Lou

Lou just turned 25 when I met him in June, on the 11th, a Gemini. 

He said his mom and dad live in a farm up north, in a village near Laos. Lou said that it was a small farm where they planted orange trees that grow bad, small fruit. His parents sell this produce for a pittance.

Lou says he makes about 9,000 baht a month pumping gas at the petrol station just a little ways after the Saint Louis Hospital on Sathorn Road. His mom has been nagging him to buy more land with his savings, to make a bigger farm, but Lou wants to buy a car instead.

Lou said he will not inherit the farm anyway, which he says will go to his little sister (only 13 years old), who is taking care of his parents when he is working in the city. He unfolds his wallet to show me a photo of his neat-looking parents. Lou looks like his mother. He also carries a creased snap of his sister, very pretty.

When Lou is not at the gas station on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays, he's off studying English in a class at Soi Convent, near the Macdonald's. 

His elder sister is a cook, and is married to a gym instructor. At Christmas, they will all quit their jobs and pool their resources to open a food stall on Silom. Lou says he can cook very well, as can his sister. But before they start the store, Lou will go back north and visit his parents for five days. One day, he says, he wants to bring his mom to the south to look at the sea. Lou said that his mother would be thrilled to go to the sea, as she has never seen it, having lived in the hills all her life.