Yippee Tai Yai, mother-bummer

So Lian's 14-year-old son, Dao, has decided to blow off middle school and make the big bucks as a carnival worker, setting up the midway games of skill. Nice to see a young man find his life's calling so early. And in a country that busts out a fresh festival every 20 minutes, he'll never lack for work. Why, in a busy week he might make the equivalent of twenty dollars, almost!

Carny Boy smiles; his mother, not so much.

Monday afternoon Lian gets the usual phone call from the teacher reporting Dao's absence yet again. The boy is not answering his cell phone, either. She has finally had it: "I think he can go live with his father. I cannot control him."

That evening we catch a Red Car to Dao's gig du noir, a cultural festival for the local Tai Yai population. Numbering some 6 million scattered around Burma, China and Thailand, the Tai Yai (also known as the Shan People) have their own spoken and written language, their own traditions and a distinct cuisine. But they share the universal fondness for tacky carnival midways. Arriving at Chiang Mai's Buddhist temple for the Tai Yai, Lian and I pay our 100-baht admission (outrageous!) and quickly locate the boy. Tonight his area of expertise is the knock-over-the-cans game, in which suckers pay 20 baht to toss oddly weighted softballs and miss every time.

As we approach the games, Lian suggests: "Maybe you can wait here?" No problem: I hang back from the blast zone and let the two of them have their Enola Gay moment.

Traditional Tai Yai attire.

Five minutes later, she's finished. We look around at the many festival-goers in their exotic attire and and decide, heck, we've paid our nickel, we might as well make an evening of it and check out all things Tai Yai ... or at least all foodly things.

Our first stop is a noodle vendor hawking a pad thai-looking dish.

Regarding the dining-out experience in this country: at virtually every Thai eatery, on each table you'll find a caddy containing, variously, dried chile flakes, ground peanuts, fish sauce (sometimes with diced chiles), mild chiles in rice vinegar, and granulated sugar. Lian always strafes every dish with sugar and a generous squeeze of lime juice. But tonight we learn an interesting fact about the Tai Yai table arrangement: instead of sugar, the bowl is filled with salt. We learn this the hard way.

Tai Yai food. Beware of the "sugar."

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