| LANDLUBBER | OCTOBER, 2000 |
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I used to live on the other side of the river. We had sort of an apartment building, and we lived on the fourth floor. There was a family-run embroidery factory on the third floor, and on the first floor, they made furniture out of rattan. The embroidery factory had a crane-like device which moved the material upstairs and the product downstairs. I used to stare out the window at the crane, moving up and down, up and down. During the summertime, typhoons would come. Whenever a typhoon came, the streets would be flooded. Motorcyclists would come up to our fourth-floor home to stay for a while during the flood (although my parents say that this never happened, I vaguely remember it). The flooding happened almost every summer until the levees were built. Then they built the bridge. Right in front of my old home. As I stared at the crane, I stared at the building of the bridge too. Finally, the bridge was completed. My Apa took us across the bridge to the other side of the river, where a even larger, industrial-scale knitting factory was located. The factory was building a dormitory nearby for the employees; parts of the same building were for sale to outside people. Apa soon decided that we were going to buy a unit as our new home. Behind what would soon become our new home, there was a water pump station, and behind that, a driving school. My Mama learned to drive there. I remember going with my Mama to the driving school. I remember the PA system, and remember somehow my sister and I enjoyed the new experience of being locked in the car, as our family never had a car previously. Behind the driving school was another part of the river. And, at the time, they were filling it up with dirt, along with some concrete and steel. We went and looked at the construction. Around the same time, levees were also built to control the flooding. The idea was to make the curving river as straight as possible so as to reclaim land from the river and eliminate the flooding problem. My family would take walks on top of the levee at night. The levees were quite tall, and it was dark at night, and I would get scared. I called the levees the scary "black mountains." We moved to the new home around the same time I entered elementary school in the early 1980s. My sister and I were quite satisfied with our new home. I am not sure whether it was my smallness that made everything look far, but my impression was that there was some considerable distance between our house and the driving school, the knitting factory, and the illegal pig farm-slaughterhouse. Yes, there was an unlicensed pig farm-slaughterhouse. They would collect leftovers from neighborhood eateries to feed the pigs. At one point, the newspapers were reporting that some of these illegal farms would "recycle" the grease floating on top of the barrels of leftovers and sell them back to the eateries. However disgusting this system might have been, it would cease to exist in my neighborhood when this pig farm-slaughterhouse burned to the ground. Ah, the blazing fire behind our home that night! After the obligatory procedure of notifying the fire department, we took the elevator from our second-floor home to the top of the seven-story building and stared at the fire, listening to the oinking shrieks. The farm-slaughterhouse was never rebuilt. The conglomerate that operated the knitting factory decided that it should be closed down, and the same plot of land would be used as a hospital. Many of the workers in the knitting factory had worked there their whole life, and would become unemployed once the factory closed down. They organized a large protest, lasting for weeks, if not months. There were people who lost their fingers, sometimes hands, during their employment at the factory; they had banners saying "We've worked here for so long, and now you're just going to kick us out?" and stuff like that. I didn't know how the thing was resolved at the end. As far as I can recall, for a long time, the pumping station lay in waste, the land with the burned-down pig farm lay in waste, and the knitting factory lay in waste. The river-filling project took a long time to complete. The driving school closed down about a couple of years after we moved there. About 6 years ago, things started to change. The knitting factory did become a hospital, run by the same conglomerate. The pumping station, the driving school and a large part of the pig farm-slaughterhouse became one of the big parks in the city, complete with a small artificial forest, fountains, a playground, a small outdoor amphitheater, and one wacked modernist artsy structure. The other part of the pig farm-slaughterhouse became a leading museum of astronomy in Southeast Asia -- or at least the then-mayor claimed it to be. It had an IMAX theater, which is pretty cool. Somehow, as they were building the park, Thai workers were hired, rather than local construction workers. The Thai people would fly a Thai flag on top of their steelsheet-built temporary housing. Occasionally they would spraypaint Thai phrases on the fences, which nobody in the neighborhood understood. A neighbor said that he thought it was insulting to us to fly a Thai flag in our neighborhood, so he went and asked them to take it off. I remember that they only took it off for a few weeks, and then it came back. I bought a Thai phrasebook and tried to learn a bit of Thai. Today I still can say "Sawutdee krup" only. I left the island in 1995, as the park was being completed. The river-filling project completed around this same time. It created a long strip of land from my apartment to the famous night market, giving about 20 new street blocks. Among the many new structures that were built was a new mall, with the second Tower Records store on the island. The new mall opened after I left, and closed due to some kind of financial issue before I was back in the summer of 1997. I never had a chance to visit that Tower Records store. The city is also planning to move the science museum onto this newly-created piece of land in a few years. The museum of astronomy had only opened for a few months when I went back to visit. There was a special exhibit about space exploration as one of its opening festival activities. A space shuttle cockpit was shipped from the United States, only to find that the city government refused to put it on exhibit for concerns of the safety of visitors. For the whole summer, the cockpit was occupying a large part of the open space near the fountains in the park. The space shuttle cockpit marked the spot where many pigs were killed by the fire. This is a story about a boy and the land behind his home.
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| --Kai-hsu Tai |
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