Niran is a busy guy.
When he took up golf, he built a putting green next to a manicured shrub with a trunk a foot thick. He says he doesn’t know how old the shrub is, just that he has to trim it every month.
Every morning we see him setting out flowers, some fruit and water at a little shrine in the corner of the yard. Niran says it’s dedicated to a local deity that he calls phi, the god of the land. As in where we’re standing.
The phi’s shrine sits on a pedestal next to a Buddhist one about the same size over by the satellite dish, opposite the shrub and putting green. Eventually we notice phi shrines everywhere, in the corners of lots around hotels, homes, stores, even gas stations.
Carolyn and I are in Thailand teaching conversational English. Our hosts Sunee and her husband Niran work in the local school system, Sunee in charge of teaching English to a thousand middle schoolers, Niran in administration.
We’re staying in a house next to theirs, one they occupied with their two daughters while Niran’s parents were still alive. There are still plastic glow-in-the-dark stars on the ceiling of the room their daughters slept in. A low concrete block wall around both buildings keeps out stray dogs.
Today is Chinese New Year. The fireworks finished in the dark this morning before we went off to teach. Now we’re having dinner beneath the trees with Niran’s extended family, mosquito coils burning near our feet.
Some of the food looks like what we saw on a table in the yard when we left this morning: pieces of boiled chicken, pyramids of chocolate coconut cake wrapped in banana leaf, an open bottle of Singha beer and a dozen other dishes for deceased relatives to enjoy during the day. Everything was gone when we got back in the afternoon.
“Bad luck to break noodles,” Niran says, lifting a sheaf of them high in the air to clear the edge of the serving bowl before transferring them to our plates.
We are brand new to Asia. I look around for chopsticks. There aren’t any, just a bunch of spoons and forks. Everyone takes a pair; from there on it’s family style, diving into multiple dishes that keep coming.
Chopsticks, it turns out later, are for soup. Not all soup; just Chinese soup, in which you ladle out broth into a bowl and add the ingredients you choose, plucking them from a tray with chopsticks and drinking the broth from the bowl.
Maybe noodles are like family. Maybe that’s why it’s bad luck to reach over and cut them off when they drape uncomfortably from bowl to plate, when they seem difficult to arrange. Keeping noodles whole might somehow keep the family together. Sort of like setting out food for the phi and for your ancestors, then eating the leftovers. It’s probably just security — lines of family, noodles of relationships, under the watchful eye of the god of the land.