Schoolgirls of the seventies muddled through childhood in the guise of one Judy Blume heroine or another (Sally J. Freedman occupying a central role), just the way girls today work through Hermione and Tris and Katniss Everdeen. If something happened to one of them that had happened to you, it meant you weren’t a freak; there was precedent. And if you could find out what they did about it, you might find your own solution, or at least learn what not to do. Through them, you could envisage an alternate existence, heroic or tragic or just more interesting than your own.
In the fall of 1993, at age twenty-two, I chose Anna Karenina. I was living in a foreign country, with little purpose other than to put myself in the way of challenge. I’d just moved to the outskirts of Chiang Mai, a small city in northern Thailand, and Anna Karenina offered an appropriate parallel. She, too, was isolated from her people. She, too, acted independently and wasn’t necessarily rewarded for it. She was a modern woman bucking expectations, and, at least I liked to believe, so was I.
I had a few thousand dollars in savings and a suitcase. My Thai, feebly informed by the GI Prep Course Language Tapes I’d listened to the summer before my move—“Where is the airfield?”; “Is it a comedy or a tragedy?”—was not a bankable asset. I didn’t know anyone and I didn’t have a job.
At least I’d picked the right country. I was thrilled to be in Thailand and dazzled by Thai culture, with its gentle appreciation of aesthetics, its spicy cuisine, and its reverence for tradition. I loved the charmingly antiquated cinematic tribute to the king, which played before the feature film in every movie house. I just needed to figure out what, if any, kind of heroine I could be in this new and very strange scenario, and then discover my storyline.
After a period of fitful acclimating to a world in which I understood approximately 4 percent of what was going on around me, I managed to land part-time work teaching English, French, and history at various schools. I found a language tutor and I found a new home on a place called the Farm—more of an untended fruit orchard than an agricultural endeavor—in a small, elevated teak house with an outdoor kitchen and a bare pipe poking out of the ground for a sink. It felt authentically Thai rather than tourist-friendly, and I even found a Thai roommate, a minuscule college student named Nai Noi. Or she found me.
Nai Noi was a “play” name meaning Sir Small; her real name, Acheeraya, meant “genius.” All Thais have an official given name, used infrequently, and a descriptive play name, like Sweet or Fat or Water Heart (which meant generous). Though she was an English major at Chiang Mai University, Nai Noi was unlike anyone I’d encountered in college. She was in her sixth year after changing majors, and she still had two years to go. She seemed to never read any of the assigned books nor did she want to read mine, rarely did homework, and didn’t once ask me for help. Having dated a student on the Princeton in Asia program a couple of years earlier, she was completely fluent in English anyway.
We weren’t alone. There were scorpions in our backyard and a large geckolike creature called a Toogaeh who lived under the eave of the roof and croaked out “Too gaeh, too gaeh, too gaeh … gaeh,” the final syllable sounding a note of weary melancholia, every night at exactly ten thirty, poking out its head to bid us good night. When I woke up my first morning there and instinctively grabbed the glass of water I’d set by the book on my nightstand, my hand tingled. I half opened an eye. Just inches from my face, my hand was pulsating within a swarm of black ants. “Get out of our water,” they said.
The ants had entered through the open wooden slats of the wall and marched in single file toward the glass alongside my bed, behind my toes, and over my pillow before plunging into my glass, pleased with the welcoming beverage I’d provided. I can’t say I welcomed them in return. It was hard to read in bed at night surrounded by the incessant movement of small shiny black creatures and even harder to fall asleep knowing of their relentless forward march, but there was no way to get rid of them in a room with open walls. They distracted me. I was reminded of a cruelty my brother Roger inflicted on me on a regular basis when we were kids: I’d be peacefully reading in bed, when, as the mood struck, he’d fling open my bedroom door, which didn’t have a proper latch, and wiggle his hand through; the peripheral movement made concentrating on the page impossible. Getting up to chase him out only compounded the interruption.
But what could be done? Killing bugs wasn’t Buddhist. If I asked Nai Noi to dispel the encroaching wilderness, she would daintily pick up the spiders that hung vertically from the shower ceiling and escort them one by one outdoors. They always came back. I learned to wrap my hand in toilet paper before flushing the toilet; its handle was inevitably teeming with ants.
It was harder to acclimate to the giant water bug who lived behind the toilet bowl. He’d come out late at night as I sat there, determinedly confronting me from the puddled floor. (Thai bathrooms did not have separate shower stalls so the floor was always wet and often sticky.) The water bug, more like a New York City rat than a cockroach, was so large you could see into his eyes and read his defiance. After flushing I would catapult off the toilet in Olympian fashion, clearing the water bug, and, panting heavily, run back to bed and my awaiting ants.
One night I snapped. Not fully aware of what I was doing, I grabbed Anna Karenina off my bed and brought it down with all my might on the water bug. I smote him. Turning on the spidery showerhead, I let the bloody remains swirl around in a wet mess until he was nothing more than a brackish veneer. I wiped the crushed limbs off my book cover. My heroine had come to the rescue.
When I looked up, there was Nai Noi, surveying me with her enormous Buddhist eyes. Murderer. One week later, sitting on the toilet, there was a second confrontation. A new water bug, even mightier than the first, was standing directly before me. I swear I could hear him say, “My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”