Thailand Confidential

The Rubber Barons

When I was growing up in the United States, the word “rubber,” in the plural, referred to overshoes you pulled onto your feet when it rained. In association with the word “check,” it meant you had insufficient funds in the bank and the check bounced. Affix it to another word and “rubberneck” meant to look about or stare with curiosity.

Some friends of my parents played a “rubber” of bridge, meaning a round or series of play until one side won two out of three games. In the United Kingdom, it was the word used for eraser, because they were made from rubber and when they fell off your school desk they bounced all over the classroom floor.

As I entered adolescence, the word gained a deeper meaning, it being the most common euphemism in America for a condom, because it too was made from what my dictionary calls “the highly elastic solid substance obtained from the milky juice of various tropical trees and plants.” Some of those little packets that American adolescents like me carried in their wallets until they fell apart (unused) said “Made in Thailand.” Now I live in Thailand, so I decided to go to the source.

Welcome to Trang, the first place a rubber tree was planted in Thailand almost exactly one hundred years ago, in 1899, (brought from Indonesia by the provincial governor, although the rubber tree originated in Brazil). Today, rubber is the nation’s second largest agricultural product after rice, thriving in the Kingdom’s humid climate so well that it is the world’s third largest exporter, following Malaysia and Indonesia.

In Trang, as in much of the nation’s southern peninsula, there are vast stands of rubber, where trees lined up like sentries form long, dark tunnels and men still go out before dawn with miner’s lamps on their heads to make foot-long diagonal cuts in the bark, placing a plastic bowl at the bottom of the “tap” to catch the dripping sap. Two hours later, the bowls are emptied, the white gooey latex is stored in plastic barrels for a day, then poured into what look like deep baking trays and mixed with sulfuric acid to aid coagulation, forming malleable pillows which are then flattened by hand and (literally) foot. Finally, they are pushed through hand-cranked metal rollers and draped over bamboo poles in the yard to dry, looking like bleached doormats. Five days later—assuming it doesn’t rain—the now translucent mats are taken in the family pickup truck or on the back of a motor-bike to collection points and sold by the kilo.

The work hours are long, starting as early as midnight on some of the larger plantations and continuing through much of the day. The labor is also unpredictable. The latex flows best when the weather is cool and the air is still. Warmer, windier weather is not so good and you can’t cut when it rains or the leaves fall, or in the spring when the new leaves are coming in. This means tappers may sometimes work only 120 to 160 days a year.

Nor is it always an attractive investment for landowners, who must wait five to seven years before a tree is ready for tapping, and replant every twenty-five to thirty years. Rubber grows better in poor soil than do cash crops such as sugarcane and maize, but the work is as labor-intensive today as it was when the business was growing up with the new automobile industry. And with world economies bouncing like, well, a rubber ball, market prices are unpredictable, too. In 1999, the slump in economies worldwide plus stiff competition drove the price in Thailand well below break-even.

Kam Nuchitsiripatra is a third-generation rubber planter who knows the market well. His grandfather migrated to Thailand from China in 1917. By the time Kam was fourteen he could “tap” eight hundred trees in a day, so he hired someone to collect the latex as he continued to cut and asked his grandfather for fifty percent of the earnings. At sixteen, he introduced a stronger, more productive strain of tree to Trang and sold cuttings from the new trees to other farmers. Stick one of the cuttings into plain red earth and in six weeks you had a plantable tree.

Kam is called “famous” in Trang province. Besides the thousand or so mature trees his workers tap on land he owns outside the city, he still has a backyard “farm” in town where he sells cuttings. As head of the local rubber planters association, he is also a storehouse of facts. There are six million acres (2.3 million hectares) of rubber in Thailand, spread across twenty-two provinces, mainly in the south, he says, a half-million of the acres in Trang. The export of rubber currently brings about US$2 billion to Thailand annually, and a family makes about US$1,750 a year. Rubber may once have made millionaires of colonial plantation owners (in what was then called Indochine, Indonesia, and Malaya), but today the world price is so low, Thailand’s government pays farmers to replant.

Choosit Lee, another third-generation rubber worker, is the factory manager at Sri Trang Agro-Industry, where in a warehouse larger than two airplane hangers about four hundred tons of the latex sheets are washed and dried every day, then graded and bundled for resale, a job he holds, in part, because he speaks Mandarin, Cantonese, and two southern Chinese dialects, Thai, Malay, English, and Japanese; his company sells to factories around the world, making him handy to have around when the phone rings. He is teaching his two young children Mandarin and English, but they, he insists with a laugh, probably won’t be interested in following in their father’s footsteps when it’s time to choose a career.

As on the plantation, he tells me, in the factory, too, little has changed in a hundred years. There are forklifts now, and regular coffee breaks for the employees, but much is still Dickensian, reminiscent of an earlier, harsher era. Here, in a building six acres in size, endless piles of rubber sheets on pallets are brought to the ends of massive cement tubs full of water for washing. Men throw armloads of the sheets into the waist-deep water and other men inside the tubs wearing only shorts hold on to bamboo scaffolding overhead and stomp on the floating mats to separate mold and other external impurities, kicking the mats forward to where women standing in the water flip them one by one between rollers to remove the surface water. The pace is frantic and the noise and water splashing recalls a public wading pool for children on a hot summer day. But you know this isn’t fun.

As the sheets come through the rollers, they’re draped over bamboo racks, taken by forklift and stacked ten meters high in metal rooms for smoking, to remove the last moisture inside the rubber. Five days later, the sheets emerged baked to a golden brown and smelling eerily like kippers, or smoked herring, the popular English breakfast dish.

Now embedded bits of dirt, insects and air bubbles are cut away by hand with scissors and the sheets are graded individually according to the quality of what’s left. The cleanest rubber is graded highest and is sold for the best price to firms making tires for airplanes and luxury automobiles. The coarser stuff is used for truck tires and everything left over, including the bits cut out of the sheets with the dirt, is turned into rubber slippers.

Like the pig, where everything is used except for the squeal, little of the rubber tree is wasted. The wood, lightweight and easy to work with, as well as abundantly available, is made into furniture and toys, from dollhouses to blocks to spinning tops. Because Thailand has banned the logging of most trees, rubber wood now accounts for seventy percent of raw materials for the country’s wooden furniture industry.

There’s also a market for the liquid latex, brought to the factory in tanker trucks. Choosit Lee takes me to a rise on the property, one of the highest points in the province, he says. Below and stretching to low mountains miles away are the countless rows of trees. Here, a cargo that looks like melted vanilla ice cream is pumped into company trucks and transported to nearby Hat Yai, where hand-sized molds are dipped into it to form rubber gloves, ubiquitous around the world.

In ways too numerous to count, this stuff thus plays a role in more people’s lives than possibly any other man-made product, save perhaps steel and electricity. Remove rubber from the earth and you lose what must be history’s favorite toy, the ball, you leave most land and air vehicles without tires and inner tubes, and homes and offices and shops go wanting the rubber band, while children are denied something with which to correct mistakes and party balloons to blow up.

Without rubber, we’d have to get along without hot water bottles, life rafts, bathing caps, foam mattresses, raincoats and other all-weather gear, wetsuits for divers and surfers, garden hoses, gaskets and seals and fan belts for cars and buses and trucks, airport conveyor belts, door and car mats, baseballs (the cores are rubber), basketballs, and ping-pong paddles. Bureaucracy everywhere would stumble to a clumsy halt without a rubber stamp. And as for all those you-know-whats essential to family planning and world health, they’d probably be made of plastic or something even unfriendlier.

They are not made in Trang, by the way. Most of those factories are in Chon Buri. Another story for another time.

Thailand’s Beer Wars

There must be a hundred ways to rate a country as “world class,” but my favorite is in the answer to this question: Does it have a great beer? So I guess it wasn’t Thailand’s “greatness” that led me to move there. Even before I visited the country, I didn’t like its beer. In fact, I thought it was quite horrible.

At the time, in the 1980s, I was living in Honolulu where there was a Thai restaurant that imported what was commonly regarded as Thailand’s “national” beer. That was because from the 1930s onwards, the government had given a monopoly to the Boon Rawd Brewery Company Limited of Bangkok, makers of a lager called Singha.

Based on a recipe and technology from Germany and made from locally grown barley and imported hops, the beer whose name meant “lion” (an animal never seen in Asia) had a high alcohol content of six percent and, for my money, too many of those female hop flowers that gave the brew its bitter taste. Of course, it could have been the water, always a determining factor in a beer’s flavor. Singha had its brewery alongside the polluted Chao Phyra River and drew its water from artesian wells, sunk deep beneath the swampy ground on which the city was built, creating an image that was less than reassuring.

When I bellied up to my first Thai bar in 1993, Singha controlled ninety percent of the market and two other locally produced beers, Kloster and Amarit, franchises from the German brewer Beck’s, competed for what was left, mainly selling to tourists and expatriates. Both had less alcohol than Singha and neither had its acrid bite. When in Bangkok, I drank Kloster. However, when I traveled outside the city, there was no choice. If you didn’t drink Singha, you didn’t drink beer. And even if you’d brought some other brand with you and wanted to cool it with ice—in Thailand, men customarily put ice in their beer—the frozen water available was of extremely dubious origin.

Then came one of the greatest shifts in the history of beer marketing. In under ten years, not only were dozens of brands made available, Singha, once in privileged command, was left hanging out to dry with only eleven percent of the market, while an upstart newcomer called Chang (Thai for “elephant”) had a whopping seventy percent! How that was accomplished is not taught in reputable business schools, nor likely would the tactics survive any court test in the developed world. It was, on the other hand, a classic story that illustrated perfectly how trade was conducted in Thailand: ruthlessly.

It was a war waged by two families, one led by a man of inherited riches who coaxed royalty to captain his board, the other by a man with a fourth grade education, the son of a vendor who sold oysters on the street. If novelist James Clavell were alive, this cast of characters and their books of dirty tricks would have offered him material for a sequel to Tai-pan and Shogun.

Boon Rawd, the makers of Singha (or “Singh,” as its loyal drinkers say), was established in 1934 by Phraya Birombhakdi, whose son Prajuab was sent to study beer culture in Germany’s Domen Institute, returning to look after the Singha monopoly. When he died, Santi and Piya Bhirombhakdi took command. For more than half a century, through the Japanese occupation of Thailand and into the 1960s and 1970s when Americans built air bases and ports and roads for the transport of bombs and out-drank the thirstiest of Thais in noisy go-go bars, and thence into the boom years of the 1980s and early 1990s when the Kingdom was listed in the Guinness Book of Records as having the world’s fastest growing economy, Singha was never challenged. The family had built its business on connections with the aristocracy and for a time Adulkit Kittiyakara, brother of Her Majesty the Queen, served as company chairman. Further competition was not allowed. And sales went up, up, up.

Then along came the oyster vendor’s son, Charoen Sirivadhanabhakdi, whose company was given a monopoly of his own, being awarded by the Finance Ministry licenses to all twelve regional whisky distilleries—“whisky” so called but made from fermented rice and sugar cane and thus, in fact, a rum. In rural Thailand, where seventy percent of the population lived, the preferred drink was one of Charoen’s products, named for the Mekhong River that flanked part of the country’s borders with Laos and Cambodia. This drink was colored brown with caramel for the city folk and left “white” (clear) for the rural market, and it was cheaper than beer by far.

Deciding to take on Singha’s dominance, Charoen formed a partnership with Carlsberg when the beer giant from Denmark was given permission to enter Thailand. The original formula was changed, increasing the alcohol content and bitterness, and the international price was reduced—but it still cost more than Singha. They claimed a price premium went with the beer’s international status. New brand, higher price: one thing was very clear—if Carlsberg wanted to topple Singha, it had to sell in volume. Thus, began a marketing war unlike any seen in Thailand before.

Charoen ordered his sales network to push Carlsberg along with all his whiskies, including Saengthip as well as Mekhong, and to tell any Singha agent (retailer) declining to take the beer that it couldn’t buy the popular whisky. The genteel Bhirombhakdi family then told its more than ten thousand agents nationwide that if they so much as sold a single bottle of Carlsberg, they’d lose the right to sell Singha. It was what was called in another part of the world a “Mexican stand-off.” It didn’t last long. Upcountry, if you couldn’t get the whisky your customers wanted, you were, effectively, out of business and as a result, the Singha distribution system disintegrated.

Some later said this was a diversionary tactic, that Charoen all along had planned to introduce a purely “local” brand. Hadn’t he obtained two licenses to produce beer, after all? In any case, in 1994, this is what he did, launching Chang, a brew with a higher alcohol content (6.4 percent compared to Singha’s six percent) and a price so low it didn’t even cover production costs, creating a product that literally delivered more bang for the baht and demanded the attention of the budget beer drinker.

How could he do this and survive? He nearly doubled the price of the whisky and bundled whisky sales and beer sales together: in order to get the whisky, a retailer had to take the package. If you wanted to buy twenty liters of the whisky most popular in the countryside, you also had to buy four cases (forty-eight big bottles) of Chang. In this fashion, the beer loss was covered by the increased cost of the whisky… and the entire nation was saturated with the strongest, cheapest beer ever marketed.

In time, this led many drinkers to change from Charoen’s whisky to his beer. He didn’t care. It was like taking money out of one pocket and putting it in the opposite one. The primary result is that Chang came to dominate the beer market as Singha’s share fell like a bungee jumper. By the end of 1995, Chang acquired seven percent of the market as Singha retreated to eighty two. Chang’s slice of the pie jumped to fourteen percent in 1996, thirty one percent in 1997, thirty two percent the next year, and to more than sixty percent in 1999, sinking Singha’s “one nation, one beer” marketing slogan once and for all.

That was the year that Boon Rawd yelled foul to the newly formed Trade Competition Board, a part of the Commerce Ministry. “We lodge the complaint because we want to make the first case under the Competition Law, and we want it to be a case study on unfair trade practices which are widespread in Thailand,” said Santi Bhirombaskdi, the man whose family held a virtual monopoly on beer production and sales for more than sixty years and forbade its agents to buy Chang when it was introduced. The irony likely was not lost on Dr. Supachai Panichpakdi, then the former commerce minister (and later the chief of the World Trade Organization). In his ruling, Charoen and Chang won the day.

One anti-trust officer said it was obvious that the distiller had resorted to predatory pricing, an unfair practice where one company, usually a big one with deep pockets, sells its product at an unsustainable low price calculated to cause its competitors, especially smaller ones, to bleed red ink until they went out of business. So what Charoen did might have been unfair, but it wasn’t clear, the board ruled, that it was illegal according to existing statute.

Boon Rawd did what it could to pick up the pieces, introducing brands called Leo (named not for the lion, but the spotted leopard, another big cat never seen in Thailand) and Super Leo, and then Super Lion to replace Super Leo, subsequently phasing out Super Lion and reintroducing it as Thai Beer. It also launched Singha Gold (a light beer) and then in 2004, Singha 70 to mark its seventieth anniversary. It hired an ad agency to produce a series of TV commercials exposing Chang’s questionable marketing practices and then enlisted three Thai boxing legends to endorse the beer in another series of spots. (A reaction to Chang’s using Ad Carabao, Thailand’s most popular rock musician.) It sponsored an Emmy nominated Thai cooking show in the United States. It launched a blend of beer with tequila. Finally, it reduced Singha’s strong alcohol content and bitter “hoppy” taste.

As beer consumption increased in Thailand, Singha sales by unit count improved, but in 2001, Chang’s market share was at seventy five percent, and Singha and Leo each stood at eleven per cent.

That was the year that Chang delivered the unkindest cut and proposed a merger of the companies. It would be a “merger of equals,” said the oyster vendor’s son, with each firm owning fifty percent. Santi surprised no one when he said it was “impossible both from the heart and for business reasons.” Chang was in a stronger financial position and had the better distribution network, so who, Santi surely asked himself, would end up running the show? Besides, he said, the government probably would reject such a proposal as being too monopolistic. Instead, Santi announced he was seeking an alliance with a foreign brewer to help with his large debt load and lost market share and to improve the company’s export capability.

As the beer market continued to open up, more new local brands and international labels gained distribution and by 2004 the supermarket where I shopped had six local beers and a surprising twenty-two imports from ten countries (some of them locally produced under franchise): Tiger from Singapore; Victoria Bitter, Fosters, and Crown Lager from Australia (plus a beer-tequila mix called Mez); Budweiser and Miller from the United States; Corona from Mexico; Asahi from Japan; Heineken and Grolsch from the Netherlands; Strongbow and Chimay from Belgium (the latter brewed by Trappist monks); Menabrea from Italy; Guinness from Ireland; and Kloster, Weihenstephaner, Erdinger, Veltins, Furstenberb,Warsteiner, and Diebels from Germany.

By 2004, Charoenhad put his children in charge of the beer business as he diversified, acquiring the local offices of the John Hancock Life Insurance and Southeast Insurance, a service affiliate of Bangkok Bank, Berli Jucker (originally a Swiss company and now Thailand’s largest bottle maker), and NCC Management Company, which operated the Queen Sirikit National Convention Centre. He also owned the Hotel Plaza Athenée, the Imperial Queen’s Park Hotel and other hotels in the Imperial Group, a controlling stake in the Lao Brewery in Vientiane, and Dho-Spaak Communication, the holder of the World Cup broadcasting rights in Thailand.

Singha was hanging in there. Sales of Singha, Beer Thai, and a mid-priced brew called Mittweida introduced to compete with Heineken hadn’t much improved, but the Bahirombhakdi family survived Charoen’s assault on its control of the bottled water market and in 2004, one of the more visible heirs, a grandson of the founder, surfaced on an interesting quest. Chutinant Bhirombhakdi was perhaps best known as a keen sportsman, a promoter of the martial art tae kwon do and a handgun sharpshooter. In 2003, he also acted in a television series. The next year he enrolled in class in the National Defense College, an elite military school that gave business executives, civil servants, and social leaders a chance to return to academic life.

Participants had to write a thesis and Chutinant picked as his subject Thailand’s competition law. In an early draft, quoted in The Nation (Apr. 7, 2004), he wrote that “…Thailand has been on its way to amending, adapting and adopting international trade practices since the days of King Rama V… The Trade Competition Act of 1999 is the latest revision concerning domestic markets, which are now under international scrutiny. But since its inception, many feel that the Act has not had as big an impact as originally envisioned, lacking major substance.”

I’m sure he’s right. Surely he has a reason to think that.

As for me, I drink Chang. I can find it just about everywhere, it suits my tastes better than Singha, it still has the kick of a mule, and it’s cheaper than all the rest.

But, sorry to say, it ain’t a world-class beer.

Faking It

In the final months of 2001, a lot of Thais raised hell about an American scientist who was alleged to have sneaked some of Thailand’s delicious jasmine, or hom mali, rice back to the United States, where he planned to mess with its genes and patent it. Why you should get a patent on something Mother Nature provides, with or without genetic modification, I don’t fully comprehend, but the issue here is that many Thais were furious… as they were again in 2004 when it was learned that genetic tests on rice cultivated in and marketed by neighboring Cambodia was identical to that grown across the border in its Thai birthplace.

The fear of “stolen” rice is not the only fret. The government’s Intellectual Property Department’s knickers also were in a twist over complaints about the liberal use of the words phad Thai overseas to describe the traditional local noodle dish. No sooner was that out of the headlines—it was concluded that protection of fried noodles was a lost cause—then concerned citizens started worrying about guarding the name and model of the samlor, or tuk-tuk, the noisy little three-wheeled vehicles that dart in and out of traffic mainly in areas popular with tourists and shoppers.

Again, it seemed to be too late, as tuk-tuk trademarks had been taken out in several foreign countries. A British company that imported the vehicles, MMW Imports, already was modifying and selling them under the MMW Tuk Tuk brand. The company, which declined to reveal the identity of its Thai supplier, was upgrading the tuk-tuks to the standards required to run on European highways—no easy task, according to the firm’s boss— thereby creating, in effect, a new vehicle.

What made these stories about Thailand and charges of alleged theft interesting was the Thais’ hostile response to the idea that someone might be stealing from them. While at the same time, Thailand was one of the centers of international theft, a country where virtually everything was counterfeited and sold on the open marketplace.

Walk down Sukhumvit Road, where I live, and you can buy clothing by Polo and Camel, Swiss army knives, Nike and Reebok sports shoes, and tee-shirts advertising the Hard Rock Cafe and popular English football clubs. There are at least fifty stores where Indian proprietors (who also own much of the real estate) sell knock-off designer suits, measured on the spot and slapped together with a second fitting a few hours later, delivery in less than a day—stitched by hundreds of poor citizens and immigrants (both legal and otherwise) sitting at rows of sewing machines in factories the length of football fields on the city’s industrial fringe. There’s even a store on Sukhumvit called Versaces; I suppose the owner thinks the “s” at the end of the name circumnavigates any smear of illegitimacy. Markets and street stalls and shops in fancy malls from Chiang Mai to Pattaya to Phuket offer more—Rolex watches, French perfumes, the newest movies, DVDs, video games, gold jewelry, Gucci purses, even, god help us, Viagra. Every item a fake.

“The Thais are not innovators,” a friend says. “They created one of the best cuisines in the world, taking a little of this and that from here and there—the chilis from Portuguese traders, the curries from India—and made it something unique. Beyond that, there isn’t much to brag about. That may sound unkind, but the truth is, what Thailand is good at is copying. With or without permission.”

To some, this means counterfeiting. Violating international intellectual property laws. Stealing. The simplest word is theft and the most popular word in the press is “piracy.”

An effort was exerted to halt this. Police arrested thousands of vendors a year and in 2003 shut down nineteen factory owners; photographs appeared regularly in the press showing phoney products being flattened by heavy equipment. (Leading many counterfeiters operating in malls to employ spotters at the mall entrances who send an alert by cell phone when the cops show up, causing thousands of counterfeit discs to disappear from open view.) When the United States threatened to delay Free Trade Area negotiations with Thailand if the Thai government failed to make progress on intellectual property issues, the prime minister said he had thirteen state agencies involved in the suppression of copyright violations. Thailand further offered US$25,000 to informants for compact disc copying machines and cops were promised more than five U.S. cents for every pirated CD seized. Even when a coalition of popular performers appealed to their fans to stop buying bogus CDs, because the forgers were making it impossible for them to earn a living, the effort was ineffectual.

The counterfeit trade remained so untouched, in fact, that local producers cut prices, between twenty and fifty percent for CDs and VCDs and the license holder for such cartoon characters as Snoopy, Popeye and Garfield re-priced their product to five percent above the fakes—giving consumers some insight as to how large the original profit margins had been and why so much bootlegging was going on in the first place. It was, both pirates and consumers agreed, as if a Southeast Asian sort of Robin Hood were stealing from the rich to give the poor.

This cuts to the core of the matter. When a copy of Microsoft Office for an individual user cost over 15,000 baht, and Windows, the basic operating system, was sold at almost 10,000 baht, and a copy of the photo-editing software Adobe Photoshop went for 30,000 baht, and the average Thai university graduate entering the civil service received a starting monthly salary of 6,400 baht, it should have been no great surprise to anyone when the copied software found a ready market.

Nowhere was this clearer than in one of the least known and most intriguing museums in Bangkok, in the offices of Tilleke &

Gibbons International Ltd., which, despite its farang name, is the oldest law firm in Thailand, owned and operated by Thais. The firm has what it calls an “intellectual property” team and here is displayed in some of the hallways the evidence from hundreds of cases, some 1,500 exhibits in all. The thing that struck me the first time I saw it was how diverse the items were. The purses and belts, the cosmetics, the clothing, the watches, the music, the stuff you see on the street I expected. But pharmaceuticals? (Oh, yes, I was assured; did I realize how much ersatz Viagra was sold each day in Bangkok?) Electric irons? Johnny Walker Black? Cigarettes? Laundry detergent? Automobile tires? Engine parts? Motor oil? Veterinary medicine?

Thailand is not alone, of course. Throughout Asia and in other parts of the “developing” world, counterfeit goods are as much a part of the marketplace as exotic fruits and vegetables and live catfish flopping in plastic tubs. According to annual studies by the industry trade group, Business Software Alliance, Vietnam and China lead the world with the highest level of pirated software—including CDs, videos, and games—at an astonishing ninety nine percent. That meant that for every legitimate disc or video for sale in those countries, ninety-nine fakes were on the market, and being sold at a fraction of the legal market price.

So good were the Vietnamese at counterfeiting, that in 2000, the Ministry of Culture and Information announced that local painters duplicated international masterpieces so believably, that from that time forward they had to make the copies three centimeters smaller or larger than the originals. And sign their work under the copied signatures of the original masters. At the time, a credible “Van Gogh” was going for about US$250.

Similarly in China, the porcelain market was doing so well, skilled potters were producing fake Ming, Qing and Song pieces that were fooling some of the experts.

Thailand was not far behind. There were in Bangkok and Ayutthaya sculptors so skilled they produced convincing copies of religious statuary, while others carved wooden figures and, after burying them in the ground and treating them with various chemicals, sold them as the real thing. Years before moving here, I once visited Thailand with a developer from Hawaii who wanted to purchase authentic artifacts for display in his fancy new hotels. Wary of being cheated, he hired a local antiquities scholar, who evaluated the items offered for sale. It wasn’t until he returned home that the developer learned his expert okayed bogus items in exchange for a kickback from the counterfeiters.

Most of the piracy is of cheaper items that are mass produced. My son is a computer graphics designer in the U.S. and when he first visited me in Bangkok, I took him to Pantip Plaza, the five-story mall on Petchburi Road devoted mainly to computers and other electronic devices, and software. Our first visit, he was stunned. For an hour or more, all I heard was, “Dad, I paid thirty dollars for that! I paid a hundred dollars for that!” And so on. Never pointing at anything that cost more than a few dollars. When Windows XP, the latest endeavor by Microsoft to separate consumers from their money, appeared in shops the end of 2001, costing almost as much as a PC, copies were flying off the Pantip shelves at two hundred baht (five dollars) apiece.

Even pornography is bootlegged in Thailand. One of the street stalls outside my bank on Silom Road openly sold XXX videos. (The bank moved, the stall remained.) This was just one of several operating in that neighborhood during the day, one of dozens offering the same product at night. The reproduction was sometimes poor—there were incomplete scenes (talk about coitus interruptus !), bad focus or color, etc.—but the $2.50 price was right, for a video that cost ten or more times that amount in the country of origin.

Counterfeiting, bootlegging, copying, call it whatever you want, it’s practically unavoidable, and so affordable it’s irresistible. I’m wearing fake Calvin Klein undershorts. Some of the Polo shirts in my wardrobe are fake. My last pair of slippers said Nike but it was a lie. (And they lasted only two months before falling apart, one of the risks of buying funny goods; there is a joke about the Rolex watch you buy in Bangkok is guaranteed to last as long as it takes to get to the airport on your way home.)

Don’t even ask me about my CDs. I’m guilty, guilty, guilty, along with what may be a majority of the urban population.

It’s a part of living in Thailand. In the slums, nearly everyone wears designer clothing and you know where it came from. (Ironically, Nike donates a lot of the Real Thing to the Bangkok poor.) The rich keep the legitimate stores going—to be caught wearing a Gucci shirt with imperfect button alignment would be to lose face, after all—but it is that Thai upper class, along with some of the wealthier tourists, who provide a majority of the customers. We poorer folks go for the ersatz goods every time, even if one leg in a pair of “Wrangler” jeans is shorter than the other.

So ingrained is the consumption of fraudulent goods in Thailand that the Bangkok Post published a story by two of its reporters (in June 2001) that told readers what to look for in determining not a real thing from a fake, but how to spot the most convincing counterfeits.

“Selecting the best fake requires a keen eye,” the reporters said.

Bi-Racial Cool

It wasn’t so long ago when inter-racial sex was scorned in Southeast Asia and children from such pairings were ostracized. No more. Today, offspring with genes from both east and west are frequently lionized, sometimes winning a spot at the top of their chosen fields, becoming role models as well as celebrities. It is no surprise that this is being exploited commercially, but what isn’t admitted so freely is: why?

Until fairly recently, Southeast Asia had an unpleasant history of racial bias. Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand… every nation in the region experienced horrific conflict between various ethnic groups. In some areas, prejudice persists today.

Illegitimate children left behind following war were spurned almost everywhere, notably in Vietnam, Thailand, Laos and the Philippines—wherever the U.S. sent its military. As colonies became nations, mixed-race children were reminders of a Western-dominated past. The most that many could expect was a mean life on the street. So grim was the situation in Vietnam, any mixed-blood youngster who could in any way establish American parentage was given a pass to the United States in order to escape the prejudice; sometimes little more than a western nose or black skin seemed enough to qualify for America’s Orderly Departure Program. In Thailand, children of racially mixed parents could not become citizens until the early 1990s.

This prejudice was not exclusively Asian; even in the United States, the last of the miscegenation laws were not overturned until 1965.

Nowadays, the picture has changed, most remarkably in Thailand, where it is no surprise to see headlines in Bangkok’s English language dailies that read, “Mixed-race superstars most popular artists” and “Best of Both Worlds.” The best example may be Amita Tata Young, the recording and movie star daughter of a Thai woman and her American husband, who serves as Tata’s manager. She’s been a star since she was eleven, when she won a Thailand Junior Singing Contest. A recording contract and film career followed and in 1998, at age seventeen, she was named by Asiaweek as one of Asia’s twenty-five most influential personalities and two years later became the first Thai singer to sign a contract with a major American recording company, Sony Columbia. She’s also had her face on the world’s biggest billboard as Panasonic’s Thai spokesperson and in 2004 was linked romantically (but briefly) with an internationally ranked tennis superstar, Paradorn Srichaphan; was castigated by the Thai government’s uptight Culture Ministry for a single called “Sexy Naughty Bitchy;” then saw her new CD go platinum within six hours of hitting the stores.

Another, far bigger name whose heritage is split between Thailand and America is Tiger Woods, although to be fair to the son of a Thai woman and a black American ex-soldier, he is a fair golfer whose mixed parentage merely gave his story an added commercial spin. It might be mentioned that Tiger is no favorite in Thailand, thanks to his refusal to leave his five-star hotel to receive an honorary degree from a local university—he had it brought to him!—and lack of interest in anything Thai: not the food, nor the sights, nor the people. This, despite the fact that he was paid a million U.S. dollars to come to Thailand and all he had to do in return was play eighteen holes of a game he was alleged to enjoy.

There are many more who are lesser known outside the region. Nicole Theriault and Peter Corp Dyrendal, topped “The Global Sex Survey 1999—A Youth Perspective” in Thailand, conducted by London’s condom manufacturer, Durex. Nicole has an American father, too, and Peter’s dad is from Denmark. Another new star, appearing in two films in Thailand, is Ananda Everingham, using the professional name Ananda Eve; mom is from Laos, dad is from Australia, and Ananda grew up in Bangkok, where his father runs a successful magazine publishing company.

There are so many, in fact—in modeling as well as in television, music, and film—that a phrase, luuk khrung (literally meaning “half-children”), was added to the language to describe them. When Time magazine put what it called the “Eurasian Invasion” (and Tata Young) on its cover Apr. 23, 2001, it said the once-despised offspring controlled an estimated sixty percent of Thailand’s entertainment industry, and informed readers that the country once had sent a blue-eyed woman to the Miss World competition, when Sirinya Winsiri, also known a Cynthia Carmen Burbridge, beat out another half-Thai, half-American for the coveted Miss Thailand title.

Of course there’s nothing new about this. The “Eurasian” look has been a niche entertainment staple for decades, coming into and going out of fashion several times, not just in Asia but worldwide. France Nuyen, born France Nguyen Vannga of French and Vietnamese-Chinese parents in Marseille, France, starred in Broadway’s The World of Suzie Wong (1958), for instance, and when Hollywood made the movie two years later, it was another Eurasian, Nancy Kwan, trained as a dancer in the British Royal Ballet, who got the part.

Yet, they were the exception rather than the rule and it wasn’t until fairly recently that Asians and part-Asians were considered first for Asian roles; remember the Swedish born Warner Oland as the inscrutable Chinese detective Charlie Chan (in the 1930s), Marlon Brando as an obsequious Japanese servant in Sayonara (1957), and Yul Brynner as the strutting King of Siam in The King and I (1956)?

It’s not been explained satisfactorily why the Eurasian “look” works. When asked, many spout clichés about the meeting of East and West or, may the gods help us, “globalization.” Time magazine said Channel V, the Asia-wide music television channel, was one of the first to broadcast the message of “homogenized hybridism,” quoting one of the channel’s marketing managers as saying, “We needed a messenger that would fit from Tokyo to the Middle East.”

The word “exotic” gets mentioned a lot as well, although the meaning of that word is seldom if ever made clear (even in dictionaries). It’s further explained that when Asians have some western features, they are more readily accepted by westerners, who are known, historically, for assigning second class status to people with darker skin. As for the Asians, it’s easy to say that it’s just a part of a global shift toward western style as demonstrated by their avid acceptance of rock music, Hollywood movies, blue jeans, European clothes and cars, Scotch whisky and French wines, KFC and Haagen Dazs. Thailand is famous for embracing western influence and material goods, during its boom years becoming the largest market outside Germany for the Mercedes-Benz, and consuming more Johnny Walker black label than any country other than the United States.

Ananda Eve’s father, John, who’s lived in Southeast Asia for more than thirty-five years, gets more specific. And he says it’s about racial stereotypes.

“It starts with biology,” he explains. “In Thailand, and elsewhere, the flat nose and dark skin are considered low class and the straighter nose and lighter skin are more acceptable because they’re associated with a higher class. My son was ‘discovered’ when he was working in a restaurant entirely because of the way he looks. He has his mom’s eyes and coloring. He has my nose. He also has a serenity from his mom’s Lao side, but it was the look that made him a movie star.”

How influential is this new look? Very. For many young people of both sexes all over Asia today western clothing, makeup and other adornment are not enough, so they dye and streak their hair blonde and red, while many young women have their eyes and noses surgically “westernized,” and their breasts enhanced. Thailand has some of the best beaches in Asia, but you won’t find many Thais there because they don’t want a dark skin; many carry umbrellas on sunny days and whitening creams are among the most popular cosmetic products sold, even when health authorities issue grave warnings about how damaging some of them may be for the skin.

Because many of the new stars—in Thailand and elsewhere— have lived and been educated in the West, or attended international schools in Asia, they’ve been westernized in other ways, too. Thus, some have strong foreign accents and sloppy articulation when they speak or sing in what is supposed to be their native language.

“These people are not Asian any more,” says John Everingham.

Thailand—Superlative!

I was heartened when I heard that the powers that be in Bangkok decided to erect billboards boasting that the city has the Longest Place Name in the world, as recognized by the Guinness Book of Records. Soon, visitors and residents were to be informed that the city’s formal name is (take a deep breath) Krungthepmahanakhon Amonrattanakosin Mahinthar-ayutthaya Mahadilokphop Nopphosin Ratchathaniburirom Udom-rathaniwetmahasa Amonphiman Awatansathit Sakkathatiya Witsanukamprasit.

That’s a total of 162 letters and according to the Royal Institute, it means, “City of Angels, Great City of Immortals, Magnificent City of the Nine Gems, Seat of the King, City of Royal Palaces, Home of the Gods Incarnate, Erected by Visvakarman at Indra’s Behest.” A total of 146 letters, in English, but the Thai words are what count. On maps, this blessedly has been shortened to Krungthep (City of Angels). The modern name Bangkok means City of Wild Plums.

I’m not sure why this is to be announced on billboards. Do the officials behind the campaign think this will make residents take pride in their capital, or add to the city’s exotic reputation and thus increase tourism interest? Or is it—as I hope—a demonstration of some newfound sense of official humor?

Thailand has many superlatives, make no mistake about it. In the Largest Restaurant category, Mang Gorn Luang (The Royal Dragon), a congregation of eating areas spread over four acres of land, with a capacity of five thousand diners who are served by more than one hundred cooks and five hundred servers in national costumes, is the current record holder. So vast is the area, some of the servers wheel about on roller skates, delivering up to three thousand dishes every hour. Surely this is another sign of Thailand’s sense of fun, or sanuk.

So, too, the world’s Largest and Tallest Hotels are in Thailand, the former being the Ambassador City Jomtien, with more than five thousand rooms, the latter being the Baiyoke Sky Hotel, with an observation deck and restaurants on the 77th to 79th floors. From which guests are told they can see the Gulf of Thailand on a clear day. (Another little Thai joke.)

Bangkok also claims the Largest Open Air Market Place, the Chatuchak Weekend Market, an overwhelming shopper’s paradise comprising approximately eight thousand stalls spread over thirty acres, where the best advice is if you see something you like, buy it immediately, as you’ll never find your way back. And be sure you do your shopping in the morning, before it becomes the World’s Hottest and Most Crowded Shopping Complex. This is not a joke.

More serious is the unchallenged record of having the Longest Reigning Royalty. His Majesty Bhumibol Adulyadej (Rama IX), succeeded his older brother on June 9, 1946, putting him at the sixty year mark in 2006 and ahead of the runner-up, England’s Queen Elizabeth, who has reigned since 1952.

Bangkok is also home of the Biggest Golden Teak-Wood Building, the 81-room Vimanmet Palace, built in 1901 by King Chulalongkorn (Rama V) as a royal residence. Construction began on an island in the Gulf of Siam, but before completion was moved to Bangkok’s Dusit Park near the palace of the present king. There, it served as home for the monarch, his ninety-two wives, and seventy-seven children. Today it’s a museum.

And let’s not forget the Biggest Gold Buddha Image, located in an otherwise unremarkable temple, Wat Traimitr, just east of the intersection of Yaowaraj and Charoen Krung Roads in Bangkok, near the city’s main railway station. The ten-foot-high statue for many years was covered with stucco and considered unimportant. In 1957, when it was moved to its present location, a transporting sling snapped and the image fell, cracking the stucco covering. Underneath was a solid gold figure, weighing five-and-a-half tons. Historians think it dates from Thailand’s Ayutthaya period (1378-1767), when monks likely disguised the image to protect it from Burmese invaders.

All this is well and good and I think such tales would make good billboard copy. However, I also hope that a sense of humor will prevail and Thailand’s lesser-known superlatives also get the attention they deserve.

Did you know, for instance, that the Kingdom boasts the Largest Freshwater Fish, the pla buk or pa beuk, a kind of catfish found in the Mekong River and its tributaries—the biggest documented catch measuring 9 feet, 10.25 inches long and weighing 533.3 pounds? Or the Tallest Stalagmite, rising two hundred feet from the floor of a cave called Tyham Nam Klong Ngu in Kanchanaburi? And let’s not overlook the Largest Grasshopper, a species ten inches long and found along the border between Thailand and Malaysia, a boundary it may be seen crossing in fifteen-foot leaps. A couple of them, deep-fried, and you’ve got yourself a meal. Also not a joke, not in Thailand.

Parents who are unimpressed by their children’s hair styles might find comfort in knowing that two brothers in a Hmong village north of Chiang Mai, Yee Sae Tow, age ninety, and Hoo Sae Tow, eighty-eight, have the Longest Hair, measuring 4.84 meters and 5.2 meters, respectively. It’s worn deadlock style and carried about like a length of coiled rope.

Probably we shouldn’t even talk about Thailand’s having the Fastest Economic Expansion and Decline, rising to 9.8 percent in 1995, making it the world’s fastest growing economy, then falling to -0.4 percent three years later. And do we really want to talk about the traffic, the humidity and the air?

Decidedly not. That’s not funny.

Tourism

Bob Levy—not his real name, I’ll spare him that—sent me an e-mail to remind me that we’d been university classmates in the United States. He said he and his wife were coming to Thailand and would like to meet me for a drink and whatever. They would be staying at the Oriental Hotel, he said, and because I didn’t remember him—it’d been more than forty years since graduation, after all—I asked them to meet me at another nice hotel closer to where I lived, for cocktails in the lobby bar, dinner to follow in an nearby cozy Thai restaurant that specialized in northeastern dishes.

Once our first round of drinks arrived, Bob confessed that he and I never knew each other; rather, he’d seen a story about me in the alumni magazine and figured it might be interesting to spend an evening with me on their first visit to Bangkok. He didn’t exactly put it that way, but it was obvious. He was paying for the drinks, so I ordered another and while I didn’t like being deceived or patronized, I figured what the hell, it was just one night and maybe he or his wife would be fun to get to know.

You’ve already guessed. I was wrong.

I won’t bore you with the details, just take my word for it when I say it was one of the least interesting and at times most infuriating evenings of my life in Bangkok, many of which are spent entertaining out-of-towners. Over a period of five hours we uncovered nothing we had in common other than the university, about which I had only distant memories.

Worse, they refused to leave the bubble in which they arrived and, from my point of view, they expected to leave the Land of Smiles without much of anything to smile about. Ordering a meal for them—their first taken outside their hotel, they said—was hampered by their belief that Thai food would either (1) poison them, or (2) merely invoke less than amusing damage to their gastro-intestinal systems. The appearance of sticky rice, part of the restaurant’s cuisine, actually made them ask if it were possible to get a potato.

The Levys seemed terrified by their excursion. The air was polluted; the traffic was worse than it was back home in Kansas City; the heat and humidity were insufferable; the food looked as if it were alive or, worse, dead; the language was abrasive and undecipherable; the river that ran past their hotel was brown; and they were sure they would contract AIDS from some passing doorknob or toilet seat. Why, I wondered, had they come to Thailand?

As we walked along the soi (street) to the main road to catch a cab after dinner, I spotted a small elephant being led by its trainer, who was selling bananas to passers-by, on the opposite side of the street. I thought this offered a perfect opportunity to introduce the Levys to something really Thai, and explained how the animal’s native habitat had been destroyed, forcing the elephants to come to the city to beg. They wouldn’t go near the tiny beast, practically withdrew into the wall in fear (on the opposite side of the street, mind you), and showed visible relief when they clambered into a taxi, to be hurried back to the security of their five-star hotel.

The Levys were what another writer, Carol Hollinger, author of a truly fabulous little book called Mai Pen Rai Means Never Mind (1965), called “the ‘Humph’ people,” the visitors to Thailand who greeted each new experience with a “Humph!” of disdain or disgust, the visitors who “stayed at the fancy hotels and hurried down to Jim Thompson’s to buy Thai silk.” And then went home.

Good riddance, say I, but the Thai government loves these awful people because they spend more money here than other visitors do. The backpackers are welcomed, reluctantly. The sex tourists, too, but never openly. And it’s those two visitor categories that give the country much of the reputation that the nation’s leaders claim they would like to shed.

In an effort to move in that direction, the Thai government in early 2002 announced plans to create two new tourist destinations that would appeal to the well-heeled traveler. Both schemes were hare-brained, but in Thailand you expected that. One was to turn a relatively unspoiled island in the southeast, Koh Chang, into “another Phuket” (the government’s phrase, not mine), but this time for the rich. The intent was to attract the kind of money that Phuket does, without the bars and trashy souvenir shops.

“We want to build a five-star image for Koh Chang by focusing on the environment,” said Pornchai Kaemapuckpong, a member of the government’s Koh Chang Development Committee. “People coming here should be proud that they can afford its high-end lifestyle.” How high-end? The goal was to attract tourists who could spend between US$1,250-1,500 a day. That Koh Chang was a national forest seventy five percent owned by the Royal Forestry Department and that the entire fifty-two-island Koh Chang archipelago was established as a Marine National Park in 1982 appeared to be regarded as irrelevant.

“For many, this has a depressingly familiar ring,” Vipasai Niyamabha wrote in The Nation (Feb. 2, 2002). “And just who stands to benefit? We have witnessed parts of Pattaya become another Patpong; Koh Tao like Khao San Road, and Koh Phi Phi another Patong Beach. Is Koh Chang destined to fill her coffers yet lose her soul?”

The other scheme was even crazier. It involved the governments of Thailand, Laos and Cambodia cooperating to construct a five-star resort that would be in what was to be called “The Emerald Triangle,” because at the time it was nothing but green jungle located where the three nations meet. The idea was to build a golf course that would allow players to swing their clubs in all three in a single round of play. There were problems, however, one being that much of the territory under discussion was heavily mined from the 1980s, when the Khmer Rouge were fighting in the area.

Major General Kitti Sufksomsatarn, director of the Thailand Mine Action Centre, estimated the cost of the de-mining would be in the neighborhood of US$10.2 million, not including construction of an access road required to reach the site, and take at least a year; he also said that his organization could not assist because the scheme was planned for commercial rather than humanitarian reasons. Talk about the Emerald Triangle stopped.

Why such crazy ideas get any attention at all led inevitably to the doors of the Tourism Authority of Thailand, then a highly politicized arm of the government. In adopting a tourism master plan the same month that these two schemes were announced, the TAT, as it’s known, identified five tourism categories, all aimed at the “quality” tourist. These ranged from beaches and islands with potential for development to nature reserves and forests to historical destinations. It was suggested, for instance, that the ancient capital of Ayutthaya be turned into a “living museum” like America’s Williamsburg.

That was in 2002, when Thailand called tourism the key sector leading to economic recovery following the Asian meltdown of 1997. In the next two years, the government had to deal with a slew of new challenges both at home and abroad. TAT figures showed arrivals climbed from under seven million in 1995 to almost eleven million in 2002, but that figure fell by more than a million in 2003, thanks to wars in the Middle East, SARS and terrorist incidents in the region. Sunny predictions regarding a comeback in 2004 subsequently were torpedoed by repeated bird flu outbreaks and separatist violence in Thailand’s Muslim south.

There were other problems, and these could be longer lasting. In a report to the government, the TAT (quoting The Nation on Feb. 25, 2002) concluded that Thailand was “caught in a trap of low prices and profits growth. Although the country welcomes around ten million tourists a year, foreign visitors are spending less time here, and less money, and perhaps looking to alternative destinations such as Vietnam and Cambodia.”

Thus, the country was “caught in a vicious circle of being a cheap destination.”

Over the years, Thailand’s image took other hits so serious they made “cheap” sound almost flattering. Most (in)famously, Newsweek (Jul. 12, 1999) said the country’s economic advantages over its neighbors were limited to “sex and golf.” In 2002, in a special section devoted to Thailand’s economy, The Economist said two growth industries that merited special attention were “sex and drugs.” And in 2004, when the TAT hired a group of researchers at California State University to explore ways the nation might attract more long-stay American tourists, it was told that something had to be done to overcome the perception that the entire country was “dirty, polluted and traffic congested.”

Still tourism boomed. Some of the growth could be attributed to the violence and political unrest in other Asian destinations (Indonesia, the Philippines, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Cambodia) or political incorrectness (Myanmar). When terrorist bombs destroyed Bali’s tourism in 2002, travelers came to Thailand’s southern islands instead. In 2004, a Lonely Planet survey named Thailand the number one destination in the world (ahead of Italy, Australia, India, and New Zealand); Condé Nast Traveler magazine ranked the Land of Smiles number two (behind Australia) for long-stay visitors and seven out of the top twenty hotels named were in Bangkok, Krabi, Chiang Mai and Phuket.

But there was a basic flaw in the figures. Ten million arrivals per year made Thailand one of the top twenty travel destinations in the world. But more than one of every ten were weekend shoppers and sex tourists from Malaysia who came for what they couldn’t get at home. Other repeat “visitors” were long-term foreign residents who left and re-entered to satisfy visa requirements. (I once took a five-hour bus ride to Cambodia eleven times in a single year for that reason, thus was counted eleven times.) Can the tens of thousands of resident business people and their families making frequent exits and re-entries honestly be called “tourists?”

(For the record, according to the Police Department’s Immigration Bureau, in 2003, of the ten or so million arrivals counted, 1.3 million came from Malaysia, one million more from Japan, 694,000 from Korea, 650,000 from Hong Kong, 629,000 from Singapore, 624,000 from China, 545,000 from the UK, 521,000 from Taiwan, 459,000 from the U.S., and 379,000 from Germany.)

In addition, there was concern about where the money went, once it was spent. Lisa Mastny, a researcher for Worldwatch Institute in Washington, DC, wrote in State of the World 2002 that “an estimated ninety percent of the world’s tourism enterprises are small businesses, from family-owned restaurants to one-person snorkeling operations. Yet governments are under increasing pressure to grant large-scale investors, including international airlines, hotel chains, and tour operators, easier access to tourism assets. Under a special economic relations treaty with the United States, for example, Thailand must grant companies owned and operated by U.S. investors the same legal treatment as those owned by Thai nationals.”

The result? Small, local businesses get crowded out and much of the revenue eventually generated by the big new development goes rushing back out of the country like the withdrawing waves on a beach.

No matter. Travel gurus nowadays advise against sustaining a low-end reputation, and Thailand seems to be going along. Not everyone agrees. Don Ross, a travel writer for the Bangkok Post, said in March, 2002, that “moving Thailand out of the cheap tour league might be counterproductive. Rather than raising the country’s profile, it might be interpreted as a reason to travel elsewhere.” Thailand needs to “keep its eyes on all market segments without belittling one at the expense of another.”

On the other hand, should the government manage to change its image and pull in more of the high rollers, the “Humph” people (including the Levys) might come back in force. I have an elephant on the street, standing by.

Country Music, Thai Style

Thirty or forty years ago, a fiery green papaya salad known as som tam was called “peasant food.” Because it originated in Thailand’s impoverished and densely populated, rural northeast, called Isan, it wasn’t regarded as fit for “proper” Thai mouths. With the migration of at least a million people from that region— to work in the factories and the tourism and construction industries that fueled much of the country’s economic boom—they brought the dish to Bangkok and began selling it from street stalls where others from Isan congregated, near the big hotels, building sites, and in poor residential neighborhoods. In just a few years, it started appearing on mom-and-pop menus and then on “proper” ones, and now it can be found in Thai restaurants around the world and may fairly be called a national dish.

Some people say the same thing could happen to Isan’s music. At least, it’s now sweeping Thailand, expanding from the niche market it once claimed and going “mainstream,” the way the papaya salad did, and the way country music did in the United States.

The comparison to what once was called “hillbilly” music in America is not inappropriate, because the various strains of music from Isan frequently describe the lives and social problems of Thailand’s poor the way country music sometimes still does in America, and they are performed emotionally, providing a refreshingly vibrant alternative to the formulaic and instantly forgettable Canto-Pop that fixes so much of the music across Asia, including Thailand. The music itself is characterized by the playing of traditional folk instruments and an insistent keyboard that almost sounds as if there might be a stoned snake-charmer nearby with a basket of sleepy snakes.

Generally, this Southeast Asian country music is called luuk thung (pronounced “look tung” and translated “child of the fields”), although there are several variations. Isan borders Cambodia and Laos and the traditions and instruments of the smaller countries have influenced their bigger, more modern neighbor. There are significant differences between Laotian mor lam and mor lam sing and Khmer kantruem, for example, but all generally are put under the luuk thung umbrella in the way blue-grass and western swing and other distinct sounds share space on a single Billboard country music chart.

Luuk thung first emerged from Thailand’s poor central plains and northeast in the 1960s and 1970s about the same time that the United States built air bases in Thailand (several of them in Isan) and Bangkok became a preferred R&R destination for GIs during America’s Indochina war. The cultural and political impact of a suddenly intensive foreign presence in Thailand made an impression on the local musicians, as they adopted jeans and tee-shirts, let their hair grow and embraced rock and roll.

The local musicians kept the sound of native instruments of wood and bamboo, however, and lyrics rarely strayed from the problems and causes of the Thais, even when some English phrases were added, as in Carabao’s hit, “Made in Thailand,” an eco-nationalistic song that told Thais to stop buying stuff made by foreigners. Others took up the cause of the farm girl pressed by poverty into prostitution.

As was true in American country music, the tone often ranged from poignant to angry—success coming from musical talent, but also lyrics that were relatable. Several bands, notably Caravan, strongly identified with Thailand’s growing democracy movement, along with leftist balladeers associated with the student uprising of 1972, calling their genre plaen phua chiwit, or “Songs for Life.”

Luuk thung went into semi-retirement in the 1980s as Thailand experienced a period of military coups, social uncertainty, and massive industrial development, beginning its comeback in the 1990s following a decade of dominance by western recording acts. (Even Michael Jackson appeared in concert in Bangkok during this period.) The revival was fueled in part by the success of Luuk Thung FM, which began broadcasting twenty-four hours a day in 1997. Two years later, the life of Phumphuang Duangchan, known as the Queen of Thai Country Song (think Loretta Lynn or Tammy Wynette), who died in 1992 at age thirty-one, was made into a television mini-series.

A number of odd events occurred during the production of the series, the singer’s songs emerging from a computer that wasn’t turned on, a missing script that reappeared only after the writer paid her respects to a statue of Phumphuang built after the singer’s cremation in a Suphan Buri temple, etc. When these eerie stories became known, and someone claimed to win the lottery after visiting the statue, the temple became a pilgrimage site. Today, thousands rub the bark of a big tree on the grounds, looking for those magic numbers, and four more statues have been erected.

Once snubbed by the urban hip and the Thai “Hi-So,” short for high society, the music found new fans in the expanding middle class, especially among white-collar workers and trend-conscious teenagers. Bangkok schools formed luuk thung clubs, presenting regular concerts; Rangsit University even produced an album of anguished songs about campus life. At the same time, leaders of the two most popular “Songs for Life” bands of the 1970s performed together with the Bangkok Symphony Orchestra and new clubs opened in Bangkok and elsewhere featuring groups led by similarly inclined activists. This continues today.

Many of the new singers, such as Apaporn Naskornsawan, Chakrapan (Got) Jakraphand, Dao Mayuree, Suda Srillamduan, Nujaree Sri Racha, and Yui Yartyeoh, became teen idols. Today’s stars even include a blue-eyed Norwegian social worker-turned-singer, Jonas (pronounced Jonat, as Thais have trouble with “s”)

Anderson, and the Dutch-British daughter of religious social workers, Christy (Krit-tee) Gibson, who have learned to enunciate the lyrics properly, and also to howl from the lungs and duplicate the severe vibrato that help telegraph the music’s emotion. Such techniques come naturally to Thai vocalists, and Anderson admits he has to learn the songs note for note.

With all this new popularity and social acceptance, the number of country music companies has grown ten-fold and there now are more than a hundred vocalists with recordings, triple the figure in 1996. Where once luuk thung singers didn’t need to be physically attractive and success relied solely on vocal prowess, now young, good-looking stars predominate, several of them making feature films along with music videos that get regular exposure on Thai language television stations. For some performers, tee-shirts have been replaced by flashy costumes reminiscent of traditional Thai dress. The line-up of eight or more dancers—key to any luk thung performance—is now choreographed and singers are taught by their record companies how to project more appealing personalities. An increasing number have their own web pages. And although they haven’t been particularly successful, Sony, Universal, Warner, EMI and other international companies have set up Thai music divisions. So far, none of this music has been exported.

Nor is there much money to be made at home, at least not by western standards. A popular luuk thung singer may be paid as much as US$500-1,000 per concert, not bad considering the country’s average annual per capita income is under $3,000. Most fees are much smaller, however, and personal appearances often generate more income than record sales, in part because of the widespread counterfeiting; the leading label, Grammy, in early 2002 reduced its CD price by half in an effort to compete with the bootleggers.

Where once a patronage system in the luuk thung business saw famous singers with up to a hundred dancers, musicians, comedians and other less famous singers on their payrolls, and the star vocalist owned everything from the dancers’ dresses to the instruments, now most performers work alone, managed by their record labels or independent production companies.

Only a few of today’s luuk thung singers have their own bands. Most travel a circuit alone, at its basic level appearing in several venues in a single night, backed by each club’s house band, performing familiar songs that everyone can sing. Many of the older vocalists work for tips from the audience, earning $100 or more a night.

Bangkok’s Tawan Isan Daeng is typical club. It’s a huge, dark warehouse of a room that serves a menu of Isan dishes and is popular with families as well as with young men and women lonesome for Isan and looking for a cheap night out.

After nine, when a seven-piece band appears, accompanied by a lineup of dancers in matching outfits and a round-robin procession of vocalists, the small dance floor in front of the stage fills with the middle-aged and young alike, repeating the easy, gliding steps and the sinuous waggling of arms and wrists held above their heads that characterizes simple Isan dance, backed by the drone and thump and lyric message that, for an evening, takes them home.

Greasing the Reels

Foreign film companies loooooooove Thailand.

After dozens of foreign productions—from The Ugly American, casting Kukrit Pramoj as a fictional prime minister opposite Marlon Brando, and the early James Bond extravaganza with Roger Moore, Man With the Golden Gun, which turned an island in Phang Nga Bay into a tourist attraction; to most of the Vietnam war films and no-brainers by Steven Seagal and Jean-Claude Van Dame—Thailand has cultivated a behind-the-camera labor force comfortable working with foreigners, and it has become recognized as a location of choice for filmmakers at affordable rates.

It has mountains and jungles, tropical island beaches, rivers and canals, ancient ruins and villages little changed since the Stone Age. It has vintage aircraft and tanks and elephants, all in working order. It has five-star hotels, where cinema egos can get the room service they believe they deserve.

That isn’t all. Thailand also has a reputation for cooperation. Virtually anything you want, if you are willing to pay for it, can be had. Want to close down traffic on one of the major roadways in Bangkok (as was done for Oliver Stone and others)? No problem. Want to halt shipping on the Chao Phraya River so you can blow up and sink a boat (as was done for Van Damme, an effort that required permission from police on both sides of the river and the marine police)? Easy as pie. Need an army of men with weapons or a fleet of helicopters? Say where and when you want delivery. Did one of the stars or production principals get thrown into jail, and you want him released? Piece of cake. Did someone die on the set and you want it to go unreported? Have a second piece of cake.

Filming is big business in Thailand, if not for the home-grown productions—whose budgets still rarely go over the US$1 million mark—then for those imported from Hong Kong, Japan, Germany, the U.K. and, most profitably, the U.S. Most of the Indochinese war films made in the past twenty years— The Deer Hunter, Air America, Good Morning Vietnam!, Platoon, Heaven and Earth, Uncommon Valour, Casualties of War and Operation Dumbo Drop among them—were filmed in Thailand.

So were Van Damme’s earlier Kickboxer and Street Fighter and his more recent Quest; Cutthroat Island, in which the Krabi coastline masqueraded unconvincingly as the Caribbean; The Phantom, based on the American comic strip; Mortal Kombat (both of them), The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles; a remake of Around the World in 80 Days, Angelina Jolie’s Beyond Borders; Oliver Stone’s Alexander; Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason, John Carpenter’s Vampires 3; another James Bond film, this one starring Pierce Brosnan, Tomorrow Never Dies; Steven Seagal’s Belly of the Beast; and, believe it or not, something called Surf Ninjas of the South China Seas.

Plus there has been a regular stream of documentaries, music videos and commercials. No one knows exactly how much this is worth to the Thai economy, although official revenues by 2003 from foreign productions had tripled since 1998, when the take was US$10 million. This is miniscule compared to the $10 billion spent by foreign visitors, but add the exposure that Thailand’s sights and scenery get, presumably easing the job of the state Tourism Authority, and add to that all the unreported exchange that takes place under the table.

“You know what it cost to lease the choppers and planes for Air America?” a Hollywood production manager said, insisting on anonymity because he wanted to work in Thailand again.

“We’re talking hundreds of thousands of dollars, all of it going straight into Air Force pockets. There were these aircraft that were supposed to be self-starting, but the batteries were dead, so we had to pay a fortune to fly in a battery starter from Lopburi. Back in the States, I could’ve bought an entire airplane for the same price.

“It doesn’t matter,” he continued, laughing, “because if the script is set in the tropics, this is the place. Apocalypse Now was shot in the Philippines and The Bridge on the River Kwai in Sri Lanka and not even tourists go to those places these days. Vietnam? Forget it. The communists didn’t invent red tape, but they perfected it.”

“Yes, it’s a racket,” said another longtime film worker, this one a resident of Thailand. “A production guy comes here with a local budget and Thailand says, ‘Hey, that sounds do-able,’ then a hundred actors and key crew check into hotels in Phuket, production begins, and about a week later, even the price of paint doubles or triples. What’s the studio going to do? Go home? There’s too much invested to do that. Of course, everybody knows this by now—when you go to Thailand, they take you for a ride. The bottom line is that it’s still cheaper here than other places. And more professional. And when the cameras are turned off, more fun.”

“You must, let me repeat that, must have an agent working for you in the country before you get here,” said Mona Nahm, originally from Germany and a co-production coordinator for Kantana Productions, a Bangkok-based company with nearly fifty years of film and television experience. “If you come here and don’t have an agent, you’re going to die because the paperwork is a killer.”

Mona said that when the film company for Bloodsport, a low-budget martial arts movie starring then-unknown Jean-Claude Van Damme, came to Thailand in 1984, the producer hadn’t done his homework. When the film’s point man arrived at the Bang-kok airport, they had tourist visas. That stopped them until they got non-immigrant visas, which would allow them to apply for work permits and go into production. When they returned with all of their cameras and other equipment and declared its value at US$1million, they were asked to deposit a cash bond in the same amount to guarantee they would not sell it. The deposit was refundable, but the company didn’t have the money, so Bloodsport was not made in Thailand.

“There are two categories of foreign film made in Thailand,” said Skip Heinecke, a twenty-year veteran of the Hollywood PR wars, then a vice president of Royal Garden Resorts in Bangkok. “There are the ones using Thailand as a setting for somewhere else, the Vietnam films and so on, and the ones about Thailand. There aren’t very many of the latter.”

One reason was the Film Board, a section of the Prime Minister’s office, created partly in response to the Japanese porn movies that were filmed in Thailand some years ago. This was a panel of forty men and women from numerous other ministries and departments that wanted to know, in the words of one production chief, “everything including the color of the leading lady’s knickers.” That wasn’t precisely true, of course, but control was fairly strictly maintained. The application for filming in Thailand required a detailed plot synopsis along with forty copies of the script in Thai and a promise that “the filming process and end product shall not adversely affect the national security, public order or good morals.”

It was the Film Board’s job to see that the country was not slandered. When part of The Deer Hunter was shot in Patpong, for example, the scene was allowed because the movie was set in Vietnam and the sign erected outside the bar, during filming, was in Vietnamese. If the movie was about Thailand, such bars and prostitution were taboo subjects, as was Buddhism, sexually transmitted diseases (especially AIDS), drugs, and anything that might in any way denigrate royalty. This last situation resulted in moving production of the big budget Anna and the King (starring Jodie Foster and Chow Yun-Fat) in 1999 from Thailand to Malaysia after the Film Board rejected the first three submitted scripts for reported inaccuracies.

“And to make sure you don’t submit one script and then try to film another, there’re always at least two members of the Film Board present during shooting and they must sign off on all raw film before it can leave the country for processing,” said Supaporn (Penny) Kanjanapinchote, who worked for twenty-three years for a Hong Kong-based film company and had a firm of her own in Bangkok. In addition, she said, Film Board representatives must be paid at least a thousand baht a day and given transportation and accommodation allowances at the same rate as that of the film crew.

The person regarded as the king of Thailand’s cinema hill was Santa Pestonji, a cigar-smoking wine connoisseur whose father was a noted Thai filmmaker. Ethnically Parsi but a Thai citizen, his first big assignment was The Killing Fields in 1984 and he coordinated in-country services for a majority of the big-budget foreign films since. Khun Sant, as he was called, coordinated everything from transportation to hotel rooms to catering and permits to equipment to locations and sets.

He also assisted with crises, including the wildcat strike that halted filming of The Killing Fields in Phuket when the American studio gave private rooms to American technicians and put their local peers two to a room, tantrums Danny Glover threw during the shooting of Operation Dumbo Drop when he was called Khun Danny—because the honorific Thai “khun” sounds like the American epithet “coon,” the high profile scuffle on the set of The Beach when local activists accused him of siding with foreigners even as they were ravaging the pristine Krabi beach, and the suicide of an assistant director during the filming of The Phantom in Krabi. For smaller problems, such as obtaining last-minute permission to use someone’s front garden or block traffic in a neighborhood or anything else causing inconvenience, he carried an attaché case full of cash.

Smaller fish swimming in the cinema sea were the specialists, or subcontractors. One, Oy Pachara, was a production assistant who took foreign passports to the Immigration Department so all the foreigners who planned to remain in Thailand for longer than fifteen days could work legally. She said that for Cutthroat Island she processed two-hundred passports.

Another specialist, Jack Shirley, a CIA agent who helped organize the Thai border police’s air force in the 1960s and later played a major role with Air America in the secret war in Laos, now was paid to coordinate police permits, a seemingly effortless task that he performed on his mobile phone, calling all his old cop buddies from his regular seat at the end of the Madrid Bar in Patpong. It was Jack who coordinated the sinking of the ship in the Chao Phrya River for Jean-Claude Van Damme. A big budget French film in 2002 required the closure of thirty-two public roads.

A third specialist was Richard Lair, a longtime resident of Thailand called “Professor Elephant” for his pachyderm expertise. He was hired by the Disney studio for Operation Dumbo Drop, a feature based on the true story of the U.S. military’s moving an elephant several hundred kilometers during the war in Vietnam to replace one accidentally killed in a village, eventually dropping it from a helicopter by parachute.

Richard, who said that it made sense for the animal to be brought to Thailand from the U.S. because it was better trained than any local ones, auditioned more than a hundred elephants before he found the one he liked for other stunts, and then he worked with the mahouts throughout the filming, using his Thai fluency to assist in communication between Thais and the foreign crew.

One more specialist was Neville Melluish, a pin-striped insurance broker whose Bangkok office is festooned with Japanese samurai swords, machine guns, and a World War II-era bazooka, souvenirs from earlier productions. He said that for The Killing Fields, helicopters were leased from the Royal Thai Army and two of them crashed. They were twenty-two-year-old Hueys, noisy workhorses left over from Vietnam’s war with America, he said, and not worth much. Still, when the next foreign film company came to Thailand and wanted choppers, the military said no.

“So I found an insurance company that would, for a price, insure the aircraft for more than their true value,” he said, “and I was able to guarantee the army that if one of their choppers went down, it would be replaced by a brand new one. That was for Casualties of War. Happily, none of them crashed.”

Steve Rosse, a set decorator in the U.S. before he became a columnist for The Nation, a daily English language newspaper in Bangkok, worked on Oliver Stone’s Heaven and Earth, filmed mostly in Phuket. “Oliver wanted white egrets in the rice fields,” he recalled, “and we don’t have white egrets in southern Thailand, so he sent a guy to Isan, who captured a couple of dozen of the birds and brought them in cages on a flatbed truck. By the time they arrived, a third were dead, another third had had their feathers blown off, and the survivors, who appeared in a long shot, little white dots in a field of green, for about two seconds, within three days were eaten by wild dogs and ferrets.”

Another story was told about The Deer Hunter. When the studio advance man checked into the Oriental Hotel in 1978, he met a man who insisted he was a colonel in both the Thai police and the Thai army who promised to arrange all security. The “colonel” walked away with a small fortune in cash and was never seen again. It also cost the producer of another major film a substantial sum to be released from jail after he openly smoked a “Hollywood cigarette” in a popular Bangkok restaurant.

Indeed, many of Hollywood’s losses are self-inflicted. “This is not a big surprise,” said one production executive. “Let’s admit it, Hollywood is just another word for waste. Between the big spenders—egos on an expense account—and the creative accountants, you say the word ‘Hollywood’ and it’s an invitation to larceny.”

Nor is it merely a case of the Thais getting fat from Hollywood’s lavish spending. In typical Asian style, Thais also skim the earnings of other Thais. “A typical stunt,” said one Bangkok-based facilitator, “is for the Thai hired to contract a crew of drivers to ask for five hundred baht a day for each one, then pay the drivers two hundred, keeping the rest for himself, and if the driver complains, fire him.” Similarly, a local production secretary said she routinely kicked back twenty five percent of her salary to her boss. “So what,” she said. “I still get four times what I can make in a regular job.”

“And,” said Skip Heinecke, “she still costs less than someone working in the same capacity in Hollywood. That’s why there are so many runaway productions. In Thailand, the below-the-line crew will work long hours, seven days a week, without overtime, without complaint.”

“You know about ‘tea money.’ This is called ‘facili-tea money,’” said Supaporn Kanjanapinchote. “If you have a big budget, I can deliver. If you have a small budget, I can still deliver, but it’s different. Cheaper hotels. Not so many stunts. You get what you pay for.”

“The bottom line is getting the job done,” said Richard Lair. “Hollywood is willing to pay fifty percent more if they know that they’ll get delivery. That’s what Khun Sant does. He guarantees delivery. This is true in any business, if you’re going to be successful—get the job done. No matter what it costs, so long as you think you can still make a profit. And in the movie business, profit is always a hopeful guess.”

“With the competition of Hollywood’s so-called blockbusters in the movie houses, the audience for local films has shrunk, so not many are made these days, and the local budgets are shrinking, too,” said Stirling Silliphant, Oscar-winning writer of In the Heat of the Night, who lived the last seven years of his life in Bangkok.

“Some of us tried to get Hollywood and New York to put money into local production of films for television, a TV series, something that would be true to Thai ways, yet commercially attractive in foreign markets. It hasn’t happened yet. So for now, the talented local professionals will have to get by on what Hollywood brings. It’s a good living for most of these people and let’s be honest, we’re all in this for the money. The glamor, too, but mostly it’s the cash.”