Bangkokorama

I have tears drying on my face right now because of this, put up by my dear friend and older brother, Will Yaryan. http://www.airpano.ru/files/Bangkok/start_e.html

Watching the high resolution sweep over different parts of a city that I've spent years learning to know made Bangkok seem so close, which it is--15 hours. I came back to the states with a firm intention to return for visits at least once a year, and I've only been back for less than seven months.

Someone who has never been to Bangkok won't be moved to tears by this panoramic view of a sprawling city. What did it for me was the blur of traffic on the expressways--going, always moving, so many lives whooshing past on those arterials, and in that weird time split that I described in my last post, I was one of those lives as well as the person who watched.

I've just finished a book that describes much of my last installment of my relationship with Bangkok and how it has changed over the past 16 years--as much as I have myself.. Anyone who is curious can read some of that history here on this blog, where I tried to be as honest as possible about my time in a place I love.

My feelings for Bangkok are no longer starry-eyed, as they were for the time I wrote about in my first book. But they are very deep and very strong and they still tie me to that place--all of it. I've lived and worked and explored in many areas that aren't glitzy--those are my favorite parts of the city. That's what came to mind as I lapsed into tears and that's where I will spend most of my time when I go back to visit.

It's an unfinished relationship that exists between Bangkok and me and I know it's never going to be over. Whether I live there or go back on visits, that city will always be partly mine.

When I'm 64...

At 63, I feel as though I'm entering my final adolescence. What began at 3 and continued through my life at different periods, the process of entering a whole new mental and physical stage is happening again. The odd part now is, that while I used to interpret stage as being an actual external platform where I tried on different roles, now that stage is an internal one where I try different ways of writing. The gift of age for me is a more defined focus, one that mingles memory and present experience in a rich blend of time that seems more malleable than ever.

Sometimes that frightens me. I thought last night of the time I lived with a disembodied spirit in Thailand. One night it seemed to be calling and I thought it wanted me. The man who was with me when this was going on didn't hear that summons. Now he is dead, and I wonder who was wanted that night--or even worse if time had folded in on itself, as I now believe it can. Was it his spirit coming through the spiral of what we think of as linear, trying to tell both of us to hold each other tightly while we still could?

Will these thoughts become less frightening and more comprehensible as I age? Will I be able to write about them without fear as I now can write about things that used to hold stark terror but are all part of the spiral shaped story that I set into words, hoping someone may want to read them? These are the kinds of questions that make me curious about growing old.

I know of people who think of aging as an adventure. So far I think they're wrong. The process isn't, any more than the physical changes of puberty were. Aching muscles are as tedious as acne or menstrual cramps. What's an adventure is life itself--the discoveries, the experiences, the story.

The other day I was caught in a hellish rain shower and a man on a street corner sold me a hotel umbrella for 4 dollars. As I paid him from a roll of laundry quarters, he decided "You're a really nice lady. I'm going to give you something," and from a plastic supermarket bag, he pulled an opened package of large pink-frosted cookies. "Have a cookie--take two," he said.

I didn't because I don't particularly like cookies, but I'm grateful when presented with something that comes with a choice. We don't always get that and sometimes what's offered isn't so palatable. But if we're lucky, there's a good story attached, either visible within the present or folded and wrapped in a spiral of time.

Living in the Third World, USA

I don't care how many times we read it or hear it--the word bedbug immediately sets off feelings of revulsion and disgrace. So what if they've been found in NYC's Plaza Hotel? If you find them in your living space, you don't tell anyone but your closest friends, do you? And then the news is broken in hushed tones. You watch the people you trust with that knowledge flinch, you see that tiny recoil, and congratulations! You've somehow-- in the back of your own mind, at least--become a pariah.

You can tell yourself they are actually less harmful than mosquitoes. Mosquitoes can kill you, while bedbugs can only make you pray for death. An exaggeration? No. Try switching on the light and finding a bedbug plump with your blood crawling across your high-thread- count sheets and then try to sleep after you've crushed it. Enough nights like that and the most sane people in the world will start thinking about the peaceful solution of an overdose.

Luckily I've only had one of those nights so far. In response to it, I've thrown away my wooden bedframe which the sniffer dog claimed was the insects' happy hunting grounds and I've taped the zipper end of my futon shut. I've washed my bedding and dried it on the hottest setting and my apartment reeks of borax powder and lemon oil and lavender. I still feel disgusted. The second treatment with whatever toxins are allowed in this country takes place this week, with one more to polish off the vermin. We hope.

A friend in Myanmar told me about a powerful poison she uses for bedbugs--it's legal in this country but only if you pay an exterminator. It's not for household use in the U.S. Fortunately my landlord is paying for my bedbug eradication. He says they've had a 100% success rate. Hope comes into play once more.

In the years I lived in Thailand, I saw traces of bedbugs in one hotel. One. I never lived in an apartment or house that had them--cockroaches yes, bedbugs no. In the last year or so, a number of tourists died in a Chiang Mai hotel of mysterious causes. Their deaths were rumored to be caused by breathing toxins that are now banned in many countries but are still used to kill bedbugs in Thailand. But that was in only one hotel in a country that has thousands. Who knows what really killed them? I'm beginning to think one or two tourists may be a small price to pay for a nation-wide good night's sleep with no visible scars in the morning.

In the U.S. bedbugs are found on city buses, in theaters, in the bindings of library books, even in clothing purchased from department stores. In Thailand I rode the cheapest city buses at times, took long distance sleeper buses and trains, bought second-hand books that had been left behind in guesthouses by backpackers, often bought clothing and shoes in street markets, frequented movie theaters and in the decade and a half that I lived or traveled in that country, had only one fleeting encounter with bedbugs. It took a trip to high-tech Malaysia to get me up close and personal with them, and my return to a country that regards itself as the world's greatest to have them become a fact of my life.

So far I'm lucky. I have few possessions and the ones I have are vermin-free except for my bed. I hope. It would be nice to have friends come over again or to lend someone a book without fearing that it may harbor bedbugs in its binding. It would be nice to have the same comfort in America as I had in the Third World.

Dry Leaves in a Hot Wind

"The day of his death was a dark cold day."--from In Memory of W.B. Yeats by W. H. Auden

How would you respond to dreadful news if there was nobody to see your reaction? Not a voice on the other end of the phone line or hands to grab yours as you found out that a friend was dying? Without a buffer of another presence, what would you do?

Thanks to Facebook I know the answer to this, for me at least. I was alone as I read a quick message sent from Bangkok and then immediately stood up, facing the way out of my apartment, both hands clutching my midriff, doubled over as my life changed. I think I was making some kind of sound because my cat rushed over to stare at me. I had no idea of what I was doing until I felt tears on my face--no thoughts, no words, only a strong blow that carried grief.

When the words I needed to get more information came to me, I felt as though I had to chisel them from ice. They emerged one by one, slowly. There came a phone number, with the warning that tubes made it difficult for the man I love to speak. "I think he wants to hear his friends' voices," his sister wrote.

I called him.

I steeled myself to make jokes about the wrong way to stop smoking and that this was no way to take a vacation so get out of bed. There was an intake of breath at the other end of the line that stretched from Seattle to Italy. There was a whisper like dry leaves in a hot wind, "I have no idea." I never heard him speak again.

And there was nothing I could do but send every scrap of energy I had in his direction. Hope became almost a prayer with every thought I had, every waking moment. There were no other words and writing anything was like vomiting up bits of broken glass.

Miracles of remission happen, but not for Sak. He died.

When I write those words, any time I write them, my fingers go numb, my wrists slacken, and I stop.

Facebook told me he was dying, Facebook told me he was dead, and now Facebook is where his wake is taking place. It's a spot where his sister has put up youtube clips of him with his daughter, where friends post photos of him relishing his life, and there are songs he sang and photos he took. His life is there. I hope it always will be.

And he is immediately on my mind when I look at the loveliness of a world that no longer contains him. Worasak Jongthirawong, September 23, 1972-January 15, 2012. Sleep well, Sak. ("Earth, receive an honored guest.")

Homesick Restaurants, Drums, and Gongs

(Photo of Mak Fai lion by Matt Brown)

A haze of smoke covered my neighborhood last Sunday and the acrid taste of firecrackers bit at the back of my throat. It didn't matter. I still followed the lion dancers and their drums and gongs for at least an hour until the cold drove me back into my apartment.

The day before the streets had been clogged with people who are rarely seen in Chinatown/the I.D.

A dragon snaked its way down to dance at the Chinatown Gate; the street was full of onlookers that obscured the sight of its undulations. My quiet little neighborhood looked like Ratchaprasong during a Redshirt gathering---an ocean of heads.

King Street had been closed to traffic and a stage had been built near my apartment. People crowded around it to watch t'ai chi demonstrations and taiko drummers, many of them eating as they watched.

There are over seventy restaurants in my neighborhood, serving food from Hong Kong, Cambodia, Vietnam, Thailand, Malaysia, and Japan. Usually during the day they are frequented by people who miss the food of their homelands. There's a burst of office workers at lunchtime, but otherwise each spot serves people who come for a taste of home.

But last Saturday there were lines outside the places that offered $2.00 takeaway specials--lines that looked as though they were queued up for the new iPad. People roamed streets with food in their hands, smiling, many pushing baby strollers or holding a dog's leash.

The owner of Phnom Penh Noodle House hurried in his shirtsleeves to the closest grocery. "We've sold one hundred pounds of chicken wings already," he said. At that point it was around one o'clock during an event that had begun at eleven and would continue for another two and a half hours. Projected figures for the four-hour special in the dim sum joint across the street from me had been 250 customers--they had 800.

As the crowd began to thin after three o'clock, a group of young lion dancers took to the streets, followed by enough enchanted children to qualify the Mak Fai lion dancers as 21st century Pied Pipers. A little blonde friend of mine was one of them; she's the only person I've ever met who is as besotted with drums, gongs, and whirling lions as I am.

A year ago I was in Bangkok's Chinatown, wandering through a densely packed crowd on Yaowarat Road. I hadn't brought my mobile phone with me, so when a friend saw me in the midst of bodies and tried to call to let me know he was there with his family, his call went unheard. This year he is dead.

We forget our time is finite. We think "Later. We'll talk later. We'll do that next week. Or month. Or year." Another year goes by and we find ourselves watching the lions, the taiko drummers. t'ai chi practitioners, suddenly in tears as we watch the beauty of the world not only for ourselves but for eyes that are no longer able to see.

Falling in Love Again

Long ago I began to understand how climate affects the personalities of people who submit to it. Alaska’s short summers and unending winters breed a sense of urgency and the need for patience; Seattle’s grey gloom with bursts of glorious sunshine results in a city of mild depressives with brief manic episodes; Thailand’s perpetual light and heat breeds a joyful languor. And Beijing? Beijing is like New York, with four vivid seasons, ranging from extreme beauty to extreme cold to extreme heat and then back to beauty again. And like New York, it’s a city of crackling energy, vibrant emotions, and borderline anarchy.

Bilingual signs in Mandarin and English were everywhere, telling people what they couldn’t do—and usually within eyeshot were a group of people happily doing whatever was prohibited. Cutting into line wasn’t just accepted behavior, it was encouraged, and pedestrians seemed to regard red lights as challenges, not commands. People smoked where they wished, ate and drank where they wished, and on the lane where I stayed, it was common to see a small child walking past with a large bottle of beer, being useful.

Perhaps because living spaces are often crowded, public spaces were scenes of intimacy. Girls gave their boyfriends fierce hell, couples made out with abandon, loud cursing seemed to be a favorite outdoor sport, and little children urinated in place, wherever they happened to be. Once on a boat trip from the zoo to the Summer Palace, a puddle appeared at the feet of a small boy, becoming a pool, then a river.

“This would never happen in London!” a young woman exclaimed, looking at her own feet with dismay. “This,” her blonde, blue-eyed companion said in the calm tones of an experienced expat, “isn’t London.”

Beijing seemed to be a city with self-assurance, which delighted me because Bangkok was one of the most self-conscious places I had ever lived in. I had grown up learning about China’s oppression but what I saw in the country’s capital was a deep-rooted form of libertarianism laced with a generous amount of humor and friendliness.

Perhaps people are kind to me because I’m an old foreign woman traveling alone, I thought after Nana had moved on. But then I met Odette, a young woman from Mexico who had come to live in Beijing with her husband, a British journalist. She was a serious student of Mandarin, had given birth to her beautiful little girl in one of the city’s hospitals, and delighted people by introducing the child as a Beijing girl. She lived next to the walls of my guesthouse, in a traditional courtyard home where each room was its own little house with a yard in the middle, enclosed by a high wall. Her kitchen was modern, there was a washing machine next to the Western-style toilet in her bathroom, she shopped in the street market outside her gate and asked William’s wife in Mandarin how to cook the things she had purchased. Odette was firmly part of the world she lived in, but then she worked at it. Beijing seemed to expect no less.

In Bangkok, years slip past and expats who have been there for decades say things like, “No I don’t speak Thai—just never got around to it.” In Beijing I commented on a middle-aged woman’s Mandarin as she spoke to a bookstore clerk, envying her facility. “Why, don’t you have a tutor?” she demanded in shocked tones. The Bookworm’s author events were often bilingual and the predominately Western audience often laughed at Mandarin sentences that were obviously jokes. As a traveler, I could get by with saying hello and thank you and pointing at my bilingual city map and smiling frequently. If I lived here, I’d need a lot more than that, I realized as I struggled to remember how to say “This food is delicious.”

Old men would frequently test my linguistic prowess by addressing me in languages other than Mandarin or English. One elderly gentleman and I had a chat in French; his was much better than mine. Another asked me if I spoke Spanish. Not wanting to place my hillbilly Puerto Rican vocabulary against his undoubtedly pure Castilian, I in a cowardly fashion said no.

William’s mother-in-law gave me stern scoldings on how to dress for winter without one word of English, pulling at the leg of my slacks to see how many layers I wore beneath them and showing me what lay beneath her own pant leg. The most I ever counted was seven and the best I ever managed was four.

I began to realize that the extraordinary kindness I found in my neighborhood was pervasive. Beijing is supposed to be the size of Connecticut and has a subway system that links its farflung corners; I used it often, especially when I searched futilely for the Botanical Gardens that nestled against the hills that bordered the city.

There was a particular bus I needed once I got to the subway’s end, and I was damned if I could figure out which one it was. I found a farm community that was a lot like the outskirts of Bangkok—ramshackle street stalls, no sidewalks, sleepy dogs—and a number of impressive parks, but not the one I wanted.

On my third morning, I was almost ready to say the hell with it. I had shown off my map to a large number of people in a neighborhood beside a freeway, with no luck at all. Trudging down an empty sidewalk, I passed a teenage boy who carried a school bag and felt a flare of optimism. Perhaps, I thought, he’s learning English; I pulled out my rumpled map.

He was very young, with the troubled skin of early adolescence. He looked a trifle alarmed by being accosted by an old foreigner, but he looked at my map for a long time and silently pointed straight ahead. I thanked him and walked off, more than ready to abandon my search.

Then I heard the sound of footsteps behind me and there was the boy. He led me to the nearest bus stop, pointed out the number of the bus I needed, waited with me until it arrived, and told the conductress where I wanted to go.

The gardens were beautiful but what has stayed with me is the kindness of a young man with acne and a big heart.

On one of my last nights in Beijing, Odette took me to one of the lakes, along a back street route I would never have found on my own. We walked down a narrow, quiet alley way; low, curving walls protected small windows of light that emerged from many little houses. For one absurd moment, I was sure we had traveled through time and were back in the middle ages. Then we were at the shore of the lake, where the darkness was filled with the low voices of old men, fishing.

It would have been a postcard moment, except Odette had Mandarin. As I watched her in conversation, laughing and bantering and briefly entering another world, I wanted nothing more than to live in this city and learn to speak its language.

The Gift of Bookstores

It's the holiday madness time but I'm enjoying my shopping adventures--every week I go off to my neighborhood bookstore and choose a few more books for people I love. It's a big, bright, light-filled space filled with things I want to read and not filled with Christmas cultch--no fat men booming hohoho or plastic trees laden with gaudy baubles, emitting a vaguely toxic scent.

I buy a cup of good coffee from a cafe that isn't a chain inches away from bookshelves and talk to friends and wander through a building devoted to the printed word. I leave feeling relaxed and happy and knowing that soon I'll do it again. This is what gift-giving ought to be.

I'm old-fashioned, I admit. Many people have found more high-tech and speedy ways to dispatch their shopping efficiently. An hour or two on a computer and packages go out to their recipients, all gift-wrapped and pretty; I can't do that. It lacks the element of surprise, not for the people I'm buying gifts for, but for me.

Serendipity is a word that has almost disappeared--it's the art of finding something you want when looking for something else, and bookstores (and record stores and video stores) are centers of serendipity. I may enter with a list and leave with something I didn't know existed until a minute or two before. For me, if shopping doesn't contain the potential for discovery, it's no fun at all.

And not just during the season of gifts--I feel that way all the time. I realized last night that I need to know more about maintaining a healthy heart. Yes, I know all the information known to mankind is on the internet but I don't have the time or patience to wallow through it all, separating nonsense from useful knowledge. For me, this is time better spent in a good bookstore, looking at titles, reading a page or two, asking the person who takes care of the health section for their recommendations--and today that's exactly where I'll be. It's the difference between a living, breathing community and pixels coming together on a piece of plastic, between the world of the senses and a flat-line life that strains the eyes and the wrists.

My city is a literate one that embraces all forms of literacy, and that's a good thing. People reading on an e-reader are still reading. And I know there will always be books in a physical, tangible form for people like me--I only hope there will also always be stores where I can choose them, surrounded by a community of readers.

Beijing Fever

Watching HBO, eating a cheeseburger and drinking a beer while the lights of a metropolis gleamed through the window of my nineteenth floor hotel room, this was a normal scene in any business hotel, but I was in Beijing, feeling as though I were an extra in Lost in Translation.

I was a victim of the latest form of Orientalism. For several years before I’d been a judge for a literary prize given to nonfiction books about Asia; I’d read countless memoirs of Chinese who’d suffered during the Cultural Revolution and academic tomes about the rural migrants who left home to work in factories where conditions were Dickensian at best. I’d expected Spartan conditions in a dark and gloomy city, a hard pallet in a cold room and a squat toilet in the bathroom with a city-wide blackout after dark. I had seen photos of soaring and imaginative buildings in Vanity Fair but somehow felt they were an isolated phenomenon, a Potemkin village segment of a grim and shabby city where everyone looked dour, wore subdued clothing and rode about earnestly on bicycles.

Instead here I was, in semi-palatial comfort, in a hotel room where the bathroom alone was almost the size of my Bangkok apartment, the kitchen held a refrigerator that was taller than I, a sparkling white cotton bathrobe waited for me in the closet, and the sofa was so elegant that I yearned to take it home with me. There was a bar downstairs that served seventy different beers and the room service menu was in English. It was out of sheer curiosity that I’d ordered my cheeseburger; it was great.

A list of hotel amenities included a few prohibitions that included "lecherous acts" and the plaintive request "We kindly ask you not to walk out of the room with bare feet."

The next morning, slipped under my door, was a business card with Chinese characters, a phone number, and a picture of a young, willowy, and scantily clad woman, poised on a bed with a come-hither gaze. Her feet were bare.

A year later I stood with Nana in a narrow street lined with small shops and cottage-like houses and food stalls, listening to two women shriek at each other. We weren’t the only spectators. People came out of their stores and restaurants and homes to watch; it was better than reality TV. Nana turned to me in complete delight. “I can understand them!”

“What are they saying?”

“The bigger woman just told the other one to go fuck her mother’s cunt.”

I looked nervously at the other members of the audience; certainly one of them would call the Beijing version of 911 before there was blood in the street. But there, listening intently to every shout of obscenity, were old ladies holding the hands of tiny, uniformed school children, matronly women with shopping bags, trendy boys with hair like foxpelts dyed in brilliant shades of green, purple, or orange standing in the open doors of small beauty shops. None of them seemed ready to put a stop to the afternoon’s entertainment, Nana and I walked on, and a couple of blocks later made way for a bicycle bell behind us. It was a good thing too, because as it passed by, we saw a familiar and still belligerent face of a very angry woman.

I never knew what to expect when I went out to explore Beijing; its capacity to surprise me was inexhaustible. One minute I was in a neighborhood where old men sat outside together, drinking beer at ten in the morning, and then I was having an espresso in the audience at the Beijing Bookworm, listening to a Bengali novelist from Manhattan explain about the special, globalized vocabulary used on 19^th century clipper ships. On my first visit to the city, March was sunny and balmy; at the same time next year I plowed my way through several heavy snowfalls. One night on my way to the subway I heard music and soon found a whole parking lot full of people, ballroom dancing. In a park of ancient imperial splendor, people came with bags of table scraps to feed a community of cats that had taken up residence in a wooded corner of the landscape.

Living in Bangkok had accustomed me to contrasts, but Beijing was beyond any easy pigeonholing of ancient traditions/modern luxury. It was a place that took everything that had happened within its walls for three thousand years and jammed it all together to make a hybrid city, huge and impossible to duplicate anywhere else.

After my first visit, I babbled to my employer about it for close to an hour over the phone. When I finally stopped to take a breath, he laughed. “You have China Fever. It usually only happens to guys.”

I still have no idea if he was right. Other people have assured me that Beijing is not China and I’ve read strong arguments that the city is actually part of Mongolia. For me, it exists alone, within its own context, and from the moment that it first surprised me, I loved Beijing.

Giving Thanks

Yesterday a tall slender young woman who was probably from Somalia, dressed head-to-toe in form-fitting turquoise shot with silver and holding a brilliantly yellow umbrella, walked down the hill outside my window like a spot of summer in Seattle's winter darkness. This morning the elderly Chinese gentleman who puffs his way back and forth, up and down, that same street with the reassuring regularity of a cuckoo clock, showed up in his usual sweater, scarf and sweatpants. Soon after, three young girls wearing down jackets in green, magenta, bright blue sauntered past, a small moving garden of blossoms.

Yesterday I stopped to talk to the young African-American guy who stands on my corner every day holding a sign for the gold shop on the next block. "I'm leaving next week," he told me, "I got a job on a fishing boat out of Dutch Harbor." He has been one of my heroes since I moved back and I will miss him.

The day before I sat and had tea with a couple from North Vietnam, on the Chinese border. Their baby woke up and watched me talk to him, moving his mouth in imitation, grinning at me when I applauded his efforts to speak. I love my neighborhood; I'm grateful to have found a place in it once more.

Today I'll leave it for a different part of the city, where I'll be with my family on the last Thursday of November for the first time in three years. Such happiness, such gratitude, so many, many thanks.

Inventing Home

Every foreigner who stays in Bangkok lives in their own version of the city, partly because of the far-flung nature of Thailand’s capital, partly because of its malleability.

In spite of its stunningly up-to-date downtown core, Bangkok is made up of thousands of urban villages, every last one of them its own little community. There were—and I hope there still are—roads not too far from downtown where oxen stopped traffic as they lumbered slowly to the grass on the other side. Canal boats still whisk people back in time to riverine enclaves where mailboxes jut out over paths of water. And it's difficult to find a Bangkok neighborhood where local roosters don't issue wake-up calls.

My own neighborhood was far from pastoral and the advent of the subway meant it was bordered by more and more high-rise buildings that seemed to sprout up after every heavy rainstorm. But at the end of the road, near the subway entrances, where the pickup trucks waited for their next load of passengers, there was a tree. And one day as I walked past, it sparkled and glittered and glistened in the sunlight, festooned with silver that wavered and flickered in the morning breeze. The pickup truck drivers had brought their old CDs and tied them to every branch of this tree that stood alone and was knocked down to make way for a new condo-housing building within the following month.

When I visited with friends, other foreigners who made this city their home, they told similar stories about their neighborhoods, but the stories were never identical Bangkok was a gigantic Rohrschach test for the strangers in its midst; even Rodney and I, who lived in the same small community, saw different editions of it when we left the common ground of our house.

Most of my friends seemed to feel that when I returned to Chokchai Ruammit, I stepped out of the subway station and then fell right off the rim of the world. In a way they were right. When I came home, I emerged from a world that moved at a dashing pace of appointments punctually kept and a whoosh of constant motion into stop time, where I climbed into the back of a pickup truck and waited for the driver to finish his conversation or his cigarette or his nap. My journey home continued when he felt it was time to go and not before; then, when I had fully left the urbanity of downtown, I was allowed to re-enter my home turf.

I often envied Nana, who lived in a neighborhood that was served by motorcycles, not pickup trucks. Motorcycle taxis were fast and immediate; the drivers left when the passenger wanted, not when they chose to, and riding on the back of a motorcycle had infinitely more panache than huddling in the back of a pickup truck. And I was deeply jealous of my friend Will, who lived close to the banks of the Chao Phraya river and had a choice of motorcycle taxis or express boats when he went out into the world. But in Bangkok, you are where you eat, and long ago I had chosen to eat on Chokchai Ruammit. I knew its story to the same limited degree that it knew mine and we had accepted each other’s limitations. Without the pickup trucks, I would never have seen the silvered glory of a doomed tree.

The friend whom I privately called the AlphaDude was nourished by neon in the neighborhood where he had lived for almost twenty years. “I have everything I need here,” he told me, “Supermarkets, department stores, good restaurants, street food, the best hospital in the country, bookstores, bars, a population that comes from all over the world, and nightlife like nowhere else.” He lived within walking distance of Nana Plaza, an entertainment complex that employed enough people to populate a small city, a multi-leveled rabbit warren of rooms that blazed into life after dark. It was a place he roamed through regularly, making friends, collecting stories, having fun, entering its community on a level that many of its visitors didn’t care to explore.

Lee came from Seattle twice a year to stay in the same neighborhood, in a hotel he had found more than a decade earlier and never deviated from. He had become part of the staff’s family; they taught him Thai, brought him food, showed him how to live in his Bangkok neighborhood. All of them had come from somewhere else in the Kingdom and had learned the city inch by inch, just as he was. For Lee, the neon glories of lower Sukhumvit Road had become the surroundings for a village homestay; his hotel was a spot where he was always welcomed, a place where he could settle in and relax.

On the streets of their neighborhoods, every foreigner has two identities, the one they construct for themselves and the one the local residents have pieced together, which is usually accompanied by a local nickname. Few people on Chokchai Ruammit asked me what my name was and I had spent too much time there to be addressed by Mahdahm, the common appellation for foreign females. When I walked past street vendors I could hear the words that announced my approach and they were telling ones. Although I was sure I had found a home, within that home my nickname translated into “Vacation.”

If ever I yearned for a less publicly monitored existence with immersion that was far from total, I could snap myself out of it by remembering the morning I met a woman at a Starbucks in an affluent expat area. I got there first and as I went to order my latte from the counterstaff, a room full of women stretched their necks to see if I were someone they knew. When my companion breezed in a few minutes later, it took her five minutes to reach my table. “I love coming here,” she told me, “There are always so many other expats here in the morning and we’ve all become friends. I’m sorry I’m late but when I walked past Le Bon Pain, there was a group from the American Women’s Club and I had to stop to say hi because I’m president this year.”

My mornings rarely encompassed another foreign face unless Rodney was at home. I smiled and picked at my scone without enthusiasm. Silently I counted the minutes until I could go back to my neighborhood street and buy crisp little pancakes, placed together in a sandwich the size of a silver dollar and filled with molten hot coconut cream that had been sprinkled with fresh chives. Although there were days I wasn’t sure that was what I wanted, I was positive that the alternative would never be a room full of expats at Starbucks.