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A Novel In Verse by C. John Holcombe
Like a contemporary Moll Flanders, the beautiful Mai Ying progresses
from Bangkok peepshow performer to bar-girl, unpaid British housemaid,
escort hostess to finally mistress and soon-to-be wife of a wealthy
industrialist. In this comedy of manners, Mai Ying is the poorly-educated
but knowing student of male hypocrisy — until she falls for
the industrialist's son and enjoys the raptures of physical possession
that she has supplied to men but not tasted before.
What did the Lord Buddha say those centuries ago? Understand
yourself and be always kind to others. So Mai Ying is, but becomes
a pawn in English social life where commodities of beauty and
human affection are traded for family loyalties and appearances.
Mai Ying left her village to support her ailing father and sister,
but learns they despise how she earns that money. She has few
friends and trusts no one, but finds even her acquaintances let
her down, as she thought they would. But Mai Ying is the great
seductress, the laughing and rapacious sorcerer, and she returns
to Thailand not a whit restrained or sadder for her adventures
in the cold and respectable land of farangs. A
long poem: free in pdf e-book format.
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CHAPTER ONE (Excerpt)
Spread in the brightness of morning, as ever
entangled and pounced on in a strange bed,
Mae-Ying the beautiful
is laughing and playing
with her small heart pounding as on plate glass,
and her bought legs beating and beating as a bird does
for the lift and for
the fervor till we are dropped,
all of us, into the quiet breath of lives passing,
dissolving as refuse into the strong Chao Phraya.
Before I was small girl only, a simpleton
working in the wet fields and the far
plantations
of the Pha Mieng Hills:
long distance it is by bus and days taking me
on from sister and father, sick sometimes
in Baen Pang
Mai Daeng, with its four
pagodas and bewildering with its festivals
and laughing everyone in wet drench of clothes.
Why should I care what they do to me,
rut as a dog does or if afterwards they
spend into me?
I have been careful
and clean in the cleft part, water-making
in the streams only or in the standing
thicknesses
of the forests and what they
pay to me after is what I launder or buy being
fragrant again in my neat shoes and briefs.
I am Mae-Ying of the bright eyelids and of
adulterous attachments seeking the soft
dust that
is trafficking the evenings with
regret as the trees press into the back yard.
I am the compositor of bright lights and
and
denizen also of the night lands of rest.
Laughing and more rapacious than is the
mantis, I extend an unruffled impudence
5. that smokes on from behind me I
in my hot cauldron of pants, which
are not
scanty or voluminous but
intricately fashioned to the machinery
of my shaping. So I am always
Mae-Ying
of the village of four pagodas
who is known walking through Patpong
or Pratunam market and big hotels.
And if there is something unmitigatingly
sad in this going away saturated in
what have
been or sinned with O my Lord
Buddha I will pay you a golden offering
of six prayers if you find me a husband
among rich
farangs and truly I will
be faithful for a while if he take me to Milwaukee,
or Chicago, be a good wife pushing the trolley
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