The Big Easy

[Note: Most of this was written on Wed., March 1, 2006.]

I’m writing this first entry from the distilled comfort of a plush Starbucks chais, in the well air-conditioned, brightly lit Ploenchit shopping center on Soi 2 off Sukhumvit Road, in Bangkok, at 3:00 p.m. on a Wednesday. I don’t have work today. I woke up at noon (11:59, actually, which, in the same way that $9.99 sounds like a better deal than $10.00, seems less pathetic than 12:00), not because I stayed up late or needed to catch up on my sleep but because I could. I returned on Monday from four days of relaxation on Ko Samui. Tomorrow I work from 10:00 – 12:00, then have three days to recover before leaving for another island, Ko Pha Ngan, on Monday morning. I will spend five days there, two at a swish resort (at about $50 a night) and three amongst partying backpackers, topless Swedish girls, and beachside bungalows, before returning on Friday night so that I can teach a class on Saturday.

So goes life as an ex-pat in Thailand. For the last two months, this is how it’s been: four hours a week of work (and getting paid for the “minimum” 50 hours per month anyway); drinking on Tuesday nights; awaking whenever; four-day excursions to the beach, to Cambodia; afternoon naps and all-day international film festival movie binges. You can see why I haven’t had time to get around to this blog until now.

In Thai, Bangkok translates loosely as the “City of Angels.” After four months here, however, I can make a pretty strong case for assigning Bangkok the nickname of a different American city: It is, more than New Orleans ever was, the “Big Easy.” On first glance, or even first visit, Bangkok appears to operate with the same organic frenzy of many of the world’s major megalopolises. It’s a “crush of humanity” and “assault on the senses” (as the countless tourist guides and travelogues might describe it), with honking horns and clicking high heels, stifling fumes and charcoal-hot food stalls blocking the sidewalks, buildings (and building) for miles in all directions, and people everywhere, everywhere -- chattering, smoking, cell phoning, laughing, hawking -- all day and night long, every day of the year. The legendary traffic -- along with the heat and the hookers, one of the only features of the city I heard much about before arriving (“Awful traffic,” my grandmother and parents’ friends would tell me, shaking their heads as if discussing a friend’s nephew who is in rehab) -- is, alone, enough to grant Bangkok “chaotic urban” status. (On their tour here a few weeks ago, my parents were informed that Bangkok has the third-worst traffic in the world, which, for anyone who has spent even one day here, is a surprising piece of trivia only because of the word third. First and second on the list, in case you were wondering -- and of course you were -- are Mexico City and Cairo.)

Upon closer inspection, however -- inspection, it should be repeated, that is being carried out by someone who works half as much as he did back home and still earns more per hour than many doctors here -- Bangkok offers, more than anything else, a cush respite from the stresses of life in the West. The farang flock here in droves, from every Western corner of the world -- America, Britain, Germany, Australia -- lured and then kept here by the warm weather, cheap goods, amazing food, and girls who are easy in every sense of the word -- easy on the eyes, easy with a smile, easy to amuse, easy to impress, and, well, just plain easy. (Why be coy? The girls themselves certainly aren’t.) A friend of mine here told me that there are about a million ex-pats in Thailand. Three-quarters of them must be in Bangkok. 750,000 ex-patriots in a city of about 7-8 million -- that’s one of every ten people. On Sukhumvit Road, where I live, it’s probably one in five.

It’s easy to see why. The Thais are friendly, welcoming, open-minded, and quick with smiles as warm as the beaches in the South. The food deserves its reputation -- it’s fragrant, fresh, healthy, spiced to perfection with an array of local herbs. As for the climate, yes, it’s too hot here, but constant sweating is still preferable to most (albeit not me) than winter in Berlin or Glasgow or New York. (I haven’t donned a sweatshirt since I got off the plane, five months ago.) But any discussion of the easiness of ex-pat existence here must begin, surely, with the lifestyle a Western salary in a developing country affords us. For all the talk of the inflation that has occurred here over the last 15-20 years, most things are still absurdly and irresistibly cheap. You can get a delicious, nutritious meal on the street for 25-30 baht -- that’s about 75 cents -- and a beer in a bar for a little more than a dollar. A perfectly good t-shirt or pair of boxers will run you about two dollars at a market, depending on your bargaining skills. Pirated CDs and DVDs go for $2.50 apiece; a movie in a lovely Cineplex theater, $2.00. It’s the one thing in Bangkok that never gets old. And while it’s true that many ex-pats aren’t incommensurately wealthy, even my farang friends who earn Thai salaries seem to coast by rather comfortably. Just go to any Starbucks or hotel bakery, where prices are comparable to what they are in the States: most of the clientele is white. Generally speaking, the only people in Bangkok who can routinely afford Venti lattes, rock concerts, and Italian dinners are tourists and ex-pats.

And then, of course, there are the women. Famous and infamous both, Thai women mostly deserve the reputation that now fully precedes them. They’re not all gorgeous. That’s a myth. (One that, in retrospect, I’m not sure why I believed before I came. I had this image of a land of genetically perfect beauty queens, which, of course, doesn’t exist anywhere. Except Sweden.) But they are all thin, which by itself separates them from half of all American women (who are also, it’s worth (chauvinistically) adding, automatically eliminated from beauty-queen-status contention by this fact alone). Thai girls also all have soft flowing hair, beautiful complexions, trendy tight-fitting clothes, and light-up-your-hour smiles made even more winning by flawless teeth. (Perfect genetics or great dental plans? I haven’t asked.) Most relevantly, Thai girls are more approachable and then more easily charmed than their fuller-of-themselves and fuller-bodied Western counterparts.

All of which accounts for the very noticeable prevalence of white-guy-Thai-girl couples in Bangkok. Walking down Sukhumvit Road and its sois, it seems as if every other farang male is accompanied by a devoted (and generally much younger) Thai female holding his hand. The men are invariably overweight, bald, and sporting European soccer club jerseys. The women are skinny and fresh-faced, if not outright beautiful. Most of these couples are the ephemeral sort -- sex tourists or single-minded ex-pats (a.k.a. “sexpats”) and the bar girls they picked up the night or the week or the month before. I, for one, find the phenomenon endlessly fascinating. You watch the scene and the questions inevitably flood in. She barely speaks a word of English. Apart from the intermittent romps in room 2802, could he possibly be enjoying this? Or, That is one of the ugliest men I’ve ever seen outside Arkansas. Could she possibly be enjoying this? (Incidentally, the answers to these two questions are, respectively: intermittent beats the hell out of never; and: does a McDonald’s counter girl like serving fries?) (Actually, in all seriousness, it appears -- emphasis on appears -- that the women really don’t mind. They flirt, giggle, and sound out complete English sentences with egalitarian élan and charm -- that is to say, regardless of the age, infirmity, or unattractiveness of their men of the moment.)

The phenomenon isn’t limited just to bar girls and their concupiscent clients. I’ve lost count of the number of perfectly respectable middle-aged men I’ve met -- in short, guys who wouldn’t, or shouldn’t, be described as sex-pats -- who visited Thailand, fell in love, and ended up staying. I’ve also met guys who aren’t so much falling in love with limitedly intelligible young maidens as they are actively seeking it. I even met one who admitted it. His name was Danny. We were in the same TESOL (Teaching of English to Speakers of Other Languages) training course together. Half the class was there, ostensibly, because they had landed in Bangkok, run out of money, and now needed a way to earn some back. I think they had been pulled straight off Khao San Road by the company running the course. (“Hey you! Yeah, you with the tattoos and bead necklaces. You look English-speaking and shoeless. Wanna teach English to hot, young, impressionable, plaid-skirted Thai girls? The hiring criterion is that you speak English. …”) One Thai woman who ultimately got her certificate barely spoke English herself. I was there for the certification, the only way I could obtain my work permit. Danny, he told me, was there to meet chicks. More precisely, he was there to get his certificate so that he could teach English and meet chicks that way. But not the kind found on Cowboy or Soi Zero. He said he wanted to meet the respectable kind, and I completely believed him.

Danny was a software engineer from the Northwest who spent half the year as a private tech consultant and the other half in Thailand, as an aspiring ESL teacher and wife-hunter. He was in his early forties, moderately overweight, mildly intelligent, and personable in that slightly awkward way that makes you wish he wasn’t as outgoing as he was. He also had an awful sense of humor -- cheesy and unapologetic in its sheer dorkiness. Awful. During breaks, I would sit in the lobby and read. Danny would wander from classmate to classmate, looking for a victim more patient than the last to chat up or crack a joke to. Usually, towards the end of his wanderings he would amble up to me and ask things like, “So, you like to read?” Yes, I would answer. “I love to read too,” he would continue. “I read everything I can get my hands on.” Uh-huh, I would respond, nodding politely, and wonder, but not really, why such an avid reader spent all his free time in a constant quest for insipid small talk.

But I’m just being a dick. Basically Danny was one of those perfectly nice, generally harmless, transparently happy people you hope to God never sits next to you on an airplane. During one lunch, I found myself in the same cafeteria as Danny. He asked if he could join me, and I said yes because I couldn’t say no. We exchanged the standard one-step-beyond-introductory questions -- What do you think of the course so far? What was your life like back home? -- before inevitably arriving at the subject of how we each ended up on the other side of the world. I asked Danny why, if he had a good job back home and few prospects here, he chose to spend half of every year in Thailand. “Well, to be honest,” he responded, “I’m sort of looking for a wife.”
I said something like “I see,” or “Oh yeah?” or maybe I just raised an eyebrow and kept chewing.

“I don’t know. I don’t really like American women,” he continued. “I’m a little bit shy and they don’t seem to like me. They’re not very nice to me. I find Asian women more approachable, less snobby.”

More like less choosy, is what I was thinking. But in fact I found Danny’s childlike candor charming. His goal, along with the supporting rationale, was the same as that of so many other guys who also preferred Asian girls (or even Asian-American girls, back home). The only difference was that Danny was willing, or ingenuous enough, to admit it.

To me Danny epitomizes the Bangkok ex-pat ethos, if not the Bangkok ex-pat himself; it’s a subnation of men and women (mostly men) who stay here because -- quite simply, and to discard with euphemism -- they can’t hack it anywhere else. Can’t afford that downtown high-rise apartment you’ve always wanted? Move to Bangkok. Only wanna work twenty hours a week? Try Bangkok. American women don’t like you? Come to Thailand! And if you can’t earn your way into the upper decile or find a beautiful girl who likes you in Thailand, I’m here to tell you, buddy: it ain’t happening anywhere else either. It’d be wise to take heed the inverse of Sinatra’s famous apothegm about New York: if you can’t make it here, you can’t make it anywhere. It’s a phenomenon my friends and I have dubbed the “Bangkok Trap,” and the result is a city with the biggest ex-pat population in Asia, many of whom never plan to return home. In the end, Bangkok ruins you not as New York does, with its unwinnable rat race, but rather with its accommodating languor and tantalizing combination of first-world amenities at third-world prices. It chews you up this way and then spits you out, returning you home spoiled and lazy and unfit for Western life.

Two of my fellow teachers, one of whom is approaching middle age and the other of whom is already there, are perfectly content to spin the proverbial hamster wheel as long as that wheel is here. When they arrived, they had planned to stay a few months. It’s five years later now, and here they still are, teaching test prep, chasing Thai girls, smoking weed and hitting the bars on weeknights, living the dream. Call it the Un-American Dream. Another colleague of mine, a young woman earning a salary that would barely keep her afloat in any major American city but which made her rich here, could hardly bring herself to leave despite a job that had gone sour and a group of friends that had turned on her. (That’s a story for another day’s blog.) She told me that she still considered the States her true home, but that it was hard to give up the lifestyle her salary allowed her here. She finally returned home to Chicago four months ago. Rumor has it she now plans to return. The Bangkok Trap strikes again.

If I sound a tad judgmental in my assessment of the easy life, that’s because I am. I can’t help it. It’s the neurotic Jew and Protestant work ethic in me, combining individualistic forces and rearing their collective ugly head. More to the point, it’s the American in me that I can’t seem to (or perhaps don’t want to?) shake -- that entrenched and constant desire to always be both on the move and moving forward. Ultimately it will be my ability to reconcile these two competing ideologies -- not so much East vs. West or Zen vs. Judeo-Christian as Type-A-striver vs. Type-B-backpacker-slash-beach-bum -- that will largely determine how happy I am here and how well I adjust when I get home. Should I sign on for extra hours at work, some curriculum development, which would bolster my resume, or should I spend those hours napping and reading my book out by the pool? Should I go to the beach, or should I take a more “cultural” trip, one that will fascinate and edify and make me a more interesting person, a more dangerous writer? How many more structureless days before the torpor that has overrun me like a virus becomes a character trait rather than a temporary side effect of my environment? Will I bring it home with me? Will I be spoiled, lazy, and unfit for American life, to be judged unfairly by others like me? Would I be content casting aside my Type-A-striver values, buying up some property on Ko Samui, and living out the remainder of my days in a breezy beachside bungalow, as that Vietnam vet we met last month did?

No. No was the simple conclusion I reached during my third consecutive day of Type-B doing-nothingness on the beach in January. I was enjoying my book and the thrice-a-day naps, but I needed more. More action, more conflict, more direction. More “on the move” and forward movement. The American in me craves goals and achievement -- concrete, striven-for destinations to go along with the journey. For better or worse, I need to have something to show for my time. Witness this essay, composed at the expense of time that could have been spent exploring Bangkok’s canals or talking to locals.

In December, a friend and I were lounging out by the pool at our gym. It was a sunny, breezy day -- clear-skied, about 85 degrees. And it was 2:00 p.m. on a Tuesday. We were both done with work for the day, and neither of us had to go back in until the following evening. I was reading The New Yorker; he was about to take a nap. “This is the life, isn’t it?” he said.

“Definitely,” I agreed. But now, as I’ve said, I’m not so sure. Yes, I worry about the consequences of so many lazy Tuesdays. On the other hand, they certainly have their appeal, don’t they? I wouldn’t mind falling into the trap for a while, as long as I had a way out.

It may not be the life, but it’s certainly an easy one.