TO COOK OR EAT ANYTHING IN RURAL THAILAND MEANS SPENDING TIME with flies.
That’s just how it goes. Flies find food and hang out. Whether you’re chopping or chewing, flies will crawl on the lip of your wok or the lips of your face if you let them. And what exactly were they doing with all this crawling around? I wondered. If they were wiping their nasty little feet on the rim of my glass or laying eggs in my pad thai, it was not obvious. Near as I could tell (and I watched them pretty closely, which was not hard to do with so many around), they seemed to be … licking. More accurately: They were placing their freaky retractable mouth apparatuses on anything that could eat or that could be eaten—a thought that did not, I assure you, enhance my desire for the tomatoes I was chopping into salsa one afternoon after school.
The salsa was part of a dinner party Traca and I had decided to throw. Initially, the guest list included four teachers from school, the three members of our homestay family, plus the four of us, for an ambitious table of eleven. It was to be a Tex-Mex extravaganza featuring, among other things, guacamole, refried beans, cheese, and salsa—all things not found in the typical Thai refrigerator. To pull it off, we bought supplies on a day trip to Chaiyaphum, and we were set to put it all together on party day.
The only trouble was that once word of our soiree spread around the village, we discovered that there’s no such thing as a private party in Nong Kha. First, guests asked to invite friends. Then those friends invited friends. Then children and grandchildren piggybacked on invitations. Apparently, everyone wanted to see what the giant falong family ate for dinner, and frankly, it had us a little concerned. With fewer than six hours till guests were scheduled to arrive, it looked as if we’d be having somewhere between twenty and forty visitors. Which meant we needed more food.
In the middle of the school day, with two free periods before us, Jackson and I hopped on the house moped and set off into the hundred-degree day. Our plan was to buy more of everything and add potatoes to the menu. Many Thai friends we spoke with thought American food meant french fries, and we did not want to disappoint. Since the closest potatoes that anyone could think of were twelve miles away at the Ban Huayangdam public market in the Nong Bua Daeng District (I can’t pronounce it, either), Jack and I hit the road to make some tracks and get more snacks.
Rural Thai markets are fun. In addition to the color and the commotion, you can buy just about anything that can be eaten: fat live toads, live eels, bugs, huge sad fish swimming in shallow tubs of dirty water, octopuses on a stick, whole pig heads, or, if you so desire, a local delicacy made up of a pig’s ear and a strip of skin leading to an intact snout—which we did not buy. You can also—by being an American—get all the attention and assistance a person could possibly want. As Jack and I walked past the simple stalls, inspecting the heaps of local produce and edible curiosities, all eyes were glued on us, following our every move.
At first I thought it was just the falong phenomenon, but after a few minutes I realized that something felt different. The women in the market did not look happy. They whispered to each other. They furrowed their brows as we approached. Eventually, a bold woman from the legion of female vendors stepped in front of me, blocking our path. She was at least sixty, tiny and wrinkled, and she pointed her tiny wrinkled hand at my chest. Then she pointed at Jackson … back to me … back to Jack … raised eyebrows but smiling. Her expression said, Explain this, please. So I did.
“Korng pom look sow.” My daughter, I said.
The woman beamed, her face a riot of happy wrinkles. “Look sow?” she said, overjoyed. Then she called out: “LOOK SOW! LOOK SOW!”
What followed was a chorus of Look sows as every woman in the market told her neighbor that I was not, thank goodness, married to Jackson. I was in fact her father.
Supplies in hand and relationship clear, Jackson and I booked it back to school, taught our last class of the day, then headed home to get cooking for the masses. I started chopping the aforementioned tomatoes, put some beans on the stove to boil, and threw our housekeeper, Boon, into a culturally induced panic in the process.
Boon was in her forties, a solid country woman with a round face and a gentle smile. In spite of the heat and the tedium, she worked hard all day long and always looked happy. My appearance in her kitchen was the only time I ever saw her frown.
Two things about Thai cooking (other than flies): It’s quick, and men don’t do it. So as I stood in the kitchen endlessly boiling and chopping, Boon wasn’t sure what to do. She tried repeatedly to take the knife from my hand, looking me in the eye each time like a sympathetic nurse helping her delusional patient. And she simply could not stop turning off the burner the beans were bubbling on, bringing me bean samples at two-minute intervals. Each time she’d appear, holding one mostly raw bean in her hand, I’d inspect it and politely say: “Mai, Boon. Rórn mahk.” Literally, “No, Boon. More hot.” Boon would groan a soft sound, imploring me to reconsider. When I insisted, she’d reluctantly return the bean to the pot, fire up the stove, and show up a few minutes later with another uncooked bean for me to reject.
Eventually it was showtime and the guests started to arrive, in cars, on mopeds, on foot. Traca and I have thrown many dinner parties in our twenty-plus years together, but I feared this one was going to be a colossal international flop. As we scrambled with last-minute preparations, our friend Por poked her head into the kitchen, sampled the guacamole we offered her, and screwed up her face, the universal symbol for “Yuck!”
“Thai no like weg-i-tables,” she said. “Like meat.”
Damn. We should have bought some of those ear-snout appetizers after all.
In the end, our party won’t be remembered for the food. Some people liked it. Some didn’t. Most of it was eaten by the time we went to bed. It won’t be remembered as a wild shindig, either. We sat on the floor, politely chatting. Many people stayed for less than an hour. For me, though, the evening will forever be enshrined in our Dinner Party Hall of Fame for an event every party planner fears. I’m speaking, of course, of the cloud of inch-long flying insects that descended on us precisely at the moment I delivered the final bowl of beans to the feast.
Thai houses are open. Windows often have no glass, ceilings and walls have large gaps, doors are rarely closed—so the swarm that invaded our village had no trouble getting in. I’m not kidding. This was a full-on, repent-for-your-sins, holy-mother-of-God plague in our kitchen, and our living room, and our guacamole, and our salsa—all of which appeared to have grown wings.
In fact, wings—and the creepy bugs they flew in with—were everywhere: in my hair, down my shirt, sticking to my sticky skin. Traca and I were hysterically laughing at the sheer absurdity of it all.
“What does Emily Post say about plagues?” I wondered.
Logan was running around with a broom and a smile, attempting to single-handedly beat back the apocalypse, while Jackson also found the whole thing wildly funny, which was not the reaction I’d expected from her. At another time and place, certainly at the start of our trip, it was not hard to imagine Jack being horrified by the bugs, seeing them as more than enough reason to go home and griping about the whole affair long after it was over. But as the swarm swirled around her, Jack was cracking up, covering her mouth to keep the invaders out, nearly losing it when she saw a foot-long lizard run across the floor with dozens of wings sticking out of its mouth.
“Godzilla just ran into the kitchen,” she said, gasping for breath, her hair crawling with insects. “And I think he’s hungry.”
It lasted for about ten minutes, and then, just as suddenly as it began, it was over. I have no idea how or why it happened, but as if on cue, every member of the swarm fell to the ground and vanished. The floor was littered with wings, thousands of wings, everywhere, but the insects were gone.
In the aftermath, we finally got to sit down as a family and have some food with our guests, none of whom were bothered in the least by the invasion we’d just witnessed. Naturally, the houseflies were there, licking my bowl, my spoon, my arm—but I barely noticed them, focusing instead on Por, who was sitting beside me fishing some trapped, struggling insects out of the black beans.
“You can eat,” she said, holding one up for me to see. It looked like a gigantic carpenter ant. “Fry. You like. Many protein.”