Culture shock (part 1)

Pim's stall sat where the pink chairs are now

"Everything that's yours is also mine"...that's a public-spirited attitude I hadn't bargained with when I decided to help a young man at an eatery close to work. 

I bought Robert a guitar, but his relatives, with whom he lived in a rowhouse nearby, borrowed it and broke it on the first day. 

I offered to buy him clothes, as he appeared to have few of his own, but his family invited themselves along and insisted I buy clothes for them too. 

Weeks after we met, in early August last year, I suggested we go out for a Thai-style bar-b-que for his birthday, but his aunt, wo also ran the streetside stall where he worked, hijacked the occasion. She dragged us along to a huge barn of a place in faraway Bang Kapi because she had been enjoyed herself there once before. 

By that time I had grown wise to their exploitative behaviour, and offered to pay for the kids in our group only; the adults would have to look after themselves.  

Robert was doing well because he happened to meet a farang who felt sorry for his plight. Yet his family was not content with that, as they wanted some of the action for themselves.

If he was doing well, then by rights they should benefit too, as they were an indivisible whole - an extended Laos family in which anything which accrued to one member should accrue to all. How joyfully socialist!

The family welcomed me as one of their own when I met them a year ago or so, which was touching, but it proved too much of a culture shock.

Back in those days I would drink regularly at a ya dong stand down the road from my office. The mainstay of the family, an attractive young woman in her 30s called Pim, opened a little stall on a vacant space next to us on the footpath.

Her stall was sandwiched between a busy road on one side and a truck yard on the other.

Some customers drove up alongside, barked out their order and waited for their food to be delivered in a white styrofoam box. 

Others with more time on their hands parked their motorcycles and took a seat at one of the rickety tables and chairs which spilled onto the roadside.

Occasionally we would have to shout to heard above the din of the trucks, as all that separated us on the footpath from the yard behind was a chain link fence.

Robert

I noticed her nephew, Robert, sitting alone for hours at a time as I knocked back my ya dong from shot glasses at another stand next to their little shop. 

He and one or two other youngsters served customers while Pim made their orders. They also helped her open and close the stall each day, and fetch supplies from the market.

This was a casual family-run stall, consisting initially of a gas cooker, a few pots and pans and a glass display cabinet, and not much else. It had no roof or walls or doors as such - when finished for the day they would string netting across their belongings, tucked into a corner on the footpath, and hope no one stole anything.

They turned up overnight after Pim reached a deal to rent the footpath space from the owners - a family living in a squattie or lean-to arrangement smack up against the chain-lik fence in the smelly truck yard. 

Don't these people own a proper home - and how did they gain possession of what was a public space by the side of a busy road?  

The husband and wife who lived in this hovel argued often, sometimes coming to blows. Customers in Pim’s shop heard the racket as it drifted through the chain link fence; we all did, but pretended not to notice. Welcome to life in the slums!

Pim, who comes from Laos, opened the stall originally in a busy nearby community called Jet Sip Rai, where she and her brothers live, but ran into trouble with the local council inspectors, who did not like the way her tables and chairs spilled onto the road.

now, see part 2