Spending time with Kavi

The next day I awoke early, repacked my bags, and headed back to the ferry. I had some writing to catch up on, so the bus and ferry ride sped by without incident.

When I reached the island I thoroughly overpaid a cabbie to take me to Kavi's family's house on the island, but with the tourism trade flourishing here, it's not easy to find or use the pickup bus system that is, in theory, in place.

Kavi greeted me at the end of the drive and welcomed me inside. His family home here is a huge sprawling three story villa that overlooks the cool blue ocean beaches, with Tamarind trees in the front yard and coconuts all around. We stand on the balcony and he points to where the coconuts thin out and there are new houses in every direction. "It used to be all forest here when we first came. You know? Lots of trees and prickly bushes and empty beach. But now there are houses everywhere." He doesn't seem frustrated or angry by this, just contemplative, and perhaps a little sad. It's a cliched moment from all those 'save the earth' films, but it is still happening here, right before my eyes.

I think about my burning yen to travel, and that of millions of other affluent young people around the world. I think of how traveling in some cases is better than just getting caught up in the consumer cycle of "buy, discard, replace" that is demonized so effectively in "The Story of Stuff" (thanks Ron and Lacey, now I feel guilty whenever I buy something new! ;P) but that we travelers still have an impact, and do damage in our roving adventures.

I think of the south Brazilian ants I read about in a recent short story--Leiningen Vs. The Ants, by Carl Stephenson--and I momentarily envision tourists like those ants. We have the burning need to experience something we perceive as real, or unique, so we flood into a new place as soon as the scouts tell us it is full of real things, and then we consume them all until the land lies empty and fallow before us and we say "this is just a tourist trap now" and we leave it for the next fascinating new place, leaving behind a husk that other, lazier and richer ants will visit in an attempt to glean meaning within the destruction we've left behind.

I've been having dark thoughts on this trip. Perhaps it is not so good for me to travel alone.

The visit is not all wistful stares off balconies though, mainly it's the simple pleasure of a Thai university student home on vacation, and it turns out that his family and mine have a lot in common--whenever he visits, they eat like they're about to be snowed in for a month.

More on that though, in a moment, after he showed me the house, we went out to the beaches and wandered around Koh Samui for a while. His father works near the most popular tourist beach, so we caught a ride with him and while he worked his afternoon shift, we wandered the beaches, talking of politics and world culture and travel.

Kavi is boldly and openly critical of the mountain of money that is expended in much of the royal family's daily lives. He points out that the crown prince is quite unpopular due to his abuse of the royal position--when he and his daughters visit the mall, they often close the whole thing, so that they can shop alone. He points out that the king could abdicate the throne to the crown prince, but is hesitant to do so since he's so unpopular, but the king and his wife are just as bad. He holds the king's daughter in high regard though, pointing out that she's a scholar and a royal for the common man--she doesn't waste government resources on her own pursuits and is known as a person heavily invested in the average Thai.

His honest and free criticism reminds me why I could never live in such a society as the Thai one--the idea that people are just people is deeply ingrained into my mind, and Kavi obviously shares that though--he clearly sees all men as equals, and the society in which he finds himself firmly denies this fundamental truth.

I don't ask who is responsible for it, but I do make note that there is an almost lifesize portrait of his Majesty the King in the dining, overlooking the table on which we eat every meal, so I suppose there is yet some disagreement among his own family on this point.

Anyway, to get to the meals.

Kavi's mother is a genius. He tells me that she actually cooks very little of the food, most of it is prepared by their helper, a concept with which I've become comfortable only through the influence of my Grandmother, Allison, and one of my girlfriends, Beth, whose family has retained a housekeeper who also prepares meals for years.

I mentally reconfirm something I'd already suspected--whether Kavi likes it or not, he's high class. With a highly educated Chinese father, a housekeeper and soon a degree in international relations, Kavi will have the remarkable opportunity to be critical of the very thing that puts him in a position of power. Class is everything in Thai society, and it's still a firmly enforced thing. It is something I've noticed myself--if you are overly thankful to a shopkeeper or waitress it makes them obviously uncomfortable, since by virtue of your very presence on what is obviously a vacation you must be at least upper-middle class, and therefore above them on the strictly regimented Thai social ladder.

I think this is interesting, since I'm in a somewhat similar position with my job--if the government acted the way I think it should, I'd be unemployed--it is only that the government is wasteful and maintains a huge standing army with extensive requirements for materiel transfer that lets me retain my current lucrative position.

In any case, there is a point I keep trying to come round to and getting distracted by politics, which is this: someone in that house has a gift for food.

That first day after we get home, there is a spread of five dishes--two kinds of fish (one fried, one smoked), fresh cooked oysters (with two kinds of spicy seasoning available), a green curry prawn and pumpkin dish that's to die for, and a sort of tomato-y soup with prawns and couch.

I don't know couch's proper name (in English it's called Bitter Melon), I never bothered to learn it. Quang introduced me to this vegetable that the Vietnamese eat perhaps a year ago, by telling me it was a popular but acquired taste, and I tried it, because I'll try (and generally like) anything. The Vietnamese prepare it by stuffing it with other vegetables (and meat alternatives, if you're a vegetarian like Quang) and then storing it in its own juice, making it very bitter.

The reason I don't know the bitter melon's proper Vietnamese or Thai name is that it tasted so vile that I turned to Quang immediately and said "this tastes like I'm eating Naugahyde soaked in formaldehyde. I feel like I'm eating a couch."

Quang laughed, and the name stuck. Now if he brings the dish to work, he tells me he's brought couch, and I know not to bother asking for a sample of his dish.

So anyway couch in a meat broth, with meat, is significantly more palatable (though still very bitter for my taste). I enjoyed it a lot more the Thai, meat eating way, than the Vietnamese, meatless way, but I still don't think I'd ever order it voluntarily, unless it was to inflict it on someone else.

The following morning for breakfast, we had three more dishes, all with shrimp this time. The prawn and coconut curry again (which is perhaps even better cold than it was warm), a shrimp and glass noodle dish that would gain high marks in any Thai restaurant I've ever visited in the states, and a shrimp and vegetable soup that is quite delicious.

As we talked that morning, Kavi says "oh, actually, that we don't eat" just after I've scooped up a radish and some broth from the shrimp soup, and I look at him rather confused as I'm chewing. He's not pointing at anything, and it takes me a moment to realize he started his sentence before I put my spoon in my mouth, and he was trying to warn me off eating the ornamental garnish/seasoning vegetable they use in their soups. Whoops. It was tasty, though a bit more fibrous than a real radish has a right to be.

But aside from hoovering up things I've no business eating, the visit went really well. Kavi's mother and grandmother and wonderful, cheerful women who don't speak two words of English but kept bringing me food and then asking Kavi why I wasn't eating more of it, when in fact I was eating enough for at least three people, so we got along fine.

Kavi and I wandered on the beach with his family's dog, and I took a few pictures at sunset--it's hard not to take breathtaking shots when the view looks like this.

Kavi's father is a very cool cat, as it turns out. The night on which I arrived he came back down after dinner dressed in nothing but workout shorts and sneakers, and after a while he and Kavi (who had been reading with me in the living room, both of us reading and half watching a Thai soap opera/sitcom that his grandmother follows, about three middle aged sisters who live above a Muay Thai training hall, and their meddlings in the romantic lives of their various twentysomething daughters) disappeared. If you had trouble reading that sentence, I apologize. I had some difficulty finding the end of it when I'd closed my parenthesis.

Anyway, I finally came out of my literature induced coma and realized they were gone. I wandered outside to find them wailing on a lightweight bag full of rice husks and taking turns performing various callisthenics and Muay Thai drills. Kavi explains that his dad was once quite overweight and started working out every night with his son a few years ago, and I can tell now he's quite fit. Hell, he looks a good deal more sculpted than me, and he's in his early 50s.

I work out with them for a while, and his father (whose English is pretty strong) peppers me with questions once he finds out I've been to Alaska. He likes to fish, so he's interested in going and maybe doing some Salmon fishing day trips from a cruise. I tell him I think it's a great idea, and that I loved it there. I tell him to go in the summer though, on account of the fact that he says Northern Thailand is cold enough for him, and if he goes during Alaska's autumn he's liable to freeze to death.

The next day, Kavi and I do blessedly little, we eat a large breakfast, watch V for Vendetta, which I like considerably better the second-go-round (Hugo Weaving is a dramatic genius--he acts circles around Natalie Portman for much of the film and you never even see the man's face), and read a lot. Kavi has a couple of optional assignments to prepare for in the upcoming month of school, and I'm enjoying having new books and thinking of trying to jettison a rather heavy one (that I'll write about when I get home) before I leave Thailand, which means about 150 pages per day, minimum, over the coming week. Then we eat a large lunch, and head for the bus, which will be its own little entry.