“I swear by Almighty God I’ve been faithful and true, may I be struck by lightning and go to hell if I lie.”
Groans, cheers, and great roars of empathy from the audience. Everyone’s on her side, including me. Cut back to the giant screen where simmers the jealous bastard who is in the process of ruining a perfect marriage and losing a faithful caring wife along with his beautiful bouncing baby through Stone Age possessiveness (it doesn’t help that he’s a three-hundred-pound slob with a black walrus mustache and shaved head): “I’m tellin’ you the kid ain’t mine. That ain’t my nose, it ain’t my chin, and they ain’t my eyes.” Boos and jeers from the indignant audience.
Now a drum roll while the presenter unwraps the lab results: “DNA does not lie, ladies and gentlemen: the man you see on the video screen over there is…not the father.” Astonishment and incredulity from the audience (Man that bitch can act! Sure had me fooled). The guilty mother collapses prone on the stage, sobbing her heart out: there goes the child support. Voyeurism that ancient Rome would have been proud to indulge at the Colosseum. At the bottom of the video clip: Know the Father, it’s YOUR right.
After the clip came the demo: you send for the package, it arrives within days wherever you are in the world. There are two envelopes and a number of swabs like Q-tips. You take one of the swabs and roll it around inside the cheek of the putative father, then you take another and roll it around inside the cheek of the child. The envelopes are clearly distinguished with capitals, one with an enormous PF, the other with a C. Naturally, you need to make sure you put the right ensalivated swab in the right envelope; this is emphasized three times. Before you send off the envelopes you pay the fee using a credit card. In my case I sent off to Know the Father for three packs, just to be sure. Swabbing would be a cinch, since all three suspects were supine on hospital beds and not in a position to refuse. Anyway, at my age there was no risk of a claim for child support, and none of them seemed to be in long-term relationships, so they had nothing to fear. Best to do it while they were unconscious, though, just to be on the safe side. I took care to use Chanya’s PC and her e-mail account to order the kit.
16
My mother was slightly drunk by the time I arrived at her bar. She, who rarely drinks during the day, sat at a table where four empty bottles of Chang beer stood like soldiers and she was sucking at a fifth when I walked in. A Marlboro Red was sending a spiral of blue-gray smoke up from an ashtray. She was still a good-looking woman, but for me, right now-well, this might have been the first time she looked old.
She threw me a guilty look when I entered. That in itself was a first. She brought me up in the old way: I owed her my life, period. Any transgressions by her were automatically discounted by that unbeatable trump. Like most Thai kids, I took in this subliminal message without argument. Now she looked guilty.
We sat in silence for a moment.
“Tell me about him-all of him,” I said.
She pulled out her smart phone to call her driver. “We’ll have to do it at my house.” She waved a hand around the empty bar. “It would be too depressing to talk about it here.” We sat in silence together while she finished her beer. A few minutes later we heard a horn outside the bar.
–
Nong’s Mercedes is large, black with tinted windows. It was Vikorn who insisted on it: a gangster’s chariot would scare off most of the local mafia, especially since they would assume it was a gift from the Colonel. In the car I sit back to enjoy the sheer comfort of this masterpiece of German engineering; you hardly hear the engine, hardly notice the wonderful acceleration; what you appreciate most is the silent, gentle, seductive air-conditioning: it’s nothing like a Toyota Sienna. At the same time I’m thinking, What really is going on? Am I on track to find my father, or am I merely a pawn in that global no-man’s-land where international gangsterism meets geopolitics?
Now we were turning off Sukhumvit in to a narrow side soi that was unexpectedly lined with ficus and other trees, not to mention a lot of big houses behind high walls and gates guarded by CCTV cameras.
When Mama Nong had accumulated enough savings from her European tours, she bought this piece of land in downtown Bangkok. I vaguely remember a time of great excitement combined with extreme stress: somehow, without documentation and handicapped by an unblemished fiscal virginity-she had never paid tax to any revenue department in any country anywhere (she still has not)-she persuaded a bank manager to grant a small mortgage over the land, but, given the nature of her trade, she was not sure she could always meet the monthly repayments. Somehow she managed, and the purchase turned out to be shrewd beyond her wildest dreams. Over the past thirty years land prices in the city have shot up more than a hundredfold and my mother had no difficulty in mortgaging the quarter acre in order to build a house on it. Personally, I would have preferred an old-style teak structure on stilts with a general hanging-out area under the house, a big garden with a Bodhi tree or two, plenty of flowering shrubs, tropical succulents, and vivid plants with weirdly shaped blossoms. But Nong had been to America and had other ideas. I did get the big garden, the plants, and-a reluctant concession since it made her feel bannock-the Bodhi tree. The house, though, albeit on stilts, was essentially a reinforced concrete imitation of something out of American suburbia, with a giant swimming pool, the dead chlorinated blue mass of which was rarely, if ever, pierced by a human form-least of all my mother’s, who never swam.
You can take a girl out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of the girl. Quite simply, once the house was finished, she reverted, called some female cousins and childhood acquaintances to form a rotating circle of puans (friends) with whom she liked to lie on futons and gamble with cards for small stakes, smoking Marlboro Reds, sipping a modest amount of beer and rice whiskey, and sharing gossip that provided reportage in extreme detail of the private lives of fellow villagers whom she had not seen for decades and probably never would again. No hypocrite when it came to exploiting her wealth, as soon as she could afford to she hired a maid from her home village whose lack of initiative and low IQ made it easy for Mum to underpay her at the same time as keeping her cooped up in a small room next to the kitchen where she slept, ate, watched TV, and did the ironing. Fortunately Maymay, the maid, was also devoid of sex drive, for not only would the owner of the Old Man’s Club forbid any kind of hanky-panky on her private premises, but she would likely forbid it even in a short-term hotel on Maymay’s day off, for Nong was quite Confucian in regard to slave control. As I’ve said, though, my mother knew how to pick women, and the faithful Maymay generally spent her free Sundays in her room sleeping, watching TV, eating, and ironing. I had a strong sense that for the first time since my birth, Mum was about to drop her tough, indomitable front and share something of her inner life. I was right. She did and the memory is present and vivid.
When we reach her house we ignore the main entrance and instead use a gate at the side that leads to the garden. Maymay is there, standing still, facing the Bodhi tree: a pure soul in a religious trance, or an idiot with a vacant stare? Nobody knows. Nong calls her softly, though, to be on the safe side, and orders an ice bucket with a bottle of Mekong and some glasses, then excuses herself and goes into the house. She emerges a few minutes later in a baggy housecoat and slippers. She is as happy squatting as sitting on a chair; now she descends to a rush mat set next to a low table, sits cross-legged, takes out a box of Marlboro Reds, and lights up. After a couple of tokes she says: