For months my best friend, here in Thailand’s life was occupied by overseeing the construction of her new home. She often involved me in the process. She knew that I had a degree in interior design and it was a fun way for me to be a part of the activity presently consuming her life. Sitting on the floor of her T.V. room, we spent evenings looking through books, selecting bits and pieces of different floor plans that we’d eventually incorporate into the vision for the completed structure. We would sit at her kitchen table paging through decorating magazines, admiring spec-houses and dream homes. We would measure out square meters on the site of her future home, which was to be built on the same lot as the old, making sure there was plenty of room for the sufficiency-economy garden that she planned to plant and tend.
Once construction began, we continued looking through publications. As she came across inspired ideas, she merely told her workers that she’d had a change of heart and that now, for instance, instead of the attached enclosed garage that they’d already poured the concrete slab for, she wanted it detached from the house sans cumbersome door. “No problem!” she and the workmen would say.
We took countless trips, in her D-Max truck, down to HomePlace in Nakonsawan to select, buy and bring back floor tiles, shingles, paints and fixtures. Each item was a separate 120 KM round trip excursion. Sometimes she would call me in the middle of the day, tell me she was leaving school where she teaches, to go pick up, let’s say…a sink, and, did I want to come?
“Now? What about the students? What are they going to do?”
She’d tell me it was important, that the workers needed the sink
and as for the kids, “No problem!” If it was convenient for me, I’d go with her, if not she went alone.
“What do you think of this? Is it beautiful? Should my house have this?” She would ask, pointing at glossy photos, color swatches or showroom-floor displays.
“Yes, beautiful,” I’d reply. If I thought something was in particularly poor taste, and surmised that she thought so too, I’d occasionally answer, “Not beautiful.”
Looking for more input than a thumbs up or down, she would reference my (I use these adjectives loosely) credentials and expertise by saying, “You interior! You interior!”
Yes, I had worked for several years as an interior designer but in that capacity, I was a
I wanted to reply, “Me designer! Me designer!”
Perhaps it’s a matter of semantics or translation, but the “You interior!” bit always struck me as funny because taken together, the title Interior Designer implies an aspect of design, or forethought, or context, or cohesion, or unity, and/or conceptual organization. “Form follows function” and all that.
Instead, she would lay out 1001 tile samples on the patinaed, plank wood floor of her bedroom and want me to pick the “most beautiful” one, regardless of how it fit into the scheme as a whole.
If I pointed out that the one she’d selected as most beautiful among them was a floor tile and she was selecting tiles for the wall behind the kitchen sink, “no problem!” she’d reply. It would work just fine.
In the end, her new home turned out beautifully. And in the same way I feel about most of my work here over the past two years, my “expert” advice was rarely followed, but I had a great time being part of the process. We bonded while appraising paint chips in different lights throughout the day.
Several times during the construction process, I’d asked her what she was going to do with the old house that now stood adjacent to the new one. Amongst other options, she’d considered keeping it and renting it out and keeping it empty for me to live in when I come back to live here someday. (She can be quite a wishful thinker and a sweet talker!) I told her that wasn’t necessary because I had no idea if or when that day would come, and she told me, "You stay in that house when you come back for your honeymoon, then.” Again, I advised her not to hold her breath. In the end, she sold the house for 60,000 THB to a company that would come, tear it down and take it away.
I happened to be going to her house for dinner the same night the company arrived with workers and trucks and I watched as they finished the “demolition.” It wasn’t what I expected. There were no wrecking balls or backhoes. Instead, the workers dismantled the house board by board. Very few nails had been used in its construction. Most of the wood planks fit together with tongue and groove joints. Essentially, the house was constructed to be deconstructed. The planks were stacked in the truck beds and the whole big house fit into the back of two trucks.
My friend told me that the house was being moved to Ayutthaya. The company would refurbish worn out boards, repair termite damage and chemically treat it to prevent reinfestation. They would restain the wood and rebuild the entire structure a few hundred kilometers away. Brilliant, I thought.
As I watched the final pieces of her house get loaded onto the trucks and the two trucks pull away, I felt nostalgic and sad. It seemed so unceremonious. I watched my friend casually watch her home of 16 years drive away and, as if it were any other day, and before the trucks were fully out of site, she cheerfully urged me into the new kitchen where we’d make pumpkin curry and start the rice.
Watching the trucks disappear, I thought about all nights we made pumpkin curry and shared dinner in that flattened house. I had only been here 16 months and she had lived there 16 years. I began to cry when I watched the place where I had felt the most understood, the most accepted, and the most loved during these disorientating past 16 months disappear down the road. I thought of all the crazy misunderstandings and fun times we’d shared there. It was difficult saying goodbye to my one place of refuge, where I knew I would I always feel safe, sane, included, sought to be understood and would be met with patience and non-judgment, and where everything was “no problem!”
My friend noticed that I was crying and sympathetically laughed at my sentimentality. “Mai pen rai. Mai pen rai”
“Aren’t you sad? Just a little?” I asked her.
“Yes, a tiney, tiney bit. Not really sad, though, I’ll be with it again in my next life!”*
The trucks drove out of site and she took me by the shoulder and we walked together into the new kitchen. She handed me a tissue to wipe my eyes, tofu, a cutting board and a knife.
We had dinner to make in this life.
*Sia Jai niiet dioayng. Dah, mai pen rai, ja die jur mai chat naa!
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