'I think long time my god hate me.'

“Will you have dinner with me?” asks my new massage therapist before our session even begins.

“Uh, absolutely!” I reply, flattered at the invitation but a little taken aback. So we set a date for 9-ish the following Thursday evening.

“Mr. Tong wants us to join him for dinner,” I later tell Lian.

“I think he want friend for drink whiskey,” she figures. Lian knows that Tong indulges alone most every night after work, so it’s a special treat for him to have a new drinking buddy. And sure enough, come Thursday night when we meet up at the open-air family style restaurant near his shop, a smiling Tong arrives packing a tall bottle of Johnny Walker Red Label.

This is a hardcore Thai establishment, no English translations on the menu, so Lian and Tong handle the ordering. My job is to sit there and eat whatever’s put in front of me (no problem – well, except for maybe the steaming pig intestines), and to keep pace with Mr. Tong’s bottomless scotch and soda. Tong himself eats little and consumes mostly Johnny Walker and the occasional smoke. (Luckily, Chiang Mai eating places are largely smoke-free, and smoking at the table is considered "not polite," so he steps outside.)

Fed, watered and feeling no pain.

Many plates and pours later we close the place down. The bill arrives and it’s Tong’s treat, for all of 459 baht – a little over fifteen bucks. As we part ways, Tong gives me the Thai version of the backslapping man-hug and we agree to do this again real soon.

I am just whiskey-buzzed enough to try riding home on the back of Lian’s motor-bike even after last week's spill, and together enough to jump off after one block and walk the rest of the way home.

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"Delicious"? Maybe not so much.

Chiang Mai probably has scores of truly delicious restaurants. Optimistic signage to the contrary, this new place around the corner is not one of them.

Saturday night we give The Delicious Restaurant a try. Ominously, we are the only customers. The menu offers an unlikely mash-up of Italian and Thai cuisine: “spaghettis” with green curry? Or with tom yum? Weird. We play it safe and order a chicken dish off the Thai side of the menu; what arrives is this pile of freezer-case breaded chick-fingers with sweet chili sauce glugged over vegetables on the side. We look down at the red mess and then at each other.

I remark: “This sauce is …”

“Bottled,” Lian finishes. Which is almost a felony in the foodie heaven that is Chiang Mai, where every roadside wok-jockey can at least throw together soy sauce, nam pla, sugar, lime juice, chilies and whatnot.

I’ll be surprised if this place doesn’t fold before I fly back to America in seven weeks.

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“Wang tan”? “Hang dong”? Do these people have ANY IDEA how awesome their language is to a filthy-minded adolescent like me?

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Several times a day we walk along the tiny soi that connects our neighborhood to the road into town. Halfway down the path sits this ramshackle wooden shanty, its dirt yard littered with all manner of junk for the family’s laundry business – plastic buckets, hoses, clotheslines and such. Most mornings an elderly woman is squatting in the dirt, scrubbing and slapping away at the bucketfuls of laundry that surround her.

One night on the way home we pause to look in at the darkened dwelling. Through an unscreened window, its canvas drape pulled back, we can make out the old mama-san seated inside, just visible in the lifeless grey light of a bare LED bulb.

I ask Lian: “Are these poor people?”

“Yes, poor,” she replies somberly, staring in at the dark dwelling for the longest time. Finally we move on in silence.

At home, Lian motions for me to sit with her. She picks up my clipboard and a scrap of paper and starts to draw: first a rectangle, then diagonal cross-hatching inside. Staring down at the paper, she explains:

“Many years ago when I am married I live in the garden with Dao father. We have no …” and she gestures to the light.

“Electricity?” I guess.

"Electricity, yes. And window cover is this,” she says, pointing to her scrawled rectangle, which I realize is not a window screen but a rattan panel. Now I get it: living with a newborn in a hovel on her husband’s farm in the sticks, her choices at night were either fresh air and 10 million tropical mosquitoes, or suffocation. “Dao is baby, and so hot!” she recalls. “Every night quiet and dark. Many time Dao and I alone. And when Dao father come home, he drink whiskey and talk-talk-talk, not make sense.

“Then I understand: we are poor people! Cannot tell my family, not tell my mother, or she worry me. I think long time my god hate me.

“Now when I see poor lady who work hard, I want to give her money, touch her arm,” she continues, her eyes misting. “Because I know her. I know.”