I coordinate logistics for Thai fruit exports to China along the Mekong from the Golden Triangle. She's been running that same port for fifteen years.

I'm from New Zealand, 50, and for the past six years I've worked in agricultural export logistics, coordinating transport of Thai fruit — mainly longan and durian — to southern China along the Mekong River, from the river port of Chiang Saen, right in the Golden Triangle, where Thailand, Myanmar and Laos meet.

It's an area with a complicated history, known for decades more for the opium trade than for anything else, though today the real traffic along this stretch of the river is mostly fruit, electronics, and general goods between China and Southeast Asia — nothing to do with what made the area famous in the past.

Orn was 44 when I met her, and had spent fifteen years managing the Thai side of port logistics in Chiang Saen, coordinating customs, barge captains, and Chinese buyers who sometimes spoke only Mandarin, a language she handled better than I handled Thai after six years in the country.

I met her my first week trying to sort out a customs documentation problem for a shipment of longan at risk of rotting on the dock while the paperwork got sorted. She fixed it in two phone calls and a brief conversation with an official who clearly owed her a favour, while I was still trying to figure out the right form.

We worked together practically daily during my first year in the area, coordinating shipments, sorting out the thousand small logistical disasters that come up when you depend on the river's water level, weather across three different countries, and customs offices that don't always communicate well with each other. Her family has been in Chiang Saen for generations, living off the river one way or another, first fishing boats, then trade.

One especially bad drought year dropped the river level so much that several barges were stranded for weeks, whole shipments of fruit rotting with no remedy. Orn spent those weeks basically not sleeping, coordinating alternative overland routes through Laos neither of us had ever used, and I helped however I could, mostly bringing food to an office she barely left.

I asked her, at the end of that crisis, how she handled that level of pressure year after year with it barely showing. She told me the river had been like that for centuries, generous some years and cruel others, and her family had learned long ago that complaining about the river doesn't change the river.

That was roughly when I stopped seeing her only as the person who solved my logistics problems and started looking for reasons to stop by her office even when I had no shipment pending. She noticed before I did, she admitted to me later, and decided to just wait for me to notice too.

Her family, when I finally met them formally, turned out to have more practical curiosity than reluctance: her father, a retired barge captain, mostly wanted to know whether I actually understood the business or was one of those foreigners who arrive thinking river trade is simpler than it really is. I won him over, over time, though it took a couple of years to earn the right for him to ask my opinion on a route before deciding it himself.

We still work together, technically for different companies, though in practice coordinating the same logistics as always. We got married three years ago in a simple ceremony overlooking the river, with barge captains among the guests, some of whom have been crossing that river border since before I was born. I'm still learning business Mandarin, slowly, mostly because Orn refuses to translate every negotiation with Chinese buyers for me forever.