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?

This time the "wave" came up from the land and covered the country. The military, a shadow government, ousted one of few truly democratically elected governments in the country's history. They replaced an arrogant billionaire Prime Minister with a General who happens to be a Muslim in a society that's 95% Buddhist. The tiny upper-class that controls most of the wealth cheered. The growing upper-middle class cheered--they want a bigger piece. And the southernmost provinces which were snatched from Muslim Malayasia and are essentially Muslim couldn't care less. Their rebellion went up a notch. So on New Year's Eve, while the General was making a pilgrimage to Mecca, the wave finally exploded in Bangkok with bombs and mayhem and death. A prevalent, long-held nightmare that finally appeared. What's next? Depends on how threatened the U.S. interests are--military bases, CIA outposts, secret Bush detention camps, "dollar-a-day" labor pools. Thailand was already suffering a severe identity crisis fueled by overwhelming tourism, the internet, and Skype. Even my glimmering home away from home, Phuket Island, is sadly succombing to the tarnishing of its cultural beauty. Addict that I am, I cannot eat plastic mangoes.

The arts of Asia abide - as expansive and merchandised as any other part of the world. What supports this is the lingering vibrancy of colonialism. There are only small traces of the political colonial powers of the last century. Today, it is the rampage of the corporate colonial powers that divides and sub-divides the Asian world-and they don't need flags with marching bands. In fact, colonialism never left, it just changed its clothes. In fact, colonial conquistadores and robber-barons have always been with us and... with Asia. Most of the newly independent nations in that large region of this small planet were at one time or another independent empires, imperialists who conquered and colonized and ruled, some in a fashion that would make the French and British look benevolent. Just roam into the history of the Khmer, or Siamese, or Burmese empires: hundreds of years of "king and country and your daughter, if you please." And, of course, there was the Chinese empire, the largest and greatest colonial power in history.

Equally striking - the numerically tiny upper classes frantically trying to keep the fattening middle classes off their backs, trying to keep entré to a trickle through the cracks in the garden wall. And both of these grinning but perspiring upper echelons are desperately trying to swat away the numerically larger lower classes from swarming into their privileged lives like mosquitoes swooshing over a downed net. It is at once pathetic and disturbingly hilarious. It is, in this day of instant communication, an instant portrait of three primordial elements of human life: blood, oxygen, and hypocrisy.

Asia, especially the economic tigerville of SE Asia, is having a disruptive time handling the explosion of communications and goods, plus here-today-gone-tomorrow cultural influences that Westerners pour through their borders. Most are having a hellish time envisioning what they are "supposed" to look like and reconciling the ancient unquestioned difference between men and women (the only difference between human beings said Strindberg, one lonely night in Uppsala!). Arrogantly and incredibly, it includes the Japanese, as well.

But not in Thailand, a centrally positioned cultural crossroads. The Thais have a cultural ether that absorbs. It is their historical legacy. In the heyday of European haute-cuisine-d'imperiale and American manifest-destiny, Thailand managed a marvelous juggling act and emerged as a buffer between their colonized neighbors. Though rudely slapped around by the French (so have we all!), the Thais really didn't suffer the pain of occupation until the Japanese madness drowned the entire region during World War II. After that nightmare, they conservatively and cleverly allied themselves with the West, especially with the U.S. It was during the next madness, the Vietnam War, that today's colonial invasion began. The American military, operating out of Thailand, decided they had found a rest&relaxation garden of eden. And they were right.

Affectionately known as the Land of Smiles, the kingdom of Thailand offered a gentle tropical climate, a gentle, poor population with a fairy-tale exchange rate, and a gentle, affectionate, smiling-laughing, embracing flower-bed of women. The American boys, half-literate, half mary-janed, and totally disoriented, thought they had stumbled into heaven before any bullet or blade took them there. And they were right.

So began the invasion of this dreamland of mists and smiles. So today, the tourist industry is Thailand's biggest business. Nearly 12 million come to visit a population of 65 million, every year. The commodities are -- defiantly low prices, grand food, magnificent art and architecture, low prices, low stress, and sex, high and low! In the midst of all this, facing the same doubts and troubles of the entire region, Thailand thrives. It aggressively strides to escape the third-world swamp in the first-world garden. It paid off its tribute the World bank and, just recently, opened a world-class, $4 billion dollar airport that rivals any huge, troubled airport in the world and surpasses many. Part of the Thai infrastructure is impressive - a modern education system, modern transportation, the internet, cell phones, cable television, and a surprisingly robust health care system, along with high tech industry, agribusiness, a home for corporate colonies looking for cheap labor, industrious workers, and an honestly corrupt bureaucracy. The other part suffers - not just from the proliferation of Starbucks and 2000 "7-11s", but also from the enduring perch of the tiny upper class on top of the thicker middle class hunkered down on top of the large, poor, mass-class. The recent and former democratically-elected prime minister is a billionaire, afflicted with many of the problems of billionaires everywhere. His party is called "Thai Rak Thai" - "Thais Love Thais" and it's new and it's corrupt. Difficult to be otherwise in a recent political history of scandals and coups and endangered elephants.

It is that silly, frightening phenomenon of the 20th century, the Junta, that has provided the net of stability for this kingdom. So they ousted him. It is the Thai military class that thrives, a highly profitable landowner, banking system, business unto itself.

Media is abundant in Thailand, most of it, news and programming, imported because much of the local stuff is stuck in the age of the "Brady Bunch." Literature is prevalent though Thais, like Americans and the French, are reading less. The visual arts, painting, sculpture, ceramics, weaving, are embedded in everyday life - part of a long tradition. The film industry is lunging out of adolescence. But it is the performing arts experience that is truly special... Thai music, Thai dance, and Thai theatre... different from anything else in Asia, as profound as the Japanese and Chinese, and as beautiful.

Bangkok is the hub - a sprawling, polluted metropolis of 10 million that overwhelms its 200 years of treasures, not unlike New York, Tokyo, London and Paris.. As a crossroads, this no longer charming city offers dance, pop and classical music concerts, opera, an array of world cinema, an array of the array of world arts. On a smaller scale, the smaller Thai cities reflect the hub.

Look into the mirror. The mosaic is dazzling. To grasp the range and impact, you need to step though the looking glass into a few pieces of the array, such as these:

In the party city of Pattaya, there is a palace of a theatre, with a huge faux-marble lobby that mimics a grand opera house. It boasts a large, comfortable 1000-seat theatre with an enormous stage equipped with the latest audio-visual systems. It's Called: Tiffany's. It produces it's own performance - a revue, a vaudeville, a classic cabaret theatre-piece, with dance, music, synchronized song, and complex staging. The sets are as lavish and well-designed as you would see anywhere. The costumes are expensive, and to coin a phrase, "spectacular." But beyond this obvious entertainment lure is the main attraction: the cross-dressing actors, mainly men with a few women. They are part of a deep tradition in Thai performing arts with little of the smirking insuations that Americans heap on their cross-dressing performers. The colloquial word is "Ladyboy." In most quarters they are revered and they are renowned in Asia for their beauty. Every night, two performances, packed houses, 2000 people, tourists and locals, stream into this theatre as they have done for over 30 years. It is considered family-theatre and families are abundant in the audience on any given night.

South of Pattaya, in the province of Chonburi, near the beach, behind a cluster of aging apartment houses... a theatre. Plain, portable seating, clean, a brown version of a "black box." An amazing audience of about 150, not home watching one of the 25 cable channels. A number of them from that tiny upper class, a number from the middle level, the rest seemingly ordinary people who could afford the 100 baht ticket (about $2.50US). 12 actors on a very small stage, with simple but effective lighting, painted cloth backdrops, two musicians (flute and drum) and a tech person. It was a new play by Satang, a local playwright. The title - "Nii-kra-cok" - "Here Is The Mirror". The actors were in the most outrageous, outlandish costumes and makeup that one could imagine. It opened in a flurry of slapstick, over-the-top comedy that fit the over-the-top costumes-makeup perfectly. Then the drama began, and that did not fit. The incongruity was stunning. For nearly two hours (with a slight intermission) the actors wove a story of love and pain, of coming together and breaking apart, of pairs of people interchanging their lives, finding themselves, losing themselves, finding themselves again.

Fortunately, I sat in the back next to two people who spoke some English. So every time I looked their way, they whispered a few words to clue me. It was hardly necessary. This work could have been performed in mime... it had that much clarity. The actors had that much clarity in their movement and voices, in the truth they portrayed and their belief in the truth they transmitted to the audience. My new-found friends were rather amazed at how much of the story and the language I was able to grasp. It wasn't me... it was them, the actors. This was theatre at its essential center... actors and their audience (such a wonderfully mixed audience!) without polemics and politics and without the packaging of production and effects and thrill-juice.

I gratefully experienced this once more in Bangkok and again in Chiang Mai, way up North. It was life as art and art as life... through a looking glass, in Thailand, in Asia.

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 a Thai village, a few years ago, I sat in a little, outdoor bar in the heat of the afternoon, drinking a cold beer. Sitting next to me, a villager, a farmer, taking a break. Between my broken Thai and his fractured English, we managed a reasonable conversation. At one point, he reached into his shoulder pack to get a cigarette and a book fell out. It was a paperback, yellowed and dog-eared. He told me it was a novel by a famous Thai writer and he carried it around with him for the past 20 years. Why? Because the book was a friend, which made the writer a friend and they were always there when he needed them. He smiled when he said that, and so did I. There was nothing embarrassing about the moment and its intimacy.

Recent surveys show that less than 45% of the U.S. population read books (or magazines or newspapers, for that matter). The numbers are similar in Europe and much higher in many other countries. The obvious and most demeaning factor is the explosion of media--the pixel is replacing the ink drop.

The internet, in its quick-fix, here and there way of comprehension doesn't lend itself to reading books. Amazon and Sony notwithstanding, the experience of reading a book on a screen is like dining alone in a delicious Italian restaurant--the intimacy of sharing is missing, in this case, the sharing of your mind with the mind of the writer. You can't get through the glass. As with all screen media activities, you're passive, sitting there as the display takes you along. With a printed book, you can touch each page with its not-perfect paper and its not-perfect ink. To experience a printed book, you have to join it, it doesn't do it for you the way a screen image does. You and the writer talk to each other and share, almost as if you and the writer were the same. You don't need an on-off switch or batteries or protocols or rules. You just need light and quiet privacy. And if you're visually impaired, you have the voice of a reader, holding a book, almost as if it were the voice of the writer.

This may all seem a bit odd coming from me as you read what I write on a screen in Scene4 Magazine, which is an electronic publication, designed as a print publication but presented only on the web for the past eight years and not by choice. A few years ago, a group approached Aviar proposing investment financing to take this magazine into printed distribution. Given its large readership and the idiosyncrasy of its content, they believed that it should have a printed edition (to preserve its "intimacy") and that it would make a profit (which was equally important to them). After much discussion and some irreconcilable editorial differences, they realized that only 50% of the readership was in the U.S. and reading was on the decline. It deserved a print edition, said they, but who would eventually read it?

This is not a "luddite" tainted treatise--I find evolution and the evolution of technology exciting, thrilling and rich with hope and a vista of personal freedom. And I believe that the book will evolve and maintain its place as one of the grand devices of human history. To that I offer a vision. It's not just science fiction. Isn't all science - fiction - until it's not? Just think of describing a movie to Cicero or a cell phone to Alexander Pope. In the relatively near future, you will be able to hold and read a book, page for page, printed in a medium that will allow you to make your book as small or as large as you like and with any material feel you desire. It will be opaque or transparent; you will be able to see all pages including both the front and the back of any page at any time. And you will be able to make a page as large as a wall, free standing, so that you can walk along as you read and step through it to read another page. You will be able to walk into a book, touch the words, listen to the words, read the words, remember the words. The variations will be almost unlimited and yours alone. All with the privacy and the intimacy of a written, printed book--just your mind and the mind of the writer.

Try describing that to Gutenberg.