FIDDLING FOR WATER BUFFALOES I / I / hen my brotherLek and I were children we were only allowed to go to V V Prasongburi once a week. That was the day our mothers went to the marketplace and to make merit at the temple. Our grandmother, our mothers’ mother, spent the days chewing betel nut and fashioning intricate mobiles out of dried palm leaves; not just the usual fish shapes, dozens of tiny baby fish swinging from a big mother fish lacquered in bright red or orange, but also more elaborate shapes: lions and tigers and mythical beasts, nagas that swallowed their own tails. It was ourjob to sell them to the thaokae who owned the only souvenir shop in the town... the only store with one of those aluminum gratings that you pull shut to lock up at night, just like the ones in Bangkok. It was always difficult to get him to take the ones that weren’t fish. Once we took in a mobile made entirely of spaceships, which our grandmother had copied from one of the American TV shows. (In view of our later experiences, this proved particularly prophetic.) “ Everyone knows," the thaokae said (that was the time he admitted us to his inner sanctum, where he would smoke opium from an impressive bong and puff it in our faces) “ that a plataphien mobile has fish in it. Everyone wants sweet little fishies to hang over their baby’s cradle. I mean, those spaceships are a tribute to your grandmother’s skill at weaving dried palm leaves, but as far as the tourists are concerned, it’s just fiddling for water buffaloes.” He meant there was no point in doing such fine work because it would be wasted on his customers. We ended up with maybe ten baht apiece for my grandmother’s labors, and we’d carefully tuck away two of the little blue banknotes (this was in the year 2504 B.E., long before they debased the baht into a mere coin) so that we could go to the movies. The American ones were funn ies t—e spe c ia lly the James Bond ones—because the dubbers had the most outrageous ad libs. I remember that in Goldfinger the dubbers kept putting in jokes about the fairy tale of Jao Ngo, which is about a hideous monster who falls into a tank of gold paint and becomes very handsome. The audience became so wild with laughter that they actually stormed the dubbers’ booth and started improvising their own puns. I particularly remember that day because we were waiting for the monsoon to burst, and the heat had been making everyone crazy. Seconds after we left the theater it came all at once, and the way home was so impassable we had to stay at the village before our village, and then we had to go home by boat, rowing frantically by the side of the drowned road. The fish were so thick you could pull them from the water in handfuls. That was when my brother Lek said to me, “You know, Noi, I think it would be grand to be a movie dubber.” “That’s silly, Phii Lek,” I said. “Someone has to herd the water buffaloes and sell the mobiles and—” “That’s what we both should do. So we don’t have to work on the farm anymore.” Our mothers, who were rowing the boat, pricked up their ears at that. Something to report back to our father, perhaps. “We could live in the town. I love that town.” “ It’s not so great,” my mother said. My senior mother (Phii Lek’s mother) agreed. “We went to Chiangmai once, for the beauty contest. Now there was a Those spaceships are a tribute to your grandmother’s skill at weaving dried palm leaves, but as far as the tourists are concerned, it’s just fiddling for water buffaloes. ” town. Streets that wind on and on . . . and air conditioning in almost every public building!” “We didn’t win the beauty contest, though ,” my mother said sadly. She didn’t say it, but she implied that that was how they’d both ended up marrying my father. “Our stars were bad. Maybe in my next life—” “ I’m not waiting till my next life,” my brother said. “When I’m grown up they’ ll have air conditioning in Prasongburi, and I’ ll be dubbing movies every night.” The sun was beating down, blinding, sizzling. We threw off our clothes and dived from the boat. The water was cool, mud-flecked; we pushed our way through the reeds. The storm had blown the village’s TV antenna out into the paddy field. We watched Star Trek at the headsman’s house, our arms clutching the railings on his porch, our feet dangling, slipping against the stilts that were still soaked with rain. It was fuzzy and the sound was off, so Phii Lek put on a magnificent performance, putting discreet obscenities into the mouths of Kirk and Spock while the old men laughed and the coils of mosquito incense smoked through the humid evening. At night, when we were both tucked in under our mosquito netting, I dreamed about going into space and finding my grandmother’s palm-leaf mobiles hanging from the point of the stars. m f en years later they built a high- J . way from Bangkok to Chiangmai, and there were no more casual tourists in Prasongburi. Some American archaeologists started digging at the site of an old Khmer city nearby. The movie theater never got air conditioning, but my grandmother did become involved in faking antiques; it turned out to be infinitely more lucrative than fish mobiles, and when the thaokae died, she and my two mothers were actually able to buy the place from his intransigent nephew. The three of them turned it into an “ antique” place (fakes in the front, the few genuine pieces carefully hoarded in the air-conditioned back room), and our father set about looking for a third wife as befit his improved station in life. My family were also able to buy a halfinterest in the movie theater, and that was how my brother and I ended up in the dubbing booth after all. Now, the fact of the matter was, sound projection systems in theaters had become prevalent all over the country by then, and Lek and I both knew that live movie dubbing was a dying art. Only the fact that the highway didn’t come anywhere near Prasongburi prevented its citizens from positively demanding talkies. But we were young and, relatively speaking, wealthy; we wanted to have a bit of fun before the drudgery of marriage and earning a real living was thrust upon us. Lek did most of the dubbing—he was astonishingly convincing at female voices as well as male—while I contributed the sound effects and played background music from the library of scratched records we’d inherited from the previous regime. Since we two were the only purveyors of, well, foreign culture in the town, you’d th in k we would be the ones best equipped to deal with an alien invasion. Apparently, the aliens thought so too. Aliens were farthest from my mind the day it happened, though. I was putting in some time at the shop and trying to pacify my three honored parents, who were going at it like cats and dogs in the back. “ If you dare bring that bitch into our house,” Elder Mother was saying, fanning herself feverishly with a plastic fan—for our air conditioning had broken down, as usual—“ I’ ll leave.” “Well,” Younger Mother (my own) said, “ I don’t mind as long as you make sure she’s a servant. But if you marry her—” “Well,/mind, I’m telling you!” my other mother shouted. “ If the two of us aren’t enough for you, I’ve three more cousins up north, decent, hardworking g irls who’ ll bring in money, not use it up.” “Anyway, if you simply have to spend money,” Younger Mother said, “What’s wrong with a new pickup truck?” “ I’m not dealing with that usurious thaokae in Ban Kraduk,” my father said, taking another swig of his Mekong whiskey, and “ and there’s no other way of coming up with a down payment. . and besides, I happen to be a very horny man.” “All of you shut up,” my grandmother said from somewhere out back, where 17 Candace Bieneman Clinton St. Quarterly
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