When you are foreign in Thailand, you are a falang
(pronounced, fa-wrong--the humor of this pronunciation is not lost on me). When you are white and a foreigner in Thailand, you are
a Westerner, which does not imply that you are a
cowboy-boot-wearin-panner-of-gold, but someone who lives in the Western
hemisphere. Never before in my life has my hemisphere contributed to my sense
of identity but, here, the way that I talk and the things I like to eat are no
longer American tastes, but Western ones.
I write all this because this past week has been a week of
indulging in the Western things I’ve been missing from home: blockbuster movies
in mall theaters with huge buckets of over-priced popcorn, bagels with lox, Krispy
Kreme donuts, bitter coffee that isn’t flavored with granulated sugar and
condensed milk. While I’m starting to find myself craving chicken satay and
sticky rice for breakfast and even learning to prefer Leo beer to American
fare, there are still small parts of me that feel empty, unfulfilled, pulled
back to the places in the States that I have called home.
This was never more apparent than when a group of us
traveled to Nana for dinner at a Tex-Mex restaurant someone had found in one of
the many travel books we’ve been clinging to over the past few weeks. Nana, a small
district located to the East of the city center, is, essentially, the Ex-Pat
hub of Bangkok. Each street is divided into little ethnic neighborhoods:
banners with Arabic script advertising bowls of hummus, a flag in French,
murmurs of Spanish floating and caught in the power lines, and of course our
destination, a small back alleyway that is as White and as English as any
street in the United States.
Strings of Christmas lights hang above cobblestone and
folksy acoustic guitar spills out of doorways where patrons drink Bud and
Corona and talk about the Government Shutdown as something relevant to their lives. We make our way to a restaurant
on the left side of the street, Charlie Brown’s. They serve salsa and tortilla
chips on the table, pour strong margaritas from cheap pitchers. We order
quesadillas and taco salads and bowls of black beans. The music is a mix of country and Top 40. The walls are decorated with pop-art paintings of sort-of-famous American celebrities. Like Mario Lopez and Santana. I feel warm and safe, more at home than I have in a long time. But the feeling fades almost as quickly as it arrived because the taco salad isn’t really a
taco salad (more strips of lettuce and grilled pork than anything else) and the
waiters are Thai and the environment is almost too carefully authentic. Of all the emotions I felt spending time in Nana
(excitement, comfort, peace), the strongest one I felt (and the one I call back
now) is one of disappointment.
Because Thailand is still in so many ways an alien place to
me, I find few means by which to compare it to home. The food is nothing like
the food back home. The people carry themselves in different ways and don’t
remind me of anyone I’ve known. But going to Nana and interacting with a people
and within a place that seemed so familiar seemed to highlight all the ways in
which it was not familiar and was, in
fact, still as foreign and as far away from home as any other place in Bangkok.
Difference never seems as perceptible or intense as it does in a slightly askew imitation.
It's become clear to me that ease will not be found in Thailand by trying to find small
Americas within it. There will be coffee shops and restaurants and back
patio bars that will remind me of home, but they will be silkscreen, puffs of
smoke. I can eat all the glazed donuts and bagels with cream cheese and over-stuffed falafel sandwiches as I want, but I will still be in Thailand, will still be struggling to discover how I fit into this new mosaic that I've found myself awkwardly jammed into.
And just to make it clear that I don't spend my thaime (GET IT?>!!) here walking around feeling sad because I can't drink Sam Adams beer or eat pepperoni pizza whenever I want, here are some photos from a weekend jaunt we all took to Kanchanaburi where we stayed in small huts on a little creek and saw the bridge over the River Kwai and climbed a mountain and saw the most beautiful waterfall.
Exploring as much of this country as I can seems to be the only way to better understand how this small mosaic piece fits into the whole. I think this past weekend was an amazing start.
Cody
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