“I’ll begin at the end. Or, a bit before the end because the end hasn’t happened yet. Seksak who runs the Fuji Photo Lab did have a cousin named Keophoxai who went to study in Australia when he was ten or thereabouts and eventually became Bruce. That much is true. But it wasn’t me. Theirs was a big extended family with more cousins and nephews and nieces than you could spray with insecticide. Your dear old friend Dr. Porn was his unpopular aunt. She’d gone off to fight the royalists, so she wasn’t the most loved family member. But I’ll get back to her later.

“The Australian embassy had language classes back then and Bruce was their brightest student. They arranged a scholarship for him, and he breezed through high school in Sydney, got into university and studied film production. Again, all true.

“And then, there’s me. I’m Thai from the northeast so, technically and historically, I’m Lao too. I was a keen student but I came from a poor family and I didn’t have any opportunities to study. My mother was a widow from a young age. My father got shot by the border patrol. Smuggling. I was the only son so I stayed home and worked the fields. We struggled. My mother went away to the town for a few weeks from time to time. She said she’d found work in a shop but I wasn’t stupid. I could smell booze on her clothes and I knew what she’d been doing. But, good luck to her, was my philosophy. Better than starving to death. She was pretty then and we needed the money. When it ran out she’d get back on the bus. I got used to the system.

“Then, one day, and I’ll never forget it, she came home with a farang—a white guy. She introduced him to me as Uncle Henry. He was tall. He had a blond buzz cut and phenomenal teeth—even and white like the man in the Darkie toothpaste ads. He said something I didn’t understand and held out his hand to me. I didn’t know what to do with it.

“Shake his hand, Dom,” my mum said.