Water lillies.

A half child of two worlds. Growing up is amazing, you see more angles than you ever would have before, you're accepted by both sides.
You're balanced.
I remember walking along rice paddies, on my grandfathers farm. He would herd buffalo on one side, and grow rice on the other. The paddies are in grids, you walk along the crossed lines, and in the squares between the lines, you flood and grow the rice. When the water dries up, you pull the rice out of the mud and hit it against the earth to get off all the dirt in handfulls. Your family put all your handfulls together making a green bunch of rice plant.
Dah (grandfather) slept on the farm, in a house of wood built on stilts. He boiled bamboo over a fire, and ate it with offal. When you sleep in the stilt house, you sleep watching the stars. And it's never quiet, it is peaceful, but there is always the sounds of Thailand. The geckos "ging gok". The big lizards "dook keh". The crickets, the ripple of fish in the water, the soft howls of wild dog packs, sometimes a gentle brey of a buffalo, and the wind through thre bamboo trees.
In the day it's hot, and to cool off, I would always swim in the pond he dug out and swim with the fish. Sometimes I could persuade Dah or one of my brothers Nui, or Moi, to pick me a water lily, and what they would to is peel off the outer skin of the stalk and eat the soft flesh of the plant, it was wet and nutritious.
Usually I had a puppy at my heels, because our dogs are wild and are left to mate, and I would nurture one for my own.
The village is dirty and backwards, the soil is red, like bricks and it shows. We had a house that my grandparents Dah and Yai had built together. It was made mostly from corrugated iron and concrete. But it was old, and we soon had the plans for a new one in my life. We cleared the land behind the house, and there was a great pile of red dirt, a hill, that you had to climb. Nui and Moi got me dried up palm leaves and we would sit on them and slide down the brick red dirt like a tabogan.
They taught me how to make a toy horse from banana leaves with a cleaving knife.
Sometimes my aunts would let me try grinding spices or rice seeds with a mortar and pestle.
There is a lake by our house, not the pond on the farm, a proper lake in the middle of the village, and in Songkran (the water festival and the hottest time of the Thai year) all the kids from school would come swim in it, and we would get the best spot, where there are huge concrete pipes, so you can go under the bridge from one side to another. I ripped my shorts sliding down the concrete water slides.
On weekends we'd go to the waterfalls. The water is the clearest blue you've ever seen and trout swim in them. In the smaller pools, we'd try to catch baby fish in our hands as a game.
The waterfall has 5-7 levels. The ground, the lowest waterfall, the slightly higher waterfall, the waterfall which starts too need climbing to, and the waterfall which you must go through jungle to swim in.
From level four you can see level 5, but there is a great tumble of silver water before it, it would kill you to try and slide down. Some of the levels have waterfalls small enough to slide down. Natural water slides, but not at the top. At the top you see the whole jungle and temples high up in the hills. There is a great slab of red rock with surprisingly little water considering how much goes down the falls.
Nui, Moi and me always raced each other to the top.
I grew up partly also in the capital city. Grung Tape, or Bangkok to foreigners.
We stayed in Honey Hotel for most of my life, and all the staff and cleaners knew me well, the breakfast ladies laughed at my face when I ate ribs in red sauce and it made a jokeresque smile on my face. It's where I learnt to swim. Once my parents bought me a terapin and my terapin ran aound the halls of the hotel and I followed, eventually when we had to go to England, I released him in one of the city parks.
At about the age of 10 my parents decided to buy our own house, cause the city had too much traffic.
The beach was different for us, we bought a house in Cha-Am. I met Marina there, she was half thai, half english like me, and she became like my little sister. Banana boats, and jelly fish, and pretending to make a house on the beach, by digging and putting up twigs and coconuts.
I met Thomas, a norweigan boy, and we played hide and seek in the village, in other peoples cupboards, empty houses and the backs of trucks, we pretty much started a war with other Sports Village boys. Thomas and I ruled us. We met lots of half kids, and foreigners. We were against the Thai boys. We played games against them. Play fights. Football, and we had to win.
We thought we ruled the world.