ADEL WAS THE son of Piko, an Akha village leader and one of the few Doi Chang farmers who kept trying to grow and sell coffee. Piko had noticed that coffee trees are hard to kill. New growth sprouted from the stumps of the trees that had been cut down, and in a few years, they began to bear fruit. Though untended and unpruned, they produced enough for Piko and a few others to sell, albeit for a pittance. Those frustrating coffee trips to Chiang Mai made a lasting impression on young Adel.
Like all Akha, Adel has a confusion of names. His real Akha name was Kopeo Saedoo. The first syllable of an Akha person’s name is taken from the last syllable of the father’s name. Thus Adel’s real name, Kopeo, derived from his father Piko’s name. His first nickname as a baby was Modeh, because he was born without hair, like a bald neighbor named Modeh. But as a child he couldn’t pronounce that, and it came out as Adel, which stuck. Since Akha names are either too unfamiliar or otherwise foreign-sounding for Thai officialdom, Akha tribal members also adopted Thai names. Adel’s was Panachai Pisailert. He wasn’t sure of his real birthdate. On his Thai ID, his date of birth was given as January 1, 1972—but all Akha birthdates were listed as January 1. Adel thought he was in fact born some time in 1970, the seventh of nine children of father Piko and mother Bu Chu.
As a child, Adel recalled picking the beautiful poppy flowers and making garlands of them in December and January, then helping to score the seedpods and collect the opium sap during the harvest in February and March. He watched his father and other men roll the rubbery raw opium into big balls and wrap them in banana leaves, to be sold to Chinese Haw traders. Adel’s family ate the empty poppy pods and used the seeds as seasoning.
When he was around nineteen years old, in 1989, Adel, who had quit Doi Chang’s inadequate school after the second grade and could speak only a few words of Thai, first accompanied his father to the lowlands to sell coffee. The road was nearly impassable on that first trip. They took the beans down with a horse and cart, then rented a pickup truck to go to Chiang Mai. It took more than eight hours to get there. “Up in the village, a messenger from a trader had promised us 22 baht per kilo,” Adel remembered, “but when we got to the city, they only paid us 12 baht.”
They returned to Doi Chang that same day, arriving late at night. It never occurred to them to overnight in the lowlands. “We had no idea where to stay. We had no identification. Sometimes we were stopped by the police. We just wanted to get back home.”
Like the other villagers, Piko eventually cut down his coffee trees, but he was one of the few who resumed harvesting and processing them when the trees grew back. By that time, the price for green coffee beans had gone up somewhat, though Adel had no idea why. In the late 1990s, major cities on the Pacific Rim were beginning to imitate the Western world, discovering the joys of high-grown arabica coffee through coffeehouses that at first catered primarily to foreign tourists.
By 1998, Adel had left Doi Chang and was living in Chiang Mai, where he had opened a shop selling Akha handicrafts and “antiques,” old tribal items that now fetched cash from tourists. Like many other Akha, he had been forced to the lowlands to make a living. Adel may have been illiterate and missed out on a formal education, but he was shrewd and enterprising, and his Thai speaking skills had improved dramatically.
He was also recognized by his fellow villagers. In 1998, they elected him the first Akha headman of Doi Chang, to replace Beno, who was retiring. The villagers (the majority of whom were now Akha) chose Adel in hopes that he might be able to bring some of his business acumen and lowland connections back to the mountains. His father, Piko, was well respected, and Adel’s youthful energy could help.
Adel closed his shop and moved back to Doi Chang, where, as he knew, people were barely eking out a living, in part because most of them had no Thai identification papers. Over the next year and a half, he was able to secure the all-important Thai ID for many of the villagers. Proving to the district officers in Mae Suai, the small city at the base of the mountain, that an Akha had been born in Thailand was challenging, especially when the written records said they had been born in Burma, which was often the case. “I couldn’t read or write,” Adel recalled, “so I could only talk on their behalf.”
His other major focus was on calling for a ceasefire in the Lisu-Akha conflict in Doi Chang. “I tried to be a mediator, asking people to come and talk reasonably together,” Adel said. His efforts to promote reconciliation were only partially successful, since the tension had been simmering for two decades. It was hard to build trust, but he had made a start.
One challenge proved to be too much, though. Adel could not see a way to raise the standard of living for the Akha or Lisu, and he disliked feeling that he was expected to achieve the impossible. He resigned in 1999, after seventeen months as headman. A moderate, conciliatory Lisu named Suchat replaced him for three years, but all the subsequent headmen in Doi Chang were Akha.
The situation in Doi Chang remained dire. The mountainside around the village was nearly barren of trees, with the exception of some 200 acres of coffee shrubs, most of which had regrown after being cut down and abandoned. Otherwise, only scraggly patches of second-growth trees, along with a few peach, apricot, and macadamia nut trees, grew here and there between the tomato and cabbage fields. Village farmers continued to spend money on chemical fertilizers and pesticides that sickened them when they inhaled the fumes. And prices continued to fluctuate unpredictably. Many Akha worked for just over a dollar a day at the agricultural research station up the mountain, but they brought back little useful information to the farmers in the village.
Most of the Lisu families had fled down the mountain, looking for better-paying jobs and trying to assimilate with the lowland Thai. Beno, now retired, remained in Doi Chang, but his daughter, Chome, worked for IMPECT, a hill tribe development agency in Chiang Rai. Beno commented with apparent pragmatism that in thirty years, the Lisu would all be Thai.
As anthropologist Deborah Tooker concluded, “A hill swidden subsistence rice economy and a semi-autonomous local political system, on which a comprehensive form of Akha identity is based,… is no longer viable… Incorporation into the larger national and global scene brings with it both losses, reflected in Akha nostalgia for older forms of collective identity… and gains, reflected in Akha acceptance of, and even strategizing within, the new regime.” Adel was more than interested in strategizing within the new parameters, but he could not figure out how to carve out a better life for his people.
With help from Akha relatives in the Yunnan Province of China, Adel began an import-export business, selling hill tribe chicken parts (livers, lungs, and guts) and eels to the Chinese and bringing back potatoes to sell in Thailand. While engaged in this enterprise, he discovered that Chinese coffee beans were being imported into Thailand. That’s strange, he thought. We grow coffee in Doi Chang. Why can’t we sell our own coffee?
Around that time, in the fall of 2001, Adel’s fifteen-year-old niece Apa asked her father, Leehu, for advice on a school project. She was attending a Christian high school in Chiang Rai, and her assignment was to bring something from her hometown to sell at a school event. Leehu, who was helping his father, Piko, with his frustrating coffee sales, said that he could have some of their coffee roasted in Chiang Mai and Apa could take that. Apa bought an automatic brewer from the Big C store in Chiang Rai and brewed coffee at the school fair, selling it for 20 baht (about 65 cents) per cup. The coffee was a hit. She sold 45 cups and gave the 900 baht (about $30) to her father.
Leehu was astonished. His teenage daughter had made more profit from the roasted, brewed coffee than he made selling 20 kilos of green beans in Chiang Mai, and she still had a few bags left over. When he told his younger brother Adel about it, Adel decided that coffee might be the solution to the chronic village poverty after all. If city people were crazy enough to pay that much money for a cup of coffee, why not take advantage of it? But he didn’t know how to go about it.
ADEL THOUGHT OF Uncle Wicha. If anyone would know what to do, it would be Wicha. Wicha Promyong was not really Adel’s uncle, but the peripatetic Thai man had roamed throughout the mountains for decades, since Adel was a little boy. Wicha had slept in Piko’s house sometimes, sharing meals, laughing, singing, and telling stories of other villages he had visited. Wicha had traveled widely, even to Europe. He spoke Akha, Lisu, and Thai, as well as English and a smattering of French, German, and Mandarin. Such a man of the world might be able to give good advice, might be able to find a way for the Akha of Doi Chang to break out of their poverty with coffee. So late in 2001, Adel ventured down the mountain to see Wicha. His timing was fortuitous. Wicha, then around fifty, was pondering his next big project. He was doing well enough with what he called his antiques store, selling traditional hill tribe goods, secondhand clothing, and army surplus uniforms from both the US Army and the Viet Cong. But he was growing bored.
Through his wanderings, Wicha had come to love the hill tribes and their way of life. He was particularly fond of the Akha, with their deep sense of their culture and place in the cosmos. He knew that unwanted change had been thrust on them. He had seen it for himself, had despaired over the forced relocations, the violence, the drug addiction and prostitution. He listened with sympathy and attention as Adel described his quandary and asked for advice.
“Tomorrow I will come up the mountain,” Wicha told Adel. “I will visit with your father, my old friend Piko, and I’ll have a look around. Maybe we can figure something out. I can’t be sure of anything, but I will try.” Adel rose to leave, expressing his gratitude even as he towered over the smaller man. Wicha stood barely over 5 feet and looked so skinny that the wind might blow him away. His hair was close-shaven, but he sported a scraggly beard and mustache and wore long braids down his back and an earring in one ear. Yet he walked and talked with the self-assurance of a much larger man.
The next day Wicha, true to his word, drove for several hours up the rutted dirt road to the village, with its scruffy children, chickens, and pigs dodging out of the way. He took tea at Piko’s home, greeting his old friend and his wife, Bu Chu, and Piko’s mother. Then, accompanied by Adel, Wicha walked around the village. It was essentially as he remembered it—small family compounds with vegetable gardens between them—but there were fewer pole, bamboo, and thatch-covered huts and more structures that looked like the poorest homes down in the city. Here, however, the corrugated metal roofs atop ramshackle boards were signs of relative wealth.
They got in Wicha’s truck and drove up toward the ridge to the northeast along the rutted dirt road, passing fields of tomatoes and cabbage. Wicha shook his head as he saw a farmer spraying. “I hate this kind of crop,” he said, gesturing at the man in the field as they bounced and swayed past. “They cut down all the trees, and they use all those chemicals.” They crested the hill, coming down into a higher valley, going toward the satellite village of Ban Mai (which means “new village”), where many of the Chinese Haw and Akha had settled. Here in the high valley Wicha saw spindly coffee trees, with their glossy green leaves and berries.
“This is where my father still tends his coffee trees,” Adel said. “But I don’t know why he bothers. There isn’t much money in it. Still, as I told you, Apa sold her brewed coffee for a lot of money. Maybe we can figure out how to do that.” Wicha stopped the truck. He loved all kinds of shrubs and trees, and he wasn’t familiar with coffee. As Adel explained how the Thai-German project had given them the trees and how they had been frustrated by the subsequent low coffee prices, they walked through the fields. Wicha touched the leaves, picked a few of the ripe red berries, and kicked at the earth with his shoe.
“You know,” he said, “coffee has become very popular in Bangkok. They have coffeehouses where people pay a lot for just one cup, and they sit and talk over it, as we do with tea. Even in Chiang Rai some tourists ask where they can find good coffee. Maybe Apa’s experience at the school fair wasn’t so unusual. Perhaps there is something we could do to get a better price. Let me look into it.”
Leehu gave Wicha the rest of the roasted coffee that Apa had not brewed. Wicha didn’t like coffee—he preferred tea—but the next day, back in the lowlands, he took the coffee to a dealer in Chiang Mai, who brewed it and declared that it was quite good, despite containing some over-fermented, bug-eaten, and broken beans. Wicha had his new project. He set out to find out how to grow, process, and brew the best coffee.
He went to Chiang Mai University, which was noted for its strong agricultural program. When he walked into offices unannounced and explained that he wanted to talk to a coffee expert about how to help the Akha, the secretaries politely told him to take a seat. Then they disappeared and came back, shaking their heads. Sorry, the professor is too busy. Sorry, the professor is in class. Sorry, you have to make an appointment.
“Excuse me,” Wicha said, when a distinguished-looking man in a tweed jacket and wearing a tie strode by in yet another office. “Excuse me, sir, but I am trying to help the Akha…” The man recoiled from Wicha, who was dressed in his customary informal clothing—baggy pants, an unbuttoned shirt over a black t-shirt, a gold chain around his neck—and backed quickly out of the room. “I’m sorry. You will have to make an appointment. I have no time to talk to any Akha today.”
So that’s it, Wicha thought. They think I am Akha. No one wants to waste time on the Akha. He turned to go, when a woman who had just walked into the office and overheard the conversation asked, “Can I help you? I have to go soon, but I could spare a few minutes.”
The woman was Patchanee Suwanwisolkit, an agronomist who would go on to write two books about coffee cultivation. She invited Wicha into her office and listened patiently as he explained the situation. “Yes,” the agronomist said, “I’ve actually been up to Doi Chang before, years ago, when I was a graduate student. I remember how muddy the road was and how difficult it was to get up there, and how frightened I was by the stories about violence and bandits.” Wicha assured her that he would pick her up in Chiang Rai to drive her up the mountain and that she would be perfectly safe with him.
There was another problem. “Doi Chang is out of my jurisdiction. I am only supposed to be giving agricultural extension advice in Chiang Mai Province. But if I were to go there on my own time, on a weekend, I suppose no one could object. And if you have 50 baht, I could sell you this basic book about coffee cultivation to start your education,” she said, grabbing a book off her shelf.
ALTHOUGH WICHA PROMYONG’S adventurous life may have seemed somewhat random up to that point, it might be seen, in retrospect, as perfect preparation for the role he was to play in helping the Akha of Doi Chang become world-renowned for their coffee. It is unclear exactly when he was born. His birth certificate said 1955, but he later said that it was late by as much as five years. He was probably born in the early 1950s, the seventh of ten children of Cham and Sudnit Promyong. He enjoyed keeping his age a bit of a mystery, always joking that he was twenty-nine when he was obviously well beyond that milestone.
His father, Cham, was born in southern Thailand in 1901, the son of a relatively wealthy Muslim landowner, though Wicha said that his grandfather wasn’t rich but smart, claiming land when it cost a pittance, and that the family was land-rich but not so flush with cash. The family’s original surname was Mustafa, an Arabic name, but his grandfather had changed it to Promyong, a Thai name, in order to assimilate better.
Wicha’s father had studied Islam in Egypt, then science and law in Europe. He was still in Europe on June 24, 1932, when a revolution ended the absolute monarchy that had ruled Siam, as it was still called, for 700 years. The current lineage, the House of Chakri, had begun in 1782 with Rama I, a military leader who declared himself the monarch, established Bangkok as the capital, and fathered forty-two children. Rama VII was ruling at the time of the 1932 revolt.
The revolution was led by rising young middle-class leaders, both civilians and military men, who had, like Cham Promyong, been educated in Europe. Cham rushed back to Siam to support the revolution, becoming a leader of young Muslims who believed in modernity and democratic change.
Rama VII, a moderate who had tried in vain to institute a constitution, only to be blocked by the powerful traditional princes, defused the potentially violent situation by agreeing to the new constitution that stripped him of most power other than his title. The monarchy subsequently had some of its power restored, but Rama VII abdicated in 1935. His successor was his nephew Rama VIII, a nine-year-old boy attending school in Switzerland. He remained there, with Thai-based regents ruling in his stead, until after World War II.
The handsome young king, who held a law degree, was an instant hit among his subjects, and as the chief representative of the minority Muslims in Siam, Cham Promyong was one of his advisors. Tragically, Rama VIII died in 1946. His brother, Rama IX—more commonly referred to as King Bhumibol—succeeded him to the throne, where he would remain for an unprecedented length of time. It was King Bhumibol who championed the cause of the hill tribes and began the Royal Project to help them.
Wicha was born in the Phra Pradaeng district just south of Bangkok, when his father was in his fifties. His mother, Sudjit, was considerably younger. Wicha wasn’t sure of his own birth date, but he knew that he entered the world on a moonlit night and that his brother ran to call the old midwife in the village. “My father owned 5 or 6 acres there. He had land here and there around Thailand, which he inherited from his father. Promyong is a big name in Thailand, and people think we are very rich, but that isn’t true. My father was a very good man—everyone loved him.” Cham Promyong spoke multiple languages and was clever at anything he set his mind to learn, according to his son. He was a generous man, who “gave away all” to anyone who was in need.
Wicha grew up worshiping his father, but mostly from afar, because as the head of the Thai Muslims, Cham was rarely home. Wicha’s mother was the steady rock on which he built his young life. “My mother raised ten children, virtually alone. She was a tough woman,” he said. “She wasn’t scared of anything.”
Wicha, who did not enjoy school, quit when he was fifteen and sold ice cream with a friend to make some money. Despite this, he won a scholarship from the University of Pakistan, but only briefly attended classes. “I couldn’t sit still like that for very long,” he recalled. After a few months, he ran away. He stayed for a while in the Peshawar district of northern Pakistan, now infamous as a Taliban stronghold, but at that time, it was simply a wild area where nomads and other itinerants lived. Peshawar was a fascinating, ancient multiethnic city. Then he hitchhiked across the border to Afghanistan and ended up in Kabul for several months. “I lived cheap cheap,” Wicha recalled. “I would stay in a place that charged five rupees a night, but I would offer to help to sweep or wash dishes, and I usually could stay for free, or they even paid me.” He would befriend older men who worked at the inns, and they gave him better food. Meeting other travelers—Japanese, Australians, Germans, American hippies—Wicha learned to play the guitar and harmonica from street musicians, and he began to smoke hashish with them to get high while he played. He learned rudimentary English and sang Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, and other folk or protest tunes.
Then it was on to Iran, but only for a short time. In Tehran, he was walking one morning with a group of Americans and Europeans when some Iranian boys ran up and began harassing some of the women, grabbing at their breasts. “It happened just right in front of me,” Wicha recalled, “so I fought with them to stop them.” After six days in an Iranian prison, he was released and hopped a mini-bus going to Turkey. He still had about $60 he had saved from his days in Kabul. He continued to wander, passing through Turkey, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.
In Austria he met Terry O’Sullivan, a Brit who said he knew a way to sneak into West Germany, where border guards were strict about keeping vagrants out. O’Sullivan planned to cross over by walking through the Black Forest. They got lost in freezing temperatures. “I didn’t know what to eat. It wasn’t like the jungle in Thailand. There were just tall pine trees. We were starving. The bread in my rucksack saved our lives.” Maddeningly, he couldn’t open the can of sardines he had brought. They kept walking west, following the sun, and finally they saw smoke rising into the sky from a fire. A rural farmer gave them hot soup and let them rest a while, then showed them the highway, where they walked and hitchhiked to Chiemsee, the island where mad King Ludwig had erected a huge unfinished castle.
For a month, he and Terry O’Sullivan toured Germany together. “Terry had worked in South Africa and had money. I only had sixteen dollars left, so he paid for everything.” Then O’Sullivan left for England. Wicha stayed in Germany, sleeping in parks and washing in underground bathrooms for a while. He eventually found work in Chinese restaurants, where he could eat and sleep in a corner in return for washing dishes and cleaning bathrooms. In Hanover, he met some musician friends, joined a band, and found steady work in a restaurant.
Then, in October 1973, a student revolution broke out in Thailand, protesting against the military junta and demanding a new constitution guaranteeing democracy. A crowd of 400,000 protestors gathered, and the regime agreed to free political prisoners and promised to adopt a new constitution the following year. Nonetheless, police subsequently attacked students, who retaliated with vandalism. Tanks, helicopters, and soldiers were brought in, and over one hundred students were killed. Finally, King Bhumibol intervened and announced that the military government had resigned.
With the student rebellion making international news, Wicha flew back to Bangkok. He stayed for four months, joining protest songwriter Surachai Jantimatorn and his rock band. It was a time of incredible energy, excitement, chaos, and optimism. Students continued to call for strikes and sit-ins to protest everything from Thailand’s trade imbalance with Japan to the CIA’s role in funding the Thai military. But nothing had really changed, even under the supposedly “democratic” regime. Corruption and violence continued. The right wing and military surged back to power in 1976, with increased assassinations of student leaders and other protestors. Surachai Jantimatorn and his fellow musicians, known as Caravan, fled Bangkok, hiding out in rural areas. They were able to return from exile only after amnesty was declared in 1979.
After Wicha’s brief but intense four months in Thailand, he left again, this time flying to England, where he spent the next four years doing whatever was needed to survive. One day a young Scottish woman named Brenda Douglas came to a Chinese restaurant to buy chicken. She was intrigued by the young Thai man who served her. They began to see one another and fell in love. By this time, Wicha was tired of the British weather and was homesick. He and Brenda flew back to Thailand in 1977, where they were married. The following year, their daughter, Chada, was born.
Wicha was distraught when he went back to see his father’s old home. What used to be a “garden plantation” was now covered with smoke-belching factories. The water was filthy. “All my plants had died from the pollution.” And his mother had sold his beloved Harley-Davidson motorcycle.
He bought a small farm on the outskirts of Bangkok, but he wasn’t happy. “I didn’t know what I was doing. My way of life was to struggle. I couldn’t settle down.” He left Brenda and his daughter in Bangkok and began to travel restlessly again. He preferred the city of Chiang Mai, farther north, which was far less crowded and polluted, so the family moved to a rental house there with two-year-old Chada.
Wicha began to roam through the hills, getting to know the hill tribes, buying “antiques”—old opium scales, jewelry, animal traps, weapons, homespun embroidered clothing—from them to resell in a store he opened in Chiang Mai. He opened a factory to make rustic furniture from twisted tree limbs and other “found” wood. “It seemed like I started a new business every day,” Wicha remembered.
Although he was a good businessman and enjoyed the money he made, Wicha was always generous and tried to help the downtrodden. When he happened to meet an ex-convict who was down on his luck, for instance, he hired him to work in his furniture factory, and that led to many other former prisoners seeking work there.
After seven years in Thailand, Brenda had had enough. Wicha was rarely home, she worried that Chada would not receive an adequate education in Thailand, and she missed her family. In 1984 she left Wicha, without rancor, to return to Scotland.
Free to roam at will in northern Thailand, Wicha continued to create new enterprises, including a pig farm, despite the Muslim prohibition against pork. “At that time,” he said, “I knew a lot about the northern mountains, the jungle here and there. No one else knew the jungle the way I did. So I worked for many people as an advisor.”
Another project involved research on stevia, a plant that showed promise as a natural low-calorie alternative to sugar. Wicha explained, “They tried to grow stevia in Thailand, starting in 1982,” which is when he was hired. This was one of the crop replacement schemes supported by the Thai military in villages that supposedly held communist sympathizers. Wicha, who loved growing things, became an expert on the plant. “Once I study something, I go deep into it,” he said. He worked nearly full-time on the stevia project for seven years and part-time for another four years.
Stevia, which is native to subtropical and tropical regions in the western hemisphere, is part of the sunflower family. The leaves of the stevia plant are intensely sweet, but most stevia products produce a bitter, licorice-like aftertaste. Wicha claimed that Thailand produced a superior strain, but it could not compete with cheaper stevia products from China, Brazil, the Philippines, and elsewhere.
During his stevia research, Wicha met Nuch, a Thai secretary at the stevia factory. They were married in 1984, though he warned her from the outset that he was a traveling man, unlikely to stick around for any length of time. He stayed home long enough, however, to father four children—Chanoot, a boy, born in 1986, two daughters, Nootcha (1988) and Picha (1990), and another son, Pichai (1995). They all had nicknames starting with K—in descending order, Khem, Kwan, Kern, and Koon.
Chiang Mai was turning into too much of a big city for Wicha’s taste, so in the late 1980s, he moved his growing family farther north to the smaller, more intimate city of Chiang Rai, where he reopened his antiques store. Here he was closer to many of the hill tribes. He continued to make forays up into villages in the mountains, including Doi Chang, and he hired a crew of buyers to work for him throughout the mountains of Thailand, Laos, and Burma. His store was named one of the top five antique shops in the world.
Not all of his ventures succeeded. In Chiang Rai, he opened a large restaurant with an adjacent retail market where members of hill tribes—mostly Akha, Lisu, and Hmong—demonstrated how to make traditional handicrafts and silversmithing. The business provided important income for the impoverished tribes. “He would throw himself into everything he did,” his daughter Kwan remembered, “whether it was antiques, plants, food, or building design.” Her father sometimes frustrated her with his generosity. “I was a selfish kid, and I would try to stop him from giving everything away.”
Her parents would help anyone with a problem. “When I was very young,” Kwan recalled, “the antiques store was in the middle of town, and a poor boy from the south of Thailand came by. Mom fried him an egg and some chicken, so he came by every day, and he told them he was an orphan. Years later, when we opened our first coffeeshop, this scruffy hippy guy, with lots of beads, said hello and asked if my parents remembered him. He was that boy. And it wasn’t just him—there were many others like him. My parents helped so many.”
But the restaurant and hill tribe market went bankrupt in 1992, after demonstrations in Bangkok against the military regime led to massacres and riots. Tourism, on which Wicha’s businesses relied, dried up, and business for his antiques shop slowed down as well. Fortunately, King Bhumibol intervened, which led to new elections, and a civil war was averted. But for much of the next ten years, Wicha struggled financially.
Kwan, who was a young child when the restaurant went under, remembered the following ten years fondly. “Before the bankruptcy, he was so busy. I remember the restaurant and the hill tribe activities, about twenty minutes from town, out in the country, and his antiques store. He never felt stretched, he liked to do many things. He moved faster than anyone. He walked ten steps for every one of ours, and he was always thinking.”
With fewer enterprises, he slowed down a bit and was around more, though he sometimes traveled to Nan Province to tend to his teak plantation there. He also became obsessed with planting rare tropical trees on his Chiang Rai property. “In my primary school years, and the first two high school years, Dad wasn’t so busy,” Kwan recalled. “We lived in a house by the Mekong River, where for us kids Dad built what we called our Tarzan House, a tree house with a sliding board.” Together they often went to their small farm twenty minutes away to pick ripe red lychee fruits, which Kwan sold out of the back of their truck. “Many people Dad had helped in the past came to the house to give us money and food, though we never felt we wanted for money, ever in our lives. We grew vegetables, and people who had cows or chickens gave us meat.”
Kwan loved the times when rock musician Surachai Jantimatorn, whom she called Uncle Nga, came to visit Wicha, still one of his best friends. “About fifty musicians would come. They set up tents, and some slept in the Tarzan House. Dad would play harmonica, guitar, and flute.”
Wicha eventually bounced back. “I was born to make money,” he explained. He also spent his bahts easily, giving to people in need, as his father had done before him. He was dismayed by the treatment of the hill tribes and appalled at the massacres, forced village relocations, burned homes, and sexual slavery. He once led a raid on a brothel in order to free twelve-year-old girls.
THUS, BY THE TIME Adel came down the mountain from Doi Chang to ask for help in 2001, Wicha had already led an incredible life. He knew the jungle, knew the hill tribes and their plight, knew how to research new crops—and knew how to make money. He also loved a challenge.
Now he found himself sitting around a fire in a small hut in Doi Chang, talking late into the night with a group of desperate Akha and Patchanee Suwanwisolkit, the agronomist from Chiang Mai University. There was no electricity in the hut, which sat on one rai (a little over a third of an acre) that the Akha had purchased for 50,000 baht (less than $2,000) on the road to the village, just as it crested a hill and was descending into the small valley where most of the houses in Doi Chang were located.
The agronomist, who had been extremely nervous about coming to this notoriously drug-ridden, violent, remote village, forgot all her apprehensions as she saw the eager, receptive faces turned toward her. She talked about how to prepare seeds for new trees—choose ripe coffee cherries from the healthiest trees that bore the most fruit, then strip the skin off and dry them in the shade, not the sun. “Then you can plant them right away, or they will keep up to three months,” she explained in Thai. She waited while Wicha translated her words into Akha.
“Before planting, soak the seeds in water overnight. Plant them in sand mixed with dirt. It takes six weeks for them to sprout. They will send out two butterfly wings at first—two leaves.” At that point, she explained, they had to transfer the seedlings to individual pots filled with rich soil. “You can’t expose them to full sun—they need about 50 percent exposure—so put black semi-transparent screening over the plants. Leave them to grow for six to eight months. A month before you’re ready to set them out in a field, prepare the soil, exposing it to the sun to bake out impurities. At the same time, take the black screening off the seedlings so that they begin to adjust to the sun.”
Adel’s older brother Leehu, younger brother Ayu and brother-in-law Akong were also present. As Patchanee explained each process, from seedling to mature, producing tree, Wicha and the others asked questions. Wicha scribbled notes, but the Akha, with no written language, simply took it all in. With their astonishing memories, they had no trouble recalling the details later.
Charmed by Wicha and the receptive, hospitable Akha farmers, Patchanee agreed to help them, returning every weekend on her own time. The timing couldn’t have been worse in terms of the world market. Because Vietnam had begun to flood the world with poor-quality robusta coffee beans, the price for coffee on the C-market in New York had dropped precipitously. The years 2001–2003 were the nadir of what came to be known as the Coffee Crisis. The good news for the Akha was that they were already in crisis, and the low prices did not discourage them.
Over the next three years, with advice and hard work, the Akha began to grow more coffee, and this time they knew better what they were doing. Nonetheless, they faced a steep learning curve and many unforeseen problems.