December 2003

Too many elephants running around, see.  Somebody's got to do something.

Wow. Definitely not in Malaysia anymore.

The cultural shift was also evident from the driving habits of the locals.

In Penang, I merely thought the cab driver who drove me to the airport was either a) suicidal or b) a frustrated astronaut trying to re-live eccentric G-force experiences. In Bangkok, however, most drivers (cabbies and civilians alike) apparently moonlight as trained assassins, using their fenders as weapons.

In Singapore, jaywalking is unthinkable: pedestrians have wide sidewalks and clear rights of way, while in Kuala Lumpur, jaywalking is a useful urban skill: pedestrians regard a BMW in the shins as a minor nuisance, nothing more. But in Bangkok, jaywalking is a sign that somebody didn't love you enough, and it's time to end it all: pedestrians are hunted and killed as large game.

Right this very minute, I half-expect a car to come careening through the window of this Internet café, killing me in mid-sentence.

The driver, however would be really friendly about it to my family.

The Southeast Asia Total Chumminess Tour continues unabated.  Stop and open a map, and within seconds, somebody stops to help you.  The only trouble: depending on where you are and your luck that minute, they might be completely sincere (as an attractive young woman named Bo was in helping me find about six different things) or completely trying to con you (as a sweet-talking guy whose name I didn't get was in grabbing my map, telling a long series of obvious lies, and then offering to save me from this dire fictional situation for a reasonable price).

I'm guessing the friendliness must be the reason Bangkok is so often remembered reverently at parties by middle-aged former backpackers, who inevitably then go on to tell you that they saw Phuket before Leonardo DiCaprio made "The Beach." Soon follow their well-worn tales of the Angkor Wat, my eyes glaze, and it's time to pass out in the cheese dip.

Anyhow, somewhere around here, I am told, Backpacker Valhalla awaits.

Maybe.  But the good and bad seem about equal here, both identical in appearance at first, and equally intense.  Bangkok feels a suburbanite's worst, most impossible imaginings of urban life: brief glimmers of sophistication, surrounded by the loud, chaotic, dangerous, and dirty.

Speaking of which, this is easily the most polluted place I've ever seen.  The river and canals are all smelly and lifeless and a thoroughly appalling brownish green.  The water is so dreadful that a local rap star named Big recently fell in and is currently dying as a result.

The air is almost as bad.  Bangkok doesn't have anything you'd formally refer to as a "sky," exactly, nor does it have a "sun," in any meaningful sense.  There's just this pale brown distant roof overhead, which brightens periodically.

It's like Los Angeles was when the half the suburbs were on fire.  Only it's like that here all the time.

Many locals (and all of the street cops) resorting to wearing surgical masks just to breathe.  I went for the Michael Jackson look myself, and still wound up coughing every night.  Next time, I'm bringing a full SCUBA apparatus.

I should mention that Bangkok has lots of really pretty Buddhist temples.  Lots.  They're huge.  And shiny.  And Buddhist.  So there's that.

But there's poverty here, too, on a level I haven't seen since South Africa.  Entire sections of town are row after row of corrugated tin roofs sheltering homes built on dirt or pavement.  I know, because I got lost in a chunk like this, just five minutes after leaving my hotel the first time.  (I've been traveling most of my adult life.  I don't get lost easily.  Bangkok is a real challenge.)  The local folks were amused to see a confused foreigner in their mix, and eagerly came out in the street to gawk, blink uncomprehendingly at my map, shout at each other in Thai, and gesture in every direction as to where I should head next - all of which, I add, was done with great enthusiasm and friendliness.  I'd probably be a bit scared in a similar neighborhood back in the States, and quite concerned in Latin America.  Here, I just felt lost, but among mostly-incomprehensible-yet-well-meaning friends.

Speaking of incomprehensible: the culture here (and by "here" I mean Bangkok; I wouldn't judge all of America by New York City, either) is a surreal mix of Buddhism, intense Thai nationalism, half-assed pop mysticism, anything-goes third world capitalism, and a burgeoning westernization, all bundled together.

The Buddhism: did I mention the temples?  Lots and lots.  Shiny.   Everywhere, big, shiny, fancy Vatican-order stuff, often looming near tenements. This is still weird to my American eyes -- seeing rich and poor in such close proximity again.  Monks in orange (or perhaps just dirty saffron) robes are also a constant sight, usually doing mundane stuff that suddenly becomes oddly amusing, just because a monk is doing it: hailing a cab, buying bootleg DVDs, or just talking on a cell phone.  Let's face it: monks are cool.

The intense Thai nationalism: the Thai flag is almost everywhere -- even the taxis and dangerous-motorized-rickshaw-no-seat-belt-death-trap Tuk-Tuks are painted with the colors of the Thai national flag. And remember how Saddam Hussein's picture was plastered everywhere in Baghdad?  The king of Thailand is equally ubiquitous, and portrayed in just as wide a variety of garb - regal, military, humble man-of-the-people, you name it, on buildings and monuments and even just random street corners.  (I'm not comparing the two guys otherwise, incidentally.  Most Thais seem to genuinely admire the king, or at least they say so to a strange American asking questions.  I'm just saying you see the face constantly.)  The king's face is also on every piece of currency (which is to be handled with accordant respect), on numerous magazine covers, and in the hotel lobby downstairs in three different places.  In paintings, by the way, the king's enormous ears are always a little smaller, and his tiny chin is always a little bit bigger.  Always.

Nobody here seems to want to talk about it (hell, nobody here seems to even know), but it's worth remembering that the whole "Thailand" name was a political move in the 1930s to capitalize on anti-Chinese sentiment and exploit ethnic-identity-as-power in a way dreadfully similar to similar 1930s movements in Europe.  And we all know how well that worked out...

Thailand does, however, have something of a fledgling democracy, so that's good.  They also have a teeny problem with cops performing extrajudicial killings, all in the name of a drug war: thousands of people are freshly dead, although the cops say most were killed by other drug dealers, see, which just proves the war is working so well. Wink, wink. The resulting human-rights outcry and cover-up, in turn, led to this brilliant newspaper headline, which I swear I am not making up: "Police Discover Nothing At All." News headline? Or Zen koan?

Half-assed pop mysticism: That sort of Zen koan news leads me to the brainless magical thinking you see everywhere here, most frequently in the constant burning of incense (trading breatheable oxygen for poisonous carbon monoxide) as an effort to clean the air.  You can't walk a mile in this city without passing a sign advertising reflexology, horoscopes, feng shui, or similar hoodoo as if they were concrete services like laundry and car repair.

(Before you guys get into me about respect for ancient cultures, that's not what we're talking about. These aren't time-honored temples where life-trained experts apply knowledge gathered over centuries; these are rip-off artists trading on the gullible via money-removing kiosks in high-traffic areas offering twenty minutes of useless illusion to people who can ill-afford it.)

My point? It's sad to see that lots of hard-working Asians are apparently just as uneducated in science as lots of middle-class Americans.  Should have figured, I guess.  That's too bad. But it does tie in with something else you see constantly:

Free-range capitalism, in all its glory: unhealthy fast food, bootleg DVDs, and even human beings themselves are easily available for a price.

Walking near the Silom night market, I actually lost count of exactly how many people offered me "young lady" when two guys said the same thing at once, and then one or two more possibly right after.  My count was at thirteen, after about ten minutes of walking; after the verbal overlap, the count would have continued at somewhere between fifteen and seventeen. I'm simultaneously amused and appalled to my core. One night in Bangkok may indeed make a hard man humble.  And judging from the behavior of my fellow tourists, it also makes a humble man hard.

Adam Smith capitalism, of course, is a proud American export - the purpose, in fact, of the massive U.S. arming of the Thai military which directly led to all sorts of bad around here, from a generation ago to the present - and so I shouldn't be surprised (but I am) when, near Siam Center (a bit like Times Square), I stumble into a large Country/Western festival, which means long displays of cowboy hats, spurs, and riding chaps, festooned with completely random Americana. I had no idea Miami, Cincinnati, and Toronto were part of the Old West.  Here, they are.

Ethnology update, for fans of the Aleutian Land Bridge: buddy, you stick western duds on a Thai fellow, you'd swear you're looking at a full-blood Cherokee.  Also, it turns out that at least several Thai citizens can play the hell out of Willie Nelson songs.

This last I discovered in two places, actually: at the C&W fest, and also when I stumbled a few blocks north of the looming Democracy Monument, hoping to find a loo, and attracted by bright lights. (Years of travel seem to have associated bright lights with the ability to pee.)

Suddenly, I heard drunken male voices doing a lewd rendition of "For All The Girls I've Loved Before."  A few steps later, I turedn the corner and found a three-man glee club, two of whom were westerners, and one of whom appeared Thai.  I'd know more about them, except my eyes were distracted by what was behind them, the source of the bright lights...

My God.  It's... it's... Backpacker Valhalla.

Tucked away behind grand avenues, hidden beneath the choking brown thing they call "up" here, Bangkok does, indeed, have one really long street which is lined with shops, hostels, restaurants, party bars, and everything else you can possibly want when you're still young enough to be angry at your parents.

I stopped to watch, since at age 40, this might as well have been a nature preserve.  And here, on this one street, if you patiently refrain from sudden movements, you can watch hardbodied Euromen with carefully-odd facial hair vie for the affection of ponytailed co-eds with skin-damage tans, often via long conversations about whether Bintang or Tiger is the better Asian beer.

This is every bit as exciting as it sounds.  And I'm sure that's the Bangkok I keep hearing about.

Well. Big whoop to that.

The Bangkok I experienced, on the other hand, is a place a water-taxi driver might threaten to dump you in the river if you don't fork over ten times the fare you agreed on two minutes earlier.

This would have been worse, except the Thai currency is so lame that he was only stealing five dollars.  Also, I had to admire the sheer Bladerunner desperado resourcefulness of a local using the sheer nastiness of his own environment as a lever to hoodwink an outlander.  So I gave him more than he asked for, as much out of pity as fear.

So. By now, you might figure that I hate Bangkok. Not quite. Sure, it's nowhere you want to visit, except to change planes.

But it does have these big shiny temples.

One of which is the Golden Mount, a big round Hershey's Kiss-shaped thing maybe ten stories high, atop on of the few hills Bangkok has to offer.  It's pretty damned amazing to look at, even when you're wearing a hat to protect you from the upward gloom (the "sun," it's called elsewhere), glasses to protect your eyes from the soot, and a paper mask to keep your lungs inside your body.

As you climb the Golden Mount, up up up a staircase up up up winding up up up its perimeter, you can feel the air become cooler and cleaner.  You can take off your shoes near the top, buy some bottled water, remove your various life-support and filtration devices, and take a breath.  That's a lot, around here.

Climbing the last inner staircase, you can even duck under a sign marked "Mind Your Head," wondering if the delightful double-meaning in this place of meditation was intentional, and if not, if random chance ever knows when it's being clever.
And if you're lucky, you might get to meet somebody like Yut.

Yut is a Theravada Buddhist monk who lives at a different temple but comes to the Golden Mount sometimes to meditate and maybe talk to people.  He's working on his English, since he's moving to Canada soon to help preach Buddhism to a new bunch of people.

I'm not religious, as you surely know.  But I liked this guy a lot.  Great sense of humor, genuine curiosity about what an American thinks of the world, equaled only by my own interest in how he sees the world and America.  So Yut the monk and I sat and chatted for about an hour and a half, facing this giant golden Hershey's Kiss in the sky.

We exchanged addresses at the end, and I hope we'll stay in touch.  It was one of those conversations that's so easy the only thing you remember at the end is the other person's face when they laugh.

Mostly we talked about families and how we grew up.  I told him a bit about my Baptist upbringing, and he told me some about Buddhism.  We didn't talk about any specific teachings, really, but about what religion is for -- which is nothing, if not to help us figure out how to get along in this world in peace.

We talked about politics - specifically, the capture of Saddam Hussein, which was in the news right that minute.  Yut thought this was a good thing, but that the war was still unjust, and he was surprised to learn that an American (and likely, a lot of Americans, if not a majority at the moment) might agree.

Yut's ability with English (which vastly exceeds my ability with Thai, of course) often forced him to speak very simply, cutting right to the basic truth of what he was trying to say. My favorite Yut-ism:

OK, granted, from where you're sitting, it probably looks like a bumper sticker you'd see outside a Janeane Garofalo concert.  But trust me: when you hear it from an actual Buddhist monk, dressed in the robe and everything, atop this giant golden holy Hershey's Kiss in the middle of Thailand, it sounds pretty damn good.

More than any wisdom, though - and Yut would rush to admit he's still learning - I really liked this guy's sense of humor.  And I really liked discovering that here, literally halfway around the Earth from my birthplace, I could meet a Buddhist freakin' monk who would instantly feel like a brother to this working-class kid from a small town in Ohio.

So even amid all the crime and grime and noise and unbearably constant urrrgggh that is Bangkok, wonder is still possible.

Now if only somebody can do something about all the extra elephants I hear are running all over the place...