by Stefanie Field

I

The backyard is overgrown with weeds, rogue grass that towers over the 5-foot stone wall and spreads throughout the property like a contagion. It is a jungle for the imagination of a dog, and a disregarded portion of life for the house owners. The backdoor is a flimsy screen of mesh wire, bent and distorted from rainy storms and gradual overuse. The faucet for the bath drips and echoes against the dirty tiles of the restroom, where toothbrushes are shared and mosquitos are born. The age-old shelf in the tiny kitchen stores uncovered plates of leftover dinners and if you’re lucky, the ants will only call his closest friends. None of this is a problem. These are the characteristics of daily life.

The problem arises when daily life moves too fast to catch up with. A washing machine, the smallest one from the shop, has bill payments that extends from the past 10 years because the interest is all one can afford. A television from the early 1990s that doesn’t receive more than five channels, so a bootleg DVD of cartoons is replayed everyday for the children when they return from school. A worn and broken laptop with no internet purchased from the street market since extra funds don’t exist, and the only games available for the two young ones are solitaire and minesweeper. These also could have been just as important (or unimportant) as the jungle in the backyard, but the demand for more sweeps across the world faster than a gust of wind. 

The two children want to watch korean dramas and music videos on cable television like their schoolmates. They want to know what Facebook is, and how to ‘tweet.’ The aunt wants to know how to email, and how to use a cellphone with a camera. The uncle wants a motorcycle that can survive his long commutes and manage to get him to work.

It’s all about the money, and there is little of it. The aunt knits projects for the market at 5 baht a piece.  Six of them would have to sell to equal a bowl of street noodles. The uncle travels far to keep a construction job and provides the only stable income for a family of four. If his wife hadn’t left him, it might have been a family of five.  This is all too serious of a talk, though. Nobody wants to sacrifice the cost of family.  But thank goodness the other sister married a farang. No one says it aloud, but her American husband might as well be an ATM machine.

II

Her screams are loud enough to be heard throughout the neighborhood, possibly the entire nation. Her rage, her wails, her sobs.  It’s front-row drama for the housewives of greater Bangkok. 

“How am I supposed to make friends, Mom?” she screeches, calling even the stray dogs from the alleys to her door. “How am I supposed to go to school everyday looking as poor as Isan people?”

Her mother shows no anger, no guilt, no emotion. With the patience learned from time’s experience, she remains in her seat, leaning against the armchair of the sofa as the evening lakorn overdramatizes a feud between sisters over a wealthy bachelor. In a calm manner, her eyes regard the daughter standing in front of her, hair strewn about like a lion’s wild mane with too much makeup on the eyes and an iPhone in her hand. 

“Child, don’t insult your own people. You don’t need a new purse. You have plenty.”

“Mom!” she screams again. “How can I be friends with them if I can’t shop with them?”

“Teach them to be thrifty.”

“Foreigners don’t thrift! They buy Louis Vuitton and Dior and Coach,” she begged.

“You are not foreigner. I am not foreigner. We are Thai.”

“‘Thai’ doesn’t have to be the same as ‘poor,’” retorted the teenager as she stormed off to her room.

The next morning, the mother found her purse empty, without a single token of thanks.

III

It came from the city. It was a plague that was spread by the word of mouth, from the business man to the politicians to the Department officials to the town officials to the farmer. 

A middle-aged man standing at the edge of the fields, dressed in his faded uniform with a polished badge, pulled at the belt obscured from view beneath his protruding belly. The black lip of his hat shielded his eyes from the settling sun as his sight roamed over the fields of rice. As he caught the attention of his friend, he beckoned him over with a wave of his hand.

His friend of several years, trudging through the dirt and mud, darkened by the rays of the oppressive sun, sighed from exhaustion as he gave the respectful wai. His mouth was missing a few teeth and his gums were stained red from tobacco, but he was honest in all his words.

“How are you, my friend?” said the official. 

“I’m tired, but healthy enough to work in this sun,” replied the farmer, briefly taking his worn straw hat off to wipe the sweat above his eyes.

The man smiles. “Your hard work pays off. Look at your rice!”

“This is not my rice. This is the rice that the world makes with black magic.” 

For a moment, the official is taken aback with the farmer’s frankness. He forces a chuckle. “But all this rice makes you good money.”

The farmer shakes his head. 

“Good money?” he asks. “Who is prosperous? You came to me and told me some educated man in a business suit, who has never touched the soil of the countryside, knows how simple men like me can become rich. They tell us strange words like ‘genetics’ and ‘modification.’ They give us machinery and fake seeds, but these rice don’t grow more seeds. We have to pay for more, and we have to pay for better machines and people to repair these machines. I have never been more into debt in my life. My wife has taken our kids away to find a better husband who can provide for them. Who is prosperous here?”

The official feels sympathy for the tired farmer, but he has no good news to give him. “I’m sorry you are going through hard times, but I am doing my job to feed my family just as you are doing your job to feed yourself.”

The farmer sighs. “If only I had been born in the city.”

The official pats him on the shoulder again. “There is bad news, friend.”

“Will the city tell me I need new machines again?”

“Worse,” he shakes his head. “The Western countries have played with those words, ‘genetics’ and ‘modification.’ They can now grow rice like ours on their own land.”

“What will I do?!” exclaimed the farmer, his shaking hands holding his head as his body trembled in despair. “How can I live if the very people who told me to make this rice will not buy it from me?”

His friend said nothing in reply. The town official only watched the farmer sob in anguish. After all, he still gets a paycheck at the end of the day.