Five years ago, Mai and Kung sat on the porch of an old wooden house in Kalasin, dreaming. They watched a TV show about a crystal-clear lake in Laos and swore to each other that one day they’d marry rich men and travel there together.
Today, they are 23. Kung works as a cashier at the local Big C. Over the past five years, she’s put on weight after having two kids. Mai, on the other hand, has been working in Pattaya. The only weight she’s gained is a three-size increase in her chest, perfectly complemented by a slimmed-down, surgically enhanced nose.
Mai is a local celebrity. It seems like half of Kalasin and neighboring Mukdahan follow the Instagram of one of the province’s “most successful girls.” She has a Belgian boyfriend who owns a chain of bakeries. His white Mercedes regularly features in her stories, and her life looks like a fairy tale. Her passport is thick with stamps: Japan, Korea, the US, Australia, Russia, and, of course, Belgium, where she flies twice a year.
A couple of times a year, Mai descends from the heavens back to her home province with bags of gifts. This time, she brought original, trendy sneakers for her sister and Kung. Kung blushed as she thanked her, secretly remembering how she had sold the last pair Mai gave her without even opening the box. Some crazy hypebeast from Bangkok drove all the way down and bought them for 6,000 baht, repeatedly muttering, “So weird to find a limited edition in Kalasin…” With that money, Kung paid off her parents’ electricity debt and bought her two kids school uniforms for the year.
“Let’s go eat noodles, like the old days!” Kung suggested happily. She was wearing her dad’s oversized pants, a stretched-out t-shirt, flip-flops, and carrying a cloth eco-bag.
Mai looked her friend up and down. Mai herself was dressed in flawless casual wear: an oversized Balenciaga t-shirt, Celine sunglasses, a gold Cartier Juste un Clou bracelet, and brand-new Hermès Oran sandals.
“Oh, Kung… You look like you’re going to dig up potatoes in the garden. It’s a bit embarrassing to go out with you. Here, take my LYN bag as a gift, I don’t like the color anymore anyway.”
The girls walked out into the yard, and Kung headed toward her rusty, rattling Honda Wave.
“Kung, are you serious? We are riding on that?” Mai gasped, adjusting her designer shades. “Let’s just call a taxi!”
“Mai… There have never been taxis in our village. You’ve changed so much…”
They arrived at the old village noodle cart. The wooden tables were sticky, and a rusty fan buzzed overhead.
“Oh, Kung, this shack is about to collapse! It’s so hot in here, and the spoons look cloudy. Let’s just go to the Japanese restaurant at Big C.”
Kung swallowed hard. She knew a single lunch there would cost her entire weekly salary.
At the restaurant, Mai scolded the waiter for a slightly dirty spoon but paid the entire bill herself. Then, she pulled a crisp 50 Euro note from her bag.
“Give me your wallet,” she commanded, slipping the cash into her friend’s worn-out faux-leather purse. “This is for luck. So you’ll always have money.”
On the way out, Mai spotted a kids’ clothing sale and casually bought 2,000 baht worth of shirts for Kung’s children.
They sat down for iced tea at Café Amazon. Kung looked at her friend with genuine admiration.
“Mai, you are so successful… Is it true what they say about farangs? That they are… huge? How do you handle it? You are so skinny! Your Belgian boyfriend must really, really love you and take good care of you.”
Mai laughed out loud. At that exact moment, the screen of her latest iPhone lit up with a Line notification. It was her regular Chinese client—he had just checked into a luxury suite in Bangkok and was waiting for her for the next two days. How convenient that she had told her Belgian boyfriend she was going to her remote village for a week with no internet to take care of her sick grandmother.
Mai took a sip of her iced tea, placed her phone face down on the table, smiled warmly at her friend, and said:
“You know, Kung… I handle the size just fine. And yes, he really, really loves me.”
There is a brilliant Thai idiom for this exact transformation: วัวลืมตีน (Wua luem teen), literally “a cow that forgot its hooves.” It perfectly describes someone who rapidly climbs the social ladder and now wrinkles their nose in disgust at the very dirt they just crawled out of.
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