Ten's a Crowd

One of the two things that, even after nine months here, continues to amuse me -- the other is the bar girl-sex tourist symbiosis -- is the gross over-employment throughout Bangkok. Whatever establishment you happen to patronize -- 7-Eleven or McDonald’s; bar, department store, food stall, or bank -- you can bet your baht there will be no shortage of young, solicitous employees there to service you. Everyone knows Asia is a pretty populace place. But most of us don’t consider Thailand a prime offender, and when we think of overpopulation, we generally think of crowded streets, noisy traffic jams, and unemployment, not too many happily employed middle-classers. Yet that’s exactly what you’ll find in Bangkok.

In many bars, on my many weeknights, there are three or four waitresses for every customer. I once saw 20-30 luminously clad bar girls in one bar, most of them wandering aimlessly or chatting with each other because there was only room for three or four girls to surround each of the two men who were there drinking that night. Several months ago a branch of the gym California Wow opened in the office building where I work. (Incidentally, it’s “the #1 fitness club in the world!” according to the tagline, which surprised me because I’ve never even seen a California Wow in California.) To promote the opening, the company stationed a cadre of presumably part-time employees -- fit-looking young men and women in clean white uniforms -- in the lobby to accost anyone who entered the building with brochures, flyers, and sign-up sheets. There must have been 15-20 of them -- and not once did they approach me. I entered the building and passed them almost every day for six weeks, and I never saw them make contact with a single potential customer. All they seemed to do was hang out by their counter, natter constantly, and crack each other up. I’m not sure how their manager would have appraised their performance, but for their part they were having a blast doing -- or rather, not doing -- their jobs.

Indeed, the main thing you’d likely notice if you had the opportunity to witness these undertasked packs in action (besides the obvious fact that they don’t have enough to do) is that they really seem to enjoy their work, no matter how menial the job. Take Bangkok’s countless massage girls. (Only the certified ones can really be called masseuses.) Bunched closely together in large groups -- half a dozen will suffice for a parlor the size of a studio apartment -- they sit in front of their parlors the way you see old Jewish or Italian women on the steps of their Lower Manhattan walkups in the movies. The massage girls’ first task, before administering the actual massages, is to win customers by harassing passersby. For the most part, they do that. But there are only so many passersby on many of the small streets, and only so much patience one can muster in a nine-hour shift. And so instead the women spend most of their time gossiping (“We gossip you!”), giggling, and chasing each other around like 6th grade girls at a slumber party. Who can blame them? Would you rather joke around with five of your best friends or earn an extra 50 baht (about $1.00) by rubbing down an old fat German tourist?

But the most egregious culprit in Bangkok’s over-employment phenomenon is 7-Eleven. Hands down. No contest. Not only is each and every store grossly overstaffed, but the population of 7-Eleven stores themselves is growing at an uncontrollable rate. It’s astonishing, really: new franchises literally open across the street or one block down from existing ones. Americans make jokes about Starbucks, but Starbucks is a veritable mom-&-pop shop compared to 7-Eleven here. It’s as if the owners give no thought as to what locations would actually be most profitable; instead, their business strategy is to simply blanket the landscape with as many stores as possible until the only place to buy a Pepsi in the entire city is 7-Eleven. There must be 200 of them in Bangkok, with 20-30 going up as I type this. Anyway, that’s not why I brought 7-Eleven into this. I mention it because 7-Eleven is one of the funniest places to visit in Bangkok (and not just because of the “shrimp crisps” and other gnarly Asian snacks they stock the shelves with). Inside every store you’ll find five or six uniformed employees, five or six of whom are doing exactly nothing. One time I counted -- as Dave Barry would say, I am not making this up -- ten (ten!) employees in a single store. One of them was manning the counter and -- again, I am not making this up -- nine of them were hanging out in various spots around the shop doing nothing. There was a line in front of one register. On the counter next to the other register was a “Please use next register” placard. Here’s a joke I heard here:

Q: How many 7-Eleven employees does it take to ring you up?
A: Eight. One to ring you up and seven to ignore you.

Here’s another one I thought up just now. Have you ever wondered why they call it 7-Eleven when it’s open 24 hours a day? Maybe it’s because it takes between seven and eleven employees in each shop to keep things running at a barely acceptable pace. (Thanks, folks. Thank you very much. I’ll be here all week...)

Both the cause and effect of Bangkok’s labor surplus are visible throughout the city, in the form of Bangkok’s noticeably high female-to-male ratio. I don’t have any figures to back myself up here (and as much as I’d love some, the closest the Thai census-takers ever come to official statistics are loose approximations), I wouldn’t be surprised if the ratio is as high as 60 – 40. Yes, it’s evident inside the shops and bars, but you can also see it on the streets and on the sky train, especially in the downtown areas: high heels, short skirts, and long hair abound. And it’s not just the sex tourism industry. Young women flock here from the outer provinces by the hundreds of thousands to make money any way they can. All but one member of the administrative staff at my office, for instance, are female (probably 14 out of 15) -- all of them young and from the provinces. They, like all the others in Bangkok, know that no matter what job they end up finding, it will pay more than they ever could have made in Isan or Surat Thani. Some of them send the “extra” cash back to their families; others stay until they’ve saved enough to return home financially secure. And of course some end up staying.

Why Bangkok? Well, imagine an America with only one major city -- say, New York. If there were no others from which to choose -- no L.A. or San Francisco or Chicago -- and you had to make more money than you could ever earn in Iowa, where would you go? You’d have to go to New York, whether you wanted to or not. And you’d have to live in a shitty rundown apartment an hour or two from your job in the City, just as many of the bar girls and girls in my office do.

Mostly, though, Bangkok’s over-employment appears to be a win-win situation, at least on the surface. The employed are given an opportunity to earn their way out of poverty, while the consumer enjoys one major benefit of the effect: bargain prices. For all the doomsayers who warn that the days of Thailand’s Third-World prices are numbered -- “It’s only a matter of time before the prices here catch up with the technology,” they say -- I should remind you that as long as there are eight employees manning the counter at 7-Eleven, the prices of the shrimp crisps on the racks nearby will remain irresistibly cheap to Westerners (even if the shrimp crisps themselves aren’t irresistible.) It’s basic economics. Basic supply-and-demand, to be exact. In this case, the supply is labor. Because there’s so much of it, the managers and owners of the establishments can pay their employees low wages, which in turn allows them to sell their goods and services at commensurately low prices. The result: “normal,” or appropriate, prices for the Thais; great deals for tourists and ex-pats. As for the social ramifications of the resultant deeply stratified socioeconomic class system and the moral implications of an economy based so heavily on the sex industry... well, that’s a lesson for another day. I’ll be here all week.

Imagine that (if you dare)

After I leave, when I think of the strange and memorable, and strangely memorable, sights I’ve witnessed here -- those “only in Asia,” or “only in Bangkok” moments -- I’ll think mostly of the images described in detail in the guidebooks and travelogues and witnessed by every visitor to Bangkok: full-grown elephants lumbering down the sidewalks, blinkers tied to their tails; transvestite and transsexual hookers (who can tell the difference?) grabbing at unsuspecting elbows; traffic jams at 4:00 a.m. So, I’d like to place here, for posterity, a definitively “only in Asia” image that I alone saw last night in my apartment building’s exercise room. On the treadmill next to me was a slightly overweight fellow-renter whose gender I couldn’t ascertain. But androgyny is not unusual in Bangkok. What was unusual was his/her attire: flip-flops, an untucked short-sleeved dress shirt, and a baggy pair of those shiny faux-silk boxers they sell on the street. Normally I would label such a getup the most inappropriate outfit one could possibly put together for exercise of any sort. Except in this case the workout wasn’t a workout at all. Asian Pat was moving -- calling it walking would be too kind -- at about one mile per hour. Probably slower. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen a fully ambulatory person move that slow. Even the treadmill wanted to speed up. So there you have it: an out-of-shape sexless person in flip-flops and underwear getting in shape by moving as slow as is humanly possible. Only in Asia... let’s hope.

Short, White, & Hansuhm

A few weeks ago I was sitting alone in the teachers’ lounge at our office, finishing up an e-mail at the end of the night, when one of the newly hired secretaries walked in. Like the other new members of the admin staff, she was young and attractive, from the provinces, with a high school education and an English vocabulary that couldn’t have totaled more than five or ten words. Also like the other secretaries, she had no work to do -- because of a Thai quota law that requires companies to maintain an acceptable ratio of Thai-to-foreigner employees, our office admin staff is ludicrously overstaffed -- and so instead she pursued one of the secretaries’ favorite workplace activities: striking up a conversation with an American teacher. I was happy to oblige. The problem was that she didn’t speak English and I didn’t speak Thai. (This has been a problem for me several other times too. And by “several,” I mean “shitloads.”) I think my Thai was actually better than her English, a statement that borders on numerical impossibility, considering that in nine months here I have only learned a few basic phrases (“Hello/goodbye,” “Thank you,” “Turn left/right,” “How much does that cost?” “How much do you cost?” etc.).

We thus engaged in one of those usually frustrating but occasionally amusing conversations that only take place in foreign countries. You know the kind I’m talking about -- those ridiculous slices of communicative best-efforts that consist of constant exaggerated gesticulations and speech slowed to the point where each person thinks the other will finally understand even though they absolutely never will. Except in this case, instead of trying to find a museum or bathroom, we were trying to learn about each other (which was more difficult than getting directions to the nearest bathroom, but which also made it amusing instead of frustrating). Ultimately we were able to communicate to each other where we grew up, where we lived in Bangkok, how much we liked our jobs, and how old we were, as well as the ages of our respective siblings. At that point I was content to declare the dialogue a success and return to my e-mail. Then she opened her mouth, rolled her eyes to their corners, as if searching for the words, and said, “You -- handsome.” I was caught off guard. All I could do was laugh and say, “Kahp khun kruhp.” I didn’t even know how to return the compliment. But I think I was smiling almost nonstop for the next two hours. Those two words -- two of the five or ten she knew -- made my night. Hell, they made my week.

No doubt about it: Bangkok is great for the self-esteem. As a white male, it’s tough to go a week here without being hit on in a club by a Thai woman (or man), complimented by a counter girl, or catcalled at by bar girls and street parlor masseuses. No matter that half the time (okay, most of the time) it’s coming from hookers. A compliment is a compliment is a compliment. If you don’t come to Bangkok for the sights, the food, or the women, I’d recommend a trip here for the ego boost alone.

I’ve had my own ego boosted three notches -- from Level 2 (Neurotic Self-Loathing Wannabe-Writer) to Level 5 (Occasionally-Confident Semi-Rich Dude) -- merely by living a normal life here for nine months. Bar girls run from their spots by the door to grab my arm as I walk by. “Come in, suh. Welcome, hansuhm gentleman.” “I have to eat dinner,” I tell them. “Come aftuh. Aftuh dinner, aftuh!” Beautiful Thai women in short skirts look me dead in the eye and smile as they pass by. (They almost certainly do this because the Thais value eye contact and have the disarming habit of staring you down, not because they find the random white guy walking past them irresistibly attractive. But a guy can dream, can’t he?)

I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve been called handsome here. I used to get my fruit shakes from an outdoor stand manned by three sisters. While one of them would blend my smoothie, all three would chatter at high speeds, shooting me furtive, guilty glances and giggling the whole time. Finally, one day, one of the sisters stopped the blender a moment and said to me, “My sister think you hansuhm,” and they all tittered some more. Last week, when I went to a dance club with Pen, a Thai girl I’m dating, I found myself surrounded, literally, by half a dozen of her friends. “You Pen’s man?” one of them asked me.

“Yes,” I said.

“You hansuhm,” she said, and kept dancing.

Now seems the time to reveal, for the record, that I am not particularly “hansuhm.” I don’t think I’m ugly, but I’m not all that good-looking either: I’m short, with big ears, bushy eyebrows, and a crooked nose. In any country, I would describe myself as decidedly average. Apparently, however, not everyone agrees; and Thailand is not “any country.” Here I am not short -- 5’7” appears to be about average for a Thai man -- and although being white is no longer anything unique here, it still carries currency (as it were -- if you’re a farang, the Thais assume, generally fairly, that you literally carry plenty of currency). Back home I’m a short white guy with cheap clothes and a bad haircut. In Bangkok I’m a rich, in-shape, worldly American with a cool beard. “Mr. Face Hair,” one bar girl called me as I passed her on the street. (That may not sound like a compliment, but it was better than being “Mr. No-Hair,” the appellation she assigned my friend Shawn, who is balding. That was us, as we walked down Sukhumvit Road: “Mistuh Face Hair! Mistuh No-Hair! Welcome! Come in, suh!”)

Amidst the novelty of being considered handsome are two other novelties: that of being hailed as such to my face, and that of the word itself -- handsome. In the States, one is only called good-looking out of earshot or to a third party or, in my case, by his mother’s middle-aged friends. That the women here are so willing to hand out a compliment about me, to me, is very endearing; that they do so using a word, “handsome,” that is a virtual linguistic relic, somehow makes the compliment that much more charming. Clearly Thai children are taught in school that “handsome” is the adjective used to describe an attractive man. Even girls from the countryside, who had no English in school, apparently learn the word and make it a staple of their limited vocabularies.

When I explained to some Thai college students that “handsome” is no longer commonly used in America, they looked surprised and asked me what is used instead. “Hmm. Well, maybe ‘cute’ or ‘good-looking,’” I said. “So, like, Leonardo DiCaprio would be cute, and George Clooney would be good-looking.”

“Ohhh,” they said in unison, understanding.

Then, feeling bold -- the sort of boldness that can only come with a Level 5 ego -- I tried my luck. “So which one would I be?” I asked them.

They paused for a moment and looked at one another. It appeared they didn’t know how to respond. I got nervous. I wished I hadn’t asked the question.

Then they all burst out, “Good-looking! You good-looking!”

I’ll take it.

5 Things the Thais Fuckin' Love

The guidebooks tout Thailand as a land of paradoxes. Pick up a Lonely Planet or Rough Guide and you can bet good money it will discredit unsavory generalizations and emphasize the complexities and nuances of Thai culture. But really, don’t they do that with every country? In any guidebook introduction, you can find something to the effect of: “It’s easy to believe the hype and buy into the many stereotypes surrounding [insert name of nationality] and their country, but in fact [insert name of country] is a study in contrasts, a nation too richly diverse for stereotypes and broad generalizations.”

That’s true, of course. And yes, Thailand has its share of paradoxes. (For example, the relative priggishness of the media -- sex and violence are edited out on TV; cigarettes are blurred out -- vis a vis the notorious red-light districts that the government and police so willingly turn a blind eye towards. Right outside the windows of hotel rooms whose TVs censor Nicole Kidman and Jude Law making love on HBO are prostitutes pestering farang men and go-go bars featuring teenaged girls shooting ping-pong balls out of their hoo-haws.) It follows that any fair analysis of Thailand (or any country) should disdain with broad generalizations (all generalizations are false...) and instead delve into the contrasts, complexities, nuances, and paradoxes of its richly diverse population.

But what fun is that? And the Thais are nothing if not fun. (How’s that for a broad generalization?) Besides, I’m not fair and I’m not an analyst -- I’m just a neophyte blogger and ex-pat with seven months’ worth of experiences and observations to share. And little is as revealing about a group of people as a few generalizations and stereotypes about what those people enjoy and value most. I thus present here a few broad, unnuanced, stereotypical generalizations about five things Thai people fuckin’ love, in ascending order of how much they fuckin’ love them.

They fuckin’ love...

5. Shitty Thai pop. Before I arrived, I expected the popular music scene in Bangkok to revolve around shitty American pop. It was a natural assumption to make. You hear so much in the news about how, as Western economic models and individual liberties expand into developing countries, so too does Western culture, especially its pop culture. “They may not like our policies,” Americans like to croon, “but they still love our music and movies.” Stories about Arab rappers and Rolling Stones’ concerts selling out in China dot the nightly news. It follows that I fully expected to be assaulted, in every club and bar in Bangkok, by Beyonce, Kelly Clarkson, and other clones I am already too old and unhip to name.

Turns out Thailand has its own brand of shitty pop. In lieu of former American Idols and other similarly packaged glam performers, my ears and good taste have instead been assaulted almost daily by equally generic and uninspired Thai vocalists. Sure, I’ve heard enough Black-Eyed Peas over the past seven months to last me a lifetime -- I will henceforth and forever associate “My Humps” with Thai strip clubs -- but the majority of awful songs that play on any given night in the clubs are still by Thai artists. (I use the term “artists” loosely.)

This discovery was both pleasant and disconcerting. On the one hand, I found it heartening and charming that they don’t just eat what America feeds ‘em. There’s a lot of national pride in Thailand; it’s nice to see the populace -- a proverbial little guy on the world’s stage -- adopt something their own. On the other hand, well, the music sucks. Most songs are just recycled versions of the most generic, unoffensive fluff that plays on American soft rock radio, with Thai lyrics in place of English. I wish I could think of a better adjective, but “cheesy” suffices. (To paraphrase Homer Simpson, it is the cheesiest bunch of cheese that ever cheesed.) The Thais only went partway in creating their own musical identity; what they’ve actually done is take all the worst aspects of Western pop music and accentuated that crappiness. (To quote Bart Simpson, “It’s craptacular.”) And yet the Thais, man -- lemme tell you: they eat it up. They fuckin’ love it. They mouth the words in food courts and scream out in unison their favorite parts on the dance floor. All you can do is cover your ears and smile. As for me, well here’s something I never thought I’d say: one of the things I’m looking forward to about returning home is being blasted by Gwen Stefani in bars and having nothing but Coldplay on the radio all day long.

4. Pork. It’s what’s for dinner in Thailand. No need for ad campaigns about “the other white meat” here. In Thailand, chicken and pork stand on equal ground, above all other meats. Beef is scarce and relatively expensive. Lamb is all but impossible to come by (except in Lebanese restaurants and on Soi Middle East). Duck is only eaten in Chinese restaurants. Most of the meals served with steamed rice at the outdoor a la carte establishments are various combinations of chicken and pork (sliced, minced, shredded, sausaged) with vegetables. Half of McDonald’s “burgers” are made of pork (including the much-hyped “Samurai Pork Burger!”). A restaurant on Sukhumvit called O’Brians [sic] claims that one of its most popular dishes is Pork Cordon Bleu [sick]. I’ll take their word for it.

A few months ago I asked one of my students, a boy who had spent several years in California, where I could find a good burger in Bangkok. He told me that Sizzler actually served the best burger he’d ever had, in Bangkok or anywhere. It was big and thick and juicy and delicious, he said. “Sounds good,” I said. Then he casually added that it was also made of pork, not beef. “Oh,” I said, trying not to look disappointed. But of course I was: when I’m in the mood for a good burger, I want a real burger, not a “pork burger.” If it’s made of pork, it’s not a burger; it’s a piece of pork -- no matter how big, thick, juicy, and delicious it may be.

Pork, which is incongruously called moo in Thai (shouldn’t it be oink?), has clearly avoided the stigma it so cumbersomely carries in the States. For one thing, there aren’t too many Thai Jews around. For another, Thais, like most Asians, don’t seem to have the same hang-ups that Americans do about what animals their meats used to be when they were alive. To the Thais, once it’s been skinned, sliced, and cooked, it’s not a pig anymore; it’s just food. Incidentally, this is also the reason most Thais won’t think twice about shelling out 20 baht at a street stall for a bag of deep-fried crickets. (Mmm... insectilicious...)

Last week my friend Shawn and I ate lunch at one of the ubiquitous outdoor establishments, which serve noodle, soup, and rice dishes for 20-25 baht apiece. The décor is decidedly minimalist -- you eat in 95-degree heat, on flimsy plastic chairs and foldout metal tables, with toilet paper serving as napkins -- but the quality of the food, the price, and “only in Asia” atmosphere outweigh the drawbacks. Shawn, who is American, told me that he doesn’t eat pork, which struck me as a particularly unfortunate practice for someone living in Thailand. “Are you Jewish?” I asked him.

“Naw, man. I ain’t Jewish,” he said. “I just don’t dig on swine.”

“Why not?” I asked him. Shawn explained to me that pigs are filthy animals. According to him, they sleep and root in shit. “I don't wanna eat nothin' that ain't got enough sense to disregard its own feces,” he said.

“But sausages taste good,” I implored. “Bacon tastes good.”

“Sewer rat may taste like pumpkin pie, but I wouldn’t know, because I wouldn’t eat the filthy motherfucker.”

“How about dogs?” I pointed out that dogs eat their own feces.

“I don't eat dog either,” Shawn said.

“Yes, but do you consider a dog to be a filthy animal?”

“I wouldn't go so far as to call a dog filthy, but they're definitely dirty. But a dog's got personality. And personality goes a long way.”

“So by that rationale, if a pig had a better personality, he'd cease to be a filthy animal?”

“We'd have to be talkin' 'bout one motherfuckin' charmin' pig. It'd have to be the Cary Grant of pigs.”

Then we both laughed.

3. Sleep. This one kind of goes hand-in-hand with something Thai people don’t like: namely, work. I’ve had some disagreement on the exact extent of the phenomenon from some of my fellow ex-pats, but our basic impression of the hours of the Thai work day, based on unscientific random observational sampling (i.e., hanging out all over town instead of working ourselves), is that it starts around 10:00 and ends at 5:00, with a two-hour lunch from noon to 2:00. For those of us keeping track -- and I always keep track -- that’s five hours a day of work. I’m exaggerating a bit -- most office jobs here officially start at 9:00 and give one hour for lunch -- but here’s what I do know:

If you get on the sky train between 9:00 and 10:00, it’s packed. Prepare to know what five strangers just had for breakfast. On the few unpleasant occasions I’ve had to be somewhere by 9:00 a.m., however, the sky train has been nearly empty. I’ve also learned (the hard way, as these things are always learned) that if you get on the elevator in my building on the 28th floor (where I work) at noon, the elevator will stop approximately 26 times before getting to the bottom. (Each time it stops and the doors open, the people waiting inevitably just peer into the already-crammed elevator, giggle, and wait patiently for the next one.) If you wait just 15 or 20 minutes longer for lunch, until 12:15 or 12:20, it’s no problem. How everyone is already hungry after two hours of work, and three hours after breakfast, is beyond me. (Ostensibly it has something to do with something else the Thais fuckin’ love but which is not on this list: eating. They do it all the time, at all hours of the day and night.) And the lunch establishments are running full-tilt till 2:00 or 2:30. All of which leads me to conclude, based on my considerable powers of deduction (oh, what one learns as an SAT teacher...), that Thais work about five hours a day.

What do they do the rest of the time? Among other things (“other things” being eating and shopping), they sleep. Now, I like my sleep as much as the next guy -- okay, I like my sleep more than any guy -- but I generally limit mine to a nightly nine hours, plus two- to three-hour naps on Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday afternoons. The Thais, though -- they make me look like an amateur: they don’t even need a bed. At any given time in the afternoon, it seems like half the construction workers on the street are asleep. And when I say “on the street,” I mean it literally. You walk around and you see carpenters and painters just sprawled out, dead to the world, in the middle of sidewalks (sidewalks that, ironically, are in dire need of repair). They lie there, still as two-by-fours, unburdened by fear of soi dog, cockroach, rat, or death by stabbing by three-inch heel. Apparently, after the two-hour lunch comes the two-hour siesta.

Ditto for cabbies. Walk by a parked taxi and look inside. Chances are, the driver is asleep at the wheel, his seat tilted back. Same with a good fraction of the city’s bus passengers. It’s like scanning the coach section of an airplane in the middle of the night on a transcontinental flight, and amusing in the same way: heads leaning on shoulders, faces pointed to the sky, mouths agape. Except that these nappers are achieving their somnambulant acrobatics in broad daylight, in filthy, un-air-conditioned buses that are idling in noisy traffic. I gaze at them, bemused and amused. Then I go home and take a nap.

2. Malls. They say that while the rest of Thailand worships the Buddha, Bangkok worships the baht. And the city’s numerous shopping centers are Exhibit A in that claim. From night bazaars and endless rows of vendors crowding sidewalks and hawking knockoffs, to the mind-blowing Chatuchak weekend market (which I once heard is the largest outdoor market in all of Asia), Bangkok epitomizes the breakneck consumerism of 21st century Asia.

For my money, though (as it were), it’s the beautiful new malls, not the bazaars and street peddlers (which have, after all, been around for centuries), that most embody the “new Asia” you’ve heard so much about on NPR and CNN. If I had to take a visitor -- you, let’s say (to my all friends reading this: hint! hint!) -- to the one place that best captures Bangkok, I wouldn’t take you to the Grand Palace or the wats on the river; I’d take you to the Emporium. There you would see thousands of Bangkokians, content as clams, milling about, chowing down in the food courts, cell-phoning, SMSing, and spending, spending, spending -- for hours at a time and at all hours of the day. Try saying the same thing about your local mall (not counting December, which, incidentally, it might as well be in Bangkok the rest of the year -- picture your city’s biggest mall the day after Thanksgiving and you’ll have some sense of what the malls here are like every day of the year). Siam Paragon, a monstrous conglomeration of high-end name-brand shops, complete with the largest aquarium in Asia (they billed it, in the marketing blitz running up to the opening, as “The Glorious Phenomenon”), opened in December, after several years of construction. For point of comparison, it often takes that long to get a small street paved. Adjacent to Siam Paragon are two nearly identical -- and nearly identically named -- indoor malls, Siam Center and Siam Discovery Center; across from it, the much-needed outdoor mall, Siam Square.

As offensive as such egregious consumerism may be to traditionalist senses, the Thais’ love of their malls is completely understandable, and, to anyone who’s visited Bangkok, not really surprising. The easy lighting, the modern architecture, the cleanliness, the spaciousness, the air-conditioning -- the malls are just flat-out, all-around undeniably pleasant places to be, egregious consumerism be damned. They basically serve as Bangkok’s version of city parks: effectively public spaces where the locals can escape the noise, pollution, and weather (heat, humidity, rain, or all of the above) that pervade most other parts of the city. When my parents visited in February, to break up a long day of sight-seeing we took refuge from the 90-degree heat in a lovely mall food court. Several months ago, when a Thai man asked out a female co-worker of mine -- a 26-year-old female co-worker of mine -- he suggested the mall as the venue for their first date. (In response, she suggested someplace with fewer teenagers.)

To say I don’t like to shop would be a gross understatement, but I’ve enjoyed my mall time here. I probably hit up the local malls two to three times a week, usually just to people watch or grab a bite to eat; still, I’ve spent more time shopping (window and real) in my eight months here than in my entire life before this combined. Call it what you will¾the height of superficiality; the encroachment of Western values on ancient Eastern cultures; an anti-social and unproductive use of time. I call it living as the Thais do. When in Rome, head straight to the Gap.


And the number one thing Thais fuckin’ love...

1. The King. How much do Thais love their king? It’s difficult to overstate this one. Probably more than their malls, sleep, pork, and shitty Thai pop combined. Certainly more than any other country loves any single one of its countrymen or -women. Indeed, I could probably prove, using some sort of citizenry calculus, that the Thai king is in fact the most beloved human being on earth. A bold statement, to be sure, but one that can be supported by indisputable mathematical corroboration. To wit:

If you were to calculate an individual’s “belovedness” rating by taking the number of people who love that individual times the average amount of love harbored by said lovers, and subtract from that product the square of the total hate engendered by the individual (the square of the hate the better to penalize those who have done something hate-worthy) -- i.e.,

Belovedness Quotient = {(# of people who love Person X) x [(sum of individual “love quotients”) / (# of people who love Person X)]} – {(# of people who hate Person X) x [(sum of individual “hate quotients”) / (# of people who hate Person X)]}

-- then the king of Thailand would have to be the most loved man in the world, hands-down. There are 60 – 70 million people in Thailand, virtually all of whom adore the man and none of whom have even a single negative word to say about him. That’s a pretty high Belovedness Quotient right there. Try saying the same thing about [insert name of any country’s political leader or figurehead here]. See what I mean? Even Oprah or Tiger Woods don’t come close. Maybe Jesus. But He’s dead.

Come to think of it, the Jesus comparison is a pretty apt one. His Majesty the King is ubiquitous here. (Or at least his picture is. The king himself holes up most of the year in his various palaces scattered throughout the country.) Taxi drivers keep his portrait on their dashboards, just as the cabbies in Ethiopia (the most dominantly Christian place I’ve ever been) keep drawings of the Madonna and/or Jesus on their dashes. Most restaurants and small shops have the king’s portrait hanging on their walls. His likeness adorns school house walls and flags on major roads. One prominent office building sports the king on one side -- mural? billboard poster sheeting? frescoe? -- his 50-foot bespectacled phiz gazing benevolently down on Sukhumvit Road. (In most of these renderings, the king is decked out in royal or pseudo-military garb; in none of them is he smiling.)

Loving your king is even a fashion statement. Seemingly half the population sports bright yellow rubber bracelets that say, in both Thai and English, “LONG LIVE THE KING.” I now wear one too. Last week, for the 60th anniversary celebration of the king’s coronation -- this king, known as Rama IX, is the longest sitting monarch in the world -- almost everyone in the city wore yellow t-shirts for all four days of the long weekend, in honor of the “king’s color.” You haven’t witnessed loyalty until you’ve seen eight million Asians hurrying around town in various shades of yellow. Yet the strangest, most uniquely Thai demonstration of support for the king has to be what occurs before movies. After the trailers and before the feature presentation, everyone in the theater rises as one to “pay respect to His Majesty,” as the words on the screen instruct. An elaborately produced montage then commences, complete with (crappy) special effects and background orchestration (the king’s anthem, I’m told): there’s King Bhumipol in the 1960s, aiding impoverished Thai villagers; and here he is saving the environment; and that’s him shaking the hand of a sick child whose life he just saved. It’s one of those surreal “only in Thailand” peculiarities you can’t read about in Lonely Planet, and which infuses travel abroad with the charm and surprise it too often lacks.

Much of the love is a just a function of a genuine and unquestioned respect for the monarchy as a whole. (Take note, Britain.) It’s a federal crime, for instance, to badmouth the royal family. (What happens to anonymous bloggers who use the word “fuckin’” in a sentence that mentions the king can only be imagined. A century in Thai purgatory, perhaps?) And when I asked a Thai friend whether the movie theater thing would happen regardless of who was on the throne, he guessed that it probably would. (There’s no way to be sure, of course, since this king has reigned since well before any of my friends here were born. Probably since before there were movie theaters in Thailand, in fact.)

At the same time, there is undeniably a special affection and reverence for this king in particular. Despite his official position as a mere figurehead -- the most important member of what is essentially a symbolic monarchy -- he has apparently put his symbolic capital to good use over the years. Forgive my ignorance of the details -- I’ve read more about bar girls than contemporary Thai history -- but I believe the king stepped in during several occasions of political unrest, even quashing one bloody coup in the 1970s. I think he has also been quite active about bringing ecological awareness and education to Thailand. His deeds have earned him esteem in all circles; Bangkok’s urbane intellectuals and the uneducated villagers in the provinces alike -- no matter how much they know about him, all Thais admire him equally. During last week’s celebration, the following banner headlines ran across the front pages, in bold type and all caps: THE WORKING MONARCH, THE BELOVED KING, SIX AMAZING DECADES, KING BY EXAMPLE. And that was just one paper in two days. Editorializing? You bet. But is it compromising journalism if every single person reading the paper already believes it? (Do you agree or disagree? Write an essay of no less than 2,000 words explaining why. Be sure to draw on First Amendment Supreme Court decisions and allude to the rise of yellow journalism in the second half of the 20th century…)

In some respects, the deification of the king goes too far for my egalitarian tastes. The road closes and all traffic comes to a halt if the king’s third-cousin, twice-removed comes within a mile of a major road. They could probably increase the country’s GDP several percentage points just by letting the royal family sit in traffic like everyone else. A few weeks ago, as I walking home from work, I was pushed to the side of the sidewalk by a police officer and told to stand still. Confused, I looked around. The road was clear; the other pedestrians had stopped as well. A minute or two later, a small motorcade zipped by. Everyone continued on as if nothing had happened. Me, I was a tad miffed that my day had to come to a complete (if brief) halt so that someone else -- someone in less of a hurry than I was, I’m sure -- could enjoy one more privilege of the privileged life. Royal people are, after all, just people -- a fact the Thais seem to have either forgotten or cheerfully ignore.

Mostly, though, the Thais’ adulation for the king is refreshing. How many countries have someone whom they’re so proud of, much less a leader? Several months ago, when the prime minister of Thailand found himself entangled in a corruption scandal, the populace responded with a vengeance, demonstrating for weeks until he resigned. The king, meanwhile, remained where he’s always been: on the throne, a rock, more beloved than ever before. No other nation can say the same about its leader, symbolic, political, or otherwise. The British royal family has degenerated into a tabloid joke. Other countries’ symbolic monarchies are anonymous at best, scandalous at worst. In America, we’re left with our celebrities and sports stars to worship, and they inevitably let us down. Who can live up to such hype? No mortal, surely. But His Majesty the King Bhumipol Adulyadej, Rama IX, of the Kingdom of Thailand is no mere mortal, if his subjects’ feelings about him are any indication. For 60 years he’s been living up to the hype, serving his 60 million admirers with grace, stability, and altruism. Being someone the Thais fuckin’ -- really fuckin’ -- love.