t-shirt.  I followed my host parents as they knelt on the top step of the porch, gently bowing their heads and ‘wai’-ing to Kun Yaa.

There are many different levels of ‘wai’-ing in Thailand – depending on the person to whom you wish to show respect, one presses one’s hands together and lifts them to one’s face – for a friend, the hands stay at the chin, for a teacher the thumbs should be right below one’s nose, and for someone who deserves even more respect, the thumbs meet with the bone underneath the eyebrows. 

Kun Yaa, parent and elder, deserved the ‘thumbs-under-the-nose-wai’.  I glanced quickly at my parents to be sure I was ‘wai’-ing correctly, bowing my head low enough, kneeling properly.  Just learning to bow correctly was a horribly difficult journey.  Not a week before, I had bowed incorrectly to a monk in front of an entire temple full of people. Stupid Farang. 

I managed to not embarrass myself this time.  All of us moved on to the porch, bending over slightly so as to not tower over Kun Yaa; another way of showing respect is to keep the top of one’s head below other people’s, below the heads of the people to whom you need to show respect.  I eventually found myself a spot slightly hidden by the hammock to kneel.  Conversation began between my host family and the few relatives who lived with Kun Yaa.  I settled back against the pole that held up the hammock, shifting my brain into this new mode that I had discovered during my first two months as an exchange student: tuning my ears to listen as closely as I possibly could, yet bringing down the energy around me, adjusting my body language so that no one would actually talk to me.

            But for the first half hour of conversation that took place, I couldn’t take my eyes off of Kun Yaa, and instead of listening, I observed. I saw the laugh lines that turned into wrinkles across her whole face, her wispy white hair, and the harsh curve of her back that I soon realized ensured that she would never move from the position she was now in.  Her vertebrae were visible beneath her faded t-shirt, her shoulders permanently hunched.  Her legs were straight and immobile;  her knees were by far the widest part of her legs.  At one point, I saw her gesture to the trees next to the house in the course of the conversation, and I saw her hands.

            Her hands were like old branches;  the knuckles looked like knots with the dark skin stretched tight over the bones.  She could no longer move her fingers separately, and I watched as my aunt, Kun Yaa’s granddaughter, peeled pieces of fruit and delicately put them into Kun Yaa’s mouth.  She chewed them without teeth and her eyes smiled. 

            The conversation continued for hours.  My host brother and sister came over and greeted their great-grandmother, said the kind things children always say to their grandparents, answered the questions grandparents always ask, and eventually went away to join their playmates in the creek once more. I heard the conversation turn to me and my stay with the family, where I was from, how long I would be there, how I liked school – I managed to answer a few questions without too much trouble.  However, there was another uncle who lived with Kun Yaa who seemed fascinated by me and made it his mission that afternoon for about a half hour to sit next to me and try to communicate.  This might have gone well if he had spoken more than the Southern Thai dialect, and if I had spoken more than the standard Thai.  As it was, we needed my host father to translate for both of us sometimes. But in general, this new uncle was kind, and we had the kind of fun you can only have when you are two people who couldn’t come from two more different places and yet happen to meet and want to talk. I got very good at talking with my hands that day.  If you only know nouns and verbs, hands can cover all the prepositions and tenses that you need.

            Eventually, that uncle went to talk with my host brother and sister, and after our mini-adventure ended, my host aunt and host mother helped to bathe Kun Yaa in the shade of the sapling next to the porch. I remember seeing them carefully ease her up and carry her weight on their shoulders, gently pouring bowls of water over her old body.  Her brown skin was wrinkled everywhere, the regular creases of her body hidden by the multitude of ones that come with age.  The bowls of water tipped and the water ran down the wrinkles like tiny waterfalls.  My host aunt gently held Kun Yaa’s hair back and out of the water, crouching slightly to make sure that her head was still below her elder’s.  My host mom, “bak rai may jai dee” (harsh mouth but good heart), as the people said, was carrying almost all of Kun Yaa’s weight since the old woman could no longer stand.  They spoke softly too each other as they rinsed her naked body in the dimming light of the afternoon.

When they were done, they helped each other gently pull a clean t-shirt over her head and re-tie the sari around her waist.  It was something that could have been embarrassing for Kun Yaa, and certainly in the eyes of my culture, it would have been.  But for them?  They made it comfortable and perfectly dignified. They joked, they smiled, the conversation continued with the people on the porch during their temporary absence, ranging from discussion of the flood that had made the price of rice go up, and how my siblings were doing in school.  But I was thinking about the grandparents and great grandparents in the country that I come from, in sterile nursing homes surrounded by strangers. They might still be able to walk and probably would never have come to this level of physical immobility, but – I compared the two. I thought about which way I would rather spend the end of my life.

            Before we left, Kun Yaa wanted to say goodbye to me.  I knelt in front of her, smiled, did my best to understand what she whispered, and I told her that I was very happy to have met her, to have the opportunity to stay with this lovely family.  And she smiled.

            Two hours later, all of us were back at our house.  My host brother and I argued about him clearing his dishes from the table, I helped to mop and do other chores, and we all reluctantly finished our homework.  Before I went to bed, I thought again about Kun Yaa.  I wrote in my journal about how she had softly spoken to me, about how kind she was to me on the one and only day we had ever met.

            Eight months later, I was holding my brother’s hand and being hugged by my host mom, trying not to cause too much of a scene at the train station. I felt like a movie star as I boarded the train; more than ten people had come to see me off, from family to friends, and even teachers.  But movie stars’ noses don’t turn bright red when they cry, and their voices don’t crack when they say goodbye.

            Three years after that, I was sitting at my desk in my dorm room, trying to brush all the eraser shavings from my homework paper into the garbage bin.  My laptop was whirring in front of me, playing some YouTube video as my cup of tea stood, forgotten and cold, on a coaster.  Multitasking like always, I went to my old email account.  There, I had a message from my host dad.

            I smiled, pulled my chair closer to the desk.  I leaned on my elbow, bringing my face closer to the screen.  I read about my host brother’s endeavors, my host sister’s schoolwork, and the vacations that the family had planned. My head was full of memories as I read.  As the email drew to a close, I read, “I’m sorry I did not reply sooner – it was because of my grandmother’s sickness.  I hope you remember her.”

            She died on November 10, 2010.  The lady must have been well over ninety when she died. Until the very end, no doctors took care of her; instead, her grandsons and granddaughters  took turns staying with her and caring for her. 

            Kun Yaa was the single most striking difference between the culture that I grew up in and the culture that I got to visit.  She was also simply a remarkably kind woman who knew me for three hours out of her ninety-something years and told me I was beautiful.

            I did remember her.  I shut my laptop after reading the email, forgetting about the homework I had had planned.  Instead, I went over to my bed, pulled out the middle drawer, the drawer I’ve dedicated to my Thailand things.  I took out my journal, the journal that I only ever kept during my exchange year.  I opened it and turned the thin pages until I came to the highway, the train tracks, the red dirt, and Kun Yaa.