625
« on: February 26, 2012, 08:50:02 PM »
On the somewhat steep side of a shrubless, torn-ground bald hill sat hundreds of go-ers under a glittery, tropical moonlight. All their eyes were gazing at one spot: the portable open-air movie screen down the hill that a movie company had set up several hours before.
Sobs were heard all over. Face-washing towers, bandanas, and handkerchiefs wiped across the faces and eyes of many late teen to some twenty-year-old women who were holding their children in one arm or both.
On the screen, a handsome Thai star hunk had just abandoned his pregnant childhood country-girl sweetheart for a hotter, richer Bangkok university classmate.
A child was later born, but the boy did not know who his father was. Nor did his father know who he was. "Each time I ask about my father, she just cries," the boy said in a soft voice to his grade school teacher after being mocked by other boys as a fatherless child. "I haven't asked my mother again."
Before she died from falling off a construction truck at work under the heat, totally depressed to the point she even refused to date any of the flirting and caring construction workers during the few years of work there, the mother watched the boy's father and the new girl interact lovingly with each other: they danced in a bar as she was looking through the window bars, they held hands in the park while she was sitting by a bench in the distance, they teased each other around a convertible while she was at a bus stop, and so forth--all that while her womb was carrying the fetus inside.
But she sobbed secretly to herself without confronting him.
"One day, he came home all drunk for the first time," the mother said to her son in an echoing flashback. "All very different and strange than before. I wanted to ask him...ask him who that woman was, what meaning she had to him. But I kept all those thoughts inside me only...He asked me to go to his graduation, but I told him I didn't have the right kinds of clothes on. The second time he asked me, I said I was pregnant and not feeling good. But when graduation day came, I could not stay home anymore. Then I went out and saw him at his graduation in a convertible with his classmate... That was the last time I saw him."
There were no quarrels between them. She never did anything wrong. He just gradually disappeared and never returned to her.
She told the child in another flashback,"[M]y son, yes, you have a father just like others have. But your dad--he is well-off now. Your mom--she is unfortunate. She doesn't have anything. Refrain, my son. If you meet your father, don't interfere with him. Don't interfere with your father's happiness."
The father had become a big businessman in one of Bangkok's most wealthy districts, working side-by-side with his hotter wife. Hot in every way--rich, slim, beautiful voice and smile!
Discrimination . Homelessness. Mockery and put-downs--with notes on back stating "No Father, You May Kick Me." Fear of life. One time he was beaten to the corner of a thatch for being a parentless child. But all only made the boy strong among other homeless toddlers in a shelter.
He now must face the world on his own. And he dared to do so.
"I want to sell newspapers," he insisted at age 8. Yes, a paperboy.
"Yell 'Newspaper! Newspaper!'" his toddler colleague coached him.
"Newspaper. Newspaper."
"Louder!"
"Newspaper! Newspaper please!!"
Tears continued to shed down the cheeks of the Hmong refugee women on the hillside. Despite two giant speakers by the screen, the sniffles became louder than the movie's special sound effects.
"Those are the women whose boyfriends have left them for America," a toddler friend later told Reporter on Camp 2.
The man did know he had a son in a far-out town, where he, too, was originally from, because the abandoned girl was already pregnant before he ...well, before he abandoned her. She even told him of her pregnancy; he seemed happy then. And the mother's older sister has been receiving child support for the boy without telling the man where the boy was. Father and son had never met each other.
But slowly, the boy matched a regular newspaper buyer to the picture of the guy who used to fondle his mother in bed: the picture was kept in a brown bag that the boy kept all of his other personal belongings in just inside the orphanage's main door.
They became closer in distance and relations after the boy had returned a fallen wallet to the man who had just dropped it from getting out of a servant's car and the man decided to hire the boy for tiny errands. "I like this kind of kid," he told one of his assistants.
"Dad," the boy whispered to himself after looking at the father closely at a meeting.
But he did not approach the man with the discovery. The boy just kept taking care of the man's errands in the most careful ways possible.
Then one day, tormented and haunted by feelings of guilt and thoughts of the ex-girlfriend, the man began asking around for his son's name. When he got it from the aunt after some intense arguments--and confirmed by an assistant regarding the child's mother--he realized that was the little boy he had hired.
But neither was yet comfortable telling the other about their relationship. So, the father sought the boy out, finding him scrubbing floors in another job.
The next scene was a toddler store's front walls: the man was taking the boy out to buy new clothes, lots of toys. Then down came a rollercoaster with them both in it at the amusement park.
"Eat fully all you want," the man told the boy at the open-air restaurant table.
"Sir, you have been so good to me," the boy replied, sipping what looked like water or lemonade from a glass on the table.
The father took off his glasses, reached over the table with a handkerchief to wipe off both sides of the boy's dirty face, inhaled deeply, looked the boy straight in the eyes, took one sip from his glass of what looked to be yellow or orange wine coolers, and spoke slowly in a serious tone, "...tomorrow, don't come to work anymore. Stay home. We will never part again, my son. Promise me that."
Sad grimace over the boy's face, tears coming down his cheeks, the boy just stared at his father with lips shivering and eyes wide open.
The message seemed clear: they both now knew how they were related to themselves.
Sobs and tears continued to dominate the hillside movie go-ers. This time many were using their shirt lapels, the back sides of their hands and the wrists--and some the upper parts of their dresses.
Somehow, something knocked some sense into the man during the short period of time when the rich girl took off to Japan for a business trip. Weakened by thoughts of the abandoned girlfriend, he sat in one of Bangkok's most famous nightlife nightclubs downing liquors, where a sad song further compounded his emotions, conjuring up images of a few scenes of his times with her--in flashbacks. The time she walked in the rain to him after college lessons, the time she told him she was pregnant with his hands on her chin, and so forth--all, combined with the liquor intakes, made the man drop to the floor and his tie loose on neck.
Outraged by the discovery that her man had a child from somewhere else, the rich chick questioned him. "I got off the plane and you said you met your child. Tomorrow, you'll meet your wife. The day after tomorrow, you'll meet your mother-in-law. And..."
Story told. Explanations understood. Yet that didn't go anywhere with the new wife. She felt cheated and lied to. Now, she wanted a decision: he must now choose between his son and his beautiful rich wife.
"You have twenty-four hours," she demanded after cutting her trip short upon hearing of the news that her husband had a child out-of-wedlock. "You choose me and we live happily like before. You choose your son, everything between us ends."
After some long silence into the night, the man walked out with his suitcase while the chick still in her whitish blue pajamas and almost bird-nest hairdo.
Meanwhile, the son had rushed to his mother's grave the day after, upon giving all of his new purchases to the other children at the shelter. "Mom!" he cried, kneeling down in his T-shirt and shorts, shoe-less feet, while holding to the side of the tombstone. "Help me! Help me! I care so much about Dad. I want to live with Dad. Mom, please let me live with Dad. Mom, please! I love you, Mom. I'm afraid you will lose hope again...Mom..." Words were uttered between sobs, tears, and sniffles.
There was complete silence from the grave. No one was waking up to do any justice or undo any promise or vow or give any permission to anyone now.
Tears streamed down the boy's face.
More tears and sobs from the movie go-ers. Shirts all wet. No one was shy anymore about crying in public.
Then father appeared at the graveyard. The son turned to him in tears. A few steps away, the boy walked in a fast pace to prepare for a run-off.
"...Son, are you leaving your dad again," the father said, broken in tears. "Your father accepts responsibility for everything. Do you see? Your father has come to live with you. Just you and me... Come! Come to your dad, son..."
Tears shedding down each other's faces.
"Come!" the man yelled out.
Dashing into each other's arms, father and son finally embraced in tears.
Turning to the dead ex-girlfriend's grave in a cement-like rugged thatch, the man said "...please forgive me... Our child will not suffer again..."
Amidst thundering sounds, rain poured onto the father and son as they walked off to the road where the father had been dropped off by a three-wheel bicycle taxi.
Then a beige, maroon sports sedan slowly pulled to the side of the road nearby. Out came the rich chick with a red, ruffled edge umbrella.
"You've done the right thing to choose your child," she said--umbrella over the son and father. "..Your child is also my child."
The go-ers walked away in this night from the movie area with tears and sobs among flashlights and bumpy and dust-flying dirt roads under their flip-flops, sniffing all the way home. Some apparently didn't sleep at all in their Ban Vinai, Loei wooden thatches that whole night, and perhaps for the next several nights.
Indeed, they cried for several more years.
Show Posts
