...and speaking of corruption, convictions, and monumental idiocy in a leadership position...

...Thailand's prime minister, Samak Sundaravej, was forced to resign on Tuesday for accepting payments for work he did on a Thai cooking show while in office. Apparently Samak made four guest appearances on a show called Tasting and Complaining (in America, this is known as "dinner with Bubby & Zadie"), and pocketed, for his hard work,

[drum roll, please]

$2,350!

Wow, talk about poor choices. I make that much with four blog entries, and I don't get paid for this blog. If only we could have nailed Bush for something like that.

Fortunately for Samak, he will probably remain in office anyway, since his party is naming him its nominee for the upcoming parliamentary vote to determine his successor -- "an outcome," says the Times, "that would seem to defy the spirit of the court ruling." Ya think? The Times would seem to be understating that one.

"The appeal in the defamation case is scheduled to be heard on Sept. 25, when Mr. Samak plans to address the United Nations in New York," according to the Times. "The court said he would face an arrest warrant if he did not appear. Mr. Samak has said he is confident that he will not be ousted while he is away."

Good thinking, Sam, 'cause it's not like that exact same thing happened the last time a Thai prime minister left town to make an appearance at the UN. Ah, Thailand, you never fail to amuse. (It just occurred to me that Thailand is like the half-witted, flakey friend in the group who can't get his act together to save his life, but you keep him around anyway because you know you'll have some crazy-ass stories to tell the next day.)

I miss you, Thailand, and I'll be back soon, no matter who's in charge and fucking things up.

Great Danes

I recently returned from a weeklong trip to Denmark, and Homunculus is here to say: them’s country has gots it going on. There is nothing rotten in the state of Denmark.

To compare and contrast:

When you get off the plane in Bangkok (which, compared to the rest of Southeast Asia, operates like a Swiss watch), you wend your way through the airport’s hallways before being dumped into an enormous pile of bemused chaos, also known as the passport control area. It is a shit show of Bangladeshian proportions. Think the DMV, minus the aid of deli-line numbers. For 10-15 minutes you veer uncertainly between serpentine masses, which may or may not be lines, before settling into a definite spot in a queue -- which may or may not be twice as slow as the adjacent one -- for the next 45 minutes.

In Copenhagen, by contrast, I got off the plane and walked twenty yards to a kiosk manned by two guys who looked like this:

God I miss Stefan Edberg.

The blond family in front of me was processed in about thirty seconds; I was done in ten. I had my bag ten minutes later, and three minutes after that I was on the subway for a short ride to the city center.

The rest of the trip went just as smoothly. Everything in Denmark runs on time, and everyone speaks flawless English. The streets and buildings are pristine. More people bike, it seems, than drive; I heard one car horn my entire week there.

It had been seven years since I'd visited Europe, and after three years of extensive travel in second- and third-world countries, I have to say, Denmark was a pleasure. The section on Scandinavia in the international chapter in America the Book sums it up nicely: “Scandinavia has blended cold, hard Teutonic efficiency with European social liberalism to create five of the cleanest nations on the planet. You can literally eat off the sidewalk in Copenhagen.” That's true. I did.

Not everyone there is blond, but, well, a lot of them are. Here are some pictures I took of blond people:

(And here is what these girls will look like in 20 years, if my trips to the bars in the touristy area were any indication:

)

Coincidentally, on the day I returned there were two major articles about Denmark and how much it kicks ass (what are the odds of that?). Thomas Friedman wrote his column about the Danes' ecological ingenuity, and this piece in the Washington Post explores the now-repeatedly-reproduced statistic citing the Danes as the happiest people on earth. Having seen it firsthand, I can corroborate everything in those stories. I would say that being there made me ashamed of my country, except that I was already ashamed of my country before I went. Then again, as my new Danish friend replied after I forwarded her the piece from the Post, at least we still have Paris Hilton. True that. We'll always have Paris.

Revival of the Fittest

When I was living abroad, my friend Ed told me about a bar trick that so transcended the standard scope of run-of-the-(gin-)mill bar stunts that it could easily be upgraded in the Pantheon of Trickery to “Legitimate Magic Trick.” I was skeptical at first -- Ed’s tales tended towards the hyperbolic -- but he swore he’d seen the trick turned twice himself, first-hand, and with his own two eyes.

Here is what you do:

Step 1. Think like a Boy Scout: Be prepared.
Setting: A bar or pub where houseflies may be found (see below -- “Materials Needed”). Usually this will be a bar with an outdoor seating section or patio, but a sufficiently shady dive bar may also suffice.
Materials Needed: housefly (alive), glass of water, coaster (optional), spoon (optional), 2 TB table salt

Step 2. Catch a fly without injuring it. The best way to do this is to wait until the fly alights on the interior rim of your water glass or beer mug, then trap it inside with a coaster. You can also use the palm of your hand. If the fly prefers to buzz around rather than alight on drinking utensils, you can try the ancient Chinese cupped-palm clapping method to trap the fly.
(Warning: Do not use chopsticks. Man who catch fly with chopsticks can do anything -- except this trick… for fly likely end up kaput.)
(N.B. Although this is the first real step in the trick, it may be the most difficult, involving as it does agility and adeptness to secure the fly, and even more skillfulness to do so in a harmless fashion.)

Step 3. Knock out the fly. With the fly trapped between the water and coaster, pick up the glass and shake vigorously. Slosh the fly around until it becomes sufficiently disoriented.
(Using beer instead of water may augment the disorientation process, though the effects of alcohol on insects have not been thoroughly researched.)

Step 4. Drown the fly. Once unconscious, the fly should soon become waterlogged and sink slowly but steadily to the bottom of the glass. If it does not, you may abet the sinking process with a spoon (or, God bless you, your finger). The fly now appears drowned and dead.

Step 5. But wait.

Step 6. Wait some more. It is unknown how long you can actually wait without killing the fly, but some spectators have claimed to have witnessed comas as long as twenty or thirty minutes.* It is a bit like sex in this respect: the longer you can hold out, the more dramatic the climax.

Step 7. Play it up. With the fly long since drowned and “dead” at the bottom of the glass, bet any and all dubious witnesses that you can bring it back to life. Gather a crowd around, even those who missed the first half of the trick. Throw twenties on the bar to show you’re for real. Smile at the ladies. Wink at them if you’re the type of guy who can pull off a wink. Then tell everyone to prepare to be astonished.

Step 8. Revive and astonish. To bring the fly back to life, simply pour all contents of the glass -- water and “dead” fly -- onto the bar, counter, or table. Pour two tablespoons of table salt on the fly, forming a miniature salt mine/gravesite. After several minutes, the fly will miraculously crawl out of the salt pile, no longer dead, and soar away as spirited as ever. The crowd will cheer. The guys will slap your back and congratulate you. The chicks will kiss you. You will be a hero. Fame and glory will follow.

Sound apocryphal? My friends and I thought so too, so we decided to find out for ourselves, and we ended up getting more excitement than we could have hoped for.

I thought the first real step, catching the fly, would cause us the biggest problems. For one thing, flies do not routinely alight on the inner rims of water glasses. How many opportunities would we have? For another thing, flies are fast little fuckers. It’s not like we invented the fly swatter because wads of Kleenex were doing the trick. Nevertheless, my friend JC trapped the first fly that landed on his glass under his coaster. He sloshed the fly under tow and pushed it down with his straw. (In the spirit of full disclosure, I should admit that we were never able to keep the fly fully submerged. Whenever we pushed him under, he kept floating back to the top. But he was definitely unconscious -- he was completely motionless the whole time -- so I don’t think our experiment’s results should be dismissed as partial or inadequate.) With the fly floating upside-down between chunks of ice, we put the glass aside and finished our breakfast.

About a half-hour later, after we’d paid the bill and had our table cleared, we resumed the experiment. We dumped the contents of the glass -- water, ice, and “dead” fly -- onto the table. (Lest you think us ugly Americans, I should point out that this was an outdoor café.) We covered the little guy with salt and waited, then waited some more. Sure enough, within four or five minutes the fly stirred beneath its briny grave, like a phoenix rising from its ashes (I know what that looks like, incidentally, because we’d performed that particular revival trick several months earlier). The clumped grains of salt at the top of the pile began to slide away, down the side of the mini-volcano. A tired wing emerged, then the other, and then a pair of antennae and a quadruplet of bug eyes. He surveyed us exasperatedly, then rolled his four eyes -- perhaps this wasn’t the first time a group of scientifically-minded diners had done this to him.

And then, the real surprise. An ant, alerted by the Homo-sapienic “Ooh!”s and “Ahh!”s from above, crawled onto the table and scuttled towards the fly. He sniffed once or twice, then ran back under the table. A second or two later -- it couldn’t have been more than three -- the ant returned, accompanied by about two hundred of his closest buddies. In a veritable insect blitzkrieg, they charged at the fly from all directions to execute the dramatic coup de grâce.

As we all know, there’s nothing like an entire entomological infantry brigade literally nipping at your heels to encourage a little hustle. Our new friend, who, to that point, had been taking his sweet time with his reversal of being temporarily dead, suddenly snapped to life. Vibrating like a dog shaking itself dry, the little guy flapped the remaining salt from his wings and took to the skies, lending credence to his species’s common name and leaving an army of disgruntled predators with nothing for breakfast but a soggy heap of sodium chloride.

My friends and I cheered in astonishment. The guys slapped each others’ backs. The girls kissed the boys. We were heroes. We soon became famous throughout Southeast Asia.

The fly, meanwhile, died several days later, having a two-week lifespan and all. That made us sad, but we later heard he died in his sleep a happy bug, reminiscing about his two victories over certain death and surrounded by his 271 children and grandchildren.


* Devoted readers of this blog -- both of you (hi Mom & Dad!) -- will recall that the fly isn't the only common household pest with the ability to hold its breath a freakishly long time (see "Big, Black, & Nasty" -- 10/14/06). On a related note, I'm not sure what it is with me and sadistic abuse of insects. I swear I wasn't one of those kids who hung out on the driveway roasting ants with a magnifying glass.

Big, Black, & Nasty

Supposedly the cockroach is the second-oldest extant species on earth, behind only the horseshoe crab. It first appeared over 280 million years ago, during the Carboniferous era. Then, four months ago, it appeared in my bathtub.

I’m not particularly squeamish -- growing up, I used to catch spiders with a tennis ball can and release them into the suburban wild. But cockroaches are a whole other can of carrots. They really bother me. And this one wasn’t your garden variety Manhattan roach -- you know, the one you find next to your shoes in the closet of your East Village walkup. Those are basically just enlarged beetles. This was a Bangkok roach -- the tropics, man -- and it was huge. Really fuckin’ big. The size of an offensive lineman’s thumb. And against the polished white glaze of the tub, it somehow looked even bigger, even blacker, even nastier. That’s what I named him: Big, Black, & Nasty.

Big, Black, & Nasty sat there and waved his antennae around in little ellipses, clearly awaiting my response. I wanted to kill him -- Thai Buddhism had not yet fully ensconced itself into my essence -- but I wasn’t about to go the route of the shoe or the rolled-up newspaper. I couldn’t bear the thought of the ensuing crunch. I could just hear it: crunch!!! I also couldn’t bear the thought of the ensuing cleanup. I had to shower later that night, and doing so whilst standing in the remnant bits of cockroach parts was another image I couldn’t bear. Indeed, there were many points related to the smashing of -- and resultantly smashed -- Big, Black, & Nasty that I couldn’t bear.

Using a tennis ball can was also out of the question. For one thing, I didn’t want to put my hands that close to Big, Black, & Nasty. For another, cockroaches are faster, if not craftier, than spiders, and he likely would have dodged the can. And besides, I didn’t own any tennis balls at the time, and so I didn’t have any tennis ball cans anyway. So that was out.

Therefore, I decided to drown Big, Black, & Nasty. I figured that if I could just douse him long enough, he’d eventually drown, or at least lose the will to live, and I’d be able to force his legs and antennae and other extremities down the drain. After enough showers, I assumed, the rest of his body -- his head and torso (or thorax, if you want to be all technical about it) -- would eventually just sort of disintegrate into smaller parts and melt away, and I wouldn’t have to deal with cleanups or audible crunches or anything.

If you’re guessing at this point that this plan was not going to work, then you are smarter than I am, and I resent you for that. I was actually getting sort of excited about my scheme, partly because I would no longer have a two-inch-long cockroach in my bathtub afterwards, but also because the drowning plan allowed me to take advantage of the detachability of the removable shower head and the massage spray setting, both of which had gone unused theretofore. But as you already know and I did not, roaches are feisty little fuckers, and when I aimed at Big, Black, & Nasty and unleashed hell’s fury -- the greatest water pressure a developing country’s plumbing technology can offer -- the little fucker fought like a tippled Irishman. He started scrambling up the walls of the tub as if his life depended on it (when, in fact, it didn’t -- as you and he knew and I didn’t), his little two-kneed legs pistoning at about 4,000 rpm. With each dash he made up the walls, a stream of water was there to meet him and send him back down. He went left, I went left; he went right, I went right.

Soon, though, I had him pinned in the drain. He was helpless and no longer flailing about, so powerful was the stream of water pounding him from above. Unfortunately -- unfortunate, at least, in this case of extermination efficacy being the most crucial criterion -- I had one of those drains with several little gaps instead of one with a single hole big enough to fit, say, a drowning cockroach. So rather than flowing neatly down the drain and meeting his eventual doom in the ghastly entrails of the ignominious Thai drainage system, Big, Black, & Nasty instead had his body wedged halfway down one of the holes, his torso hanging there, vertical, like in those cartoons of fat guys getting stuck in their toilet seats.

I continued assailing him for another 10-15 seconds or so before stopping the flow and assessing the damage. Big, Black, & Nasty appeared to be a beaten bug. His legs had also been forced down into the drain, and his antennae no longer jutted out tall and proud, at attention. Instead they swayed sadly back and forth, like tree branches in a light wind, as if to say, “I surrender. These are the best simulacra of white flags I can render as a mere cockroach. Humans are clearly the superior species, and furthermore, I am your bitch.”

Of course, if I’d known better, I would have recognized Big, Black, & Nasty’s gesture not as a sign of capitulation but rather as a wily stratagem. He was actually telling me: “In truth, I am neither bushed nor battered. I am just putting on this pathetic show in the hopes that you, foolish human that you are, will falsely assume I am finished and will thereafter leave the bathroom and continue on with your meaningless existence... while I, Big, Black, & Brilliant, crawl happily back from whence I came.”

Well, I was not about to be outsmarted by an invertebrate, much less an arthropodic blattodea, so I waited the clever bugger (as it were) out. Sure enough, after a minute or so, Big, Black, & Nasty, foolish insect that he was, crept back out. “Back for more, eh?” I said to him, and then let loose another torrent. Big, Black, & Nasty immediately reverted back to Scared Shitless Insect mode, clambering up any wall he could find. I couldn’t believe it. It was as if he was surprised by my actions, even though I’d been trying to kill him throughout the duration of our relationship. I mean, what did he think I was going to do at that point? Call a truce, pick him up, and take him on as a pet?

________

It’s been said that if or when a nuclear holocaust annihilates life on earth, only two life forms will remain: cockroaches, and Keith Richards. Well, I don’t know who said this, but whoever did must have been joking, because there’s no way Keith Richards could survive a nuclear blast. A cockroach, on the other hand -- that, I now believe. If my little confrontation with Big, Black, & Nasty taught me anything (aside from how not to kill a cockroach, I mean), it taught me that we should treat other species -- big and small, nasty and pleasant alike -- with empathy and respect, if not mercy. (It also taught me to never give up, but that’s sort of cliché.) At some point in our fracas, I developed a real admiration for Blattella asahinai, a creature that has thrived on this planet for approximately 279 million years longer than we human beings have. It was an esteem bordering on kinship, I’d say, and one I’d never experienced with a lesser life form.

It was at this contemplative point that I unleashed my coup de grâce. Having once again trapped Big, Black, & Nasty in one of the drain’s gaps, I pushed the shower head within inches of him and really let him have it. It was the entomological equivalent of being trapped underwater beneath Niagara Falls. (I’d like to see Keith Richards survive that.) (I mean it. I really would.) And yet, unbelievably, the little shit persisted. I furrowed my brow into a scowl and screamed, “Die, fucker!” (Luckily my Thai neighbors weren’t bothered; in Thai, “die, fucker” means “now we eat rice.”). But Big, Black, & Nasty either did not listen or did not understand, or perhaps he couldn’t hear me, what with 100 pounds-per-cubic-inch of water pressure battering his ear canals. Whatever the case, he did not obey; he pressed on, Darwinist instincts in his primordial protocerebrum and Gloria Gaynor in his heart. How was this possible? How could he take such punishment? Even if the force of the spray didn’t do him in, wouldn’t he at least have drowned by now? (I later read that a cockroach can hold its breath for up to 40 minutes. This information, I don’t doubt, would have been useful before I decided on the drowning plan.)

I continued the assault, but by this point I was in pain myself. I just wanted the carnage to end, to put the poor guy, who had so earned my respect, out of his misery. I squinted in empathic agony and turned my head away as I fired, and it was at this moment -- and not three minutes earlier, when I embarked on this ridiculous, elaborate plot instead of just squishing the thing, or in eighth grade, when I stood at the side of the gym trembling in fear instead of asking Ashley Barnett to dance -- that I realized I was an enormous pussy. I was a pussy, and Big, Black, & Nasty was a valiant soldier who deserved to die a soldier’s death, quick and proud. I lay down my arms and peered down, hoping to find the Captain expired. And indeed, praise Buddha, it appeared he was. Big, Black, & Nasty was stuck upright in the drain, just as before, but this time he was not moving even a little.

Still, after the last near-death experience, one couldn’t be sure, and so I remained vigilant, eyes aimed intently downward, shower head in my hand at the ready. I was so sure he would suddenly pop back out, alive again, like Glenn Close in Fatal Attraction, and scare the living badingo out of me. Unlike Glenn Close and most moviegoers, however, Big, Black, & Nasty had no desire to kill Michael Douglas, and thus had no reason to continue living. After two more minutes of suspenseful quiet, still breathing heavily and sweating profusely, I dropped my weapon and declared victory. I saluted my vanquished foe and returned to my room, happy that I was a human and not an insect that had inadvertently wandered into the territory of a clearly superior enemy.

________

The next morning, when I walked into the bathroom, I was surprised to discover that Big, Black, & Nasty had survived after all (something you, of course, knew all along, but only because I told you, so don’t act all smart). Not only was Big, Black, & Nasty not dead, but he had escaped. And not only had he escaped, but he had left a path of -- I shit you not -- blood tracing his exact escape route! Yes, cockroaches bleed, and they bleed red, just like us (Keith Richards excepted). Splotches of blood the size of quarters trailed out away from the drain. As for Big, Black, & Nasty? Nowhere to be seen.

________

And as for me? Well, I didn’t sleep well after that, I can tell you that much. Every time I crawled into bed, I could just see Big, Black, & Nasty scuttling about, those menacing little eyes, those antennae waving around, slowly, threateningly, in that way of his. Once I even swore I heard the pitter-patter of those barbed little legs on the bathtub tile, as if to simply taunt me. I moved into a new apartment three weeks later, and three months after that I was chased out of Bangkok entirely, but that was by an insanely jealous Thai husband, not a cockroach. (But that’s a story for another day.)

I may be 10,000 miles away, but I can picture him now, frolicking amidst the innards of that drainage system, plotting his revenge, and swearing to his little cockroach friends: “I don’t care if I have to wait another 280 million years... The next time Homunculus J. Reilly comes to Bangkok, I’ll be waiting. Oh yes, I’ll be waiting, and I’m gonna get that son of a bitch, if it’s the last thing I do.”

Well, let it be known: I have a message for him, too. Now hear this, Big, Black, & Nasty, you smug little shit, and hear it well: Careful what you wish for, cause I’ll be ready, and next time it won’t be a fuckin’ shower head. So bring it on, smart guy. Bring it on.

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.

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.