Under the Christmas tree

My parents, who live overseas, have just bought themselves a Christmas tree.

They sent me the news in an email, which I passed on to Mr Maiyuu.

‘I would like one too!’ I exclaimed.

Maiyuu heard me, but said nothing.

Last year, I was so busy working over the Christmas and New Year period that the festive season almost passed me by.

Later, I felt upset that I had missed out on the Christmas spirit. We did nothing at home to mark the occasion.

This year, the same thing threatens to happen again, as once again I am working.

My words about longing for a Christmas tree must have made an impact on Maiyuu.

A day later, he went to Silom to buy one.

He did not tell me anything about his surprise, but turned up with the kitset tree in a box.

He assembled the tree, and decorated it himself. It now occupies pride of place in our living room.

We have no presents to put under it, as Maiyuu asked for cash as his Christmas gift this year, which I have already handed over. If he has bought me anything, it has yet to appear under the tree.

I am not sure if he is aware of this custom, however, as in our 10 years together, we have never put up a tree to celebrate Christmas.

For some reason, I thought we had owned one in the past, but it had disappeared when we moved home, or threw it out. Wrong.

'We have never owned a Christmas tree,' Maiyuu said, looking at me strangely.

I am too vague to recall such details, it seems.

I passed on this gay christmassy tale to a colleague, including the part about how the tree's undercarriage, if trees have such things, lies bare.

‘But you’ll still put a stocking at the end of your bed, won’t you? You do that every night anyway,’ he quipped.

My colleague is straight. Because he is also a friend, I spared him the sharp end of my nastiest straight jokes as a retort to his gay suspenders and stockings remark.

Actually, I doubt I could have thought of a witty response in time anyway.

Young man divided

Rising actor Saran 'Porsche' Siriluksana (พอร์ช ศรัณย์ ศิริลักษณ์) plays a lad divided between his masculine and feminine side in his first starring role for television.

In Channel 7’s Look Khon, Porsche plays a manly muay Thai boxer who would rather be acting in traditional khon stage drama.

He enters the boxing ring at his father’s urging, in this drama made to honour the King’s 83rd birthday this month.

His father is upset to find his son prefers to do girly things such as donning costumes and make-up for his stage role as a khon artist. He recommends him to a Thai boxing promoter instead.

In the drama, it is Porsche’s challenge to do justice to both Thai boxing and Thai masked dance.

He said the role was a tough one, as he had to take courses in both artistic pursuits.

‘My body was stiff and hard, but my teacher wouldn’t let me pass until I had mastered the poses needed to perform khon dance,’ he said.

‘As for muay thai, I was familiar with the steps and moves to some extent, but still had to spend hours in the gym buffing up my body, as I have to take off my shirt for my scenes in the ring,’ he said.

Can I cancel that? I'm having a domestic

A  doctor living at my condo hires me to teach him English.

Mr B saw a notice I pinned on the condo office noticeboard advertising my services for just B200 an hour.

The notice was up for a couple of months, but he was the only one of the Thai owner/tenants here to call asking for lessons. About 60% of this inner city condo's occupants are Thai.

That’s not to say that the other Thais who live in this eight-building complex have perfect English. They don’t.

They are just too busy making ends meet to afford the pricey rents, or perhaps too stuck up to take English lessons from a foreigner. To do so would be to admit a weakness.

Mr B lives with his doctor wife and young son in a condo twice the size of mine which cost him B4m baht. He secured a 100%, 15-year loan from the bank, which he is paying off at B40,000 a month.

He volunteered these details when I asked one day last week. We meet for conversational English at his condo, where he also has a nanny and a maid to help him get through the day.

Thais can be disarmingly honest with financial and personal details which as westerners we prefer to keep secret from each other.

We met in the morning for an hour. The same day, Mr B asked me to come back in the evening for a second round.

However, the second lesson failed to go ahead, after Mr B sent me a text message to cancel.

Mr B has a habit of pulling out at the last minute.

The public and private hospitals which employ him to practise sports medicine keep him busy. He can be called in to perform an operation at short notice.

On this occasion, however, he cancelled because of problems at home.

Charming Mr B sent me the following message, which was disarming with its frankness, and rather sweet with its broken English:

‘I apologise you once again. I have some problem with my wife. I don’t have any concentration for learning. Can I cancel you once again our meeting this night?

Poor B. I know just how he feels. I have problems with my wife too, which can leave me unable to think straight.

A few days after he wrote me that message, Mr B was planning to take his wife and son to Chiang Mai for a break. I hope they were able to surmount their little problem, and enjoy their time away.

Morning sickness blues, building a nest

Ball’s girlfriend Jay has morning sickness, and has entered her third day in a row of being unable to keep food down.

I have urged her to see a doctor but she wants to wait until pay day on Tuesday. Her health insurance has run out, so she will have to pay the medical fees herself.

‘It can’t come to more than a few hundred baht, surely,’ I said, urging her to go straight away.

‘But I have no money,’ she said.

On pay day, Jay gives a few thousand baht from her meagre pay to Ball’s mother, to help pay her way. Towards the end of the month, she must borrow from Mum, as her money has usually run out.

Even when she needs it, she is reluctant to borrow, as she worries Mum will resent it. Ball is just as unwilling to borrow from his mother, as he doesn’t want to impose.

In such circumstances, I feel obliged to hep occasionally, though I would rather the couple made their own arrangements, as I am sure the money is there, or at least some of it, were they to ask.

On the internet, I am depressed to read that there are no simple cures for morning sickness, although plenty of self-help remedies are on offer. However, even they require money.

Another reason Ball wants to delay taking Jay to the doctor until next week is that Jay wants to arrange pre-natal care with the doctor at the same time. ‘We may as well do both at the same time, as it all costs money,’ he says.

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In happier news, I am pleased to report that Ball’s bedroom is now ready to welcome a child into the world.

For the last couple of months his mother and I have been doing it up. He now has new boarding on the walls, and a tiled ceiling. We have also lined the floor, bought a wardrobe, a mattress, and bedding.

Ball’s mother does most of the work, though to repair the walls and ceiling, we hired a builder. In her youth, Mum was a painter, so she tackled the walls and door, and also lined the floor.

I gave moral encouragement.

Actually, I did more than that, but want to keep the language vague, as Thai eyes are watching.

Pyramids of false hope

Ball and his girlfriend Jay are looking for extra work to supplement their income before the baby arrives.

They spent two days over the weekend attending a seminar in Bangkok about a job which they were told involved easy work on the computer at home.

They paid a training fee of B150 each. Jay borrowed B500 from me to cover the fees and any other expenses. Mum gave them B200 a day to cover transport and food on top of that.

They spent the day there on Sunday, and another few hours at an ‘evening session’ the next night.

Both took the day off work so they could attend the second day of the two-day seminar.

When the seminar ended, they expected they would be able to start work for the company straight away.

Wrong.

Ball and Jay came home bearing bad news: organisers told them they would have to invest more than B30,000 buying the company’s products before they could join.

Why did they not say this at the outset, before training began?

Ball and Jay had fallen for a pyramid scheme, they now realise.  Team leaders bring hundreds of potential recruits together for a seminar in which successful members of the 'multi-level marketing network' (direct sales to everyone else) get up and talk about how their lives have changed - for the better, of course.

They talk about the smart cars they have bought, the holidays they have taken overseas, and the huge incomes which members of the network stand to earn once they sign up. Pictures of expensive cars, exotic holiday locales, and fat cheques adorn the walls.

Relatively little time is spent extolling the virtues of the products, which can comprise unusual health cures or miracle remedies for ageing, diabetes and so on.

Who cares about what you sell? It's all about growing your network so people under you do all the work.

Mum was disgusted when she heard the news.

‘I fell for one of those schemes once. I lost B40,000 buying their products which I could not sell. Your success depends not just on how well you sell, but the quality of the people you recruit to work under you,' she said.

'At the sales presentations, men in sharp suits get up and tell you how rich they are.’

Needless to say, Mum is not interested in paying out on their behalf to buy the company's products.

Ball is still a believer, but when he heard how much they wanted him to pay, he gave up. They learnt the bad news shortly after midnight. Neither had eaten for hours, as the organisers permitted no breaks.

A long journey home awaited Ball and Jay, who now wonder why they bothered.

'Whether I was cheated or not is not the point...I can't find B30,000, so I have to forget about that idea,' he said.

Perhaps most iniquitous is that these slick sales people urge potential recruits not to tell their families that they are involved in the scheme.

'Multi-level marketing has a bad name...they won't understand,' they pur, while at the same time urging potential recruits not to turn to pawnshops or illegal lenders to pay for their initial B30,000 outlay.

What I don’t understand is how Ball and Jay could spend so long there before they realised what these desperate people were peddling.

I spent a day with a pyramid sales company in Bangkok once. The company sold ginseng juice. 
Those people were just as ruthless. That story is here.

PS: I could name the other direct sales company here, but I can do without the grief.

The similarities between the sales presentation which Ball and Jay attended, and the one I visited several years ago in the story above, are uncanny. It's almost as if they are run by the same crowd.