my mom carries pot cross-border in the golden triangle!

Yes, that's right. You may think of her as a mild mannered, law-abiding, sweet Canadian Gramma and, well, you may be right, but she has her tricky side too. She is a pot smuggler. Not just any old pot either, golden triangle Asian-produced pot. I can hear you wondering 'How did it come to this? Did Margie's daughter rip up her plane ticket home, forcing Margie to turn to the easy returns of illicit smuggling? Was Margie's shopping habit really so bad that she had to make some extra money...oh, wait, no that'd be Cathie, wouldn't it. So then what is it with Margie?'

Let me tell you...

Back in September, Mum and Emma came to visit us here in Bangkok. For a side trip, they decided to go to Luang Prabang in Laos. Luang Prabang is the ex-royal capital of Laos and is a mega-magnet for tourists. As you can see from the pictures we've taken in Luang Prabang, it's a gorgeous city. The old part of the town is nestled between two rivers and is chock-full of temples. Every morning the monks walk the streets at dawn looking fantastically handsome in their orange robes. Every third shop sells delightful scarves, or hand-crafted lanterns, or naturally-dyed cotton clothes and every fourth shop is a restaurant that is sure to sell Beer Lao and scrumptious dried-and-salted-and-spiced river (sea) weed. If Pattaya is the Americanized armpit of south-east asian travel destinations, Luang Prabang its polar opposite.

Mum, Emma, and Auntie Cathie arranged to go on a river boat ride to some outlying villages near Luang Prabang while they were there. I did just the same thing when I went to Luang Prabang on a bidniss trip and my favourite stop was the rice wine alcohol village. But my mother's favourite stop was the pot village. She was being given a tour by a little girl from the village, who took her to a number of pot shops. The open-air shops were over-run with handcrafted earthenware pots, intricately incised and cut-out and suitable for use as garden decorations, planters, or candle-holders. My Mum found a particular pot that she adored and asked to buy it. The little girl said no. My Mum insisted, that was the pot she wanted. What was the price? The little girl said no again. Mum pulled out a stack of kip and offered the child the equivalent of the price of a week's worth of pots (ok, p'raps a slight exaggeration here, Mum you can correct me if I'm wrong). Finally the pot was handed over. But before leaving the pot village, the little girl took Mum to her mother's pot shop, where she tried very insistently to interest Mum in a different pot, emphatically sign-language-explaining that Mum's pot was somehow inferior. Mum refused and got the impression as she left the village that all the pot makers were laughing at her, but she still wasn't sure why.

But it wasn't long before the truth was revealed. A piece of the pot chipped away just a day after Mum had bought it and she realized her error: she had bought an unfired pot. Unfazed by her grave mistake, Mum toted the 10 kilogram pot to the Luang Prabang airport and stuffed it with a 3 kilo bag of Lao coffee for the cross-border journey. By the time we met Mum in Chiang Mai and were given the pot, it came accompanied by a plastic bag containing a complex variety of pot pieces that had steadily chipped away from the pot. We were under strict order that the pot must be transported back to Bangkok, and so we nestled it as best as we could into our luggage. Here you can see the pot in its original glory, and me drinking a vodka toast to the pot's "safe" arrival in Chiang Mai:

When we got the pot back to Bangkok, we put it on display at our front entrance so that all our visitors could revel in it's aesthetic supremacy. However, we discovered that it shed pot dust and pot bits constantly. Finally, after Mum headed back to Canada (pot free, I might add, maybe because she's got some connection to Uncle Stan and his BC Bud) I exiled the pot to our balcony. I hadn't really remembered the whole "monsoon" thingy that often occurs on humid autumn nights here in Bangkok, and when I woke up the next morning, the pot had mooshed down to the left about 2 inches. But by that point what could I do? I decided to enjoy the pot melt-down in a zen manner and learn something about the passage of life while doing so. Everyday I'd go out and check the pot as it sunk lower and lower towards the tiled floor of the balcony. Finally, after a deluge so epic it would've drowned even an ark, the pot was no longer recognizable as a pot (pot qua pot) but had once more become a pile of clay.

I observed to Ji one day that the pot had returned to its lumpen-ness, and he asked me, "Mum, now it's clay, can we make something with it?" Sure, why not, I replied, and on the next weekend we soaked a honking whack of clay in our dish drainer until it was pliable and spent the morning rolling out snakes and fashioning super hero models to our hearts' content. And even now, after having cleaned the last of the clay off the balcony, I am left with this reminder of my Mum's thoughtfulness:

Thanks Mum! And I hope you go on the pottery factory tour while your on your Mexican cruise. Just remember to check out the Spanish word for "won't break because it ain't been fired yet, dammit" first! [Laos-16-January-2006]