This tale by Lao Khamhom is a loosely based sequel to one of our earlier stories, As If It Had Never Happened. Road and bridge building projects have connected a once isolated Thai rice farming village to the outside world. A young girl, excited about her first bus-trip to a nearby town to sell vegetables, is befuddled by a petty extortion attempt at a government counterinsurgency checkpoint. Later, she experiences real graft when the “concessionaire” of a newly built highway refuses to allow her and other village busses to proceed. Themes include innocence, family, progress, connectivity, change, fear, oppression, corruption.
In the earlier story, the “Masters” constantly referred to by the girl were government officials. In this story, new layers of “Master” have been added. The first checkpoints she experienced would have been official or unofficial parts of the security bureaucracy, financed and trained by the American CIA for communist counterinsurgency purposes. The “concessionaire”, who claimed to “own” the new road, was one of a new breed of powerful local figures backed by the Bangkok elite to take advantage of the political unrest and exploit rural resources.