Jimm Juree 01; Killed at the Whim of a Hat

she left me to do the dishes by myself. Once everything was clean and stowed, I walked down to the beach. Gogo tagged along twenty meters behind me. If the moon was full as the calendar would have it, the clouds were so thick you’d never know it. Granddad Jah was right. The squid-boat lamps formed a sparkling chain along the sea line. It was like looking at the far bank of a wide river. I walked along the sinking sand until I reached one of Arny’s coconut tree logs. I sat with my back against it admiring the green and white cat’s eyes that blinked at me from the horizon. Gogo strolled past me, turned two circles, then lay on the sand with her back to me. She was about two meters away. As usual, she pretended I wasn’t there. I’m not sure which of us was more surprised when I clambered across to her and patted her – twice. There was no reaction. It didn’t matter. I only did it in case she turned up with froth in her mouth the following morning. At least then she’d have sampled a brief moment of intimacy with my name on it.
    It had occurred to me very early in my incarceration in this colorless circus that I was slowly becoming a traditional Thai woman: regressing, slipping back through time to an age before cable and cappuccino. I looked myself up in one of those old ‘Understanding Thailand’ books for foreigners. Why was it, I wondered, that these books were always written by Western men, usually British, who professed to know us better than we knew ourselves?
    I didn’t know the people in those books. I’ve never looked like any of the charming women in the photographs. Last year I wouldn’t have found mention of myself in them at all. I was born into an era that is rapidly freeze-drying and shrinkwrapping our culture, distorting it through Western and Eastern influences. I grew up dressing like Winona Ryder and listening to Bon Jovi. My mother was a Beatles fan. My second cousin’s girl is fourteen. She has dyed light-brown hair that stands up like a cartoon look of surprise, and she wears her jeans well below the belly button. All her heroes are Korean. So tell me, what is a typical Thai woman in 2008?
    She’d be around 120-130 centimeters (I’m a palm print short of that range). She certainly wouldn’t wear flip-flops to go shopping, eschew the positive effects of cosmetics or consider dark skin to be more attractive than that of the cadaver-white actresses on television. She’d have a collection of cute e-mail emoticons larger than her spoken vocabulary but still have dreams to go to live in a foreign land. If the polls are to be believed, she would have experimented with booze, drugs and ⁄ or sex before she reached fifteen. She’d wear her hair long because men preferred long hair and, heaven knows, our only purpose for being on the planet is to flutter our tail feathers and snare us a mate. Sissi might argue that I’m only talking about modern gals in big cities but I know for a fact the mentality goes all the way down the food chain to the smallest village.
    So where do I fit exactly? I’m thirty-four. I have the type of face that looked adorable on a twelve-year-old but that will pucker like an old peach by the time I reach fifty. I wear my hair short. I have small but whimsical breasts and a little pot belly that makes me look four months pregnant when I sit at the computer. I’m moody for long periods either side of that inconvenient time of the month – two weeks on either side. In fact, I’ve never seen what it is in me that attracts, not a deluge to be true, but a steady drizzle of male interest. Perhaps the boys’ mothers taught them what a nice homely girl should look like. “Get a housewife in the kitchen, then go find yourself something sexy, son.”
    But suddenly there are shadows of me between the pages of the Thai Female chapter. I’m slowly becoming charming, heaven help me. Since we moved south, I’ve been forced into a state of politeness, returning smiles from people I don’t know and making conversation. In Chiang Mai I could walk around in a non-seeing social trance. I’d never find time to cook, shop, garden or feed livestock, but suddenly that’s my life. And here, although I dread to say it, I feel inferior to men. They can all cut down trees and drag heavy nets full of fish and dig wells and tap rubber and build. And all I can do is gut fish, and I learned how to do that on YouTube.
    This had been one interesting day. It had begun with a death