"Uh-huh," Rachel said knowingly.
While still in Berkeley, Martiya prepared for her time with the Dyalo as best she could. Very little guidance was typically offered to graduate students at UC Berkeley in the Department of Anthropology before they set out to do fieldwork. I spoke by telephone with Lee Cheng, who in 1967 set out from Wheeler Hall to study Saharan nomads, today the L. Stein Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. "The philosophy really was that the field was something you did on your own," he said. "The department had the attitude that nothing much could prepare you for anthropological fieldwork, and if you couldn't do fieldwork, then you had no business being an anthropologist. It was a real rite of passage." If you couldn't figure out how to get out to the jungle, the desert, or the savannah; if you couldn't figure out what to ask the natives; if you couldn't figure out how to build rapport with recalcitrant and suspicious locals — perhaps, the department implied, it was time to think about a nice career in sociology, where the data were unlikely to carry a spear. A story circulated in the department about the grad student who asked her hoary and accomplished adviser for his counsel on the field. The professor handed her a copy of the thickest ethnography on his shelf, one of the magisterial works of Kroeber. "I send thee forth, that thou might do likewise," he solemnly intoned. An elderly professor much interested in the Australian aborigines advised Martiya to pay particular attention to forbidden animals and eldest daughters: long years of scholarship, he continued, and a lifetime in the field had taught him that these were the soft spots of tribal, nay, human culture itself. "Don't do what I did and act like an old animal around the forbidden daughters," he said with a sad, greasy chuckle. Atkinson advised her to bring a bottle of tequila, a shot of which, he said, inevitably made everyone just a little more easy when discussing incest taboos, a perennial topic of anthropological inquiry.
There was no anthropological literature on the Dyalo, but in the vast holdings of Wheeler Library she found a slim memoir by a Welsh traveler named Swinton who had lived with the Dyalo in the first half of the century in the remote wilds of China's southern Yunnan Province. He offered a very brief description of the people: the Dyalo, Swinton reported, were found in small villages across southern China, northern Burma, and northern Thailand; Swinton estimated that there were perhaps a hundred thousand Dyalo speakers in the world. The Dyalo, he said, were slash-and-burn farmers and fiercely independent. To emphasize his point, Swinton told a story of a village in which the headman had been shot by his subjects with hunting rifles after he overstepped the bounds of his modest office. The Dyalo had no written language, although Dyalo poetry was subtle and beautiful. Swinton wrote, "The Dyalo language, reflecting the thinking of the Dyalo people, has neither a word for ‘love,' nor ‘sin,' nor ‘salvation.' In Dyalo, it is impossible to ‘forgive' someone. It is a brutally honest language." Swinton noted the Dyalo custom of selling their daughters into marriage, and Swinton wrote that the Dyalo were obsessed with spirits and ghosts, which they reckoned existed all about them in great numbers.
When Martiya herself went off to live with the Dyalo in the fall of 1974, she had very little more than this description to go on.
Joseph Atkinson and I gossiped about Martiya through February and into early March, as the very hot season came over Chiang Mai and the grinning, good-natured elephant outside the Westin Hotel turned brown. The hotel's gardener watered the topiary daily but was unable, as the days grew warmer, to keep the animal green: first the elephant's trunk, rearing high, changed color, then his massive, drooping ears. Day by day, the line of brown drifted southward across his mighty back. Finally, only the tail, protected during the searing hours of the late afternoon by the long shadow of the hotel itself, kept its original winter hue. Hot! Every visit to the Westin, every new letter from Atkinson, saw the hotel doorman, dressed in elaborate silken costumes appropriate to the court of great King Chulalongkorn, swing open the heavy glass doors with ever less alacrity, the pained look on his smooth face suggesting that all that movement in the heat was an affront to common sense. My underwear clung damply to my butt.
But inside the hotel it was cool, dark, carpeted, and quiet, which was why I liked to read my e-mail there in the morning: in the Westin, my otherwise sluggish thoughts seemed fresh, like sprigs of winter mint. I had made friends with perky pretty little Gai, the receptionist at the Business Service Center, and she let me check my e-mail there for free, when her boss, Miss Tong, wasn't looking. Gai considered Miss Tong's insistence on charging a regular customer unseemly. What, after all, was friendship for? Miss Tong, Gai said bitterly, was kee nieo—literally translated, a sticky shit. That this is a grave insult in Thailand says a considerable amount about the Thai character to those inclined to consider the Freudian themes of anal expulsion and retention.
Joseph Atkinson wasn't my only correspondent, of course: my mother wrote me; Josh found a job managing Thailand's first gelateria. My editor at Executive wondered if I would be interested in writing a couple of thousand words about a vineyard in Loei Province, the first in Thailand. Of course I would, my interest in viticulture being longstanding. But Joseph Atkinson's e-mails were the ones that I clicked open first and read over and over again.
I always printed out Atkinson's letters for Rachel to read, before exchanging a conspiratorial smile with Gai and strolling homeward. Midway between the Westin and my house, not far from the 7-Eleven, where I stopped to drink a mango Slurpee, there was a hospital, and on the façade of the hospital hung a hand-painted canvas sign at least two stories high advertising discounts on plastic surgery. I no longer recall the text of the advertisement, but the face depicted there struck me. It was the face of a young woman, with the pale skin favored in the Thai ideal, long dark hair, and eyes as round as Meyer lemons. As was typical of Thai commercial art, the woman was neither entirely Asian nor occidental, but in-between, her face bearing the drama of Western features but none of their vulgarity. She was the product of a surgeon with the deftest touch. It was this woman's face that in my imaginings I associated with Martiya.
From the field, Martiya wrote Atkinson still more long letters. Martiya's first letters from Thailand were ebullient, he said. They made him recall his own early days in Africa, when, leaving behind gloomy London and snowbound Chicago, he first saw the land the Doyo called the Beautiful Kingdom of the Yellow Sun. Atkinson was proud to have urged her to go. She wrote exuberantly of the beauty of Thailand: the flooded lime-green rice paddies bordered by swaying palms; coconuts, mangoes, and durian for sale by the side of the road; the ornate temples with flashing mirrored roofs; wandering Buddhist monks with shaved heads in saffron robes; the cut galangal in bushels drying in the midday sun, the humid air earthy, like a root; and the sleepy, sweating water buffalo reluctantly plowing the fields. Her descriptions of Thailand, Atkinson admitted, were clichéd, but no less touching for the fact.