Bangkok III

We passed a milestone on Sunday, when we were derided for America's politics for the first time. The critic was a cranky man with few teeth who wanted to take our money.

He approached us on the street and spoke in malformed pidgin English. He said he fought with the South Vietnamese in the Vietnam War, the American government abandoned him, and now he has no money. He showed us some battle scars.

Americans are very cold, he said, meaning insensitive. And always bombing (pronouncing the 'b'), all over the world.

I started to speak up, "That's my president, you mongrel!" "Let it go," Mike said.

The old man told us we should give him money. Mike offered him 5 baht if we could take his picture. He scoffed and said that would be 20 baht. There was nothing in the Lonely Planet book about bartering with beggars. I gave him 10 baht -- enough for two skewered squid or a pineapple -- and we were on our way.

Forgive us for being cynical, but we've started to mistrust anyone who approaches us with the common exclamation, "My friend!" We figure his story had about a 50 percent chance of being true.

Shop good time good feeling

That day we moved south, toward new Bangkok and into a more middle-class sector of the city. Our room went from ~$4/night each to $10/night each, but we got our own bathroom with hot water, air con, free breakfast, and there were no goddamn dogs or roosters outside our window all night long.

As we roamed around that part of town, we came across Bangkok's new eight-story shopping mall, MBK, or in English, The Leviathan. We walked in and immediately started to swoon, then were propped up by a kind of frightened daze that carried us through the mall. We had some sort of purpose here, or were we lost, no reason, no, a reason, DVDs. We had to buy DVDs to burn photos onto.

On the fourth floor we found an electronics store. Store? The western electronics store is based on the old timey general store. You walk in, old man Jones says hello, and you peruse the shovels or whatever. The Thai model is the street market, which should never have been united with modern technology. You walk in and suddenly there are no walls or exits, only an endless grid of kiosks, buzzing and flashing. Arrays of mobile phones and TV screens, glare from glass cases, people shouting gibberish at us, and it all runs together every time you turn your head or the room spins, which happens every few seconds in order to disorient the shopper.

"There's no way we're going to find DVDs here," Mike says. We turn around and there they are, as though someone heard us and whipped out a makeshift display. Mike hands the woman all his money, and we keep walking. Mike thinks he might throw up. "Can we find a way out of here?" he says. I lead him away by the elbow, into the lesser chaos of the mall proper.

Tony from Nigeria: On ladyboys, "coping," and his scam operation

We sit down on the edge of the mall's open center. A pretty woman beckons to us from a third floor shop. Is that how things happen here? Tony the Nigerian speaks up from the adjacent bench. That's no woman, he says. He tells us about his many misadventures in learning to identify Thai ladyboys.

Then he goes on to tell us about the lives of many Thai women. They outnumber men in Thailand. Often, he says, a woman has a baby with her boyfriend and he leaves her in a couple years, then she has few real skills and has to go fend for herself. Tony said they call it "coping," when Thai women go out and either sell their sex or try to find a Thai or more often farang (foreigner) boyfriend who will provide for them in exchange for devotion. We've met some Thai women who do pretty well for themselves, so we know that not all Thais live this way.

What is Tony doing in Thailand? Well, he finds Thai people with valuable ideas or crafts but little business sense, and he gets a copyright for himself, then sends the plans to his people in Nigeria for mass production. This being the case, we couldn't feel too sorry for him when he told us the story of the Thai girl whom he took back to his hotel only to have her make of with 40,000 baht while he was in the bathroom.

Chong Kao! I take care you

That night we made some great friends at a sidewalk...restuarant? There's no real word for it. Anyway, there was a policeman, Aew, a computer engineer, Namsom (orange juice), and Kare, who worked at the restaurant but drank with us anyway. There was also this little kid, wearing a plastic bag over his face, who kept running into the street and climbing onto the roof of this truck. They just called him "ling," monkey.

Namsom spoke decent English, and she helped lubricate the conversation. Many people, like Namsom, are introduced to us with a "nickname" that denotes an actual thing. The day before we met Phone, whose name means rain!

Between our broken Thai and their broken English, we could only express simple statements, which made for a sort of jubilant and innocent conversation. "Drink whiskey with you, make happy, we friends!" "American people no like war, no like army!" "Thai police drink whiskey, law good, Thai army send police shoot gun. No! Drink whiskey. Thai army bad. Police good." "I like you!"

We want to smuggle this kind of directness back to America with us. It cuts through the shit and you become friends a lot faster. "I like you. We drink whiskey

Complete and total surreality

On Monday, Kare from the night before invited us to meet up with her at MBK. She brought two of her friends and told us we were going to a restaurant on the sixth floor. We said MBK is insane, let's go outside. Mai chai, she said, we stay MBK.

Unlike orange juice, these girls had the English vocabulary of a retarded baby. I don't really konw if any medium, short of a total virtual reality experience, could render what that dinner was like.

First they ordered duck and green noodles. Kare kept putting the food in my bowl, but when I tried to put it in her bowl she usually wouldn't let me. Same with Mike and a girl named Aaa(SP?). Every few minutes they would give us each a tiny napkin. Lots more food came, course after course--black ear cloud mushrooms, squid, fish ball and fish roll-- and they put the food in this boiling pot in the center of the table.

The conversation was absolutely exhausting. We began to settle for just expressing anything that we possibly could. There was corn on the table, and Mike asked me to tell them that corn comes from America. I managed something like, "In American, eat corn first."

Comprehension was extremely taxing, and at certain points I just collapsed mentally and answered chai (yeah sure) to everything. They laughed at every single thing Mike said in Thai. Often we'd ask a question and they'd answer a different question.

Mike and I could talk to each other in code -- which I'm sure they did as well -- without their understanding. "These tricks gone stick us with the check." "Fo shizzle."

Sure enough they did, and even though we looked like high rollers paying for it, the total bill amounted to about $20 U.S. for five people. We walked around Siam square with them for a while, having more lobotomized exchanges. Time came to go home, and they tried to get us to take a cab with them, so we could pay, obviously. We said we'd be walking home, see you later.


Thai words of the weekend

Hua lok -- funny (the girls thought everything normal that we did was hilarious)
Chung kao -- cheers!
bao/bek -- white/black
ja rang kiat mai thaa ja hai nom luuk thii nii -- Do you mind if I breastfeed here?

Travel note: Today we leave by train to this other town whose name we can't remember at the moment.