Sticky Rice

Kayla Kawalec, 134 YinD

I love my big, wooden Thai house. I love that sweeping and mopping and dusting and spraying and wiping it fills some of that empty, endless time on the weekends. (Although, I admit I don’t altogether like it when I have to do those things after a long day at work.) But early in the morning, when I wake up with the sun to sweep first thing, I love that first moment of groggily peering out my bedroom window to see what the sky is doing. Sometimes I find it tinted salmon and lilac, brightening over the far-flung fields of green; sometimes there’s mist enveloping the Phu Langka Mountains in the distance; sometimes, in my least favorite season, the sky is a choked yellow from the burning fields.

The green of the rice fields, by the way, is a specific green. I’ve gotten very intimate with it as my house stands sentry over several of them. I survey from my window as the shades of green wax and wane with the seasons – from corn stalks to blades of rice, full to fallow, the many hues of green in flux. 

The green of the rice fields is a shade one might be tempted to call fluorescent. But that word calls to mind toxic sludge like one of my students might draw. This green is overwhelmingly natural, but brighter – like it’s glowing from within. It glows up at me from behind my iron window bars.

I love constantly being surprised by the critters I find in my Thai house. (Although, I admit I don’t particularly love when that critter is a roach on my granola jar, a bat in my shower, a giant Huntsman spider crouching in my coffee cup, a snake brought in by my cat, mice eating my jackets, socks, and ointments(?!), a scorpion on my pillow, or a toad in my sneaker.) But the Tokay gecko feet poking out from behind my ceiling panels and snails on my drying rack make me giggle.

I love watching the rain roll in, hard and fast on a Sunday morning, while I’m still nursing a steaming cup of coffee, and I love hearing the sound it makes against my tin roof, lulling me to sleep. I love the giant, epic, fluffy clouds that appear hyper-realistically set against the blue sky on scorching days – so white they hurt to look at. I love that I can see the stars and the moon and, sometimes, the Milky Way on a clear night from my back balcony. 

I love when the ice cream vendor pulls up to my front gate, stopping just for me, the last house on the street, in the middle of a delirious summer day – those days that are so hot that I think I might actually be melting into my couch. I hear the tinkling bell that announces his arrival and I feel like a kid again. 

I love that I could bring my family to my Thai house, even though my mom said it was like camping. (The bathroom is outside and, to be fair, it does look a bit like a log cabin.) I love that my American people got to meet my Thai people. Food was brought over in metal tins and plastic bags and cylindrical coolers stuffed with sticky rice. We laid everything out on a mat right there on the floor of my living room and we ate like a family. My American mom got to meet my Thai moms – the women who feed me, listen to me lament in broken Thai about the daily tribulations of being a Peace Corps Volunteer, and even though they have no obligation to, take care of me – not as hosts, but as neighbors, as family. Gifts were exchanged, hugs were given, and laughter spilled out of every crack in the wood of my Thai house as I played amateur translator for this strange, blended family.

I love that all of my neighbors know me (for better or for worse). They show up to my front gate, call out “Nam Pung!”, my Thai nickname which means honey, and they heap treasures upon me, more than I could ever dream of giving back. Sometimes it’s papayas as long as my arm, deep reddish-orange and leaking juice; cucumbers, so many cucumbers I’ve had to get creative with how I can eat them; passion fruit, bulbous and highlighter yellow on the outside, so sour they make your mouth pucker just to think about them; corn and spicy peppers and sticky rice and deep red river crabs still warm out of the pot, and so many other fruits and vegetables that don’t even have recognizable names in English. They surprise me with buckets of snails they’ve caught in the rice fields or just come over for a visit. At first, their gifts and attention made me feel like I was being treated as their extended foreign guest, but over a year living here with no signs of stopping, I see that they’re just treating me as a part of their extended family.

I love my big, wooden Thai house. But most of all, I love all of the people (and one fluffy cat) who have, over the last year and a half, made it my home. 

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Read Kayla’s previous articles and contributions.