Ho-Ming So Denduangrudee: FAIRYTALE • Cleaver Magazine

Ho-Ming So Denduangrudee
FAIRYTALE

Once upon a time, one of my children assured me that “America” was not just the name of a country but the name of the world. My children are young and have no memory of Thailand, where I grew up and where my mother still lives. So, I organize a propaganda tour for them.

Summer is monsoon season. Undeterred, I pack our schedule with Grandma, aunties, mangos, beaches, monkeys, and elephants. My mother loves her grandchildren, but she’s seen the elephants and the beaches and eaten all the best mangoes. She needs no propaganda. She’ll see us when we are in Bangkok.

The monsoon charges on. The rain and cold render the pool unappealing. Outside, tiny frogs, smaller than my thumbnail, materialize all over the resort grounds. They’re on every pathway, desperately hopping to try to make it somewhere. The grass? My children are fascinated, until they realize we’re crushing them by walking the grounds. They look with regret at the mangled bodies, the size of ants. We spend the day watching television, downloaded princesses on the iPad. Moana. Raya. Snow White. Elena.

In the morning, our family takes a long tail boat ride in misty, light, unending rain. Unusual because the monsoon is torrents. The monsoon I knew poured for hours, then stopped just as abruptly. Things have changed since I was little. Things keep changing.

It’s just us and the boatman, no guide. Some years ago, China started the Belt and Road Initiative, a competitor to the western loans and aid money offered by western-backed international financial institutions like the World Bank. Belt and Road provides developing countries technology and infrastructure support—money to build roads, architects and engineers to design factories, guaranteed trade relationships, and more ways to make money and create jobs. The World Bank itself has assessed the efficacy of the Belt and Road Initiative, which runs across 149 countries. In totality, it has reduced costs of global trade by up to 2.2%, and can boost country trade flows by up to 4.1%. Like the World Bank, the Belt and Road Initiative has often come under fire for causing human rights violations and damaging the environment.

On the opposite side of where we embarked is the Laotian riverbank. Thick, squat green forest vegetation abruptly ends in the concrete walls of a Special Economic Zone marked with a long, cement sign and red script in Chinese, English, and Lao. The boatman says that they are producing pharmaceuticals. It’s eerily quiet, but construction continues adjacent, where tall casinos and apartment buildings are being put up. The boat man politely answers all my questions about what it’s been like since the zone has been in place. It was lively before COVID, and he’s confident it will be lively again.

“There is so much opportunity on the other side,” he says. He adds an extra, unsolicited tidbit. “Many girls for sale there,” he says. “Beautiful, pale ones from Viet Nam.”

The boat man nods, and I think it’s inconsequential. Maybe it’s the rhythm of the river, rocking the boat. Maybe he’s telling me I’ve done well, marrying a foreigner. Maybe he’s telling me nothing. The air is brisk and damp.

On the Thai side of the sloped embankment, perched up high, is a makeshift church with a rudimentary wooden cross. The trawlers parked below it are painted bright blue, teal and green. They’re rusted, paint peeling. The signs of life are matter of fact and resigned. Laundry lines on deck, faded, painted over flowerpots on windowsills, and lounge chairs laid out gently suggesting stagnation, maybe an unintended permanence by happenstance. On one, a middle-aged man in a wife beater, cigarette hanging out of his mouth, is stirring a pot over a stove. The sides of many boats have Hangul characters. One has an English sign in a window that says, in brown red like dried blood; God is Love.

I look at my daughters and they are peaceful and disinterested. I look at my daughters and they are beautiful, quiet and pale. We tip the boat man when we disembark.

The resort driver picks us up at the pier and we ask if we can stop at the small town of Chiang Saen to see the local wet market and the remnants of stupas and the old city wall. An elderly couple run a double stall taking up prime real estate in front of the 7-11. They lift open a wooden board covering a blue plastic tub to show our children eels gliding and splashing. Our eldest reaches out to try to touch one.

“Ask first,” my husband says, but the old granny is already helping her try. Our youngest is more hesitant but cannot resist the commotion in the blue tub. The granny laughs with them. When we get ready to move on, she puts a bag of sweet longan fruit in one of their hands and refuses to take money. I try again and again but she won’t budge. I am unreasonably moved.

“Thank you,” my husband says. She pats him on the arm. My husband and children can only say hello and thank you and so they do and steer me on.

Ho-Ming So Denduangrudee lives in Truckee, CA.