Bangkok Old Hand

by Collin Piprell

  Although the current investment hysteria (one which is paralleling an unparalleled rush to development and, some say, a rule of greed in the larger society) waxes and wanes with the bulls and the bears, when the scent of easy money is really in the air and the SET index is soaring, you see everyone from bargirls to housewives to government clerks to what look for all the world like school kids haunting the trading rooms.

  Meanwhile, absenteeism soars in government and business offices because everybody's down at the brokers in the mornings. Maids and drivers sit around from 9:00 a.m. till noon glued to the stock market quotations on TV and the telephone, waiting to execute the buy and sell orders of the business people who actually did go to work.

  What someone like Hal from Wisconsin can't understand is why everyone isn't living in Bangkok and clearing over $100,000 a year for doing little more than putzing around a trading room for a few hours five days a week. He's been doing just that for years now, and it has done him nothing but good, or so he'd have you believe. Understandably, to some, he wears an ineffable aura of well-being — a Buddha-like demeanour belied only by the merest manic hint of some delightful secret, an unholy joy in some illicit recipe for success in this life. When the bulls are running, this "Buddha" is at his best. When the market is in the doldrums, on the other hand, he comes more to resemble a poorly conceived image in stone — some vital force is absent, his raison d’être missing for the time being. But as soon as those lines on his graphs start to take off again, he is reanimated with the passion to multiply his take.

  But the promise of easy money doesn't affect everybody the same way.

  Having spent his mornings in the trading room for most of the long vacation, Richard, a local university teacher, is a haggard shadow of the man who only two months ago plunged most of his life savings into the Thai stock market, putting together a nice little portfolio for himself just before the SET index went into a giddy decline. He had actually managed to adopt a becoming fatalism in regard to his "luck", and he had got quite used to gradual disaster. But now the bulls are running again, rampaging even, and Richard is undone by success, unnerved by the compulsion, the unrelenting necessity to decide.

  "I sold all my babies today. Everything; the whole lot of them. "

  This news, shocking to the innocent bystander, is delivered in tones of real regret. But Richard is merely talking about the shares of Thai-German Ceramics which he acquired at a preferred rate upon the occasion of a capital increase — "baby shares", as they are known in the vernacular. He's decided it's time to sell them off.

  Even once the decisions are made, they won't leave him alone. It seems to matter nothing that he's been cleaning up lately. He's strung taut as a piano wire, a string upon which has been struck a deeply reverberant note of greed which thrums and hums and won't let up even in the middle of the night, when Richard snaps awake to a review of the day's bidding. Drenched in a sweat of self- castigation for not having done better, he is apprehensive of the morrow and what he should do then.

  "This is killing me," says Richard. "I think I liked it better when I was losing."

  Still and all, despite the incipient nervous breakdown, he can say this; "I'm fed up with being a teacher. I think I'll become a fulltime player. Maybe I'll go and ask Wiwat what he thinks."

  7 SOCIAL FREE-CLIMBING

  Here's a quick guide, an aid to making your assault on the more rarefied elevations of high society in Bangkok. In fact, the rules outlined in this story aren't much different from those which apply everywhere.

  Class is money and manners. To scale the heights of social status, you need both.

  Possibly, though, you need more money than manners. For one thing, money in itself gives you manners. The confident knowledge of where one's next meal is coming from quite naturally engenders a certain poise. It lends an ineffable social presence to the individual who knows it doesn't matter if the Benz is double-parked; one's driver can always look after things. If you want social status, in short, then get a bunch of money.

  TIP: Be rich.

  But bunches of money don't grow on trees, and the question for aspiring socialites often becomes this: How

  does one cultivate the manner without having the money?

  Social free-climbing — mounting an assault on the social heights without thick cushions of money to fall upon — is as reckless as scaling sheer rock-faces without ropes and pitons. Still, it can be done; one can climb ahead of one's own current material resources. All you need is nerve and a steady grip on a few simple techniques.

  Just remember this: books are judged by their covers. Human beings, however, have one key advantage over books: they can redesign their own covers. That "me" with whom you yourself are intimately acquainted is not the social you. The public never has to know that this déclassé individual exists — this bozo with bunions and a broken denture who likes nothing better than to curl up in front of the soaps with a tin of beer and some potato crisps, ignoring the creditors queued up at the door.

  What the rest of the world sees is merely the exterior, the surface phenomena. Who you are is how you dress, in which car you arrive, where you are seen, and in whose company this happens.

  Who you are is how you dress. Clothes make the person.

  If you are still in the early stages of redesigning your own cover, perhaps you should go for designer labels. This is the climbers' equivalent to painting by numbers. Most people will have to believe you're a Real Person simply because the advertising world has already told them you are, or else you wouldn't be wearing their clothes.

  After your first stumbling steps up the social heap, on the other hand, you'll find that being covered in trade names — having designer labels shrieking on all sides just as though you'd screwed up and put your clothes on inside out — merely announces your insecurity, your need to say you've arrived. You are transparent, your aspirations revealed.

  TIP: The modern cult of Consumerism is trying to make it mandatory that we all provide free advertising, wandering around like sandwich boards for the fashion industry. But real class will always baulk at this. Real class will always opt for the anonymity of quality material and expert tailoring, with perhaps just the discreet flash of an exclusive label as you reach inside your jacket for your mobile phone.

  TIP: The mobile telephone has become an indispensable fashion accessory. Anybody who is anybody wouldn't be caught dead at a traffic light without one. It's also an invaluable aid to one's poise when one finds oneself at the top of a stairway about to descend into the crowd — what better time to call your stockbroker? People with real style have even been known to flourish mobile phones in the midst of a 40- megablitz storm of fusion jazz at their favourite trendy pub. No more would one climb an Alp without a Tyrolean hat than aspire to class without a mobile phone.

  No matter how well you dress, though, if you haven't got the money to back it up, you'll never ascend to the final reaches of social class. The genuine nob can get away with blue jeans and a sweatshirt. Dressed in real threads, a fortiori, the aristocracy can wear clothes in a way you simply can't. The thing is this: Money enhances your whole physical appearance, smoothing the lines on your face, lending an aura of well-being which exudes from your very pores and leaks through the fine weave of your worsted suits or silk dresses. Generations of this, moreover, can have a cumulative effect, with "old money" often doing better at the game than the nouveaux riches, even where the real aristocrats may not have as much cash lying about. There is more than tailoring to a good fit.

  Who you are is which car you arrive in. The right car can help speed you up the slopes of social success.

  The efficacy of any specific automobile is a function of both length and expense — the longer the better, of course, because this takes up more kerb space and thereby more surely establishes your presence on the scene. (Scientists speculate that the social climbers' instinct to acquire ever longer cars is related to the habit wolves in the wild have of establishing t
erritorial rights and relative rank by peeing on everything they consider theirs.)

  TIP: For maximum effect, your Benz should be double-parked when you visit trendy pubs in the evening. Jaguars and Bentleys are customarily triple-parked.

  If you're still a little insecure about how people are seeing you as you drive around town, even after lashing out all that money, then for just a few baht more you can customise your image. One ideal rear windscreen might read AMERICAN EXPRESS, CHULA UNIVERSITY, HARVARD, NAKAMISHI STEREO SPEAKERS, and I WAS GOING TO BUY A MERCEDES. BUT THIS WAS MORE EXPENSIVE. The front windscreen should have a Polo Club parking sticker and no fuzzy bat on suction cups.

  TIP: Don't install more than three antennae on your car; it is tacky. Even with three, at least two of them should be connected to something.

  Too many people in Thailand today are making the mistake of spending so great a proportion of their climbing budget on a car that they can't afford fuel to drive it. This makes it difficult to be seen getting out of your car in all the right places—which is, after all, the main reason for having the thing in the first place.

  TIP: If you can't afford a car appropriate to the status to which you would pretend, then it may be better to have no car at all. Rather than be reduced to living together with your entire family of four in a 1970 stretch Mercedes-Benz limousine for which you have no fuel (or, on the other hand, rather than be seen driving an ancient Toyota with the holes for the taxi sign still apparent on the roof), hire taxis and limousines.

  Who you are is also where you are seen. It is extremely important to be seen arriving in the right car at the right places.

  You should go to five-star hotels a lot. This is where you have the best chance of appearing in the society pages of the local newspapers.

  Originally, in Bangkok at least, the practice of congregating in first-class hotels stemmed from the fact that these establishments were among the few public places with air-conditioning. This was important, in the first place, because there was nothing more disheartening than blowing a bundle on some fancy threads only to have them soaked with perspiration even before anybody got to see your new outfit.

  TIP: Proles sweat; climbers perspire; the nobs merely glow.

  Besides that, first-class hotels have always been designed to intimidate the hoi polloi. Their outrageous expense, not to mention their aristocratic veneer, acts as a convenient social filter.

  These days, of course, so many places are air-conditioned that even the rabble can be cool. Still, the habit persists: one congregates in hotels to be seen by society photographers and one's would-be peers while one hobnobs with the peer group to which one currently aspires. Fortunately, as the middle-class population of Thailand explodes, the number of classy hostelries grows to keep pace with the herding instincts of parvenu society.

  TIP: There is not much to choose between most five-star hotels in Bangkok, as places to hang out. It's simply a matter of exactly where the Right People are going to be on any given night, and how likely it is you'll be able to get close enough to them to share the frame of a normal camera lens.

  Golf courses are the only place to be when you're being seen in the out-of-doors.

  TIP: If you want to impress the Right People on the links, be sure to have at least three caddies (one to carry the clubs, one to spot balls, and one to hold your parasol), but no more than four (one extra to run to the clubhouse for drinks). Five or more is tacky.

  Trendy pubs, of which there are an ever-increasing number in Thailand, are a must for the young social climber. These are places where you go to enjoy being envied by your social inferiors while at the same time you get to observe your social betters (your role models). It is also where you affect a taste for fusion jazz, no matter how much you really think the stuff sounds like runaway elevator Muzak.

  TIP: Know the names of at least two popular jazz bands and be prepared to say at least one of them has gone downhill since they lost their saxophonist, Whasizzname.

  Who you are is whom you associate with. And, when deciding whom you should be seen with, apply the same rule you follow when looking for tennis partners — always try to match yourself with social players more accomplished than you are. Your own standards will then tend consistently to rise to the challenge as you continue to mount the social heights.

  TIP: One notable exception to this rule should be mentioned. Wherever you are seen, it is a good idea to be seen in the company of underprivileged children, preferably underprivileged children upon whom you are in the process of bestowing generous gifts. Ostentatious contributions to charity are in general an essential criterion of social class.

  Your choice of spouse is very important (always assuming, of course, that you plan to be seen in public with this person). Every climber should try to marry above his or her current station in life.

  TIP: Bad news for the male contingent: Thais

  have traditionally taken a dim view of higher- class women marrying their social inferiors.

  TIP: "There is no stronger craving... than that of the rich for titles, except that of the titled for riches" (Hesketh Pearson, The Marrying Americans, 1961). This refers to one particularly synergistic sort of liaison between man and woman. If you have neither title nor riches to offer as an ante, however, you will be forced to rely entirely on manners. Plus considerable luck.

  Who you are is also what you talk about and how you talk about it.

  What do you talk about? You talk about other people who are there to be seen, about people who aren't there but should be, about people who are there but shouldn't be (sometimes despite the best efforts of the doormen), about whose car is parked farthest from the curb and whether it's expensive enough to be so displayed. That's if you are talking among yourselves. If somebody else intrudes, let us say for example a reporter for the social pages, then it's best to talk about the environment. Sometimes you can also talk about how much you love children.

  Among yourselves, however, it is best to stick to certain tried and tested topics. Servants, for instance — everybody talks about their servants. This is okay, but take care you don't natter on too long about them, for fear of stigmatising yourself as such a parvenu you still think having a domestic staff is something remarkable.

  TIP: Talking about your driver has more cachet than talking about your maid, since everybody in Thailand has a maid. Even the maids have maids.

  TIP: Talking about your bodyguards is better still.

  TIP: If you have no servants (!) you can score points simply by saying "Oh, I never have problems with servants", and leaving it at that.

  Talking about the SET is a sine qua non of membership in society, in these heady days of economic expansion and imminent NIC-hood. Many people are investing, not because they need the money, but only so they will have something to talk about at cocktail parties.

  TIP: If you didn't know that "SET" referred to the Stock Exchange of Thailand, then you're so far out of it don't even think about leaving base camp, much less mounting an assault on the lofty heights of local society. (You also didn't read the previous chapter of this book.)

  The aspiring socialite must remember, however, that introducing this topic of conversation can equally be a faux pas, a gaffe sufficient to cause the Right People to shrink away from you in the way they would from something found in a polyester suit.

  TIP: Before introducing this topic in the Right Company, it is essential that you know whether the stock market is currently on a bull run or whether it is being savaged by the bears. The astute observer of local society will note that in the latter instances there is generally a profound hush where once one would have heard all manner of sparkling chit-chat about such things as the darling baby shares someone's favourite stock just gave birth to. Hitherto scintillating conversationalists will be found gazing deep into their Campari-sodas and speaking in monosyllables if at all. During a bear market, in fact, merely the inadvertent use of words such as "buying" or "selling" in polite company invites
a social frost.

  TIP: When the bulls are running, tell everybody about how you sold a big winner at exactly the wrong moment. Be sure to smile ruefully the while. In fact if you can smile ruefully and yawn at the same time, all the better.

  TIP: If you don't know the difference between a bull and a bear, then you might just as well stop reading right here and go bowling.

  Generally speaking, finally, the cardinal rule for real social adepts is this: Never talk about yourself to people you are trying to impress. Instead express a relentless interest in the other's life history, political opinions, and tailor/dressmaker. All the while you do this, of course, you gaze admiringly at them. Properly executed, this procedure will not only win you the reputation of being a brilliant conversationalist, it will also establish you as a person of excellent breeding.

  But there is more to it than choice of conversational gambit. There is how you conduct yourself in general, as you associate with those with whom you wish to be associated — what you do with a fingerbowl and how you behave if you don't do what people think you're supposed to with it.