Making Alms for Abbots

It’s six a.m., Chiang Mai in a thin and early light. Beside the occasional lone monk moving down the street with a plastic bowel in search of alms, the city is an empty shell. None of the tourists of last night’s frantic market bargaining for trinkets, no song-thaews cruising through the damp and filthy alleys. At this hour, there are hardly even dogs. Thais, apparently, are not a morning people, or at least today they’re not. Normally, I’d be fine with this, but this specific morning the four of us are up early in order to make breakfast. Also, Daow, Josh’s girlfriend from Khon Kaen, has joined us. We’re sitting groggy eyed and yawning in the lobby of our hotel, drinking Nescafe and waiting for Riley. We’re always waiting for Riley. As far as Americans go, he’s slow. As far as Thais go, he’s right on schedule, a delay so perpetually reliable that after all these years Josh and I have no choice but to appreciate it at Riley’s expense.

“How much you wanna bet right now he’s lying in bed, making noises, and thinking of B-ing his T’s,” Josh says, referring to one of Riley’s many short-hand expressions for things he likes to do, one of which is taking way too long to brush his teeth. 

“Twenty Baht says he’s taking a shower first, then B-ing his T’s, then taking another shower,” I say.

Kelli laughs at this, but Daow doesn’t get it.

“Does he have problem,” she asks in a brand of English so broken it’s cute enough to make you want to hug her.

“Yes,” I say.

“Farang," Josh says, "on Thai-time.” T0 this, Daow nods her head, smiles, and then starts soaking her arms and legs in bug repellent, a mist which smells suspiciously like sugar water mixed with powder flavored teenage body spray for girls. A mosquito lands on her thigh and bites her. Eyes half shut, Riley approaches down the hall, wanting coffee in order to want a cigarette. He’s wearing blue jeans, a t-shirt, a blue polyester shirt, socks, and black sneakers. Six a.m. and he’s already mostly sweat. Josh is mostly  laughs and head shakes.

The fact that we’re a half hour late to Co Co.Ok, the restaurant where we’ll spend the next five hours cooking breakfast for twenty five monks at a local temple, doesn’t seem to matter. Josh’s dad is waiting patiently in the parking lot and the owners greet us grinning. They bring us coffee, Oreo Cookies. They bring us water. We eat and drink and talk for about an hour. Sayan, a French ex-patriot living in Chiang Mai, is partners, business and otherwise, with Yupapan, the owner and head cook. Also, he speaks English and is incredibly enthusiastic to have us here. There are pictures of the farm where the food we’ll make was grown, a video he shot of the river which runs through it, dark water moving quickly over mossy rocks and through the jungle.

In the kitchen, Yupapan, her sister, and a girl with braces who I’m not sure of wrap us tightly up in aprons, give us tasks. Kelli and Riley are pulling shit strings out from the backs of shrimp in a glistening, gigantic shrimp pile. Josh is hacking at an ugly lump of liver. Daow is cutting lemongrass. Me, I’ve got a big bright knife and I’m turning a vegetable, some sort of half-soft tuber I’ve never seen before, into big white cubes. Yupapan takes the knife away from me. Apparently, my cubes are wrong.

“Like this,” she says.

“Like this?” I say.

She nods and I continue cutting. Outside a dog barks back at another dog. It’s hot as hell in here. Our knives go thud thud thud against the wooden cutting-boards.

Hours later, our menu looks something close to this:

Main Courses

Shrimp and Cashew Stir-fry (shrimp, cashews, peppers, onions, garlic, chilies, sugar, fish sauce, oyster sauce, etc.)

Laab (liver, pork fat, pork skin, pork, lime juice, cilantro, chilies, chili paste, sugar, toasted rice powder, fish sauce, etc.)

Tom Ka Gai (coconut milk, galangal, lemon grass, weird white tube vegetables, cabbage, tomato, chicken, garlic, tamarind paste, sugar, etc.)

Chicken Wings (coriander, sugar, deep fried lemon grass, peanuts)

Dessert

Mango with sticky rice

Coconut soup with salted egg and boiled pumpkin

We’re proud as hell, especially Riley, who has managed half his life to feed himself by having girlfriends, and Kelli also. She's the kind of girl who keeps an endless schedule of friends to go to dinner with back home so as to keep herself from starving. We pack everything up in the back of a pickup truck and drive in the hot sun to a temple at the edge of town. There, the monks are waiting for us. They’re not allowed to eat after one pm, which gives them about an hour to fill their bellies. We watch them eat, which is hard because I’ve been up since dawn and I’ve only had an Oreo. When they’re full, we take what’s left and put it in our faces, which is a lot.

Here's something, a ceremony which I don’t understand. During it, I walk up slowly to the front of the room where a big fat golden Buddha is frozen serenely in a lotus pose. I light a candle. I use the candle to light some more candles, then some incense, then some more incense which I hold in my hands while kneeling at the altar. I pray for a while, to what and for what I’m not exactly sure, but I’m going through the motions anyway. I put the incense in a pot of sand. My friends all do the same. And now we’re pouring water. We’re supposed to pray a second time while pouring and so I say “I love you, I love you, I love you.” I say this over and over to myself in the direction of a girl I care about who's far away until the water’s gone, and I’m hoping that it counts. By this point, however, given the heat and time at which our day began, I can tell that Kelli is at the end of things, “hitting the wall” as we have come to call it. Usually, Riley hits the wall, but today it’s Kelli in her purple dress and black sweater, entire rivers pouring down her face which is kind of sagging downward from exhaustion. I can tell her eyes are tired because she keeps taking her fingers and stretching them back from the corners, a habit of hers which makes it look like she’s slightly racist, pretending to be Asian. One of her eyes is bad, so the other one works too hard. Usually it takes all day before she starts to pull her eyes back, but today, at two in the afternoon, my friend has nothing left.

And here's another thing. We’re sitting cross-legged in a half circle around the Abbot, a man whose name I can’t pronounce but which translates loosely into Full Heart. Draped in a deep brown robe, he is lotused at the front of the room. Behind him, an arrangement of flowers and realistic, life-sized plastic statues of monks are sitting eerily and still. I know I’ve seen their faces before in posters and in pictures hanging on the walls of houses, but their names and reputations are alien to me. There being here gives the appearance we’re in a wax museum, and now one of the wax replicas is moving his hands about, talking to us in a language we don’t get, and now, pointing at me, he’s laughing. In fact, he’s almost always laughing. I ask him questions and he responds, through a translator, with long, circular narratives, stories about his life and the lives of others. Usually there is suffering, death, poverty, and starvation in there. Ultimately, laughter.

From what I can gather, which isn’t much, the Abbot decided to become a monk in his early twenties, a decision sprung from reverence, culture, and a lack of real alternatives. All Thai men are required to spend part of their lives, even if it's only seven days, in saffron. The King, I think, did fifteen days, which doesn’t seem like a lot, but sitting with my legs crossed beside my friends in a half circle around the Abbot, even for only a couple hours, makes me hesitant to take my turn at the temple should I finally gather courage to. Riley and Josh have agreed to join me in a monastery at some point in the ten months I’m here, but to see them now, Josh perpetually shifting and re-shifting, Riley making little noises now and then that mean he’s suffering, glad to be given an audience, but suffering nonetheless, makes me worry. And then there’s Kelli. Right now, Kelli is a puddle in a black and purple dress, pulling back her eyes.

“What do monks do for fun,” I ask, which is a mistake. The Abbot with the full heart asks me what the nature of fun is and I come up empty, dumb. Unsurprisingly, he tells a story and I struggle vainly to trace it back to what I asked him.  In it, a man from Chiang Mai walks for a long time over great distances. He has neither food nor money. Eventually, a woman gives him noodles, which he likes. In fact, these are the best noodles he has ever eaten, will ever eat. When he dies, he will remember those noodles, their greatness.

“Death is every day,” the Abbot laughs, “like if one day you try to speak, and then another day you stop trying, you’re dead already!” He pauses and his eyes light up, a brighter shade of brightness spilling out from his face onto my face. I look at Josh. His face is red with brightness also, though of a different nature, and his knees are cramped up tight against the marble floor. I can tell that he agrees, which makes me glad we're here, the four of us, deep friends. I look outside. It’s raining. Rain, too, is every day. Death and rain. Rain and death. And sweat. Sweat is every day as well. Riley trying hard to listen, Kelli staring at the ground.