From time to time, these expat contributions and influences—particularly the American variety—have been scorned and shunned by Thai thinkers and politicians. Thailand’s leading architect, Sumet Jumsai, who designed the Robot Building on Sathorn Road and The Nation structures on the edge of Bangkok, lived in France and studied architecture at Cambridge, before returning to his homeland in 1967. “There were American military bases in Thailand for bombing Vietnam, so I was very angry when I first came back. But I could only write articles in English so I suppose our generals—dictators—must’ve thought, ‘Oh, he’s quite harmless’, because nobody reads English here.”
“That was the first big boom period in Thailand and the red-light districts in Patpong and Pattaya got started because of all the American GIs. It was much more negative than positive, but we’ve only adopted the negative side of America here. I know the good side of America more than most Thai people because I’ve been there… America is a wonderful concept.”
Yet, American involvement in foreign countries has always been a double-edged bowie knife. Thank the CIA for helping to get the first big office tower in Bangkok off the ground. Built in 1969, the Chockchai International Building (near the Emporium on Sukhumvit Road) was equipped with the most efficient communications system at that time in the whole country, perhaps even in all of Southeast Asia. The 24-floor structure laid down the template for the construction boom to come, with the first air-conditioning system, an elevator and internal phones. Once again, Thai ingenuity rose to the fore as architect Rangsarn Torsuwan designed the building so it could withstand the tropical heat.
The surge of expats and tourists resulted in the formation of the Tourist Organisation of Thailand in 1960 (now the Tourism Authority of Thailand). That year, the country notched up 81,000 arrivals. By the early 1970s, those figures had risen tenfold. The proliferation of sex and drug tours gave Bangkok its sleazy image, which still persists, and the budding popularity of homegrown marijuana (colloquially known as ‘Thai stick’ or ‘Buddha stick’ in the West) yielded the only Thai word ever loaned to the English language: bong. Byron Bales, a former Marine-turned-insurance investigator and private detective recalled landing at Don Muang International Airport in Bangkok “when there was still a dirt runway in the ‘60s and I could carry my gun on the plane. Many of the cases I worked in the ‘60s and ‘70s were about young Westerners overdosing on drugs in Thailand.”
Tourists, drug dealers and opportunists make for a perverse threesome. Among the new arrivals following the wealth of the traveller’s trail was the notorious serial killer Charles Sobhraj. Living off Silom Road in Bangkok, the Vietnamese-Indian’s hunting ground encompassed the upscale hotels in the area, where he sold gems for exorbitant sums and cajoled tourists into staying with him for months on end, ensuring their compliance by drugging and poisoning them. After two white women in bathing suits were found strangled on the beach in Pattaya, the perpetrator was dubbed the ‘Bikini Killer’ by the local press. But Sobhraj, who allegedly paid the Thai police a US$15,000 bribe and fled the country, continued to kill backpackers and steal their identities, before being apprehended in India while attempting to drug a whole busload of French tourists.
The presence of all those American troops sowing their wild oats on Thai soil also gave rise to a second coming of the mixed-marriage phenomenon, not seen since the days of Ayuthaya. Some Thais denigrated these local women as mia chao (‘rented wives’), but, in their own unwitting way, the GIs and their partners were psychosexual pioneers. As the northeast became a breeding ground for both love and war, the number of mixed couples, and their offspring, grew exponentially.
Those unions are still spiking. A 2008 study by the National Economic and Social Development Board (NESDB) revealed that there were almost 30,000 women in the northeast married to foreigners. Most, but certainly not all, of the men are of retirement age. According to the NESDB, the foreign Romeos have pumped some 14 billion baht into local coffers and created around 650,000 jobs.
Across the 19 provinces of Isaan, there are now enclaves of foreigners, invariably nicknamed ‘Soi Farang’ (a road of ‘white foreigners’). Unofficial estimates state that the number of farang-Thai households across the region may number 100,000, or about three per cent of the married populace. Many of these expats have been reduced to a stereotype, based on a morality tale, and retold as a dirty joke. In this case, one size does not fit all. Steve, a young Brit in his early 30s, who has his own IT business he runs from the Northeast, is hardly a caricature of the obese and lecherous, homo erectus species known as the ‘sexpat’. Married to a local woman with whom he has two children, Steve (who did not want to give his surname), said he prefers the friendly, pastoral and easy-going life in the Thai hinterlands, to the dreary city and sullen people he left behind in London.
Still, the clichés about men like him do rankle. “Many people think that our girlfriends or wives are only with us because of the money, but Western women are incredibly materialistic these days. In places like Singapore or Hong Kong you’ve got what Chinese women call the four Cs—‘cash, credit cards, a condo and car’—which they look for in male partners. So materialism is a facet of relationships everywhere and the fact is, many foreign husbands treat their wives a lot better than some Thai men do, and there’s far fewer incidents of domestic violence,” said Steve, a former falconer who once taught fencing in Korea.
Read the memoirs and chronicles of the merchants and expatriates from centuries ago and those references to ‘beautiful, languorous women’ persist, as does the fascination with a land where elephants are part of an extended family, where spirits haunt banana trees and a hedonistic populace alternates between gentility and extreme bursts of violence. As author Jerry Hopkins said, “The beautiful women are both the cheese and the trap, but if you stay long enough you find plenty of other things to think and write about.”
Jerry, whose first rock biography on Elvis was suggested to him by his drinking buddy Jim Morrison of The Doors (who subsequently became the subject of his number-one bestseller No One Here Gets Out Alive), also lived with a local transsexual streetwalker in Hawaii. This is a man with almost superhuman tolerance levels for debauchery and strangeness. Out of all the stories he compiled for his non-fiction collection Thailand Confidential, the weirdest tale, he said, came from watching a sex-change operation in Bangkok. “I don’t know anyone who’s done that.” The operation took place when a friend of his ex came to town for an operation that has become so globally renowned that Thai Customs and Immigrations has considered adding a box for ‘Gender Reassignment Surgery’ to the list of reasons for visit. In Venus Envy, he wrote, “Dr. Preecha then turned his attention to the penis, skinning and removing most of the interior and leaving the hollow flap of skin still attached to the body. The end and open side were then sewn to form a kind of sleeve, which then was pushed into the vaginal cavity, an act that gives this procedure its medical name ‘penile inversion’.”
Around the time Jerry arrived, the English-language press began to flourish with a number of new magazines and a third English daily. For many of us aspiring writers and editors, the Thailand Times was a journalism school. It would not be hyperbole to call this the worst and most preposterous English daily that has ever existed anywhere. During the paper’s reign of errors from 1993 to 1998, one of the most famous was the front-page gaffe showing a photo from the gruesome Easter celebrations in the Philippines of a stand-in for a Roman centurion staring up at a surrogate Christ who is crucified on a wooden cross. The photo caption reads: ‘Prime Minister Chuan Leekpai chats with Foreign Minister Prasong Soonsiri during a break at parliament.’ The actual photo of the Thai politicians had the caption from the Philippines.
Because the majority of the Thai layout artists did not speak much English, these kinds of errors were common. On the features page I edited, they somehow managed to put the cover of a book written by the Pope upside down. No one mentioned the error. Even the head honchos and the
staff did not read the paper. As far as I remember the only complaint we ever received was from a high-ranking minister in the government of Laos, who was in Bangkok for an economic forum. He was irate that the paper had referred to his government—this was a joke between two sub-editors that was supposed to be edited out—as the ‘Lao People’s Undemocratic Republic’.
Because our deadlines were so early, we often missed important late-breaking stories. Although the masthead referred to the paper as the ‘Voice of the New Generation’, most of the staffers referred to it as ‘Yesterday’s News Tomorrow’.
Where else would a major English daily like this be allowed to exist? (As it turned out, the company needed one English-language publication in its portfolio to get listed on the Dow Jones Stock Exchange.)
The Thailand Times’ most trenchant wit-in-residence, Cameron Cooper, came up with headlines that even a British or American tabloid would have found in bad taste. After John Wayne Bobbitt’s battered wife famously castrated him, and they reattached his penis only it did not function properly, Cameron titled the story, ‘John Wayne’s Six Gun Only a Pee Shooter’. After country star Tammy Wynette (best known for the single ‘Stand By Your Man’) was hospitalised with bowel cancer, Cameron entitled that story, ‘Tammy Stands By Her Pan’. And as if that wasn’t enough, when Jack Lord, the star of the TV detective series Hawaii Five-O—whose tagline was ‘Book ‘em Dano’—passed away and was cremated, the incorrigible Canadian headlined that snippet, ‘Cook ‘em Dano’.
Riddled with mistakes and laced with obscenities, this only-ever-in-Thailand publication gave many of us the opportunity to report on the repercussions of the boom-in-progress, as the first Cineplex and the first Tower Records opened in 1994, as 500 new cars and 1,000 motorcycles came on the streets of Bangkok every day, as the city resembled a gigantic construction site with the worst air pollution in the world, and as the second invasion of British bands first came to Bangkok with gigs by Suede, the Manic Street Preachers and Radiohead.
All the groups played in a hall above the MBK shopping mall. When the crowd began leaping up and down to Radiohead, the entire roof of the mall began buckling so shoppers fled for their lives. I was there to review the gig, but the crowd surged backwards when Radiohead started, knocking my pen and notebook out of my hand only ten seconds into the show. But in Thailand, a country where motorcyclists make mudguards out of tree branches and people put plastic bags on their heads during the rainy season, you have to learn how to improvise and discard any formalities that don’t harmonise with the merriment of the moment. I yelled in the ear of a fellow staffer, Pradip, to remember more or less what songs they played in more or less what order, and then we leaped into the dancing melee of what was one of the weirdest crowds I’ve ever seen at a gig. Many of the kids were wearing Sid Vicious T-shirts and dog collars. Some had used food dye to colour their hair and combed them into Mohawks. A few of the college kids were still wearing their uniforms. And almost everyone on the dance floor was pogoing up and down like it was a punk rock gig in London in 1977—except they were all smiling and laughing. The clothes and the safety pins didn’t matter, the constant bombardment of Western culture and music videos didn’t matter, even the anguished music of Radiohead didn’t really matter: it was still a distinctly Thai event. Five centuries of Western and Asian imperialism had done almost nothing to tarnish those smiley facades.
Through another bizarre series of circumstances that only seem to happen in Bangkok, I ended up ferrying two members of the group back to their hotel room in a three-wheeled taxi known as a tuk-tuk. Singer Thom Yorke said, “That was the happiest crowd we’ve ever played to.” Guitarist Ed O’Brien chimed in with, “When we played ‘Creep’ it was like being in a massive karaoke bar. Who smiles to a song like that?”
Both Thom and Ed were impressed by the fact we could drink in the backseat of this glorified golf cart and that the driver, upon learning they were from England, wanted to know what their favourite football teams were. Once or twice Thom smiled. He made a few jokes with the driver and he actually laughed too. Yes, Thom Yorke, often referred to as ‘that miserable bastard from Radiohead’, had caught a Bangkok joy buzz. Instead of going back to their hotel room, Ed and Thom decided they wanted to see some of the city’s historic sites and monuments. Neither of them was interested in the nightlife or girly bars. “We’ve been to Amsterdam, mate.” So we spent the next few hours cruising past Democracy Monument, the Grand Palace and Parliament Buildings, while they gave me an exclusive backseat interview and we carried on drinking for a few hours. When I dropped them back at their hotel, Thom said, “This is a brilliant city. You’re lucky to live here.”
But our quest to find the British Club that night had gone awry. The club’s lineage is an expat history lesson in itself. Begun more than a century ago, it was based on Victorian coffee houses, where women were forbidden to enter, said Warwick Newton, one of the members of the elected general committee. “It’s only been about 20 years since women were allowed to drink here and granted full membership rights.”
During World War II, the club was commandeered by the Japanese military, which destroyed many of the archives and vintage photos. “I’ve heard stories, perhaps apocryphal,” Warwick said, “that expats and some of the club’s members were also arrested and interred in dreadful Bangkok prisons, where the Thais treated these prisoners much better than the Japanese did.”
The British Club reopened in 1946. Located off Silom Road, the venue’s original, colonial-style buildings and fixtures are still intact. Approximately 60 per cent of the 1,000 members hail from Commonwealth countries (Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada), who must compose the majority. But if you look at any of the photos from their events or sports tournaments, you will see a multi-nationality contingent of Indians, Europeans, Thais and other Asians. They even have a bagpipe band. “We try not to discriminate, and drinking ability will make you a strong candidate for membership in the British Club,” said Warwick with a laugh.
Warwick is one of those life-long expats you meet in Thailand, who worked in footwear manufacturing for companies such as Nike, where he was posted to Vietnam, India and Eastern Europe, but finally returned to Thailand for the people and the climate (those meat-locker winters in the Czech Republic still give him chills), as well as the Jekyll and Hyde life of dividing his time between a house he owns in the rural Northeast (“It’s a bolt-hole really.”), and the metropolitan madhouse of Bangkok.
As subdued and old guard as the British Club can be, its annual events take on a distinctly Thai slant. At a recent Guy Fawkes Night, the burning of the effigy, the fireworks and the food were most British, but the entertainment was supplied by a troupe of young Thai dancers and sword-fighters, musicians and acrobats from a Bangkok orphanage, performing against a diorama of a London skyline punctured by Big Ben and edged with fairy lights. None of the English people on hand stiffened their upper lips about the lack of traditional British entertainment on tap. As Ben Hopkins, the Birmingham-born editor of Traversing the Orient magazine, said, “Sure beats Morris dancers. No sane English person can enjoy them.”
Among the expatriates of Thailand, the British are vastly outnumbered by the Japanese, who remain the largest demographic. Around 46,000 nationals are registered with the Japanese embassy in Bangkok, but unofficial estimates put the total at twice that. During the Ayuthaya era, the Siamese court prized the Japanese, and the samurais in particular, for their military expertise. By fighting alongside the Siamese, Yamada Nagasama, the head of the few-thousand strong Japanese colony, rose through the ranks to become the governor of Nakhon Si Thammarat, which the one-time pirate and deerskin trader administered with the help of 300 samurai. A statue in Ayuthaya’s Japanese Village, which demarcates the old settlement, shows Yamada dressed as a Siamese soldier.
The Japanese also committed the gravest slaughter of expatriates and Thais in the 20th century with the building of the ‘Death Railway’ from Kanchanaburi to Burma.
Working by hand, Allied POWs and conscripted labourers (many of them Thai) carved a railway line out of malarial jungles, tunnelling through rock and working by torchlight, which gave ‘Hellfire Pass’ its name. Officially, around 16,000 POWs and 90,000 Asians perished, but the unofficial numbers are much higher.
By far the most moving chronicle of that tragedy I’ve ever read is The Railway Man by Eric Lomax. A signals officer in the British army, Lomax was brought before the Japanese secret police in Kanchanaburi after being caught with a concealed map and radio. The tortures he suffered were so traumatic that he could not even begin writing about them until the early 1990s. Of all his captors and tormentors, he came to despise the young interpreter Nagase Takashi most of all. The interpreter never touched him, but for decades he would hear echoes of that cold, inhuman voice, “Lomax you will be killed”, spawning vengeful fantasies of beating the interpreter with the same pickaxes and pipes the secret police had used on him, then caging him under the boiling sun for days on end while red ants feasted on his flesh, like the Japanese had also done to the railway engineer.
While writing his memoir the Scotsman received an ‘extraordinarily beautiful’ and contrite letter from Nagase, asking to meet him on the fabled ‘Bridge Over the River Kwai’. Unbeknownst to him, Nagase, equally tormented by guilt, had helped the Allied War Commission identity the graves of some 13,000 POWs buried in the shadows of the railway over the course of seven weeks after the war ended. Nagase then became a vehement anti-war campaigner, speaking out against not only the Japanese Imperial Army but the emperor as well. Using his own money, he built war memorials in different parts of Thailand and a ‘Buddhist Peace Temple’ near the River Kwai. Beginning in 1976, Nagase organised a series of reunions between former POWs and members of the Japanese army on the bridge that symbolised all they had fought and died for. Towards the end of his memoir, in a scene fraught with high-wire tension, Lomax recalled their emotional reunion on the River Kwai Bridge in 1993, almost five decades after they’d last seen each other, under very different circumstances. Unexpectedly, it was the Scotsman who had to console the weeping and profusely apologetic Nagase. In what must be the most unlikely ending to any chronicle of war, guaranteed to melt the hardest of hearts, Lomax and his wife accepted an invitation to visit the former English professor in Japan, where the two men finally buried the hatchet and forged an enduring friendship.
Jim Algie Page 7