To put it simply, Thailand in many ways is a Third World country posing as a Developing Nation or NEC (Newly Emerging Country), a runny-nosed kid in a counterfeit designer tee-shirt with his nose pressed to the window of a gold shop.
It is a place where there is a whoopsy sense of improvisation at play. Thais can fall asleep anywhere, both quickly and comfortably: piled in a heap like puppies on the floor, beneath a sidewalk stall, atop a motorcycle. Because there are so many times when shoes must be taken off—not only when entering a temple but also anyone’s house—shoes are worn as if they were rubber slippers, the heels flattened rather than fitted into. Give three ingredients to a Thai cook (and men as well as women can cook) and he or she will produce half a dozen world class dishes. Take a wrist watch to one of the sidewalk vendors who serve much of Bangkok’s needs for timepiece repair, and the three primary tools in use may be a broken, counterfeit Swiss army knife, eyebrow tweezers and a toothbrush.
Thailand is a place made for the phrase “Only in…” I have a friend who moved here forty years ago after reading a story about a tram car that struck a pedicab, which in turn rammed into a taxi, causing the cab to swerve and fall into a canal on top of a boat selling charcoal. “I knew then and there,” he says, “that I just had to live in a place where such things happen.” I read a story myself not so long ago about rat tails being burned to rid a village of sin, another about a large provincial town where some twenty five thousand people turned out to publicly curse the narcotics trade and all those involved in it, Thailand’s way to “just say no.” While approximately a hundred police generals were told to take a five-day meditation course to improve their efficiency, discipline and ethics. (Guns to be checked with the shoes at the door.) The same police also were banned from the nation’s golf courses, an attempt—the newspapers said—to get them back to their desks. A wealthy massage parlor tycoon, who claimed he paid bribes to police amounting to millions of baht every month, ran for Governor of Bangkok in 2004 and placed a respectable third, then was asked to co-host a television talk show.
How can you not love a country where stories like this are a regular occurrence? I still believe Hawaii is the most beautiful place on earth, but in 1993, I was falling asleep under the same old palm tree every day. Hawaii may sound like Elysium to others, but to me it became a big yawn. I needed challenge again, the energy generated by surprise, the edgy feeling that accompanies disarray and portends chaos. After a lifetime of travel on five continents, I thought Bangkok was my best bet. I haven’t been disappointed. The country’s tourism authority had it right a couple of years ago when it called it “Amazing Thailand.”
I spent several of my teenaged years reading science fiction and fantasy, living—in my head—in alien worlds, zipping back and forth in time and outer space. During the 1960s and 1970s, my lifestyle included numerous experiments with psychotropic drugs. And over the years, my friends have included circus performers, ex-cons, drug addicts, prostitutes (male and female), priests, cultists and faddists, magicians, cops and transsexuals. Today I live in Thailand. I think I’m in a rut.
Of course that is my white, male, Western, et cetera point of view. My Thai wife doesn’t think Thailand is odd. When I took her to America, well, now, that country was downright weird. From her point of view. When I thought about it, I couldn’t really disagree. It’s just a matter of what we’re used to. “I looooove phee,” she said to me recently, when a movie about Dracula popped up on the TV screen. Phee is the Thai word for ghosts. I don’t even believe in ghosts and she loooooves them. We’re both right, of course.
So, call this book a love letter to what I think is a peculiar place. As I say later in a different context: dreams may come true in Hawaii, but in Thailand it’s fantasies that come true; it even has several bars like the one in Star Wars. And if I sound as if some of what’s here isn’t to my exact taste or delight, I didn’t like all of the drugs, either.
About a third of the material in this book was previously published in newspapers and magazines. In them, as well as in the stories written specifically for this book, I have tried to explore subjects that generally were ignored or described in travel magazines and guidebooks superficially, or from a fawning point of view. (I remember reading in one Big Name Guidebook that the planning in Bangkok was “haphazard,” the water off Pattaya “murky.”) I try here to burrow a little deeper and more honestly.
Thailand is called The Land of Smiles. I don’t intend to wipe that smile off Thailand’s face in the pages that follow. Only to take a look behind it. From a grumpy old farang’s point of view.
BEHIND THE SMILES
Talking Thai,
Understanding Englit
I’d tried to learn Thai. I really did. I spent more than a hundred dollars on a set of tapes and a manual the size of a small American city’s telephone book. I still have a shelf of how-to books and the pocket-sized Thai-English dictionary I carry around with me is so worn a rubber band is all that holds it together. I even enrolled in a class to learn the language.
In many ways, Thai is far simpler than English, once you learn that the adjectives follow the subject and a couple of other easy rules. There are no prefixes or suffixes, no tenses or plurals, nor any articles. The verbs do not conjugate and there are no genders, as in, say, Spanish and French. And there is no punctuation or capitalization.
That’s the good news. The bad news is that there are forty-four consonants, twenty-four vowels (each with a long and short form), and five tones. Because it, like some other Asian languages, is constructed of monosyllabic words, thus limiting the number of combination possibilities, how you say and hear the words determines if you can speak or comprehend it. For example, the syllable mai can mean “new,” “burn,” “wood,” “not” or “not?,” depending on how it’s pronounced. Thus you can say “Mai mai mai mai mai?” and mean, “New wood doesn’t burn, does it?” If your tonal use is correct.
I’d lived in Thailand for about three years when I started classes and I was the star pupil. I knew many of the rules, was familiar with the sound of the language, and had a small vocabulary of common words and phrases. But the class quickly passed me by. The first problem was my hearing loss. I was born tone deaf and that made it impossible for me to hear the words precisely and when I spoke, people often didn’t understand, wrinkling their brows and, in some instances, suppressing (or not suppressing) laughter. Suay with a rising tone, for instance, meant “beautiful,” and with a falling tone “bad fortune.” Intellectually, I knew this, but I had trouble making it clear what the hell I was saying.
I also had a more general impairment that required mechanical devices to hear speech of any kind, a loss so great I was growing dependent not only on my battery-operated hearing aids but also on a relatively quiet environment and lip-reading to get by. Bangkok is not known for its relative quiet. And reading lips doesn’t help much, either, when the language spoken is other than your own, or English is spoken in a manner that changes the pronunciation and thus the movement of the lips. Tones don’t show on the lips, either.
My age was another factor. It was generally agreed that picking up a foreign language was a snap when you were young; children living in multi-lingual households learned two and three tongues simultaneously. But apparently the part of the brain that absorbed and sorted language went on holiday more frequently as age advanced and by the time I arrived in Thailand at fifty-eight, my language learning potential could be described as semi-retired. After two months in class, my instructor said she would welcome my presence for as long as I wished to attend, but… graciously, she left it at that.