Everybody is a big faker

We are riding cross-town Saturday afternoon in the back of a Red Car, one of the fleet of covered pickup trucks that pass for mass transit in Chiang Mai. The driver pulls over and in hops another passenger, a slight 30-ish man. He's carrying a crutch but certainly has no problem climbing aboard. In Chinatown the Red Car stops and the man hops out, hands the driver a 20 baht note and continues down the street at a pretty good clip.

"You remember him?" Lian asks me. Come to think of it, he does look vaguely familiar.

"On Loi Kroh, near Night Bazaar," she reminds me. "He beggar."

Sure, now I place him: most evenings this fellow parks himself along the dusty lane in full view of farang passers-by, legs splayed at horrible angles, crutch before him, one cupped palm pointed upward. And the eyes, oh the eyes, so pleading. He's really got his character dialed in.

But Grownup Tiny Tim has nothing on his competition two blocks up the street, a ragamuffin woman with her prop-baby cradled in her lap. Every evening around 5:30 she clocks in, occupying a narrow point on the sidewalk opposite upscale Hotel Centara so that pedestrians cannot simply ignore her -- they have to step off the curb and into the street to get around.

To the woman's credit, the kid looks pretty well-fed and happy, but little wonder when you consider the economics of her gig: all she needs is a half-dozen softies to part with a 100-baht note and she can pocket more in a few hours than Lian earns on a decent workday in high season.

Which I guess explains her poisonous disdain for beggars.

---

We are gone for just a few hours, so I leave my laptop in the care of Lian's 13-year-old son, Dao, who is visiting for the weekend. Might be a good opportunity for the boy to practice his computer skills, I figure.

Later that evening, while Dao is watching Tom & Jerry cartoons and Lian is tidying up after dinner, I happen to check my computer's browsing history. The boy was busy: Spider-man movie searches, online games, video torrent downloads, and porn porn porn porn porn. And what amazes me is how many pornos he consumed in that brief time we were gone.

The next day, after Dao returns to his father's house, I show Lian how productive her boy was.

"Ohhhhhh," she says, reading down the list of smut sites, then is silent. Finally she turns to me: "He is normal for boy, you think?"