lucyoncolorado

In which I chat about free will with a woman from Wenatchee, Thailand...

I'm sitting in the living room of my childhood home. It is a Heathrow waiting room. A Thai woman, about my age, sits with me. She looks a lot like G's wife- short and cute with black bangs framing her smiling face. We chit-chat about our travels.

She is returning to Thailand for the first time in twenty years. She has repeatedly overstayed her visa but has managed to get extensions each time so that she's never been illegal in the UK but she will be illegal from the point of view of the authorities in Bangkok. She's not terribly worried about this; she'll just have to pay a fine to enter. She's far more concerned with how Thailand has changed in the years she's been away. She feels she's more British now than Thai, but with the Brexit vote, she'll have to return home.

I've been to Bangkok more recently than she has, and she asks my impressions. We talk a little about the city, and she tells me she's from a lakeside village in the south. She says it's the most perfect place in the world.

What's your village called? I ask her.

Wenatchee, she says.

Wenatche? Like the town in Washington?

Yes, the same. Not too far from Lake Chelan, she answers.

But that's not in Thailand, that's in the US. I'm very confused.

No, it's in Thailand, she insists.

I tell her that my best friend lives in Seattle and that we've visited Lake Chelan. It's definitely in Washington state. She maintains that Washington state is actually in Thailand, and she points out that my best friend is married to a man from Bangkok. I'm astounded that she knows this, and I'm suddenly confused. Perhaps Thailand and Washington are connected somehow? No, that makes no sense.

I'm pretty sure that Thailand and Washington are two different places. I've been to each.

Americans are always trying to explain things to me about my own culture, she responds. I grew up there after all. I know a little more about it than a tourist.

Well, that had to be true. Still, it just didn't settle well with me. I tell her that I don't mean to be a know-it-all but I'm really confused. She asks if it would be helpful for me to look at a map?

We walk over to the center of the room where a dozen featureless two-inch tall figures stand around. They are round and lack any anatomy at all- just blobs of people. They have large faceless spherical heads connected to cartoonish limbs that look like gobs of play-dough rolled into cylinders and stuck onto round torsos. These clay men are shell white and animated.

They don't have to worry about anything because everything is going to happen exactly as it always was, she says. She balls her fist and smashes one of the figures into a flat lump of clay. It was his time.

Are you saying we can't escape our destinies? I ask.

There is nothing any of them can do about it. It's just a fact that at some point, they are going to each be squished into a giant featureless mound of clay.

I can't argue with the logic of that. Of course it's true. That's exactly what is going to happen, eventually.

So we have no free will? I ask.

She laughs at me. Everything is going to happen in a certain way. No escaping that. The only thing you can do is decide how you feel about it.

The little men run around the floor of the airport. The Thai lady and I stand up to go back to our seats, and on her way, she steps on one of the clay figures. It sticks to the bottom of her shoe. She scrapes it off, and there is now dirt in the clay. Bits of it sticks to the airport carpet.