Two thousand five hundred and fifteen years after the birth of Buddha, in the Christian year of 1972, sixteen-year-old Thana Phondaecha bumped and jostled in the back of a bus making its way south along the dirt highway skirting the west coast of the Isthmus of Kra. The young man, whom everyone called Wichien, gazed out the window at the clear waters of the Andaman Sea. He had heard that huge deposits of tin were being dug from the earth in Nam Khem and that a young man with strong hands and a powerful back could become rich. If he could find a job that in one or two years’ time would allow him to send a fortune back to his mother, who had eleven other sons and daughters to feed, he might still have a chance to return to school.
After six hours, the road veered inland and bustling downtown streets emerged. Wichien suspected that he’d just arrived at his new home, but the bus moved straight through the center of activity. It continued south on the highway, past a large district hall, past an equally large hospital, until civilization vanished and the jungle returned. After several miles, the bus pulled over at a small roadside market.
“Nam Khem,” the driver called out.
Walking up the aisle, Wichien looked out the dust-caked windows on both sides, searching for any sign of the thriving village.
“This is Nam Khem?” he asked.
The driver smiled and pointed to a narrow road adjacent to the market that wound west through a tangle of brush, apparently down to the coast. “It’s about three kilometers that way.”
“Can you take me there?”
“I don’t go to Nam Khem,” the driver said. “Even the police won’t go to Nam Khem.”
Wichien reluctantly stepped out under the blaze of sun, and as the bus sped away, it spat up a reddish gray cloud of dust that coated his black hair and neatly pressed clothes. He bought some mango and sticky rice wrapped in a palm leaf at the market, and then he began the long hike down to the village. The surrounding walls of vegetation boomed with the wee-wee call of the mangwee bugs, which hovered around the rubber trees in the forest. He’d grown up in the country, where the combined racket of millions upon millions of insects had become as normal as the sound of his breath, but the strange noises of this unfamiliar jungle filled him with both fear and excitement.
He stepped out into the clearing thirty minutes later and froze, red rivulets of sweat running down his cheeks. The village clung to four miles of coastline, the center of which jutted out into the sea to give the village the shape of an arrowhead. The scene before him looked like one from the cowboy and Indian shoot-out movies they made in America. The gruff men sauntering around carried guns on their hips and had bleached red hair from spending months and years beneath the sea, diving for tin. Hundreds upon hundreds of young women, some no more than thirteen, lounged on benches in front of brothels and brushed the arms of men who passed by. They came from the poorest parts of the country, where a daughter’s body became a means to support the family. They wore hot pants and tube tops or miniskirts, T-shirts, and boots. All of their faces were plastered with neon makeup.
Wichien began to walk. The majority of houses were small boxes constructed entirely out of sheets of aluminum. The few thatched homes he saw had holes in the walls and roofs. Nam Khem appeared to be the worst kind of slum, filled with the poorest of the poor, but at the same time, the village teemed with entertainment for the wealthy. He passed a shack filled with bench seats and a massive screen advertising the latest film starring Charles Bronson, an actor Wichien later learned had achieved legendary status in Nam Khem because his means of solving disputes was with a pistol. Then he passed another cinema, and another. He peered inside half a dozen casinos, where men with red faces argued over dice and card games. He gazed inside smoky barrooms, where patrons dished coins into large machines that blared the latest hit songs. He passed thousands of men and women who wore rags strapped to their backs, yet they moved in and out of these places, obviously with money to burn.
Even in his small hometown, Wichien had heard that Nam Khem was the most dreadful village in all of Thailand, and now he knew why. This was no place for honest people who didn’t drink, smoke, gamble, or have an itch for bar girls. He wasn’t sure the town held anything for him. Then he caught site of the massive holes dug into the earth in the center of town. He walked to one and peered over the edge. At the bottom of the pit, fifty or sixty feet down, three men gripped a thick hose that ate away at the wall of the ditch with a powerful blast of water. As muck collected at their feet, a tube sucked it a hundred feet up and leaked it onto a shoot suspended by scaffolding that stretched over the ditch and then across the land for several hundred yards. As the water made its gentle downward journey, particles of tin, which were heavier than sand, clung to small ribs along the shoot, while everything else drained with the water into the sea. Those red and black particles were the reason he had come, the reason this entire village had been carved into the jungle decades before, and he promised himself that he would fight his urge to climb aboard the first bus out of here and would stay long enough to get his family out of the hole it had fallen into.
Having spent the last of his money on the bus ticket, that night Wichien headed into the jungle and hacked down bamboo poles and gathered leaves. He carried them toward shore in the southern reaches of town, which at the time supported a forest of towering pine trees. No one owned the land on the outskirts of the village, so no one told him he couldn’t build a home there. In a matter of just a few days, he had constructed a small lean-to that would keep the rain off his head. Then he went back into the village to land a job.
The best he could find was a position as a laborer, which involved carrying heavy bags of dirt, cleaning pumps, digging with a shovel—whatever nasty job his tin-mining boss thought needed doing. He worked for twelve baht a day, roughly thirty cents, which worked out to be around two cents an hour. But Wichien managed to live off less than two dollars a month. In one corner of a thatched hut his boss had built for his employees sat a pot of steamed rice from which Wichien had been told he could eat whenever he had the urge. He still needed to buy something to put on top of the rice, but he could get one small fish or a packet of curry in the market for half a baht. At the end of the month, he had plenty of money left over to send home to his mother.
Hauling bags of cement on his shoulder and digging ditches didn’t bother Wichien, but the town of Nam Khem still did. As it turned out, Nam Khem was an even rougher town than he had first thought. When arguments arose, they were almost always settled with a gun. The village was extremely territorial, and the bosses who could hire the most hit men claimed the most land. And when the hit men weren’t working for the big bosses, they were doing their own killing on the side. Many mornings, Wichien emerged from his hut to find a body that had been chucked to sea washed up on his shore. The hit men were easy to spot—they wore leather jackets, boots, and jeans, as if trying to copy the tough guys in America. They sold marijuana and heroin. They could kill and deal as much as they liked, because what the bus driver had told Wichien was true—the police had given up on Nam Khem long ago. When the drugs got out of hand years later, police started showing up in Nam Khem by the truckload, but they never came alone. A law officer alone on the streets of Nam Khem wouldn’t have lasted five minutes.
After much thought, Wichien took a portion of his savings and invested in an unregistered pistol of his own. He had no intentions of shooting anyone with it, but on those nights when he heard men wandering around his home, threatening him, he could squeeze off a round to let them know he was not to be messed with. He still considered himself a country boy with good notions; as of yet, he hadn’t taken a single drink of alcohol, laid a single bill on the betting table, or taken a single bar girl up to her room for a romp, but he had learned fast and hard that in this devil town, pushovers never lasted long.
As his skin darkened and toughened from the hard work under the sun, he began to realize that if he remained a laborer, he would be stuck in Nam Khem until he was an old man, or at least until his brothers and sisters reached an age when they could support themselves. By then his chances of returning to school would have drifted away. Every morning on the walk to work, he passed by men with red hair heading out on rafts to mine at sea. When he walked home at night, he passed those same men heading toward the whorehouses and casinos with pockets full of cash. He knew they had to be making a lot more than twelve baht a day. Wichien started looking for a new job.
Most tin-mining bosses told him to get lost, but when he agreed to work for ten baht a day rather than the customary twelve, he managed to land a position as a laborer on a raft boat. On his first day, he headed out to sea with six other men. Two of his co-workers strapped on masks and rubber shoes and climbed down a rope until they stood on the bottom of the sea. The divers remained sixty feet below the surface for two hours, using a hose to suck sand and little flakes of tin up to a trough on deck, which Wichien would then have to separate with a mining pan. Soon Wichien knew that he would become a diver. After the divers had given a cut of their find to the boat owner, they divvied up the rest of the tin among themselves, which fetched them a whopping 3,000 baht. Still, Wichien received only a petty ten baht for his services—there were no bonuses, no gratuities.
Wichien knew nothing about diving, so every chance he could, he gazed over the edge of the raft boat and watched the movements of the divers below. He watched how they held the hose, and how they descended and climbed back up. It didn’t look all that hard, so when one of the divers on their team neglected to come to work one morning, Wichien quickly volunteered to replace him.
While climbing down the rope with a mask strapped to his face and oxygen shooting up his nose, he was terrified at first, but once he stepped foot on the soft sand down below, he felt just as at home under water as he ever had on land. He got a view of the fish, the lobsters, the stretches of colorful coral, and, most important, a rich deposit of tin. At the end of his first week, he had a sack that weighted thirty kilos. Knowing that tin sold for 170 baht a kilo, he quickly did the math and discovered that he was rich. He added to the pile each day, and at the end of the month he sold the whole lot for 15,000 baht, roughly $375, which was more money than he had ever held in his hand. Instead of digging a hole in his floor and burying the money, as nearly everyone else did in Nam Khem, he quickly sent the money home to his parents to avoid spending any of it.
The job carried occupational hazards. A few of the divers on his raft and many on other rafts came up too quickly and got sick. Some of them died. And everyone who dove in the sea ended up with bright red hair. But his vanity and the risk of death mattered little when Wichien stood on the raft boat at the end of the day with a pile of tin. If he kept this up, he would be back in school in no time.
But the money was hard to leave. Even if he went back to school and received an education, it would still be hard to find a job that would pay anywhere close to 15,000 baht a month. At the beginning of the month, he would tell himself that he would work thirty more days and then be done, gone from Nam Khem; and then, at the beginning of the next month, he would tell himself the same thing.
Years began to pass.
Wichien used some of his earnings to travel. He went to the north and west and southeast of Thailand, experienced the countryside, the cities, the towns, the villages, but he always went back to Nam Khem. He still didn’t drink or smoke or gamble, but the village had worked down into his blood. The killings had become second nature, and when he stumbled across a body, he paused for a brief moment to see if it was someone he knew, and then he carried on. He found himself venturing into the heart of the village more and more to look at the young ladies who came from all over Thailand and Burma to work in the shops, the markets, the cinemas. He was twenty-five years old and had been living in Nam Khem for nine years, and never had he been with a woman.
Then, one afternoon while wandering the village, he saw the woman he would marry. She worked in a small restaurant by the shore. Her nickname was Nang, and she had arrived two months earlier. She was a small girl, no more than eighty pounds. Wichien didn’t want a woman who wished to bear twelve children and could carry four sacks of cement on her shoulders, but at the same time he didn’t want a woman who needed to be pampered day and night and was fearful at the thought of lugging a child in her belly. The first time Wichien mustered the courage to draw close to Nang, he saw that she was a happy medium. Her wrists and ankles were slim, yet her hands and feet bore thick calluses. From afar she looked dainty, but up close she looked determined. She had a smile and sparkling white teeth that could make even the most gruff miner drop to his knees. She was beautiful in a way that only a country girl could be, innocent and pure and so unlike the majority of women who came to Nam Khem to sell their bodies. She was perfect.
Soon Nang became all he could think about, and every afternoon when he got back from the sea, he would go and sit in her shop. He hadn’t the slightest clue as to what to say to her, so he just sat there, staring at her.
She liked him—Wichien could sense it—but after two months passed, he began to notice that she had attracted the attention of other men in town. While he sat in a corner of the restaurant, gazing over at her as she washed dishes and cleaned the counters, other suitors confidently approached her. She would smile and bat her lashes at the men. Finally, Wichien couldn’t take it anymore. He got up from his seat in the corner and headed over to her, ready to give her a piece of his mind. He would tell her that she wasn’t a nice girl like he’d thought. He would tell this girl Nang that he never wanted to see her again.
Shortly after she was born, Suphee Namlakorn was given the nickname Nang, which means “woman.” She grew up in a small village near the Laos border, and she studied until grade four, when she joined her mother, father, six sisters, and two brothers in the rice fields near their home. Despite the family’s having so many hands out in the field, the weather had been so bad that the rice crop was nearly ruined. Her family wasn’t earning enough to put food on the table, so when Nang was thirteen, and a man came to the village with a bus, looking for young girls to work in Bangkok, she got pushed aboard by her family, all of whom kept telling her how much they loved her and how sorry they were. Nang had never ventured farther than five miles from her home. She was on edge for the entire journey, and she began to cry as the bus entered the congested, smog-choked streets of Bangkok. She became certain the city would swallow her whole.
She was shuttled into a warehouse where twenty other young teenage girls waited with their small suitcases and worried looks. She sat in silence for several hours. Eventually a nice-looking man and woman came and picked her up. The company leader said that the family would pay her 300 baht per month and that she was to wash their clothes and clean their dishes. As she drove across town with the couple and saw the villa in which she would live, a smile actually crept across her face. Three hundred baht was more than her entire family made in the rice fields for a month of labor. The bright lights and tall buildings of Bangkok now began to intrigue her.
The enthusiasm didn’t last long. The family she had been sold to was wealthy, yet they paid her only one hundred baht a month. They kept her working thirteen hours a day. She didn’t mind cooking, cleaning, and taking care of the children, but the father of the home always wanted her to massage his legs, which wasn’t proper for a young lady and made her feel strange. She did as she was told, but a couple of weeks in she made a mistake—she hadn’t washed a dish or had forgotten to water a plant. She couldn’t recall exactly what she had done wrong to cause what happened next. The father of the house threw her to the ground, kicked her in the stomach, and then beat her severely with a mop handle. A week later, he used a belt. The week after that, it was a metal clothes hanger. Nang tried to do everything perfectly, sat on the floor when they sat on the couch, kneeled when they stood, but the beatings kept coming. The few times she went out in public, she wore long-sleeved shirts and pants to hide the bruises. She thought about writing to her mother, but she didn’t know what to say. She didn’t even know anyone who could help her write such a letter. The beatings became her dark secret.
After working a year and a half in a constant state of fear, she met another housemaid, who worked in the villa next door. They hit it off and managed to spend a few hours together each week. They talked about where they were from, how much they missed their families, and what it would be like to one day have a husband and children of their own. A month after they had grown somewhat close, her friend asked her how she had gotten all the welts on her arms and legs. Nang told her friend that she had fallen down, but the lie kept her from sleeping that night. A few weeks later, she told her friend what had been going on.
“I can’t do anything,” Nang cried. “They are rich people, and I am so small. I have no mouth to argue with them.”
“Why don’t you escape from here?”
“Where will I go?”
“If you stay in that house, he will kill you,” her friend said. “You must leave that house. I will meet you on the street.”
Nang almost abandoned the plan, but at the last moment she silently gathered up her few possessions and sneaked out the back door. She met her friend in the darkness on the street, and together they walked out of the residential neighborhood, through an industrial district, and then into the downtown area. After nearly four hours of walking, they arrived at a noodle shop in Bangkok’s Chinatown. A sweet little lady owned the shop, and once she learned Nang’s story, she showered her with hugs and kisses and took her right in. It had been eighteen months since Nang had felt a human touch that wasn’t violent, and she broke into sobs. She didn’t stop crying until morning.
Nang lived and worked at the noodle shop for two years, until she was seventeen years old. She loved her boss like a mother, but there was no replacing her family and the countryside in which she had been raised. She had heard that the rice fields back home had returned to normal, so she caught a bus back there to once again work beside her family.
There was a celebration when she arrived, and it seemed to last for months and months. She told stories of her adventures in Bangkok to her sisters and roughhoused with her brothers after dinner. Every Sunday, the entire family lounged on the front porch, swatting mosquitoes and drinking green tea. They caught up on old times and had a lot of fun, but as much as she liked being home, Nang also wanted to see more of the world. In her village, people seldom traveled, and when they did, it was out of necessity. As a result, she had heard very little about the sea while growing up. But she’d heard all about the Gulf of Thailand and the Andaman Sea from the fishermen who had eaten in her boss’s shop. They had made the ocean sound so romantic, saying that it was sparkling blue and stretched for as far as the eye could see. She longed to see it for herself.
“Mama,” she said one day at breakfast, “I want to go to the south and work down there.”
“Don’t be silly,” her mother shot back. “A fine-looking girl like you, they will kidnap you and sell you to a whorehouse.”
“No they won’t! I can take care of myself.”
“No. I won’t let you go. And that’s final.”
Nang held her tongue. She helped her mother work in the fields for a couple of years, but the urge to head to the south of Thailand grew only stronger. She thought about just leaving but decided against it. Then, when she was nineteen, an uncle who lived in the south came to their home to pay a visit, and Nang saw her chance.
The day her uncle left, the entire family went outside to see him off. Nang quickly said her good-byes and then headed into the house. When her mother had said her farewells and come back in, Nang slipped out the back door.
She followed her uncle to the bus station. As he stepped through the front doors and took a seat at the head of the bus, she climbed aboard through the rear doors and took a seat in the back, sinking down in the seat to avoid being discovered by her uncle. Unbeknownst to Nang, they needed to change buses in Bangkok. This time, her uncle spotted her as she attempted to sneak aboard.
“Nang, what are you doing?” he shouted.
“Please, please, don’t send me home,” she begged. “I have to see the south of Thailand.”
“Nam Khem is not a place for a young country girl.”
“But I really want to go with you.”
A puzzled look came over her uncle’s face. “Why?”
“I heard that the ocean is made from salt,” Nang said sheepishly. “Is that true?”
Her uncle smiled. “Yes, Nang, it is true.”
“Then you have to take me with you,” she said. “I don’t believe it. I have to see for myself.”
Her uncle put up a few minutes of resistance, but when the bus driver made the last call, he gave in. They sat side by side during the eight-hour journey to Nam Khem. When they arrived, her uncle took her around, looking for a job. Her uncle obviously didn’t want another mouth to feed, and she didn’t expect to be one. She had been working thirteen hours a day since she was six. At the second food shop they walked into, the owner agreed to hire her for 300 baht a month. Nang was thrilled.
Later that night, Nang sneaked out of her uncle’s home. She went down to the shore, dipped a finger in the water, and brought it to her mouth. When she tasted salt, a smile spread over her lips. She sat in the sand and gazed out over the shimmering water. She didn’t move until the sun began to surface on the horizon.
In the months that followed, she washed dishes, cleaned the kitchen, and eventually learned how to cook. She felt good about herself, and she liked Nam Khem even though it was a rough place. There was always something going on, whether it was a fair or the cinema. And the boys—there were so many boys her age.
After about three months, one of those boys began frequenting her restaurant. He always took a seat in the corner and never said anything other than the occasional sabai dii reu, but she could tell that he liked her, because he was always staring at her. Every time he came in, she expected him to finally talk to her, but every day she was wrong. He’d come in, take a seat in the corner, and then just stare. Then came the other boys, all of them very handsome. She smiled and shifted her hips, partially because flirting was fun, but mostly because she could tell that it drove the shy boy in the corner crazy.
It went on like this for a week, but then one day, after she had spent an hour talking to a good-looking fisherman, the young man in the corner came over and introduced himself as Wichien. Then he ripped into her.
“So you want to have a husband to take you to bed,” he said. “Is that why you’re flirting with all these boys?”
This made Nang mad. She wanted to shout, Who the hell are you? You’re not my husband. You can’t be jealous of me.
“Yes, I want to have a husband,” she said. She hadn’t actually given the matter much thought, but she knew it would get to him.
“Be careful,” he returned, pointing a finger at her. “I will kill you.”
Nang experienced a brief flash of fear, but when Wichien stormed out the door, she felt a pang of regret. She figured that was it; he wouldn’t come in and stare at her anymore. It bothered her for a couple of days, and then she put it out of her mind—she still had five or six suitors coming by on a regular basis.
About a week later, a young man named Kai, whom she had seen hanging around with Wichien in the past, stopped by the shop to invite her to a party. Nang felt overjoyed. She had never been to a party before, at least not one that her parents hadn’t attended.
“What should I wear?” she asked.
“We’re going to be taking pictures, so you have to dress really nice. White skirt and blouse will work. Do you have that?”
“Yes,” Nang said, partially lying. She had what once had been a white skirt and blouse, but over the years of labor, they had turned an off-gray. Since photographs never turned out all that well anyhow, she figured it wouldn’t matter much.
She had been told to arrive at the party at three o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday, but an hour before she planned to leave, some of Kai’s girlfriends came by her shop. They were all nicely dressed, and they wanted to help her put on some makeup. Nang loved the attention, and she also loved how she looked when they were through.
They all headed off to Kai’s house at three o’clock. The moment Nang walked through the door, she saw Wichien standing there in a suit. At first she thought he had put his friends up to this, but then she noticed that he was just as surprised to see her as she was to see him. She hesitantly walked over to him.
“Wichien, what’s going on here?”
Wichien shook his head.
A few seconds later, Kai placed two chairs in the center of the room and told everyone that he needed their attention.
“Groom, this is your seat,” he said to Wichien. Then he pointed to Nang. “And this seat is for the bride.”
Nang had no idea what to think or say. She could feel her heart racing and her head began to spin, but she didn’t know whether that was a good sign or a bad one. It was true that she had liked Wichien from the moment she saw him, but marriage was so serious and it lasted forever. She liked finally being able to act like a teenager. She still wanted to do so many things, but now it felt like she didn’t have a choice in the matter. When she hesitated to say anything at all, Kai came forward. He took her hand and placed it in Wichien’s.
“I don’t know,” Nang managed to say.
“Come on,” Kai returned. “Every time Wichien comes back from the sea, all he can talk about is Nang. And you, I see the way you look at him. This is your wedding party, so you might as well enjoy it.”
When Nang didn’t issue any further protests, Kai tied a piece of twine around her wrist. Then he did the same for Wichien. From that moment on, they were husband and wife. For the rest of the night, they talked and laughed. Nang knew nothing about marriage, but it certainly had its perks. Everyone attending the party, mostly friends of Wichien’s, had each placed 300 or 400 baht into a hat for them to begin their life together. A room in Kai’s house had already been set up for the newlyweds, and they stayed in the house for fifteen days.
“Wichien,” Nang said one day as they lay in bed. “We’re going to need to buy a house.”
“I agree,” he said. “Tomorrow we look for a home.”
The next afternoon, they bought a house for 2,000 baht. It sat less than fifty yards from the beach, had no deed, and was in need of serious repair. The mangrove support beams were rotten with bugs, and the aluminum walls kept the place blistering hot during the day and terribly cold at night. The concrete floors had cracked and fallen apart over the years, leaving big holes in which rats now lived. It wasn’t a house suitable for raising children, but they didn’t have much choice. A few months after they were married, Nang got pregnant.
She figured that Wichien would be able to make enough money in a couple of years to improve their home or buy another one somewhere else in the village, or perhaps in her hometown, but that wish never came true. A few months before they had their son, Nueng, the tin market started to dry up, and Wichien found himself out of a job. To support his family, Wichien, still a clean-living country boy at heart, strolled over to the dark side of Nam Khem.