Bangkok Attracts Expatriates

[george]

Bangkok attracts expatriates

Even short-term visitors to Thai capital keep running up against big contrasts.

BANGKOK, Thailand -- Bangkok is a city filled with all kinds of engaging people. The challenge -- as you may have heard -- is getting to them, though I found Ben with no problem.

On Saturday morning, I walked out of my hotel at the end of Soi 2 to Sukhumvit Road, where I headed west -- the tall Skytrain track looming suggestively above my left shoulder -- to Soi 12, where I had been told to look for Crepes & Co. on the opposite side of the street from Cabbages & Condoms.

Like many of the people I meet, Ben was a FOAF (friend of a friend), accompanied by a few friends: two American expats and a handsome young Thai. The Americans were working in government, law, computers; enjoying life, for the most part, in a steamy, overgrown metropolis packed with pleasant, decorous people. Though, they all admitted wearily, they were frequently asked to sing "Hotel California" (especially Ben, who hailed from San Francisco). And there was no good Mexican food around. Which, for a city with a large foreign population, in a country that also eats fire, was a little surprising. But there were a number of other distractions for farangs (foreigners).

"I know somebody who works for the U.S. Embassy," John said. "One of her jobs is to send home the bodies of Americans who die here. There is a high suicide rate in the expat community. And she told me that when she goes to the home she always finds three things: a large stash of cash, drugs and sexual paraphernalia."

Late for the movie, I grabbed a taxi, a big mistake. Unable to make a right on Sukhumvit Road, the driver headed east, then south, making a long, circuitous loop on a car-clogged Saturday night. Five minutes before show time, he dropped me off in front of the Emporium.

Theater on top floor

A glittering mall, it rose up instead of spreading out. The cineplex, of course, was on the top floor. Escalators carried me in air-conditioned splendor to a maze of food islands and indoor cafes through which I hurriedly worked my way to the ticket counter. There, a young woman handed me my ticket and then brought her hands together under her chin and bowed. The uniformed young man who checked my ticket did the same. I had never been so respectfully ushered into a movie.

This gesture, known as a wei, would have seemed out-of-place had the ticket been for, say, "Shallow Hal." But I was going to see a Thai film, "The Overture," about a village boy who grows up to be a master of the ranad, or bamboo xylophone, playing it even during World War II when traditional Thai arts were actively discouraged by a regime bent on modernization. It was a beautifully told story that made an eloquent statement about the role of national culture in perpetuating national identity. Before the movie began everyone in the theater stood, as they do before all movies, even "Shallow Hal," while the national anthem played and the screen filled with a photo montage of the beloved king.

The taxi Sunday morning had it easy, gliding unobstructed down Sathorn Nua Road to Christ Church. Attending Holy Communion in an Asian capital gives you a whole new perspective.

The interior featured wooden chairs with armrests instead of pews, and there were no kneelers, or even cushions for kneeling. The clear Gothic windows on the south side looked out on clumps of palms, bringing to mind a phrase coined by the writer Pico Iyer: tropical classical.

The Anglican service, conducted by an Australian priest, was very informal, even the baptism of the triplets: Chawin, Chawit, Chawisa. Afterwards, everyone repaired to the parish hall where tables had been pushed together for a tropical classical feast: bowls of calamari salad and curried chicken sat brilliantly next to square pans of macaroni and cheese.

"Do you always eat like this after the service?" I asked a woman.

"We always have lunch," she said. "But usually something simpler. Today's special because of the baptism."

Most of the parishioners were Anglo expats, a few with Thai spouses (predominantly wives). I asked a Canadian consultant how he liked living in Bangkok.

"No safety net"

"There are constant assaults on your conscience," Dave said thoughtfully. "The way the disadvantaged are treated, the great gap between rich and poor. There are no retirement funds, no social welfare, no safety net.

"I was in a taxi the other day and the driver spoke some English. It was not his real job. And he said, 'You don't want to live here.' 'Why?' I asked. 'You will die young.'

"He said he works all the time to put his children through school. Then when he gets sick, he'll have no money for health care and he'll die. He had nothing to look forward to. There is no Florida here."

For farangs, of course, things were different. "Thais are gracious, accepting," Dave said, "up to a point. They smile. They give the wei. It shows respect, deference to your position. I have a hard time with that at work. You and I don't do that; we see each other as equals. Why can't they come up to me and tell me what they think? But they don't. That's not their way."

His wife came by, and motioned to a woman sitting at a nearby table. "She runs an organization that tries to get girls out of prostitution and into a profession," she said. "They have a beauty parlor in Patpong (the famous red-light district), where the girls work as beauticians."

"It can be tough on men here," Dave said. "I've seen men deteriorate, marriages ruined. Sometimes they come here with shaky marriages and that's not a good thing. They come here and find something that was missing from their lives." He said there was a name for men who come looking for excitement -- VOMITs: Vile Old Men in Thailand.

One morning I took the Skytrain to the river and then caught a water taxi heading north, piling on with a colorless crowd enlivened here and there by a few blue-skirted schoolgirls and saffron-robed monks. The boat churned through choppy currents of mud-colored water, high-rise hotels and lopsided hovels lining the banks.

I got off near the Grand Palace and walked up Mahathat Road to Thammasat University to meet Chat, a friend of a FOAF (a FOAFOAF) and a professor at the university.

He led me around a tight collection of faculties -- student dorms, he explained, were far off campus -- squeezed between the Chao Phraya River and the grassy expanse of Sanaam Luang. He would do a quick wei, often in the middle of a sentence, whenever a colleague, or even student, passed by. (The height of the joined hands varied, I had read, depending on the status of the other person.) Some of the students -- those taking exams -- wore white blouses (or shirts) and dark skirts (or trousers, held up by belts with buckles carrying the Thammasat seal). An outdoor boxing ring stood behind the law school.

We had lunch in the large faculty dining room: boiled chicken soup, though it sounded -- and tasted -- much better in Thai: tom kha gai. We poured it over rice. A TV set was on in the front of the room, while Thai pop music, unconnected to the show, drifted out of speakers.

Chat told me that he saw no conflict between his professional and religious lives. "Buddhism is advanced psychology," he said. "When you have stress, something you can't clarify, you use the way of meditation. You pray to Buddha. Sometimes you talk to a monk."

A night market

That evening I made the obligatory visit to Patpong. I had called the woman from church, expressing interest in her work with prostitutes, but she had refused to see me, insisting she was too busy. So I was demoted from crusading journalist to lonely voyeur. Not that I saw much. The two main streets were filled, surprisingly, with a kind of night market, and I strolled them both, seeing through the occasional open door a lineup of young girls dancing in bikinis. In one humdrum bar two hardened regulars played pool to the implausible strains of "Greenfields."

I preferred exploring the dead-end sois of Sukhumvit. Bangkok was a comparatively safe city, despite a capacity for spectacular crimes, the coverage of which had become the bread and butter of the local, non-English-language newspapers. Most of the mayhem was contained within the local population, but recently an Israeli tourist had been taken into questioning for the murder of his wife, whose various parts were turning up in canals around town. And one morning I read in the Bangkok Post that the Rev. John White of Boston -- a friend of the Rev. Paul Shanley, one of the priests embroiled in the sexual abuse scandal -- had died in Bangkok.

You never knew what you would find at the end of a soi. One night, wandering through a hotel lobby, I ran into a large group of Thais emerging from an Amway meeting. "So you're going to be rich," I said to the pleasant young woman who needlessly, and futilely, explained the philosophy. "Not rich," she corrected me. "Secure."

Another night I came upon a singer sitting on an outdoor terrace reading a book on English grammar. (Ah, the big city.) Rose had just finished her set: Thai pop music for guests of the hotel.

But her love was jazz: Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Billie Holiday. I could actually see her as the Thai Billie Holiday. Her boyfriend, she said, was a jazz musician, with a regular gig in the Bamboo Bar at the Oriental Hotel.

We walked to Sukhumvit Road and stopped for a nightcap on the sidewalk. A short-legged table hugged the shutter of a closed-down shop, two drink menus resting atop it. Inches from the traffic stood a portable, well-stocked bar, which carried, somewhat grandiosely, the name "Bar 5/7" (no doubt because those were the numbers of the sois it stood between). We took our seats on the tiny stools and the bartender came to take our orders -- Singha beer for me, orange and lime juice for Rose. When he returned, he placed our drinks on the table as if we were regulars. Thai pop music blared from a neighboring shop while the nightly parade passed inches from our eyes.

--South Florida Sun-Sentinel 2004-09-04

[Indo-Siam]

Well written piece - fairly accurate appraisals.

Cheers!

Indo-Siam

[meadish_sweetball]

Yep, that's pretty much what you hear and see.

But why write 'wai' as 'wei' - this isn't Germany.