Mom, Maniacal Genocide and Some Very Talented Cats .... by Adam (2002)

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Nothing stimulates a grown man more than suckling at the breast of his mother once again. I mean metaphorically, of course. When my Mom came to visit me in Thailand last month, it was a wonderful chance to show her the places I love. As both mother and child age, the relationship becomes more complex and more equal, with both parties suckling the other in a sort of 69 of familial affection and learning. I took pleasure in showing her what I have learned in life here in Thailand. Just to clarify, at no time did I touch her breasts.

I arrived to pick her up from the airport my usual 90 minutes early. This allowed me time to skulk around the departure area, chuckling at the sorrow of parting loved ones. As my Mom’s appearance drew closer, a little girl barfed about four litres of chunky fluid onto the Arrivals floor. Unfortunately nobody slipped and fell, but several people stood in or walked through the splatter before noticing the viscosity underfoot. Most satisfying was the dapper businessman who completed an entire mobile phone call as he unknowingly waded from one vomit bank to the other. I was enjoying the show until two diminutive custodians arrived and wiped up a good portion of the muck with roles of toilet paper. Satisfied with removing the majority of the vomit, the two women exchanged nods and left me to retrain my energies back on the arrival of my closest relative.

Our first few days together were spent in Bangkok touring the compulsory temples and markets. Although she rebuffed my offers to dine on local delicacies like grubs, pig hooves or unidentified stomach lining, Mom was pretty adventurous. We even visited the notorious sex district Patpong where touts attempted to lure us into improper bars with programs boasting “pussy write letter”, “pussy play snooker” and the cryptic “pussy cut banana”. Mom thought the whole thing sounded adorable, similar to the way her cats help her knit or flush the toilet.

There is no shortage of temples in Bangkok. We tried to see a good quantity – fat Buddhas, lazing Buddhas, headless Buddhas, Buddhas cut banana.  But most of our Bangkok time was used acclimatizing Mom to oppressive heat, unruly traffic and the mingling aromas of garbage, food, urine, flowers and exhaust. It might not be Paris, but Bangkok has its own wily charms. Where else in the world can you nibble on a spicy meat-stick as the spectacular hues of a pollution-enhanced sunset dance off of the stomachs of the dead dogs floating down ancient canals? Certainly not back in Brockville, Ontario.

Next stop was my old stomping ground of Mae Sot where my Mom could see a starkly different side of Thailand. Here the sweet, smiling Thais of Bangkok revert to their dark-hearted cores as evil sweat-shop barons, violently corrupt law personnel and blandly irritating guesthouse owners. This is the Middle Earth of Thailand where government-supported wraiths attack and rob the illegal Burmese hordes.

A few months ago the bodies of over 20 Karen (from Burma) villagers were found floating down the border river. The consensus is that some local factory owner thought he could save a few Baht by offing some of the lazy workers whose yelping for back pay had grown tiresome. But the (notoriously corrupt) Mae Sot police threw together an investigation and decided that the dead were actually “drug traffickers”. The police cheerfully closed the case, reaffirming the local wisdom that Thailand is a paradise and Burmese scum deserve to die.

Anyway, it is easy to glide through Mae Sot and enjoy its colour, even if you never get a sniff of the under-smells of corruption and oppression. I went to work (um… something about training Burmese media groups) and my Mom explored the dusty, frontier-town, notable for its vibrant Burmese character, large Islamic community and legions of overpaid (and some underpaid) NGO and UN workers.

During her 3-week stay, Mom and I had wonderful talks ranging from our usual leftish analyses of world politics, to the exploits of wacky loved ones to strategies to relieve her sleepless jetlag. I am a lucky man to have a Mom who is knowledgeable, sweet as a sticky bun and completely bereft of the usual mother’s trait of nagging.

We couldn’t have gotten along better. Except, perhaps, during the 7 hours and 46 flights of stairs it took us to find the Bangkok airport’s left-luggage facility. That ordeal would have caused Jesus to jam a spoon in Ghandi’s eye. But over three weeks, we outdid any mother-son team I know. The worst we endured was my terse warning, “MOM, you are going to have to start giving me some decisions,” after she refused to tell me if she wanted a window or an aisle seat.

After Mae Sot, we headed to my exotic home in northern Thailand (Chiang Mai), which is around the corner from the Dunkin’ Donuts near the 7-11. Okay, so we don’t exactly take elephant taxis or wear penis gourds in my neighbourhood. But what it lacks in romantic exoticism it redeems in comfort with a large banana-tree-shaded patio, a fancy hot shower machine and a three-legged stool with a hole in the middle that transforms my rudimentary squat toilet into a luxury den of excremental bliss. Or so my Mom described it.

Next, in Mae Hong Son, Mom and I climbed to a hill temple to watch the sun peacefully drift off behind the jungled mountains beyond. Unfortunately we were met by battling loudspeaker sets belching out Thai pop songs, British boy bands and the shouts of various MCs. It was Loi Kratong holiday and the old adage came back to me: “Never let a Thai near a microphone.”

Loi Kratong is actually my favourite Thai festival. Like most Thai holidays (or most Thai days in general) it is a vehicle for alcohol, firecrackers and immense quantities of food. But there are some ceremonial aspects that I really enjoy. Kratongs are floating slabs of banana tree trunk festooned with flowers, incense sticks, and candles. Each person launches one into the water as a gesture of good luck, adorning them with coins, locks of hair and bits of fingernail (my additions of dried foot skin and nose-pickings no doubt ensured an extra portion of godly consideration). Those revellers whose vital facial features are left unmarred by the maniacal use of fireworks are treated to the spectacle of thousands of luminous kratongs drifting under the full moon.

Our last week together was spent in Cambodia, dodging burn victims and amputees at the spectacular Angkor Wat. The temples there are on the scale of the great pyramids, with dozens occupying the jungles near Siem Reap. We spent 3 days climbing through temples and dining in old colonial restaurants.

From Thailand to Cambodia, you sink a couple notches on the human development scale. Cambodia is demonstratively poor with the penises of myriad snot-crusted little tykes poking out from under their only piece of clothing: mud-caked, soccer jerseys (the penis count has been adopted as a development assessment tool by the UN).

Other appendages are in short supply after years of landmine use. You face the occasional limp-by begging by those with deficient limbs, seared skin and other aches and pains. The infected, the flipper-armed, the limbless – they are well represented in Cambodia. Conversely, in Thailand disabled people are seldom seen because your average Thai family keeps the retarded brother tied up behind the pigsty. (Integration of the disabled is, unfortunately, not a prominent feature of current Thai community values.)

After Siem Reap we spent a few days in Cambodia’s capital. Phnom Phen, is a bustling city where French colonial mansions (now mostly posh NGO offices – your tax dollars at work) share dirt roads with floorless shacks and barefoot kids playing soccer. Most tourists in Phnom Phen come to see the killing fields and other memorials of the years of genocide and oppression that Cambodians endured less than 25 years ago.

More than 2 million people (1/4 of the population) died under the Khmer Rouge regime, some merely for the crimes of having soft hands, wearing eyeglasses or possessing the ability to speak a few words of a foreign language. Families and neighbours were turned against each other as the Khmer Rouge launched their plan to build an agrarian utopia, cut off from the rest of the world.

We visited the local killing fields (the country is full of them) in Phnom Phen. We stood over mass graves and learned of the brutalities people were forced to commit and endure. For example, Khmer Rouge soldiers unlucky enough to get “tree duty’ at the killing fields, spent their time gripping panicky babies and toddlers by their ankles and thwacking them against the killing tree until their skulls were sufficiently smashed. Then the bodies could join their parents in the mass graves, just metres from the rice fields beyond.

We like to think that it has nothing to do with us, but four years of carpet bombing (killing 50,000) by the US’ secret war levelled more that just the playing field. People became desperate for change and xenophobia and nationalism ripped through the country. This laid the seeds for the nightmare to follow. (Along with several other causes, but why not simplistically blame the convenient yanks? Try it, its fun!).

We met a few people on our travels. Most notable was our taxi driver who, after we invited him to lunch, announced that he had found the mother he never had (his parents died during Khmer Rouge) and that he would never forget the humanity and fortune that our buffet lunch had brought into his life. After my Mom had flown back to Canada, he invited me home to bellyache about his flooded shack, meet his kids and surprisingly fat wife, and profess his deep endearment and gratitude to my mother and myself. It was great to be received into his home, but he grew into a bit of a lonely puppy – our conversations consisting of reasons why my mother and I are special and how our relationship had transformed his existence. I forget his name.

Another encounter sticks out: the dowdy missionary sisters who introduced themselves to us in a Phnom Phen café. There really is a uniform for missionary women, isn’t there? I imagined their closets to bear 30 Laura Ashley dresses of slightly variable prints. They begin their days yanking each other’s hair into sensible clips and debating over the turtle-necked brown floral with blue background or the more daring button-front blue floral with brown background. But they were nice enough to hand us a couple of terrifying, flower-covered pamphlets warning that Satan’s trickery is afoot and reminding us that broad-mindedness is hell’s plaything.

So time with my mummy was pretty special and fun. And we have great photos. Unfortunately my mom looks like she just removed a lime from her mouth in most of them. Since my father died and I realised we had few photos together, I have tried to capture my Mom and I in a worthy pose. I will keep trying. Of course there is a fantastic one of Mom and our taxi driver at lunch. But then when posed with me at the same restaurant, her expression seems to say, “I just sat in something wet.”