666 Words about Penang

666 Words About Penang

And of course there is sunlight today, not profuse and glorious but more than I’ve seen in a week. I have to remember that if the Brits settled somewhere in SE Asia it was because it tended to be cloudy. I wonder why they never made it to Hanoi; they probably avoided it because it lies inland, gravitating toward the small and misty islands with bad climates instead. The woman who wrote Morning is the Whole Day pointed out the similarities between England and Malaysia. I should have remembered.

Jessie said yesterday that she had been horrified at the change between the woman she first met and the one who had spent two months in music hell. “Your face was so different from when you came,” she said. Ah yes, and I rarely burst into tears in a public place either, as complete strangers walk past.

I’ve read in novels and memoirs how people—usually women-- weather times of crisis without wavering and then become masses of quivering nerves when all is well again, Post-traumatic stress disorder is the term our time and place reduces that to, an envelope of clinical words for the near-panic state that comes from having what is accepted and demanded as normalcy being shot directly to hell. The Vietcong reputedly sent blasting music for hours into the jungle nights as torture for nearby American troops and I can testify that it is extremely effective. I would rather endure 24 hours of something truly horrible and then have it over and done with than ¼ of my waking moments consumed with sound that I can’t abide, when I’m winding down for sleep, for weeks and weeks and weeks.

Lack of sleep plays hell not only with emotions and sanity but appetite too. I know the food here is good; I loved it when I first arrived but now I associate tamarind and shrimp paste and even the lovely fresh orange juice with throbbing amplifiers and bellowing singers and my stomach closes shut.

When the music was going on every night, I found ways to keep from screaming but once it ended I was shocked when I discovered that I couldn’t sink into silence at night. Somewhere inside I waited for the noise to begin, even though it was after the legally bound time of silence, after midnight.

“It will start again,” Jessie said, “You never know when. It depends on the deity.” And another woman told me, “It’s much worse in August, and it goes on longer.”

I know that if I stayed here, the minute I saw a blue plastic structure go up indicating that stage-building is in progress, inwardly I would start to scream and wouldn’t be able to stop.

This is done to benefit Chinese temples. The music doesn’t burst into full glory until after the final call to prayer fades into the night, at around 8 pm. Since the concerts have ended, that last call to prayer has become longer, louder, and more pronounced. It makes me wonder what the Moslem population thinks about the deity concerts and if they ever attend them? I didn’t see a bescarved head among the concert-goers the night of my investigation. Unless it comes up in fiction, or I ask Jessie, I will never know.

I look at the decaying houses that I had dreamed of living in. They stand waiting for renovation or destruction in the part of Georgetown near the historic area and now I know that within their grace and silence lives vermin. I’ve seen rats swimming down the open drains and I have learned in this city exactly what a thriving bed bug colony looks like. Even here in the modern splendor of Symphony Park, I received a spider bite that took over a week to heal. I’m only grateful that I escaped the experience of lice—but then of course I do face another 36 hours or so in Georgetown...

Noise, clouds and vermin. Hello/goodbye, Penang.

Early Resolutions

Hong Kong is easy. I have stories to find, work to do, people to visit, and miles of sidewalks to walk. With fewer than thirty days in that city and with still so much of it unexplored, I simply plan to succumb to its rush and energy, absorbing as much as I can.

I’ll return to Bangkok at the perfect time, after Christmas and New Year’s with their emotional weight and well before Chinese New Year, which I love with an ignorant passion. It’s still cool there in January and the light has a winter cast to it, but there will be sun. After two months of Penang’s clouds, I’m hungry for Bangkok’s sunlight.

I will have avoided the knots of Christians who sing carols on the Skytrain and the frantic commercial frenzy of lights and Christmas trees that glitter in the shopping malls. I won’t be there for Starbucks’ marketing of eggnog lattes or hotels serving up hearty winter meals in a city that has never known a winter.

When I get back, even the holiday hangovers will be old news and Bangkok will be getting ready for the return of blinding, blazing heat and a spurt of holidays that have nothing to do with the Western calendar. The exception of course is Valentine’s Day where the streets are full of stalls selling little pink garments for miniscule Thai girls and hordes of flower vendors take to the open road.

I need to find my new home, but after the domestic disaster that I blundered into in Malaysia, I’m going to look for my Bangkok spot with all deliberate speed. I’ll find a place where I can work and then I’ll reclaim my life in Thailand.

I did that rather badly over the past two years. I tried to step back into the past and let the present annoy me far more than I should ever have allowed. I took a place I loved for granted and then wondered where its charm had gone. I whined a lot. I was a true pain in the ass.

In the past two months I’ve become acutely aware of what I walked away from. When I go back, the things I will be grateful for will far outweigh the things that are less attractive to me. I won’t list them here; I won’t fail to write about them as I re-experience them; I won’t forget how it has been to live without them.

Homeward Bound

Last summer I returned to my home in Bangkok to find few traces of the unrest that had turned the downtown core to a battleground and no hints of any sort of reconciliation between the government and the Red Shirts. The burned shopping centers were already being rebuilt. If I hadn’t read the news articles about the battle that had consumed the end of April and much of May, I would never know that my city had been full of smoke and gunfire a week or so before I returned after a three-month absence.

There were ripples on the domestic front. Tensions that had to have been exacerbated by the political debacle had come to a flashpoint between my housemates and the woman who had been our housekeeper for fifteen years. She packed up her meager belongings and left in tears.

The man who sold coffee on the main street of our neighborhood now brought his baby son to work with him every day. One of my favorite restaurants had been closed for a month because of the street fighting outside its walls and now was almost empty every time I went to it.

Adrenaline surges during times of crisis and ebbs away after, leaving exhaustion behind. What I returned to was a post-adrenaline Bangkok, and since I had never seen it in an exhausted state before, this was more disturbing than the burned-out buildings.

I left it. I was certain I could make a home in another Southeast Asian city, and in Penang I found what I was sure I needed. I was mistaken.

Since 1995 I have lived off and on in Bangkok. I was never completely sure of why it continued to pull me back. Now I know.

It’s the people who bring their energy and creativity to that place from all over the Kingdom of Thailand. They make this a kinetic city, constantly moving and changing and redefining and adopting and absorbing. Bangkok is a city that is never going to be completed and that makes for some rather stunning dissonance within its continually expanding borders. But it has, as my friend Elizabeth observed recently, “great infrastructure.”

And I agree, although the infrastructure I salute isn’t the Skytrain or the Underground or the new train to the airport. It’s the stall only feet away from a shopping center on Sukhumvit that sets up tables every night to serve one dish only—the best chicken rice I’ve had anywhere in Asia. (Yes, Penang roasts the chicken they use for this dish—which is terrific—but the sauces from stall to stall all taste the same, and that’s where the excellence of this meal resides.)

It’s the network of trucks and motorcycles and riverboats that will get you where you want to go, anywhere in the city, far beyond the newer forms of mass transit. It’s the man from Chiang Rai in my neighborhood who makes fabulous food from the north of the country and the thousands of women who have made papaya salad and grilled chicken Thailand’s national dish. It’s the exquisite manners that children are taught from the day they can bring their chubby little hands together in a wai. It’s the markets that sell fresh food still, all over the city, even though supermarkets are everywhere nearby. It’s the shining, glossy, clean hair and the well-scrubbed bodies of people who live in one of the most polluted cities of the world but who never smell bad themselves. It’s the temples, still supported as social centers, providing education and shelter for people who might not otherwise be able to afford these things.

Yes, it’s the bookstores that draw me back as well and the eccentric and original expats I’ve met who have lived in this place far longer than I. And the lovely, nondurable shoes for sale on almost every corner, and jasmine garlands and fruit stalls and beautiful blazing sunsets. But these things exist because of Thai people and the way they have chosen to shape their capital city.

I will have days and even weeks when I complain about the trendiness of my home in the world—Krispy Kreme anyone?—and the insanity of its politics. But those things aren’t the core of Bangkok—that’s the coffee-slurping that causes every long-term relationship to quaver and scream. I will take off when I need to, for the rest of my life, but Bangkok is where I choose to be and will choose to be, over and over, because of the people who live there and how they live their lives.

Thank You Note to Georgetown--It's Been Fun!

For the past two months I’ve lived in a very lovely little city. I’ve posted photos and tried to write lyrically about Georgetown. God knows it deserves all the adjectives I could possibly bring to bear upon it.

I’ve met some unbelievably kind people, all of whom speak my native tongue, and have found several gorgeous little spots to relax in. Here are my favorites.

On the backpacker oasis of Chulia Street is a hotel that up until recently was one of the disheveled examples of decaying grandeur for the frugal traveler. It has been renovated to financial heights far above my own fiscal capabilities but I found that its breakfast buffet is like a tutorial in Penang’s culinary history. The Yeng Keng Hotel was built in the mid-1800s as an Anglo-Indian bungalow and became a budget hotel in the 1900s. Now 5 million ringgit and over a century later, it is a stunning place to sit and ease into the day. Manager Jacky Cheung takes great pains to bring in the best of the BabaNonya delicacies that travelers might otherwise never taste, and the coffee he has chosen is almost the best I’ve had in Penang.

It would indubitably be the best if the guy at Fatty Loh’s Chicken Rice on Nagore Street hadn’t told me about siTigun Café, where Indonesian Tigun Wibisana retired from backstage work on Broadway to roast coffee beans in Georgetown. (Tigun is beyond a doubt still a New Yorker—he knows his smoked salmon and you should not pass it up when you’re there—comes with a very good croissant and just the right amount of cream cheese on the side.) Sinking into the faded comfort of an aged sofa, surrounded by Broadway posters and listening to jazz, I go there every week religiously. I buy beans to take home and have lunch and sit in one of the prettiest spots I’ve found in Penang

It would be the prettiest if a debonair little dog hadn’t lured me through the door of the place she is in charge of—Amelie Café on Armenian Street. It is incredible how much beautiful stuff has been artfully arranged in a dark and delightful little room that is certainly bigger than a breadbox—but not by much. The owners are clearly artists and are fabulous conversationalists and also make the best lassi in the city. It’s almost my favorite drink on the island of Penang—with absolutely no sugar involved.

It would be my favorite if I hadn’t ended up one day at the Jolly Café on Masjid Kapitan Keling or Pitt Street. I went in because of the name and because it is open-air on two sides with a great view of sidewalk strollers. I go back as often as possible because of the nutmeg juice, made from fresh nutmeg fruit and more aromatic than sweet. No other place has measured up to that standard of nutmeg juice for me, and although the Jolly Café isn’t as pretty as my other refuges—oh hell it is not pretty at all—it’s been another once a week staple in my Georgetown incarnation.

As has been the Trois Canon Café on Chulia Street, because the lady behind the counter is one of the kindest people I have met in my wanderings through this city and because it is one of the few diners in a classical mode that I’ve found in SE Asia, and because the hot buttered toast with kaya (coconut jam) is superlative comfort food. And who doesn’t need comfort once in a while? Even in Georgetown…

Exiles in the Mansion

When I returned to my room in Chungking Mansions on my first afternoon there, I walked into a smell that was a lot like soggy bread and when I sat on my bed, the blanket felt damp. At first I thought that when Hari or Jun cleaned my bathroom, which was only inches from where I slept, perhaps they’d inadvertently sprayed the outer room with water. Then I realized that in my zipped suitcase, out of cleaning range, my clothes were damp too.

I opened my window but the air that came in from the enclosed space between buildings smelled like garbage and mildew. No wonder, I realized. Earlier in the day I’d used my camera’s puny little zoom feature to augment my myopic view of the airconditioner in a window across from me. The white objects that covered it in a small mound were bags and boxes and less identifiable debris and outside my window were pigeons cleaning up food that someone had dumped from above me.

The imposing glass and steel building across from me on Nathan Road smelled unmistakably of wet mops when I had gone there for coffee that morning and on the streets the air was still. Throwing open the window I had pleaded to have was an act of simple-minded optimism, the instinctive act of someone who lived in a Bangkok neighborhood filled with the scent of jasmine and fried chili.

Thailand had turned me into a woman who lived through her senses. Deprived of all but the most rudimentary language skills in that country, I depended on sight and smell to interpret the world around me. In Kowloon, my view was of diseased concrete and trash-covered air conditioners and what I smelled made me feel as though I were living at the bottom of a deep and polluted river. I thought of the trees covered with small and fragrant blossoms on my Bangkok street and struggled to keep from whimpering.

I was going to spend a month in Chungking Mansions and although I didn’t mind living in a room that was perhaps the world’s cleanest shower stall, there were changes I needed to make. Fortunately it was a very small room; it wouldn’t take the efforts of a Martha Stewart to transform it.

In Bangkok my bedroom was a scented orchard every morning, thanks to Boots, the British shop that sold lime and coconut and orange fragrance in the form of soap and shampoo and lotion. Although Hong Kong had been shaped by Great Britain, Boots wasn’t one of the blessings of colonialism and the local version, Watson’s, wasn’t the same olfactory paradise when it came to bathing. But, I remembered, with a burst of relief, there was at least one branch of Lush—I’d smelled it when I left the Hong Kong subway station on my way home hours before.

Lush is so cute that I usually avoid it with enthusiasm. Its salesgirls would head toward me in charming little clouds if I even seemed to inhale when walking past one of their Seattle shops and it merchandises soap as though it’s food, which nauseates me. But when it came down to living with the odor of wet bread or watching adorable little girls slice bars of soap as though they were serving cheese at a cocktail party, my choice was obvious.

I wince every time that I think of how much money I spent on aromatherapy that afternoon but it was worth it. Lemongrass, jasmine, lime blossoms pervaded my little portion of Chungking Mansions every morning and lingered through the rest of the day.

I handed over the bedding from my narrow little cot and replaced it with the muted earthy colors of vanilla and dark green, punctuated with a bright magenta cushion, and lined my tiny windowsill with a pot of azalea and one of jasmine that I found at the flower market on the edge of my new neighborhood.

“You’ve made a little home,” Hari said when he came to take away the unwanted bedlinen. His smile didn’t reach his eyes, and both of us for a second were caught in the memory of other places we had loved.

He had told me once about fishing in Nepali mountain streams and as he spoke, it was the only time I saw the sadness leave his eyes. I felt my own heart brighten as I remembered the sound of water flowing over rocks in an Alaskan valley and for a second felt a wave of nostalgia for the world I once lived in.

A few days later I found a magazine with photographs of Nepal and gave it to Hari as he sat at the reception desk alone.

“So beautiful,” I said and his response was immediate and bitter. “Yes so beautiful, my country—so many trees. Trees, only trees, no jobs.”

But later as I walked through the reception area, his head was bent over the magazine. He didn’t look up as I passed and fleetingly I could feel the trees and rivers of Alaska and Nepal, palpable in a small corner of Kowloon.

Traveling with Ma Thanegi

Of course it wasn’t Ma Thanegi’s fault that I found myself risking my life trudging beside a busy highway on the outskirts of Penang’s suburbs. Just because I was reading her latest book Defiled on the Ayeyarwaddy when I overshot my bus stop, so immersed in her longing to play the drums at a Kachin festival that I was half-way to the airport before I looked up and realized my error, I have no reason to blame that on her. God knows I’d been eager enough to rush downtown to get her book and bring it home—and it was my greedy curiosity that made me rip the package open before I even left the post office.

Just because I was still thinking about the stones she had found at the beginning of the Ayeyarwaddy River, which she had someone polish into smooth, cool beads and string into necklaces and bracelets, and was feeling blessed that she had given one of each to me, and wondered what they had looked like when Thanegi found them and crammed her pockets full—this was no reason to mentally castigate her while I walked cautiously along a little grassy strip as cars whizzed past me.

I tried hard not to let my mind wander to the prospectors who dredge one of the rivers that becomes part of the Ayeyarwaddy, looking for gold, wondering how similar they were to Alaskan gold panners, and forced myself not to think about the woman with the baby strapped to her back whom Thanegi talked to, the one who dreamed of finding lumps of gold as big as peanuts in the round wooden tray that served as her gold pan.

But as I realized my trek was taking me into the territory of a freeway and retraced my steps to find a less hazardous route, I began to think about the quiet villages and rock-strewn roads and the ice-cold, clear water that began Ma Thanegi’s 1300-mile trip down the Ayeyarwaddy river and felt envious. I roamed past squat, ugly, cement “link houses” with a strong pang of gratitude that I didn’t live in one of them and wondered why some women find themselves wandering in search of a bus stop while others boat-hop their way down one of the world’s great rivers.

When I found a bus that would take me home, I refused to allow myself to go any further with Ma Thanegi until I had entered my apartment. After all, it’s not as though I hadn’t read it before, I scolded myself, I’d edited it, for God’s sake. But even though at one point a year or so ago, I practically knew every page of this book by heart, I couldn’t wait to plop down on my couch and keep reading.

A whole day shot to hell, I thought happily as I sank back into Thanegi’s verbal company. Drat the woman, I echoed her long-suffering pal, Ko Sunny, here we go again…

Ma Thanegi is my friend; I am her editor at ThingsAsian Press. I can’t review this book. But I can lose myself in it, I can get lost while reading it, and I can tell everyone I know that if they want to meet one of my favorite people in the world, take a trip with her down the Ayeyarwaddy. Just don’t begin your journey while you’re still on a bus.

A Little Night Music

A week ago I went to a fancy little expat café to have a pre-birthday lunch. I ordered a glass of Merlot and spent the next thirty minutes holding the bowl of the glass in my palms trying to warm the wine to a drinkable temperature. It hadn’t been chilled; it had been iced. But it eventually released a little bit of aroma and flavor—I can live with that.

Since I arrived, I’ve tried desperately to find the sort of cute, cheap shoes and handbags that are on every Bangkok street corner. No luck— but Thailand is right over the border—I can live with that.

There was something very dubious in my fried rice today. As long as I can convince myself that it was only the size and shape of a rodent turd and not the thing itself, it’s okay. There are other places to eat—I can live with that.

Somebody above me seems to be fond of chopping vegetables on the floor for an hour or two in the early morning but it’s not every day—I can live with that.

I’ve lived here for almost six weeks now and except for the week of Deepavali, every night at 8 pm, pop singers who will never be at the top of anyone’s charts—least of all mine—sing and whoop and make little speeches until midnight, over sound systems that wouldn’t disgrace the biggest clubs in Vegas, on outdoor stages. For four hours almost every night, I’ve heard music that makes me yearn to be stone deaf.

Penang has a regulation that says noise must stop at midnight—and it does. But because it is regulated, it seems to be the god-given right that anyone with an amplifier can turn it up full-blast every night they choose and keep the noise going until midnight. And we are talking noise that comes blaring into my apartment even when I have all the windows closed and earplugs crammed in my ears. By the time it ends, my delicate little nerves are so jangled that I’m usually awake until after 2 a.m. Bad music does that to me; I can fall sleep listening to Chinese opera but not to this bilge.

“Penang is famous for this,” a woman told me in the elevator the other night—and it’s absolutely true that I live in a complex called Symphony Park with Harmony View right next door. But I didn’t think that would mean that I would end up in Cacophony Acres—and you know? I’m not at all sure I can live with that.

Tonight I saw that the stage across the road from me had been taken down but before I could feel exultant, I saw a sign for another ‘concert” right beside my building. It’s going to happen next week on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. If I had the money, I’d leave town—as it is, I have absolutely no idea of how I’m going to live with that.

…Crazy for Crying and Crazy for Loving You—

My new life is filled with colors and trees and old architecture and water. It is, I’ve been told, against the law to cut down any of the trees that shade generous portions of the Penang streets and road ways; even in my somewhat lackluster neighborhood, small green groves punctuate the rooftops below my balcony and leafy plumes lend grace to the ugly thoroughfares.

Only a few miles from where I live, in the hills that range at the edge of the suburban sprawl, is jungle and terraced hillsides where crops are being grown and gigantic, mysterious boulders that are the size of small houses. Small clear streams make audible sounds—it is that quiet—and the air smells moist and cool. An unpaved road holds a handmade sign at its beginning—“the art of living” it says and an arrow points invitingly down the lane. Someday soon I’ll go back there just to see where that art can be found.

The street where Sun Yatsen lived for a while still looks as it might have when he walked along it one hundred years ago, if you ignore the little Euro cafes and galleries and boutiques that fill the buildings that were probably much more utilitarian when Dr. Sun plotted revolution in their midst. A Western woman passed by me as I gaped my way along Armenia Street; she held the leash of a large German Shepherd and together they entered one of the old, refurbished houses. I longed for her life, her house, her dog—but only for a moment.

I moved to Penang because I needed time to step away from Bangkok’s jangling turmoil. Seduced by color and greenery and the promise of natural beauty, I signed away a year of my life to live here, in a small city that isn’t prey to the cognitive dissonance that characterizes Bangkok for me.

In Bangkok, I was whisked from downtown to my neighborhood in minutes on a glacially cold subway—and then climbed into the back of a pickup truck and sat until the driver decided he had enough passengers to make it worthwhile to start his vehicle and drive us all home. For the first six months of my return back to my Thai neighborhood, I thought this was charming and then I began to feel homicidal, especially when the humidity was around 110% and it was raining so the driver had put up his Visqueen walls to keep his passengers dry.

There are no pickup truck transport options in Penang, and no motorcycle taxis. Once you leave the downtown area of Georgetown with its taxis and trishaws, you take a bus. It’s clean and airconditioned and just a tiny bit boring. But on the other hand, I don’t conclude a foray into the larger world with thoughts of murdering a fellow-human—or by racing down a highway sitting side-saddle behind a man whom I pray hasn’t had one too many Red Bulls. Oh wait—that was the good part of living in Bangkok, and I realize now I didn’t do it often enough.

In my new home, I get on a bus and I go to the one place I’ve found that has really good coffee beans and I go to another place where I’ve found I can buy the International Herald Tribune and sometimes I go to the spot near the seawall where I can sit at a plastic table and watch the water as I eat something that is very good indeed. I come home to a place that is bright and pleasant and triple the space of any apartment I’ve had in Bangkok for what I would pay for a studio in Thailand’s capital. There are no mosquitoes and no cockroaches and no rooftops to block out the setting sun or the SE Asian l’heure bleu that I love so much.

And there are no bookstores to tempt me into spending my last cent, and no wonderful eccentric opinionated writers and booksellers for me to drink too much beer with as we chat for hours and hours, and there are no riverboats to call me away from my work. And damn it, when I think about it, I’m a lucky old broad. So why am I crying? Beats the hell out of me…

The sky outside my balcony is golden and pink and dark grey with flashes of heat lightning. A curtain of rain rolls toward me and I remember a student years ago in Bangkok asking me “Can you see the shadow of the rain?” Those kinds of memories have informed my life in Thailand and gave it depth. I look down at the houses below me now in Penang and know I will never have the glimmer of understanding about them that I was lucky to have been given in Thailand—and oh god, at this moment how much I miss all that I was so eager to leave behind,

An Illusion of Borders

Acres of chicklit and the male equivalent, shrines to James Patterson and Jody Picoult, books I might read but only if there were no cereal boxes lying around to keep me company—this is what I found in Penang’s presiding bookstores. I came away with nothing I yearned for—a map, a book on Bahasa Malay, the conclusion of Anchee Min’s life of the Empress Tsu-zi.

Kinokuniya in Bangkok had kept me alive as a reader, along with Orchid Books’ history selection and the wonderful grab-bag of perpetual surprises of well-chosen used books at Dasa Book Café. What in the merry hell was I going to do for books in Georgetown, I wondered gloomily. A used bookstore yielded a volume of Agnes Smedley’s wartime years in China and I read it slowly, trying to make it last.

And then I rode past yet another mall, which is where bookstores live in this part of the world, and a sign emblazoned on it announced that it held a branch of Borders Books and Music. As someone who resolutely avoided Borders and Barnes & Noble in the States, I didn’t get off my bus, but the damage was done.

A day later I set off to investigate what a Malaysian version of a big-box category-killer might have to offer. I walked into a gigantic brightly lit room with a Starbucks off to one side; I almost walked out but there were display tables…

And on them were multiple copies of Dan Brown’s latest and good old James and Jody and many, many vampire novels. Nothing leaped out at me in the fiction section as I wandered past its shelves and I kept on going. There was a separate space for music, half of the room I was in held really ugly children’s books and stationary supplies with the rest of it a confused jumble of haphazardly placed books in the usual sections. But not all the usual bookstore sections were visible, to me at least.

I roamed around and finally gave up. At the information desk was an earnest-looking boy who responded, “We don’t have a biography section.”

I tried to keep my voice level as I repeated his statement. I tried to smile but I knew it was a grimace as he explained that if I wanted a biography of a writer, I should look on the fiction shelves.

I did. I also looked for the short stories of Somerset Maugham and any of Joseph Conrad’s Asia-based novels and finally just one book that I might want to read. I came away with a thirty-year old novel by Alison Lurie and the knowledge that I would never, ever return to this hellish parody of places that have nourished me and brought me great joy.

But the truly terrible part of my abortive shopping expedition is that if this place had the vaguest idea of how to be a bookstore, I would have returned. And somewhere in my most hidden portion of my heart, I wish it had been well-stocked and well-run and you know what? If you were here, you would wish the very same thing…every last one of you bibliophiles and independent booksellers, because like me, you are an addict and will take what you need wherever you can get it. Be grateful you aren’t in my position and be sure to support what you are lucky to have, junkies.

Writing without Thought

My postcard post was written with the same degree of carelessness that I use to scrawl a message on an actual postcard. I think that's fair for a blog entry but it isn't a true representation of my deepest thoughts and feelings about Bangkok.

Certainly, like any spot in the world, it has flaws. It also has been extraordinarily generous to me, and many people whom I love I would never know if Bangkok hadn't presented them to me.

When I returned two years ago and rented an apartment at RTS Condotel, I had no idea I would meet a family there who have become my friends. Mrs. Nupa, Mr. Prateep and their two sons have brightened my Bangkok life with their intelligence and warmth and radiant kindness. I'm lucky that we are still in touch on facebook, I hope they will come to visit me here in the year to come, and I desperately miss the conversations that I would often pop in to have with them and hope to continue to have throughout our lives.

My friend Usa and I have struck a sort of generation gap that had never come between us before. She is a vibrant, beautiful woman in her 30s and I am a 60-year-old who has slowed down a lot. But I love her dearly and know that in another few years, that energy gap will narrow and once again we'll spend hours chatting and eating and having a good time, whether it's here, there or someplace in the middle. And if we're lucky, her evil brother Eddy will be with us.

A friend of more recent vintage is the irrepressible Jessica C--I met her in person in Bangkok soon after she returned from a long meditative stay in Chiang Mai so I was ready to bask in her spiritual wisdom. "Let's go somewhere where we can have a bottle of wine with dinner," she suggested--which was a challenge for me because it was a Buddhist holiday and alcohol was off the menu in most restaurants. We ended up eating terrific food and drinking a very nice merlot in a hotel restaurant near Patpong--an evening that cemented our friendship, for me at least.

As for my relationship with Bangkok? I'm examining it from a distance in a trial separation--not for the first time since I first fell in love with it fifteen years ago. It's the place where I found my voice, where I learned to live in a way that made sense to me, it might be the place where I grew up. I love it still, always and forever.