Published Fall/Winter 2007
 
Asian Tigers
by Mithran Somasundrum | ns 69
Mana's wife was an auditor. She visited factories all over Thailand, checking they complied with ISO regulations. She audited the hygiene, the suppliers, the traceability. At times Mana thought she was auditing him. They could be sitting in a restaurant or a coffee shop in one of those pauses when the conversation died, and Mana would start looking around at the other diners, wondering about their lives, and then glance back to find Ting quietly watching him. He'd sense ISO-type criteria being ticked off a checklist: appearance, ambition, prospects. It was both complimentary and a little unnerving.
The job suited Ting. Not just mentally, but physically too. She was tall for a Thai: five foot eight plus another two inches from her heels. She'd arrive at factories in Buriram and Korat, power-dressed in something dark with wide shoulders and a narrow waist. A startled manager would lumber out of his office, and, finding himself peering up at her, lose the initiative and with it the belief he could talk her around receipts he didn't have and invoices he couldn't provide.
Her outlook, Mana thought, also fit. Ting was one of those people who believe in a correct way of doing everything. A correct way to dress, to decorate an apartment, to cultivate friends. It was only in bed she became improvisational. Mana felt she needed these moments as ballast, and so tried not to object when her experiments turned painful. She went, for instance, through a period of biting him hard enough to draw blood, which frankly was the most unerotic thing he could think of. On another occasion she slapped his bare behind hard and then glared mischievously, which meant, he assumed, that he was supposed to slap hers. Foreplay with Ting was always a form of sparring, in which one of them had to be initially resisted, force met with force, and then surrendered to. A few days after watching Basic Instinct on DVD, she straddled him on the bed, and reaching under his pillow, self-conscious but determined, drew out a white silk scarf. "Did you buy an ice pick as well?" he asked. Ting pouted, and pushed the hair back from her face. She expected these experiments to be taken seriously.
Her audit extended, often, to the way he dressed. She'd come home with a new shirt and instructions to wear it with a particular pair of trousers. The next morning she'd see the "look" she'd envisaged and give a small firm nod. That was that taken care of.
Mana was 25. It seemed strange, after his years of bachelorhood, to have someone buying his clothes. He sometimes wondered if other wives did this. But then he understood the rules for himself and Ting were different. They were a Modern Couple.
This awareness of modernity had come upon him slowly, and consisted of different things. One was the fact that they already lived in their own apartment, a place they shared with no one. There was a time when a young Thai wife would be expected to move in with her husband's family. But Mana's parents lived over a hundred kilometres away, in Lopburi—inside of a large walled compound that contained four separate houses: two aunts and Mana's grandparents on his father's side. Mana had grown up amid a happy chaos of cousins and arbitrarily-shared bedrooms and communal meals. It had provided him with a secure early childhood but, during adolescence, a frustrating lack of privacy. He'd felt unable to form a personality outside of his family's influence.
"It's such a pity to work so far away," Mana's mother had told him, and Mana had pretended to agree.
Ting's parents lived in Bangkok, but far from her or Mana's workplace. Her family was Chinese-Thai, and her father a stern man whose arguments for or against anything were always cost-based. His own father had come to Thailand alone at sixteen, on a wooden boat down the Mekong, to escape a period of famine, and had instilled in his son the importance of practicality above all else. As a girl, Ting had been prohibited from reading fiction, since during that same time she could instead be absorbing useable facts. She convinced him with a cost-based argument of her own: her and Mana's combined salaries were enough to afford a mortgage. With the bank's help they could buy a condominium in a convenient location. And for sure there would be something convenient, for condos were springing up everywhere. It was 1996—boom time. In the newspapers and on television, politicians of all parties told them Thailand was one of the "tiger economies." They said this in tones of shared pride, for if it was so, then weren't the Thai people themselves tiger-like in some way?
If you bought stocks on the SET their value would rise. If you bought land you re-sold at a profit. Friends from university began businesses—they opened photocopy shops, or laundries, or sold second hand computers; they invested in the construction industry. It didn't matter what you did, anything would succeed.
Ting and Mana were eager to embrace their new life. They moved into their apartment before the furniture, and when they saw the empty blank-walled rooms, held each other and laughed. They'd fooled everyone.
They slept on a mattress on the floor and lived out of suitcases, and then by the end of the week there was a bed. For some time it was the only piece of furniture; and that fact in itself made their new life seem wonderfully illicit. Mana looked forward to coming home each day, to finding Ting waiting for him on the bed—because where else was there to wait?—sitting up cross-legged under the ceiling fan with her blouse unbuttoned, biting her bottom lip and gazing back at him with a bright excited stare that said, Aren't we terrible people?
Gradually the flat acquired goods. It wasn't difficult: auditing paid well, and Mana's field, IT, was the coming thing. As he accompanied Ting around the department stores, he discovered something new—he liked to shop! He liked taking his time in places like Zen or Central while a store assistant stood demurely at his shoulder with her feet together and her hands clasped. He bought silk ties and linen shirts and new leather shoes. Together they bought furniture. A bamboo standard lamp with a rice paper shade, a Scandinavian armchair that tilted back with a footrest, a wooden coffee table whose surface consisted of white pebbles under a flat plane of glass. Mana liked driving home fast on the expressway with his purchases safe in the boot. It was fulfilling.
And besides, when they got home he knew they'd have sex. It was always better in the afternoons. Their apartment was on the fifth floor, backing onto an orchard of coconut palms—a dense canopy of green bordered by a Metropolis skyline that glittered at night. Invisible from below, they slid the glass doors open behind the insect screen, and never drew the curtains. As soon as they got inside, before even unwrapping things and putting clothes on hangers, Mana would be reaching for the top button of Ting's jeans. "Mana!" she'd say, slapping him away, but with her eyes alight. He'd keep bringing his hands back, finally undoing the button, the zip, one hand cupping the tight curve of her behind, and then she'd be pulling at his trousers, furiously, like retaliation for an insult. From the pavement five floors below, they'd hear the sounds of children at play, the hiss of water from someone washing a car. Ting would push Mana onto the bed, and he'd have a sense they were ahead of the city. Wherever this city was going, they'd got there first.
- - - - -
They rarely socialized with colleagues from work, preferring their own circle of friends made during their time at university. These were people who thought as they did, who were eager to enjoy life and wanted the best. On the weekends they looked for new restaurants to try, new clubs to visit. When Royal City Avenue opened up, they all went along and marvelled at the loud neon pulse of it: a road purely of bars and nightclubs. They went tipsily from one venue to the next and all agreed it was just what the city needed—even if they hadn't actually noticed this need until now. And even though the crowd was a bit young, it made for a good scene. Sanuk.
Ting developed a taste for Black Label which she took diluted with plenty of ice, instead of the over-sweet alcohol-juice mixers women were supposed to drink. In RCA nightclubs like School Bus or Brown Sugar, Mana enjoyed watching her dance. He liked her complete self-absorption, every atom of concentration centred inwards, as in the air-conditioned semi-darkness her hips swivelled and the hair whipped around her face, each move frozen by the flash photography of the strobe lights. He liked watching the men gravitating into her orbit, hungry to connect.
Mana rarely danced, but instead stood by the clutter of drinks with Sombat, a university friend who also preferred to watch his own wife, Aim.
Sombat and Aim as a couple were something Ting's auditing instincts approved of. She'd certified the four of them as looking right together. Or perhaps, Mana suspected, she thought herself and Mana were made to look good by their friends' company. Sombat wore glasses and was starting to run to fat, and Mana believed, without pride, that he measured up favourably against him. Aim was a quiet serious girl who Mana had never understood, but whom Ting seemed to have connected with in a particular husband-excluding woman-woman dynamic.
At some stage of the night, Sombat could be relied on to talk about his car—a two-year-old BMW he'd just bought. "Practically new!" he'd bellow over some hard driving bass line. "Has a new car smell! Still!" And Mana would nod his head, often without having heard him.
It didn't matter. He was only there for Ting.
Watching her, he'd have a feeling of sexual impatience so acute it was almost pleasurable. He'd want to strip her there on the dance floor, in front of everyone.
- - - - -
Sombat had a proposition. A seafood restaurant, he told them over dinner at Lemon Grass, eyes eager behind his glasses. They were seated in the main room, having missed the chance to book a table in their usual alcove. All around them, waiters clattered over the red stone floor. For Mana this made the meal feel hectic, and in his distraction, the conversation skittered ahead of him.
"Well, what do you think?"
"Seafood! Great, it's exciting," said Ting immediately.
"We'll have to move fast," said Sombat. "The chance won't wait forever."
"Wait a minute, what chance? What restaurant?" Mana asked.
"I mean starting one, obviously," said Sombat.
"Obviously," agreed Ting.
"What are you talking about? Starting one where?"
"Bangkhuntien," Sombat replied, pouring more whiskey into Ting's glass. "Out there by the shrimp farms. Near the gulf. The seafood's cheap, they bring it up the klongs. It's a nice rural setting."
Ting raised her glass in a salute.
"What do you think about all this?" Mana asked Aim, who'd been sitting silently.
She blinked. "Why not?"
"But the Bangkhuntien-Chaitalay Road's not even finished. Who's going to come down there?"
"After it's finished, how much do you think that land will cost?" Sombat asked.
He was right, thought Mana. It was a good opportunity. And yet, listening to Ting and Aim discuss the menu, the situation seemed all at once beyond his control. He decided he would discuss it with Ting later, but by the time they returned home from Brown Sugar, buoyed by alcohol, holding on to each other as they swayed out of the elevator, it wasn't possible to sensibly discuss anything.
- - - - -
Sombat drove them out to the site. Not wanting to risk his BMW on the broken latterite road, he borrowed his brother's pick-up. Mana sat in the front next to him, and Ting and Aim squeezed onto the half-seat behind.
Sombat talked for the whole journey. He told them about the group he was setting up and the money they'd need to raise—four million baht.
"So much," said Ting approvingly, as though such a large amount proved on its own the well-planned nature of their project.
Sombat told them he and Aim could probably raise one million with a bank loan—could Ting and Mana do the same? Mana thought so. He was still uncertain about the whole idea, but for reasons that were hard to define. The morning after their meal with Sombat, he'd said to Ting, "So this restaurant, you really think it's a good idea?"
"Of course. It's an investment. We need to think about the future. And it's only the latterite, you know. If Bangkhuntien had a proper road, that land would cost too much already."
There wasn't much you could say against arguments like that. The future was out there and had to be accounted for. And yet Mana resented having to do so. He liked their stylish unbound life—the clubs and the pubs and the shops, and the small discoveries you made inside them, the things you hadn't realized you'd wanted.
In Sombat's pick-up, Mana tried to project an image of mature considered approval. He wanted them to see he only agreed conditionally, through an exact knowledge of the risks. During the journey down he asked precise questions, picking on details he wanted clarified. What was the distance from the klong to the gulf? How long did it take a long-tail to make the journey? What kind of mass could a single long-tail carry? He had no idea why any of these things were important, but felt they showed him in the correct light. He nodded thoughtfully when Sombat gave his answers.
It was late afternoon, and on both sides of the road flat sheets of water mirrored the low sun. Shrimp farms, Sombat told them. The water here was brackish; they didn't even have to rely on the klongs for their seafood.
The latterite ended and now they were bumping over pot-holed red earth, the pick-up lurching from side to side as on their left the shrimp farms became untended land. Eventually Sombat bumped off the dirt track and rolled to a halt. "We're here," he said. "Welcome to the restaurant."
Of course, there was nothing. Just parched grass and weeds and five skinny kapok trees which would have to be cut down. Sombat spread his arms out. "We want four rai, at least."
"So much?" asked Mana.
"The restaurant needs space around it. People will come here because it's rural. And there has to be enough room to park all the cars. This is what's ahead of us, you know. No one wants to go down Sukumvit Road every Saturday night. All that traffic. They get bored."
But we do, thought Mana. We go there every Saturday night. We're not bored.
"Right," said Ting. "We're the new thing."
Why change? he thought. For what? She's not bored. I'm not bored.
The building would be simple, Sombat told them. Functional. A raised wooden floor and a roof with broad eaves. There would be no walls as such, just a low railing all the way round, leaving the place open to the breeze. In the cold season it's amazing, he said, painting a picture: planes of blue-grey water, the cool wind whistling over them.
Mana looked around. They were in the hot season now, and it was hard to imagine their wind-cooled restaurant appearing from such surroundings. Ting was standing under the meager shade of a kapok tree, hands in her hip pockets. Mana wanted to see the close evaluating stare of an ISO auditor, anticipating every problem. "When the sun sets it's going to be beautiful," she said. Sombat raised his eyebrows and pursed his lips, as though to indicate that of course he'd thought of, and laid on, sunsets as well.
Aim was walking by the barbed wire fence that marked the perimeter of the four-rai plot, her long white gypsy skirt held to her sides, to keep it from snagging on the bushes. She turned to face the three of them.
"So, what are we waiting for?"
- - - - -
Ting and Mana visited each set of parents at least once a month. In turn, they told each set about the restaurant. Ting's father wanted to know the start-up costs. And what was their projected income? What about advertising? Publicity? These were all the things Mana realised he should have been asking on the drive down. Hearing them now, he understood that in his gruff way, the old man was showing them he was pleased.
The next weekend they visited Mana's parents. It always seemed to Mana like re-crossing a frontier when he returned to Lopburi, to this dusty town without a department store, without anything you could properly call a nightclub. Back inside the family compound he was like an apologetic time-traveller, trying to hide his greater sophistication. His cousin, Chai, a companion throughout childhood, now worked as an accountant for a pineapple-canning factory on the edge of town. He lived within the compound with his now-pregnant wife. What did they do on the weekends? Mana wondered. When they chatted over a lunch of som tum, sticky rice and grilled chicken, Chai seemed as placid and content as ever, stroking his wife's swollen belly with a proprietary air; and yet Mana was conscious of keeping pity from his face.
Over the meal, in her rapid-fire way, Ting described the restaurant. Unlike Mana, she didn't feel the need to hold back any part of her worldliness, or perhaps, unlike him she wasn't aware of having crossed a border. Mana's parents received everything she said in a silence that was more uncomprehending than hostile. They were willing to accept the restaurant as a Bangkok event, as one of the things that happened in that far-away place.
- - - - -
Ting and Mana took out a second mortgage after speaking to their bank manager. Mana had been idly wondering if the man would try to hold them back, but instead he'd been more enthusiastic than they were. "We like to help small businesses," he said, sitting up very straight in his chair, behind a desk which seemed to have been cleared purely for their meeting. He adjusted his gold cuff links and smiled. He seemed to have pulled on optimism with his clothes. "You can count on us," he told them.
Sombat found four people in his company to take up the remaining two million between them. To Mana's surprise, all four were middle-aged. They were to be silent partners, content to let others do the work. Mana called them the Two Million Baht Men, and suspected them of quietly condescending to himself and Sombat, even while they went along for the ride and the profits. He tried to communicate some of this to Ting, but she didn't seem to feel it mattered. "As long as their money's good who cares what they think? And they must believe in us, or they wouldn't invest."
With the Two Million Baht Men in tow, they had a celebratory meal at Lemon Grass, this time reserving an alcove. They ordered a bottle of Black Label and the waitress kept everyone's glass full to the brim. Mana sat diagonally opposite Ting, and watched her cheeks gradually redden from the alcohol. He noted her bright eyes, the tip of her tongue moistening her red lips; he knew that when they got home, they wouldn't have sex.
Before long they didn't have sex in the afternoons, either. There wasn't time. Entire weekends were taken up with the restaurant—driving to different builders and getting estimates, driving to timber yards and comparing the prices of hardwoods. In such places, Ting was back in her element. She audited the workers, the equipment, the people guiding them; she raised all the right questions. Mana was the one who did the driving. He became familiar with the turn-offs on the manic outer ring road, the bumper-to-bumper traffic on the Bang Na highway, the wafting clouds of dust on Rama II. But even with familiarity, the trips never lost their tension. He was always thinking of Zen or Central, and how he could instead have been strolling through an air-conditioned department store. His knuckles were always white on the wheel. At the timber merchants he'd trail in Ting's wake, scuffing his new leather shoes through the sawdust, smelling the freshly cut wood and feeling martyred.
One afternoon, back home from a furniture warehouse, he began fumbling at Ting's jeans.
"Mana, I'm tired." She moved out of his reach, around their minimalist Philippe Stack dining table, and then padded away into their parquet-floored bedroom. They were supposed to meet Sombat and Aim for dinner that evening. As Ting opened the wardrobe to inspect her clothes, Mana caught up with her and jerked at the jeans again. They were white 501's. He got the top button undone. "Mana!" she shouted, not as a part of foreplay, but in genuine irritation. Without saying anything, he pulled her to him and yanked another button open. She slapped him in the face, hard. "I'm tired! Do you speak Thai? Do you understand?" She stormed past into the en-suite bathroom, slamming the door behind her.
After she came out, glowering, Mana apologised.
"What's the matter with you?" Ting asked, not in an aggressive way, but with a gentle diagnosing tone. She stroked his cheek. "You don't like this restaurant, do you, hmm? Why? Because it's Sombat's idea?"
"That's not it," said Mana, trying to find words for his feeling of being hurried into unwanted responsibility. "I liked it before, when we could just have fun..." He took her hand in his. And then Ting started to giggle. "Look," she said, "your cheek is turning red." And the giggle amplified into a laugh.
- - - - -
Saturday nights became increasingly frustrating. Between Ting, Aim, and Sombat, Bangkhuntien was the only topic of conversation. They talked about the merit-making ceremony they would hold at the opening and discussed how many monks they should invite. Not from a big wat, they agreed, somewhere small and deserving. In these conversations, Sombat gradually took center stage. Mana felt how the balance of power that had existed when they were students had now shifted. In those days they'd been equals, due to the fact that they competed in different arenas. Mana played badminton while Sombat preferred table tennis. Mana's favourite subject was maths, which Sombat conceded as beyond comprehension. It was as unconnected equals they supported each other, through exams and girlfriends and the job market.
But Sombat's vision over the restaurant now accorded him a guru-like status. On any other subject—politics, cars, the economy, his opinion was deferred to. Depressingly, Ting took on a girly helpless role around him, playing a part Mana knew wasn't really her. He found himself looking for ways to prove Sombat wrong. Repeating a column in the Bangkok Post, he said, "According to the Bank of Thailand, there's been a slowdown. People should pay attention." They were in a new place on Sukumvit Road, a restaurant with purple-tinted glass cubes illuminated on the walls, and high white circular tables. Sombat said, "Don't worry, take a look around you. All this money isn't going to just disappear."
"Unless it comes to our restaurant," said Ting. He was right again, thought Mana. The people sitting about them had the unquenchable glow of celebrities. Still, Mana wanted to argue the point, just to prove Sombat could be questioned.
"The Bank of Thailand says this year has been subdued. People are speculating against the baht."
"I'll tell you something," said Sombat and then paused. It was his new guru-style of imparting information. "People have been speculating against the baht since 1995. For two whole years—how about that?"
Why did no one tell us? Mana wondered. Who took care of these things? It was like finding an invisible army had waged a war against you in secret—it should have been on the news. And then later that year, it did reach the headlines of the Business section. Official reserves had dropped from $38 billion, at the beginning of the year, to $20 billion. The baht was being defended. Throughout the year, the figures fell: $10 billion, $5 billion, $3 billion... "sharp economic downturn" said the Bangkok Post. Eventually the government closed the trading floor. Mana and Ting were back from work, having driven home fast on eerily empty roads, when the news came through. "Should do something else to them," said Ting to the television, as though the currency traders had been punished and would now learn their lesson. She was sitting with her feet up on their fat white Winyu sofa, her arms protectively encircling her knees. "They should do something more."
"Yes," said Mana, and this comforting illusion stayed with them in the living room. He did nothing to break the spell. For the whole of that evening they didn't mention the restaurant. Mana was sure that Ting wanted to but was waiting defensively for him to start. At dinner she poured out iced water and placed the best sections of fried fish on his plate. It was the gentle overly-solicitous way she'd behaved when they'd first dated. He knew that now all it would take was a single sympathetic question and she'd unload her anxieties. But he couldn't bring himself to begin. There was so much he simply didn't want to think about. Instead, he asked after her father and talked about work, and she answered at first in little hurt monosyllables and then became icily polite.
The next morning, Saturday, Mana woke to find he was alone. Looking at their Hygge steel wall clock, he saw it was 10:00 am—he'd slept in. Ting had left no note, but he supposed she'd taken a taxi to Bangkhuntien. What could she be doing out there? he wondered. He knew that soon the price of land would fall. I saw this coming, he thought. Didn't I?
- - - - -
Two years later, after increasingly bitter recriminations, they would finally divorce and divide up their possessions—Sombat and Aim being boxed and labelled as Ting's friends—and Mana, embarking on his new single life, would become increasingly convinced he had foreseen everything.
Living in a one room flat on a traffic-choked road off Victory Monument and travelling to work on the bus—for he could no longer afford to run a car—the past was malleable under his hands. He saw himself as being cleverer than they'd given him credit for. Cleverer than he'd realised. He found himself wanting some acknowledgement of this from Ting. He knew she'd moved back into her parents' house, and sometimes, jolting into work with the morning crowd, Mana would think of her with a mixture of resentment and regret at something left unfinished. There were days he could turn up at the office furious—angry all over again at how she'd called him "passive" in one of their last arguments; angry because in his memory she was still attractive.
One evening, seated on the bed with a bottle of beer between his feet, he phoned her house, but then rang off when her father picked up. The next evening he dialled again, unthinkingly stabbing the buttons, and this time she answered. After "hello," she paused and he strained to hear her breathing. "Mana I know it's y—" He put the phone down and said to the receiver in its cradle, "I saw it coming."
Two years earlier, lying on his bed that Saturday morning in the silence of their empty flat, aware that Ting had taken a taxi to Bangkhuntien on some confused mission of rescue, he was already starting to think it. His hand crept under the waistband of his pyjamas. He remembered her dancing at School Bus, the hair whipping around her face. That's the people we were, he thought, as though looking at a photo in an album from a dim distance of years. He tried to stimulate himself, but was soft. I was right, he repeated, trying harder. Yes, yes, yes.
Still nothing.
Mana took his hand out. He would get in the car. He would drive to Central. He was going to buy something really expensive.
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