Ghostworld

Where old replicants go to die...

Après le Deluge

Songkran ended and the world around me began to take on a normal cast again. Water and good wishes had done their job--sunlight had returned and the sky was no longer white. Feeling the exhilaration that comes with the third and final New Year, I climbed on an ordinary bus (windows open, no aircon) and went off to Chinatown and the Indian section of the city.

Traffic was minimal, the air felt fresh, and our bus moved persistently and almost rapidly. When we got to the spot where all buses converge at Victory Monument, our driver felt no reason to slacken his pace. Faced with a minor traffic snarl, he took to the sidewalk and then back to the open road (well it was a more of a concrete island in the middle of the street, but even so...)

As we traveled along a leafy boulevard that was divided by a tree-shaded canal where people have set up basic living structures, a goat loomed into view and when I got off the bus, the woman who preceded me slapped a small hand towel on top of her head to fend off the heat of the sun. Suddenly I was no longer in Bangkok; I was in Thailand.

For the first time ever, the dark and claustrophobic halls of Sampeng Lane were empty with long, unpeopled corridors stretching toward a slant of light. The moshpit of the Pahurat market was easy to walk through as well and I headed into an almost vacant Indian Emporium. Post-Songkran, this beehive area of Bangkok had become my own little private, surreal world that I shared with only a very few people.

Clutching a little bag of samosas to take home for supper, I climbed into another unimpeded bus that reminded me of how much I miss by sticking to the subway and skytrain. Passing a food cart that featured thin slices of meat held in drying position by little pink, blue, and yellow clothespins, I made a New Year resolution that I would take a bus at least once a week in 2555.

Written in Water

Anyone who thinks there's no revolution taking place in this country should go downtown and witness the latest battle on Silom.

With a certain degree of terror, I went there yesterday to see how my bookselling friend Victor (http://www.orchidbooks.com) was holding up with Songkran raging all around him. The subway I took was crowded with teenagers brandishing multi-colored water-fueled AK-47s, all headed to the same spot that I was. What they were wearing was barely tolerated on the beach when I first came to Thailand--skimpy shorts and tank tops and flipflops were only worn by my gay male friends in public at the turn of the last century. And even more surprising to me was that these kids weren't wearing their public masks of polite formality; they were goofing around as though they were in their own living rooms--and that to my barbaric American point of view looked great.

When we reached our destination, they headed for the open street while I took refuge in the skybridge walkway that links the subway to the Skytrain and to the shopping center where Victor works. As I peered cautiously over the edge, the only vendors on this sidewalk that is usually thronged with goods of all kinds were selling bottles of water and bags filled with pellets of compressed powder. The pavement itself was invisible, covered with moving bodies that were daubed with chalky powder that had been mixed with water to the consistency of whitewash.

The sounds of disco music pulsed through the crowd, and on the street in front of Burger King, was Soi 2 in broad daylight. In the olden days, this gay male enclave was a night world, even during Songkran--it didn't wake up until around 10 pm and nobody I knew went there much earlier than midnight. Its music and craziness and Songkran water warriors, who were more vicious than any I'd ever seen amywhere else in the city, all were concentrated in this short little alleyway, and its companion neighborhood of Soi 4. I often thought that was a shame because the life and color of this neighborhood could do a lot to liven up the rest of the city. And now it was.

As I watched, I realized that where the disco music played was where the heart of the Silom activity was going on--dancing, battling, flirting was all happening right there, like a mini-Mardi Gras--an integrated, uninhibited, full-tilt party. The teenagers moved through and beyond the noise and the funk and the warfare, slowly in an almost ritualistic procession, reaching out to smear each other's faces and bodies with paste, shooting and splashing and hurling water as they walked in an almost orderly fashion.

There had to have been thousands of them filing along this long main street where last year tires burned and people died. For the three days of Songkran, Silom was theirs. From all over Bangkok, these kids put on their most informal clothing and grabbed their water guns and shut down the heart of the city. Their numbers allowed Soi 4 to come out into daylight and be crazy, caused stores to shut down, and covered the street with a chalky, egg-shell, powdered finish.

This particular Songkran scene is light-years from the one I experienced two days ago on the canals. The teenagers I saw on Silom are almost a different species from the students I used to teach who seemed frozen into formality by a rigid code of etiquette. Thai culture is being transformed and transmogrified and where that will take the country is anybody's guess.

More than anywhere I have ever lived, Thailand is held together by family. The glue is that particular unit--starting from the very top, with the King's birthday celebrated as Father's Day. The grouping I saw yesterday was a unit I never saw before here--thousands of teenagers on the loose, taking a tradition and turning it inside out. These are the people who are going to determine the future of this country; they are going to change it.

I'm old enough to recognize and salute their energy, while also feeling very sad for what is being lost. And as I peered down into the disco inferno in front of Burger King, I was grateful for the privilege of being removed from all of that by the gift of age.

Victor, I discovered, had stayed home.

Water, Water Everywhere...

Songkran, or Thai New Year, is a holiday that grumpy old people love to gretz about. Life as we know it comes to a screeching halt and is replaced by people brandishing water artillery and pots full of dirty water that comes from a gigantic plastic garbage can and buckets replenished at that same source. Two days ago, the best-selling item on Silom Road seemed to be plastic pouches for cameras, cell-phones and currency, presumably water-tight and all in brilliant flaming Crayola colors.

The small children on my street began their dress rehearsal for this festival two days early. Luckily I had already bought their friendship with Hello Kitty stickers and they let me pass by without saturation. I rewarded them the next day with gummy hamburgers and hotdogs, which mollified everyone of them except the baby. Never underestimate the brute determination of a two-year-old brandishing a garden hose.

"Come with us to Taling Chan," my friend Mrs. Nupa invited me. The outing fell on the first official day of Songkran when my life stretched in vast emptiness for the next three days, so I was delighted to accept--even though I wasn't sure of what the event would involve. There is a floating market at Taling Chan but only on weekends so that couldn't be our destination. Would we bathe Buddhas at a temple? Visit a family home in the country? It seemed rude to ask so I resorted to the indirect approach.

"When we go to Taling Chan, Mrs. Nupa, what should I wear?" She looked puzzled.

"Will we go to a temple in Taling Chan?"

"Maybe, if there's one on the way," she replied, still looking confused by my inquisition.

"What clothes should I wear to be polite?"

"Your usual ones," she assured me, "Yes, black is okay." But I knew Songkran was a time to wear bright and blazing colors and went off to find something in aqua, which seemed appropriate for this particular holiday.

We ended up at the Floating Market which was open for Songkran and Mrs Nupa’s husband immediately arranged for a canal boat ride, which is one of my favorite things to do. As we got in the boat, small children viciously bombarded us with waterfire and a man handed out plastic bags to all who wanted them. Mrs. Nupa tucked our handbags inside a plastic shroud, tying it tightly, and I considered getting one for my shoes, which were already soaked. I gave a brief and longing thought to the horrible flipflops that I'd bought on the beach at Samet, and then shrugged. Shoes are cheap in Bangkok.

We sped away from the small snipers and entered a world that's a century behind the one we live in. Houses bordered the edge of the canal, flowers and trees softened the banks on either side, and temples gleamed ahead of us. "Water on the left," the boat's helmswoman warned and handed out little buckets which were rapidly filled with canal water. And as we passed the temple grounds, we were hit by a wall of water, hurled by men, children, and very old ladies.

For two hours, that was our existence--throwing water from tiny beach buckets and being inundated by cannonades of water from the porches of houses, bridges that spanned the canal, other boats as they passed by, and from the sacred sanctuary of temple grounds. And it was fun--cold, soggy, and laughing, everybody on our boat was having a fabulous time, although a very little girl, wrapped in a towel like a baby burrito with a plastic bag tied over her hair, wasn't always sure that she was.

At the end of our journey, we dried as we ate riverine food--fish, cockles and shrimp--admitting to a strong urge for naps as we drove back home. I slept for two hours after a restorative warm shower. This morning my fingertips are no longer puckered and waterlogged but the sense of happiness remains. Sawatdee Phi Mai, took khon, happy Thai New Year to everyone in the world.

Time Forgot

The front of the one-storey, dusty concrete building had a sign in English that said "Bookstore" so of course I had to walk in. A glass counter held pamphlets that looked as though nobody had touched them since they were first printed and probably with good reason. The closest wall held books in Laotian, one of which was a picture book of a bearded Russian who looked like a crazed forest monk capable of killing every last one of the Romanovs with his bare hands.

In the far corner of the room were women sitting on the floor and with very little hope I asked them if there were books in English. They beckoned to another wall. And there were English books--Lao/English dictionaries, workbooks for learning English, texts on Business English from the days when business was still conducted on typewriters. I scanned the shelves hoping for one of Colin Cotterill's Dr. Siri mysteries that he had published in special editions for the People's Democratic Republic; I'd seen them in Vientianne in a bookstore that was only marginally more enticing than this one. There were none.

I wasn't surprised. The English language literary scene didn't seem to have appeared on Savannakhet's radar; there wasn't even that traveler's mainstay, the shelf of yellowed, curling, abandoned, multilingual paperbacks, in the hostelry that I was staying in. Although I usually ignored that amenity, at this point I would have tackled a John Grisham masterpiece in Dutch or even Norwegian. But the Savanbanhao Hotel didn't even have maps of Savannakhet in English, which meant not only did I not know where anything was--I had no idea of what there was in this place.

So I walked, for hours, in hot sunlight, down roads that shredded my shoes with the efficiency of razor-blades. Along the river and under the trees were tempting little spots that served grilled chicken and fish and papaya salad at cloth-covered low tables. Hungry, I ordered and looked for a table that didn't have clusters of flies where food had been spilled on the jaunty red tablecloth.

The food was good and the flies enjoyed it. I thanked every god I could think of for the lid on my basket of sticky rice and for the generous portion I'd been given; resolutely I tried to avert my eyes from the plates of chicken and somtam and green vegetables that were no longer mine.

Across from my hotel was a kind woman who sold me a large bottle of cold Beer Laos. I was asleep before six.

The free breakfast offered by my hotel involved one sunny-side up fried egg, a cold baguette, and a cup of milky, sugary instant coffee. "We don't have black coffee," the waitress told me and I fled.

"Chez Boune," the desk clerk replied to my desperate plea for real caffeine, "I will take you there on my motorcycle." And in a small, impeccable cafe, built from Laos timber and open to the dilapidated sidewalk, I was served the most splendid double-espresso in Southeast Asia. "Better than Bangkok," I told the woman who brought it to me, who responded "Better than Starbucks?"

Chez Boune eroded my moral fiber. It was there that I had a dark Beer Laos with my bruschetta well before noon and finished my lunch with a piece of coconut layer cake. And it's the only place in the world where I ate every last morsel of the butter that was served with my baguette the following day--it tasted like summer, sweet and clear and clean on my tongue. "We get it from France," the Laos owner told me, "My husband and I lived in Paris for years."

I walked for miles in Savannakhet, constructing my own mental map of the place, realizing that if I had never been to a colonial Mekong outpost, I would probably have loved this one. But I had, and I didn't. Same old broken pillars behind the walls that obviously once enclosed an estate, same old gaping windows in abandoned French villas with fading mustard-colored walls, same old goats foraging near government offices. A few leafy trees swooped over a road for about a block; the other streets were unshaded and the one large and ugly fountain near a dismal-looking park was bone-dry. Not only did I miss the grace of Kratie in this place--it made me miss Vientianne.

And yet Savannakhet is what I'd wanted. It is Thai. People speak Thai, eat Thai food, happily accept baht for the smallest transaction. They are kind; not even the tuktuk drivers can measure up to the rapaciousness of their counterparts in Vientianne. Their slow pace is soothing and the lack of distractions offered by the town makes it a fine place to catch up on projects that have been ignored or to sit on a verandah and read. Just be damned sure that you bring your own books.

Blowing in the Wind

The closer to the border I got, the more I realized I wasn't feeling good about going to Cambodia right now. Since I had already jettisoned Saigon because of depleted resources of all kinds, and because Battambang is a place that has always called to me, I did my best to ignore the feeling. Spend the night in Aranyaprathet and cross the border in the morning when your energy's returned, I told myself more than once.

But the truth was, I didn't have the energy. Wiped out and depressed by a long and dismal cold, in no way had this been a trip I was ready to make; I was more than willing to stick to my comfort zone. As the bus moved closer to the end of my journey, it became clear that I didn't want to leave Thailand.

But I had to. There's a quaint custom that almost every expat must adhere to while living in the Kingdom that is dashingly called the visa run. Although this phrase conjures up men in Panama hats and white suits and women with blood-red lipstick and cigarette holders, the reality is far less glamorous. People in wrinkled clothing scurry across the nearest border as cheaply as possible, get a visa renewal within a day or two, and race back to work. As far as I could tell, this was a way for Thailand to put tourist revenue into the pockets of less-favored countries, since despite their best efforts, the visa-runners shell out money after they cross the border for necessities-- transport, food, a hotel room, and beer.

When I have to renew my privilege of living in Thailand, I usually combine the chore with a trip that will make the process fun, and I've always enjoyed these journeys--until now. As I tried to buoy up my spirits for my Cambodian foray, the bus stopped, policeman got on who barked questions at the passengers and a number of people got off. Only two or three returned.

After a half-hour or so, this happened again. The young girl sitting beside me did her best to persuade the policeman to let her remain but he was obdurate. She didn't come back, nor did any of the other passengers.

The third time this happened, soldiers took the place of the police. The young man sitting beside me removed the Buddha image he had on a chain around his neck and slipped it into his pocket just before the bus stopped.

"What's happening?" I asked the woman who sat beside me after my former seat-mate disappeared.

"Khmer people," she explained, "They have no passports, no ID cards."

Suddenly the border tension at Preah Vihear seemed very close and any joy I had tried to muster up over this trip went away. I had no desire to go to Cambodia right now; this wasn't the right time for me and I knew it in the way an animal knows there will be an earthquake. When we reached Aranyaprathet, I asked to be let off at the bus station, where I bought a ticket for Korat. From there, it would be an easy matter to reach the Laos border.

Laos is almost Thailand, I told myself, it's not like really leaving. I can do that. As I stood in the first sunlight I'd felt in weeks, chatting in bad Thai to a friendly, chubby woman who stood nearby, I clutched my bus ticket that would take me through a part of Thailand I had never seen before. Shadows dappled the dust, my sweater was at last too warm, and I felt very happy.

Destination Anywhere

Nothing feels quite so strange to me as preparing for a trip that I don't want to make. I don't think I've ever felt this way before and I'm not sure why I am now. Ordinarily I'm the sort of person who perks right up at the sight of a new tourist visa, or when making lists of things to take and places to go. None of this is working this time.

Perhaps it's a byproduct of the clouds that have covered Bangkok for much too long, or a lingering trace of my Penang bedbug phobia. Maybe it's apprehension about leaving an extremely imperious cat to his own devices for a week in my apartment. Or maybe it's because I'm finally going to be in Saigon, a city I haven't really avoided, but not one I've yearned to go to either.

The reason I suspect is the cause for my lack of excitement is one I'm reluctant to tell. As banal and boring as it may sound, the trip I really want to be making right now is one that would have me disembarking at SeaTac Airport and heading for the light rail that would take me back to Seattle.

I miss my sons. I'm really not the adventurer I pretend to be, I suppose. The real me is a 62-year-old woman who wants to hug her kids and embroider Home is where the heart is in cross-stitch on a dishtowel.

Tomorrow I'll get on a bus that will take me to one border and then on to another. I will glue myself to the window and stare until my eyes are bloodshot. I'll walk and eat and look and wonder and write things down. I'll get permission to live this life I have now for another stint, if I'm lucky, and during that time I'll think very hard about the second half of this already crazy year.

One Reason Why I Live Here--a Postscript

The umbrella that fell apart in yesterday's rainstorm never made it home with me. I made a few impotent attempts to make it work properly and then left it in the back of the pickup that I rode home in, fuming.

Anybody who's been patient enough to read this notebook that I keep on this blog knows I'm more often than not annoyed by the pickup trucks that carry people from one end of my neighborhood to another. As I waved one down today to come home after a quick trip for food and the paper, I was amazed to see the driver give me a radiant smile--and my repaired umbrella.

This is Thailand, people, even though that phrase is frequently abbreviated to a perjorative T.I.T. This is the community that has decided to be kind to an elderly farang woman, despite her obvious crotchets, and this is the sort of truly beneficent behavior that makes me melt into a puddle of gratitude.

I love this country and this story is one of the reasons why.

Black Hole Sun

I bought an umbrella today, which by rights I should never have had to do. This is the season of the inferno in Thailand, and yet the sun has been elusive since mid-February. Warm cloudiness greeted my children when they arrived and prevailed into their departure and beyond. And I've acclimated enough that I like cloudy weather--a good old tropical depression no longer depresses me.

But rain in March is completely wrong. The occasional thunderstorm is always diverting, whenever it shows up--but not drenching rain that bounces back up from the road after it falls, not the kind that bursts out of its swollen clouds just about the time that you've decided to go out and find your dinner. (Three bottles of Minute Maid Pulpy from the convenience cooler of my apartment building doesn't make a meal, but my choices were either Coke, Fanta, or Sprite. Thank heaven Coca-Cola bought Minute Maid for that little jolt of almost-nourishment.)

I live in a Thai building which means the apartments have no kitchen. If I were culinarily inclined, I'd do what local people do in such a building and buy a gas cylinder with a burner attached and make food on that. Or even worse, and more popular in Thailand now, buy a microwave and some frozen meals. The first option terrifies me and the second disgusts me. I moved to one of the world's great food cities so I'd never have to cook again. And the idea never crosses my mind until the season of the deluge hits and food vendors disappear as the rain torrents down upon them. But this is happening about four months earlier than it ought to and I'm not mentally prepared for the "rainy season diet."

For me, this consists of salted nuts and fruit, fresh orange juice and beer--but only if I'm foresighted enough to buy these things early in the day, before it begins to pour. Yes, there are delivery services--even McDonald's will deliver to apartments--and it's possible to have almost any cuisine in the world brought to your door. The Catch-22 is when it rains, traffic comes to a halt and even the delivery motorcycles have trouble negotiating their way through that standstill. And of course, every wuss in Bangkok wants their food brought to them on nights that resemble the forty nights that had inspired Noah to build his ark. Good luck, suckers. I'd rather feast on broken dried noodles from a package of Mama.

Rain in Bangkok rarely is accompanied by chill, but this bout of precipitation has brought a cold snap with it. Laugh if you will, but a 30-degree drop in temperature is cold in any language. I'm wearing a sweater and socks, my windows are closed, and my fans aren't running, which has the cat freaked out because they provide a constant background noise for his life, under normal circumstances.

On one side of the city, there's a weird gleam in the air that would almost be encouraging, except for the bank of menacing clouds that are closing in on the other side. I should feel well-prepared; after all, I bought an umbrella.

It came apart in my hands before it ever made it home--Chinese workmanship at its finest. I know it's an omen of some kind but I'll be damned if I can decide what it means--probably nothing more than "Never buy a umbrella out of season--you'll end up with one that they couldn't sell during those monsoon days that came when they were supposed to."

Gone Baby Gone

My son and his wonderful girlfriend were here and now they're gone. As always, the hole that is left in my life by their departure is vast and it hurts. Childbirth was nothing in comparison to this.

Here is the curse of early motherhood. You are close enough in age to your children that they sometimes feel like quasi-siblings, which means that during the time that you were intended to explore and experiment, you were a parent. When parenting becomes less of an active job and more of an observatory occupation, you go out to see the world--and with everything you see, you wish your adult children were there to see it all with you.

And then they come and they go--or you visit them and leave--and you hurt more than you ever thought you could. You realize that the loves of your life are your offspring--everyone else was just an amuse-bouche--and you wish more than anything that you could become an on-tap, drop-in-when-you-have-time-kids sort of Mom with cookies fresh from the oven cooling on your kitchen counter and beer in the fridge. (Although that is a nauseating combination, isn't it, come to think of it...)

By the time I'm old enough to stop roaming around and am ready to produce gingersnaps and snickerdoodles again, I'll be too old to be any fun for my sons to be around. (Feel free to edit that sentence--if it weren't mine, I certainly would.) Right now I have learned that I'm happiest when I can see something new with one of my children--I'm lucky. They're explorers too.

I've learned where home is and it is near my children. But there's still so much to see, so many stories to find. That's what seduces me into thinking that there's time to go just a little bit farther before I turn back to be with the people I love most on this whole crazy lovely messed-up planet.