Chinatown- Bangkok style

"Beware da pickapocket," a weathered Chinese lady said to me sternly, our eyes meeting for a brief moment as we passed in the market. Her purse was strapped to her front like an infant carrier, cradled against her body for protection.

Her friendly warning raised my already heightened awareness of my back pockets. With my right hand slightly behind me touching the pocket containing my wallet, and the left doing the same to my passport, I shuffled with the slow moving crowd through a corridor lined with, well, junk.

I'm no stranger to the dangers of traveling and I was well aware of my surroundings. Having dropped off my large pack at the bus station for storage, I maneuvered relatively well through the sea of people with their heads bobbing in and out of the shoebox-sized stores.

Erik, on the other hand, still had his pack and it was limiting his agility to wind around a family stopped to buy a pair of Pokémon socks. He instead toddled through, catching glares from shop keepers afraid that he would knock their precious cargo over.

Chinatown in Bangkok was stimulus overload. Everywhere we flowed with the masses, the scenery morphing into a different section as we went along.

"We've found the towel department!" I squealed in amusement.

"Look, it's the hair accessory aisle," Erik joked back, pointing to his right.

"Where's the sunglass section?" Our goal was to purchase a cheap pair of shades, as mine had broken. But where, in this busy, chaotic maze could they be? We walked around the tunnels of goods with the others like a colony of ants: single file and constantly looking, searching, moving.

“Which way now?" I called behind me. “Left? Right? Straight?” The right led down a small side street lined with food carts, the smells of cooking meats and sweet jellied soy hung in the air. The left was full of trinket salesmen with glittering plastic toys and porcelain salt shakers shaped like cats. Straight continued down the current path of entombment with the ants.

Decisions had to be made in split seconds; the crowd didn't stop so a tourist could look around and decide. They had twenty packs of cheap plastic doll key chains and shiny barrettes to purchase for crying out loud!

We emerged from the tight corridor, spilling into the byway. Fresh fruit stands rimmed the small area giving a splash of organic color to the dimly lit tunnel. Cart men sprayed water from plastic bottles on apples, drenching the fruit in a cool mist that beaded on the tight pink and green skins. One man meticulously placed stems and leaves perfectly atop his bunches of merlot, eyeball-sized grapes. Sliced cantaloupe, papaya, pineapple and green mango sat on ice displayed within a glass cart, ready to be placed in a plastic bag, hit with the dull side of a knife to break it into chunks, and eaten with a small wooden dowel. Piles of fruit still wrapped in its leathery skin sat in pyramids while bunches of ripe, yellow bananas hung on strings. Cardboard signs of curlicue Thai writing separated the piles of produce by price, or what I assumed was the price.

The fruit market led us into the dried-stuffs department. Little dried shrimps, fish, and unknown and indecipherable dried entities sat in large canvas and plastic bags to be weighed out and handed over. Pork rinds? Pig’s ears? Tails? Dried squid? Octopus? I couldn't say, but it looked like cheese puffs without the cheese and came in different shapes and sizes of twisted and gnarled spindles.

Sizzling meat on skewers smoked the area with a delicious tamarind-barbecue aroma. Paying the incredibly reasonable five baht price to the cart of our choice, we requested two kinds of the tender meat. The rumple-faced cart owner proudly presented the sticks, a smile wide across his face at the farang (foreigners) eating his product above the many competitors. We spilt the meat so we each had a selection to try and at each progressive chew, our eyes grew wide, our excitement mounted — how tasty!

We munched as we made our way back into the current, feeling like water going down into a dark and tight drain. We were once again squished together with the petite bodies of Asians and the odd looming tourist. We shuffled past handbags and utility belts and abruptly came to a standstill. We were all smushed together and wondering why we weren't going anywhere. In the distance the crowd separated and piled onto the sides, bodies twisted and packed together. What was going on? And then we heard it — the rumble of a motor scooter. A motor scooter! People couldn't even get through here among people, but now we had to find room to get a motor scooter by? The bike moved through the crowd like an egg passing through the body of a snake, the crowd expanding and contracting around the vehicle as it passed.

We flowed through the plastic bag and wrapping department, the textile department, the luggage department and the cheap jewelry department and as we approached the stuffed animal department, it began to rain. Booth keepers scrambled to put up large plastic sheets over their goods.

A group of men gathered around one particular booth, laughing and shuffling things. What were they looking at? We inched closer and tip-toe-peered over shoulders. Porn, lots and lots of porn: DVD's, pictures and even a sex toy magazine, its pages fluttering scantily in the breeze. Erik and I exchanged a humored glance, a chuckle and moved on in our search.

Sunglasses! A whole section of sunglasses unraveled before us. We found them! I scanned the rows of imitation Oakleys, Diors, Bvgaris and Chanels, trying on each over-sized pair for the right fit. As I looked at myself in a mirror, wearing a pair of fake Dolce & Gabbanas with encrusted faux-diamond arms, I noticed a large object over my left shoulder hanging from the booth behind me. A gun. Holy shit, guns? It couldn’t be real. Could it?

"I guess the sunglasses are in the shady department with the porn and guns," Erik snickered to himself.

The rain picked up. Huge drops began to plummet us. Time stops in Thailand when it rains; traffic pulls over, businesses close up, electricity fades in an out. Everyone at the market hurriedly covered their wares with plastic sheets and sought cover. People on motorbikes pulled off the road nearby to seek shelter underneath a building's overhang. The rain soon became a downpour. Lightning illuminated the market and a moment later the sky cracked open with the sound of a whip.

We stopped along an outer street, out of the throngs of the center market, under an awning to plan our next move. The storefront displayed large gold necklaces with cloudy green jewels. Inside the store, on top of one of the glass jewelry cases filled with yellow-gold sparkles on red silk, knelt a small Thai girl.

Her hair was tied back haphazardly. She was delicately shaking out puffs of powder and rubbing it on her skin. Several Thai women, relatives perhaps, sat around the cases talking. But this little girl, atop the gleaming case of jewelry, applied white powder on her face like a Renaissance courtesan. She had a seriousness and grace about her. She caught my eye and held it as she daintily shook more out into her tiny, upturned palm. She didn't smile, but she didn't grimace either. She just held my eye as she continued smoothing out the powder, turning her skin a ghostly white.

Everything stopped. The sound of my breathing and her eyes were all there was. She was like a pearl, a gem among the shining brilliance of the room. Was she for sale? Was she on display, or just an ordinary kid who just happened to like sitting on jewelry cases instead of the floor?

There was something so innocent, but also perverse in this act. I couldn't help thinking of all the girls involved with the sex trade here, kidnapped or bred into the life of a whore. I became enchanted with this girl, hoping that she wasn't one, but at the same time imagining she was. There was a kind of withdrawal in her eye, an absence. Maybe she was just mechanically powdering as if brushing her teeth; an act so ordinary it was boring and she dissolved into herself while doing it. Why didn't her family notice her?

It was dark and grey, drizzling outside, but this store was like a warm fire with all its radiant, lush colors.

My mind was snapped away by a jolt of lightning reflecting on the glass, a crack of thunder and of the pounding rain. We had a train to catch.