Джерри Хопкинс: Thailand Confidential

When people asked me why I chose to leave Hawaii—nearly everyone’s idea of paradise—and moved to Thailand, I had an answer so long it qualified as a speech. I started visiting Thailand sometime in the 1980s, I said—so often it sounded as if I were pulling a string in one of those Chatty Cathy doll’s necks, giving a recorded reply—and by 1993, I was spending as much time in Southeast Asia as in the United States. I had lived too long in the islands, where every day was precisely like the last and I knew the next would be the same. I was single, my kids from a long dissolved marriage were grown and gone, and I figured I had enough money put aside to last two years, so I decided to go where it seemed more interesting.

I picked Thailand over other countries—I droned on—for its hospitable population, alluring women, light-yet-healthy cuisine, affordable cost of living, historic culture and varied geography, tropical climate, the most interesting expat community I’d encountered anywhere, the contemplative nature of Buddhism (and its lack of a god or dogmatic creed), a reasonably free press, an entertaining government and an abiding sense of fun. It also had a major city where there was cable TV and the phones worked most of the time, whose location was proximate to just about everywhere else I wanted to spend most of the rest of my life; in under three hours I could be anywhere from Hong Kong to Bali to Kathmandu. There was a rawness, a messiness, an attitude that defied Western-style logic. Thailand was a place where time wasn’t linear, and property was given more value than life.

Like most new arrivals to Thailand, after I’d been here for six months, I thought I knew everything there was to know. At the two-year mark, I was beginning to have some doubts, and now, after more than ten years, I realize I’ll probably never understand a damned thing about the place and its residents. That doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes pretend to know, and about a third of the little “essays” and stories in this book illustrate this delusion.

I am, by training, a journalist, and by nature what might fairly be called a grumpy old man. As a journalist, I’m from the old school. I’m not one of those gonzo types who never let a fact get in the way of a good story. At the same time, I recognize that there is no such thing as objectivity, only degrees of subjectivity, and even the best of us tend to present the facts according to circumstance, mood, biography and biases. I’m male, white, sixty-something, American, well educated, a social liberal raised as a Quaker, a family man, a cynic with a twisted sense of humor and an expat living in a foreign country totally unlike the one I came from, where I now have a big Thai family and spend a lot of time with poor people, in the slums of Bangkok as well as in the rural countryside. All that, and a lot more, comes into play, no matter what I do, think, and write.

In all the time I’ve lived in Thailand, I’ve only written one letter to the editor, and that was to ask that the numerous and mysterious Thai holidays be announced in the newspapers the day before so that dummies like me will know when banks, the post office and government offices are going to be closed. My suggestion was ignored. I don’t expect any action to follow any of my opinions stated here, either.

It will be clear to the reader which of the forty-two “chapters” are rants, and I say in my defense only that this is what expats probably do best. I’m a member of a loose group of expatriated malcontents called “chairs.” We meet every Saturday for coffee and complaints. It gives us an opportunity to feel superior. We have all the answers and solutions—just ask us. Make me prime minister and I’ll fix everything!

The truth is, we wouldn’t have it any other way. Because living in Thailand is never less than fascinating, beneath all the grime still exotic and always a surprise.

Thailand is easy to criticize. What country isn’t? (Don’t ask me about the United States, unless you’re prepared to get sprayed with saliva and vitriol.) I have a file labeled “Thai Troubles.” In it are newspaper articles and various official reports saying that out of twenty-one million children, one in five suffers from physical or mental abuse… that thanks to all the artesian wells tapping its ground water and the dumping of so much steel and cement on top in uncontrolled development, Bangkok sinks twelve centimeters (four and a half inches) a year, so that much of the city already is below sea level… that one of every three billboards is illegal and unsafe… that AIDS is the leading cause of death nationwide and life expectancy for the average Thai is falling… that there are up to three thousand high-rise buildings in Bangkok that pose “grave risk” of collapse (the government refuses to name them; rumor has it that several house movie theaters)… that more than half the vehicles on the road in the capital exceed the legal exhaust fume level… that only 104 of the two thousand fresh food markets in the country meet hygiene standards set by the Public Health Ministry and ninety percent of the meat sold in markets comes from dirty and unsanitary slaughterhouses… that every day more than a million cubic meters of untreated waste water is released into the Chao Phrya River… that more than four hundred species of wildlife are on the brink of extinction… that since 1932, when the absolute monarchy was replaced by a constitutional monarchy, the nation has had twenty-nine governments, twenty coups d’etat and seventeen constitutions… and that according to the Health Department, more than half of all public toilets in Thailand are unhygienic, smelly, dirty and damp.

That’s not all. Little seems to make any sense here. Even the most critical activists admit that Thailand has some of the best environmental laws in the world, but they, like most rules governing behavior are ignored or bent. Motorcyclists use the sidewalks as if they were lanes in the roadway and there are so many vendors and other obstructions, pedestrians frequently are forced to walk in the streets with some of the most horrendous traffic in the world. (And likely encounter an elephant!) Thailand has the highest rate of road fatalities in the world and no public ambulances. When cops and military officers are caught doing something illegal, they aren’t charged and tried, they are assigned to “an inactive post.” Thais don’t walk, they meander, drifting all over the footpaths, looking in one direction while moving in another, bumping into people, like children seeming unaware that anyone else might be nearby. Two recent Miss Thailands were raised in the United States and unable to speak Thai fluently. Businesses spend a fortune on advertising, signage, menus, etc., where the attempts at English spelling and grammar are so mangled they are as humorous as they are sad. Order a meal in a restaurant and the cook will put the easy-to-prepare dishes on first, the longer-to-cook and more complex orders last, so that diners who came in together get served one at a time and they don’t get to eat together.

That’s not all. Squatters and pocket slums are commonly found in otherwise wealthy neighborhoods, roosters adding their hiccupy morning cries to the purr of Mercedes Benzes being driven to work. Time is circular rather than linear. Thais eat six, seven, eight times a day and remain thin. Women take their clothes off to dance in nightclubs, but at seaside resorts enter the water dressed from ankle to neck. (Money driving the nudity, shyness the public cover-up.) Thais won’t work in an abattoir because killing violates a Buddhist law, yet they matter-of-factly murder each other. (And know precisely what to do—with gusto and imagination—when the butchered pig or steer shows up in the kitchen.) In a country of sixty-two million, the incidence of mobile phone ownership is projected to reach fifty percent by 2005, while seventy percent of the population barely ekes out a subsistence living on the land. Thus, there is an illusion of modernity, but many (some say most) of Thailand’s citizens (even the rich ones) cling tenaciously to feudal codes and Stone Age belief systems.