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The Egg Dilemma
Leah Salow
Portland, Maine
I sat on the blue linoleum floor in a hut, in a zoo, in Thailand, and wondered what to do about a fried egg.
See, I hate fried eggs. The idea of actually eating the bright, rubbery goo was unthinkable. But my Thai brother watched me, pleased and proud to have made me the egg for dinner, and I didn't know what to do about it.
My presence in the Bangkok zoo was something of a scam to see Thailand on somebody else's money. Having just completed my second year of veterinary school, I could receive a grant to learn veterinary methods abroad. Since I was barely halfway through my education in American veterinary medicine, the amount of learning I could have acquired was negligible, even if I had been able to speak the language, which I was not. But Thailand was where I wanted to go, and I wrote to the Bangkok zoo and persuaded them to take me on. There was no existing program, or any kind of precedent, but the zoo didn't object to letting me come over to shadow young Dr. Weezit as he fed bananas to the hippopotami, or blew tranquilizer darts through a bamboo shoot at a puma that needed to be relocated. Actually I saw very little medicine being practiced.
The employees lived in their own community of huts within the walls of the zoo, and I lived with the family of the monkey-keeper. There were a mother and father, and a young man and young woman in their early twenties, around my age.
They were warm and friendly people, who didn't speak any English. As I have already admitted, I don't speak any Thai either, and the entire three weeks that I lived with them, I never knew any of their names. In my journal I called them my Thai mother, my Thai brother, my Thai sister.
The reason I was fretting so much over the fried egg, glistening fearfully on my plate, was because in our lack of explicit communication, I had already committed quite a lot of faux pas, and I didn't want to be guilty of another.
I say we lacked "explicit communication" because it is amazing how much can be communicated without any words exchanged at all. When I first entered their hut, for instance, all smiles and outstretched hands, they all cleared their throats and cast their eyes at my feet, and by this I understood immediately that I should have left my sneakers at the door.
By the same clearing of throats and embarrassed nudging, I also understood to switch the fork from my left to right hand when I was eating. I actually knew already, from my guidebook, that right hands are for eating, and left hands are for unexplained "toilet purposes." I forgot, though — it was hard to remember every single time I ate, especially the first time, when I was nervous and jetlagged. After I left the zoo, I backpacked for two months around Southeast Asia, and laughed about this with other Western travelers. My favorite story was from the tall, blond Aussie who found everybody staring at him in a cafe, as he left-handedly forked up his nasi-goreng. He swept the spellbound room with his alien blue eyes, sniffed his hand, shrugged, and continued eating.
But there are some things that really do need words to be told. Not to be gross, but there came the problem of what to do with the debris of the monthly curse. The bathroom was basically a dirt-floored alcove, with a trough of water and a hole in the floor. The "toilet" didn't flush; you used a scoop to pour water into the hole, until everything was pushed out of sight, and I was already risking putting toilet paper into the system. (Southeast Asians don't use toilet paper, but as I was never going to use my left hand "for toilet purposes", I carried it hidden in my camera bag. If they were surprised that I carried my camera bag into the bathroom, they never addressed the issue.) Anyways, there were no wastebaskets that I could recognize, and what I would do was hide the maxi-pads in my camera bag until I was in the public part of the zoo, and then discretely put them in the trash bins. I say "discretely", but I doubt I could do anything discretely in the zoo, where I was apparently so unique that Thai families often asked me to pose in pictures with them. (I was actually more popular for photographs than the young leopard kept on a chain for that very purpose.) For all I knew, the entire employee population watched me as I emptied my feminine products into the trash, and laughed about the stupid and disgusting American.
The worst thing I did, that I know of, was to "shower" in the family's clean water supply. I knew from my guide book that I was supposed to dip a bowl into the trough - called a mandi - and empty it over my head. What I couldn't figure out was where to stand and let the water drain. The floor was dirt, after all, and the toilet just a small hole in the floor. The answer to this riddle is to let the water drip on the dirt floor. In hotels, I later found out, this is obvious; the floors are tiled, and angled towards a drain. Anyways, the floor was always dry and mud-free in the hut of the monkey keeper, and I guessed wrong, and let all of that soapy, sweaty water drain back into the mandi as I leaned over it.
It did occur to me that if everybody washed the same way, I was not bathing in clean water, nor were they using clean water for "toilet purposes". Thinking these thoughts, I was nauseated when I first went to brush my teeth, but it was nothing compared to what I felt when my Thai sister took me aside and explained my mistake, in pantomime and in gibberish, until I understood.
They were warm and generous always, despite my mistakes. They held my hand when we walked together, and gave me gifts of strange foods. They posed for my pictures, and gave me the only bedroom there was to sleep in. Everybody else slept in a tent, pitched nightly on the linoleum floor of the main room. But I didn't want to err again, and there is no way to pantomime a dislike of eggs without transgressing every bound of courtesy that there is.
My Thai brother made me the egg when I returned to the hut long after dinner. I don't know if Thai men don't usually cook, but he seemed proud and happy to have made it for me. Smiling bravely, I forked up a bit and swallowed it without chewing.
Suddenly he remembered his duties as a host, and jumped up, miming shaking a ketchup bottle over the egg. (How did I know that is what he meant? I did know, immediately, and I was right.)
I nodded eagerly, my face alight, and as he disappeared into the kitchen, I slid the entire fried egg into my camera bag.
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travel stories
My presence in the Bangkok zoo was something of a scam to see Thailand on somebody else's money.
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