_HOUSEKEEPING IN SIAM._
All ordinary Siamese houses must have three rooms. Indeed, so
important is this considered that the suitor must often promise to
furnish the requisite number before the parents will consent to let
him claim his bride.
There is the bedroom, where the family all huddle together at night;
an outer room, where they sit through the day and where they receive
visitors; and the kitchen.
I will begin at the latter and try to describe the dirty, dingy place.
The Siamese have no godliness, and the next thing to it, cleanliness,
is entirely lacking. So please step carefully or you may soil your
clothes against a black rice-pot or come in contact with drying fish.
There is usually a rude box filled with earth where they build the
fire and do what they call the cooking; that is, they boil rice and
make curry and roast fish and plantains over the coals. All in the
household are taught to do these simple things, and the father and the
brothers, if they are at home, in poor families, where the women work
for the living, are just as apt to get them ready as the women.
There is no making of bread or pie or cake or pudding――no roast, no
gravies, no soups. Even vegetables are seldom cooked at home, but are
prepared by others and sold in the markets or peddled about the
streets. There they buy boiled sweet potatoes and green corn, and
stewed fruits and curries, and roasted fish, and nuts and peanuts and
bananas, sliced pineapple, melon and squash; and pickled onions and
turnips are sold through the streets of Bangkok and Petchaburee just
as pickled beets are in Damascus.
Curry is made of all sorts of things, but is usually a combination of
meat or fish and vegetables. If you want an English name for it that
all can understand you must call it a _stew_. The ingredients are
chopped very fine or pounded in a mortar, especially the red peppers,
onions and spices. The predominant flavor is red pepper, so hot and
fiery that your mouth will smart and burn for half an hour after you
have eaten it. Still, many of the curries are very nice, and with
boiled rice furnish a good meal. But sometimes “broth of abominable
things is in their vessels,” as, for instance, when they make curry of
rats or bats or of the meat of animals that have died of disease; and
they flavor it with _kapick_, a sort of rotten fish of which all
Siamese are inordinately fond. Its chief peculiarity is that it
“smells to heaven” and is unrivaled in the strength of its flavor.
Siam is unique in that she produces two of the most abominable, and
yet the most delicious, things, if we believe what we hear. These are,
first, the durian, a large fruit found only on this peninsula; and,
second, kapick, which I hope is not found anywhere outside of Siam.
But to return to the kitchen: it has no chimney, and the smoke finds
its way out as best it can, so that nearly everything is black and
sooty. There is but little furniture except the fireplace, the
rice-pots, a kettle and perhaps a frying-pan, and baskets of various
shapes and sizes, one pair being daubed within and without with pitch
and used to carry water. There is a little stool, a foot square and
six inches high, that they call a table, and on which they place the
curry and fish and sliced vegetables, while those who eat squat like
toads about it, each having on the floor before him a bowl of rice,
which is replenished from a larger dish near by or directly from the
rice-pot in the fireplace.
There is no regularity about their meals, and they do not wait for one
another, but eat whenever they get hungry. In the higher families the
men always eat first and by themselves, and the wives and children and
dogs take what is left.
The usual rule is for each one to wash his own rice-bowl and turn it
upside down in a basket in the corner of the room, there to drip and
dry till the next time it is needed.
They eat with their fingers, very few having even so much as a spoon,
and they do not use the wafer-like bread so common in the Levant,
which the Syrians double into a kind of three-cornered spoon, and,
dipping up some _kibby_, or camel-stew, or rice, eat down spoon and
all.
The kitchen floors are nearly all made of split bamboo, with great
cracks between, through which they pour all the slops and push the
scraps and bones, so that sweeping is unnecessary. Near the door are
several large earthen jars for water, which are filled from the river
by the women or servants. Here they wash their feet before they enter
the house, and their hands and mouths before and after they eat,
dipping the water with a gourd or cocoanut-shell. They use brass
basins and trays a great deal, but for lack of scouring they are
discolored and green with verdigris; and I cannot help thinking that
the use of such vessels is one of the fruitful sources of the fearful
sores and eruptions with which the whole nation is afflicted.
[Illustration: SIAMESE LADIES DINING.]
There are no washing- or ironing-days. Many wear no upper garment,
only a waist-cloth, which they keep on when they go to bathe, and when
they come up out of the water they change it for a dry one. It is then
rubbed a little in the water, wrung out and spread in the sun to dry.
If it is not stolen, they fold it up when it is dry and pat it with
their hands, and that is all the ironing they do.
The outer room of the house is barren enough, with perhaps a mat or
ox-hide for guests to sit upon, and a tray from which all are served
with betel and tobacco. It is considered a great insult not to offer
betel to your guests, and a greater one still, I believe, to refuse it
when offered. They think the red lips and black teeth it produces are
very beautiful. They have a saying, “Any dog can have white teeth,”
inferring that only human beings know how to blacken theirs.
The bedroom is where things accumulate――old baskets and bags, rags,
bundles and boxes. You seldom see idols in a Siamese house, but I have
seen them sometimes in the bedroom, especially if any one is sick.
There are no bedsteads, no tables, chairs, bureau, washstand, or
indeed any of those things which we consider necessary. A torn straw
mat or two, or perhaps an ox-hide on the floor, with a brick-shaped
pillow stuffed with cotton or a brick itself or block of wood for a
pillow, constitute the ordinary Siamese bed.
In families not the very poorest you will find long narrow mattresses
stuffed with tree-cotton. They may be covered with an old ragged
waist-cloth instead of a sheet, and over them is suspended a mosquito
curtain of dark-blue cloth or one of unbleached cotton. I have known
these curtains to hang for years without ever being changed or washed.
The beds and mats are filthy and swarming with bugs, which also infest
the curtains, the coverings, the cracks in the floor and the wall, the
boxes, and indeed all the rubbish in the room. I have seen them
creeping over the people, and no one seems to mind them or think of
being ashamed.
These rooms are never cleared out or swept or scrubbed. The cobwebs of
succeeding years tangle and entangle themselves in the corners, drape
the rafters and the windows, and indeed every place where the busy
spinners can do their work. There is seldom more than one window in a
bedroom, and at night it is carefully closed, and if it were not for
the cracks in the floor and walls the miserable inmates would surely
smother. They do not bring their cattle _into_ the house, for it is
very frail and set upon poles about six feet from the ground, but they
do keep them _under_ the house, so that they can hear if thieves come
to steal them.
They never give any dinner- or tea-parties or visit each other, as we
do at home. There is an occasional feast, as at a wedding, a funeral
or a hair-cutting, and sometimes neighbor girls will sit together
under the trees to sew, or by the same lamp at night to economize oil
and to chat and gossip. A great place for the latter pastime is at the
temples when they go to hear the Buddhist services, which are usually
in Bali, and therefore not understood, or by the river-banks and wells
when they go to fetch water.
Thus you see that housekeeping among the Siamese is very simple and
primitive. There are no women who have worn out their lives in making
and mending, baking and scrubbing, and fussing over a cook-stove. They
do not dread the spring house-cleaning or the fall setting up of
stoves and putting down of carpets. There is no Thanksgiving dinner to
cook, nor Christmas holiday feasting, and no Fourth of July picnic; no
preserving or pickling, no canning of fruits nor packing of butter nor
pressing of cheese.
But, alas! there is no happy home-life either――no family altar, no
pleasant social board where father, mother, sisters and brothers meet
three times a day, and, thanking God for food, eat with joy and
gladness and grow strong for his service; no sitting-room, where some
of the happiest years of our lives are spent in loving companionship
with those of our own household, no place for books, and no books to
read, except perhaps a few vile tales or books of superstition and
witchery.
May God pity Siam and plant in her kingdom many happy Christian homes!
May her people be purified and cleansed, and taught of him in all
things! Then, and not till then, will the good influences, working
from the heart outward, touch and cleanse and beautify all their
surroundings.
NOTE.――The reader will doubtless notice that my description
is of Siamese life among the lower classes, not among those
who have come in contact with missionaries and been improved
somewhat, nor those of the higher classes in Bangkok――the
princes and nobles, whose old-time home-life was neater and
more orderly than that here described. These, through the
influence of foreigners coming to Siam and visits to foreign
lands, have raised themselves in the scale of living, and
have foreign houses filled with foreign furniture and
conveniences, order sumptuous meals from foreign bakeries,
and have them placed upon their tables and served in modern
style. I do not consider that true _Siamese_ housekeeping.