Bangkok Old Hand Read online

  It's true. Thais perceive all large farangs as being "fat", no matter whether it's really fat or just meat and bone. For someone like myself to get called "smart", I'd have to be marooned without food for a month and then have a long spell of dysentery besides. Still, it seemed to me Martin was being a trifle harsh.

  "But it's not only the smiling," he continued. "There's the ambling." He reached up gingerly to touch the gauze dressing on his head.

  I found this observation puzzling. Martin pronounced the word "ambling'" as though it were some kind of invective, referring to an activity so heinous that it should not be discussed in front of children.

  "Thais amble. There is no discernible pedestrian traffic pattern on sidewalks and pavements. Moving with the deliberation of upcountry oxcarts, they manage at the same time to be everywhere they should not be."

  I could see that Martin had thought about this feature of Thai culture deeply, and that this tirade would

  become a set-piece, to be recounted for years to come.

  "People walk in any direction," he went on. "There is not the slightest idea of lanes of traffic. They stop without warning; they step directly into one's path; they mill about in impromptu roadblocks, play pedestrian 'chicken', and generally take no more account of my person than they would a rumour of snow."

  Obviously this was a sore point with him. I hesitated to tell him, seeing the condition he was in, that this was Thailand and these people were Thais, walking in the Thai way; and that if he wanted to walk his way and not find his every path an obstacle course, then he should go walk in Toronto or somewhere.

  "You see this?" he asked me, pointing to his head. "I was striding along in Tha Phra Chan Market, yesterday, dodging and weaving and trying to do better than a mile an hour, when a band of schoolgirls materialised directly in front of me. I swerved to miss them and immediately felt a sharp object penetrate my skull deeply enough to give me a frontal lobotomy."

  Evidently the operation hadn't been a success; Martin was working himself into a real temper.

  "It was the corner of a metal sign, mounted low enough to be an effective trap for anyone taller than 5' 11"."

  Martin, as I'm sure the reader has guessed already, is 6' tall.

  "I reeled away as blood began to pour from my head. Some concerned passers-by gathered 'round, and for once they weren't smiling too much. I had learned how to ask in Thai where the hospital was, while I was upcountry; and I tried it out again now. This elicited an excited gabble that I couldn't understand at all. A couple of good Samaritans, however, took me in charge and led me to a ferry landing and pointed to the hospital across the river.

  "We had a few minutes to wait for the ferry, and I really just wanted to be left alone to see what life with a frontal lobotomy was going to be like. Unfortunately, my earlier essay at the Thai language had convinced them that I was a hot-shot Farang who could speak Thai. I kept saying, 'Mai khaochai; I don't understand,' in impeccable accents, and thereby exhausting my entire store of Thai; but it was no use. These kind people kept smiling and speaking Thai and asking me, I had to imagine, things like, 'And how do you feel about the Hegelian dialectic; do you think it holds water, when it comes right down to it?'

  "Eventually I got to see a doctor, who smiled, took three stitches in my scalp, and insisted on knowing how it had happened. He gave me a tetanus shot and a packet of antibiotic capsules, and then, strangely enough, suggested I see a monk at a temple right across the street from where I had encountered the sign."

  "What, for meditation classes?" I asked.

  'That's right."

  "Going to do it?"

  "Are you nuts? I'm getting out of here. I'm going back to Toronto, where people walk at a good clip in orderly lanes of traffic as though they're going someplace, and where everybody isn't smiling all the time. I've got to go somewhere and relax."

  5 THE ORIGIN OF THE THAI BUS QUEUE

  In Thailand, things are not always what they first appear. What is it, for example, that occasionally prompts such normally free- spirited individualists as the Thais to line up at bus-stops in queues of geometrical precision? Why do many construction workers wear woollen balaclava masks even in the hottest weather? Read on to have these and other mysteries revealed.

  I showed up at the restaurant a little late, that afternoon, and found my friend Tony from England already deep into a large bottle of beer. He was, he told me, bamboozled.

  "There they were," he said. "They were standing in a queue as straight and orderly as if someone had surveyed it for them." He pointed to the bus-stop on the street below, outside the window. "Then the bus came, and all of a sudden it was gangbusters — every man for himself in a mad scramble to get on board... Take a look out there now: there's another queue forming."

  And so there was. Thus far three people were lined up

  as smartly as the Royal Guards on parade. Tony shook his head in bewilderment and sought Veritas in his vino. Actually it wasn't vino; it was beer, and his glass was empty.

  'Your shout," he said.

  I suppose it was, in light of the fact I'd been late and missed his round.

  By the time the beer arrived several more people had lined up at the bus-stop. You might have thought Thailand had spent 50 years under the British Raj. given the geometrical precision of that queue. Then a bus appeared, and Tony told me to watch carefully. The "queue" abruptly disintegrated into swarming knots of people at the doors of the bus.

  "See!" exclaimed Tony. "What do you make of that?"

  I had the explanation, in fact. Seeing as how I was paying for the drinks, however, I figured I shouldn't make it too easy for him. I pointed to the crowded sidewalk across the street. It was a typical scene, with people moving from cover to cover like soldiers under fire. A number of them had newspapers, shopping bags, even briefcases held up to their faces. In England, they would've been shielding themselves from the perpetual drizzle. But here in Bangkok, with the sky clear and the sun still hot at 4:00 p.m.?

  "They must be keeping the sun off," said Tony.

  Right then, I told him; he should have a look at the bus-stop again, where yet another line of people had formed, and think about it.

  Tony stared and ruminated. Then he swigged at his beer and ruminated some more. Abruptly, a grin of delighted comprehension cracked his face wide open. "Aha," he said. "I have it! It's the telephone pole — they're in the shadow of the telephone pole." He chortled, ordering more beer with which to celebrate his perspicacity. For that was indeed the answer. Far from representing some historically unaccountable vestige of the British Empire, these people were being regimented simply by their aversion to sunlight and by the long, late afternoon shadow of a telephone pole.

  Flushed with the success of his deduction, Tony decided to overawe me with the quickness of his mind. "I see it now," he said. "This kind of behaviour has evolved as a survival factor — little habits that constantly minimise the heat, right?"

  "Wrong," I replied. "Have a look across the street; do you see those construction workers?" A dozen labourers, both male and female, occupied a building site. It was hot, yet everyone was dressed in long-sleeved shirts buttoned at the collars and fastened at the wrists. They wore broad-brimmed hats together with either scarves or knitted balaclava masks covering their entire faces but for the eyes. Some kind of insulation against the heat? Or maybe they were breathing through the scarves because of the air pollution. Nice theories, but almost certainly wrong.

  It was vanity, I told Tony. That's what it was. Your average Thai has almost a phobic reaction to sunlight on the skin. And why? Just because it makes you darker.

  "I can't accept that," Tony said. "Surely these habits have evolved as the distilled wisdom of generations who've had to work in the hot sun. If you spend too much time in the sun, your skin ages and you get skin cancer. It makes good sense to stay out of it."

  Skin cancer? I responded. Good sense? Rubbish. Nobody cares about skin cancer until they get it. Not
in face of the Cosmetic Imperative. No, it's all vanity.

  You look at your average Westerner. I've seen Germans, Americans, all sorts of people who are supposed to have better sense lying in the sun till their skin blisters, cracks, and curls up crisp at the edges. Skin cancer? The popular media are full of stories about sun and skin cancer, but you still get people devoting the better part of their annual vacations to working on the perfect suntan. Good sense? You get them spending large amounts of money and time subjecting themselves to something that has in many traditions been used as a form of torture (though when it is applied as torture there generally aren't any cold beers or gin and tonics involved). You get shirtless Aussies in the middle of Chiang Mai and topless Germans on Jomtien. Are they merely concerned with staying cool? No; once again it's only vanity. 'To hell with local customs and local sensibilities; we want an all-over tan to flaunt back home."

  It's ironic. Thais tend to be naturally darker than a lot of Westerners, and they're often concerned with getting lighter, or at least with holding steady. Westerners, on the other hand, suffer all sorts of expense and discomfort trying to get darker. In the West, a tan lends an aura of health and vitality. In Thailand, it is generally about as welcome as leprosy.

  This can be explained, at least in part, by the fact that Thais associate darker skin with manual labour, while fair skin represents a visible sign of class. Of course this used to be true in Europe as well, where in days gone by tans were associated with the working class. Ladies, for example, would carry parasols and wear big floppy hats and gloves and things, just to keep their skin white and upper-crusted. It was the advance of the Industrial Revolution which democratised pallor in the West, taking the hoi polloi out of the sun and putting them into the dark Satanic mills and pits of Industry. Pale skin lost its classy cachet; few aristocrats could compete with the pallor of a factory worker, for example, who was required to sweat inside for 18 hours day. Then along came the 20th century, when tropical beaches and tennis courts became readily accessible to those with the money and leisure, which is almost everybody, these days. A nice dark suntan has become prized evidence of a trip to the Bahamas or one's membership in the Gastown Polo Club. It really is a powerful thing, this attitude towards tans: even though I have to laugh at the obsession, I myself almost throw up when I see newly-arrived farangs on the beach — some couple from Liverpool, for instance, lying there like gobbets of whale blubber washed ashore. In two days' time they'll resemble boiled lobsters, except for the skin hanging in shreds from their tortured bodies. Within two weeks of their return to Liverpool, of course, they'll be white as fish bellies again or, as the average Thai would have it, "Suay mahk (very nice)."

  In the West, tans have become a symbol of health, beauty, and money. In some circles they are virtually mandatory. Have you ever seen Liz Taylor or George Hamilton without a tan? No, you haven't; and they'd hide under the bed before they'd let you. And Ronald Reagan would've done the same, at least before he did, in fact, get skin cancer.

  "Okay, so you've convinced me," said Tony. "Westerners are crazy. But everything you've told me goes to show that the people standing in the shadow of that telephone pole are eminently sensible. They know what they're doing."

  "They may be doing the right thing," I replied, "but they're doing it for the wrong reasons. Let me give you just a few random bits of evidence.

  "I come home from the beach glowing with health and a tan fit to get me on the back of the bus in Alabama, and my Thai neighbours greet me with 'My, you look good! Been to the sea?' Dark farangs are okay, it seems. My

  Thai girlfriend, on the other hand, comes back from the beach to be greeted with expressions of concern bordering on horror: 'Oh, you're so black! Naaglee-ed (ugly).' She's unusual, inasmuch as she likes to sunbathe; most Thai women at the beach stay in the shade, and they cover up with clothes if they go in the water. 'Modesty', you say? Maybe. But I've got my money on vanity.

  'Take another example. The first time I went up to Chiang Mai, I was expecting to be swept away by the incredible beauty of the ladies, having been primed with the folk wisdom that the loveliest women in Thailand are from the North. I must say I was a bit disappointed. Sure, the local maidens were by no means blemishes on the landscape, but I reckoned I'd seen more heartbreakers per square metre in Bangkok. What had everyone been raving about? Only after I'd lived in Thailand for some time did I realise what it all meant: it's simply that northern girls are fairer-skinned than the North-easterners or the Southerners and, hence, 'more beautiful'. No, you're not going to get most of your Thai women sunbathing when Thai beauty pageants have a 'Miss Fair Skin' category, and when you can bet the one who takes the crown as most beautiful of all is going to be at least as fair as Miss Fair Skin."

  Tony was ready to concede the point, he finally indicated, if only I'd stop yammering on about it. In any case we were distracted by the appearance at the bus- queue of a lady of indeterminate origin (she was a little too dark for Chiang Mai) but of truly breathtaking physical attraction. Though she stood in the shadow of the telephone pole, she glowed as though with an inner light. After a couple of minutes a bus came along to signal the disintegration of the queue and to carry the object of our admiration away to grace other fields of perception. Tony and I heaved sighs in unison, and there followed a silence wherein we practised our middle-distance stares.

  'You know," I said after a spell, "my brother wrote from Canada the other day. He told me he's been going three times a week to an institution known as 'Fabutan'. Apparently this is one version of something called a 'tanning salon', and he has been preparing for a vacation in Jamaica."

  You mean he's getting a tan before he goes away?"

  "Yeah. Maybe it's a status thing — the Joneses down the road just came back from Bermuda with a tan, and now he's going to fix them by going away with a tan. Who knows?"

  "Well, Bangkok's already got Dairy Queens and McDonald's; when are you going to get the first Fabutan Salon?"

  "Are you kidding? Trying to sell Fabutan franchises in Thailand would be like trying to promote Pork Sausage Parlours in Arabia. No, what you'd want to set up here would be Pallor Parlours. That's the thing — lead-lined rooms shielded from the least glimmer of ultra-violet; immersion in bleach baths and massages with skin lighteners...

  "That's it — this is what you do: you establish a chain of Pallor Parlours in Thailand right away. Then, with the fortune that pours in, you buy into the tanning salons in America. The way the Western media are going on about skin cancer, and what with Ronald Reagan describing what's left of his nose as a billboard proclaiming we should all stay out of the sun, the trend is going to turn, and before you know it the anaemic look is going to come back into fashion in Europe and America. At the same time, the influence of the West and Western-style affluence is striking ever deeper at Thailand; and, as always, the popular culture embraced abroad is going to lag behind what is actually current in the West, so more and more Thais will come to see that the smart thing is to be tanned and to look as much as possible like George Hamilton. And that's when you pull the old switcheroo. Suddenly, overnight, you convert your American tanning operations into Pallor Parlours, and your Thai Pallor Parlours into tanning salons. Before you know it, you're bigger than Coca-Cola."

  By now it was becoming clear we'd both had a little too much to drink, and we agreed to postpone further discussion of our new commercial empire till we could re-examine the matter in the cold hard light of day.

  The next morning, in fact, it didn't seem like such a good idea anymore; and I had a pallor that showed right through my Koh Samui tan.

  6 RUNNING WITH THE BULLS, BANGKOK-STYLE

  They call it investing; their critics call it speculating; but it's really gambling, pure and simple. Thailand has a large "community" of both Thais and foreigners who devote themselves to playing the SET (Stock Exchange of Thailand). When the bulls are running, the quick and audacious can make tons of money in a day, and everyone is anima
ted, filled with an unholy delight at the prospect of all this free loot. Most people are, that is; some people can't handle winning...

  Wiwat is wired; he's wound up tight.

  Most of his colleagues on the stock exchange floor are more recognisably Thai, taking it easy even in the heat of the trading hours, adopting the mai pen rai ("never mind") attitude which often tends to set the pace in this country. But Wiwat is a chain-smoker, sucking tobacco smoke down like it was jet fuel; and when the action heats up he gets a violent twitch under one eye which puts the lie to the unfailingly calm, professional voice he uses to reassure his clients.

  However many years, or months, he has left before he blows that vein which throbs in his temple, he has an uncanny aptitude for getting things right. If he says you should pick up Songkhla Canning now and sell it in two days, you can be pretty sure that's exactly what you should do. Just let greed get the better of you and hold it for that third day.

  He makes an unlikely Moses, yet every morning Wiwat comes down from the mountain with the sacred wisdom on what should be bought and what should be sold that day. "What does Wiwat say?" This question buzzes about the trading floors of brokerages all over the city. "What does Wiwat say?" It hums along the telephone lines, as Wiwat's own clients leak the word to their fellow punters.

  When it comes to investment decisions in this town, what Wiwat has to say is arguably more important than enough quarterly earnings reports and PE ratios and Metastock-generated graphs to paper your office and half the corridor too.

  Thailand has seen the growth of a large fraternity of gamblers, both Thai and expat, who more or less compulsively ride the bulls and duck the bears through a combination of insider leaks, time-worn principles of sound gambling, black magic, and pure luck. But such was the growth of the Thai economy over much of the past several years, one would have had to be especially adept in order to lose money playing this market. More recently, though, a political scene sometimes reminiscent of Alice in Wonderland — sometimes darker than that — complete with military coups and recurrent rumours of more coups, has kept the market volatile and the pessimists without sleep.