in the field

My grandmother’s house in Ban Nong Sai sat on stilts like all the other houses in that part of Thailand. They had been built like that due to the massive flooding that occurred during the monsoon season. You had to climb a ladder to get to an open deck area and there was just one large room where everyone slept and a covered area where they did all the cooking.
Grandma had these huge clay vats sitting outside the kitchen area which collected rain water for cooking and drinking, which was supplemented by daily trips down to the canal. I remember men in a huge diesel truck delivering two of these vats to grandma’s house when I was young. The guys and the truck must have been from the neighboring town of Udon Thani, as no one in our village even owned a car.
Converted Toyota trucks would pick passengers up several times a day to take them to Udon so they could go shopping or to movies or whatever. The truck beds were equipped with wooden seats on either side and a canopy overhead. A short ride on the “dollar bus” would take us from the Bronze Age into the twentieth century just like that. Udon Thani had such luxuries as electricity and running water which the villagers of Ban Nong Sai did not enjoy.
The cooking area was where the women would stay while they were in labor and they usually gave birth there as well. One of the family members would start the fire and they would keep it going throughout the labor. They even called it “sitting next to the fire” and supposedly the heat somehow helped speed up the process. My grandmother was the village midwife, so I guess I had seen her helping to birth all the kids a few years younger than me, including my sister.
My own birth was a little different, as all things about my life seem to be. My mother sat next to the fire for hours, starting sometime around noon. About dinner time, my mother was still having labor pains, but my hairy little head had yet to poke its way out into the world. She was having extreme cramping and decided at some point that she really needed to go to have a bowel movement. No one in Ban Nong Sai had a bathroom at that time, but each family had a designated area for people to relieve themselves.
My grandmother’s house was next to my aunt’s and uncle’s, all three of them in a little compound. There was a family garden for the three to share and beyond that was a shitfield as well. My mother made her way down the ladder and walked slowly, stopping often to catch her breath in between contractions. She finally made it to the field and squatted like she had done thousands of times before.
That’s when I decided to make my grand entrance into the world. When my head crowned, she had no choice but to keep pushing. So my mother, the daughter of the village midwife, sat in her family’s shitfield and gave birth to her first child by herself. I landed in the field, at my mother’s feet, covered with the ancient detritus of my family.
That’s how my mother explained my nickname, Hua Ki.
Shithead.
She only started calling me Tony sometime during my teens.
She explained to me that her people are very superstitious and that they give their children nicknames to confuse and ward off evil spirits. I guess that makes sense. My grandmother gave birth to twelve children and only five of them made it to adulthood.
But shithead?
I don’t recall my cousins having nicknames like that.
My mother has made the mistake of calling me by my nickname at Thai functions and you should see the looks I get. My people are ethnically Lao, from the northeastern part of Thailand and many of our customs are viewed as being a little odd by other Thais.