Thai Nights

There is a nearly uncountable number of urban-rural myths regarding people in foreign lands--places other than where you live. Here are a few: All people want to come to the U.S.; all people have been on airplanes; all people have cell phones (mobiles). False, False, quickly becoming True. According to many reports, studies, and first-hand observations, most people want to stay in the land of their birth, and, contrary to the prophets of mobility, most people want to live in the town or village in which they were born. So it is, also, that most people do not travel outside their country. How could that be? With a billion+ passengers on airlines and trains every year? A small group of people must be taking a lot of trips. Nevertheless, it's all true.
Here's just one case-in-point. She is 35 years old and a district manager for FedEx in Thailand. Her only airplane experience was in a FedEx cargo plane parked in the Bangkok airport. She has never been outside Thailand, not even crossing the borders of nearby Cambodia, Laos, Malaysia or Burma (or as it's called in its current ice-age incarnation-Myanmar). She is bright, university-educated, hip, computer-literate, beautiful, and loves the Bangkok discos and the night-market entertainment of her hometown, Chiang Mai, where she still lives.
She has four mobile phones, all with text-messaging, graphics and music. She adores her King, is a devout Buddhist, and a terrific cook. She hasn't married yet because of her career, her sisters' and friends' experiences with Thai husbands, and her wariness of farang (foreign) men. She meets a ton of them through her job and her vibrant nightlife.
She has a very curious mind--she reads the news avidly, sees all the latest movies, and surfs the net. She is disinterested in traveling to the countries she sees and reads about, based on her observations of tourists in her country--some 12 million annually in a country of 65 million. "Anglos (trans: Brits, Aussies, Yanks and the Deutschers) don't smell good all the time," she says, "and they move around as if they were in an amusement park. They don't try to understand our culture, they think our food is 'cute', and they don't even try to learn a little of our language." Those are her words--her English is almost perfect--she also speaks French and German.
A point inside this case-in-point: There are huge chains of fast-food restaurants in Thailand, primarily American, Burger King, McDonald's, Pizza Hut, KFC, and they are always stuffed with tourists. During all the years I've wandered in this beautifully unusual, self-contained country, I've often stopped dead in my tracks at the sight of tourist-laden eateries. Once, and only once, I went into a McDonald's and asked a farang, "Did you travel 10,000 miles just to eat a hamburger?" He said: "Hey Mate, it's a bit of home and it makes me sleep better. Who can live on Thai food?"
So--is she xenophobic? Somewhat, most Thais are. Is she happy? Well, she believes she lives in the Garden of Eden. Might be so or else just a delusion that may explain the people of Afghanistan and the Sahara. Is she part of the Global Village? Indeed! Will she ever visit the other side of the rainbow? And do what--eat at McDonald's?

It has been over two years since a dark depression claimed Iris Chang's life [q.v.]. She is not forgotten. If you haven't read The Rape of Nanking, read it. It will upset the hell out of you. Read it. It was a bombshell when it was published. Each year as the Japanese bury their heads deeper into the sands of shame, this brilliant, beautifully written history becomes more and more relevant--in a panorama of Rwanda and Darfur and Iraq and other genocidal swamps that CNN hasn't gotten around to documenting. Read it!

From the Lyriana Nocturnes...

You lose them! That's what happens in death. All that love, all that happiness--you lose it.
There are two forms of death--the causal and the inevitable. To protect against the causal would require a sheath, a capsule, an absolute 360° impenetrable cucoon. Where is that armor? Better to focus on the clone of the brain and its perpetual update. Death from physical cause is preventable--but excruciatingly difficult. It is a race against time, where time is the emergence of the clone. Believe that the race will be won, that discovery will create your immortal mind. If you cannot believe, if this hope is dope, a monkey on your back, then consider this:
The purpose of life is not to die. The way not to die, and be reborn again as the Buddhists believe, is to achieve enlightenment. The way to achieve enlightenment is to to travel the middle way between the extremes of indulgence and denial--to always move forward in the present, always selecting in favor of--never rejecting. If the journey can survive, if the traveler can survive, then enlightenment, immortality will come when the mind is no longer dependent on the shell that contains it. But beware, again, of the monkey.

This was the voice she heard when everyone had vanished, when Lyri was alone and no longer chained to herself. Not asleep, awake and unafraid.

We're talking about scam and fraud but there is also a thriving, highly profitable and legal industry in Faux Art--paintings that are fakes, copies and presented as such with "buyer-beware" certificates and upfront, incessant winks of the eye. In both cases, fakes or faux, the driving motive is outsourcing, shadow contracting, tempered with compulsive consumption and no small amount of greed. It's a motive that can be applied wholesale and reveals a bewildering array of assumptions.

Fakes, Forgeries and The Madnesses of Crowds--such as:

The U.S. government and its "virtual" President, a clone of one of America's most beloved public philosophers - "Howdy Doody".

So-called Reality television, with actors who cannot act, writers who do not write, and producers who trained a McDonald's.

The "virtual" music in Rap.

YouTube and Myspace.

The "virtual" photography of mobile phones.

The army of private contractors who conduct the "virtual" war in Iraq.

The army of private contractors who are creating new "virtual" American towns and cities without the need for elections.

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Her name is Lat, and she is a Thai "daughter" of Jim Thompson. I met her through her step-sister, same mother, different father. No more details, for reasons that will become apparent.
Two days after he "disappeared" in Malaysia, he collected her and her mother in Nong Khai and they traveled across the north of Thailand (only at night) to Mae Sariang, and then crossed the border into Burma. In the following years, they traveled a great deal in south Asia, always returning to Burma, where she spent most of her childhood. She told me - he had been planning this for a long time. There was more to his business than just silk. His involvement with certain groups and governments had reached a point of "no control" and would explode just prior to the American escalation in Viet Nam. He was "marked." He survived. He died in 1984. Lat's mother died four years ago. I saw photos and documents. I believe her. And some day, when her safety is no longer an issue, she will release them.

My family and I were in the Cameron Highlands at the time of Mr. Jim Thompson's disappearance back in 1967. I personally, though a young boy of only 15 then, used to hike in the "jungle" regions opposite and surrounding the tea plantations near Mr. Robertson's flower villa. I never had any problems within them though I did explore some previously abandoned buildings covered then by vegetation and full of bat dung and presumed to have been used by the Communists during the "Malayan Emergency"...now they are nice homes again. Mr. Thompson, I believe, never disappeared per se...he merely "withdrew" as the article ("As Promised") below states and this, I believe is the truth about it!

Alan

In 2000, Terence Taylor Gold privately published the tormented journal of a man whom he claimed was neither an acquaintance nor a patient of his, but which he felt compelled to put into print. Though no longer available with few extant copies, Gold has consistently refused to explain the circumstances surrounding the publication and the disturbing events that followed it. This is an excerpt from the original journal.
excerpt