Back in Bangkok, Slightly Changed

I expected nothing from Bangkok on this trip, while all of the ones before had been weighted with memories and longing. I had already seen how malls were crushing the city, along with a squeaky clean version of gentrification that was doing its best to turn chaos into uniformity. The eradication of markets and street food carts had been well publicized in the two years that I had been gone, and a planned riverside promenade threatened areas that were the original core of the city. I knew where I would be for two days would no longer be the city I’d loved for twenty years, that mad, swirling, cornucopia of freewheeling entrepreneurs, hawking everything from food to silk to motorcycle rides twenty-four hours a day.

This stay was the shortest I had ever made, a two-day visit made only to see people I care about. I was staying in a hotel, a standardized European cookie-cutter model that was only differentiated from others of its kind by being set on the banks of the Chao Phraya River, that muddy, crowded, water-hyacinth-clogged heart of the city. The view from my room took in a glittering temple and a “ghost building” still unfinished long after the 1997 financial bloodbath but which was now swaddled in a covering that proclaimed the glories of Coca-Cola.

I tried not to think of the gallons of Coca-Cola I had been offered when I taught English to chemists at the regional bottling plant. Instead I swallowed food from the breakfast buffet, puzzled that the kitchen had managed to come up with inedible fruit in a country where trees laden with bananas and mangoes grew even in parking lots.

I watched pale bodies at play in the nearby swimming pool and wondered when and how I had become a lady tourist in a city where I had lived close to the bone for years. But that time was long passed and I no longer loved Bangkok, I told myself, viva La Turista.

I walked out to the main road beyond the hotel, one that I’d traveled often on my last trip, and there to my great relief and jubilation, was the breakfast I should have had, stretching for blocks on the sidewalk. I crossed to the other side on an overhead footbridge that was draped with pink and fuchsia bougainvillea and gave me a stunning view of TV antennas on rooftops and lines of laundry. My spirit perked up a bit at this Bangkok hallmark view that combined beauty with utility and damned the consequences.  

I beckoned for a motorcycle taxi and rode off to the Skytrain stop with just enough speed to banish the morning’s gloom, thrilled that I hadn’t been forced to wear a helmet and that my fragmentary knowledge of Thai was still serviceable. When I reached the central shopping area where a friend’s bookstore was, the sight of food on the street made me wonder if reports of Bangkok’s death might be exaggerated.

“They all disappear when they hear the police are on the way,” my friend told me. On my walk to his store, I’d seen the face of a woman who had sold baked goods on the same corner for at least ten years and a large orange tomcat was still sleeping in the basket of a motorcycle that he'd been tethered to for years as his owner cooked nearby. Beyond the sidewalk the street was still filled with unmoving buses, taxis, and motorcycles; later in the day when we went to dinner, my friend and I wandered with no urgency through stationary vehicles to get across the street. The air had the fragrance of fried garlic and auto exhaust and it was making me high, long before I had my first beer.

There was a lot of beer with our dinner and soon after leaving the restaurant, I realized I probably should have visited the restroom. When I got off the Skytrain on the other side of the river, I quickly found a taxi and was soon in my room. It wasn’t until I came out of the bathroom that I realized I’d left my laptop bag in the taxi.

It wasn’t as disastrous as it might have been. My passport, cash, and credit cards were all in my purse, which had made it up to the room with me. The only valuable thing missing was my ipad, which was enough to make me very annoyed with myself.

I went back to the lobby and told one of the receptionists about my stupidity. “Maybe the driver will find it and bring it back here,” I said, “I’ve read about that often in the Bangkok Post, how taxi drivers have returned thousands of baht that they find in their cab.” She smiled sympathetically and wrote down my room number, just in case a miracle happened to occur.

Back in my room, I was preparing to brush my teeth without my newly purchased toothpaste that was traveling around the city on the backseat of a taxi when the phone rang.

“Can you come downstairs,” a voice asked, “the police are here and they have your bag.”

I grabbed 500 baht as a potential reward and went to the lobby. There was an old man who had been my taxi driver, in the company of two brown-clad policemen. One of them handed my bag, asking “Is this yours?” My reply was immediate and enthusiastic, quickly followed by “Thank you! Please take this,” as I tried to hand the money to the taxi driver. He refused it.

“Check and see if everything is still in your bag,” a policeman said. There was my ipad and my newly purchased toothpaste, along with a book I’d bought at my friend’s shop that afternoon. “It’s all there,” I said and again stretched the money toward the cabbie, who once again refused.

“Thank you all,” I said and turned toward the elevator. “No, wait,” a policeman said, “we have to take your picture.”

My heart plummeted. I’d seen those photos in the Bangkok Post, the grateful tourist, the virtuous taxi driver, and the triumphant policemen. I am not photogenic at the best of times and it had been a very long day. Obediently I moved into line, silently cursing and trying to smile.
Before he left with the policemen, the cabbie accepted my 500 baht. I'm sure that we both had the same hope--that he was allowed to keep some of it for himself.

“If you see me in the Bangkok Post, never tell me I was there,” I told my friend the next day. But I knew that somewhere in the Thonburi police files, my image was frozen in time as the clueless tourist who had been rescued by Thai culture, a phenomenon that, as a foreigner, she would never understand.