Happy 1

My Freedom

There was only one Province’s kindergarten in the town.  It was close to the Province’s boy school and girl school, but not at all close to my house.. I mean, close enough to walk to school or from school to the house.

My father was a manager of the shop and my mother was a very famous dressmaker for her fine job.  She worked hard with the dressmaking also had to cook for the workers, three meals a day, therefore she hire a taxi tricycle to pick me and my young sister to school every morning and take me and my sister back home every evening. 

We called him Uncle Sook.  He was an honest man in his middle age and he was trustable to take good care of the children.  Very soon, many mothers and fathers also hire him to bring their kids to school also.   His tricycle must be the first school bus with 3 wheels. 

The tricycle was big enough for 2 thin adults to sit together.  If you weight over 80 kg, only you could get on.  Imagine how this small tricycle carried 8 children!  three on the bench, three on the floor, and the other two would either be on the laps of the one on the bench as uncle Sook told us to, or hanging around which worry him very much. 
Yes, I was always one of that hanging around kids.

Many times uncle Sook reached my house with only my young sister.  When mother asked he would say.. “I don’t know what to do.  Eat said she wanted to walk back home by herself.”

Walking back home, sometime I followed the senior to buy SomTum  or papaya salad.  It was 50 Stangs or half a Baht.  My parents gave me only 25 Stangs a day so I could not go every day.  My young sister put her 25 Stangs in the saving pigs every day and I was surprised that one day she could buy something expensive while my pig was always thin.

Sometime I stopped by my friend’s house.  She was Vietnamese and stay alone until her parents came home.  She had to cook the rice and Wow! she put some green beans together and the rice came out very nice.  From that day, I always like to put red or green been in the rice when cook, but rarely have that chance because I rarely cook.. J
I have learned from my father later that poor people put stuffs in rice when cooking in order to add more volume to the rice.  I still like the idea, putting bean in rice taste nice and have more protein.  Apart form green beans, there are red beans, taro, sweet potato, etc.  Taiwanese put those in boiled rice.  It later became fashion in Thailand.  Taiwanese boiled rice is another way of value added to the normal boiled rice, sold in large restaurants and hotel.

Sometime I stopped at the market.  There was serious propaganda about the communism.  There were cartoon poster about it, telling how scary they were and sometime they did bomb the villagers.  I always read that poster with interest.
One day, there were some very dark green, almost black big balls, piled into a small mountain.  I was very scared, thought that they were the bomb as said on the poster.  I ran home to tell my father, frightening.

He laughed at me.  They were new kind of water melons!!

The water melon I had seen was a long one.  The color was like young leaves with zigzag dark green strips along the fruits.  I knew later that they were water melon from Bang Berd, a small district of Prajuab Kirikhan, the province where famous Hua HIn was.  This district has nothing but this kind of water melon and was distributed all over the country.  But they were fading in time, replaced with the dark green cannon balls one. 
One day on the plane, I talked to the passenger sitting beside me.  He was a man from Jia Tai, the mother company of Telecom Asia.  Jia Tai was a very large agriculture company.  They first buy and sold the seeds only.  They later giving seed to the farmers to grow from them in the way they like, to get seeds or the get fruits.  From seeds to chicken, pigs, fish, etc.  They are very clever.  The have workers and land to get the products they want with cheap investment.  The farmers got free seeds and knowledge, promised market and price.
The dark green cannon ball melon probably one of their products.  Over 40 years back, it was only big company could do that.
Now, there are many new style of water melon in the market but the Bang Berd one had disappeared. 

[While searching for the picture of it, I found a website telling the history of Bang Berd Farm managed by His Serene Highness Prince Sithiporn Kridakorn,  grandson of King Rama 4.  He was the Foreign Minister in the time of King Rama 5 and had resigned in the time of King Rama 6, to have his farm in the drought land of Bang Berd, brought the new technology to develope the land and got the Magsaysay award.  He brought the watermelon from USA, grew it here and was famous as Bang Berd Water Melon.  So,  Thailand did not have water melon before.  He sold his farm to the government in 1959 and bought a piece of land to make a smaller farm and passed away in 1971 when he was 88.]

Sometime I did not come home until very late evening.  I was at a friend’s house.  He, so young, came home to find no one.  His mother had some rice in the pot and cooked something for him since the morning and left them on the table for his dinner.  I was there to teach him homework. 

I always wondered why many friends had to be home alone after school pitifully.  I had never been home alone.  It was the home that had to be alone without me.

My elder sister said that she had to look for me every evening by walking along the street and call my name out loud.  Soon the dirty little face would pop out from a house beaming with happy smile.  She said, tiresome and bored as she was, that smile took away everything.  She then carried my hand and walked home and I would be dancing, jumping, talking like little bird.

Sometime I went further from my house to uncle Sook’s home, which was seriously forbidden later.  His house was far from my house.  It was a long legs house.  His family did the food called Cap-Mu.  The dried and deep fried pork skin until it was crispy and puffy.  The most delicious one must have a little meat and pork fat with the skin.  The fragrant of it makes the mount water.

About 30 years later when people began to afraid of cholesterol, Cap-Mu was developed in Chaing Mai.  They use pure pork skin, without fat, cut into small pieces make it easier to eat, and easier the mind of the people who want to eat.

One day I was still at school.  It was going to have a new fence so they brought a lot of bricks to put near the fence, under a big rain trees.  I was excited about it.  I went direct there after school and tried to build bridge, house, etc with those bricks.  It was the first time I was so close to that trees.  I have learned that the tree would produce some resin to cover its wounds and the resin made the ground slippery.  There were little trees came out from the seeds and the seed fell down from the tree.  They were cute and the fruit of the rain tree gave sweet aroma in that nice cool evening.  I was really enjoy being there, alone.

It was almost dark when my father came to the fence to call me.  He was angry and worried.  I was so late and he could not find me any places I used to be.  He had been running around asking people whether they hade seen me.  School was the last place and I was playing there.
I was surprised and very happy to see him.. did not even know that he was angry or worried.  I was a true optimist.  Hi hi..
I kept telling him how excited I was, and what I had seen.  He listened to me quietly and told me not to play there alone and so late again.  I did not understand about the dangerous he mentioned.  It was a very pleasant and cozy place. 
I promised him anyway and was happy to be allowed to go again only in the day time.  Very soon, the workers came to build the fence. They used all my bricks and occupied my personal playground!

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Cooking Shop

Like little girls from all over the world, one of the favorite game of me and other girls [including the girl who was born in the boy’s body] was cooking and selling.  We like to take various kind of leave, sliced them into tiny strip and took them as noodle.

The best leaves are Hibiscus leaves because when put in water they produce some kind of moose made the food looked real.

One day I took a large leave from the garden and sliced them the put in water.  My shop was good selling.. then my hands got red and very itchy, then my customer’s hands became the same.  We put the hands in the water and felt better.  Once the hands were out of the water, it was very itchy again.

In the late afternoon, a neighbor was shouting and complaining that some naughty kids had destroyed his garden and cut the leaves of his Taro plant.

Taro, from head to toe, would make the skin itchy if they were wet!!

The cooking shop had to close.

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Rice Fort

Nakohn Phanom was at the border to Lao.  My house is at the bank of the Mae Kong river, only a small street in between.  Opposite my house was also our land which hotad a small house for the workers to stay sometime. 
Next to that small house was a large mango tree.  I heard that they measure the tree by standing hand in hand around the tree to see how many people used, so we did.  It was so large that 4 people could not get it. 

I forgot that I and my friends were about 7 years old.

This mango tree was really large and have plenty of mango fruits.  When they were ripe, the tree were full of lovely yellow mangoes.  Once my father taught my elder sister to shoot the gun.  She shot one mango by its calyx. Wow!

She looked at the mango with surprise and said doubtfully that the one she aimed for was still on the tree!

Most of the houses at the bank side of the street had their house, partly on the street, partly lower.  In the hot season the water was so low, about 30 meters from the street.
In rainy season, it was sometime flooded up to the street.

One day I woke up and was very surprised that there was piles of rice sacks at the gate.  Wow!  It was amazing.  Children were there all the time, climbing up and down.  From the top of the pile, we watched the owner inserted a very large metal pin through the sack and were surprised to see the rice came out with that pin.  He checked the rice and left.  We, children, climbed down right away to see the hole of the sack and took out some rice grain to check, even non of us know what to check but our action of checking were sure to be exactly the same as how the owner did, but we use our fingers. 

Can you imagine a small hole after about ten little fingers poked through?

The owner borrowed about place to keep their rice because his house was flooded by the water from the river.

The floor of most of the houses at the river bank side was almost the same.  There was a square cut on the left side, in the middle of the house.  To get to the ‘second floor’ down, there was a ladder.  The ‘second floor’ mostly have only 3 sides wall.  The river side was mostly open.  “Mostly”, how could I say that?  I had seen only 5 houses which were far away from each other but they all were the same.  That gave me the feeling that all houses were the same.

One of the houses I have seen was that of the meat ball maker.  I watched him shopped the meet and kneaded them until they were fine red dough.  He then squeezed them by his left hand and use a spoon in his right hand to sweep the meat and let it fall into boiling water.  When the small meat balls floated his staffs took them off and put in the cold water.
He let me try.  My meat balls were too small for him to sell but the side was just right for small mouth of mine..

Another house which was about half a kilometer away from the meat balls house was the “Glassy Coconut.”
I watched them slide the coconut meat into thin strip while another aunty boiled sugar in a very large pan, so large that it could boil me.  When the sugar was thick and almost dry she would put the coconut strips and stirred and put them off the pan, dropped them into eating side and let them dry.  They became sweet dessert with nice fragrant of coconut.  Sometime they colored the sugar to have the soft pink, green, blue, yellow but I like the white one the most.

On the flood season, I used to go to the house of my parents’ friend, watched the elders did the fishing at the open side of the ‘second floor.’  It was amazing to see that the water could come up that high when the river was dry enough for us to walk across to the Lao border. 

That year, the water was higher than other years.  The water flooded over the “second floor” and almost reached the “ground floor.”

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