In the early days of my stay in Ban Huay Meng, in June2015, the kamnanassigned his daughter-in-law to take me to their ownvillage port. Before we could arrive there, she keptasking me why I even bothered to go to their tinyand messy port. She seemed even more bewildered whenI stated my interest in cross-border trade as themain reason. She asked me plainly why I was notlooking at the larger, official border crossing atthe Fourth Thai-Lao Friendship Bridge, where all thesignificant import-export companies would belocated. There, I would be able to obtain a“picture” (ภาพ phap)of the entire cross-border trade, which would be“much clearer” (ชัดกว่าเยอะ chat kwa yoe) than their “confusing”(สับสน sabson)operations out of rather chaotic circumstances atthe local village level. She thus persistentlyexpressed her puzzlement as to why I would take onthe burden of trying to decipher their complicated,if not incomprehensible, trading situation, whilethe allegedly much more obvious, clearer, betterorganized, more professional and, most importantly,larger picture of cross-border trade would await mejust a few kilometres away from their village. Herconcern is somehow representative of the overallresearch climate I was operating in on the groundduring fieldwork and later in differentconversations in the academe during the writing ofthis book, where I was often asked why I wouldbother to attend to these trivial and unpretentiousinstances of small-scale trade. As I have pointedout in chapter 3, these trade activities, as part ofthe banality of everyday transnationalism, were thusdeemed not worth mentioning or researching both bythe traders themselves and by external observerssuch as scholars.