The Race to Salvation

Three things separated Jesús from the typical ex-pat English teacher. He ran everywhere, he was American but had smooth brown skin, and he didn’t eat rice.  When he explained the Paleo Diet to the group of his Thai colleagues, the reactions following the collective gasp ranged from the assumption it was a slow suicide to a confirmation that American privilege led to insanity. Nit, who had taken a World History course at university, said with a voice of authority,

“But paleolithic people died at 30. How old are you?”

“29”

Sumontha, who was certain the young man wanted to end his life, gave a little cry and covered her mouth.

“But now we have medicine and less war. If we eat the food our bodies were designed for which is meat, vegetables, nuts, and berries—stuff that grows naturally in the ground—we could live to be a 100!”

“But rice is life!” This was an inarguable point and everyone nodded in agreement. Jesús smiled and finished his fried morning glory and steamed seabass. After he cleaned his dishes, he changed and began running around the track in the center of the campus.

As the teachers finished their laab and sticky rice, they continued to talk about the young man and passed on some gossip from the students, half of whom were in love with him, and half who resented being taught English by someone who looked the same as they did.

“They say he runs around the room jumping and stretching like an Olympic monkey!”

“He’s going to die. It’s too hot for foreigners.”

“We will have to take care of him for his mother’s sake.”

During this conversation, a teacher who had hidden himself behind a copy of Ulysses, put his book down and went outside to watch Jesús. Adisak was the English Department’s most beloved teacher. Part monk, part grandfather, and part Mr. Bean, Adisak was treated with reverence by the students who laughed loudly and often during his lectures and who took to heart all he said. It was a well-established fact that he fasted five days a week. Saturday and Sunday he enjoyed a bit of the fish he caught in a nearby pond, the rest given to the department’s cleaner who had three small children under the age of 5.

Jesús ran over to Adisak who handed him a bottle of water.

“Buddha says, ‘To keep the body in good health is a duty…otherwise we shall not be able to keep our mind strong and clear.’ But why do you run in circles?”

“I’m training for the Sea to Sea Marathon from the Andaman to the Gulf of Thailand.”

“That is quite a journey. Why did you decide to do this?”

Jesús always found it difficult to answer this question. It had made him eccentric enough to run marathons in the relative cool of a Midwestern spring, but to quit his job and move to SE Asia to run in an obscure race made him plain “loony”. He had been unable to make them understand the meditative effects running had for him. It was never about the finish line but the process. He said as much to Adisak.

“Yes, of course. You cannot travel the path until you become the path.” And with those parting words of wisdom walked away, his hands clasped behind his back.

Adisak meandered around the campus, thinking about the young farang. Adisak had been at the university for several years and many a pale Western had graced the classrooms. Most of them seemed to be broken and in need of a clear mind. He knew they were prone to drunkenness and sloth from the sweaty smell of beer they left behind in every room. He knew too that the English teachers were driven to his country by desires of the flesh rather than the soul. He often had to remind himself to “Have compassion for all beings, rich and poor alike; each has their suffering. Some suffer too much, others too little. “ But Jesús was different. Adisak felt a wave of gratitude that his students were being exposed to a Westerner who lived like the Buddha.

After Jesús had explained the Paleo Diet, the teachers began a campaign to feed him properly. Every evening he heard the sounds of plastic bags being placed on his doorknob full of two or three servings of rice, curries of various colours, and grilled banana leaves full of something sweet and gelatinous. At first he moved the bags to the doorknob of a man who lived alone down the hall, but after the fourth night, he sought counsel from Adisak.

“I will take the food to the orphanage. Those ting tong ladies will be making merit without even knowing it!”

On the day of the race, Jesús was one of the first across the line, but instead of feeling proud, one thought kept repeating itself: If I return to America, no more food. Late that night, he discussed the problem with Adisak.

“A jug fills drop by drop.”

“What does that mean?”

“Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart give yourself to it.”

Jesús’ life soon became a pleasant circle of running, teaching, collecting food, and joining Adisak on trips to the orphanage. The women gossiped that Jesús was becoming a skeleton and even began to bring him KFC and McDonald’s much to the delight of the children. When Jesús did at last collapse and never awaken, the women sobbed that they had murdered a helpless foreigner. Adisak addressed the distraught group.

“Never is there any effect like that of Merit. The most valuable service is one rendered to our fellow humans. Especially the young poor ones with no family.”

Sumontha, who had designated herself as “Most Guilty” was desperate to remove the mark on her soul.

“Ladies! I know what we can do. Let’s go to the orphanage. Adisak, do you know where it is?”

The English for Sex Workers Course

It started with an offer.

 “You want cock?” Fon asked the man who had just ordered a glass of Jack Daniels.

“Darlin, that’s my line,” he drawled as he pinched the girl’s buttocks. The small group of men whooped and cheered with the glee that erupts in the space between too much beer and too many spirits.

“Lime? What he talk about Kay?” Kay looked up from her crossword puzzle, smiling.

“You said cock,” she said pantomiming putting something in her mouth, “not Coke,” pointing to the can in the cooler. At this, Fon’s trademark smile with its abundance of teeth emerged and she laughed. “I stupid. Speak again.”

“Cock. Coke. Cock. Coke. Repeat.”

“Cock. Coke. Cock. Coke. You good teacher”

Kay realized she was drunk and in Teacher Mode and that these two worlds she vowed to keep separate had flawlessly merged

“Fon. I can teach you and the girls sex English. Do you want?”

“I poor! I no study.”

“No money. Free. Sanuk mak!”

Kay took a calendar from the wall. Beneath the picture of the benignly smiling King, she pointed to Tuesday and Thursday of the following week. “2:00. Here. Ok?”

Kay put the crossword into her backpack, took out a notebook and made notes as she would for any other new course, choosing topics and the language points for each. Knowing her students would be labelled “Elementary” at best, she kept it simple.

Body Parts, Verbs and Dirty Phrases, Small Talk, Minimal Pairs

She lit a cigarette, sipped on her gin and tonic, and studied the men watching a football match on a tiny black and white TV. The men hadn’t even glanced in Kay’s direction and she wondered what they thought of an aging white woman in a Thai whorehouse.

Kay gravitated towards the tiny bar after a long day of teaching because the darkness and artificially cooled air was armour against the brutal afternoon sunshine. Though there were a number of open-air bars on the beach, Kay cringed at the thought of being seen by her students who wandered in packs throughout the town.

A year earlier, Kay had been anchored in Indiana, waiting for her mother’s death to release her. She had been the only of the four siblings to stay and her sacrifice was rewarded first with rages and dirty diapers, but later as the sole heir, an ample enough sum to escape.

As she smoked and relished her fourth gin, she smiled at the irony of a celibate woman teaching sex language. In Indiana, there had been many lovers who had come and gone. Some needed to be forced to leave and there was one who had left by dying. Kay wasn’t sure if it was death or recently turning 50 that had slammed the door on her appetite. Having no cravings, she subsisted on gin, cigarettes, toasted cheese sandwiches, and crosswords.

The first week three “students” arrived, dutifully armed with notebooks and pencils. Unlike her daytime students, these girls approached the task of learning with a clinician’s detachment. Pussy, ass, mouth, fist, suck, harder, slower, lips, tits, pay were dull and necessary jargon to master. They grasped meanings quickly, but producing the unfamiliar English sounds left their tongues and jaws more tired than a night’s work. Kay hoped the context of the bedroom would elucidate utterances like: “sick cock”; “give hate”; “fear goose?”; “you in church”; “in my mouse”; “bro chop”.

After two weeks, word of Kay’s free English classes was the first positive thing to spread among the bargirl community.  Some only wanted a glimpse of the tall woman with spiky blonde hair and blue eyes and never returned, but a small core group arrived day after day, folders growing bigger with papers and notes. Kay gave them exercises and during the hour in a small back office at the bar, did games and role plays which sent everyone into hysterics. Toey was especially adept at a nasally “Bend over you whore” and Kay felt certain she knew which Aussie the girl was impersonating. They thrived on the feeling of being young schoolgirls again while simultaneously receiving something they had long come to believe was off limits.

During the seventh week, Kay noticed two things. One, she was drinking less, which given the cost of a gin and tonic, was the same as being paid by the girls.  And she was ravenous. Each day after the class, she finished her drink, hopped on a tuk-tuk and headed to a night market. She devoured bags full of pork satay skewers, tiny bananas, fresh spring rolls, hardboiled eggs, and bowls of noodles. The tastes were phenomenal, but it was the grabbing and pulling with her teeth, the slurping, the feeling of the smooth egg or rice paper on her tongue that sent her to bed full and exhausted.

In the third month she began to have dreams. Lurid, banal, plotless encounters with men half her age and twice as dark. In the waking world, teachers at her school began to avoid her eye. It wasn’t long before the head of the department called a meeting, smiling and offering treats, to tell her she would no longer be needed due to a cut in the budget. She knew they knew what she did in the afternoons but wasn’t sure if it was her whoring herself out to other learners or the whores themselves that got her sacked.

She continued to teach the girls and live off the money from her mother’s estate, rather enjoying the thought of how disturbed her mother would be to know the profit of the house and all its lace doilies went towards gin and bags of papaya for prostitutes. When the girls found out she’d lost her job, they held a secret meeting. Fon, the self-declared student leader, handed Kay an envelope stuffed with neatly folded bills. “For you. We pay.”

“You don’t need to!”

“No problem. You and we same same. Everybody a whore for someone.”

 

Lost in Space

 

When Deng sat across from Pam at the canteen that day, he wordlessly handed her a piece of paper. She put on her glasses and a second later, her round cheeks became splotchy and red as they usually did when she was angry, embarrassed, or turned on. Deng couldn’t read which emotion was spelled out on her delicate skin as she said, “Oh. It’s time. So soon.”

“Yes. Father made another deposit.”

“We best go next week. I heard there are only a few left with a view.”

Deng folded the bank statement and put it in his front pocket, and though Pam wanted to talk more about the task ahead of them, the determined stabbing Deng made with his chopsticks warned her otherwise. She eased their conversation to the soft and worn topic of their day in the classroom, which because of the curriculum and teaching philosophy hadn’t changed much in the last hundred years.

After dinner, they walked separately to their dorms. Pam shared a room with a Physics teacher. The room was small and the concrete walls had once been white. One window and a small table with a plant separated the two beds. Wall hangings were forbidden by the college so each teacher expressed herself through the duvet; Pam’s had grey, purple, and dark green stripes and the other, younger teacher’s was full of brown bears on a pale pink background.

Pam greeted her roommate, who briefly looked up from her computer to murmur in response. After washing her face and brushing her teeth, she immersed herself in the tiny bed, propping herself up in the corner so that a shoulder blade touched each wall. She reached up and a touched a spot near the window where the concrete had been chipped and felt her body sigh with the relief that yet another day was over. She pulled the duvet around her shoulders and opened her computer to watch “Lost”. But the familiar absorption with survival on the island would not come. Instead she found herself rubbing the gouge and thinking.

She loved Deng fiercely. He was a good son and would be a good father. They had met at university and had been together for five years, both of them luckily finding a position at the technical college on the outskirts of the growing north eastern city. She was an English teacher and he an electrical engineering lecturer. Their buildings were only a few hundred meters apart and they ate all their meals together in the canteen and at night chatted on-line after Deng finished playing football with the people on his floor. On the weekends, they went to the city centre to shop or go to the cinema. The dorms were free so they had been able to save both their salaries for a new home to move to once they were married.

As Pam continued to rub the chipped wall, she thought of how all the long hours spent hunched over desks in crowded libraries and classrooms had prepared her for the very moment when she walked with her husband through the door of their own home. They, as the foreign teachers would say, “had made it.” They were paying back the debt of their parents’ misery and sacrifice by fulfilling this dream and though she should have felt filial pride, she only felt tired. So she turned off her computer and fell into a deep sleep that lasted much longer than usual.

Within three months of receiving the final deposit, Pam and Deng had married and purchased their two bedroom apartment in a new high-rise near the college. It was located on the fifth floor and overlooked a field, a rare sight in the city of seven million people. Twice a week they had taken the long bus journey to IKEA to wander through the maze of displays, stopping occasionally to post “selfies” on their facebook pages. They matched, selected, and ordered several sets of curtains, linens, frames, candles, and decorative pillows. Other items they bought on-line from the comfort of their dorm rooms. The buzz and hum of the days only quietened when Pam could at last, make her perch in the twin bed.

As the pieces arrived and were stuck in corners or on walls, Pam found herself drifting from room to room or stopping to look out onto the field. She posted photos and enjoyed the envy and compliments of her friends. Yet, while gliding through the apartment, she couldn’t fight the sensation of falling. She put out her arms and legs for balance and marvelled that they touched nothing. Deng watched nervously, only occupying the spaces he needed to complete each task. Only when she was back in the dorm, wrapped in the striped duvet, the concrete wall nearby, did she feel the sensation fully leave her.

Finally, the day chosen to be most auspicious for a housewarming arrived. Pam and Deng had invited friends as well as the foreign teachers from the English Department to make dumplings. Deng and Pam greeted each guest, finding new places for the growing collection of plants and candles. After an hour of strained small talk and weak barley tea, they broke off into small groups to prepare the dumplings. Pam moved easily between teaching the foreigners and then ridiculing their large, awkward hands in Chinese.

As the sun began to set, the weight of coldness settled on the apartment. One of the foreigners exclaimed, “Don’t you use central heating?”

“No, we don’t have it yet.”

“But why? Don’t you freeze at night?”

“Oh, we don’t live here.” All of the foreigners’ eyes turned towards them, wondering if something had been badly lost in translation. Pam laughed and her face turned red. “We prefer the dorm.”

“Why a dorm? This place is amazing,” one of the foreign women said, her voice unable to disguise her shock.

“Here, it’s..,” she paused realizing that she hadn’t understood until this moment, “it’s just too big.”