Alumni dedicated to reuniting long-lost friends from the International School Bangkok

The house was haunted. My father neglected to tell us this in his enthusiastic letter describing where we were to spend the summer. It was "a villa, almost on the beach, with an indoor swimming pool" on the island of Phuket, off the coast of southern Thailand. I had visions of Somerset Maugham and the Raffles: a white, verandahed villa nestled among flame-bright bougainvillea and succulent mangoes.

"You'll like it," he said in his letters from Bangkok. "There are mango and banana trees in the back yard. Phuket is paradise." I thought of pre-war Vietnam, where I grew into adolescence, a tropical Paris. Phuket, we all agreed, must be a lot like the Côte d'Azur.

My father got a very good deal on the villa. It was centrally located – sandwiched between a crematorium and a pork slaughterhouse. Tall marijuana plants grew in the back yard between the banana trees and the mangoes, where fragrant plumeria and other native flowers also bloomed. During the windy monsoon season the mixture of smells was indescribable. Of course, we knew none of this when we boarded our flight out of Tulsa, headed “home,” back to the southeast Asia where I had spent my early childhood.

Our ghost was a man who murdered his young wife and then hung himself in the living room. He apparently hated music, or at least our electric piano. We would turn it on, practice our scales, take a break and return to find the piano disconnected from the wall socket, its switch neatly turned to the "off" position. He was otherwise the most polite of ghosts, exemplifying the Thai attitude of courteous tolerance. He rarely materialized: unlike my two youngest sisters, I never saw him. I had the distinct feeling he was slightly embarrassed to be living in the house with farangs, foreigners. It was certainly a predicament by Thai standards. How do you maintain the correct distance and politeness necessary with strangers, when they run around the house in their pants and bras? Or, in the case of the six- and nine-year-olds, in nothing at all? Probably Diane, the baby, bothered him least: it would have been my 16-year-old histrionics that set his teeth on edge. The old cook, Sumporn, swore she could hear him bewailing his wife’s infidelity. I never heard anything, despite my best efforts. But we returned from Bangkok each summer, each vacation, to find him waiting by the electric piano.

Phuket. Most Americans – even well-traveled ones – had never heard of it then. It wasn't until the '80s that Phuket became a refuge for the world-weary rich. In 1968 there was no causeway linking the tiny 300-square-mile island with the mainland of Thailand. A dilapidated ferry loaded your car, motorcycle or bicycle at one shore and took a lazy 30 minutes to cross the channel. At either end you could buy sunflower seeds to spit, pieces of the hard, sour-apple falang to dip in a mix of sugar, salt and hot peppers, and sweet orange Bireley soda. We never threw our bottles overboard; there were always wet, giggling boys to collect them for the 50-satang return. Two-and-a-half cents was bus fare.

Our first journey to Phuket wasn’t by car, so we didn’t see the ferry that trip. We drove from a four-day sojourn in Bangkok to the Don Muang airport, on the outskirts of town, and boarded a beat-up two-engine plane bound for the island. My mother seated herself across from the two-hundred-fifty pound bulk of my father, and my three younger sisters tried to find places among luggage and legs. As eldest (but thinnest) of the four daughters, I was thrilled to win the narrow co-pilot's seat. The plane lurched off the runway and rain began to fall. I noticed immediately that the co-pilot's side of the roof leaked.

Thunder roiled and crashed just outside the dripping windows, and a tropical monsoon shot lightening across the dark sky. I immersed myself in the storm, watching the water sheet across the windshield, listening to the wind wail through the glass. It never occurred to me that we were in any danger. Years later my mother told me that my father, the hero of two wars, had held her trembling fingers in his own white knuckles. The pilot told them it had been touch and go. None of this had anything to do with the light show outside my window, and I inhaled the acrid fragrance of ozone as I had back in Tornado Alley – northeastern Oklahoma – watching as the pilot maneuvered the plane through a bright hole in the clouds down to a stretch of grassy beach below. We weren't but halfway to Phuket; the storm had forced us down prematurely at Prachuab Khiri Khan, a small beach resort. Pastel beach houses tumbled over the shore like children's blocks, and the rain-streaked sunset illuminated the sky over the water.

That night we slept in two tiny beach houses. Dinner was crab fresh from the ocean, folded with red chilis into seaweed envelopes and grilled over a charcoal fire. We bathed from the rainwater cistern outside our hut, and slept on too-short mattresses built to accommodate smaller Thai frames. In the morning before departure, we drew our names on the beach and collected shells we had no room to carry. After a breakfast of prickly rambutan and sweet mangosteen, we continued on to Phuket.

The airstrip at Phuket was short: you landed at one end of the island and had to come to a halt before the runway ended in the sea. Landings never lost that initial feeling of "journey to the end of the earth"; I always felt that the pilot would overestimate the length of the runway and run us off into the blue water a hand's-breadth in front of us. Some of the drunken Scottish tin miners piloting their own company supply planes did just that, more than once.

When we arrived at the house, dead-tired from the long flight, all we wanted was to settle in. That was when the fun started. None of the house staff spoke English. None of us spoke Thai. Nonetheless, my father left us. That night. His other station was a day's drive northwest over the mountains to Nakorn SriThammarat, and he assumed that as a good expat family we would manage. He had to be at work in Nakorn Monday morning.

My mother found sheets and we two older girls began making beds. Mother made it known to Sumporn, the cook – in universal language, an open mouth and fingers pointing – that we were hungry. Sumporn smiled and nodded, making the traditional wai of respect – her two hands clasped in front and her head bowing over them. Mother correctly assumed this meant dinner soon. While Sumporn was preparing it, we unpacked. Mother took the large corner bedroom with the private bath. Its proximity to the noisy electric generator wasn't obvious at first, or my sister Dori and I might have inherited a private bath. Dori and I took the bedroom next door, which had French doors opening on the center hall corridor. The two little girls, Jaynie and Diane, took the third bedroom, which was smaller, but nearer the "swimming pool" and the central bathroom. We put Daddy's extra things in his study at the rear of the house, just off the indoor kitchen.

Since there was no tub in either of the bathrooms, my father had hired a tile mason to construct one in the central bath. The creative Thai workman had done a magnificent job. The walls of the "bathtub" were about a meter high: a long-legged 16, I could just barely clamber over them. Dori, 13 and taller than I, managed about as well. For 10-year-old Jaynie and six-year-old Diane the climb was impossible. We eventually found one of those stools with the pull-out steps for them to clamber over. It became permanent bathroom furniture.

But at least dinner was coming. We sat down at the linen-draped table in the dining room. The large windows were open to the island night, geckos were calling as they criss-crossed the walls in search of dinner, and for a fleeting moment we did feel like characters from dinner at some Maughamian outpost. Then Mother took a bite of her curry… Thai curry – especially southern Thai curry – is renowned for its "bite." There are tiny pea-shaped peppers in Thailand, which will blind you if you get their juice in your eyes. Thais eat these peppers as Okies do pickled jalapenos, and Sumporn had liberally peppered our curry with them. The inner lining of Mother's esophagus was burned out at first contact and she lost her voice for three days.

Now reduced to my meager attempts to translate Mother's sign language into something Sumporn might understand, communication foundered critically. Sumporn was supposed to do marketing but there was no car to take her. So she would go by samlor, a bicycle-driven rickshaw. This meant, however, that Mother could not accompany her. Sumporn made it understood that Mother's presence would only be a liability, anyway, as a farang – the derogatory Thai term for foreigner – would drive up prices. However, this also meant that Mother had no control over what Sumporn bought, and as Sumporn was desperately attempting to regain face in my mother's eyes, she bought what was cheapest: what Oklahoma girls grew up calling “innards,” and unfamiliar seafood that looked like catfish bait.

"Face" is a concept some Westerners never grasp. Not as simple as the Western idea of reputation, it is bound intricately with social status, family, even one's religion. To lose face is to lose something less ephemeral than mere status. It is to lose, as well, one's carefully earned position within the cultural matrix. Face is gained, earned. When it’s lost, Thais feel that face is never "made up." Lost face is gone forever, as if a portion of one's face literally melted from the social mirror. Perhaps because I grew up in southeast Asia, perhaps because my mother was empathetic and unusually adaptable for a woman of her background, I learned early that face was even more important than a gentleman’s handshake in the Depression. If your word was your bond in the red hills of Oklahoma, it was only as good as your face in the green hills of Thailand.

Without a car we were unable to make use of the island's beautiful beaches, some of the loveliest in the world. We were in Phuket almost a month before my father returned with transportation. As Mother spoke no Thai, she was reluctant to venture out in local transport. Unlike in cosmopolitan Bangkok, the more isolated island Thais spoke little or no English. This did not bother children. We loved the samlors, and seldom used taxis unless my mother was with us. We would flag down two samlor drivers, bargain for fares to Narison Road, and then beg the drivers to "bai lao lao," go fast, fast. The drivers' faces would crease horizontally across the vertical wrinkles of too much work, too much sun and too little laughter, and they would stand up on the backs of the samlors to turn the chest-high wheels faster, faster. Two of us in each samlor, we would encourage the charioteers with shrieks of exhilarated laughter. Finally the two middle-aged men would deposit us at the top of the long, steep hill to the villa, their narrow chests labouring to breathe, but their eyes kind and patient with the four of us. We would pay them the two fares, wai-ing respectfully and they would nod courteously. Another afternoon satisfactorily concluded.

Now, many years and a post-colonial education later, I wonder what those kind men thought of the four American girls, the three younger ones placed under my none-too-conscientious care. We had the run of the island, taking samlors from the house to the market, to the gold stores, to visit the nuns up the street. Every samlor driver on the island knew us, the blonde American stair-steps. Did the men who seemed so old to me then – certainly younger than I am now – resent our unexamined privilege? Did they find us any more imperial than well-loved children anywhere? We spoke little Thai, although we practiced diligently, much to the amusement of everyone we met, creating a patois of hand-language, execrable Thai, and tourist English. When we finally did learn enough to carry on a conversation of sorts, we returned to Bangkok to find that we spoke with a "southern" accent, something that metropolitan Thais found very funny. A Thai friend compared it to speaking French with a Texas twang.

Our lack of long-distance mobility meant we had limited social outlets. There were only a few expat families on the island. It wasn't until these families heard of us through their servants (the island communication system for farangs and Thais alike; much more dependable than the local phones) that we had any visitors. First to come was the 16-year-old son of Mr. Nelson, one of my father’s acquaintances. We regaled Bobby with tales of the house tarantulas, some as large as an adult's hand. These entered the house through the open drains, along with other exotic Thai fauna. After excusing himself to the kitchen at the back of the house for a drink, Bobby returned puzzled. "If your mother’s so scared of spiders how come she has a spider design on the toaster?" he asked. He led us back to the kitchen. A plate-sized tarantula had centred itself precisely on the toaster. At my mother's entrance it jumped to the floor, precipitating my mother onto the three-foot-high counter in her own tarantella.

There was no English radio, no TV, no movies other than the weekly one shown at the quonset hut rec center for the Scottish/Thai aluminum mining consortium. About the newest one we saw was Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, dated even then. With so little in the way of entertainment, we created our own. The four of us staged plays for my mother; my mother taught us bridge; I tried writing poetry. Once my father returned with the Land Rover, we went almost daily to the beach, buying watermelon and pineapples from roadside vendors. He would hack them open with his machete. But before my father's return, we were limited to the activities we could generate around the house, or at the homes of friends. So we filled up the indoor swimming pool he had beguiled us with in those first letters. This turned out to be a sunken garden room in the house, formerly open, now roofed with glass, almost surrounded by a tiled knee-wall. When the tile mason built our bathtub, my father had him close off the step-through into the "swimming pool" and install a primitive drain: a hole drilled to the outside, fitted with a plug. The result was a huge, shallow, indoor Turkish-bath affair. The first time we flooded it a family of naked newborn mice floated mewling to the water's surface, from a small crevice in the tile. It was days before any of us could bring ourselves to play in the water.

Reptiles, amphibians, and other animals all lived comfortably within the house. The animal life in Thailand is as exotic as its orchids, and almost as colourful. Tiny tree frogs would perch on the toilet lid after dark, trilling midnight sonatas from their rainbow throats. Lizards in turquoise, magenta, saffron and cream wove tapestries of movement across the stucco walls. Infant cobras nestled in the jungle undergrowth behind the house, while scorpions poised themselves like arrows on the hot terrace. At night there were velvety bats chasing moths through the moonlight. It was at night that the animals were most memorable: many midnights I stumbled through the dark into the bathroom, only to be greeted hysterically by a damp frog who had been quietly minding his own business in the toilet bowl.

Life is a web in Thailand. This shows itself graphically in the Thai attitude towards animal life. None of our servants would presume to disturb the animals of the house. The animals had as much right to the house as we did. The Thais revere animals as equal to humanity. But then, Thais do not exalt humanity. This results in a curious duality. While Thais don’t believe in exploitation of animal life, neither do they necessarily accord human beings the rights privileged them in the West. Animals are, for the most part, treated with amicable disinterest. So are children. This sense of interconnectedness, where each component fits into one cohesive whole, is one of the most seductive aspects of Thai culture. Each of us has our own place, and it dovetails perfectly with the "place" of the person(s) next to us. Life is a web, and there is only Buddha at the center of it. Everything and everyone has a place along the spirals of the webbed design, like the perfect order of Fibonacci numbers, each growing from the sum of the previous numbers. This sense of "place" was for me the beginnings of my social conscience.

It was in Thailand that I began to examine the ethics of vegetarianism. The Thais, from their Buddhist-informed perspective, have a profound reverence for life. Thai monks traditionally wield soft-bristled brooms as they walk, gently sweeping insects from their paths. Each dawn they would appear outside the high concrete wall of the villa, hands joined in the templed wai that resembled the peaked chedi, or temples, where each Thai male traditionally spent a year. Standing by their bristled brooms, the monks extended the wooden begging bowls for Sumporn to fill with rice, bits of onion and cabbage and peas. Not even egg would sully the rice seasoned only with garlic and perhaps soy. Sumporn would ladle the morning’s offerings into each bowl, the monks would smile and nod in blessing, and she would return to the kitchen, secure in the centuries-old exchange.

Even those Thais who do eat meat use it for seasoning, not bulk. The attitude is one of respect and balance, a seeking for harmony that manifests itself in areas as disparate as cuisine, architecture, even fashion design. The French philosophers DeLeuze and Guattari would say that Thai thought is rhizomatic, not linear or bipolar. A thought or belief does not suggest its opposite; it sends you on to another thought, which sends you to yet another – like a hero on a quest in the Ramayana, a popular Thai myth. Good and evil belong in the epics of legend, not in social behaviour. Everyone I met seemed to believe in the fairness of karma: what you had from life was what you had earned last time around.

At least twice a year we made the trip from Bangkok to Phuket and back again. It was an odyssey of epic (and comic) scale. As there was almost no one on the island for us to play with, my mother allowed each of us to bring a friend. That meant at least seven children, all female, and my mother. Obviously we couldn’t all fit into one Land Rover. So my father would call transportation, requisition another vehicle, and we would load up the cook, the housemaid, the two cats, and the housemaid's bird – complete with cage – as well. Baderm, my father's driver, piled luggage in precarious heaps on the tops of each of the two roof racks, and then climbed into the front Land Rover, while my mother brought up the rear. We seven girls moved freely between the two cars at each rest stop, singing rock-and-roll and gospel at the top of our lungs. Since we traveled the same route down the coast every holiday, three or four times a year – Hua Hin, Prachuap Khiri Khan, Chumporn, Ranong, Surat Thani – the Thais along the road came to know us. That meant a loud welcome at every restaurant with a bathroom – few and far between in pre-tourist southern Thailand, and we knew them all well.

When there was no "real" rest stop, we would unfold a large blanket we carried for the purpose, enfolding each of us in turn within a portable outhouse. After we had used the “facilities,” my mother would open a large cooler and we would eat fruit, sipping lukewarm sodas. Food along the road was Thai only, but that posed no problem to children who had grown up on noodles, rice and curry. We searched out the best cafés, and our loyalty meant enormous portions as well as instant company: usually the owner's entire family joined us, great-grandmothers with betel-stained teeth surrounded by young wives nursing infants. My youngest sister Diane would translate when our rudimentary Thai was inadequate to the social situation, chattering with fluent giggles. Over Thai iced tea, thick with condensed milk, we would catch up on the news since our last pass through. Lunches could last three hours, as my mother chatted through Diane with whoever sat to lunch with our lunch companions.

We traveled south on most holidays. This meant we were usually on the road on the Thai holiday Songkran. Songkran is a spring holiday, falling around Easter and Passover. The custom on Songkran is to drench friends, relatives, and passers-by with buckets of water, bathing the fortunate victim with luck for the coming seasons. One April all three religious holidays fell on the same weekend. We were planning to spend spring break in Phuket, so we decided to brave the road despite Songkran. At each rest stop, we were greeted with delighted welcomes (Sawadee, ca!) from our friends of the road, as well as with happy splashes of water. We weren't a quarter of the way to Phuket before both Land Rovers were sloppy wet, inside and out.

It was a minimum of 14 hours from Bangkok down the coast of Thailand to Phuket, and we usually tried not to stay overnight. Accommodations were sketchy then, although by the time we left, six years later, there were a few Western-style inns along the coast. Driving south out of Bangkok the land was hilly rather than forested, as it became further south. The land surrounding Bangkok is similar to that of south Vietnam, graceful hills draped in shrubby greenery. Farther south, teak and other rainforest trees grew up to the highway's verges, and often we saw teams of elephants logging. Their young mahouts would straddle the giant necks, slim brown legs lost behind the beasts' waving ears. The elephants would push steadily against heavy chain harnesses, chewing stalks of sugar cane as they worked.

It was in Thailand that my mother began to collect elephants. China, jade, Cantonese ware…they lined up like a working processional across the black lacquer of her dressing table. One birthday my father decided to surprise her: he had a driver bring an elephant calf to the apartment house where we lived in central Bangkok. When they arrived, my father led my blindfolded mother down to the parking lot, where he placed her hands on either side of the calf’s soft face. She opened her eyes on a sloe-eyed baby of mammoth build, with lashes as long as a woman's hair. As a joke it far surpassed my father's usual repertoire, which included ordering monkey once at dinner.

Thai food is exotic but excellent, complex in spicy tastes and fragrances. It is a hybrid formed by the intermarriage of Chinese, Malaysian and Thai cuisine, which resulted in one of the more memorable dinners I’ve attended, a wedding party to which my father was invited by a Chinese police colleague. In the Thai tradition, this meant our entire family was expected. Mr. Loh welcomed us personally at his door, wai-ing deeply even to us children. We were seated at a separate, family table, and seductive delicacies were brought to us: fish heads with the eyes left white and gleaming within their perfect sockets; monkey curled like broiled babies on platters; tiny birds roasted crisp and whole; the steaming entrails of anonymous animals, and pickled 100-year-old eggs. Not to eat would have cost us much face, as well as insulting our host. So I, as eldest daughter, smiled and smeared everything liberally with chili paste – the Thai equivalent of ketchup – while guzzling limeade. The other three girls were excused by virtue of their tender years.

There were very few Westerners on Phuket when we were there. The tin consortium, the Seventh-Day-Adventist hospital staff, the Catholic missionaries, a few diplomatic families, and the Peace Corps made up the non-Thai contingent. Thursday nights were movies at the tin consortium, and Friday evenings were usually a party at someone's house. Mr. Campbell flirted in his kilt, inviting comment in an inebriated brogue. Sometimes the Andersons would drive in from Chumporn for the weekend. She was British; he was American. On our drives through Chumporn on the way from Bangkok to Phuket we often stopped at their house for tea. She would cover an old, polished table with a lace cloth and serve us tea from fluted cups. Plates of small sandwiches and wafer cookies set on the three-tiered stand, and the scent of tropical flowers mingled in a strangely familiar way with the fragrance of black China tea and warm cookies. The boundaries of colonial reality were the space between the fresh white linen of her round table and the edge of the forest behind us.

Usually the Andersons stayed with the Nelsons when they came, stepping gracefully over the family’s several large dogs. The Nelsons were the "premier" family on the island. He was an American intelligence officer, stationed in Phuket to monitor the communist insurgency problem. His other functions we were unaware of, although he was the last person known to have seen the famous Thai silk magnate Jim Thompson alive. The Nelsons were a pleasant, hospitable family, serving as the social nexus for island entertainment. As there were only two other American families with children our age, and their visits didn't always coincide with ours, we saw a great deal of the Nelsons. In the curve of their lawn a deep rock pool nestled, into which they piped seawater from the shore down the hill. The children would set up water games: Marco Polo, volleyball, horse-and-rider. Sometimes we would recess from the pool to the lawns, playing croquet or simply chasing each other madly over the grass, tumbling in breathless laughter under the plumeria. When there was no one else to talk to I played gin rummy with my mother, and read every one of my father's Westerns, my mother's mysteries.

It was a peaceful, indolent time. Curled quietly within our family we fell in love with every facet of Thailand, from its carnivorous spiders to its vegetarian monks. The house off Narison Road was to remain with us always, not as a place that had formed us, but one that insinuated itself into our lives. A place of quiet grace, a peaceful center around which we shaped ourselves. From this spiritual center I learned to make my forays into the confused disunity of Western society, always returning, like one more ghost who could not leave.