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Thailand

I have made several trips to Thailand since getting married.

Dao grew up in Udorn. She was the youngest of her siblings. During the Vietnam war there was an American airbase in Udorn. Her older brother had a contract with the US Airforce to supply food and other supplies to the base. Her parents ran a small hotel. The rooms are simple with just a bed and chest. There is a common bathroom that all the guests share. Dao liked to follow her Dad around and had learned a few English words in school. She sometimes helped him translate between an American and he was quite proud of her for that. Udorn would flood every year during the monsoons, so all the houses were built on stilts. There would be a pipe from the second story to the ground to connect to a pit for the toilet. The flooding would sometimes damage this system and it did not always get immediately repaired. One time her father caught a Thai boy stealing from their hotel and he chased him with a switch. The boy saw the toilet pit and jumped it it to hide. When he looked over the side at the boy, her father decided that the boy had already suffered enough punishment, of his own doing.

On our first trip to Thailand as a married couple, my wife (Dao) wanted me to meet all of her relatives and see her home country, many parts of which she had not yet been to. She arranged a bus tour that took us to Ayutthaya, Chiang Mai and Phuket. The bus would stop for delicious meals in the evening. When I grew up in New Ulm, we had to ask permission from our parents to leave the table after a meal. One of the prerequisites was that our plate be completely empty It was impolite to leave food that my Mom had worked hard to prepare and my Dad had worked hard to provide. The Thai food was very good but I was full and ready to leave the table, so I cleaned off my plate. This however, triggered the Thai servers to believe that I liked the food and wanted more so they would immediately put more food on my plate. So we got into an endless circle of me cleaning off my plate and the Thai servers putting more food on it. I was thinking “when are they ever going to stop bringing food, I can’t eat another bite?” I finally asked my wife what to do, and she told me to just leave some food uneaten. I found out later the Thai servers were thinking “how can this guy eat so much, he is going to put us out of business?”