The food cart brought in anywhere from $10 to $70 per day. That normally meant $300 to $2000 per month.
But that didn’t include payments to local police- $50 per month- nor did it include the cost of ingredients, food packaging, cooking gas, plus gas for the motorbike.
Such expenses generally added up to around $300 per month.
At month’s end, and if it were a good month, they’d be left with around $1650 in profit. And if the month wasn’t so good, maybe $150 in debt.
Of course none of this included personal expenses. Living costs, food, utilities, rent. A worse month could reach $300 in the red…
“But this shouldn’t be,” Peechai lamented. He and his wife of 10 years sat next to one another on their bamboo mat, which doubled as their bed, in their windowless, sweltering, sparsely furnished one-room apartment.
“The math added up to $1000 per month,” Lamyai, his wife, agreed, “but that didn’t take COVID into account.”
“COVID,” Peechai snorted, before taking a prolonged sip from a bottle of rice whiskey.
“There used to be loads of foot traffic. Office workers, the tourists.”
“They didn’t lie to us. We could have easily earned $800 per month. The granny selling coconut cakes was once making $2000. HiSo office workers were sending their assistants to pick up cakes from her. The sausage and sticky rice seller too.
Both made enough, eventually, to retire back to Cambodia.”
“But we are nowhere close to retirement.”
“We can’t worry about that now. Right now, we don’t even have enough saved to get us to next month. We’re going to need a loan.”
“No…” Peechai moaned, his nostrils quivering, then his jaw muscles clenched up, as if he were about to puke.
But Lamyai was unmoved; shaking her head, she lamented, “It’s the only way to get us through...”
Arrangements were made. A $4000 loan. With 20% interest. It had to be repaid, in full, within a year, or else the interest rate increased to 35% and an additional 20% on the principal would be added to the total.
Their lender was not a standard banker. The lender was a nearby neighbor. A diminutive elderly man. The old man and his family ran a hole-in-the-wall noodle shop just off the main road and lived in the apartment on the upper floor of the shophouse.
The old man had earlier left a lasting impression on Peechai, as he looked like the Buddha, with his bald head and potbelly, and Peechai had initially viewed this as a positive omen.
The Buddha lookalike’s son, a jowly, muscular, kickboxing enthusiast greeted Peechai with a wai and showed Peechai up to the old man’s cramped but clean apartment.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The apartment appeared almost like an Asian museum. Its living room so full of Chinese calligraphy, paintings of rivers and mountains and various golden Buddhas statues sitting, standing, and reclining everywhere.
Peechai passed an altar, with flashing red lights and black and white photos honoring the family’s ancestors, before entering the old man’s tiny office, which was also heavily adorned in Buddhist and Daoist paintings, calligraphy scrolls and statues and figurines.
It was there that over a glossy, mud-brown wooden desk the loan terms were discussed.
The Buddha lookalike lender spoke in a soft cadence, his words measured, his voice low, calm and reassuring.
However, his son spoke in a booming, bass-heavy voice, a voice that reverberated, shook Peechai’s soul. Looking over at the son, Peechai surmised that the young man might have been a tiger or a crocodile in another life. The young man exuding a predatory energy…
Peechai received a cash-filled manilla envelope. Then the lender’s son escorted the aspiring restauranteur to the door. Before Peechai left, the young man pointed to the phone cradled in his palm, then nodded to a picture flickering on the phone’s screen.
In the picture was a beggar, a middle-aged man who’d been maimed. Disfiguring burns covering his face. The beggar looking like something from a horror movie.
Then the lender’s son flicked the screen to another picture. This one of a grimacing middle-aged man, the man missing an arm, the man kneeling on a street corner, with his lone arm extended, holding out an empty plastic cup.
“Please pay on time,” the bass-heavy voice spoke. The words edged with a discomforting politeness.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer Peechai and Lamyai had been banking on the virus situation to improve. For businesses downtown to reopen. For tourists to return. But time went on and the virus only worsened. Every day, higher numbers of infections were reported.
Sales were scarce. With Bangkok practically a ghost town, the couple were lucky to bring in $10 per day. Some days they made nothing.
When the first installment of the loan was due, the couple panicked, knowing they’d be unable to pay. They fretted over the pictures they’d seen, those poor disfigured souls forced to beg. They knew the lender’s son or another goon would be showing up soon. And they did.
The lender’s son came calling, his deep voice resonating, echoing off the walls.
He’d brought along two other goons, also appearing as kickboxers, also covered in tattoos. The pack of young thugs showing up at 10 p.m. to the couple’s apartment, hammering on the flimsy front door, demanding the first installment.
The ruffians cornered Peechai, began backing him up to the grimy mustard-colored wall by the bathroom. Peechai could smell a whiff of sewage pushing up from the tiny, stinky bathroom sink. Beads of healing sweat streamed down his forehead and lower back and he lifted his hands high in the air as if being busted by the police.
Smelling the stink of shit, his heart jumped like a monkey in a cage as he contemplated how he’d be beaten.
It was at this moment that Lamyai emerged with a tray of drinks- a bottle of beer and three clear plastic cups half-full of rice whiskey.
“Please,” Lamyai said, in a calm voice, though her eyes were red and wet, “please, let’s sit down and discuss this. There must be another way.”
The men craned their necks at Lamyai. One swept his gaze over her figure, which, even under her loose-fitting pajamas, was visible and quite fetching, quite sharply curved.
Cancel Culture | Kim Cancer The lender’s son grunted to the other men, who nodded and the three repaired to the pink plastic seats around the small foldable table in the center of the room.
Lamyai handed Peechai the bottle of beer, and then she served the men, who each wasted no time guzzling the whiskey, slamming the clear cups down to the thin table. One of the ruffians even crunched the cup in his hand, staring ominously at Peechai as he did so. All the young thugs looking like tigers eying prey.
Within seconds, though, the menacing young men’s faces blanched, then twisted to mortified. Then they began convulsing and coughing. Eyes popping. The tattooed pack wheezing and clapping their hands to their necks and faces, struggling to breathe, choking on words. The young men then keeling over, out of their chairs, falling to the floor and retching until they finally seized up, froze in place.
Peechai crept forward, stopped and stood above the young men’s fresh corpses, staring, aghast, like he’d seen a ghost.
But Lamyai wasted no time before checking the lifeless men’s pulses. Finding nothing, she rifled through each’s pockets, lifted out their wallets, phones, and sizable cash wads, then carefully plucked off the goons’ gold chains, amulets, and rings, stuffed the pilfered treasure into her knock-off Charles and Keith purse.
Peechai’s mouth tightened as he stood frozen in place. Then he felt his jaw loosen, and it was as if a circle of golden light were rising above Lamyai as she rose to her feet.
“We’ll take an overnight bus back to the village,” Lamyai said. Her words like a warm gust of wind. “Just after we visit the old man for a glass of whiskey,” she went on, in a tone that told only of tranquility.
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