Visiting China always cracks something open inside me. If I want to describe this thing, I close my eyes, and it will appear as a hotel room that has just been put back into operation after being unused for a long while. Its door and windows are wide open to air the place out. Furniture is dusted off, floors swept. After the final once-over, the room is ready to do the only thing it's supposed to do: accommodate fresh memories.

Yes, okay, in some ways I was the author of my own downfall. I am not seeking sympathy. I’m telling you how it was. I don’t have to think too hard to imagine how Noi felt to see me walk away from the bar with Orn and return to my hotel at just after six in the morning. Yet, in light of what had just happened I felt no guilt. Noi had it coming. I felt that at the time and since. The “since?” You will soon discover more when you read on.

My friend Wayne (not his real name) is a medical doctor at a large university hospital.  Twice divorced but ever the optimist, he is currently in search of the woman to spend his remaining years with.  Recently a female researcher from China visited his university.  He was interested, and not only in a scholarly sense, as I deduced from a couple of emails I received from him querying me on matters of Chinese culture. After not hearing from him for a while, I decided to check on  how things were going, and received the following response:

            Since Melcyan and, I suspect, others as well, were interested in reading about how I met my ex-wife, I decided to make that the subject of my next blog entry.  At the beginning of 2009, I had spent the last nine months dating online.  During that time, I was using E-Harmony and was not specifically looking for East Asian women.  I found the experience rather disappointing.  I was surprised at how few of my "highly compatible" matches were interesting to me and how few of them were interested in me.

The day was fixed for our trip to Phuket. Noi and I were familiar with the place but some of the others had never been there before. They were excited. Before setting off on the long drive I had made it crystal clear to Noi our appointment was for two in the afternoon the following day. She knew she had to be present with me during the appointment with the lawyer as she had to sign the legal documents. She knew exactly what was required of her. It was my “insurance policy.”

            I'm not really sure just how widespread the term, "Peanut Gallery", is but it is a well-known term among Americans though most have no idea of its origins.  Several months ago, I was sufficiently interested to perform a little online research.  Turns out that Peanut Gallery was originally a theater term.  During the days when Vaudeville was the most popular theater genre, the performers took to calling the balcony the Peanut Gallery.

            Every day I checked to see if she has logged-in again, and every day I was both disappointed and relieved that she has not.  I was disappointed that she has not logged-in and read my messages, thus proving my interpretation of the fact pattern correct.  I was relieved that she has not proven my interpretation false by logging-in and then failing to read my messages.

Many of you familiar with the blogs and forum know that I’m a Christian through the various comments I’ve made there, and the debates I’ve entered into concerning climate change, apologetics, politics, macro-evolution, comparative cultures, US History, Chinese culture, worldviews, religion, and homosexuality.  I’m a Christ-follower who used to be a religious person. I attended church and embraced a New Age/Buddhist/Hindu worldview. I came to trust and follow Jesus while a Senior in High School.

            I had peace of mind for the next nine days as I waited patiently for my almost perfect match to return from her vacation.  But on the tenth day, I began to feel uneasy again.  I dealt with my uneasiness by sending two more messages to my almost perfect match.  The first message was short, just a reassurance that I was still waiting patiently for her.  The second one was to correct a mistake which I had made in my second message.  Those mistakes revolved around some confusion which I had about the time stamps on CLM.

Landfill trucks came and went for two weeks solid. They would drive past the vacant lot, now belonging to Noi, brake then reverse before tipping the load of landfill. This was repeated time after time until after a while a small bulldozer arrived and started to push and level the landfill material. That material seemed to be made up of sandstone rocks and shale. It came from a quarry about ten miles away. The lot was part of some old rice fields. They were sunken areas and still flooded with water in parts making proper landfill a necessity before construction could commence. Further back from the rice fields lay the inland lake, part salt and part fresh water. One happy consequence of the fleet of tipper trucks was they ate in Noi’s restaurant. I was paying for the landfill but at least Noi was getting some money back through increased takings in the restaurant.