Who ate my fish in Thailand?

From previous narratives of my LDS mission in Thailand the reader may glean the mistaken notion that I did nothing but act the merry madcap in my capacity as a goodwill ambassador for the Church. True, I did over a hundred clown shows during my 2 year stint there, but I was never excused from my official calling as a proselytizing missionary. Sometimes a month or more would go by without a show. During such intervals I and my companion tracted, held street meetings, and taught the codified Discussions, as all LDS missionaries were required to do at that time.  

And that brings me to today’s missionary memoir -- The Case of the Missing Fish.

In Pak Kret, a northern suburb of Bangkok, I and my companion, Elder Lang, found ourselves living in a pillared mansion that included extensive grounds quickly reverting to jungle, as well as an ornate marble guest house in the back that had sunk into the moist ground and was now three feet under water in the middle of a pond.. Some mornings the maid’s little boy would silently glide into the sunken guest house to surprise a large toothsome carp for our lunch.

Let me backtrack --

One of my contemporaries in the mission field, Elder Nebeker, had run across this particular mansion while tracting with his companion, Elder Ah Ching. The old woman who lived there all alone was impressed by the good looks and good manners of Nebeker and Ah Ching, and asked if they would like to rent the whole shebang for a very modest fee -- that way she could go live with her daughter up in Chiang Rai. As Elder Nebeker explained it to our Mission President, Paul D. Morris, the mansion would make a wonderful chapel for our members in northern Bangkok. In fact, he guaranteed that if President Morris gave the okay to rent the place as missionary barracks, they would have it filled with newly baptized members in a matter of months.

The mansion was rented, and 3 sets of Elders set up housekeeping there -- myself with Elder Lang; Elder Nebeker with Elder Ah Ching; and Elder Wright with Elder Reidhead. The mission office paid for a maid to cook and do laundry for us, so we could concentrate on bringing in the sheaves. Back in those days all the food had to be bought at the local outdoor market, with much time-consuming haggling. There were no supermarkets. So a native maid was a necessity, not a luxury.

Elder Lang was the senior companion, meaning that his two years of service were just about up, and he made all the decisions about where and when to go proselytizing for us. And he was pretty trunky. This is LDS jargon for a missionary who has already arrived back home, in his own mind, even while his corporeal body is still knocking on doors in the mission field. A trunky missionary tends to be rather laid back and unambitious. And a shopaholic.

Each morning after our prayers, scripture study, and language study, Elder Lang would survey a map of our district tacked up in the dining room, and decide which street held the most gold and gem shops. We would then spend the morning and early afternoon traipsing among the red-lacquered gold shops, with their somnolent guard posted by the front door and Chinese girls in corriscating silk cheongsams hustling gold chains behind the glass counters. These places were lit up with flood lights and played an excruciating loop of Chinese opera music that was all gongs, bells, bamboo flutes, and what sounded like soggy bongos. I was terrified of these loud, garish places -- since my Thai was not all that good. But Elder Lang would greet the guard in fluent Thai, find out about his family, give him a pamphlet, then start flirting with the Chinese gals behind the counter. He had a fair amount of Mandarin at his command. And he had an expensive Leica camera that he took along to snap photos of everyone in the store.They’d show him a dozen or so supple gold chains while he told them the Joseph Smith story. Sometimes he’d pick out a modest gold chain for his mother or aunt or girlfriend back home. He’d leave the simpering clerks a few pamphlets and we’d walk to the next gold shop. Or a gem emporium -- these places were rather dim and looked like a feed store, with burlap sacks lying about, and indolent Thais scattered around with no apparent purpose besides sticking their legs out for me to trip over. Elder Lang had an unerring sense of who actually ran these places, usually an older Thai woman who sat in the back endlessly eating pumpkin seeds. He would cotton up to her with flowery compliments about her dismal store and her youthful looks, until she would smile and tell him to beware -- the ants would soon be crawling up him to reach his ‘sugar mouth.’ And again, while he would narrate the story of Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon, she would bring out sapphires, emeralds, and polished jade pieces for his inspection. If he liked the price, he’d buy ‘em.

What did I do during all this? Stood around gawking, for the most part. Elder Lang would let me bear my testimony about Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon at the end of our visits -- but by then the clerks were ringing up his purchases and they paid little, if any, attention to me.

This was engaging work, at least for Elder Lang, and so we often came home very late in the afternoon, long after the maid had served lunch to the other Elders. Our plates were left on the table, under coarsely woven rattan baskets to keep the flies out. And there was always supposed to be a big fat fish, bathed in a delicious tamarind and kaffir lime sauce, waiting for us. But someone started to eat our fish before we returned -- so all we had was rice, klong weed soup, pork balls wrapped in Thai basil leaves, and cold glass noodles. When we quizzed the maid about who ate our fish, she only shrugged her shoulders and said “Ling.”  Monkey? Monkey, my foot!

We quizzed Elders Nebeker, Ah Ching, Wright, and Reidhead about the theft, but they all pleaded innocent. I had my strong suspicions about Elder Ah Ching -- a former quarterback at BYU-Hawaii who could wolf down a dozen skewers of chicken satay in the blink of an eye.

Well, we never caught the malefactor, which is probably why I was so prickly to Elder Lang when it came time for him to go back home. I dropped him off at the Mission office in Soi Asoke, where I shook his hand and said “Now I can get back to some real missionary work!” He just gave me a sleepy smile and asked to take one more photo of me with his Leica.

Elder Nebeker’s promise to fill that mansion with new church members on Sundays never panned out -- but darned if several of those Chinese clerks that Elder Lang had chatted up on our shopping trips didn’t come out to our services and eventually joined the Church. I sent him a postcard telling him about it, but never heard back from him. He was probably too busy surfing out at Malibu, which is what he told me he planned on doing for the rest of his life once he got home. He invited me to join him there once I finished my hitch -- maybe I should have done just that . . .