Thailand Confidential

INTRODUCTION Confessions of a Grumpy Old Expat

When people asked me why I chose to leave Hawaii—nearly everyone’s idea of paradise—and moved to Thailand, I had an answer so long it qualified as a speech. I started visiting Thailand sometime in the 1980s, I said—so often it sounded as if I were pulling a string in one of those Chatty Cathy doll’s necks, giving a recorded reply—and by 1993, I was spending as much time in Southeast Asia as in the United States. I had lived too long in the islands, where every day was precisely like the last and I knew the next would be the same. I was single, my kids from a long dissolved marriage were grown and gone, and I figured I had enough money put aside to last two years, so I decided to go where it seemed more interesting.

I picked Thailand over other countries—I droned on—for its hospitable population, alluring women, light-yet-healthy cuisine, affordable cost of living, historic culture and varied geography, tropical climate, the most interesting expat community I’d encountered anywhere, the contemplative nature of Buddhism (and its lack of a god or dogmatic creed), a reasonably free press, an entertaining government and an abiding sense of fun. It also had a major city where there was cable TV and the phones worked most of the time, whose location was proximate to just about everywhere else I wanted to spend most of the rest of my life; in under three hours I could be anywhere from Hong Kong to Bali to Kathmandu. There was a rawness, a messiness, an attitude that defied Western-style logic. Thailand was a place where time wasn’t linear, and property was given more value than life.

Like most new arrivals to Thailand, after I’d been here for six months, I thought I knew everything there was to know. At the two-year mark, I was beginning to have some doubts, and now, after more than ten years, I realize I’ll probably never understand a damned thing about the place and its residents. That doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes pretend to know, and about a third of the little “essays” and stories in this book illustrate this delusion.

I am, by training, a journalist, and by nature what might fairly be called a grumpy old man. As a journalist, I’m from the old school. I’m not one of those gonzo types who never let a fact get in the way of a good story. At the same time, I recognize that there is no such thing as objectivity, only degrees of subjectivity, and even the best of us tend to present the facts according to circumstance, mood, biography and biases. I’m male, white, sixty-something, American, well educated, a social liberal raised as a Quaker, a family man, a cynic with a twisted sense of humor and an expat living in a foreign country totally unlike the one I came from, where I now have a big Thai family and spend a lot of time with poor people, in the slums of Bangkok as well as in the rural countryside. All that, and a lot more, comes into play, no matter what I do, think, and write.

In all the time I’ve lived in Thailand, I’ve only written one letter to the editor, and that was to ask that the numerous and mysterious Thai holidays be announced in the newspapers the day before so that dummies like me will know when banks, the post office and government offices are going to be closed. My suggestion was ignored. I don’t expect any action to follow any of my opinions stated here, either.

It will be clear to the reader which of the forty-two “chapters” are rants, and I say in my defense only that this is what expats probably do best. I’m a member of a loose group of expatriated malcontents called “chairs.” We meet every Saturday for coffee and complaints. It gives us an opportunity to feel superior. We have all the answers and solutions—just ask us. Make me prime minister and I’ll fix everything!

The truth is, we wouldn’t have it any other way. Because living in Thailand is never less than fascinating, beneath all the grime still exotic and always a surprise.

Thailand is easy to criticize. What country isn’t? (Don’t ask me about the United States, unless you’re prepared to get sprayed with saliva and vitriol.) I have a file labeled “Thai Troubles.” In it are newspaper articles and various official reports saying that out of twenty-one million children, one in five suffers from physical or mental abuse… that thanks to all the artesian wells tapping its ground water and the dumping of so much steel and cement on top in uncontrolled development, Bangkok sinks twelve centimeters (four and a half inches) a year, so that much of the city already is below sea level… that one of every three billboards is illegal and unsafe… that AIDS is the leading cause of death nationwide and life expectancy for the average Thai is falling… that there are up to three thousand high-rise buildings in Bangkok that pose “grave risk” of collapse (the government refuses to name them; rumor has it that several house movie theaters)… that more than half the vehicles on the road in the capital exceed the legal exhaust fume level… that only 104 of the two thousand fresh food markets in the country meet hygiene standards set by the Public Health Ministry and ninety percent of the meat sold in markets comes from dirty and unsanitary slaughterhouses… that every day more than a million cubic meters of untreated waste water is released into the Chao Phrya River… that more than four hundred species of wildlife are on the brink of extinction… that since 1932, when the absolute monarchy was replaced by a constitutional monarchy, the nation has had twenty-nine governments, twenty coups d’etat and seventeen constitutions… and that according to the Health Department, more than half of all public toilets in Thailand are unhygienic, smelly, dirty and damp.

That’s not all. Little seems to make any sense here. Even the most critical activists admit that Thailand has some of the best environmental laws in the world, but they, like most rules governing behavior are ignored or bent. Motorcyclists use the sidewalks as if they were lanes in the roadway and there are so many vendors and other obstructions, pedestrians frequently are forced to walk in the streets with some of the most horrendous traffic in the world. (And likely encounter an elephant!) Thailand has the highest rate of road fatalities in the world and no public ambulances. When cops and military officers are caught doing something illegal, they aren’t charged and tried, they are assigned to “an inactive post.” Thais don’t walk, they meander, drifting all over the footpaths, looking in one direction while moving in another, bumping into people, like children seeming unaware that anyone else might be nearby. Two recent Miss Thailands were raised in the United States and unable to speak Thai fluently. Businesses spend a fortune on advertising, signage, menus, etc., where the attempts at English spelling and grammar are so mangled they are as humorous as they are sad. Order a meal in a restaurant and the cook will put the easy-to-prepare dishes on first, the longer-to-cook and more complex orders last, so that diners who came in together get served one at a time and they don’t get to eat together.

That’s not all. Squatters and pocket slums are commonly found in otherwise wealthy neighborhoods, roosters adding their hiccupy morning cries to the purr of Mercedes Benzes being driven to work. Time is circular rather than linear. Thais eat six, seven, eight times a day and remain thin. Women take their clothes off to dance in nightclubs, but at seaside resorts enter the water dressed from ankle to neck. (Money driving the nudity, shyness the public cover-up.) Thais won’t work in an abattoir because killing violates a Buddhist law, yet they matter-of-factly murder each other. (And know precisely what to do—with gusto and imagination—when the butchered pig or steer shows up in the kitchen.) In a country of sixty-two million, the incidence of mobile phone ownership is projected to reach fifty percent by 2005, while seventy percent of the population barely ekes out a subsistence living on the land. Thus, there is an illusion of modernity, but many (some say most) of Thailand’s citizens (even the rich ones) cling tenaciously to feudal codes and Stone Age belief systems.

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.