By Steve Rosse

My son just sent me an instant message to let me know that my ex-father-in-law died last night. I haven’t thought about Than Sunee Sophonrat in years, but I’m sorry to hear he’s gone. The man was a mean drunk and a savage soul but he was honest and in his own perverse way a man of honor, and ask not for whom the bell tolls.

Than Sunee was the balaad amphur for Ranong Province for thirty years. The balaad amphur is a position in local government equivalent to a county clerk in Iowa, the man you bribe to obtain a business license. In most provinces this would provide a stable but not grand income from taxi drivers and hair stylists, but in Ranong it’s a different story. Ranong is the only spot on the Thai-Burma border that is not impenetrable swamps or jungle-choked mountains full of armed rebels. There used to be a thriving fishing industry in town, and there are still dozens of fishing boats casting off from the town’s piers, but the canneries all closed down decades ago. Now it’s more profitable to transport people and products back and forth across the river than it is to chase the decimated schools of market fish. A fishing boat full of contraband is a business like any other and requires a license. Thus Than Sunee was a man of some wealth and considerable political power in the Kingdom’s smallest province.

I met him the day before my wedding. Mem’s family came down to Phuket and we checked them into an anonymous mid-range businessman’s hotel in Phuket Town. Mem’s mother had died when Mem was 10 years old and Mem had not spoken to her father since that day. We had a tense family dinner and I was introduced. He came with his second wife, who had been his maid until he knocked her up and promoted her to New Wife. She was maybe seventeen and he was in his late fifties. She had a baby in her arms that my soon-to-be-wife had to call “Sister.” She hated that.

The next afternoon we were all getting ready for the reception. It was going to be a lavish affair because my wife had a position in the island’s public relations industry that required spectacle. There would be reporters and photographers present so we had to spend a lot of money. We had begun the day feeding monks at one temple, then laid wreathes at the Heroine’s Monument, then presented new robes to monks at another temple, then hosted a lunch for forty guests at a fancy hotel on the beach, then napped, and now we were preparing for the Western style reception to be held in the biggest ballroom in the Metropole Hotel. Mem would be wearing a white wedding dress and I would be wearing a tuxedo. Despite the nap I was hung over and sleep deprived.

Our apartment was filled with women bustling and singing and laughing and turning my normally business casual girlfriend into my wrapped and draped and coifed and painted bride. Mem’s three brothers were smoking and playing cards on the patio. Her father sat in regal indolence on my leather sofa, having his thighs massaged by nieces. He wore his green karachakan uniform, skin the color of an old saddle, and a sour expression. He looked like Jabba the Hutt. Mem had told me that the family had had to talk him out of wearing his pistol.

I was sent on some errand and when I returned the house was full of weeping women and crying children. I had missed some God-awful explosion of emotion by moments. Something had happened and since everybody from Ranong speaks a weird kind of hillbilly Thai I couldn’t figure out what had gone wrong. Mem was in our bedroom splayed out on the bed ruining her makeup with tears. Her three brothers were still smoking and playing cards on the patio. Jabba the Hutt had left the building.

Mem’s sister Ying said to me, in the clear Bangkok Thai used by the anchormen on the TV news, that I had to go find Than Sunee. “Why me?” I asked.

“You are his host.” Ying answered. “He won’t come back into this house unless you ask him to come back.” Ying was (still is) the Chief of Nursing at Ranong Provincial Hospital, a smart, gentle, capable woman and undoubtedly the sister I should have married, her overt lesbianism aside. If she thought I should do something I probably should do it.

I went out the front door and looked up and down the soi. Not a soul in sight. At one end of our soi was a Chinese cemetery that covered four square miles. I figured he probably did not go that way. At the other end of our soi was a main road that led to Phuket Town. I headed down that way.

Where our soi met the main road I looked across the street at a karaoke bar. It was about three in the afternoon and the Christmas lights on the fence were turned off. The neon sign was turned off. The previous night’s trash was still on the curb. But the front door hung open on a dim interior. I went there.

Inside I took a moment to let my eyes adjust to the gloom. The place had a concrete dance floor that was damp half-way across; a mop and bucket were abandoned at the line between wet and dry. All the chairs were up on tables except one. My future father in law sat in that chair glaring away into a corner. On the table were a half-full bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label, a half-full glass that held no ice or soda, and an ashtray. There were already three Khrong Thip butts in the ash tray. Than Sunee was motionless but he was tense as a coiled snake. I was glad he was not wearing his pistol. Behind the bar a skinny man whom I assumed had abandoned the mop was held hostage by Than Sunee’s uniform and bad mood.

I slumped my shoulders and ducked my head and approached slowly. Than Sunee spoke no English so I spoke in Thai.  “May I sit?”

He grunted. He did not look at me. I pulled a chair off a table nearby and sat down.

“Excuse me,” I said, “I do not wish to cause you to receive annoyance, but I must ask what happened at the house.”

He looked at me. I don’t want anybody to ever look at me like that again.

“That woman says I killed my wife.”

Not “my daughter” or “your wife” or even “Mem.” She was “that woman.”

Mem’s mother died of uterine cancer, but Than Sunee had deserted his family the year before the diagnosis, so it’s easy to see how 10-year-old Mem had connected the dots that way.

“She’s wrong.”

What he said after that I don’t know. If he had wanted me to understand him he would have spoken in Bangkok Thai. But he spoke in lang dtai and he spoke quickly and through clenched teeth. He didn’t care if I understood the words; he knew I’d understand the emotion. He was angry and hurt and he was a man not used to being defied. I wanted to cower behind the bar with the janitor.

He stopped speaking and drained his glass. I said, “I want to invite you to come back to my home. I do not think you killed your wife. Nobody else thinks that. Mem is wrong and I know she loves you. I know she wants you here. You have not seen each other in fifteen years. Please come back to my home.”

“I don’t care if she wants me here. Do you want me here?”

“Yes.”

He drummed his fingers on the table. He picked up his pack of cigarettes and his lighter and he stood up. He walked to the door and I followed him out to the street. The sunlight was painfully bright. Nobody paid for the whiskey.

We walked in silence across the main road and back up my soi. The corrupt bureaucrat and the newspaper columnist. I walked a step or two behind him and to his right. Mem’s three brothers were smoking and playing cards on the porch. They didn’t look up. The door of my apartment was open and he walked in. Everything stopped. I swear, babies stopped crying. Mem was standing at the apex of three floor fans, wrapped in miles of chiffon, her hair piled a foot over her head and woven with flowers. She was staring at herself in a floor-length mirror while her sister Ying fed her bites of a club sandwich. She was beautiful. He crossed behind her, within arm’s reach, and took up his old position on the leather sofa. Conversations began again, babies resumed crying.

I went to the kitchen and mixed him a drink of whiskey and soda with ice. I took it to him on my knees. He patted the seat next to him and I took it. Then he reached out and placed his massive hand, solid as mahogany, on my thigh. He gave me a pat and a squeeze. The women chattered and the children ran around and the day progressed and I got married. There was food for four hundred people at the reception but I couldn’t eat. There were speeches made that I don’t remember. We opened wedding gifts in front of everybody which was embarrassing as hell. The next morning a photo of me and Mem took up a quarter page in Siang Dtai newspaper. Smaller photos appeared in the Bangkok Post and The Nation and Thailand Tatler. Mem sent them in.

I saw Than Sunee only two more times over the next five years, when my children were born in Ranong and he and the three brothers took me out to eat at a fantastic seafood place. The first time the youngest brother offered to take me to a brothel but I declined. He seemed relieved. Then we came back to America and lots of bad things happened and I fell out of touch with my in-laws. When the tsunami hit the Andaman coast in 2004 Than Sunee was already retired. He lived on a few acres and grew pineapples; his estranged young wife and child lived in an apartment in town he paid for. When the wave hit he didn’t die because he had run out of coffee and ridden his tiny motorbike into town to buy some more. When he got home there was nothing left of his house but the foundation, his two farm hands were missing, never to be seen again, and there was two feet of salty sand on top of his fields. His land, the land he’d paid for with decades of graft, was now sterile and worthless. He was in his 70s, in failing health, and destitute.

He moved in with his estranged wife and youngest child. His daughter Ying paid his rent. His liver deteriorated for a few years and this morning my son told me he was dead. I can still feel his hand squeezing my thigh. I don’t know what to say about it to “that woman,” with whom I shared a bed for ten years. Now we communicate through text messages and the lawyers at the Iowa Child Support Recovery Unit.

So now my son tells me via instant message that he wants to go to Thailand next summer to discover his Thai roots. He does not remember his Thai grandfather, of course. When his farang grandmother died he was only eight and it did not inspire him to visit Lithuania. But now he’s a teenager and he’s trying to figure out who he is and suddenly he realizes he’s half Thai. So he wants to save his money and go there alone next summer, the summer between his junior and senior years in high school. He’ll be just seventeen years old.

It’s probably a passing fancy, like the bass guitar lessons or World of Warcraft. Maybe by next summer he’ll have lost his desire to go. It’s expensive as hell, of course, but he makes a ton of money waiting tables at a fancy sushi restaurant. For some reason when they get to America Asians become huge tippers. It’s a face thing, I guess.

So if he actually saves his money and buys the ticket what do I do? He’s got a Thai passport, but he speaks not a single word of Thai. He’s a very handsome boy, very smart, but he is naïve and trusting and always thinks the best of people. The first time I went to Thailand I was thirty years old, and coming from New York City. I was mature and cynical and street smart, but even so I got robbed by the taxi driver who picked me up at the airport, got a blow job from a man I thought was a woman, and got herpes from the first bar girl I slept with. Then I gave up the career I loved and spent the next seven years there, and came home to find that Thailand had ruined me for life in America.

What do I say to this kid I love more than life itself? Don’t go? Go, but go with your father and your little sister so we can visit temples and palaces and see the khon dancers and you’ll be safe? He can afford the ticket, I cannot. His sister cannot. And he says he wants this to be a spiritual journey. You don’t take a spiritual journey with your Dad and your little sister. I have never been more proud of my son and never been more scared.

Damn you, Than Sunee.