Final Days

I didn't do anything that I had intended to do. In my last mornings I drank too much coffee and stared at the sky, which is the way I began my time here in this incarnation. I took the comfort way out in the afternoon, although the two-hour traditional Thai massage that I was subjected to wasn't exactly comforting. My haircut with two long, luxurious shampoos was and so was the best mani/pedi I've ever had--also two hours with much saran wrap and lotion and concentration on each of my twenty nails.

It's appropriate to end this stay like this. I've been in an expat frame of mind here for the most part, whereas in other times I could fool myself into thinking that I was living a Thai life. Like many snobs, I have felt that to have an authentic experience here, I had to be uncomfortable.

In some ways, I defend that position to the death. The worst Thai food I've had here has been eaten under airconditioning, although I've also found some truly abysmal food stalls. And buses, whether taken in the city or to a national border, are self-enclosed communities; the Skytrain and subway are not. Outdoor markets are the place to buy fruit and fish and flowers--not supermarkets.

But although my recent experience here may not have been as I wished it to be, it has indeed been Thai. This multi-layered society has room for many ways of living, and mine hasn't even come close to Bangkok luxury. Or even middle-class living. As always, I've gone for the bizarre, Bohemian, bookish life that I lead anyplace that I sleep in for more than three nights.

There is so much I haven't seen in Thailand--and quite a bit that I haven't seen in Bangkok. The other night a friend took me to a chic little bar called WTF, where you can have a cocktail that wouldn't disgrace any stateside bistro and Elliott Smith was played in the background. I had a Beer Lao Dark and tried not to feel too out of place. I've never been to Soul Food Mahanakan, the spot du jour run by an American chef that's rumored to have the best gaeng hang ley in the city, or Nahm, David Thompson's controversial foray into Bangkok's hip scene.

And I don't care. What bothers me is that I haven't yet had the salt-encrusted grilled fish on my soi and I've only been to Elvis Suki and the ice-cream place in a shophouse livingroom three times and I definitely have not eaten enough shwarma. And if you gather from that sentence that Bangkok is food for me, you would be absolutely correct.

When I come back, I'll go to Thailand with just enough time in Bangkok to see friends. There's still so much to see and to do and to taste--and like any good gourmand, I've left room for more.

The Newspaper Woman

I went to the end of my soi where the old lady used to sell me the Bangkok Post http://tonedeafinthailand.blogspot.com/2011/06/all-news-all-time.html with the feeling that I had lost a finger--nothing felt quite right. But within a day or so, there she was, sitting at a little card table in front of the new internet shop that had taken the place of her magazine storage area, with a few newspapers in Thai spread before her. And then at the beginning of July, she called to me and beckoned toward the table. "I have it," she told me.

And there was the Bangkok Post--one copy at the end of the table. She beamed at me and nothing was quite as lovely as that toothless smile.

I've gone every day since to buy my paper; recently she's been asleep, only waking when I put a weight on top of my payment to keep the baht notes from flying away. I know her days are numbered--and I've told her mine are as well. Her take on that is that my sons ought to move here instead.

Her table has expanded to a magazine rack--she is back in business. Someday she'll nod off for her nap while at work and die happy--we should all be so lucky.

Beijing Story

Beijing wasn't at its best in April a year ago. The trees that give the city much of its beauty were still bare and bony-looking and the sky was a leaden bowl. It took a fair amount of effort to bundle up against the chill of early spring and wander and look, but there was a path along a canal to follow and I set off.

Suddenly on my left was a huge area, fenced in, with standing stones in formation and a pagoda on a hill. Bamboo provided a note of greenery that my eyes were starving for so I approached the open gateway. A man in a small guardhouse waved me inside--no ticket, no fee.

The stones were eerie, looking as though they'd grown from the ground they stood upon. A wall of rock buttressed the hill on which the pagoda was perched. There were pavilions scattered over the landscape and a lovely curving path led me into the bamboo grove. The only signs were ones that warned against electric shock with cartoon-like images; nowhere was there an admonishment for visitors to behave in a good manner or pictures of items forbidden in this mysterious spot. There were no park benches or anything that indicated this was a public area, except for children playing on the pagoda's hill and a couple of old men sitting in the pavilions.

The path that twisted into the stand of bamboo led to a walled-off construction site and there were clothes drying on a line that had been strung between two standing stones. Men in hardhats looked up and smiled as I turned to retrace my steps.

Broken things--what looked like an incense burner, bits of statues, and large white cylinders that seemed as though they might have been parts of columns were strewn about near the pavilions. The fenced area was spacious in a city where space indicates wealth and yet I had no idea of what it was or had been, only that it was enigmatic and beautiful.

I took a picture of a sign carved in stone, the only one I could find, and asked a woman what it said. It warned that nearby were municipal electric power lines, she told me. Still puzzled, I kept the photos I'd taken and continued to wonder about where I had been.

Months later in Bangkok, I bought a book called Peking Story, written by a man named David Kidd, who had, in the year I was born, met the aristocratic Beijing woman he would later marry. Her family had lived for generations in an old mansion with more than a hundred rooms that was surrounded by a wall; it “sprawled over several acres,” with a garden that was "more than fifty thousand square feet."

Kidd was in Beijing when Mao reinstated the city as China’s capital and when the Communist government became officially installed with elaborate and jubilant ceremonies. He eloquently describes his father-in-law’s funeral and he is Felliniesque when he tells the story of the last party in the garden at which the guests arrived in costume under the full moon. "That's not a costume," he tells a smitten diplomat, "she really is a Mongolian princess," although, he continues, "I hadn't the heart to tell him that the Mongolian princess was really a Mongolian prince."

But for me, it was the house and grounds that I tore through the book to learn more about; its bamboo groves, its “tree-shaded paths,” the rock grottoes, the hill that symbolized Mount T’ai. It sounded familiar and then suddenly I came to a full-stop because I had chills.

For the decadent costume party, the family’s electrician was called in to tap power from “the city electric lines that ran just outside the garden wall.” I thought of the sign that had been translated for me and read even faster to see if I could find where this house had been.

I found no address but the more I read, the more I was certain that I had been on the grounds of the mansion Kidd had lived in. I was positive the paths I had walked were part of the ‘private landscape of careful deception” that he described and that the stones I had seen were the same that he wrote about. “Lavalike…filled with holes and hollowed into whirls and arabesques by wind and water”; or “balanced on slender ends, like sculptured maidens on tiptoe”, or “long, striated, grey shafts of stone that shot straight up out of the earth”, “the rarest” with ‘more stone below ground than above.” “They are called, living stones,” Kidd’s brother-in-law told him, “because it is believed that they grow an inch every hundred years.”

“Unlike a Japanese garden, which is made chiefly to be looked at, a Chinese one is meant to be walked in.” That, I realized, was what had drawn me in to the place I had stumbled across and had walked through, feeling somehow spellbound.

When the house was sold, Kidd said, it took two weeks for two hundred horse-drawn carts to empty it of its contents. And then, he writes, it was razed to make room for offices of the Ministry of Finance. When he saw where it had once been thirty years later, “where the courtyards and gardens should have been” there was “a forbidding, multi-storeyed brick building.”

I wanted to cry.

So I hadn't found the site of the old mansion of the Yu family, but I’m sure it was not the only one that lay beside the city electric lines near Donshengmen. Yet I was correct that the grounds where I had been were ancient and regal and somehow haunted.

As beautiful as the spot still was, its reason for existence had disappeared and what remained was a shadow of its past magnificence.

Early in his account of his Peking Story, David Kidd tells about fourteen incense burners that had never cooled once in five hundred years. Cast from Burmese red copper and ground Turkestan rubies during the Ming dynasty, the burners were lit when they were still warm from the kiln, "magical objects, glowing and shimmering like jewels, no two alike. Some were red; others were speckled with iridescent green or with twinkling bits of ruby or gold. One had a smooth gold surface, incredibly bright and shining." But, Kidd's wife told him, "Once the burner is allowed to grow entirely cold, the color fades and no later heat can bring it back."

A spiteful servant, after being scolded, poured water in each of the burners in revenge--"five centuries of tending and firing wiped out in the space of seconds." They were still of exquisite shape but "all the color and life was gone."

(Peking Story by David Kidd is published by Eland. It was originally published in England by John Murray in 1961 under the title All the Emperor's Horses. Kidd was nineteen when he first came to China in 1946; he left at the age of twenty-two.)

Hard Traveling--Part Two

I was aching with every jouncing kilometer but I knew I wasn't the only one in pain. The man who sat astride the seat of what was essentially a three-wheeled motorcycle took the brunt of what I was beginning to think had to be a portion of the Ho Chi Minh trail. When he had stopped to buy water, he flexed fingers that had been poised in a deathgrip on the tuktuk's handlebars. He grimaced a little and then smiled.

By the time we reached Huen Hin, the tuktuk had stopped several times. What was an interesting trip for me was quite possibly a livelihood-jeopardizing experience for the man who had agreed to bring me to this place. Tuktuks weren't designed for this sort of journey and people we had passed along the way had gaped at the one we rode in as though we were ambling past on an elephant. There had to be a good reason why the other vehicles on the road were motorcycles or vans, and I began to realize the selfishness of what I had asked for. At the end of our time together, I'd walk away with a story and a collection of sore muscles; the man I was with could be faced with several days of unemployment while his tuktuk was under repair. Under the circumstances, a dollar a mile didn't seem an exorbitant price for me to pay.

As we walked through a battered gateway into a tree-encircled clearing, I said, "This is a bad road and it's not good for the tuktuk. I think two thousand baht is better than fifteen hundred." The man beside me looked at me and nodded, "Two thousand baht--I'll take you to That Phone before we go back to Savannakhet--and we'll return on a better road. It's longer but it will be better."

Huen Hin was a jumbled collection of the huge square blocks of rock that the Khmer had used for building in this part of their empire. Here they found laterite that could be carved from the earth in moist slabs that would harden to rock when exposed to the open air. Before the slabs became stone, holes were poked into them, which looked as though they probably held ropes that allowed men to pull them to the building site.

At least here the site was flat, instead of the dramatic hillsides upon which many of the temples had been built. Huen Hin was supposed to have been a resthouse for travelers, not a sacred place that needed the cosmology of Mount Meru. And yet the spot upon which it had been placed was peaceful and lovely, surrounded by tall, leafy trees that almost blocked out the sky and with the Mekong River flowing past at the edge of the site. Clumps of stones dotted around the clearing indicated that once this might have been a large complex of buildings and the entrance to the surviving structure was marked by stones bearing carved naga, the seven-headed cobra.

Only one side of the building had steps that were easy for me to climb so I ignored the steeper approaches and walked toward an inner chamber. There was the man who brought me here, offering sticks of incense to a rather motley collection of mismatched Buddhas. Somehow they were more moving than any of the original statues would have been; it looked as though each had been presented to this spot by different sojourners who brought what they could afford. Quietly, so I wouldn't disturb the man who stood in front of me, I sank to the ground and offered an unvoiced thanks for my opportunity to be in this room, in this place.

We walked out to the edge of one of the steep set of rocks that jutted narrowly to serve as steps and I shrank back. "I'll go out the other way," I said but the man beside me shook his head. "You can, come on," he told me, and held out his hand.

We came down one rock at a time, and steadied by his grip, I felt not a flicker of the vertigo that usually assaults me on a downward climb. At the bottom, he went off to a pile of stones for a cigarette and I walked toward the river. I was beginning to wonder who I was with, this man who had swiftly poured some of the water from the bottle he'd purchased onto the road before he took a drink himself and who told me what to do without making my hackles rise.

I walked back to where he was and sat on a rock nearby. "This is a beautiful place," I said. "Yes, he agreed, "the trees are beautiful, the river too. There's nature here." "So much nature in Laos; it's different from Thailand," and he replied "Thailand has money. Laos has," he gestured towards the trees, 'This is good."

And as I looked at him, I knew that, given enough time, he was someone I could love. Or was it what he had made it possible for me to see that I was falling in love with? Was I in love with the long, curving boat that I saw men carving by the roadside, under a canopy, protected from the sun, shaping and hollowing the trunk of a very tall tree? Was I in love with the herds of bony cows, watched over by boys who lived in a different century from the one I inhabited? Was I in love with the houses painted in soft colors with contrasting trim, their porches encircled by a curving cement balustrade, or with the simple wooden houses with arched, shuttered windows and carved doors? Or was I falling in love with this man, not young, with a clear and steady gaze, the patience to talk to me in a language that belonged to neither of us, and the kindness to help me down a path that I was afraid of?

I muddle these things together all of the time; I often find it hard to know where my love for a place bleeds into my feelings for a man. This man? This place? I will never know but I will always wonder.

Hard Traveling--Part One

A butterfly joined me for breakfast, flexing and flirting its pale green wings inches away from my coffee cup while I pondered whether I wanted to go exploring or sit near the Mekong all day to watch sunlight play with the river currents. The day before I had taken a tuktuk to a stupa built in the glory days of the Khmer Empire. The driver had been young and speedy; my right arm still ached from clutching the side of the vehicle, bracing myself for a possible collision.

Still undecided, I walked to the river, where local tuktuk drivers relaxed and waited for customers. "Two thousand baht," one of them said, when I asked how much to go to Huen Hin, the Stone House, the ruins of a rest house that dated back to the turn of the twelfth century, "It's fifty kilometers away."

Sixty dollars seemed a stiff price for a roundtrip of a little more than sixty miles, and the man's attitude was off-putting.

"Not today," I decided and went back to the Sala Savanh.

"How much would it be for a tuktuk to Huen Hin?" I asked the boy who had served me breakfast. He agreed that two thousand baht was exorbitant and made a phone call. "Is a motorcycle okay?" he asked, "One thousand baht."

I shrugged. I had resolved to avoid long-distance motorcycle travel after being almost immobilized for a week after a jaunt from Paxse to Champasak when I was a couple of years younger, but it was a beautiful day and "All right," I agreed.

Soon a motorcycle pulled up, driven by a man who smelled like six months worth of stale cigarette smoke. His smile revealed a scanty collection of teeth and he moved with the stiffness of an arthritis sufferer. He's old so he'll be cautious, I told myself and perched behind him, trying not to feel apprehensive.

His wife had no such qualms about revealing her doubts about our proposed journey when we stopped at the driver's house to pick up motorcycle helmets. Her harangue was echoed by her daughter, but the old man ignored them both. Handing me a helmet, he jerked his head toward the motorcycle and off we went.

But not very far--after a few kilometers, his phone rang and at the end of the call he turned to me and said "I have to go back, okay?" I thought he had forgotten some crucial requirement for our journey, but when we arrived back at his house, his wife led us to their garage and a huge farm truck that was easily of the same vintage as her husband. "This is better; go in the truck," she ordered. The old man moved toward the driver's side, looking as though he might burst into tears.

Back at the riverbank, I was now fully determined to go to Huen Hin, and was equally determined to pay no more than the fifteen hundred baht that Miss Darling at Lin's Cafe had just told me was a fair price for a tuktuk. None of the drivers who surrounded me seemed to agree with her so I resorted to passive-aggressive bargaining. "It's okay. I don't want to go today--maybe next time," and I turned to walk away.

"Okay, okay--fifteen hundred baht," the tuktuk spokesman agreed and called to a knot of drivers who were watching from across the road. One of them sauntered toward us, a man wearing clean but ripped Levis who looked a lot like an older version of Tony Leung. Nodding in agreement, he led me to his vehicle.

"Five hundred baht," he said when we pulled into a gas station and I watched him hand one-third of his prospective earnings to the attendant. After a quick stop at a house where he filled a plastic bottle with water from a tap, our journey began.

Soon we were on a road where the recent rain had battered deep potholes into the coarse gravel that had been strewn over red dirt. I could smell wood-smoke, sun-heated earth, the sweet, clean smell of grass and leaves, and as we passed an occasional farmhouse, the unmistakable odor of fresh manure. Once in a while, a sharp jolt of citrus hit my nostrils and I tried unsuccessfully to find its source as we bounced away from the scent.

People wearing ski-masks and shorts planted rice seedlings in paddies that escaped the precision of their counterparts in Thailand, taking on the outlines of trapezoids, rhombuses and shapes I'd not encountered in elementary geometry. As a breeze rippled the sun-dappled water, the rice shoots looked as though they were dancing in the heat--or perhaps it was our tuktuk that was dancing, manically jouncing past small craters in the road and over little bridges that provided painful bumps as we began and finished each crossing.

This road was very familiar to me. I had spent my earliest childhood hating to ride in the family Jeep because traveling in 1950s Alaska meant journeys as bone-rattling as this one was turning out to be. I clutched the side of the tuktuk with white-knuckled hands to keep from falling to the floor and the driver's body was in constant motion as he tried to avoid the holes that peppered the track that we followed. The tuktuk lurched and bounded over every inch that its tires hit; it rattled ominously and I wondered how it and we would weather the return trip. Fifty kilometers on paved roads and fifty kilometers on what I was positive was a portion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail were completely unrelated in any way. I began to remember childhood trips of seventeen miles and back that took all day, and the time my father drove into a pothole that proved to be a ravine.

We stopped at a little roadside shop and the driver said, "No, stay here," when I got up to join him as he walked over to it. He returned with two bottles of cold water and handed one to me; I held it in my aching hands as he rotated his shoulders and cracked his neck.

"Are you okay?" he asked and I replied, "Yes, but is the tuktuk?'

"We'll go back to Savannakhet on another road," he told me and I felt a surge of relief until he resumed our odyssey and we passed a roadside sign. We had traveled a little over ten kilometers and had thirty-nine more spine-crushing ones to go.

Searching for the Puzzle Pieces

I travel to see how other people live their lives in places profoundly different from where I live my own. It's a form of voyeurism, as well as the most seductive kind of drug that I have ever experienced. My earlier stay in a hotel designed for tour groups on overnight stays had left me completely clueless about life in Savannakhet, but this time the town plaza was practically my front yard. As I sipped coffee in the early morning sunlight, a woman of my vintage came out with a tub of food scraps for a cluster of dogs and across the way another woman bearing food was greeted expectantly by a feline family. Small children swooped about on their bicycles like swallows on wheels as several monks filed past them rather cautiously. A young man pulled himself down the street near the sidewalk; sitting on the ground, he propelled himself forward using the only leg he had. He looked at me with dull eyes as I pushed a banknote into one of his hands.

At a lovely little refuge called Lin's Cafe, I had found a surprising selection of leaflets for travelers, in English, with thumbnail photos and clear, simple maps. Although sightseeing isn't my favorite diversion, I am besotted with Khmer ruins and the Savannakhet area had two, far enough away to let me see a bit of the countryside if I went to them. And, the young woman who ran the cafe told me, the gorgeous church near the plaza offered Mass every Sunday. I'd avoided Catholicism strenuously for almost fifty years but Mass in the People's Democratic Republic of Laos was too enticing to pass up.

It was hard for me to tell what was making me more euphoric--the sunlight that had been elusive for months in Bangkok yet flooded the leaves of Savannakhet's trees with translucent light, or the privileged status of being the Sala Savanh's only guest? Or was it breakfast in the garden sala, coffee in a china pot and a baguette wrapped in a white cloth, two small bananas sliced with a mandoline to create elegant serrated edges and drizzled with dark honey? Or was it the small puzzle that was Savannakhet, a post-colonial river town with an affluent side to its decaying grandeur? New cars were parked in front of large, freshly painted modern villas; several stores had a profusion of refrigerators and washing machines for sale, and Cafe Chez Boune in the morning was filled with prosperous- looking men wearing white shirts, speaking Chinese and drinking leisurely cups of coffee.

On my second morning, I heard voices singing from within the church and took my place in one of the pews. Nuns dressed in white, beautifully groomed men, women and children, an adult male acolyte in white robes and a priest with green vestments sang the Mass in Lao, a symphony of prayer and response. Parishioners read the Gospels in Laos and Vietnamese, a nervous young teenage girl taking her turn at the lecturn. The line for Communion was headed by the nuns, followed by old women, then the younger, and finally the men. An echo of Buddhist and Hindu ritual pervaded the church at the beginning of the Mass, when the priest walked down the center aisle of the church, sprinkling water on the kneeling congregants from a bundle of green leaves dipped in a silver bowl of water held by the acolyte. A breeze wafted through open shutters from one side of the church to the other, keeping the interior cool and an open door tempted small children from the pews to play under the trees nearby.

When I walked down a small and quiet street back to the Sala Savanh, I passed a row of people on the opposite side of the street, in the shade of a decrepit building, each of them eating an ice cream cone. One of them greeted me and assured me that my sunny side of the street was too hot. "I like heat," I said and then asked if their ice cream was delicious. The overall assessment was that it was very good indeed. Not the sort of dialogue that Noel Coward would kill for, but nice and pleasant and for me completely Savannakhet--a place where I speak more Thai in three days than I do in three months in Bangkok, simply because I'm not politely ignored.

In Thailand when I say something in Thai, I usually get The Look, a mixture of incomprehension, boredom and condescension. In Savannakhet when I say something in Thai, I get a look of surprised delight and then a conversation, as basic as it may be. A crucial part of life falls into place for me here; I like this town, I decided.

A Second Look

I was in a taxi, inching my way down a narrow, congested road that was far too small to handle the post-rainstorm traffic that was struggling to get to Bangkok's busiest bus terminal. I had missed my bus, was annoyed at the thought of buying another ticket, and was in no mood to answer my phone--but I did. A man's voice rattled out a long string of rapid and purposeful Thai that I couldn't keep up with. I handed the phone to my taxi driver, with a murmured plea for help.

His voice brightened audibly as he responded with information on our whereabouts and he smiled as he gave me back my phone. "The bus is waiting for you," he told me, and we both relapsed into happy shock as we pulled into the entrance to the bus terminal. A man grabbed my bag as I opened the taxi door and my cab driver wished me luck, too bemused to quote the fare. I jammed more bills than the meter asked for into his hand before following my luggage into the night and onto the bus.

The woman who had sold me my ticket to the Thai/Laos border had asked me for my phone number as we completed the transaction and I'd thought it was merely another manifestation of Thai bureaucracy in action. I'd been tempted to make one up for her and now I was deeply glad that I hadn't. As the bus inched its way out of Bangkok and then began rocketing down the highway, I felt so happy and grateful that I didn't care that I was unable to sleep.

I'd been careful to leave on Thursday evening, before the flood of voters began their odyssey to their home provinces to cast a ballot in a crucial and highly emotional election. Although this year for the first time ever, people from other parts of the Kingdom had been able to cast absentee ballots in Bangkok, many were eager to go home for the weekend, especially since--as I discovered later--Friday had been declared a holiday and Thailand faced a three-day weekend. Buses that we passed on the road were packed with travelers and I was even more thankful that my bus had waited for me.

This was my last visa trip before I returned to the States, and I'd decided to return to Savannakhet, even though it had been less than enticing when I'd gone there several months before. This time I brought reading material, including two big fat police stories by Jo Nesbo, and my netbook so I could work during what I knew would be a long, lethargic Laos weekend.

I had a reservation at a place called the Sala Savanh, a French villa that had previously been the site of the Thai Consulate-General, At least I'd have a modicum of colonial grandeur to wallow in before I left town on Monday afternoon, unlike the stark and dirty surroundings of the hotel I 'd stayed in during my last sojourn in this unprepossessing little spot, I told myself. The online photos of the place had looked promising and it claimed to have free wifi. Given the wretched, stormy weather that had engulfed all of SE Asia and had my Bangkok Internet only intermittently useful, I wasn't counting on any wifi in a town that looked as though it had just received the blessings of electricity the week before.

By the time I dropped off my visa application, was found by a tuktuk and entered the Sala Savanh, I was soaked through to my liver and my shoes I knew would never be the same again. A narrow, curving wooden staircase led me up to a little landing where double doors let me into my room. All I noticed was a bed and a hotwater heater in the bathroom; stripping off my saturated clothes, I savored the luxury of a hot shower in a bathroom that had no urinal and a bed that let me stretch out at length. This is why I take buses, I decided, it makes me appreciate life's most basic pleasures. Then I fell into the silence that engulfed me and slept.

Not only was the Sala Savanh wonderfully quiet, it was within walking distance of the river, the Thai consulate and the city plaza, which was long, bare, and bordered with places to eat, including a sidewalk cafe that served comfort food with a strong French accent. A picturesque Catholic church sat at the far end of the square and in the afternoon rain, women wearing traditional Lao skirts drifted past on bicycles, steering with one hand, the other holding an umbrella. The sound of crickets and children's voices filled the cool afternoon air and I savored that as much as I did my frites and Beer Lao. Houses in soft shades of pistachio, mint green, pale indigo, sky blue, mustard gold, and fading cream were my view when I watched the approach of twilight from the Sala Savanh's covered verandah, along with a forest of vintage TV antennas sprouting from rusting tin roofs, silhouetted against the darkening sky.

I tucked the mosquito net to make a snug canopy around my bed, put my netbook on a little wooden writing table, and tried the wifi. Even though the rain still fell in relentless drips, the Internet was slow but sure and the small vases on my bedside tables held tiny bouquets of green leaves. When I reached out to touch them, I was amazed and delighted that they were real. I misjudged this place when I was here before, I realized just before I was caught up in another wave of deep and restful sleep.

As the Page Turns

I work for a small press that publishes books about Asia. We take chances on unknown writers, edit them carefully, pay them a lump sum, and put their words into beautiful trade paperback editions that have weight and substance. We keep our titles in print and we pay for sales reps to present our books across the United States and Canada. So far none of our books have made a profit for us, but we continue to publish books that we believe are well-written and well-illustrated.

We should be an author's dream, right? Wrong.

This is what I hear from writers:

1) What! No royalties????

2) What! You only pay that much for a manuscript?

3) What! You don't have sales reps in the UK? South America? Cambodia?

4) What! You expect me to rewrite my blog pieces so they will make a coherent and logical book?

5) What! You won't send me on a nationwide book tour?

6) What! You expect me to revise my work?

7) What! You've deleted my prose in this spot?

8) What! You don't have a marketing department?

These are direct quotes except for the two words that usually follow What...

And in answer to these heartfelt cries of anguish, I have a brief reply:

Self-publish as an e-book. Consider print-on-demand and consignment sales. Take two aspirin and don't call me in the morning.

I am a writer. I've also been a bookseller at a store that is known to be one of America's best. I buy books for pleasure reading. I work for this small press and I am published by it too. I have covered just about every inch of this waterfront, which by the way, is not dead yet.

I have friends who were published by major houses, were paid a lot of money, and now have books that are out of print. I have friends who were published by major houses as paperback originals and saw their words put on grainy paper with cheap, curling covers. For me, it means a lot for my books to stay alive and to look as though they are worth more than a damn to the business that brought them into the world.

But that's me--and I am clearly an idealist. I still believe in books as physical objects that deserve respect. But that respect has to come from all sides of the publishing spectrum. It's not match.com--publishers are not Prince Charming on that white horse, out to make every dream come true. But if we work together, we can make your book come true--in a way that makes everybody proud. Probably not rich or famous but proud to say, "See that book? That's mine."

All the News All the Time

For the past fourteen years, when I have lived in Thailand, I've lived in the same neighborhood, and during that time the same woman sold me a paper any time I wanted one. Long after other stalls gave up on selling Bangkok's two English language newspapers, this lady continued to carry them. She looked rather gleeful when I told her she was the only person who now did. And when I came back from a trip to Laos, ecstatic to see newsprint in my language again, she looked almost as happy as I did.

She was on the sidewalk every day for the entire day, behind her little cart, owning that portion of the street. She always looked old from the first day I saw her until the day she told me it was her last as a newsstand proprietor. "I'm sick," she said, "I'm old."

"I'll miss you," I said, and I do. It's difficult for me to go to that part of my neighborhood now; part of my world has been diminished. One of the people with whom I've shared a history of sorts is gone and a piece of the fabric that tied me to this spot in the city has frayed. My community is fading, both with people departing and places transforming into something I wish they hadn't.

This street has several gigantic estates, with a thick green canopy of leaves rising above the walls that conceal them from the rest of the neighborhood. I've peered through the gates of these places for years, fantasizing about someday having one for my own. Then came the day that the gates swung open on the greenest of these compounds and the trees came down. My heart broke.

There are four air-conditioned restaurants on this street now, all of which serve mediocre food, often thawed and heated in a microwave. There are precious few people who make food in a wok--and when I think about it, I can't blame those who've stopped using one. It's hot and hard work, with fumes from frying chile and garlic that have to damage the lungs and eyeballs of whoever is frying them. Nonetheless, the stinging fragrance of sizzling food is one I never thought I wouldn't smell on the street of my neighborhood.

The tapping of sticks that heralded the approach of an itinerant noodle-seller, the mournful call of the kouay-chai man, the little Bozo-the-clown horn that meant ice cream was on its way were all sounds of my street which I rarely, if ever, hear now. Life is change, and it is changing all around me. It makes me realize that what I thought made this place home was merely cosmetic; more and more I feel as though my neighborhood has gone away, leaving me behind.

A friend who lives in the heart of Bangkok told me his neighborhood holds everything--department stores, supermarkets, hotels for visiting guests, bars, bookstores, fleshpots, Middle Eastern enclaves--the list could fill a Webster's Unabridged. It's an urban and urbane spot; highrises soar and so do the prices of meals in many of the restaurants. When many people think of Bangkok, they think of this part of the city.

My neighborhood holds Thailand. Resolutely without sophistication and largely homogeneous, it's a spot where the opening of a new convenience store means every street urchin gets a helium balloon and where a pair of shoes can die within a month because there are damned few sidewalks. Ancient food carts serve up delectable meals in surroundings of dubious hygiene. The same fat dog sprawls on the same sidewalk every day, forcing pedestrians into the street, taking up more room with each passing year.

But it's a village encircled by highrises and will eventually become indistinguishable from the rest of Bangkok--international, glitzy, on the move. There will be a Big C complex where now the huge food market sets up three times a week and condos will have sprouted where the trees tower behind walls. And residents in that future- to- come will buy their copy of the Bangkok Post or the Nation or even the International Herald Tribune as part of the way that life is meant to be, never knowing that once in this neighborhood, these could only be purchased from one stout little newsstand owner, a lady who kept on going until she no longer could.

Keith and Me

I was recently given Keith Richards' Life on (numerous) CDs and have spent many evenings listening to decadent rock-and-roll anecdotes as bedtime stories. Aside from one or two crazy dreams, I came away with a realization that Keith and I have a bond between us--we both were scarred by vicious dentistry in our formative years.

If I had grown up fifty years later, my mouth wouldn't be in this condition. Now dentists don't inflict pain and in Bangkok at least they are the most soothing people I've ever encountered. I've started to approach the chair of torture without wanting to vomit and with normal blood pressure levels. I'm actually looking forward to next Sunday when my temporary crown is installed and my IQ visibly soars from 5 points to numbers that indicate that I just might know my ABCs.

Yet even without pain and with a dental bill that amounts to 130 US for this latest phase of repair, I still returned home with the sort of energy that's usually associated with Raggedy Anne. Dental drills, their noise and vibration, immediately take me back to Marathon Man; every fiber and muscle in my body clenches against them in an insane form of isometrics and I leave the office limp and exhausted and absurdly wanting to cry.

Bad teeth are the highest form of deadly sin in the Western world. They are a class indicator and a badge of low self-esteem and a symptom of sloth, all rolled into one. People who have never known sadistic dentists look at the generation that Keith Richards and I share and make some rapid snap judgments based upon the attractiveness of a smile. People without dental insurance learn how to conceal the sins within their mouths, or reveal themselves without shame.

"I smile with my mouth closed," a seventy-year-old friend told me, and I replied, "I forget." Keith Richards smiles without revealing his lower teeth, which has to be a long-standing habit because if there's anyone who could afford good dental work...

I hope to be back in Seattle before whatever fragment of summer is alloted to that part of the globe has faded away for another nine months. Some of my deadly sins will be corrected, without pain, shame, or a small fortune involved. I'm blessed that this whole divergence from my well-laid plans happened in Bangkok, where my rent is reasonable, dentistry is affordable, and pain isn't part of the package.