War of Hearts and Minds

June 1973-Sept. 1973, Thai Language Lessons from Noy Noy’s family lived in Tat Panome, fifty kilometers south of the Salaglang where she worked. Tat Panome had its own high school, but several students from Tat Panome commuted to a larger high school in the provincial capital, and Noy rode to her job with these students on a rot-sawng-teo. When she first arrived at the Salaglang, she was wearing her navy blue skirt hitched high above her knees as she had in Bangkok. After other government workers began to gossip about her appearance, she changed to a fashionable midi look, but that set her apart again. She said she really just wanted to maintain her independence from the unwritten dress code which dictated that female government employees wear their skirts cut precisely just to the knee. Noy was well aware that her mother wanted her to become the wife of a jownatee who lived for his next promotion, but she’d only temporarily succumbed to her mother’s plan while deciding on another. And then, by whimsical irony, her first suitor became the Provincial Protector-a heavy drinking, crude talking communist suppression policeman-who relished his position of power. The policeman wasn’t the type of suitor her mother had had in mind, but he was a family friend, and his status couldn’t be denied. He’d even been to America for training. Some said the policeman had a wife in Bangkok, but he was living as a bachelor in government provided quarters in a compound adjoining the Salaglang. He had a cook who prepared his meals, and he started inviting Noy to join him for lunch. She’d sometimes accept these invitations, but, as nearly as I could tell, she considered the policeman a crusty and somewhat risqué uncle type even while he was trying overtly to seduce her. It seemed like a dangerous game. The policeman seemed like the type of guy who often got what he wanted. Noy was also making friends with government officials closer to her own age. She met Jiawn, the softhearted manager of the Community Development Department Office, and she met a jownatee named Yim who’d just learned her boyfriend had deserted her to marry a farawng. Together, Noy and Yim decided they ought to meet the farawng who worked for Jiawn . I was at the office returning a transit I’d tried, and failed, to make work (see chapter entitled The Irrigation Project). My Peace Corps tour was pretty much over. I’d been unable to justify an extension, and I had only two more months before going home for good. And yes, it’s true, dear reader. I was the farawng whom Noy and Yim had spotted. Back then, I had the red, red hair Thai women seemed to love. I didn’t really have red hair, and it was beginning to recede, but my hair was bleached blond by the sun, and the women called it red, and they always said red twice when describing my hair. Noy and Yim could have never approached me directly, and so, when they saw me at the café, they asked Jiawn to make introductions. Then they all sat down at my table, and Yim began to tell the sad story about her ex-boyfriend. “We graduated from high school together,” she began. “We planned to marry after college. I went to school in Bangkok while he had an opportunity to study in New York City, but our plan to get married didn’t change even though it was impossible for us to see or talk to each other. He wrote me every week for four whole years as if we were still lovers, but then, just before I graduated, he wrote to tell me he was married and was a father.” “He didn’t want me to be distressed,” she continued, “so he’d kept me from knowing the truth. He knew, if I learned he’d gotten married, I would have become distraught and might have even dropped out of college. He didn’t want me to do that, so he waited until I was about to graduate before giving me the news. Were it not for his compassion, I might never have received my diploma and been able to start my career.” Yim means smile in Thai, and Yim smiled as she told her story. She acted as if she was fortunate to have received the bad news so suddenly and irrevocably with just one letter. It was hard for me to believe she really felt no ill will towards this cad who’d been deceiving her for years. Yim wasn’t unattractive. Wasn’t it possible or even probable that she would have found another boyfriend had she not been being so loyal to this jerk in New York City? Of course, I didn’t say that. It wasn’t my place to pierce her bubble of fantasy. Then she changed the subject abruptly. “You can visit me at my office!” she said enthusiastically. “I can be your language tutor!” She probably didn’t know that, although male Peace Corps volunteers had been working out of the Salaglang for six years by this time, none,at least to the best of my knowledge, had ever socialized with female government workers much less with female jownatees. While Yim was trying to ease the memory of four years of romantic duplicity by her ex-boyfriend in New York, Noy was looking for a pragmatic way to avoid the policeman’s advances. I was much younger than her policeman. I was tall and slim while he was overweight and balding. I also had that red, red hair, and it seemed a shame to her that only uneducated bargirls should have access to farawngs. She saw no reason not to change that. “I can teach Thai too,” she chimed in. “You can come to my office. You can visit me on Saturdays too.” She said this, and then she jumped from her chair, ran behind the counter of the café, and opened the refrigerator to see what might be inside. She ran back to give her report. “There’s Fanta,” she smiled. “There’s also Sprite and Coke.” She was acting stupid, and her act, as nearly as I could determine, was meant for me. The next day I went to visit Noy as she was leaving for the policeman’s quarters for lunch. “You’re invited too,” she told me, knowing full well that I wasn’t, but knowing I’d come along if I had any interest in her. I went along and watched her play with the policeman as his cook spooned out the rice. “I can’t eat all that,” she complained, spooning most of her portion back and leaving just a couple bites on her plate. She obviously didn’t get her energy from food. “Do you want to see the Thai boxing match on Saturday,” the policeman asked. “I hate boxing,” she retorted. “I hate violence. And why are you bombing Nah Kaa?” “That’s just jungle out there where we drop bombs,” he told her. “Nobody’s there but communists.” He talked to her as if she were a child. He seemed to enjoy her impetuous nature. “There might be villagers out there hunting,” Noy pressed her case. “When you drop your bombs, you kill them.” “War is war,” he said abruptly, ending a topic of conversation which, in his mind, had nothing to do with children. Noy stopped going to the policeman’s quarters for lunch as I started seeing her daily. She started out language lessons and also seemed to feel it was her role to teach me nuances of Thai culture. “If you greet a young woman by asking her where she’s going,” she told me, “and if she wants you to know she’s spoken for, she’ll tell you she’s going to visit her family. If she says she’s going to visit her family, don’t pursue her. No one gets hurt that way.” After a year-and-a-half of finding my social life in the bars of Nakohn Panome, it seemed strange for this diminutive woman, who was violating a longstanding social more herself by offering one-on-one friendship with a male farawng, to be advising me on how to meet women who weren’t bargirls. It also seemed strange that she was trying to help me adapt to life in Nakohn Panome just as my tour was drawing to a close, especially when she’d been in Bangkok for the past five years attending college.