Kosoom's Story
I cannot not remember much about my childhood at Nong Shai Khao. My mother told me some stories about myself as a child,when I grew up. I pronounced some words wrongly for a long time. I called the old woman's name that ìNguiî instead of ìRuiî. When I was two years old, I fell about 2-3 metres from the bridge over a river near our village . Before that time my parents, my elder brother and I walked to the bridge to relax in the late afternoon. My brother and I carried a bag of snack by ourselves. While we were walking on the bridge, my brother was finishing his snack and I was helping him to carry his bag so I had no hand to hold onto anything, that was when I fell down from the bridge. The result was the scar under my lower lip. ...The first year in school, My teacher told us students to read a lesson at home as a homework.The next morning, my teacher ordered me to read that lesson in class but I said to her that I had already read it at home and I did not want to read it again.
My earliest memory is of my house which was not far from the train station. The village market was at the back of my house. At that time, I was living with my father, my mother, my oldest brother and my younger brother. It was a little house which was basically three rooms, one big room and two smaller rooms. In the middle of the big room, there was a big showcase which was 2 metres high and about 4 metres wide. This divided the room into a bed room and a living room. One of the small rooms was a kitchen and the other room was storage for a variety of rice which was sold. The backyard had a small garden. My mother grew vegetables, a custard apple tree, rose trees and many small plants. This house belonged to the big rice mill where my father worked.
Next door down from my house was a large two storey house with a big rain tree in front of it. I cannot remember how many people lived in that house. I remember only a big Chinese man and his daughter. I called them uncle and sister. The uncle, who was an older brother of my father's brother in law, lived on the first floor. The ground floor was an office of the big rice mill as he was the owner of the rice mill. The uncle's family did not stay with him because he had another business in a different place which his wife managed.
Surrounding the rice mill, were four rice storage rooms, a balance room, a kitchen house, a pond and a row house for the workers around the rice mill. One family, husband, wife and their son lived in the kitchen house. They cooked for everyone who worked in the rice mill. He was Chinese and his wife was a Thai woman. They argued a lot but were very kind to other people. In the afternoon at around 5 PM, the children, including me, liked to help them to carry the meals from the kitchen to inside the rice mill for the workers. The children received the crisp rice which stuck to the bottom of the rice cooker after they had finished their job.
The village market was not big. There were two row of houses divided by a foot path at the front of them. There were about 10 houses in each row. Some of them were shops. Some shops sold meat and vegetables. Some shops were restaurants. Some shops sold only desserts. Some houses did not sell anything but there was always a pig or hen farm in the back yard. There was a fence between the rice mill area and the market but there was a door on the fence. We could go to the market through that way.
About 500 meters down from my house was a railway station. This station was called Nong Sai Kao station. It was on the Northern line connecting Bangkok and Chaingmai.On several occassions we waited at this station to welcome his majesty the King of Thailand and his family as they passed on this line to the northern part of Thailand. At that time, the only public transport for the village was the train. I knew uncle Chom who worked at the station. He was a big black man who lived with his wife and two sons. The eldest son was a very clever boy but he caught polio when he was young, so he had one leg smaller than the other one. The second son was the same age as my brother and they were friends of each other. Each day, after Uncle Chom finished work, he would get very drunk on Thai whisky.
The area between the rice mill and the railway station was a lawn. My family liked to go there after my father finished his job each day. My mother brought the children's food and a reed mat to sit on the lawn. She sat on the mat and fed the children while they ran and played together around the lawn. We stayed there until the sky became dark then we returned home.
In grade 1 in primary school, there was an eclipse of the sun in Thailand. At that time I was at school. My father made this thing that looked like sun glasses and was made from cardboard and smoky glasses. He brought them to me so I could see an eclipse of the sun, at school. That was the first time I saw an eclipse of the sun. My twin sisters were born one year after that. My mother looked after them by herself. I helped her to looked after them when my mother had to go to market to buy some food or while she was cooking. When my mother went to the market, she would take my naughtiest sister with her and the other one stayed with me. When school opened I went to school which was not far from my house. I could return home to have lunch each day and look after my sister while my mother went to the market. Then I would go back to school again after lunch.
After my family moved to Noen Yao village, I moved from the school in the Nong Shai Khao village to the school in Amphur Banmi as well. I started to study in the new school in the third term of grade 3. That was the first time I studied English at school. I didn't like it because I started to study at the same level as my friends in our class who had been studying English since they were in grade 1. I was not good in English but I had no problems with other subjects. This was a private school. The school's name was ì Piya boodhraî which means a beloved son. Most of the students in our class lived in the market of Amphur Banmi. One of my friends was a boy who always came top of class and I always came second. He was a head of our class and I was a deputy head. I studied in this school until I finished grade 7. After that I gained entrance to a government school, Banmi Vitaya school, by passing an examination. Every student wanted entrance to that school because the parents paid less fees, but not everyone could pass the examination.
My house in Noen Yao village was lovely. There was a canal, a branch of which came in front of our house. I always rowed a boat in the canal with my sisters. We had three ponds around our house. Every year a fish seller came to our house to buy all the fish from the ponds. The fish seller would pump the water out of the ponds and catch the fish. There were many kind of fish in the ponds such as snakehead mullet, catfish and small freshwater fish. Some years the fish seller did not want to buy the fish from some ponds, so my family would have to catch the fish ourselves.
I remember the first time we had to do this, after the water had run out off the pond, there was a lot of mud in the bottom of the pond. When my father came to catch the fish the mud level was to the top of his thigh. When they began to catch the fish, they let me stay by the side of the pond. I stayed by the side for a while but then I started to go to the bottom of the pond. I edged my way little bit...by little bit until my feet were covered in mud. My father saw me coming towards him.
"Do you want to try to catch fish?" he asked.
"Sure," I answered.
"Okay. You come here, I will teach you how to catch them," my father said and started to explain the technique.
"When the water dries up, the fish will disappear into the mud and stay there for a long time, so we can not see them. You have to insert your hand into the mud to find them. When your hand touches a fish , you have to use both of your hands to press it's body and use one hand to catch it. Find it's head, then press it's head under your palm and insert your index finger and middle finger behind it's fin, so it's body will be between your fingers. Then you grasp it and raise it from mud. That's it. Be careful, the catfish are very dangerous because they have spines which can hurt you." My father taught me well.
"Yes, I will," I promised and started to catch them. I did well until I caught one fish and raised it from the mud then I saw that the fish was the catfish. I threw it away but it had already hurt my palm. My palm was in pain and swelled then I had to stop catching fish and could not use the hand for two days. After we finished catching fish, we were covered in mud from head to foot. I liked catching fish and I learned to catch them well after some fish hurt me several time. I learned the technique of catching fish. The technique was different for catching different kinds of fish. Some fish were very fast in the water and on the land but very slow in the mud.
My house was elevated 1 meter off the ground to prevent floods that happened most years. However, I remembered that in 1971, there was a big flood which rose 1 meter above the floor of my house. My parents had to build some thing which looked like big tables and insert pieces of wood under the bed's legs and a sofa to rise them higher than the water level. We stayed on them until the flood came down. One day during the flood I wanted to take a pillow from a sofa, but I was shocked because I found a cobra under the pillow. I told my father and he took it away. Normally the students went to school by mini bus but during the flood the bus could not come. We took the long boat, with a small motor driven propeller at the end of a long shaft, to the higher land, where the mini bus could come and take us to school in the morning. In the afternoon we had to hurry to go home because there was a boat to pick us up at a particular time, otherwise we had to walk through the water to our house. That would not have been easy. After the flood, we had a lot of things to do because there was a lot of mud on the floor, in wardrobes and on the walls. Some plants died and the area around my house had changed to mud.
I loved to row a boat. I learned to row a boat from my parents. We had two boats, one was about 230 centimetres long and 60 centimetres wide and another one was longer than it. Rowing boats in Thailand are different to the boats from China, Hong Kong, Europe, Africa, America which I have seen in movies or television. It was a symmetry shape so we could call one side a head and the other side as a tail. It had two seats on the head and the tail . I sat on the tail of the boat and the head was in front of me. I used one stick to row the boat, one hand was on the top and other hand on the middle of the stick. I kept both hands far from my body, put the stick into water and then dragged it to my body. Then the boat would go forward and turn right. If I wanted the boat turn left, I reversed by dragging the stick from my body to the front. At first I did not know the secret of how to row the boat straight ahead, so I could only manage to row the boat in a circle. The secret was rowing forward and rowing backward a little bit. I paid attention to this detail for a long while, after which I learned to row well, and then I really enjoyed it.
There was the area around my house, where my family grew big and small plants such as mangoes, bananas, egg plants, cucumbers, pumpkin, lemon grass and a lot of plants for which I don't know the English. name. We kept pigs, chickens, ducks and pigeons at different times. When we had ducks, we collected their eggs in the morning. My mother packed them and my younger brother would carry them to the market before he went to school. On the weekend my sisters, my brother and I rounded up the group of ducks and took them to seek their food in the empty paddy fields. While waiting for the ducks to finish their meal, we would climb the tree to sit and to listen to the radio. Some times we rowed the boat to collect some fruit. We would stay there for about 2-3 hours before we rounded them up to go home.
I moved from Banmi Vitaya school after I finished secondary school to study in high school at Piboon Vitayalai school in Amphur Muang, Lopburi. I studied there for two years, from March,1975 to March 1977.
I lived in Noen Yao village until I went to Chaingmai University which was in the northern part of Thailand. My family moved to another town when I was studying in year 3 of university, in 1979. My family lived there more than 10 years. Now I am still thinking about the natural and happy times in my life at Nong Shai Kao village and Noen Yao village.
Kosoom (1996)