A well-dressed man in a formal gray suit came up to me to ask where I was from. I was standing in Sanam Luang park in front of the Grand Palace when he approached, and he had a generous smile, was fluent in English. It was my third day in Bangkok and up until then I had been alone.
It would be a long bus journey from Lijiang to get there and it was not clear where I would stay once I was there. The guide books did not show anything. And it was not certain why it was off limits. Perhaps it was a route, albeit circuitous to Tibet. Perhaps it was because the society who lived there was matriarchal.
A pale moon, the color of muslin, lit the town with the soft touch of cat’s fur. It remained un-wavered by thin grey wisps of cloud that passed in front; the streets were dark with shadows that bulged and re-formed as the figures moved through them, slow stately figures gliding like statues on air, and the women treaded with the soft pat of thongs as girls who kicked puffs of dirt around them flitted this way and that behind serene mothers.
Karin skipped through the barriers and past a security guard. She took one final look back at me, over her shoulder and her eyes were green as the misty slopes of her Cambrian childhood, glistening despite the cold neon lights.
Alone again, and I had all the time to look at the room. It was unseasonably hot and I switched the fan to circulate the heat from the walls. It started slowly, each blade cutting the air in steady breaths until it spun into a whorl that swept the hair away from my face. The light was off and from the window, dusk shifted a red and orange hue across the walls. I looked out and beyond the river. The silhouettes of corn terraces scanned the valley, black mountainside beneath red shimmered light, a dying sun that left colours in the water like blood on oil.
