Away in Rangoon

I made as many trips to Rangoon as Eid did to her hometown during my year with DVB. But my trips lasted just a few days, while hers were always for a couple of weeks or more.

Bumper banana harvest

Harvest time in Eid’s hometown. Eid just sent this photo of some bananas and banana blossoms that she cut down this morning. When I was in Canada last year, she planted a couple dozen banana trees in an area that was previously overgrown, because a neighbour (a retired teacher who goes all over Thailand buying fruit to sell in the local market) said he could give her a good price.

The blossoms (which are cut off to help the fruit grow) are eaten in salads, soups and curries, and probably a lot of other things. Sometimes the tender white inner petals are served with pad Thai. They don’t have a lot of flavour on their own, but they have a nice texture, both when they’re eaten raw and when they’re cooked into other foods. (Thais often munch on raw cabbage and other leafy vegetables when eating things like sausages and grilled meat, mostly, I think, to help with digestion.)

These banana trees were planted by Eid and her mother while I was in Canada the year before. Eid continued tending to them even after her health began deteriorating several months later.

Hip tragedy

The final concert of Tragically Hip didn’t really mean much to me, as I only knew them by name, but hearing about it reminded me of this photo, from Eid’s first trip to Canada in September 2004. The band’s lead singer Gord Downie had been diagnosed with terminal brain cancer a few months earlier, and died in October 2017 — just six months after Eid.

Here’s a related post with a link to a song by another band from the same era:

August birthdays

It was around this time that Eid and I started planning our trip to Canada at the end of the year. We had already told Mom, though nothing was fixed at this point.

A week later it was Harry’s birthday, so I decided to post a few pics of him, too.

Here is the complete set:

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Here are some comments:

Offerings to ancestors

This was why Eid returned to Phanat Nikhom: to help her mother prepare food to offer her ancestors. This was something that Eid did on a few other occasions when we were living in Chiang Mai, but usually only during the Chinese New Year. In retrospect, it feels as if Eid were not only paying her respects to her ancestors, but preparing to join them.

My explanation and a couple of comments:

A few days later, I posted this “memory” (a feature of Facebook that I now value as much or more than its primary function as a communication tool). It is a further reminder of the impermanent nature of things:

 

Another farewell

My job at DVB was mostly to oversee the transition of the English-language team from a Chiang Mai-based operation to one that would be run mostly from Rangoon. It was a messy situation that met a lot of opposition, especially from Burmese staff who had spent many years in Thailand. This was partly because of concerns about the political situation in Burma, but also had a lot to do with people’s personal circumstances (including the fact that they were expected to work for half the salary in a city that had roughly double the cost of living of Chiang Mai). The young foreigners on our team, however, were eager to go where the action was, and Libby was the first to make the move.

Eid and Libby barely knew each other, but Eid always had a special affinity for young foreigners — especially women — who seemed to be taking their lives into their own hands when they plunged into these new and sometimes risky situations. I suspect her feelings were a mix of solicitude and envy — real concern for their well-being, and genuine sadness at the thought that such boldness would have been conceivable in her case. She grew up knowing that she could never afford to fail, and that if she fell into difficulty, it would only multiply the hardships that her family already faced. Probably the greatest risk she ever took was getting involved with me. And as difficult as that proved at times, and as unsatisfactory I was as a husband, she never complained or expressed any regret. And yet, from my side, I still wish that I had been better to her, and had done more to make her feel that she made the right decision.

Eid returns to Chonburi, again

I lost track of how many times Eid returned to Chonburi in the course of the time I worked with DVB in Chiang Mai. To be honest, it suited me fine to have so much time to myself, as I found the job stressful and at the end of the day, all I wanted was to have a quick dinner and an early night. But I knew it was hard on Eid, having to go back and forth every month or two, as it involved a tiring overnight bus ride each time. The saddest part was that she probably felt that she was doing me a favor by being away. After I was offered the new job, I told her it was only temporary, and that she shouldn’t get the idea that we were moving back to Chiang Mai to stay. I think she felt this meant that she should continue to think of Chonburi, and not Chiang Mai, as her real home. But at the same time, we were also planning a trip back to Canada — our first together since we got married 10 years earlier — and I was seriously considering making it a permanent move. So Eid, in the final year of her life, was less certain about her future and where she would call home than she had been at any time in the years since we first met in 1999.  Still, she did her best to help her family and make sure that I was OK, mostly on my own, in Chiang Mai. It was a hard way for her to have to live, and it saddens me deeply to know that I never gave her the home that she had always longed for.

I think some of our friends and family probably wondered why Eid spent so much time returning to her hometown. There was always some ostensible reason, but the truth was that her life had been completely destabilized, largely as a result of my actions.

Here is the complete set of photos:

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Keiko comes to town

We always looked forward to a visit from Keiko, who often came to Thailand around this time of year, usually with a few students from Japan. Eid made all of the arrangements for her stay in Chiang Mai, and sometimes we accompanied her on trips to the border.

Libby was an intern from Australia who became a staff reporter for DVB around the time I became editor of their website. Shiho was the only student from Japan to accompany Keiko on this trip.

Fine dining

So much of our time together was spent enjoying delicious, inexpensive food and coffee. It saddens me to think that Eid would soon be deprived of this simple pleasure forever. It makes me wish we had never left Chiang Mai at all. The last two years of Eid’s life were spent mostly in her hometown in Chonburi, where she was close to her family, but far from the place she had come to think of as her home.

Extra special birthday

Happy birthday from Kanya, who returned to Chonburi later in the day with her father:

 

And a happy birthday from Eid, who bought me a pie to mark the occasion: