Farangs

This is how we count the days. June: the Germans come to the Island—football cleats, big T-shirts, thick tongues—speaking like spitting. July: the Italians, the French, the British, the Americans. The Italians like pad thai, its affinity with spaghetti. They like light fabrics, sunglasses, leather sandals. The French like plump girls, rambutans, disco music, baring their breasts. The British are here to work on their pasty complexions, their penchant for hashish. Americans are the fattest, the stingiest of the bunch. They may pretend to like pad thai or grilled prawns or the occasional curry, but twice a week they need their culinary comforts, their hamburgers and their pizzas. They’re also the worst drunks. Never get too close to a drunk American. August brings the Japanese. Stay close to them. Never underestimate the power of the yen. Everything’s cheap with imperial monies in hand and they’re too polite to bargain. By the end of August, when the monsoon starts to blow, they’re all consorting, slapping each other’s backs, slipping each other drugs, sleeping with each other, sipping their liquor under the pink lights of the Island’s bars. By September they’ve all deserted, leaving the Island to the Aussies and the Chinese, who are so omnipresent one need not mention them at all.

Ma says, ‘Pussy and elephants. That’s all these people want.’ She always says this in August, at the season’s peak, when she’s tired of farangs running all over the Island, tired of finding used condoms in the motel’s rooms, tired of guests complaining to her in five languages. She turns to me and says, ‘You give them history, temples, pagodas, traditional dance, floating markets, seafood curry, tapioca desserts, silk-weaving cooperatives, but all they really want is to ride some hulking grey beast like a bunch of wildmen and to pant over girls and to lie there half-dead getting skin cancer on the beach during the time inbetween.’

We’re having a late lunch, watching television in the motel office. The Island Network is showing Rambo: First Blood Part II again. Sylvester Stallone, dubbed in Thai, mows down an entire regiment of VC with a bow and arrow. I tell Ma I’ve just met a girl. ‘It might be love,’ I say. ‘It might be real love, Ma. Like Romeo and Juliet love.’

Ma turns off the television just as John Rambo is about to fly a chopper to safety.

She tells me it’s just my hormones. She sighs and says, ‘Oh no, not again. Don’t be so naive,’ she says. ‘I didn’t raise you to be stupid. Are you bonking one of the guests? You better not be bonking one of the guests. Because if you are, if you’re bonking one of the guests, we’re going to have to bleed the pig. Remember, luk, we have an agreement.’

I tell her she’s being xenophobic. I tell her things are different this time. But Ma just licks her lips and says once more that if I’m bonking one of the guests, I can look forward to eating Clint Eastwood curry in the near future. Ma’s always talking about killing my pig. And though I know she’s just teasing, she says it with such zeal and a peculiar glint in her eyes that I run out to the pen to check on the swine.