A World of Place

A World of Place

She was there as she’s always been. The change was within me.

I walk past her every morning – the 70-year-old Thai woman whose back is so deeply curved that her fingers hover inches from the ground. I’m an ordinary American foreigner (a farang, as we’re called) here in Bangkok for a cultural experience and working hard to learn the Thai language. She’s an ordinary Thai woman selling cold drinks from a huge cooler on the corner. And this place is an ordinary soi (a Thai side street) branching off of famed Sukhumvit Road. For the past few months I’ve been living in an apartment about 200 meters down the soi. It’s a one-way soi, so no matter where I go I have to walk past her to get there. Each day I nod to her and when we make eye contact I say hello in Thai (sawatdee-khrup) and she offers the brightest toothless smile I’ve ever seen. But one morning the total ordinariness coalesced and granted me a brief moment in her world of place. I don’t know how or why it happened. I only know that it was among the most beautiful experiences of my life.

She sat atop her cooler and watched the cooks and at first I watched her watch them. Then I seemed to inhabit her place and I began to experience what I imagined she was experiencing. All of a sudden my bones felt the pulse and thump of mortar and pestle, the acidic humid heat of a Bangkok breakfast so different than the pancakes and eggs of home. The smells seemed to drift toward me in heavily seasoned ribbons as the corner cooks drummed tom yam (papaya salad) with one gloved hand and flipped fresh river fish on the sizzling grill with their worn silver tongs in the other. The thick humidity was made all the richer by the coconut cream that bubbled to a boil with the prawns and red chillies.

Through her eyes I learned that the soul of a city resides not in the loudness of its extremes but in the quiet beauties of those ordinary moments that are often seen but rarely observed.