Tsunami Anniversary: Mai Pen Rai

Papa Holland lent me a book written in 1965 by a US Foreign Service wife who ends up teaching at Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok while her husband is stationed in Thailand. It's amazingly culturally relevant even today, and especially so in quintessential Thailand outside the big cities.

Author Carol Hollinger's hilarious adventures with Thai electricity mimic my own travails with Internet access on the island of Koh Jum.

"The Internet cafe open?" I inquire at the open air front desk.

"Broken before tsunami." Knowing that it was perfectly fine on December 24th last year albeit too far to walk to from my enchanting lounge chair in front of the Andaman Sea and three times as expensive as on the mainland (mainland pricing is $1/hour roughly but the entrepreneurs here have to account for the generator and Satellite), I ask again.

"Before?" I look puzzled to help with the interpretation. "Do you mean after the tsunami?"

I'm trying to be thorough as disaster seems to warp memories. Twelve people died says the boy who transported me from the ferry to the beach. Fifteen says another resident. Sixteen reports the Krabi Flyer in October 2005.

"Eighteen." Eighteen, are you sure? "I was at the funeral," says Phil, a Scot who now lives at Woodlawn Lodge, which is after all adjacent to the cemetary itself. As we speak I can watch several men bang away repairing the tsunami-ravaged gravesites and building a memorial to the eighteen.

So it's when the third person insists the wave went all the way to the "road" (that's the dirt path I spoke of) and through the Internet cafe that I finally believe it.

"Electricity was much more interesting in the Far East. It seemed more personal," writes Carol Hollinger in her book Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind.

Personal, I can relate. I've only posted to my blog thus far from borrowed laptops. Jan at the Koh Jum Lodge graciously lent me her and her husband's, Jean-Michel, business laptop yesterday morning.

I spoke with Jan at length in their warm wood-toned bar while sipping a banana shake Monday night about their and the island's reconstruction. Although Thai, her English is better than most Europeans on the island. The brand-new Koh Jum Lodge catering to the French market had been opened one day when the tsunami wiped them out.

I'd normally be frustrated when the wifi goes down for five minutes at the local cafe, but I'm definitely not in Silicon Valley anymore.

And I am finding that I am meeting a heck of a lot more people this way.

"One evening as we were expecting ten people to dinner within the hour, Uthai [their head servant] announced pleasantly that both water and electricity had vanished. I was startled to hear my own voice murmur, "mai pen rai." Uthai gave me a gentle smile and her large, liquid eyes approved my answer. As I helped her look for old candles, I brooded over the fact that I wasn't in hysterics. In the usual fashion of American women, I had always believed that public utilities were guaranteed by the Constitution. That first mai pen rai was something of a landmark, I now realize. Thailand had begun to teach me that it was possible to whittle down my gigantic list of necessities. The lesson trailed a curious freedom in its path." - Carol Hollinger, Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind

Mai pen rai may help explain the Thai response to recovery better than anything else.

It's hard to translate but it's not just "never mind" or "whatever" but rather a calm acceptance, a yielding to what is so. A deep okay that I may mouth, but they mean.

I've seen with no exaggeration hundreds of photos by now since I've arrived. Everyone whips out their tsunami album when I explain what I'm doing.

There is one photo that sticks in my mind.

It's a picture of the Coco Bar owner evacuating after the third wave, whom Mama insists is a very meticulate and exacting business owner. He's walking uphill through young trees. And carting in his arms a small sack with bottles of Bacardi and a few other liquors.

It's all that's left of his bar.

"Today," Mama says he said when he joined the others, "Everything's on me."

I look at the picture again. He has a huge grin. If I didn't know it was only hours after the tsunami I'd have thought he was on an afternoon jaunt.

When a girl here had a motorcycle accident, everyone runs out. "I think they are rushing to help," Mama says, "but they're jotting down the license number." Lucky number. Perfect for the lottery.

"What?" I'm aghast. "But she was just in an accident. How's that lucky?"

She's alive, Mama replies.

So Mr. Coco Bar was beaming at his good fortune. And if you wander by his bar on the beach, you'd never know now that it was demolished.

Mai pen rai. Okay. I think I am beginning to understand some Thai.

p.s. Right now I am writing from a borrowed desktop at the Koh Jum village school with permission of the headmistress Rina. I'm here in between computer classes and only a twelve- or thirteen-year-old girl in her crisp blue and white uniform sits next to me playing a game. The five new computers and the satellite dish are donations to the one desktop installed here before. (More on that later.)

p.p.s. I will be in tourist's paradise-Internet-is-not-an-issue Phi Phi tomorrow. I'm glad I started in Koh Jum which economically relies on rubber plantations and fishing as well as tourism to better understand post-tsunami Thailand. (In other words, understanding Thailand in heavy resort areas alone can be like trying to understand Mexico in Cancun or the US in Disney World.) 

Comments

[Marilyn]

I was aghast when we first moved to the tropics to discover that the power would go out...frequently...and seemingly without cause. Five years later, a power outage simply meant lighting some candles and not making the mistake of resetting all of the clocks until after the power had gone off and on a few times. Because at first, as surely as my West Coast-bred self would start resetting the clocks, everything would go dark again. :) Mai Pen Rei is something we could all learn from.

[simon]

I have never read such so much condescending arrogant us bullshit. You have no idea of the world outside your pathetic american enviroment. What a waste of a great mind and a wonderful book on such a small-minded stupid person. You just did not get it, did you - like all your stupid ignorant american countrymen.

[simon]

I have never read such so much condescending arrogant us bullshit. You have no idea of the world outside your pathetic american enviroment. What a waste of a great mind and a wonderful book on such a small-minded stupid person. You just did not get it, did you - like all your stupid ignorant american countrymen.