He felt the lifelessness and perfunctory movements of being a noodle worker further exorcized from him and became enriched in the freedom of his own impulses. Still, he told himself that even though he was almost as poor and homeless as those strewn about him, he should not be out here to be possibly robbed. It was an inherent defense because, more than fearing robbery, he knew that he would most likely do anything for money. Also there was a secondary voice of a cruel conscience that taunted him for being such easily sold goods even though he had never really put himself up for sale and had never been bought. As American as he wanted to be, in Thailand (even Sanam Luang in Bangkok) there was little chance of being robbed or murdered. He realized that he wasn’t really worried on that score.
He was the same as the visual images of street life that had come to him earlier that day: dogs that gnawed through the trash; a man whom he had seen in the middle of the afternoon holding a tree of hooks attached to small plastic sandwich bags where water and goldfish dangled within (how his child cried particularly for the sake of the fish); strangers pushing against each other in the mad rush to sell something and improve the lot of their lives; and a blind man who had screamed a song into a microphone to gain the one baht coins he was begging for. Like them, he would do almost anything for survival and the gaining of a better life that would shake in the pockets of his pants. Life was rained on one like rocks thrown at the emaciated dogs as they scavenged for their food or listlessly lay in the center of congested sidewalks.
Like those homeless individuals on their mats, he wanted someone to look into his eyes and confirm his humanity. He wanted to hear a voice in the solitude of the night that would give him hope that life was not entirely random and that he had an importance. He wanted to believe in illusions. He wanted to believe that the incidents that happened in one’s life were for a good reason and that they were the iron scaffolding that built up his life into one monumental edifice which would go on and on. And yet if his family didn’t care to deceive him into seeing connections and connectedness in random events and time, no stranger out there would be benevolent enough to attempt the task. He was a rotting organism there to be trodden on like any insect. He sat on a bench and reread the earlier part of his Laotian poem: the queens’ prayers; the youngest queen’s pregnancy; the oldest queen’s plot foiled by reality stranger than the plot; the birth of the bird; the exile; the growth as a boy in the shape of a bird; the growing independent striving of the boy-bird and the longer flights away from home; the princess who saw the bird and wanted it...
“Who are you?” asked a girl who was around his age. Jatupon felt nonplused. Beauty and truth were extracted from him. He was forced out of himself and his reading like a boy who stared at the light so long that when he walked away from it he fell into a ditch. Stupefied, he did not say anything to the dark skinned glasses-girl. “I’m Noppawan Piggy,” she continued. “What are you reading?”
“A poem. It is from Laos.”
“Are you Laotian?”
“Not really. I don’t know what I am.”
“Why wouldn’t you know who you are? If you were born here from a Thai mother or father you are Thai and if you weren’t you are a foreigner. I can’t think of anything simpler. By the way, your grammar is awful. It’s ‘who I am.’ Not ‘what I am.’ Maybe you are Laotian”
“Well, I do. I do know who I am. Maybe I’m just wishing to not know.”
“And you are reading poetry to not know?”