DANCE BEAUTIFULLY by Bonnie J. Rough
When I returned to my newspaper job in southwest Washington after three weeks in Thailand, people kept asking me, “When are you going to write about your trip?” And I kept saying something I thought was firm and even a little rude, so they wouldn’t ask again: “Well, I’m kind of savoring it for myself for a little while.” In other words, When I’m good and ready.
In other words, I have no idea how.
I felt there was no place I could start. Nothing from the trip I could really do justice to in a personal column, and nothing I knew deeply enough for a prize-winning feature. Three weeks in a land where I didn’t know the language, the clothing, the street names, the automobiles, the road rules, the schools, the religion, the ethnic groups, the professions, the flora, the food . . . I knew I had only brushed over Thailand, my shoes barely scudding the landing surface of the place before I left. When I quit the newspaper months later, I still hadn’t published a word about my trip. I felt hands-down unentitled to write about it.
I still do.
Tonight I am so tired. I am tired way in my guts and sick of walking and my forehead muscles hurt from holding my eyes open and still we keep at the Bangkok streets. Sleep, oh. But we have to go to Patpong, have to see the night market and all the touts selling girly shows with their flyers, sketches of little stick figures doing sexy stuff. I walk through the stalls. All I can think of are the beaches. The beaches are saved for last on our trip. The blue blue blue in my guidebook’s pictures, the sparkle. Forget about the museum stuff, forget about trekking in the Northland and bamboo rafting and whatever we have planned. Forget about visiting Yui’s family in their hot dry farm village. Beaches. The beaches. Blue cool, sandy naps.
Walking through the stalls. Fiancé holds my hand, says Soon, soon. I buy a shirt. Walk on. Want to lie down on the pavement and cry. Sleep, please. Finally Dan says Hey, ok. Let’s get you home to bed. And then he says, Uh oh, kiddo – look. And there she stands. My first ever. I stop dead, can hardly move. She is a low shadowy bulk at the edge of the alley, and her mahout tugs her ear. She takes a few lumbering steps toward me. Without speaking, Dan hands the mahout 20 baht and the mahout hands me a bag of bumpy little cucumbers. Curling her strong scratchy trunk-tip, Proi accepts them from me one by one. Dan pays again. I feed her another bagful.
What’s it worth for a sorry tourist to feed a baby elephant on the city streets? I know elephants want to be in the woods, working. I know logging has just been banned in Thailand, and without work, elephants are going hungry. So their mahouts charge tourists to feed the animals. What’s it worth? What’s it worth for me to run my hand over the tall-standing bristles on her forehead, to remember even now that stiff grassy feeling and the whish of her tangled eyelashes brushing the hot heavy air? I don’t know. I’m going to go back to America and remember the elephants I touched. Elephants are going to stay here and wish for work. I don’t know what it’s worth. Can I say, though, that no matter how sleepy I got, I would stay awake forever if it meant I could crawl into an elephant’s ear, find a cradle in her elephant brain, and dream the elephant’s dreams?
It’s only a mildly big deal to be a Westerner in Bangkok; mildly bigger if you’re a Westerner who lives in Bangkok. That’s the story with Dekker, Dan’s high school basketball pal who lives there now with his Thai wife, Yui. After Dekker graduated from Port Townsend High in Washington State, he decided that a Victorian seaport on the Olympic Peninsula wasn’t the best place for a guy who wanted to get a degree in Asian Studies. So he applied to Bangkok University and left the States. (Having a mom who grew up a missionary kid in Laos made the choice a little more natural for him.) Now he works in Bangkok, baby on the way.
When Dan and I flew into Bangkok a year ago, it was my first visit to Asia. The streets . . . dogs, cats, vendors, vendors, vendors, all times of day, all times of night (bright white, goods glittering), and the people . . . my wonder . . . how to?
I couldn’t see the ethnic mix Dekker had developed an eye for. To me, everyone was Thai. But over five years, Dekker had learned to tell the Chinese from the Thais, the Cambodians from the Vietnamese, the Burmese from the Laotians from the Koreans from the Malaysians . . .
I thought the people on the city streets must have found Dekker amazing – a tall, strong basketball player, white, unabashedly American, and fluent in Thai. Whenever we were out together, he avoided speaking Thai – I still don’t know why. He liked knowing just what the salesman or the taxi driver was saying, but he seemed to feel he would give away something too precious, too fun, if he spoke back. I think he did this, “played tourist,” when he was with Dan and me, because we looked so much like a gaggle of backpackers lost from Khao Sanh Road, the center of revelry for Western backpackers in Bangkok, the safe haven from the unknowns of the big Asian city. The frenzied mix of booze and sex and techno and cheap deals on everything from noodles to braids on Khao Sanh is created by Westerners colliding in the intoxication of adventure and the desire for home. Any white person found far from there in Bangkok either lives in the city or is badly lost. Ill-mannered taxi drivers can spot such prey easily, and sometimes Dekker let himself get ripped off, just for the fun of it. He’d tell us while it was happening, “He just charged me 50 baht too much.” Dekker seemed to like the feeling that by understanding perfectly, he could silently fool someone at the very moment he was being charged too much for a ride home. It drove me crazy. It seemed like such a privilege to have what he did: fluency, versatility, a trained eye in an unfamiliar world . . . I couldn’t imagine letting go the thin grasp I had on this buzzing culture. I kept barely afloat. Before our trip, Dan had shown me how to place my fingertips together and wai when greeting someone, but the Thai Airways stewardess waied so quickly as I boarded the plane that I missed my chance – and I felt guilty about it until a long layover in Tokyo made me too tired to remember my first little misstep, that first lost chance to do as the Thais do.
The next night, we are on the freezing bus to Lampang. Past midnight, we try to sleep, but the air conditioning is arctic. Dekker knew it would be this way. He wore jeans and a sweatshirt. It’s ninety degrees and muggy outside.
Three in the morning. The village of Thoen. The bus blats us out its side. Yui hugs her mom, under a buzzing street light, and her brother Tom.
Around the corner is the morning market. This is not my idea of morning, but the stalls bustle. Oh, the beds of color, of flesh, of shapes and smells! Even now, at three a.m., my camera hangs around my neck. I peer into a red plastic bin teeming with scraping, scrabbling cockroaches. Yui’s mom poses, smiling, behind the bugs. Yui says her mother loves them. You squeeze them for their juice in a very special dish.
They are shopping for our stay. We’ll be in Pha Pang, their little peanut-farming village, for only a few days, but they buy heaps of green stalky things, hard green papaya for spicy salad made of the rind, peppers, peppers, peppers red and magenta and green and orange and yellow . . . And lemongrass and spices, rice and noodles, tomatoes, brown onions, garlic, potatoes lots of potatoes, chicken and eggs and cabbage and coconut. No roaches. I wander the aisles. The vendors stop staring at me only to stare at Dekker or Dan. Or Yui and Tom and their mom, the locals who brought these unusual visitors. I can’t tell whether to hide my alternating delight and disgust with the sale items; how much reaction would they like to see? At last I get up the guts to ask this pretty round-cheeked lady with shiny red lipstick and a flowered apron if it would be okay for me to take her picture. She smiles one of the most gentle smiles I can remember from my trip, her eyes making little half-moons of goodness. In my camera frame, she stands just to the right of a giant pink pig’s head hung upside-down from a metal hook. See how fresh! One giant-lily ear brushes a bright red slab of meat spread over the woman’s blue plastic tablecloth.
What does it take to own a place? What, ultimately, adds up to entitlement to speak of a place, to describe a place, to actually think something about a place? We seem to think being born somewhere is entitlement. Having lots of relatives or ancestors from someplace is a kind of entitlement. And then there are visits – unentitled, random visits from random people in the world to random places. Places chosen because they were recommended by a bus driver or because they looked lovely in a restaurant poster.
Tom is just learning to drive, and he is driving us home from the market in the pickup tonight, over jouncy roads while his mom shrieks and screeches at him, terrified with every hard bump that we’ll plunge into the vegetation flashing close and white in the headlights. Someone yammers on the radio. In my half-dreams, I believe I understand Thai. I wake up a little and tell Dan that I understood that last part on the radio. He pats my head. But I swear I did. Some government guy talking about international relations, finding warm places among strangers.
People who think visiting world places is important seem to divide visitors into classes. The higher class, the golden folk, the wanderjahr-entitled, are the “travelers.” These are the people who sacrifice life’s superficialities, who want travels to be hard, who don’t use soap because it’s not environmentally sound to do so, who ride in buses and boxcars only when it won’t do to walk. These people wouldn’t be caught dead parasailing over the beach. They are the proud twenty-year-olds with matted hair, the ones who say “oh, just a tiny little while – ten weeks” when asked how much time they spent in Tuvalu. These are the ones who know because they have been there, the ones who write poetry but don’t photograph, who love being broke because then they have to work a little while picking bananas in order to party on. They have shit in all the world’s assortment of toilets and they have gone without fresh water for days and they have eaten wiggly grubs in the Aussie outback and they’ve puked in beach bars all over the South Pacific. These are the real deal. These are total world citizens, true travelers.
It is morning; we’ve slept upstairs on firm mattresses over rich teak floors, mosquito nets arching over us like royal silk. When I go to the window to spit my toothpaste and scatter the chickens below, I see herb-stalks I don’t recognize carefully arranged, drying on the roof. Downstairs, they give me rice and chicken and fruit, and it seems the food never stops coming. I try ant eggs in a spicy fishy noodle dish. I get used to drinking from the same wooden ladle as everyone else, and I discover how you can crave a handful of khao niaw, even when you’re stuffed. Sticky rice sticky rice sticky rice . . . Dan and I say it so often it becomes part of the buzz of passing motorbikes, part of the whine of flies.
“Sawai,” Yui’s mom says to me after I wash my hair in the cinder-blocked bathroom, squatting low as I pour dog-bowls of cool water down my back, wondering if Tom can see me naked through the wide-spaced blocks. “Sawai,” she says again. Yui tells me, “Beautiful. She says you’re beautiful.” And when I want to say Thank you, Yui’s mom shows me how to bend a little, touch my fingertips together and lower my eyelids, utter strange words that sound beautiful like beginnings, that trail off like dust behind water buffalo. Khawp-khun kaaaaa . . .
Then there’s a drop to the lowly class, the trinket-buying sellouts, the pathetically clean group with sunburns and cameras and suitcases with wheels: Tourists. These people drive out to the suburbs after their plane lands at the end of their trip. They have rents or mortgages to pay someplace and jobs that last longer than the picking season. They have kids sometimes, the sort that play video games and eat Pizza Hut in the school cafeteria and buy pre-packaged foods such as Chex Mix and Twizzlers from vending machines. Tourists read travel guides – carefully, to be sure – on the plane trip across the ocean. But no matter how they try to ready themselves, they feel unprepared for the chunk of Earth they have chosen to bite off this holiday. They know they will flounder, feel lost and afraid and tired and hungry for the first few days of their trip – and this isn’t the part they look forward to. It’s the part after they crave – the part where it becomes a challenge to keep clean, sudsing in funny little bucket-baths and looking for laundry service on hot little islands because the underwear long ago went above and beyond and not wearing underwear is not an option. The tourist sees these silly challenges as charming, part of the fun of it.
Then I hear the music, a folky tinny sawy band blaring from something. Yui tells me the party is beginning. Today, three village boys are becoming monks. It is that time of year; March is full of lucky days. I grab my camera and my little voice recorder. (I have realized that sounds bring back memories for me, work like time machines, so I wanted to bring home as many as I could this trip; I have trouble remembering even my most startling days in Australia, and it’s because my memories run mute, like film without a sound track.)
I remember watching a young man chat with a couple of Swedish girls at Nong Khai, the Thai-Lao border station. He let them gush about Khao Sanh Road and the beaches down south. Then he said, “For me, it’s way too easy to travel in Thailand. You can get a bus or a train or a plane and go wherever you want. You don’t even have to hitchhike. That’s why I’m going to Laos. Less developed. More culture. More authentic.”
When I heard him speak, I didn’t look him in the eye and defend my choice to spend nearly all of my vacation in Thailand. I didn’t say “What do you mean ‘authentic’?” or “So this is about you, then? Not the place?” Instead, I stood silent, staring down at my squeaky-clean Tevas. I felt shamed; it seemed right to agree with him, but I was nothing like him.
This is something I have trouble admitting; I only recently discovered it myself: I am not a traveler. I’m a tourist. Please do not tell my friends.
I stand at the edge of the big house, at the front of the little general store Yui’s family runs from the porch, next to the old-fashioned gas pump – the kind you crank with your hand. My camera is ready. My recorder is on, propped high in my pocket, inhaling the little wisps of happy music floating up the red road. The parade is here, almost here! It seems Pha Pang’s 500 villagers must all be out in the street already, packed in a walking, dancing crowd before a line of trucks. Monks-to-be sit in pickup beds beneath bright sun shades, clasping lotus blossoms between their fingertips. One truck carries the band on a high stage, loudspeakers honking melodies in all directions.
Oh, I’m so white and such a girl and curious about the world mainly because I am clueless about everything. I speak English, yes, and then barely French, but nothing terrific like Gaelic or Tagalog. I’m one of those annoying people who have played the game – the place-dropping game. “Oh, yeah – that’s true about Australia, you know. They do drive on the left side of the street. I saw it happening because I was there for a while in college when I lived there for five months and fifteen days and twelve hours in an apartment all by myself to get the full experience of being on my own in a new place and to become a better person, someone whom others would admire.” Yep. I’m one of those people. I have made the weird equation between touring the world and being cool.
Between travelers and tourists, then, I’ve noticed that we take measures, draw still more lines. We try to work out what “counts” as traveling. Often the verdict seems time-related. How long does a vacation have to be before it becomes “travels”? Usually more than a month, I gather, which is why I must be, in the end, a mere poseur; all but one of my visits to other continents (only three) have come in under a month. The only exception is the semester in Australia. And I was sure proud of myself then; I could say I lived in a foreign country, and I did say it, all the time. Just like I kept saying “I’m a reporter. I’m a reporter,” when I got to cover city council meetings after college. It sounded like more than I was.
I step into the middle of the road and focus my camera on the women at the front of the parade. They hold their elbows cocked square and twist their wrists, gently fanning their flat-held hands in time with the music. Focus. Snap. Zoom. Snap. They’re so close! It’s like the elephant! What a miracle to be so close to something so magical! And all of them laugh, harder and harder, it seems, and then there is a moment I don’t remember. How did I have time to string my camera around my neck? The recorder, so carefully propped before, slides deep into my pocket and begins to tape the rustling of my shorts.
Australia was something I could really own, I thought. Back in the States, I bought a beautiful map of the country and hung it on my apartment wall, over the dining table. I promised myself I would only hang maps of places I could really justify a claim to. So I added a second map of Australia: “Australia’s natural resources.” And a political map of the world, because anybody can get away with a map of the world; no one expects you to have covered the whole thing – not yet. Then a geographic map of the world, because there was blank wall above the couch and I couldn’t really justify putting up the New Zealand map because I only spent ten days there, and then only on the North Island. And finally a laminated map of the U.S. over my bed, with a push pin in the plasticky suburb where I grew up.
In Southeast Asia, I bought a dingy map of Laos with cool native script and soft edges. Of course I haven’t unrolled it. Should I admit? I spent just a single night on that side of the Thai-Lao border, in Vientiane. And not even cramped on the sidewalk or snoring in the sand beside the Mekong. I snoozed with Dan in a white-and-yellow bed-and-breakfast chamber with wicker chairs and smooth-spinning ceiling fans.
Farang! Farang! “Foreigner,” they all cry, pushing me to the front of the parade, demanding that I lead, insisting that I dance. A hand reaches up and crams a straw hat onto my head. Two more hands cup my face, smearing wet baby powder over my cheeks, my nose, my forehead, patting me with such soft, wet palms. Men grab my hands, stuff little glasses into them. One pours Beer Chang, the beer with the elephant label, and a woman smacks ice into the glass, and for a moment I think, “But it’s 11 in the morning!” and then the other glass is full of rice whiskey.
So Australia, it seemed, was the only thing I could really lay claim to, discuss with authority, write with any entitlement. But then some real travelers, and real travel zines, and real travel writers, helped me to see that I was at a university, and anyway Australia is an English-speaking country, and it’s developed and not just developed but totally Western.
I suppose it’s true. Who better to write about a foreign country but native sons and daughters? Why read Rough on India when you could read Rushdie? Why read someone like me, a mass-produced middle-class American, on Trinidad when you could read Naipaul? Me, I can write smooth suburban roads with evenly-spaced street lamps and evenly-spaced SUVs.
The women make me dance, make me move my arms, push me to the front every time I try to melt into the group, push me to the front and yell that I should lead, and dance, and dance, and lead, and we dance over the bridge and past the paddies, up to the wat on the hill, just one of our stops in this three-temple town, and in the courtyard under a canopy of waxy round leaves, as the neophytes step inside to pray, we dance and drink, and everyone wants a turn with me. The beer is cool and the breeze is clean and I close my eyes to feel my wrists turning in the air. For a moment, I believe I dance beautifully.
So what do I do with myself? Maybe I should just stay home, put away my pen. Maybe I should try to travel harder, better, make a soap-shunning attempt to measure up. Or I could quit trying to fake it.
If you want to, you can read me: a suburban white girl with all America’s “privileges,” a bourgeois-educated brat with no business saying a word about anything, but insistent on talking all the same.
I guess I have to ask: Is it possible to appreciate the garden-variety tourist? Could she offer something that we normally feel too responsible to enjoy? The tourist doesn’t have time to dig into the dark side of things, so perhaps she preserves a notion of the world as a beautiful place.
One thing I noticed when we finally got to the beach: the shallows always look lovelier than the deep.
They laugh and hold my hands. I have never felt more white. And I have never felt more celebrated. They laugh harder when I pause my laughing, when I concentrate on dancing well, when I sip my icy beer, when I refuse more whiskey, when I dance, when an old man dances with me, when an old woman dances with me, when the little boys run past me shrieking, they laugh and hold my hands.
Bonnie J. Rough lives in Iowa City. “Dance Beautifully” is her first published essay in a national literary magazine.