I have this vague memory from growing up as a child in England that royalty came to town one day. I don't think it was even the Queen; perhaps it was Princess Anne? I was probably nine or ten. In any case, it was a big deal for us schoolkids. Instead of being in school, we got to line the streets as the motorcade went by. In return, as befitted the loyal subjects we were, we were graced with a royal wave.

Last week I did it all again, when the princess came to Ban Nem Kem.

My nature is to be cynical about all this; I have no time for royalty and all its trappings; I would not cross the street to meet the queen of my country. But it is not my place to judge another culture: this was a big deal. Remember that Ban Nam Kem has certainly seen its share of famous people. It is a poster town for the tsunami, and it seems as if every visiting dignitary and celebrity makes a stop there. Clinton and Bush senior came to Ban Nam Kem, as did Bethany Hamilton and Petra Nemcova and goodness knows who else. Foreign celebrities are one thing, though; Thai royalty is quite another. The villagers turned out in force, and indeed Sanam made a point of contacting me to make sure that I took Neung along.

(Can I mention in passing that I had to check many Petra Nemcova sites before finding one that was worksafe? I hope you appreciate, dear reader, whoever you are, the efforts that I go to on your behalf.)

The reason for the visit was the official opening of the rebuilt Ban Nam Kem school. This school abuts the camp where Neung used to live, so we know it well. It was where Neung was in kindergarten when we first came back to look for her, before she moved to Baan Bang Muang school up the road.

When we arrive, the rebuilt school is festooned with gold and lavender banners (lavender is the princess's official color), and the red carpet is flanked with orchids. The local dignitaries sit on satin-covered chairs surrounding a golden throne in the center of a new hall.

I sit with the villagers on plastic chairs set in the mud.

We wait.

The motorcade arrives in a wail of sirens, and the band begins to play. The princess emerges from her car, protected from the sun by a large purple parasol borne by a retainer in traditional Thai costume. The welcoming committee surrounds her as she walks down the freshly swept carpet, and the crowd of photographers all but block her from view as she sweeps past. Not even a wave this time, although she captures my affections somewhat by being one of the most simply dressed people present (excluding those of us down in the mud, of course).

Much money has been donated to the Ban Nam Kem school by Carrefour and other companies, and so there are the appropriate speeches from the corporate representatives. One speech is in French, so I can understand it. It lists large sums of money. Then the princess departs to tour the school, and to make her way, interminably slowly, through an exhibit about the tsunami's effect on Ban Nam Kem. And still the crowd sits, for the pleasure or honor of glimpsing her in occasional moments.

I mean no disrespect by any of this. The King and the royal family are respected, even revered, by most Thais, and they have been concerned and generous in their response to the tsunami. The Thai attitude to royalty, as best as I can gauge it, is reminiscent of that of my parents' or perhaps my grandparents' generation in Britain. It seems odd and old-fashioned to me, but I suppose everyone has their heroes.

"Using the complex system of royal pronouns correctly is a daunting prospect even for the vast majority of educated Thais. At the simplest level, one should refer to oneself as khaaphraphutthacaw ('Your Majesty's servant') when addressing the King or other high-ranking members of royalty, and use taayfaalaoorngthuliiphrabaat as a second person pronoun to the King and taayfaalaoorngphrabaat to other high-ranking members of royalty; both terms can be translated as 'dust under sole of royal foot'."*

I don't wish to downplay the corporate social responsibility efforts of the multinationals either. Carrefour has indeed donated a lot, and so I am almost willing to forgive them for their refusal to offer any kind of discount when we were bulk buying toys for distribution after the tsunami. Almost, but not quite. For not only did they give no discount; they also sold us defective merchandise: footballs that wouldn't inflate. Come to think of it, I'm not willing to forgive them at all. But I digress.

As we glimpse and wait I find myself thinking, as I so often do, about the two worlds I now inhabit. The truth is that I am much more used to being among the besuited crowd on the satin chairs. Not that I move in the rarefied circles of royalty, but I often must mix with senior executives of large corporations. That's what happens when your spouse is a professor in a business school. Yet here I find them alien, and I am more comfortable on the periphery. I don't belong with the suits in the hall, dropping in and flying out.

I don't mean to pretend to be what I am not. I grew up in a middle-class home in a prosperous country; I have never been poor. I do not know what it is like for the villagers of Ban Nam Kem, first to have their lives so terribly ripped apart, and then to have to suffer the indignity of handouts and the constant trail of tsunami tourists. I intend neither to patronize nor to romanticize these people who tolerate and even welcome me, despite the fact that I am apart from them in so many ways. And I drop in and fly out myself, I know. No doubt it won't be too long before I am back at some cocktail party in Singapore making small talk with business executives.

Sanam appears and sits in an empty chair nearby, and Neung runs from my lap to hers. Then Neung signals to me to bring my chair over next to Sanam's. We briefly catch sight of the princess again.

In Ban Nam Kem, this is where my family sits, and this is where I belong.

 

*David Smyth, Thai: An Essential Grammar, Routledge 2002, p. 46.

2/11/2005

Good News

This morning the Thai courts awarded guardianship of Neung to Sanam. Our rational selves knew that there was no reason why this wouldn't happen, but that hasn't stopped us from being very stressed about this a long time. This was also the part of the process that was most out of our control.

The court order also stripped Neung's biological father of all rights.

The next stages are as follows. First, we wait another week for Sanam to receive the official documentation from the court. Then I take Sanam and Neung to get passports. Then Sanam signs an affidavit empowering us to take care of Neung in Singapore. Then -- finally -- we can take her home to Singapore. With luck, we are only talking about two more weeks.

11/11/2005

Wildlife

If you ignore the climate, it is easy to forget that Singapore is in the tropics. It is a rich and modern city, and although it is certainly possible to get away from the concrete, most of the time we just live the urban life. As far as exotic fauna go, I've seen a large monitor lizard there, and I have seen monkeys, and that's about it. In the city, you see precious little sign even of insect life, in large part because buildings are fumigated on a regular basis; I honestly do not think I have ever seen a single insect of any kind inside our apartment.

Even here in Thailand, where the rainforest meets the coast, we live in hotels set in manicured gardens that keep us insulated from the insect and animal kingdoms. Jill once got a spider bite that swelled up alarmingly and required antiobiotics, and there are lots of mosquitos, but that is about it.

All of which I report just to explain why I was rather taken aback to meet a scorpion in the bathroom this morning.

12/11/2005

Mmmmm... Doughnuts

Two nights ago I was sitting working, a couple of hours after Neung had gone to sleep, when I heard a noise behind me. I turned around and she was standing there, looking infinitely sad, as if she was about to burst into terrible tears. She was barely awake, if at all.

I know that dealing with bad dreams is standard parenting duty, but this did not seem like a run-of-the-mill nightmare. She wasn't scared; she was evidently dreaming of something really, really, saddening. I was able to hug and calm her: within a few minutes whatever awful misery had invaded her subconscious went away and she went back to sleeping peacefully. I was left there remembering that abjection, my imagination filling with all the things that I thought might have been filling hers. She had told us the other day that she was sad when her house was washed away by the tsunami; was she dreaming about that? Was she dreaming of her mother? Of course, I can't know, and so I imagine the worst. For all I know, she was just dreaming that she had dropped a doughnut she was eating, or something.

15/11/2005

Dialogue

— Norng Neung, tonight we are going to Ban Nam Kem for Loy Krathong. We'll float the little boats on the water.

— Ban Nam Kem no water.

— What do you mean, 'no water'? Ban Nam Kem. Ban Nam Kem, What does 'Nam' mean? It means 'water'! There's lots of water at Ban Nam Kem!

— The water coming. Shoo! Run!

— What?

— Water coming. Tsunami! Shoo!

— Is that what Por [Panya] said? He told you to run? When the tsunami came?

— Yes.

— And then the water came?

— Yes.

— And you and Maeh [Sanam] had to run?

— Yes.

— Were you on Maeh's motorbike?

— No.

— Were you frightened? Klua maak mai, ca?

— Yes. Papa frightened too?

— Papa would have been frightened, yes. It must have been very scary.

— And Mama?

— Yes, Mama would have been frightened too. But now they have boats out there in the sea that look for tsunamis, so they know if there is a tsunami coming. So we don't need to be frightened any more.

— And Neung's house gone.

— Yes. Were you sad that your house was gone?

— Yes. And Neung's kittycat too.

— You had a kittycat before the tsunami?

— Yes.

— And the kittycat had to swim away?

— Yes.

16/11/2005

At The Zoo

It must seem quite magical to Neung, the way that we just produce things for her -- new clothes, books, toys, and so on. We are trying to do this without encouraging too much acquisitiveness on her part, but it isn't easy. Based on the evidence of our trip to Phuket Zoo a couple of weeks ago, we are not succeeding.

"Neung like camel. Neung no have camel. Neung want. Peeeeeease!"

21/11/2005

Loy Krathong

Hotels like festivals. They are an excuse to stage special events and to provide guests with a sense that they are experiencing local culture. Whether this exposure is authentic is of course unclear. Sometimes these must be just shows for the tourists, nothing more, nothing less, with any counterpart in everyday life long vanished. I have no idea whether the elaborate Thai dances that I have seen still have any existence outside of tourist venues, for example. (And if not, then are such shows now just a sham, or does this mean that places that cater to tourists have also become repositories of cultural heritage? Discuss.)

In any case, the Thai festival of Loy Krathong is alive and well. Neung and I celebrated it twice.

Loy Krathong is held on the night of the full moon of the twelfth lunar month. A brief description can be found here. The krathong is a small vessel typically made of banana leaves. It is decorated with flowers, incense, and a candle, and people also sometimes add a few coins, a lock of hair, or a nail clipping. They light the candles and the incense, say a prayer or make a wish, and then float the krathong on water -- a river, or a canal, or the ocean, or in the case of the hotel, the swimming pool.

At the hotel we also lit floating hot air balloons, and watched them drift into the sky. First they are floating lanterns, then bright lights burning high above, then a constellation of yellow stars; and then they vanish.

Then, as the hotel guests also started to drift away, Neung and I got into the car and drove to Ban Nam Kem. Sanam and Panya had made a krathong for each of us, and we took them down to the pier. There is no particular time at which Loy Krathong is celebrated. When we arrived it was after 11pm, but still there were perhaps twenty people there. We lit the incense (it was too windy to even try to light the candles) and each placed a krathong on the ocean. For perhaps five or ten minutes they bobbed near to the pier, caught in the local eddies and currents, but then finally Panya's broke free, and started heading for open water. A few minutes later, the other three krathong also left the land.

The floating of the krathong is in part an act of worship of the Goddess of the water, and an attempt to dispel bad luck. I can only imagine the thoughts of Sanam, Panya, and others in Ban Nam Kem as they remembered those who floated krathong for the last time on the 25th of November 2004.

21/11/2005

Last Day of School?

Sanam received the official court document a couple of days ago -- only a few days later than promised. Jill arrives back in Thailand tomorrow, having spent a crazy week and a half teaching in Singapore and France. Sanam, Jill, Neung, and I fly to Bangkok on Sunday, and go to the passport office and the Singapore embassy on Monday. We are not quite sure how long it will take to get the passport -- some people have said you can do it in a day; others have said a few days. Jill flies back to Singapore on Tuesday, and I will come back here with Neung. Middle of next week, maybe, just maybe, Neung and I go to Singapore.

So maybe, just maybe, this was Neung's last day of school in Thailand.

25/11/2005

Positive Discount Rates

— Neung, you can choose: you can watch this cartoon now, or you can watch a DVD tonight, OK?

— OK

— So you want to watch the cartoon now?

— Yes

— And you understand that means no DVD tonight?

— Yes

Three hours later, out of the blue

— Papa, I want DVD tonight, and no DVD tomorrow.

26/11/2005

In Bangkok

Sanam and Neung applied for their passports yesterday, and will receive them tomorrow. Sanam has decided that she wants to accompany Neung to Singapore, which is of course fine by us. Unfortunately, she also wants to be accompanied by someone else whom she trusts and who can interpret a bit -- either Jacky, the family friend from Phuket, or Neung's aunt Jiraporn. Jacky cannot travel until next week; Jiraporn might be able to travel this week, although this depends upon her being able to retrieve her passport, which is currently being processed for a visa.

On one level, this is very frustrating for us (and I include Neung, here). We have put our lives more or less on hold for the last five months, and just when it looks like we are within a day or two of bringing Neung to Singapore, we find that we are still in limbo. Sanam was also very wary about the document that we needed her to sign for our Singapore guardianship and the document giving us permission to travel with Neung -- mistrustful of translations, and translators, and so on. We know that these documents do not take away Sanam's rights in any way, and it is also difficult for us to imagine anything nefarious that a translator could do without our being complicit, so it is hard for us not to take this mistrust personally.

But then we try to step back and look at it from their side. They are about to send a five-year old child, a child that they love, to live with foreigners in a foreign country. They are being cautioned on all sides -- they have told us this -- that they should not do this. People are probably telling them that terrible things could happen, and they are scared. They also have a mistrust of authority, I think, and are uncomfortable with lawyers and legal documents. I think they do trust us, but they are scared anyway. We know that we are doing this out of goodwill and love, but they cannot know that for sure -- not with the kind of certainty you need when doing something so momentous and irrevocable.

Today, Sanam has taken Neung out in Bangkok. I delicately asked if they wanted me to join them, but I think that Sanam wants some time with Neung on her own, to take her shopping and to the zoo and I don't know where else. I'm not unhappy about this: it is exactly what we want Sanam to able to do. It is what a grandmother should be doing with her granddaughter, and in Ban Nam Kem she is always too busy, I think, to spend this kind of time with Neung.

I probably should be out taking advantage of the city myself, but I am still desperately trying to catch up on my work. Not that I am finding it particularly easy to get work done. The last three or four weeks in particular have been very stressful: I am both struggling to find the free time in which to work, and struggling to stay focused when I do have the time. It doesn't help that I have been a single parent for much of that time, either. And although I have enjoyed Bangkok on my previous visits, this time it seems oppressive to me.

Tomorrow, Sanam, Neung and I pick up the passports and then fly back to Phuket. By then we should have a better idea whether we will be bringing her to Singapore this week or next. Frustrating though this is, the beginning really is in sight.

29/11/2005

Page One

The Minister of Foreign Affairs

of Thailand hereby requests all whom

it may concern to permit the citizen / national

of the Kingdom of Thailand

named herein to pass freely without delay

or hindrance and to give all lawful

aid and protection.

30/11/2005