HE HAD COME from Burma eight years earlier. He had worked in a restaurant around Rangsit for three years, so spoke Thai better than his friends, who had come over to ‘strike gold’ in Thailand. But the owner had sold the business, and the new owner had kicked him out, saying he didn’t like Burmese. There was news at the time of a Burmese maid killing the family she worked for, and plundering their house. After that he followed a Burmese friend to work on a farm in Nakhon Nayok for quite some time; next he worked at Don Mueang airport, and then he found love. She came from the same town as he did, had a pretty face and a well-rounded body. He followed her to sell clothes in Pakkret. But after only half a year, she’d fled with a better-looking young man with better prospects, leaving him with a big pile of clothes and a big pile of debts. He finally repaid the money he owed by selling the clothes, and then by his own labour.

     The moneylender, seeing how determined he was, sold him a cart he had confiscated from some other debtor. It was old, and rusty all over. The lender sold it to him for only two hundred baht. He spent three days scrubbing off the rust, then took the cart here and there to peddle things until he settled on a condominium construction site. His customers were the construction workers. He experimented with selling all sorts of things, from personal wares to sweets, grilled squid and barbequed fish balls. That’s where he made a new friend, Samran, a young lad from Korat. Samran was selling drinks, and before long the two of them were sharing the rent of a room to lower their expenses. He had followed Samran to sell here.

     Here there were more people assembled than anywhere they’d been before. There were vendors, male and female, from everywhere, but there were customers in huge numbers as well. He didn’t know what these people had come here for, day after day, night after night. Most of them wore expensive clothes; some even wore ties.

     Vendors sold foodstuffs as well as other useful items. Some drove delivery vans stocked with goods from soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, mosquito repellent and cigarettes to plastic hand clappers.

     He sold sodas, bottled water, green tea, instant coffee, tissues, mats, sun hats, mosquito repellent. Before long wholesalers were offering him goods for resale, yellow T-shirts and stickers with political slogans, yellow flags and Thai national flags. He made five to six hundred baht in profit every day, some days up to one thousand.

     He loved this country!

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