Along China, the plane rocked until she feared crashing. Shackled in her seat, she jerked, unable to speak to anyone. Couples snuggled. A baby whimpered. Passengers chattered in many tongues during the long flight. The woman ahead of her loosened her seat belt and bent around to address a man across the aisle from Nan and behind her.
His profile—evened in thirds, forehead, nose, and mouth-chin—had entered their plane at Taipei. He was reading his magazine page by page. Yet in one grand dive of the plane, their eyes almost bumped. His face, stoic, turned back to Fortune to ignore her and the turbulence. Abruptly, he pointed to a photo. “You.”
After this sit-in months ago, she, out looking at war zones, said, “Maybe not, you don’t see what you look like. I don’t. Maybe you in a mirror remember.”
“Your likeness.” The Macau-American woman ahead agreed. The tipsy plane distracted her from Nan and back to her little daughter.
“Onward to the smugglers’ world capital Hong Kong and to the pandas’ Beijing,” he said. With the plane’s downdraft, he grinned. A Washington zoo trustee, he squeezed her hand. Red-brown hair raveled around his ears and square forehead. “Come with me to Beijing.” You couldn’t get easily into China in those days. He’d take her there on another plane.
Again, the plane zoomed down, outflanking the wind. Nan grabbed a barf sack and wished for her father, Will, or uncle. “I’ll let you know.” She knew where she wanted to go.
He suggested meeting up in Bangkok.
The flight calm, passengers again chattered. Next to her, an American pilot, round-faced, said, “Avoid cities all Chinese. Meet real Thais. Wade out to the people of the paddies.”
Later on, stretching along the aisle for the toilet and readying to leave for their Land of Smiles, students urged her to mingle in Bangkok or Chieng Mai with real Indo-Chinese.
As the plane swooped, they groped seat backs to their places. The young Macau woman began wiggling her fore and index fingers over her high chair back and vouched for Guanyin, Goddess of Mercy, against the turmoil.
Go upon landing to inner Thai gardens, students recommended, while the plane coasted. Along the klongs, the canals, between the avenues, go onto the rungs. Alleys have alcoves with all wares. Pass between stalls and among kiosks. Taste delicacies, tidbits spiked with leek or sweets. Drape jasmine garlands over sarongs. Go into caves for silks and thongs for change from outer to inner rooms. Move on through to temples in spired gold. Surrender unto serenity.
•
Yet Bangkok stretched out like DC. As the passengers readied to disembark, slipping their arms through backpacks, like donning parachutes to unleash. Pull the strings to go with one streamer to paradise.
On the ground, Bangkok looked parched; the other, DC, bleached. In Krung Shep, native for Bangkok, city of angels, neither Los Angeles nor Washington, honking exhaust harangued from one landmark to the next. After the monsoon, the city dried up. Its grit and dust in khaki nettled her. However, lapped by paddies from the Central Plain, Bangkok stoked up like a desert within an oasis.
Upon arrival at any capital, Nan poked along streets to seek what she needed and see how people reacted. In Tokyo, some Japanese had nodded or bowed slightly and interrupted their scurrying to gesture and point out the way forth. So hopes for the same thronged toward Bangkok.
Stilled by the heat, she little bothered whether the city smiled upon her. From airport to railroad, she and two others, by chance from the plane, crossed avenues and canals for their hotel. Autos clogged the streets and her lungs, exhausting her.
Finally, they slunk toward the bin of a hotel, the cheapest nearest the center. At first hostel thought meant for youth, they checked into a huge room with rows of cots, scaled like a gym armory.
Her air mattress blown up, she crawled inside her parachute sheet’s body-sized pocket. Inside she pulled off her flowery dress and on pale green cotton nightgown, net-like for air. But in the night heat, the silk parachute stuck to her body. Why didn’t she escape with the trustee? Her nightgown twisted as she tried snuggling within her sheet pocket to stay on her air mattress and off the hostel one, with its dried goo of bought sex.
Against night light and later dawn through the window, couples’ coupling hazed, and low moans were heard. It was like the cheap IG hostel in Hong Kong, where signs on doors warned, no whores here. Where was she? Sleep no more.
•
Before the two students from the plane woke up, she slipped outside and squinted at khaki figures milling around. A war was going on somewhere.
Maybe no one would catch on to her black eyes and thick dark hair, Irish, Hungarian. Some taking her for Asian might leave her alone as invisible.
A laughing time ago, a boyfriend had removed his glasses to demonstrate that half-Hungarian eyes, his, ancestry racing across the Asian steppe infinity. Recently too, in Japan, some men, if down and out and untuned, poor or better off, bowed to her.
Recently, she and her fellow backpacker Mae had been strolling within high bonsais of unequaled beauty, in a garden between Tokyo and Hiroshima. Koreans, it turned out, rather than Japanese, pursued them. These men wished for American women to pose for small payback for all the half-and-half wartime babies. After snapping their cameras, they had bowed in unison.
•
Later, she fled to another Bangkok hostel, recommended from the guidebook on the cheap. Lizards tched-tched overhead. In America, boys scared little girls with them. In Thailand, they were stirring her under her netting and stupefying her with more fatigue. What if they lost their miniscule suction grips on the ceiling?
One roommate here, half-Chinese, half-Indian, was shimmering within her waves of black hair above her deep rose sari. Before leaving for the night, she told Nan a tale.
Once, taking her tea, her legs had twitched to her surprise. Leaping up, she’d shaken out a lizard. “Lizards are harmless.” She snapped out the light and closed the door. Her musk and Chanel No. 5 wafted. Nan burrowed in, praying the lizards stayed on the ceiling. In her quasi-haze, they loomed into crocodiles and alligators, like leviathans.
•
Next morning, in a Chinese café. Its vitality would bolt her into the day. Shuttling among tables, the waiter gave out chopsticks. She received a knife, fork, spoon with her eggs.
Someone turned on the overhead fans, whose propeller stirred the sullen dawn. Hustle in the café was minutia, atoms shivering, until she woke up to see the whole.
The café floor edged into the sidewalk frets angling up and down the street, before the streetwalkers or students arrived. Workers were rushing and spitting. Shopkeepers yanked open metal doors. Lottery hawkers and beggars flocked in, belonging not to the saffron-robed monks circulating with bowls for travelers to favor them.
•
Now in another whitewashed hostel, the day manager, Thai or Malay, her sturdiness dipped in her chocolate-colored paisin, asked, “Why up so early?”
“Bangkok, lizards, monkeys keep me awake.”
“Harmless, they fear you. Leave your keys at the desk. Watch out for boys who might steal them.”
Handing in the key to her shared room and feeling denied of judgment, she asked for Mae, expected from Tokyo. The owner-manager found no sign of her registering. Nan brooded in a deck chair.
Magnolia, geraniums, and roses, pale and gaudy, grew amid the feathery palms and grasses. Bougainvillea draped high where a sparrow flew.
The legs of a brown-haired man gulped the distance between the gate and her chair. “Welcome to Thailand,” he said, throwing his brown-haired head back, more English than American. They shook hands and exchanged names: Jim Ripley and Nan Marvin, as if partying, coming and going.
“What brings you here?” In this Asian Eden, he tensed, not listening, evidently waiting not for the woman in the sari, because another man crossed the garden for her. Ripley stood, vexed at nonappearance. Was he rankling over the tiny one, another roommate Nan glimpsed?
Meanwhile, Nan was aiming for Thailand north, India and Nepal, if someone appeared to go with.
“I plan,” he said, “to hit those places someday. Too lonely to go alone. I work up north. Fly to Chieng Mai, Rose of the North, virgin territory with teak forests.”
He would eye a gardenia tree, like Thais in crystal slippers and earrings. Unable to choose one, he would pluck all of them.
“On the train north, you can meet people,” she said, “third class.”
“Cheaper than planes, you could hitch on trucks.” She giggled.
He mocked her way that backpacked, kept costs down, contacts up and knew few maps. Compass points were left to chance.
“Don’t go the fancy way.” He urged her like a child to journey more Thai than Chinese.
Jim Ripley launched his lesson. Thais, a Chinese-Mongol people, settled in Indochina in the twelfth century. In filtered with them genuine Chinese. A century ago they launched retail and wholesale trade, customs, and taxes. “Still, they hold skilled jobs. Dutch, English, even French and Americans consulted with them for the post office and railroad. The Kuomintang Republic Chinese, now in Taipai, post guards with Thais on the border. These KMT now serve in their third or fourth and future generations.”
Nan’s head swarmed with his words as Mae arrived, flaring her long blondish hair in rare breeze within the compound. Bristling, she said, “I’m flying to a Vietnam base next Thursday. I just got asked to see the troops. Come on.”
“Entertain them?” Nan pondered whether to go or travel alone.
“Except for nabobs, the nobility.” Ripley was still talking. “Thai country folk without hierarchies and with Buddhist flexibility vary their lives for overall well-being.”
Mae interrupted. “The Thais were never conquered.”
“Apparently not,” he replied. With his ruddy good looks, call him Boone. His outdoor style shouldered a load, and his height was a tower to survey for forest fires.
“Why’re you in Thailand?” Nan asked.
“Up north,” he said, “winning tribes over to crops easier to plant than opium.” Laughing slightly; sneering might follow. He whispered, “The tribes move south from Laos and China hill to hill, slashing and burning without bothering about forests and boundaries. I teach them self-interest. The Meo have taken to growing pigs for family wealth. Just think: these were American pigs only two generations ago. It’s late.” He jumped up. “Got to run. Keep in touch.” He galloped back across the hostel grounds.
•
Waiting for Mae to go pick up a hat against the sun, Nan crouched outside the gate. They both wore gauzy blouses, hers white and Nan’s yellow, over black pants and scuffs.
Imps were flitting close by in tag. Having studied for child psych degrees without knowing what to opt for, Nan craned to watch them. One was “it,” except when scampering across the invisible line between inside and outside the compound gateway. Another became it. He giggled when she grabbed his hand. An older schoolgirl, uniformed, snatched the escapee from the pavement. He wiggled away from his captor, a young teacher or aide, and scrammed down the street to his safety.
Two others slipped away into cottages or city edge shacks in a toy-like village section rendering into a city neighborhood Ripley had identified. From her angle, the avenue corner, better-off Thai homes, tectonic for popular elegance, mitered verticals, diagonals, and horizontals sided with cut-work shades inside windows and royal blue awnings outside. Such ribbed terra-cotta roofed houses lined side streets, where rows of parasols, turquoise, bloodred, and dark blue, paralleled palm-lined walkways.
•
She could be anywhere, in any country, summering in the States. The gas station down the block, the department store, and diner made travel placeless, ageless, and timeless. Indochina was suspended, unconfined strangely, until she and Mae sighted Temple-Place, orange-red and green. Dragons flew off its immemorial corners, king-like and fierce in guarding and giving.
•
That night her other exquisite Thai roommate said, coiled or gyrated in Nan’s head, trying to rest in some groove or convolution.
“You like dress woman sew? No. Pretty cloth I buy in Sampeng, where Thais go. See earrings. Boyfriend bargain for them. I try to take you there.”
The hostel placed everyone in touch to speak. The Thai disclosed the boy as her fiancé. She unrolled Thai silks, shantung-like, imperfectly woven by design. One with rose butterflies stamped on ice blue, and the other with green and coral flowers on gold.
“Mother want me to marry Thai. No, so, oh, she mad with me and does not speak. She hates my work. So I move out. I want fun. No mature enough to marry. I work to be happy. She say, then work in family truck busyness with trucks going all over Thailand.”
Her round eyes pursed. Her smile erased sadness, and her eyes and feet in crystal slippers sparkled as she asked, “Have fun here? Go by New Petchaburi Road, where Americans go for fun. Hostesses there girlfriends. Soldiers marry hostesses. Sometime, I go there to seal a deal. Fun. Be careful.”
On her crystal heels and in crystal earrings, she fanned out life photos for Nan, who could not figure them out. “Mother is mad to see me Thai with Westerner. Thank you. I learn English in the States in Chicago nine months at busyness school. Yes, I sell land in Florida for American company. Oh, bell for me. Pardon me. Boyfriend from Chicago but lives everywhere. Fun to go with to Chieng Mai this weekend. Many flowers there. Go there and to Sampeng.”
The lizards tch-tched in the quiet.
Next morning, within the compound garden’s mayapple-like plants. Bangkok and the north ranged ahead. Mae in her floppy straw hat. Nan tried imitating the throw of Mae’s head, but Nan’s dark hair tossed uneasily. “What’s wrong?” Mae asked. “Your head ticks?”
“Nothing.” With guidebooks for stop-offs on the cheap, they passed old women whose heads were shaved or hair growing like crew cuts, respectful of the dead. Next, the live boys or men on work crews in royal blue shirts flicked their hands or slapped their scuffs on the pavement.
At once, she spun on her heels to look back. Her eyes skewered five boys at three meters behind them. Bangkok was growing a breed of youths, haunting the two of them between two points. They picked up dirty dishes, docked Chao Phraya tour boats, and dove under them to remove weeds from motor propellers. Their crew-trimmed heads jutted in sturdiness for hewing. No gentle Buddhas here.
Flamboyant and hibiscus-like flowering trees or hidden bushes perfumed the air as her mind snapped in mind the boys of yesterday who asked, “How much you sell?”
Youths signaled by raising a middle finger, as if to finger. What had she done except be here? “Oh my God, when does a finger become a fist?”
“What?” asked Mae.
Glancing back down again, Nan avoided the eyes. Dusty feet were closing in. Swirling, she tested whether they pursued her. “Mae! Cut across the avenue to the klong.”
“One’s no kid,” Mae yelled. “Run into the open compound.”
“There aren’t any.” Nan rushed up to an epauletted official coming toward them. But he knew no English.
She thrust her shoulder bag out in back to ward off one youth. “Mae, go easy. He’ll pass us,” she hissed. “Four more.”
The one closest lit a cigarette. Mae shrieked, “Watch out! He’ll get you!”
Nan yelled and angled her arm to the burn on her back. They dashed through the stucco wall gate. No one was in the huge lounge. She sank on a bench. Mae wet tissues for Nan to dab her wound to cool its burning.
She gazed at blow-ups of scaly, tumid people with open sores with pus or scars, impressing her as victims of some catastrophe.
From on high, footsteps began echoing around them, a walking rhythm billowed down the curling stairway. Someone suppressed a laugh. Another coughed. Giggling spurted into hilarity. Nan weakened in this hee-hawing cloud.
She reeled when Mae said, “Let’s get out of here.”
First, Mae strode toward the laughing eyes to spike them. A man swiveled toward Nan, speaking in Thai or Chinese to another in white, who ripped away. This elder graying man approached the boy slouching outside against the wall.
Meanwhile, Nan was resting on a stretcher. Medicinal smells collided with flowers. Outside palms were serrated like green knives.
“Sorry.” The older man and woman in white curved over her. “We cannot get into our first aid. Clinic shut now, for venereal disease seminar. Wait for our car to drive you to guesthouse. We hold unruly boy here. Leave.”
•
Nan had assumed herself exempt from city skirmishes. Bangkok circled on and was occupied by innumerable khaki strangers. One day Jim Ripley was gunning his motor scooter and called out, “Off to the northwest.”
Taking advice: good-bye Mae en route to Vietnam and trusting self-fate to meet hikers in Chieng Mai, Nan boarded the train north that, at times, unaccountably halted. When sleepy in the fervid heat of the rain forest, she converted train switches at stops into bayonets spiking the sky.
The train crawled on. A Thai family across from her seat gave her pieces of mango when smelled she hungered for, though worried about bladder trouble. Like a puppet, her head strung by a cord though detached from her body, wobbling and bobbing, while stretching, she smiled and bowed.
Reaching Chieng Mai, she gaped at endless recreation and rehabilitation hotels for American soldiers. Little surprising her, her belly’s tightening did. Outlandishly, bigger than hostel doors, soldiers lengthened next to Thais. She chose a guesthouse, off-track. Again, Mae was to catch up to her. If necessary, Nan would move. After her check-in, she pulled mosquito netting over her.
The nearest army canteen was improved on with local Thai cuisine too hot. A gussied-up blonde on the bench across the table asked, “Want to fly over the war? It’s a quick, cheap flight away.” Nan scrunched her shoulders and slurped up welcome mashed potatoes and gravy.
•
Beneath her netting, she cringed, sat up. A dog howled. Another whined. Outside a full moon and a dim light shadowed the land. A motorbike was gunning. Her eyes pressed to see the night scene.
Jim Ripley whizzed off into the night. Her stomach looped.
Next day, the guesthouse proprietor lent her a detailed map. She hooked up with three Europeans, hoofing around Chieng Mai. Poking around for beer and snacks landed them at dusk within a courtyard, where music rolled and pitched. A dancing lithe Thai shimmied and shed her bronze sarong-like wrap around her pale golden body. Her dancing, like a plume, engrossed her fans. They applauded, hooted, and soft-whistled.
Later, this Asian with soft crystal slippers from the Bangkok hostel compelled Ripley at the city-edge Chieng Mai guesthouse to speak to Nan. She waved to Nan. “I must tell you,” he said, “that the girl’s family are honored she’s chosen to dance for her own salary.” With her routine over, he and the Thai with the crystals buzzed away on his cycle.
•
In the countryside, hill tribes flowered the hills. Their names like Meo, Karen, and La Hu corresponded with handwoven dresses; most red bloomed in the heights. The only way to their sacred peak, Doi Sutep, was to rent the back of a motor scooter, driven by a Thai student in uniform. Nan wound her arms above his waist and placed her head on his upper back during the ride that skittered by cliffs, veering and edging upward.
Finally on the mountain, her terrified self eased out her breath. She relaxed and saw. Just after dawn, the sun gilded across the land, during this time of watch and wait. Indochina’s peaks with Doi Sutep mounted and lined into the spine of Asia, stretching around the monumental ball.
Jean Verthein works at Columbia University Schools of Public Health and Social Work as a disability specialist and adjunct professor, which enabled her theme of survival. A Sarah Lawrence College M.F.A. with two Ragdale grants further enabled her writing. Bus travel and research in Germany, Iran, Afghanistan helped deepen stories in Saint Ann’s Review, Downtown Brooklyn, Gival Press, Green Mountains Review, Evening Street Press, Artifact Nouveau, Adelaide.
