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Cinderella


MrX

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Nee took in washing making their rooms smell of dirty clothes. That day she was crying over the ironing board. I didn?t speak Thai then but I knew her sister. She was a sexy bitch on the edge of blousy and this was her place. Everything was hers: the fading pan-aristocratic husband nearly 30 years older, a pair of neglected vivacious daughters, the posse of buck male admirers.

 

She tried to explain. The demands for money had become intolerable. First it had just been the electric for the washing machine, then the water usage, now some kind of rent was being wrung from her. This insult after she had raised her younger siblings practically single handed since her teens and later given up a job to care for the next generation. She would leave for Ubon the next day.

 

I spoke urgently with Catherine. We had been looking for a maid since Moon had found us this half-genteel apartment in Phra Kanong round the corner from her solitary digs. But the unknown we feared. How could we trust young Kit to a stranger? With Moon, and Sumitra our middle class paranoid friend, never tiring of their horror Bangkok stories of kidnap and con. You never knew who you could trust, they chorused until we had run out of not believing them. But this was different. Nee we knew. More than that; we knew her sisters, her nieces, even her broken down mother who ghosted among the offspring between whisky glasses. Moreover Kit liked her.

 

 

Catherine and I reckoned would have to bid high to cover the costs of her renting a room in our condo. We offered 7000 and Nee graced us as her saviours. Within a few hours she had found a room on the eleventh floor and had ezibuyed an industrial sized toploader to continue her business part-time as had been agreed.

 

 

 

She was 38 eight years old, the eldest of six. I knew two of her sisters and her brother who was quiet and docile. Gay lived in Phuket in the penumbra of prostitution and Goo did something in IT near Bang Na. One sister was absent and the last sibling, another brother, had died eight tears before around Yaa Baa. Their mother and father had separated in 1980 and Nee had elected to stay with him in Bangkok. The other children remained in Ubon with their alcoholic mother but steadily filed to the household in the capital, straining resources. Worse, Nee was just 19 when her father died while driving his taxi. She already had 3 dependants.

 

 

Her then job in the factory paid OK but was too inflexible to let her be mother.She gave up her boyfriend and laid a bamboo pole across her shoulders loading the pans up with wares. How far and with what kilos did she tramp? I don?t know but I have seen the indelible weals in her shoulders and the flexors of her back feeding into a Hottentot rump.

 

?They wanted me to put on make-up but I wanted to work? she said of that period, one rainy morning between swabbing, reminding me of Moon speaking nonchalantly about labouring the building sites for about 100 baht a day, in a not such different context. About five years later, her sisters and brothers already part grown, some even earning a wage, she changed job.

 

 

A Thai Chinese businessman wanted a Nanny/Housekeeper and at 24 with her peculiar history she had the gravitas. This job might have gone on forever except the bitch had a litter and Nee was summoned. Just that when they grew up she had to start the laundry.

 

 

 

 

I cannot date when I realized she was helplessly in love with me though I recognized it well, being similarly afflicted by the IP. Perhaps it was when we took the condo gang and Kit to Koh Samui to spread out in Mercedes' apartments on Chaweng, or maybe later. Certainly before perception had hardened into resolve we went for a night out on the Cowboywhere she gawped in revulsion and awe. I saw clearly then how unkind I was being.

 

Now, in our rooms she intones "Falang chai dee and take care of their women" while my trying to disenchant her only fuels the infatuation. Catherine is not amused.

 

What should we do since one day this Prince will surely collect the glass slippers and fly all the way home?

 

Smuggle her in through the diplomatic bag or coax her out as a faithful housekeeper to an ex-pat brat-pack in Thong Lor, more likely I suppose

 

I hate the pseudo third world.

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>I hate the pseudo third world. <

 

Yet, You love it, because it allows you to maintain the ambiguous position you're it right now.

 

Would you go back, live in UK, if only you could take your housekeeper with you?

 

Not`withstanding this challenge , thank you for sharing thhis stuff,

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