These emissaries from the natural world were telling me something: I wasn’t really cut out for the Farm. I loved living there, but not as my former urbanite self, as someone new, someone who did things I didn’t do. In Thailand, I climbed a mountain, learned to motorcycle, and accidentally ate durian, the dread “stinky fruit.” I crossed the border into forbidden Burma. I even ended up riding a donkey and a camel, Thalia Zepatos–style, and an elephant too. Being off the path didn’t always come easily. Sometimes I would ride around town on my motorbike, running unnecessary errands, just to feel like I had someone to meet or somewhere to go. I’d stop at a newsstand to read as much of the International Herald Tribune as I possibly could on the rack without feeling shamed into buying it, something I’d budgeted to do twice a week, making sure to get the weekend edition, with its movie and book reviews. I’d head to the library at the Association of American Alumni, where they had three-week-old copies of the Sunday New York Times. At night, I read my comfort books, hauled across the globe from New York. Hello, home culture.
As much as I was getting out of the experience, I wasn’t always sure Thailand wanted me there. One night on my way home to the Farm, an angry water buffalo came careening down my lane of the highway, against traffic, bent on mowing me down. It felt like an unfortunate metaphor, the natural world telling me, “Watch out. You’re going the wrong way.” On another occasion, a full-size municipal bus turned straight onto me as I puttered en route to a local guesthouse for a twenty-cent passion fruit shake. My motorbike was thrown against a telephone pole, the front tire somehow landing parallel to the road, squashed beneath one of the bus’s front wheels. Everyone on board was abuzz at the site of a damaged foreigner, pointing and gaping out the windows. Physically, I was fine. But I felt like an idiot for ending up under a bus, making a spectacle of myself in front of a crowd of people who surely knew better.
My very presence in Thailand felt inherently offensive despite a constant effort to avoid offense. I didn’t tell anyone, for example, what I really thought about ghosts, which Thais take seriously, building small wooden “spirit houses” outside every residence and office building so the ghosts will elect to stay there rather than wander into human territory. Despite such precautions, ghosts occasionally do come inside and cause trouble. Spring semester, a ghost moved into the dorm room of one of Nai Noi’s classmates, Oi (Sugarcane). “The first night the ghost just lay quietly in the corner, but on the second night, she leaned over my bed,” Oi confided. “She was crying and whispering my name.” Apparently, that’s all it took for Oi and her roommate to get the hell out of there, leaving the ghost with a spacious double to herself. Oi temporarily moved into our house until the university could relocate her into a ghost-free dorm. The only one who didn’t seem understanding was me, and I was teased for my obtuseness on the matter.
I regularly found new ways to draw attention to my ignorance. For weeks, I helpfully told shopkeepers who were tending to other customers, “Don’t worry—I can wait.” The inevitable response was baffled silence. It turned out I was using the wrong tone and was in fact saying, “Don’t worry, I can penis.” On another occasion, as I gathered my clothes to have them cleaned and folded by a local laundry, as I’d been doing since I’d arrived in Thailand, Nai Noi recoiled in horror.
“You can’t, you can’t…” she said in a strangled voice. I stared at her, awaiting enlightenment. “Underwear,” she finally sputtered. “You can’t give them your underwear.”
My underwear? I knew my underwear wasn’t clean at that moment. But what I didn’t know was that in Thailand, women’s underwear is never clean. It is by its very nature a foul and despoiled thing, and can never, ever be handled by anyone other than the woman who wears it. Women’s underwear was dangerous just as women were dangerous—helpless and yet dangerous—and helplessly dangerous.
What kind of heroine was I, anyway? In my own small-scale Anna Karenina style, I, too, was trying to act independently but inadvertently defying social norms. Everywhere I went, people asked about my husband. Where is he?, they needed to know, with the implied, How could he have let you come here by yourself? I lied about him since he didn’t exist, even contemplating wearing a fake wedding ring, as many women did while abroad. But I didn’t want to pretend I was something I wasn’t, and I didn’t appreciate the suggestion that a wedding ring made me inherently less unnerving. A wedding ring also seemed to shut off any prospect of future romance, which I held on to with dwindling hope.
My Vronsky was nowhere to be found. Moving abroad, I’d expected to meet other young college graduates keen on adventure. Instead I met people fleeing bad marriages, on the prowl for subservient Thai wives or underage sex partners, pedophiles and misfits, missionaries and teachers who hadn’t succeeded at teaching at home. Everyone had something to escape and someone to exploit. One night after a Thai kickboxing match, a bunch of us went to a bar catering to expats and were immediately surrounded by prostitutes. They dove into the laps of every middle-aged white man, giggling and fawning with sly expertise. My presence was superfluous. Just being there felt like its own kind of racist acquiescence and degradation.
Still I held on to hope that I might meet some like-minded fellow American traveler, pitifully encouraged by a psychic monk who offered to read my palm during a Thai lesson one afternoon. It was difficult to read women’s hands, he explained, because much of a good palm reading involved touch, and monks were forbidden to touch women. By his estimate, about 30 percent of the available information would be lost. Still, he leaned forward, peering at my outstretched hand. I was, he pronounced, an impatient, critical, and stubborn person. “Your life will require intense effort in the next few years,” he told me. My stomach, he emphasized, was in horrible shape; I ought to see a doctor.
“You are intelligent and artistic,” he continued, perhaps in response to my grimace. “You work with your hands, but not manual labor. You do the work of an artist.” Now this was more like it. I longed for a lover, he said delicately, yet would not find one for a long time.
“But when you do”—he smiled, curling a long pinkie nail in front of my nose—“it will be magic. No effort. Done!”
Just not yet. Everyone else I worked with at the International School seemed to be getting busy. Clive and Neil, an expat couple from Australia who taught elementary students, fed their bickery relationship with a parade of outside stimulation. Clive was bitter about being a teacher in Thailand when he was meant to be in the theater in Sydney, bitter because no matter how many he tried, he didn’t actually like Thai men, and bitter because, with his squishy physique and parsimoniousness, he wasn’t their type either. This was not a problem for his partner Neil, who looked sixteen, taught fourth grade, and liked to pick up teenage boys after work.