Comrade Aeon's Field Guide to Bangkok by Emma Larkin

Author:Emma Larkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Granta Publications
Published: 2021-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

Yai Sunan sits uncomfortably on a plastic stool at Losers’ Corner. The slum is densely packed and Losers’ Corner is little more than a slight widening of a narrow lane, but it is the only available area for residents to gather and today it is the location of Kongkiat’s meeting to launch his campaign to save the slum.

Loong Pradit is also present and every time Yai Sunan glances over at him he glowers back at her, still annoyed by her dismissiveness the other day and no doubt wondering why she has come to the meeting. Yai Sunan is not entirely sure herself what she’s doing here. She doesn’t intend to get involved in this no-hope fight against the development but when Kongkiat had dropped by a few days earlier to tell her he was calling on ‘people of significance’ in the slum, she had been flattered to be included. Now, she finds herself wanting to move out of Loong Pradit’s eyeline but every stool, chair, and bench has been pulled out for the occasion and the twenty or so people of significance have blocked off the lane and filled Losers’ Corner to capacity. The best Yai Sunan can manage is to re-angle her stool, causing her hip to ache and precipitating a crick in her neck as she has to twist round awkwardly in order to see Kongkiat delivering his opening speech.

‘We belong to this land,’ Kongkiat begins, projecting his voice in an oratory fashion Yai Sunan has never heard him use before. ‘We are the ones who struggle here to make ends meet, to bring up families, to survive. You, Paa Woonsen, I know you have a paralysed son at home and yet you go to an office building every single day to do the cleaning. You work longer hours than anyone else in that place but I know without a doubt that you’re bringing home just a fraction of the salary that anyone else there earns …’

Paa Woonsen, an otherwise timid woman who flinches when greeted too loudly, claps enthusiastically. ‘That’s my lot, for sure!’

‘And you, Yai Sunan, pushing your pah-tong-koh cart every day come rain or shine. At your age!’

Yai Sunan nods self-consciously. She doesn’t know her exact age because she was born at home in the village and it had never occurred to her parents to travel to the provincial office to get a birth certificate. It was only a few years ago, when the government announced the thirty-baht healthcare scheme, that she finally applied for an ID card. She wasn’t even sure the process had been worth it, involving as it did copious amounts of paperwork, several trips to the village and, with both parents long since deceased, evidence of her birth being provided by the local abbot whom she knew to be too sozzled to even remember who she was, though he did manage to satisfy the box-ticking bureaucrats by pronouncing the year of her birth and making her, officially and on paper, now sixty-five years of age.

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