Cult Recovery in Thailand: Day One
Trump and Trauma have Made Me Bitter. Dragonfruit, Anyone?
PS: This blog is for and about real cult survivors, but in Trump’s new world that definition just might apply to us all.
“What year were you born?” asks the unexpectedly attractive Swedish farmer-host who meets me and my exhausting baggage in the little Thai town of Doi Saket in the Chiang Mai province. Exact coordinates: “the Tesco Lotus next to the big hill where the taxi drivers hang out under the tamarind tree.”
“What year were you born?” before we’ve even reached the car. This is not the first question a mid-30’s woman usually gets back in America from a stranger.
Hans, because, of course, is tall, built like a soccer player turned hippie. He’s tan, with bright blue eyes, long, spiky lashes and shoulder length, wavy blonde hair pulled back in a neck-nape man bun. I feel like I just left Brooklyn and found an actual real hipster. And by real I mean he uses a machete, has taught me a juditsu move called ‘the jaguar crawl’ within a couple hours of arrival, and keeps a Carlos Castaneda book on ‘The Power of Silence’ tucked under one arm because again, of course.
I tell Hans my birth year, 1980, and he laughs, it seems triumphantly. He turns to his mother, whom, impressively, appears to have joined him for her retirement on this permaculture farm and, also impressively, to me, is driving us from the right side of the car, in the left lane of a dirt road. Or would be, if this dirt road had two lanes.
A moped with what appears to be an entire family on it veers past us, the youngest ones turning to gap-toothed stare-smile.
“1980! Another metal monkey!” Hans crows, to his mother. “Three at the farm, now!” He turns back to me. “This is very rare. But unsurprising,” he says. “What month?”
Oh. Chinese astrology. Okay. “September.”
“Oosh!” he exhales, and raises his eyebrows. “A white metal monkey.”
“What?” I ask, worried. “Is that okay?”
“Oh you’re okay, other than that monkey mind,” he laughs. “But the question is, are those around you?!”
At this, I have to laugh. This guy might have me pegged, already. I’ve come to Thailand — or run away, that remains to be seen— to recalibrate. I need to find myself again, after working way too hard on a memoir about being raised in a cult, and then freaking out over this Trump nightmare. I’m pretty sure I haven’t been that great to be around, of late.
“You are focused,” Hans continues analyzing my Chinese monkey self. “Determined, so determined, no?”
Yes.
“You are sharp, like steel, chop, chop,” he says, slicing the air. “Your standards, so high! Your criticism, so deep.
“You are capable of cutting with your words,” he says. “It can be very hard for other people.”
Was this guy in New York with my sister and I for our last conversation where she accused me of exactly all this, before I flew out?! And where I defended myself by saying we live in a Trump world now, which means we have to get tough?
Later in the evening with my new farm friends, over an organic meal of spicy pumpkin soup, banana cake, rice grown on the farm and jungle-foraged salad, Cameron, from the UK, born 1990, jumps in, too.
“Metal monkeys appear strong,” he says. Apparently everyone on this farm is fluent in Chinese astrology. “But their Achilles heel is grief.”
I just raise my eyebrows at him, wide-eyed, and purse my mouth, resignedly. My entire journey here has felt like a last-stand against the frigidity of bitterness, a creeping frost on the windowpane of grief.
Cam continues, nodding knowingly. He’s pale and slight, big-eyed and a little strange, like a wood sprite. He has a way of staring at you firmly, unblinking, with an unsettling placidity. But I’m already realizing that his uncanny, soft-stepped stance is really just that of a person who is present, a person who doesn’t live his life behind screens. “Here is where the coffee grounds are stored for compost,” he said earlier, showing me around the outdoor kitchen while stirring pineapple in a wok over an open fire. “When you prepare them for exfoliation in your shower, you’ll find the avocados in that tree and the honey over here.”
“Metal monkeys appear strong, even impenetrable,” the exceedingly fragile-appearing Cameron continues now, spooning bright-green soup onto sticky rice and squeezing passionfruit over it. “I’m one, too.”
“But they’re like a gong,” fills in Hans, pointing at the bronzed dinner-bell hanging from a nearby banyan tree. “When something hits them, it reverberates on, and on, and on.”
Yep, that’s me. Things happened. Now they’re stuck in me. I came here to write my story, but I also am on a quest to find forgiveness — real forgiveness — because this bitterness is getting way too real. I can physically feel it.
“You have to let it go,” says Cameron, staring right into my eyes even though I still haven’t said anything and I can’t help but start laughing, because this is so intense and so freaking right-on. What is it about travel?! This is why I do this.
“At least you’re not a dragon,” says Cameron, still poker-faced. “They’re so clumsy.” He points at the structure behind him. “We had one land on the roof, once, like he didn’t even know his own weight.” His English accent is droll, dry. “Crashed right through onto a bamboo bench, which broke his fall.”
“And now it’s nothing but a legend, right?” I say. “Except for a few scales left embedded in the bench?”
“Oh so you noticed!” says Cameron, as the table breaks into laughter. He cocks his head at me, half lizard, half Dobby the house elf and blinks, finally. “More dragonfruit?”
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